Urban listened to the game without a radio

July 9, 2011

I asked Tim Hughes, son of Urban Hughes, who was one of Wickliffe’s main characters, to remember some more of the stories about his dad. I have at least a couple posted in various parts of this site.

Tim wrote back, “Since I was just now sitting in my house watching a baseball game, I am reminded of the following story, circa: springtime 1960-something.”

Tim had just gotten home for the weekend from college and he happened to run into Ken Rudy Doke, who was his next door neighbor at the time.

“Ken came up to me and said he had a bit of a scare a few days earlier when he arrived at his house. He told me that he saw Urban in his car in front of our house. And Ken thought Urban may have had a heart attack,” Tim writes.

The driver's side door of Urban's car was open. Urban had his left foot out of the car on the ground. The car window was down and Urban had his elbow resting on the window sill. He was slumped over with his head on the steering wheel.

Ken Rudy rushed over and said, "Mr. Hughes, are you OK?"

Urban raised his head and said, "Yes I'm fine .... just listening to the Cardinals’ baseball game.”

When Doke told Tim what Urban had said, Tim replied, "Ken, that car does not have a radio."

Ken and Tim had a big laugh and surmised Urban must have just returned from a "board" meeting at the Prairie Lake LD Lodge. Ken said as a matter of fact, he did detect the bouquet of Kentucky Bourbon when he was chatting with Urban.

I have mentioned the LD Lodge in another Urban story. I shied from being explicit about what the letters LD stood for, other than to say that L is for limber and the name was chosen because it allegedly represented the less-than-potent condition of the members, all of whom were senior citizens.

Howl, howl the gang’s all here

(an Urban Hughes story)

July 14, 2011

Danny and Tommy Ryan, sons of the late Bill Ryan of Wickliffe, both have mentioned a time when Urban Hughes came home and led the neighborhood dogs in a howl-fest.

Urban’s son Tim Hughes sets the story straight.

“As I think about it, when Urban came home and howled at the dogs, this happened on more than one occasion,” Tim recalls. “However the most significant event that I remember happened probably in the late 1950s.”

Here’s the story as Tim writes it:

The most vocal of the neighborhood dogs were the coon hounds. And from time to time, the hounds would serenade the neighborhood (without encouragement). And they would wake everyone – living or dead.

Now some of the dogs in the choir were 1) Old Joe which was Roy Kimsey's hound. Joe was a growly, somewhat ill-tempered hound with a voice range between two and three miles

2) Next door to me at the time was Harry Rollins. He had some kind of a dog. I think it was a short-haired poop eater ... very noisy with bad breath. Come to think of it that also applied to some of the neighbors.

3) Around the corner on 2nd street heading north was Martin Robertson's home and he had some kind of a hound that liked to howl.

4) Then across the street from Robertson was the coon hound icon of Wickliffe, Ky. – Coon Dog Jesse Rollins. And he had one or two hounds. I think they were the leaders of the choir.

Sometime around midnight, my father returned from the Prairie Lake Lodge, and for whatever reason, Urban thought it appropriate to engage the coon hound choir in an A Capella rendition of the Battle Hymn of The Republic.

So, perhaps guided by his primordial instincts, Urban cupped his hand, placed it to one side of his mouth and began to howl and yodel.

All the neighborhood dogs awakened and chimed in (VERY LOUDLY). And then within seconds, the porch lights in the neighborhood illuminated, and the inside lights as well.

I could hear neighbors cursing, phones ringing and a few other irreverent comments.

Urban laughed, stumbled into the house, mumbled something about the call of the wild and headed to bed. My mom said, "Urban, you did that just for damn meanness." To which Urban replied, "They started it."

Red Harrington and the salty dog

July 11, 2011

          I’ve been holding this story in the “to write” folder for about a year.

          I’m moved to write it today after Rick Harrington left an entry in the Guestbook on this site. You can go to the Guestbook and read what he wrote, but I’ll quote most of it before I’m finished.

          Rick’s grandfather was Red Harrington of Wickliffe, one of the town’s main characters. If you set up a hierarchy of characterness among the Wickliffe residents back in the 1950s when I was growing up there, Red would be in the top tier along with such other notables as Bill Ryan, Urban Hughes, Archie Wear and a few others.

          You can read another story about Red in the “Tales from Bill Ryan’s Station” category on the left side of this page. The title of that one is, “If an asylum, the inmates ran it.”

Rick writes in the Guestbook, “We've communicated through Facebook but this is my first visit to your website. As always, I enjoy reading about my Granddaddy (Red) as he passed away when I was 11. I never got to hear these ‘good’ stories, but I always heard he was quite a character.”

In the “asylum” story, Tommy Ryan mentions that he believes Red was quite a baseball pitcher in the local leagues.

Rick confirms this. “You're correct that he was a baseball pitcher. My grandmother had a team picture (that has since been lost) of the Cairo (Illinois) baseball team. He also was a streetcar conductor in Cairo and he worked for the Federal Barge Line. You could always recognize the Federal boats on the river because they were yellow.”

I also mentioned in the “asylum” story that people said Red had tuberculosis. Rick says, “And for the sake of accuracy, it was emphysema, not TB, which is what ultimately killed him. He always kept a can of tobacco and his pipe and OCB rolling papers handy which I'm sure didn't help his cause very much.”

Tommy Ryan mentioned that he still has a treasured keepsake that Red whittled for him, a monkey with its tail in its mouth. Red whittled it from a block of hickory wood.

Rick writes, “I also have some of his monkeys with their tails in their mouths. Mine are hollowed-out peach pits with the outer perimeter unbroken. He hung them from a chain, charm-bracelet style.”

He concludes his entry, “Thanks again for writing this all down. My grown daughters are amazed when I tell them there were three grocery stores, two drug stores, and a couple of restaurants ‘uptown’ when I grew up there. They also get a real kick hearing stories about people they only see in old photo albums.”

That’s enough background for this story, the basics of which were relayed to me by my good friend Danny Ryan, Tommy’s brother. Their father, Bill Ryan, ran the Standard Oil station in Wickliffe which was something like the equivalent of today’s comedy clubs except there was no charge, the comics were all local residents, and the stories had at least some basis in fact.

Red’s wife, Agnes – the grandmother Rick mentions above – raised roses at their house, which I recall being on the right side of the road going up the hill toward the old Wickliffe School, just past what is now the Wickliffe City Park.

A neighborhood dog, or perhaps it was a stray, decided that the roses were his personal commode, and he started leaving doggy landmines in the roses.

Red built a wire cage to go around the flowers.

According to Danny Ryan, the way the story was told at his dad’s gas station, “The dog worked his ass through the cage, planted one turd and then crossed it with another, making a perfect X.”

          Red couldn’t tolerate that type of insult to his wife and her roses.

          Because the cage wasn’t a sufficient deterrent, Red loaded a shotgun shell with salt.

          The next time the dog came around to sign his name with the X, Red took aim and shot the dog directly in the offending part of its anatomy.

          Danny reports, “The dog hit ground in middle of the street, took a right on Sixth, and was last seen dragging his ass in sand to cool it off.”

Red Harrington: Two splashes, both of them big

July 15, 2011

          Chicken Brack was a Wickliffe resident of ample proportions. That’s a polite way of saying that he was a big man, with an abundance of insulation to keep him warm in the winter. In other words, he was fat.

          Red Harrington went on a duck hunt with Chicken Brack in a small – probably around 12-feet long – jon boat. I don’t know who sat in the front and who in the back, but that doesn’t really matter. The force of gravity applies to both ends.

          Red was not a heavy man. Chicken was. The boat acted sort of like a balance scales. Gravity causes the heavier end to drop and the lighter end to rise. Red’s end of the boat, therefore, was out of the water with Red essentially sitting in the air.

          Chicken’s end of the boat was low, which meant that Chicken was separated from the water by no more than a couple of inches.

          I think you can visualize how the boat looked in the water. Well, at least partly in the water.

          They hadn’t been there long before a lone duck flew over. Chicken had right of first shot. He shot once, but missed. He also missed the second shot. By this time the duck was directly overhead and Chicken – he of the ample proportions – shot a third time, straight up.

          One of Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion goes something like this: If there is a force there also is an equal and opposite force. What this means is that if you shoot your shotgun straight up, there will be an equal force pushing straight down against your shoulder. Or something like that. It’s been a while since I studied such things at Ballard Memorial High School.

          The laws of force worked. When Red shot the third time, the force pushed his end of the boat into the water.

Red said, “After the boat went under, the next thing I saw of Chicken was from the ears up.”

          Another time, Red was among the group of people – read that, loafers – hanging around Bill Ryan’s Standard Oil station in Wickliffe on this particular day. It was pretty much a regular thing for people to be there, trying to outdo each other in stories.

          For some odd reason, probably for the same reasons that bathroom humor will never go away, on this day each one was trying to position himself as having had the worst case of constipation.

          It now was Red’s turn.

          “I hadn’t shit in more than a week,” Red reported, “but I thought I’d try to force something out. I sat on the commode for quite a while. I groaned, I hunched over, I groaned some more. Finally a ‘three-cornered possum turd’ trickled into the water. It hit the water and splashed so much that I was wet up to my armpits.”

          I suppose they get dense as the constipation persists.

Urban’s dad was quite a character too

July 25, 2011

          I’ve written some stories about Urban Hughes, who was one of Wickliffe’s leading characters. Urban’s father, Jesse Hughes, may have been even more of a character. Most people called him Mr. Hughes, or referred to him as Jess Hughes.

          Here are three stories I’ve heard about him. This first one about patent leather shoes I’ve heard from multiple sources.

          Mr. Hughes had a dry goods store in Wickliffe back in days gone by when there was an active retail establishment in town. He sold lots of shoes.

          A woman bought a pair of patent leather shoes from him. According to my father, those shoes were quite stylish back in the days when women wore long dresses. Daddy says it wasn’t unusual for a woman to simply squat in the yard back then when she needed to urinate. The long skirt protected her modesty, but not necessarily her shoes.

Daddy said that you had to care for patent leather with some sort of lubricant or polish, and if you didn’t, the leather would crack.

          Well, this particular woman brought her shoes back to Mr. Hughes and complained because they had cracked.

          The story goes that Mr. Hughes took the shoes over to the window, looked at them real closely in the light, turned them over from side to side, and finally burst out, “Why hell, hell! You pissed on them.”

          He refused to replace them.

          I heard this next one from Bill Ryan and maybe some other people, too.

          Here’s how Bill told the story.

          “A deaf and dumb beggar (remember, this was back in the days when people weren’t concerned about politically correct language), pencil seller or whatever he was, went into Mr. Hughes’ store, trying to sell him something, some magazine or something.

          “He laid down a card that said he was trying to get enough money to go through college.

          “Mr. Hughes put it down on the counter and wrote on the back side, ‘You should have stayed home!’ ”

          “As the beggar turned to leave the store, Mr. Hughes yelled, ‘Hey!’ The beggar turned around and Mr. Hughes handed him the card.”

Daddy told me this one that’s related to outhouse logic. For those of you who don’t know such things, outhouses were wooden buildings back in the days before indoor plumbing, and they served the same purpose as a commode. Today they’re made of plastic and called port-a-potties or some such clever name.

          Anyway, Mr. Hughes told daddy:

          “When you build your new outhouse, don’t put two holes in it because the women will go out to the outhouse and they’ll sit and they’ll talk and they’ll shit and they’ll talk and they can’t get their housework done. Don’t build but one hole, then they won’t socialize out there. But it’s handy to have a small hole at a lower level for the children because they’ll have trouble trying to climb up on the bigger hole.”

Bob Level: Wart witch from Bandana

July 28, 2011

          Folks say that Bob Level was a wart witch. He could touch a wart and it would go away. Or sometimes he could just say the wart would go away and it would.

          He was from Bandana, just down the road from Joe’s Place in Monkey’s Eyebrow.

          My mother, Jessie Lee Crice Culver, remembers one time when she had warts on her fingers. She saw Bob Level in Wickliffe and showed him the warts. She said, “Bob, I have all these warts on here and they hurt at night.”

          They hurt even when she put her hands on a pillow at night.

          Level looked at the warts and said, “Oh, they’ll go away.”

          Mother said she looked down one day and they were all gone.

          Daddy said sometimes Level would touch the warts, sometimes he wouldn’t. “He was a wart witch. He was the seventh son of a seventh son, I guess. That’s sometimes the way it works.”

          Mother mentioned one time when her father – Robert Crice, who served as Ballard County jailer – had a “big ol’ thing” on his head. He went to Dr. Russell, a doctor in Wickliffe and a legend in his own right in the area, and wanted him to take it off.

          Dr. Russell asked if it was hurting him, and my grandfather said it wasn’t. Dr. Russell didn’t want to cut it off. Because it wasn’t hurting, he told granddaddy, “Just leave it alone. Don’t mess with it.”

          But granddaddy didn’t like having it on his head, so one day when he saw Bob Level he mentioned it. “It’ll go away,” Level said. Sure enough, it just went away, just disappeared.

          “You’d sort of forget about the wart after talking to Bob and all of a sudden you reach up there and it’s gone,” mother said.

          Daddy mentioned a man he worked with at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “I had a wart on my thumb and it bothered me,” daddy said. “I was complaining about it one day and he said, ‘Here, I’ll just buy that wart,’ and he gave me a penny.”

          Daddy said he put the penny on a shelf on his work bench and, “believe it or not,” at some later date that wart went away.”

          From Teresa Morris Salonimer, daughter of Charles (Block) and Aileen Morris: Pug Hammett was another one who could remove warts. I had one on my thumb and Daddy told me the next time Mr. Hammett came in to shop at Sunlane IGA have him touch it. I did (though I was a non-believer). The next week, the seed wart dried up and flaked off.

 

Reading the Word … almost

(A story told by Urban Hughes)

August 5, 2011

          You’ll find other stories about Urban Hughes in various categories on this website. Here’s one of the stories that he told, rather than one told about him.

          This comes courtesy of Urban’s son Tim.

          Tim points out that it won’t be as funny in writing: “The story, as my father Urban told it, was very funny. But without my dad's words and voice inflections, the story in text form loses much of the humor. I don't know or remember the names of individuals involved. Perhaps it's just as well.”

          Here’s the story, at least the words, as Urban would have told it.

          “Way back when .... now this was from the old horse and buggy days. One of the small Baptist churches near Wickliffe (note: Urban named the church but I’ll leave it out to avoid any possible embarrassment) could not afford to employ a full-time minister. So, there were a few lay-ministers who took up the slack.

          “The lay minister of this particular Sunday could neither read nor write.

          “This particular minister liked to speak a few passages from the Bible to open the service. In order to accomplish the reading of the Word, the minister would open and hold the Bible. A literate deacon would stand behind the minister at the pulpit, and read (silently) from the Bible and then whisper the passage of scripture into the minister's ear. The minister would then repeat the Bible verses aloud to the congregation (and I mean really loudly with voice tremolo).

          “Dialog as follows ….

          “Deacon whispers to minister: ‘And the Lord loved the world.’

          “Preacher loudly to the congregation: ‘And the Lord loved the world.’

          “Unfortunately at this point, the deacon could not see the next verse because the minister's hand had covered the Bible text.

          “Deacon in a whisper, ‘Please move your thumb.’

          “Minister to the congregation: ‘As it is written, the Lord has commanded, you have got to move your thumbs.’

          “Deacon in a whisper: ‘Preacher ... you stupid dolt, now you've played hell!’

          “Minister to the congregation: ‘As it is written, you all are stupid and have played hell and into the hands of the devil!’

          “The deacon left the minister at the pulpit, and exited the church along with half the congregation.”

The other side of the tracks (bottom side)

August 7, 2011

          I am indebted to my good friend Danny Ryan for providing the basis for this story.

          Dugan Shepherd was generally well thought of around Wickliffe. He had lots of friends.

          His wife, Rosie, might have helped keep him mostly on the straight and narrow. She didn’t put up with a lot of crap. Apparently she had a bit of a temper.

          Someone said of Rosie, “If they ever name a hurricane after Dugan’s wife, you’d better hit the tall timber.”

          Dugan’s actual name was Wilbur Lee Shepherd. His face was not quite right. A relative said that was because he was kicked in the face by a horse or mule when he was young.

          Another relative passed on that Dugan taught himself to cuss when he was a kid by tying a string to his big toe. Every time he yanked the string, he said a cuss word. I don’t know if that’s true or just family lore.

          Dugan was an ironworker. He worked hard and, as is the case with most ironworkers, he had periods when he was between jobs. Ironworking is an undertaking that keeps its practitioners in good shape. Dugan was a strong man.

          I don’t think Dugan was one of the men in Wickliffe who regularly nursed a bottle of beer or took a little nip from a bottle of the harder stuff.

          He would go for periods without anything and then – as did other men in Wickliffe – would go across the river to Cairo and go on a drinking binge, or as some of the men put it, “go on a tear.”

          These tears weren’t just for a couple of hours.

          Here’s how one of Dugan’s co-workers once described Dugan’s most recent (at that time) escapade in Cairo: “They were planting corn under the Mile Bridge when he went over to Cairo, and they were picking it when he came back.”

          I can’t vouch for the story that follows as far as whether it’s true or not, but it’s a good story to tell.

          They say that Dugan went to Cairo on one of the tears and managed to put away quantities of the hard stuff over a quantity of days.

          One night he decided it would be a good time to go home and, seeing as how he would be going home in the middle of the night, he decided he might as well walk.

          For some reason he chose to walk across the railroad bridge that spans the Ohio River from Cairo to Kentucky, or from Kentucky to Cairo depending on which way you’re going.

          He had been walking for a while, long enough that he figured he must be somewhere near the middle of the river which flowed far below him, when he heard an approaching train.

          Not having been on a tear sufficiently long that he was willing to face a train head-on, Dugan managed to work his way through some openings and hang onto cross ties or supports or something beneath the bridge.

          He hung on for dear life because he didn’t think he would survive a fall from that bridge into the middle of the Ohio River.

          Finally the train passed by, but Dugan was tiring and didn’t have the strength to get back up on the track side of the bridge. He was getting worried that he might not be able to hang on for much longer, and he wasn’t sure how he was going to get out of the predicament.

          Daylight was breaking so he decided if only he could hang on until it got light enough that he could see what he faced, he might be able to escape the danger.

          When the light reached a level that let him see his surroundings, nervously he looked down to see how high up he was. Turns out, he was only a couple of feet above the ground, having walking nearly to the end of the bridge on the Kentucky side. It was a simple matter of letting go and dropping safely to the ground so he could continue his journey home.

          The story, as told, doesn’t say what level of hurricane he encountered when he got home.

Marshal Marshall’s years as Wickliffe police officer

August 13, 2011

          He came to Wickliffe in 1936 in a barge from Mound City. He was Wickliffe’s police officer for about 17 years. He was scraped by a bullet once and shot at another time. He jailed a millionaire. The county drunk came to his aid one time and used a crotch grip to force the bad guy to stop beating him. And the young people of Wickliffe trusted him and were a regular source of information that helped him do his job.

          It would have been correct to call him Marshal Marshall.

          Marshall Pennebaker was born in Charleston, Mo., 86 years ago. He served Wickliffe as city marshal from 1949 to 1954, and then again from 1956 to 1967.

          He could have served without a break except he quit the job in 1954 on a matter of principle.

          Pennebaker always ran the police business the way he thought it should be run.

          Then in 1954, when Buddy Bell was police commissioner, “There was a kid who stole a bicycle and Buddy was wanting the kid put in jail. He was only 16 years old and I argued against it. It got so heated I just went down to city council and told them I quit.”

          Pennebaker was first hired as Wickliffe marshal after he served in the Navy during World War II.

          He wound up in the military, he says, because during an assembly program at Wickliffe High School he heard Anita Faye Crice sing “God Bless America.” He was so touched with patriotic zeal that he ran out and joined the Navy.

Except for the Navy, the marshal’s job was Pennebaker’s first real job.

          Asked about the philosophy that he applied to the job, he said, “My philosophy was always give a kid a break and they always gave me a break. They were good to me and I was good to them.”

          He tells a couple of stories to illustrate the relationship he had with young people.

          “I went home one night and I was laughing and told my wife, those kids think they’ve got me figured out. I was in Doke’s bathroom (Doke’s was a gas station) and I could hear the young people talking about me. One of them said, ‘Well he’s a pretty good fellow but let me tell you one thing right now. If he ever starts scratching that damn bald head, you’d better pay attention.’ The one who said that was Joe Giles.”

          Pennebaker said Doke’s station stayed open all night long back in those days and it was a gathering point for police officers “from Cairo and Mounds and Mound City and Bardwell. We had a heck of a good time.”

          Pennebaker said there wasn’t anything the young people wouldn’t tell him.

          “I’ll give you another story on that. One time Anderson Moss was county judge. That’s when the county judge had power. There had been some break-ins in Ballard County. I had to go to Cairo to get this fellow out of jail on some misdemeanor and he told me if I’d get him out of jail, he’d give me the names of the people who were doing the break-ins. I told the sheriff the names of about 20 who had done them. When they were having their hearing there at night, Anderson Moss wanted to know who I got my information from. I said, ‘That’s none of your business, I ain’t going to tell you.’ He said, ‘I’ll put you in jail.’ I said, “Well that means you’re going to have to put me in jail because I told him I would not tell and I will not.’ Jack Hall was the jailer. I got over there and I was laughing all the time. I said, ‘Jack I need to use your phone. I want to call Judge Stahr.’ (Elvis Stahr was the circuit judge.) The judge said, ‘Marshall what are you doing waking me up at this time of day?’ I said, ‘They’re throwing me in jail.’ He wanted to know what they were putting me in jail for. I told him what Judge Moss said and he said, ‘Put him on the phone.’ He asked him if he wanted to go to jail instead of me.”

Pennebaker didn’t go to jail.

          The young people in Wickliffe may have cooperated with Pennebaker but they weren’t angels.

          Pennebaker tells this story about some of the young folks. “Kenny Teeters, Tony Phillips and I believe Punchy Garrison (Harold Garrison, later to serve as Ballard County sheriff) were there. This was back when men first started wearing long hair. There was a hitchhiker in town. One of them said, ‘That guy needs a haircut.’ About 15 or 20 minutes later Mrs. Joyce Carpenter called and said, ‘There’s been a kidnapping!’I knew just as well what had happened. They had gotten that boy, taken him to the cemetery, gotten a pair of mule scissors and was giving him a haircut.”

          Halloween several years ago was a time when you could count on the boys of Wickliffe to pull pranks. Fred Byassee’s barber shop was an annual target. Some years the front of the shop would be littered with truckloads of empty cans.

          “They did that because Fred would run them away from the front of his shop,” Pennebaker says. “I guess I was a little lax on that. One year I went by and the boys were standing across the street in front of Mildred Swain’s.I asked them why they hadn’t dumped anything in front of the shop. They just pointed and I looked. There sat Fred Byassee in a barber chair with a shotgun across his lap.”

          Pennebaker doesn’t think there are many differences between young people today and then. He doesn’t think today’s kids are meaner, but he does believe that drugs affect them.

          One difference he sees is that “the police don’t try to help ’em. They try to squeeze ’em.”

          He said he used to spend a lot of time in Cairo at the Mark Twain. “If there was something going on in Wickliffe or Ballard County as far as that’s concerned, I guarantee you one of these kids would come to Cairo and tell me I’d better get back to Wickliffe. They wouldn’t tell me what was going on, they’d just say get back to Wickliffe. I never asked them why, I’d just come to Wickliffe. There was one time when Punchy Garrison and Tony Phillips got my blackjacks – I was in St. Louis at a ball game – and they had a man in jail when I got back. They had made a citizens’ arrest of a man on top of the building, trying to break in down at Urban Hughes store.”

          But the drugs make a difference, he believes. “I think the dope has a different effect on them than whiskey.” He refers to the Wickliffe young people as “my boys” and says, “My boys drank beer. I knew they did. I told them they had to clean the beer cans up, not leave them on the street.”

          Drugs led to one odd incident when he was serving as marshal. “They called me down to the Ancient Buried City (now the Wickliffe Mounds) one night, said there was a man down there chasing hogs out of the road. I got there and there wasn’t even no hogs in the road. He was calling soo-ey soo-ey and making strange noises. I just loaded him up and taken him to jail. What it was, he was on a handful of pills.”

          Pennebaker remembers a couple of dangerous situations he was in.

          “The most dangerous thing, I guess maybe it was the time a man had escaped from prison and was in a stolen vehicle heading south. The state police got him stopped at the red light down here. I was on one side of the car and Lloyd Key (a Kentucky state policeman who lived in Wickliffe) was on the other. I never knew Lloyd to cuss. When the guy started firing Lloyd said, ‘By Ned, hit the ground!’ He always called me Crip. He said, “Hit the ground Crip.” He took off but we finally got him out of the car over in Bardwell.”

          There was another time when Pennebaker stopped a car at the Gulf station that was operated by Richard Parham, across the street from the Methodist Church. The car had been weaving when it came through town. “There were five of them in the car. Four of them stayed in the car, but there was this big fellow about 6-9 or 6-10. He said, ‘We’re going to fight.’ I was young and full of vinegar, and I said, ‘That suits me fine.’ He started in and two of them got out of the car, pinned my hands behind me and took my gun. He cocked that gun and held it on me. He knocked the fire out of me. Here come John Moyers. He had a radiator hose, and he was whupping them with a radiator hose. Ned Robinson, the county drunk – that I’d arrested no telling how many times – came up behind the big man and grabbed him” in a sensitive area in the crotch. That ended the fight. “Robinson came to my rescue. He said, ‘They can’t do nobody from Wickliffe that way.’ ”

          Pennebaker got shot across the side of his head in the scuffle. He was holding the man’s arm to keep the gun pointed away, but one of the shots came close, scraping Pennebaker’s head. It was only a surface wound.

          When Pennebaker started, he started out at $75 a month, and was on call seven days a week. There was no overtime pay.

          “There were five law enforcement officers in the county then.There was the sheriff and his deputy, La Center went to Bandana and Kevil, Barlow people would go to La Center and take his place, and I would run between Wickliffe and Barlow so we could sort of even things out. Now,” Pennebaker says, “they’ve got 27 deputies to cover the county.”

          Wickliffe had its own jail then but the city council didn’t want to use it unless absolutely necessary. “When I first come back and started, they done the right thing and they told me to try my best not to put anybody in jail but tell them to go home. That worked okay for a pretty good while and then it got where they were having so many break-ins .…” That was about the time the city council bought what Pennebaker believes was the area’s first two-way radio for local officers. He also was “the first one to get one of those modern si-reens. I thought I was in hog heaven. But it would save your life. It was a si-reen and a PA system too. You could sit in your car like at night time and say, ‘Get out of your car.’ You didn’t have to walk out and get beside that car.”

          Pennebaker remembers the time he put a millionaire in the jail.

          Fain White King was the owner and excavator of what was then known as the Ancient Buried City, now the Wickliffe Mounds. The Kings also owned the Magnolia Manor in Cairo. In 1946, King and his wife, Blanche, donated the Ancient Buried City to the Western Baptist Hospital. George Johnson managed the site for the hospital for many years until he retired.

          During the transition period, Pennebaker says, King and Johnson got into it.

          “I always tried to settle things, to talk things out,” Pennebaker says, “but King told me how he’d killed two or three people in Mississippi and how mean he could get. He was carrying a concealed pistol. I knew it was wrong but I thought, ‘I’m going to give you a taste of the Wickliffe jail.’ Old George Marshall (who lived beside the jail) was sitting there and saw us drive up, and he came out there in his wheel chair and was the tickledest old man you ever seen in your life. King got him a lawyer and he sued the city of Wickliffe. It went on for about a year. His lawyer was smart and he told King, ‘You don’t want to go to trial in Ballard County. They hate you and they’ll hang you.’ ”

          Police got by with a lot of things then that they couldn’t get by with now. “Several things we used to do, you’d be hanging yourself now,” Pennebaker says. “Lloyd Key or myself, or the people over in Mississippi County, we’d have somebody you thought had done the crime but you couldn’t quite prove it. What you’d do, you’d clean up, put your suit on, you’d go in and tell him you were his attorney, see. At the end of it you’d advise him to plead guilty. They’d put you in the pen now for doing that.”

          Another story Pennebaker remembers involved home brew.

          He says there were “two old colored women” – Ella and her sister – and they made home brew.

          “Earl Johnson was sheriff,” Pennebaker recalls. “He come to me one time and talked about raiding Ella. I said, ‘Earl are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ He said, ‘I know what I’m doing!’ All right, fine. I think he got about four or five cases of home brew. He took them to the court house. About a month later they started exploding. In the meantime Ella had gone to court to get that home brew back. How she got out of it completely, she wasn’t selling home brew. She would sell you a barbecue sandwich and give you a home brew to drink. They couldn’t get her.”

          Pennebaker hasn’t been able to live in his house on Beech Grove road since the floodwaters came up this year. He had lived there for 36 years and water never got into it until this year.

          He has been married to Martha Sue for 63 years. She has been mayor of Wickliffe since the last election.

          Today, his hearing is fading and age is taking its toll, but his mind is still sharp and he’s a good source of memories about times gone by in Wickliffe.

Three stories about Mr. Jones

August 14, 2011

          Anytime you walked past his house in Wickliffe when I was growing up, Mr. Jones would say, “Fine day, boy.” Rain or shine, it always was a fine day.

          His name was Robert Herman Jones but most folks called him either Mr. Jones or sometimes Old Man Jones. Some people called him Herman.

          Marshall Pennebaker, longtime lawman at Wickliffe, told these three stories about him.

          Mr. Jones usually attended services at the Christian Church in Wickliffe more or less across the street from his house, where the Rev. Bill Morris preached. He sat up front every Sunday – middle row, second pew, left-hand side looking toward the pulpit, according to Teresa Morris Salonimer, a niece of Rev. Morris. Mr. Jones was hard of hearing. Some folks say if you ever heard his wife sing, you would know it was a blessing in disguise.

          On this particular Sunday, Mr. Jones attended church at Morris Valley Christian Church where Rev. Morris also preached.

          It was a long-winded sermon and Mr. Jones had pretty well reached his fill of being preached to.

          He pulled out his watch, checked the time, and said loud enough for folks to hear, “Too damn long, too damn long.”

          Here’s another: Mr. Jones was behind the wheel of his vehicle in Cairo, Ill. The Cairo police thought he was driving too slow and they wanted to give him a ticket.

          He was poking along heading south on Highway 51. The Cairo police had two cars with red lights on at 28th Street, trying to get him to stop, and one officer standing in the road with his hand up.

          Mr. Jones thought they were being mighty friendly so he waved at the friendly officers and kept going.

          On down the road at 8th Street there were three police cars with their lights flashing. Mr. Jones waved at them again and kept going.

          When he got to the Ohio River bridge, he had to stop because the police had the bridge pretty well blocked.

          Mr. Jones didn’t understand what the fuss was all about.

          “I didn’t do nothin’,” he said.

          Third story: Wickliffe’s Baptists were having a revival. Mrs. Jones went over to the service on this night.

          The next morning, Mr. Jones asked her if there was a good crowd. She said, “Yes Herman, they had a good crowd.”

          “Well,” he asked, “was anyone there unsaved?”

          “I don’t know, Herman,” she answered. “I didn’t go around asking people if they were saved.”

          “Well, were they any Baptists there?” he continued.

          “Well yes, there were Baptists there.”

          And he wrapped up the conversation: “Well then, if there were Baptists there, there were some unsaved there.”

          There’s another story about Mr. Jones in the “Around Ballard County” tab of this web site.

The Garretts of Wickliffe

October 9, 2011

          I’m not blood kin to the Garrett family of Wickliffe, Kentucky, but I feel like I am.

          My uncle Dick Crice was married to Oma Dell Garrett, one of the four children of Joe and Nola Garrett. The other three were Clifford (better known as Wart), Rosie and Howard.

          Dick and Oma Dell’s son, George, and I were not only cousins but also great friends as we grew up in Ballard County. Because the Garretts were George’s family on his mother’s side, he and I visited their house often.

          It wasn’t a big, fancy house. It sat on a narrow lot in Wickliffe, between Allie and Kathleen Rollins toward the west and Quacker Sullivan to the east. The house was two rooms wide, and, I recall, two rooms deep, plus an additional room that sat behind the kitchen.

          Small and basic it was, but I always felt welcome and at home when George and I would visit. The same was true later when I lived away from Wickliffe and came back to visit. I would usually go alone to visit Rosie and Mrs. Garrett on every trip home, and I always felt like I was visiting family.

          That generation of the Garrett family came to an end a few days ago when Howard died. I believe Howard was the youngest of the four children.

          My friend Eddie Faye came in from Bowling Green to go to the Wickliffe reunion on Saturday night (October 8), and he and I went to Howard’s funeral earlier in the day.

          It still was like going to a family gathering. The younger Garretts – the children of Wart and Willie – and their children, all talked to us and made us feel like we belonged there with them.

          Wart and Willie had, I believe, nine children. All the girls were attractive and they have become attractive women, mothers and grandmothers. The Garrett boys weren’t quite so lucky, but that’s all I’ll say about that.

          As I sat there during the service at the Milner-Orr Funeral Home in Wickliffe, I thought back to times with the family.

          Mrs. Garrett, Nola, was a kindly woman. She cooked for years at Bernice and Sheepy Dupoyster’s restaurant. I don’t guess a work day went by that you didn’t see Rosie and Mrs. Garrett walking to town or back to their house. Rosie lived in the house with her mother all her life, I believe.

          I was around Oma Dell more than any of her siblings because George and I were together so much. Oma Dell was very good to me.

          I never saw Rosie in a dress. She always wore a shirt and jeans. And Rosie delighted in trying to scare George and me, and her Garrett nephews and nieces, with stories of ghosts and goblins and headless apparitions and mysterious lights from when the Garretts lived at Fort Jefferson.

          Clifford, or Wart, was too busy to spend lots of time around us. He was working or hunting or engaged in commercial fishing, or doing something busy. I went coon hunting a time or two with Wart. That was enough. He would hunt in the Mayfield Creek bottoms and I believe he must have trained his dogs to cross every creek they could. When you hunted coons with Wart, you’d better be prepared to run across logs to cross creeks.

          Howard was probably the least memorable of all of them. I recall talking with Howard many times, but I don’t recall him doing much talking himself. I think Howard was a quiet listener. You might leave wherever you saw him, and then start wondering if he had been there. He didn’t make much of an impression, and I think that’s how he wanted it.

          I heard only one story that Howard was part of.

          Joe Garrett, Nola’s husband, was asked one time at Bill Ryan’s station how his kids were.

          He shook his head slowly a time or two and then summed up his parental observations very succinctly: “There’s Oma Dell; she married Diamond Dick. And Clifford, he doesn’t talk right. Rosie dresses like a man. And Howard stands in front of the mirror all day combing his hair.”

          And Mr. Garrett shook his head slowly a couple of more times and walked off muttering to himself.

Roy Dowdy defends his good name

October 10, 2011

          Lots of people around my hometown, Wickliffe, Ky., remember Roy Dowdy.

          There’s a story about the first time Roy ever went to a movie, also referred to as a picture show by many folks.

Roy walked into the theater to pick out a place to sit, the story goes. Being a movie theater, all the seats were folded up against the back of the chair. Roy noticed that but didn’t know they could be moved into a more comfortable position, so he perched right on top of his up-folded seat, like a big bird.

          Somebody punched him and told him he was supposed to let the seat down, which he did, and he sat in it, much more comfortably.

          The movie was about a man who had stolen a diamond ring.

          The accused was on the witness stand being grilled by an aggressive prosecutor.

          Roy was sitting on the very edge of his seat during this tense moment of the movie.

          With the camera focused on him, so that he’s looking right at the audience, the prosecutor pointed his finger straight at the accused man, which means he was also pointing directly at the audience in the movie theater.

          “Did you steal that diamond ring?” he roared at the defendant.

          Roy jumped up out of his seat. “Hell no, Roy Dowdy never stole a damned thing in his life!”

          (Story told to me by Wade Garrett.)

Heavy fish and magic lantern

October 11, 2011

          Very often, you could find Maxie Burnett sitting in Joe Hall’s barber shop in Wickliffe, Ky. He and others found it a convenient spot to sit and lie … uh, strike “lie” … have conversations.

          Doc Bales walked in on this particular day and announced, “By George, I caught a crappie this morning and that crappie weighed eight pounds.”

          A rightfully skeptical Maxie said, “You didn’t catch no eight-pound crappie.”

          “Yeah, I did too. I did too.”

          Maxie sat there a while and eventually got to talking about coon hunting.

          “I was up there at Prairie Lake coon hunting the other night,” he began. “I started out across the lake and had my lantern but I dropped the lantern out of the boat while I was crossing the lake. I went back up there the next morning and fished my lantern out of the lake. That durn thing was still burning.”

          Doc Bales said, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. If you dropped that lantern in the lake, it wasn’t still burning.”

          Maxie said, “I’ll tell you what, Doc. You knock five pounds off that crappie and I’ll blow that lantern out.”

          (As told by Wade Garrett.)

Urban Hughes relegates the delegates

November 2, 2011

          Quite a few years ago there was a big controversy going on in Wickliffe, something to do with the water system, according to Larry Kelley, who told this story.

          Unable to resolve the problem at the local level, Wickliffe powers-that-be – or maybe I should say, since this was in the past, Wickliffe powers-that-were – decided they needed to send a delegation to the state capital at Frankfort to get funding or have the law changed, whatever it was they needed to do about the water system.

          They chose as the delegates, Carl Horn, Noah Geveden, who was city attorney at that time, and Sis Phillips, who before Ballard County voted itself dry ran a tavern and sold liquor and perhaps took the occasional nip.

          Local businessman, wit, cynic and grade-A character Urban Hughes, sitting on the bench in front of his store, said to whomever he was talking to at the time, “By God, that’s a fine delegation to send to Frankfort on the Wickliffe water problem. There’s Carl Horn, who don’t even live in Wickliffe. (He lived on Beech Grove Road at the time.) There’s Noah Geveden who don’t own no property in Wickliffe. (Which was a put-down on Geveden.) And there’s Sis Phillips who never drank a drink of water in his life.”

Nothing like a friendly city

Nov. 25, 2011

          Roy Dowdy of Wickliffe, Ky., had a brother named Russell, who moved to St Louis.

          According to Wade Garrett, who told this story, Russell came back home for a visit and he was telling Roy and his wife Lillie about life in St. Louis.

          “Man you ought to come to St. Louis and visit us, Roy,” Russell told him. “You’d love it up there. These people are so friendly, you’d really like it.” He painted a big, pretty unignorable picture to Roy of how nice St. Louis was.

          When Russell left, Roy told his wife, “Lillie, when we sell our tobacco this year, I’m going to buy a car and we’re going to go up there and see Russell.”

          When the tobacco was sold, Roy – who never had driven – bought an old car. He practiced by driving it around a little bit, then he and Lillie took off for St. Louis in the old car.

          Roy didn’t have a driver’s license but he made it all the way to St. Louis. After he entered the city, the first road he turned down was a one-way street. Naturally, the one way the street goes is not the one way Roy is driving.

As Roy headed the wrong way down the one-way street, people were waving their arms and yelling at Roy, trying to tell him he’s going the wrong way.

          Roy turned to Lillie and said, “By George Lillie, I wish you’d look there. Russell was right. We just now got into town and these people are waving at us like they’ve known us all their lives.”

Where did Richard Parham get the name “Apple”?

December 4, 2011

          Richard Parham ran the Gulf station in Wickliffe, Ky., when I was growing up there. It was across the street from the Standard Oil station run by Bill Ryan, and across the highway from the Methodist church.

          Many men – perhaps even most men – in Wickliffe were known by nicknames at the time. Richard Parham was known as Apple Dick Parham.

          I don’t recall ever wondering about names back then, starting more than 60 years ago. We kids heard the names people were called, and we assumed those were their names, I suppose.

          I ran into Apple Dick’s son, Dale Parham, on Dec. 3, 2011, at the monthly breakfast at the Wickliffe Masonic Lodge #625 F&AM on Buck Road. I usually take my uncle, Billy Bob Crice, to that breakfast which is held on the first Saturday of each month. Billy Bob has been a member of the lodge for more than 60 years.

          I asked Dale how his dad came to be known as Apple.

          “The family didn’t have much of anything,” Dale told me.

Back in those days that was a condition not uncommon among Ballard Countians.

          There were three generations of Richard Parhams: Grandfather, father and son.

          Richard, who eventually ran the Gulf station, was called Dicky to distinguish him from others. Later, the last part was dropped and he was called Dick.

          One time a neighbor brought a bushel of June apples to the Parhams, who were very poor, Dale told me.

          Richard had a brother known as Chigger. Dale said he didn’t know where that name came from, but I can guess that a lot of scratching (and not scratching of heads) went into that nickname.

          Richard and Chigger got into the apples.

          Richard ate his fill of apples from that bushel, and he paid the price, the price being a case of trots that lasted for a few days.

          After that, Dick Parham became Apple Dick Parham.

Maybe the ducks should have ducked

December 14, 2011

          Joe Hall’s barber shop at Wickliffe was one of the several places where local characters would hang out and swap tales, most of them being tales tall enough to play center on an NBA team.

          Otto Beardsley and Maxie Burnett frequently sat in the barber shop, trying to outlie each other.

          According to Wade Garrett, Otto came in one day and said, “I’ve done something this morning that I ain’t never done before in my life.”

          Maxie had to ask, “What’s that, Otto?”

          “I killed 26 ducks with one shot.”

          Maxie didn’t really challenge that. He limited his comments to, “Yeah, sure you did Otto.”

          But a day or two later they were back in the barber shop and Maxie said, “Otto, how many ducks was it you said you killed with one shot?”

          Otto said, “Twenty-six.”

          “Well, I beat you this morning.”

          “How many did you kill?” Otto asked.

          Maxie said, “I killed 28.”

          Otto got in the last word: “Yeah, but you were probably using a shotgun, wasn’t ya?”