MY BROTHER BILL

My brother Bill is the closest one of my brothers in age to me. There are only a couple years difference in our age with him being the younger. When we were kids we did a lot of playing in the woods, creeks, fields and barns. Picked a lot of blackberries walked to school, walked to church and to Cole's and Lamar's stores.  Played with the Humpherys, Carrs, Reesers and eventually the Lawsons. There was no television, cell phones, i pads, play stations, x box, Nintendo's,  digital games or anything else so we had to entertain ourselves. The first ones on our road that got a TV that I remember were the Reesers. We would go to their house and watch The Little Rascals.  I don't recall a lot of the things Bill did when he was younger but I am sure my brother Ron could give you an ear full. I always thought Bill got more 'whippings' than the rest of us. I remember when we would go to school my dad would let him out of the car and he would be back home before dad could get to work. I remember when we went to North Acres church him and the Mellon boys would 'rock' poor ole Clarence Elmore in the outside toilet and not let him come out. Clarence was a little preacher man that had a speech impediment and would stutter a lot but when he preached he didn't stutter at all. He loved my dad and we always said if Dad jumped off the Gay Street Bridge Clarence would be right behind him. It was a real game to throw rocks at the outside toilet when someone was in it so they couldn't come out. I have asked the family for stories about Bill and here are a few of them. My brother Ron has lots of memories about our brother Bill. He said he could start with the time he was a child and brother Bill invented child abuse. But he said he dare not go there but wanted to dwell on his brother Bill as the compassionate man that he has become. Although Bill was always the first one to go "whope" anyone who picked on his little brother Ron they would soon realize the wrath of a big brother was like a momma hen protecting her chicks. He said when he went to college Bill would always give him a little extra money if he needed it. Ron, along with the rest of us, remember Bill's act of self sacrifice in volunteering for the extra tour in Vietnam so our brother Jim wouldn't have to go.

That gives us all a sense of pride. Bill has provided for his family very well and his three children have turned out to be wonderful individuals and citizens.  My sister Mary said she remembers hiding behind the door when Bill would get a whipping. I told you I remember him getting more than the others. I remember one time my dad was going around and around in the kitchen giving Bill a whipping and my mom made him stop so Bill must of really been in trouble that time. Mary said one time Bill gave her a Baby Ruth package and tried to get her to eat it when he had filled it with rabbit balls. And he had her touch a radio in the basement so it would give her an electric shock. She also remembers him not wanting to go to school as I mentioned above and would go out the back door of the school after Daddy would drop him off at the front door.  She was with him when he was driving and he ran into the back of a car and knocked her over in the front seat. As with me he always scared her when she rode in the car with him because he drove too fast. She remembers also when he joined the Army and went to Germany and went to Vietnam. He came home unexpectedly from Vietnam and was there when mother got sick and they thought she was going to die. I think that was when she almost hemorrhaged to death following a diverticulitis rupture. My sister June remembers the tender, compassionate side of Bill. The tears that flowed when our mom died, the arm of love wrapped around her at the deaths of her husband and daughter. Bill is always the first to buy groceries and honey baked ham and turkey when we have a death. June has been like a second mama to Bill and it is her house that the first stop is made when he is visiting. Of course he likes to smoke and drink coffee with her. We also remember the day they were working on the septic tank and Bill fell in. My great nephew Andy was telling about one time when Bill was telling all of the little kids a ghost story. He was sitting under the big tree that was in the middle of the field between us and the Hairs before any houses were built in the field. They were all sitting under that tree (I think it might of been a hickory nut tree) and Bill was telling the ghost story. It got scarier and scarier and then all at once a ghost (someone covered with a white sheet) came walking down the hill and all of the kids were scared to death and went running down the house toward mama's house. I am sure Bill had planned this ahead and had the ghost come just at the right time. Bill came to my house one night when we lived in the little block house closer to the road and he brought a girl with him. He came in sat down on the couch never introduced her, sat there and talked to us for a while and then said, "come on stupid lets go". To this day I never knew her name or anything about her. Bill was a fast driver and I remember one Wednesday night he came to get me and Pam to take us to church and we were going down Washington Pike on that stretch close to Stoffel's dairy and I looked over and he was going over 100 miles and hour. I said if I ever got out of that car I would never ride with him again. But I did.  One time Bill gave me a pig. He had raised it and then his kids wouldn't eat it because apparently they had made a pet out of it so when he had it killed I got the meat. Bill would get packs of brand new $1.00 bills at Christmas and give to my kids. They would be brand new and sometimes they would stick together and the kids would get more than they thought they had. Bill has a heart as big as a wash tub. He was always doing something for me and my family. When I had to go to Nashville to take my exams for my LPN License I did not have a car that was dependable to drive and he let me take his new car to Nashville.  When our dad was sick and dying with Lymphoma Bill stayed night after night with him at Baptist Hospital. Bill volunteered for a second tour of duty in Vietnam just so our brother Jim wouldn't have to serve there while they were at war. Bill was one of James's groomsmen in our wedding.

Bill, Marvin, James, Chester

As we got older Bill married and we were both raising our families and we didn't get to see each other as much. He went to work for Southern Railroad and after a few years him and his family moved to Michigan where they stayed for several years and then he went to work for the Federal Railroad and moved to Texas where he lives today. So now it is longer and longer between visits. Bill has three children and one son lives in Michigan and is married and has 3 children, one son that works for John Deere and traveled to Brazil for work and met his wife there and they are now expecting their first baby. His daughter lives in Texas close to Bill and she has 2 children so soon Bill will have 6 grandchildren. Bill loves his coffee, cigarettes and dogs. He has finally retired and is one of those Hardee's guys that eat breakfast out. Bill also does some cooking and a lot of our phone calls are to get a recipe. He calls me when he has a cooking question. He likes to make homemade ice cream. I forgot to put my ice cream recipe and my banana pudding recipe in my cook book and he calls me for them. Sometimes its questions about Thanksgiving Dinner when he is cooking. Bill and his wife also collect a lot of antiques. They go to a lot of estate sales and have several cabinets full of things they have bought and collected over the years. It is always a happy feeling when we know Bill and his family are coming home for a visit. If we know in time either June or I try to make some chicken and dumplings for him and a pound cake or sour cream coconut cake. We all love our brother Bill and he is one in a million.

Ron, Bill, Jim

Chicken and dumplings at Sue's

Bill and Rachael

Bill, Ron, Sue, Mary, Phyllis, June
at Jim's funeral

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

You have heard the saying 'Home is where the heart is'.  I have found that to be true over the years. We were just a couple of kids in love and wanting to get married. I was 19 years old just graduated from high school the year before and working at Kay Jewelers downtown in a part time job. James was 22 and working at Standard Knitting Mills at minimum wage which at that time was $1.00 an hour. So we had no money and also no where to live. I don't even know how it came up but very generously James's mom and dad told us we could live with them. Now they didn't live in a fine or big house. Actually James told me at one time the house had been used as a chicken house for the big house that his Aunt and Uncle lived in. His Aunt and Uncle's house faced Millertown Pike and the former chicken house that had been converted into a place to live faced the road behind it which was Grayson Road. The property has now all been taken over by the building of the interstate and Cracker Barrel. But that was where the house was. It was not big had only 4 small rooms and then an addition of a living room not long before we married. So James had a very small bed room mostly just big enough for a bed and a chest and a small closet. But it was wonderful to us. So we got married and I packed up my stuff and we moved into that little bedroom. We were married on June 2nd and at that time everybody was going to Gatlingburg for their honeymoon and we wanted to be different. So we left here with $40.00 in our pocket which was a weeks wages and started to Arkansas. Now I don't know why Arkansas but that was during the time that all of the problems over segregation was going on and James was very interested in history so that may have been why. But our $40.00 slowly begin to dwindle and we decided to turn around and come back to Gatlinburg. When we arrived in Gatlinburg we found a motel to stay in for $5.00 a night. We went downtown to eat and one look at the menu after we were seated told us we did not have enough money to eat there. So we got a salad and a glass of water and then went down to Sevierville where they had a real good steak house and ate there. The next day we went back home. I still had not brought a few of my things to James's house so I asked him when we got home if I could go get them and he said yes to start the car and if the gas hand moved just a little bit I would have enough gas to go to my house and get my things. I only lived about probably 4 miles from where James lived. So I got in the car and the gas hand moved so I went home and got the rest of my stuff and came back. I remember going into the living room which was kinda shut off from the rest of the house and I shut the door, laid down on the couch, and cried. That was the only time I every cried over leaving home. James was working second shift at the Standard and my part time job was soon over. His mom and dad both worked at the Standard and they worked the morning shift so they were gone from about 6:30 of the morning until about 4:30 and Jame would leave about 2:30 and get in about 11:30 so we had a lot of privacy and time to ourselves. At night when James was working I would go to my mom and dads to visit. This was all fine until I found out I was pregnant a few months later. We knew one small bedroom was not going to be big enough for a baby. So we began to look for a place to live.

James's sister Barbara had married a guy named Chester the year before and him and his dad were builders and Barbara and Chester had built a house on DeMarcus Lane in the Greenway Community and his dad also had some rental houses on the same road. So we rented a house from Chester's dad for $50.00 a month. That was a lot of money at that time. James had been put on production work at the Standard and was now bringing home $80.00 a week. James's mother bought us a lot of furniture for the house and we moved in probably about March of the following year after we married so we lived with James's mom and dad almost a year. Pamela was born the end of April and things seemed to be going OK until James came in one night and said they had put him back on wages instead of production. With rent to pay, baby food to buy, light and water bill to pay it made a big difference going from $80.00 a week back to $40.00 a week. Needless to say with a new baby and a cut in salary things begin to get tough and looked very depressing until one Sunday afternoon.

Gas was cheep in those days and one thing that we did a lot of on Sunday afternoons was ride around into the country. From East Town to Maloneyville Road doesn't seem far now but in our days it was a long way to go from there to Luttrell. So one Sunday afternoon we were riding out toward Union County and we decided to go down Maloneyville Road past where James's Uncle Jessee lived. His Uncle Jessee and Aunt Cora had bought the big grey house on Maloneyville and had lived there for some time. I remember when I was a lot younger my mom and dad would go there. It was a big two story house that at one time had slave quarters upstairs. It also was divided off into two parts where the carriages used to go through to let people out. The slave quarters were over the kitchen and there was a staircase that came down into the kitchen. There was a porch that ran around the side of the house that has now been closed in to make a bathroom. The house is still basically the same as when I was a kid. But that Sunday afternoon as we drove by the old house we noticed just a little further out maybe 3 acres past the house set a little flattop block house in the weeds. Jess and Cora's son Ross had built the little flat top house and when the automobile industry became so big in Detroit Michigan Ross and his family and also his sister Rose and her family all moved to Michigan. So here set the little flattop, four room house in the weeds. James started wondering if Jess might rent it to us. We stopped and looked at it and it was almost hidden in the weeds. It had not been lived in in a long time and the roof needed some work. The floors were all concrete and the walls cinder block. But we begin to get excited and was thinking about all of the things we could do to it. It did not matter to us that it didn't have a bathroom or running water. The old outside toilet would work just fine. So James went to talk with his Uncle Jess about the house. Jess said sure if we wanted to live there but he wouldn't charge us any rent. James wouldn't have that so they settled on $5.00 a month and anything we did to the house would come out of the rent. We were thrilled. The first thing we did was put water in the house. Not hot water just cold water. That was $60.00 so that paid for the first years rent. We began to mend the roof and paint the block walls, painted the concrete floors. So in October of 1963 when Pam was 6 months old we moved into the block house on Maloneyville Road. We had a coal burning stove, outside toilet, no hot water, no air conditioning, no screen doors. The house had a living room, two bedrooms and a kitchen. But to us it was an answer to our problems. We had a hard time the years we lived in this house. The roof leaked almost everytime it rained. James was always patching it. James was still working at the Standard on the second shift and when he would get home at night about 11:30 I would have supper ready and we would eat. It was nothing for us to go out in the front yard and take a shower. Jess and Cora went to bed early because they were still working at the Standard and the Graves on the other side which you could hardly see their house went into work early in the morning so nobody was up but us. Because James didn't go into work until 2:30 we would sleep late. We would lay in the bed with Pam and listen to Classical Music. I think that is where she got her love for the piano. We would read to her and she was very smart. The years began to pass and in 1966 Byron was born. By that time James was very discouraged with his job and not making any money. He realized if he was ever to get ahead he was going to have to get more education and a better job. But he hadn't even graduated from high school. James loved to read and never a night went by that he did not read before he went to sleep. Not novels but history, philosophy, Bible, psychology, he wrote short stories and poems. But he had no formal education. He had a supervisor that took an interest in him at the Standard and encouraged him to go and take the GED test to see if he could get his high school diploma and he did and passed it with no problems. Now let me remind you he only went through the 9th grade in high school. So he passed the GED and then he encouraged him to take some college classes and he went and took the College Admittance Test  and passed it and enrolled in classes at the University of Tennessee. Not knowing at that time what he wanted to do. So here we were still living in the little block house on Maloneyville Road, now with two children, James taking classes at UT and me being a mother and housewife. We realized if James were to ever get a degree he was going to have to go full time to the University. So when Byron was about a year old I got a job at Levis so James could go full time to school. I hated it the day I walked in and still hated it the day I walked out in 1970. I put the zipper slides on men's casual pants and because my job was standing on my feet I made $1.25 an hour instead of $1.15 which was minimum wage. In the meantime James was going to school during the day and keeping Byron and Pam at night. Byron was still in diapers. James used to talk about how Byron would stand in the baby bed shaking and rattling the rails while he was studying.  I was keeping the kids during the day and working the second shift. We only had one car and many nights James would have to load the kids up and come get me at work. But somehow we made it. It was a lot of cheep macaroni and cheese. We did have a garden at that time and had a lot of good fresh vegetables during the summer time. So in 1970 James and I sat in the audience as his class walked across the stage to receive their diplomas. He would not walk across the stage. He graduated from the College of Education at the University of Tennessee with a Bachelor of Science in Education with honors. I was so proud of him and all he had accomplished. Waiting on a job with Knox County Schools he went to work for my brother in law at Perkey's Upholstery for the summer. I will never forget the day he called me and said he had received a call from Knox County Schools to go for an interview at Mascot Elementary School. He went for the interview and got the job and that fall started teaching there. He loved Mascot and taught there until they built the new East Knox Elementary School and he was transferred there until they built the Carter Middle School and he was transferred there where he spent the rest of his teaching career retiring after 30 years of teaching. Soon after beginning his teaching career at Mascot we were expecting our third child Jennifer. Jennifer was born in 1971 and we were still living in the flattop block house that we moved into in the fall of 1963. But things were soon to change again.

Not long maybe a year or two after we moved into the house on Maloneyville in 1963 Jess and Cora were coming from church one night and when they crossed the Maynardville Highway just in front of the Halls High School they were hit by a car. Cora lived only a few days before she passed away. Jess began dating a lady and they soon married. After they married they built the yellow brick house at the top of the hill above the big grey house. Jess sold the big grey house to James's mom and dad and they moved into the big house.  This was before James went to UT and before he started teaching. In 1973 after James had been teaching a couple of years we started talking about building another house. When James's mom and dad bought the big grey house it included the land our house was sitting on. So they owned several acres and gave us an acre of ground. They also gave James's sister Brenda and her husband the acre next to us and to his sister Barbara and her husband several acres on the back of the property where they built a house. When you didn't have a lot of money but you did have a piece of land you could have a 'shell' home built. Jim Walters was the builder of the day during the 70's. So we had a Jim Walters home built for $15, 804. Our payments were 87.80 a month for 15 years. But the problem was it wasn't finished. It had to be wired, plumbed, sheet rock etc. It was as they said a 'shell'. So we made a few payments on it and decided to borrow the money to finish it. We went to Fountain City Bank took out a loan to pay off Jim Walters and finish the house. We borrowed $12, 500 for 10 years at $151.27 a month at 8.5 interest. That still was a lot of money to us but less than a weeks groceries cost today. James was not a builder, plumber, electrician, painter, carpet layer or any of those things. He was a scholar. So today when I look around and see the crooked walls, the seams showing on the ceiling, the uneven woodwork, doors that don't shut good I remember He Did The Best He Knew How To Do. AND he was always too prideful to ask for help. But we have raised 4 children in this house, took care of 15 foster children, had numerous dinners, showers,  parties where I have to sit up 3 or 4 card tables in the living room. Life in this house and death in this house. This house has lived and will continue to live until I don't need it any more. So remember HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS.