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Baptist Church, a former student stated that Dad dispensed a frontier justice in the spirit of: “Son, now don’t you go a-worrin ‘bout bein’ treated right. We’ll give you a fair trial and then hang you.”
Since my father was principal, it was to my advantage to be straight laced and to con- form. I avoided controversy. He had enough problems with the other kids. I never drank except when Mom served a Christmas glass of home-grown grape wine, or wild red muscadine or white scuppernong wine. Besides, Daddy had excitement delivered to our door.
Mother was a good cook and fed the scraps to the pigs and chickens. Scraps of those scraps she fed to the cats or worms. Where today people have mulch piles, we had a worm farm whose gobs of wiggly yield we used for fishing. Mother was almost completely deaf for most of her life and was always experimenting with hearing aids, yet she could hold her own in any social group.
An old man with hearing problems went to the doctor. The doctor said: “Cut out your drinking or you’ll become com- pletely deaf.” The man replied: “Doc, I
