Richard B Persinger 1913 – 2011

by Philip B Persinger

He was 38 years old when I was born, but he was older than that. He had been a grown up most of his life.

He was born in Salem, Virginia in 1913, in a house. If you look at the family photographs of the time, he was born into the Victorian Age.

But it was also into the world that Norman Rockwell wished he could inhabit. My dad had a friend called Granville Bussey. You can’t make that name up.

Granville would tie a string around his toe and drop it out his bedroom window with a stick tied to the other end. Around four o’clock in the morning, Dad would pull on the string to wake up Granville and they would go check their traps.

They would also gallop on horses through the alleys at night. They made a boat that fell apart in a creek but they didn’t drown. They shot a lot of squirrels and cooked them. They walked up mountains.

Later on, Dad’s friend, Doc Wasson, had an old Model T Ford. One day when he was driving it, on a whim he threw it into reverse. He heard a loud noise, then felt a sudden drop. When he looked in the rear view mirror, he could see the drive shaft and the rear wheels and axle shooting down the mountain road behind him.

My dad’s parents were Southern Methodists. There was no card playing or dancing. Dad really enjoyed a good Martini.

Dad was five foot four. I personally recommend that one should avoid all Eagle Scouts who are short and lawyers as well.

Dad was on the Rescue Squad. Once after he saved someone’s life, he was rewarded with a store-bought pie. He had never seen one of those before. He pulled it out of the box and bit into, nearly breaking his teeth on the plate that it was sitting in.

Dad was the most honest man that I have ever known. It was incredibly irritating. I have often thought that he became a lawyer, just so that he could learn all the rules that should not be broken. When he drove my mom down to the post office to mail a letter he would put a coin in the parking meter while he sat waiting for her because he knew that the law made no distinction if the car was occupied or not.

When he took his Boy Scouts out camping in the woods, he had a folding oven and always baked biscuits for breakfast. Once when a white-faced Scout announced that he had seen a rattlesnake, my dad said, “I hear they are delicious.” He ran down to the creek, picked it up, snapped its neck and fried it up.

My aunt Charlotte told me that my dad would have been happier being an engineer. That might have been true. He always “reengineered” every tool he ever bought the minute he got it out of the package and saw what was wrong with it. The guys who sold him tools in the town loved my dad.

When I was six years old I hated how much my dad enjoyed sailing because I was terrified. I can’t imagine anything that would ever scare him. Every time he pointed high into the wind and the boat heeled over I knew that we were all going to die. But he was always grinning at the helm.

In a time of branded patriotism, I believe that my dad was an archetypical American in the best sense. He was a bit pigheaded in certain ways, but true blue in every way possible.

He died having done everything he planned and hoped to do. He was married to the woman that he thought was a gift, a treasure and a blessing. He lived his life to the best of his ability and by all accounts he did it well.

He was ready to die. His last word was “Enough.”

Godspeed.

A Thrilling Sled Ride—Into a Post
(from a memoir written to a young grandson)

I never quite managed to kill myself on the sled I had been given while living in the Keck House, although some people thought I might. The closest call came after we had moved to another house. When a big snow had fallen, I walked back up to Market Street for sledding or “coasting” on the Roanoke College fields and adjacent hills. I met a friend, Stafford Price, who was the son of the dietician at the College and lived there. We went to nearby Sterns hill, named for the family who owned it and lived on the property—a very steep slope. It was a fast track that day; icy and without very much steering control.

My friend and I decided that if both of us got on the same sled, lying down in two layers to keep the weight low, that with more weight on the sled we might go even faster than with a one boy sled. After several runs which were fast and very exciting, it was my friend’s turn to be on the bottom, steering the sled, with me on top. The icy track which the sledders were following curved half way down the hill, going within two or three feet of a barbed wire fence at the side of the field. When we came into that curve on the final trip, we didn’t turn quite enough or the runners slipped sideways on the ice.

My friend was thrown clear—sliding over the snow, and was hardly damaged. I hit the fence and a post, coming to a very sudden stop, and being cut by the barbed wire. I didn’t know I had a problem until about twenty or thirty minutes later.

There was no ambulance on call at that time and anyway there was no telephone on that hill. One of the older boys loaded me, unconscious, on a sled and with some of the other kids pulled me down the hill, over the pastures and the College football field. I woke up after they had come out on Market Street nearly half a mile from that fence post I had hit. They pulled me on the sled about another half mile to my home on College Avenue. A doctor was called. Except for a lot of sore spots, the biggest injury seemed to be a small, deep hole in my head. The doctor said that a wire or nail had gone in there and that if it had gone on the other side of the small bone it hit, it would have killed me. I am not sure he was skilled enough to express an accurate opinion. Anyway, I recovered in a short while.

I Go Out Into the Rougher World

I started to school about the time we moved to the Keck House. I walked down Clay Street about three blocks to Academy Street. Things seemed to go along in a fairly normal way. I began to encounter the usual mix of people, including a few bullies and other troublemakers. My first fight was a surprise. I was not much hurt, but it did my clothes no good.

My mother was normally a very mild and peaceful woman. After she had looked over my torn and muddy clothes she told me that if there was going to be a fight I might as well try to win. That seemed like good advice and I started being a little more aggressive when I was attacked.

One boy with whom I had a number of fights lived just a few houses up Market Street from our house. We were rather good friends and played together often. After a few fights in the street near the front of his house, his mother would come out and say to me, “He shouldn’t fight. Beat him up.” I never hit anyone first. Later I sometimes wondered if I was so provocative to the other boy that he just had to hit me.

For years I had a small scar on one cheek. When I was on the Roanoke College football field one winter day checking whether the ice on a big mud puddle was thick enough so that I could get a running start and slide across, for some reason another boy got into an argument with me, picked up a half a brick and threw it, hitting me in the face hard enough to make a small cut. Being more angry than sensible, I walked through the big puddle, breaking through the ice, picked him up and dropped him full length in the water and mud. It was probably not necessary for me to try to punish him any more. His mother probably took care of that when he got home wet and muddy. Fortunately, at that age the kids were not strong enough or skilled enough to damage each other a great deal. When they got into fights. In those times we did not have the problem of large knives and guns being carried now even by young children.

Another mark by which I can be identified is a small, while, lifetime scar. On a Sunday afternoon, my future bother-in-law was taking my sister for a walk in the direction of Orphanage Falls, a local point of interest where a small stream dropped a few feet creating a not very impressive little waterfall. I am sure they would have been happy to leave me at home, but they were nice enough to invite me to go along. On the way back, perhaps a little bored with walking rather slowly along the red clay road, I was running along a barbed wire fence by the field, up a low bank bordering the road, when I slip and the barbed wire cut me. It bled quite satisfactorily and when I got home it was bandaged. Now that would probably call for a couple of stitches and tetanus shots, but we didn’t think much about such treatment then.

Spring Sports

Without a lot of entertainment like television, radio and other outside activities, the kids had to find their own amusements. At a certain time each spring, all of the boys suddenly got out their “tops” and started spinning them. This was a toy shaped like an upside down pear, made of wood with a metal point on the bottom. A piece of string about four feet long was carefully wrapped in a spiral around the “top”, from the bottom near the point to the upper part. Then the top was thrown to the ground with a practiced motion. It took a while to learn the skill so that the top would end up in the proper position on the ground and spin for quite a long time. A group of kids would get together and spin their tops for an hour or more at a time, talking about those important things that kids talk about.

Some of the more adventurous or aggressive top spinners had heavy tops with strong sharp points and would have battles with other top spinners. The contest was to see if your top could be thrown down hard on the other boy’s top and split it in two. Some tops had a metal piece on the upper portion to protect them from being split by an enemy top. I never got into that game.

Suddenly, the tops would be put away and all the boys would start shooting marbles. Marbles were, of course, small spherical objects in many colors, made of clay, brightly colored glass or other materials. If you were a really privileged kid, you might have an “aggie”—made of agate, which could be quite beautiful and was of a hard material.

The most popular marble game was played by drawing a circle, sometimes on a concrete sidewalk, but more often on a level place of dirt or small gravel. Each player would put an agreed number of marbles, usually the clay ones, into a compact group in the center. Then each boy would take turns, crouched down on one knee with his hand on the ground just outside the circle and use his thumb to shoot a somewhat larger marble and try to knock one or more marbles out of the ring. It helped to have a rather heavy shooter marble. Usually it was glass—since most players did not own an aggie. Sometimes a rough player would show up with a good size steel ball bearing which might give him quite an advantage and the possibility of breaking the other kid’s marbles.

There was another marble game in which three shallow holes were dug in the dirt about a foot apart in a straight line. I am not very clear about the rules, but the object may have been to knock the other player’s marbles into the holes. I never thought much of that game and rarely played it.

At a certain time during the spring, with tops and marbles put away, some boys got out their hoops. I never saw a hoop for sale. Most of them were made of the outside metal rim taken off a spoked wheel common used then for some baby carriages, children’s riding toys and other things. The spokes, hub and rubber tire were removed and just the meal rim was used. The favorite size came from a wheel about twelve or fourteen inches in diameter. The other piece needed was something to push the hoop forward and guide it. These devices were usually one of two types. The simpler one, which could be made by quite a young boy, was just a flap strip of wood long enough to reach from the boy to the hoop rolling on the ground, with a piece of the same strip, about eight inches long, nailed at a right angle across the lower end of the longer piece. This could be used to push and guide the hoop, but it was not considered very elegant.

The more sophisticated one required a little more skill. It was made from a piece of fairk, ly heavy wire with a flatted loop at the top for a handle. At the lower end there was a “U” shaped piece bent at a right angle to cradle the rim of the hoop to propel and guide it.

One thing I could never figure out—then or now—is how these games suddenly started each spring, seemingly by everyone at once, as if there had been a public announcement by loud speakers all over town. But there were not loud speakers anywhere then. They seemed to spring up just at the proper time in the season. Maybe it was nature at work in the way that causes the black bears to come out of their winter hibernation and the leaves to come out on the willow trees in the spring.

It may be noticed that only boys seemed to play these games. Now and then a girl might show up shooting marbles or spinning a top, but not often. Most people seemed to thing that girls should engage in more lady-like activities; playing at cooking, playing with dolls, skipping rope or other game thought more suitable for girls.

Not a Bird—Not Superman—an Airplane

(from a memoir written to a young grandson)

During the summer after the end of World War One, I was playing in our house on upper Market Street when I heard a tremendous noise such as I had never heard before. I ran out onto the porch along the side of the house and saw flying over the playing field of Roanoke College an AIRPLANE. It was the first time I had ever seen a plane, in the air or even on the ground. At the time I probably thought that might be one of the greatest experiences I would ever have. It certainly never occurred to me for a second that I would be a pilot and have my own plane in later life and fly over much of the United States, from the Pacific to the Canadian border, the whole Atlantic Coast, to Key West and the Bahamas. That was far beyond the capability of my imagination.

Later I learned at quite a young age that this was a JN4D, which people nicknamed a “Jenny”. These had been manufactured in rather large numbers for training American and other pilots to fight in the War. When the War ended, the Country had a lot of training planes it didn’t know what to do with. The famous Charles Lindberg, first to fly solo across the Atlantic, had bought a new Jenny, complete with engine, in the original manufacturer’s crate, for $500. Of course, at that time a lot of people worked a very long time to earn $500.

Some of these planes were still around when I was in high school and college and later. They were used by many of the “barnstormers” who travelled over the country putting on air shows—doing stunt flying, men or women wing-walking or climbing around the airplane or parachute jumping—trying to collect a few dollars from the people who came to watch or took $5 rides around the field. Sometimes those old parachutes didn’t open or there were other problems. I remember hearing about one show near Salem when a young jumper fell when the “chute” failed to open and he was, of course, killed. He had collected about $13 from the crowd before he jumped.

During the year after World War I ended, I was getting to be almost six years old. About then, either my parents decided to look for another house or Mr. Bradley wanted move back into his house. It may be that he was not reelected sheriff. Or maybe Mrs. Bradley got tired of cooking for the prisoners and listening to them yell and scream.

Anyway, we moved down Market Street to a house which was about a block from Main Street, quite a lot closer to the stores, the street car, the bank, the “Grand Theater” where there were movies, the Church and other places we needed to go.

We Move to the Keck House

Then we moved to a house owned by Mr. Keck. It was on the corner of Market Street and Clay Street, which was really a kind of an alley, although it had some little houses on it. It was called Clay Street because for many years it was an unpaved street of red clay which when wet was a sticky mud. By the time we moved there, some gravel had been put on Clay Street so that the street was no longer actually covered with clay.

This was a two storey brick house with an addition of wood on the back. The bricks were a dark red, very hard fired, which we were told were made in England, brought over as a ballast in sailing ships and transported from the coast more than three hundred miles to Salem. Another story said that the wooden kitchen which was a few feet from Clay Street had been used many years earlier as a school where a woman, whose name I have forgotten, taught school.

In the back yard was a little building, also of brick, very nicely finished inside, which may have been built as an office. We just used it for storage.

All of the furniture and our other belongings were moved from the Bradley House to the Keck House. For some reason, I don’t remember this move so clearly. I was probably in school while most of the moving was being done. I think we again used a one horse farm wagon.

When making the move, my parents wanted to make a few changes. After the move, they called in our former landlord, Mr. Bradley, the sheriff, who sometimes worked as an auctioneer. An auction was advertised and the auction was held at the house. Of course, I was there. It was very interesting for me, with the excitement of the sale and loud cry of the fast-taking auctioneer, ending on the sale of each item with “Going, going, gone. Sold to Mr. Brown.” Or whoever was the high bidder.

Most of the things sold were small items of little monetary value then—a waffle iron to be used in the ashes of an open fireplace and such things. I am sure most of them came from the home of my father’s family and had been owned by his father or grandfather.

Note from PBP: Dad’s grandfather, John Abner Persinger, survived Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg.

Sixty or seventy years later they would be considered valuable and fascinating antiques. I would have enjoyed having some of them.

When we moved to the Keck House, we had a number of spinning wheels, I think three, large, three feet high or more, and small, about two feet or so. Before there were mills spinning thread of all kinds, women had to learn the skill of working with cotton, wool or linen to spin thread or yarn on the spinning wheel, a wooden arrangement driven by the operator’s foot to twist the material into thread. That was woven on a hand loom into cloth for clothes and other things. These spinning wheels may have come from my father’s family, but he was not much interested at that time. He gave all of them to some historical society. Many times I have wished he had kept them so that I might have them now.

Camping Out in the Back Yard

I had a lot of adventures while I was in that house. One of my favorite activities may have been the beginning of my liking for camping. We did sleep in the house at night, but my mother allowed me and my friends to cook on an open fire in the back yard. Our main foods for this were white potatoes and sweet potatoes. We would wash, peel, cut up and cook the potatoes in a frying pan over the open fire built in the yard. They were sometimes a little hard and maybe either raw or burned, but we usually managed to eat them and thought they were delicious.

While I was in that house and about eight years old, I had some pigeons. These were just regular standard pigeons like those flying around New York and other cities. Pigeons seem to like cities better than the mountains or open fields. Maybe they want to be close to cultural advantages, but it may be that they like the people who feed them large amounts of bread crumbs and bird seed. I bought two or three pair after I had gone up to Mr. Brown’s hardware store and brought some two inch mesh wire that we called chicken wire, because people often used it to make chicken coops. I built a pen in which the pigeons could fly, attached to the little office building.

During that time, a very large rat moved in, living under the office and no doubt eating some of the pigeon’s grain. I found what we called a steel trap which, when stepped on, would catch the rat by the leg. Now that would be thought cruelty to animals, but then people lived a little closer to the frontier days and caught animals in such traps. Rats were caught to get rid of them. Other animals were caught in various kinds of traps, some painless (until the animal was killed), for their fur or for food or both, as with rabbits and squirrels. One morning, before going to school, while feeding the pigeons I saw a big and very frightening rat caught in the trap, leaping around and squealing. I could not risk getting close to those sharp teeth. I had been given a Daisy air rifle which used compressed air to shoot a very small lead pellet called a bee bee. I rushed up to Mr. Brown’s hardware store around the corner on Main Street, bought a tube of bee bee shot for about 12 cents, went back home, loaded my repeating air rifle, put it through the wire of the pigeon cage and shot the big rat until he was dead.

While in that house, for Christmas I got what was called an express wagon. It had four wheels, which in this case were cast steel, a sort of a box on top about five inches deep for riding or hauling things and a tongue in front attached to the front wheels for pulling or for steering when you were riding in it. I played with it for many hours with my friends, running wildly up and down the cement sidewalk along the street. I don’t know how the neighbors stood the noise of those steel wheels on the cement and the kids screaming. I don’t remember that we got that we got many complaints.

Diagonally across the street lived the minister or priest of the local Episcopal Church whose name was Faulkner. I spent most of my free time for two or three years playing with his son, Tom, although he was four years older than I, a big difference at that age.

Tom was the only boy I knew in town who had an electric train set. He had a very good set, with a lot of track. We would move the furniture and set up the track on the Faulkner dining room floor and play for hours.

It was while playing at the Faulkner house, when I was six years old, that I first met the woman who would be my wife. But I didn’t know it at the time. She was a few months old, so I don’t believe I said anything to her then.

On one or two of the days when we were playing with the trains, I noticed in the room a tall man carrying a baby who was wearing a long white baby dress, which was the current style of dress for babies at that age during that period. Before I was married, I learned that he was my future father-in-law carrying my future wife. I certainly gave it no thought at that time.

Tom and I had a number of projects. At one time we mounted a big wooden spool on a window on the second floor of our house and another outside the window in his room on the second floor of his house. We got together a lot of strong string, enough to reach all the way from one house to the other and back, and looped it around the spools. Then we could tie a message on a piece of paper onto the string and pull it over to the house. The rattle of the turning spool usually gave notice that a message was coming. This gave us a big thrill.

Besides the wagon, while in the Keck House I was given for Christmas my first really good sled. The Rolls Royce of children’s sleds ten was called the Flexible Flyer. The longest model was the Racer. Mine was the Junior Racer. While I would like to have the top of the line, mine was quite large enough for a boy of my age and size. That model is still being made, with very little change.

While I was living in the Keck house, fire works were a big deal. Older boys would spend what was a lot of money then for big fire crackers which made a big bang. The three inch long ones were loud. The five inch were even louder. I never had any longer than two inch. One night when I was burning some sparklers on the front porch, another kid came along and gave me a two inch firecracker. To light it I touched it to the sparkler I had burning in my hand. I forgot that I couldn’t see the sparks shooting from the fuse when it was lit, so it went off in my clinched hand. It blew my clinched fingers open, leaving a scorched hand which was swollen for several days. I learned that was not the way to light a big firecracker.

A Trip to the Country
(from a memoir written to a young grandson)

When I was about five years old, my mother borrowed a horse and buggy from a friend. With another friend, who was a woman who lived nearby, she took me out see a friend of theirs who lived a few miles out in the country. I suppose my mother learned to drive a horse when she was living in the country and small towns while she was growing up. It is not something a person would want to try without a little practice. Not with a strange horse anyway.

I don’t remember that we had any particular adventures that we didn’t expect. I don’t even remember that we passed any cars, which might have frightened the horse and cause trouble.

Almost all of the people travelling on the road at that time were using wagons, buggies, carriages or other vehicles pulled by horses. Some people rode horses and there might be a bicycle now and then. With so few automobiles, horses were not accustomed to autos and some horses had never seen one. So when a car appeared, a horse might rear up on its hind legs and sometimes would run off at top speed, wrecking the carriage and injuring the passengers. I saw some very frightening horses who put their passengers in great danger.

Since autos had so recently arrived on the roads and there were so many more horse drivers than car drivers, the horse people were very angry and hostile toward the car people. One problem was that the horseman did not understand very much about cars. I learned later that some very strange laws were passed in various states.

Some of them required such things as—a car could not go more than five or ten miles an hour. Or, every car traveling on the road must be preceded by a man carrying and waving a red flag. Or, that a moving car must blow its horn every two minutes. Of course, some of these things might frighten a horse more than ever.

Maybe the craziest law of this kind I ever heard of was the one that said: Before starting out, the driver of a car must fire a rocket to warn all riders and drivers of horses. Every TEN minutes, the car must be stopped and another rocket fired. After each rocket was fired, the car must wait FIFTEEN minutes before moving forward.

I never looked up that law, but I read about it somewhere recently.

We Had a Cold Winter

When I was four years old, there was a very cold winter all over the eastern part of the country. The temperature was quite low and there were deep snows many times. People were saying there had not been such a bad winter in nearly forty years. There were no heavy machines to push the snow off the sidewalks and out of the street. There was a man, or maybe two or three, hired by the town to drive a horse, pulling a V-shaped box in which the driver stood while driving up and down the sidewalks to clear a path for people to walk in. The street car company attached snow plows to the front of a street car and keep it running up and down the tracks while it was snowing to keep the tracks clear for the cars carrying passengers. The town did what it could to clear the streets, but mostly people just struggled through as best they could. In those days a big snow hardly disrupted people’s schedules as much as eighty years later when snow and bad weather made things hard for so many thousands of cars, trucks, buses, trains and airplanes.

During the very cold part of that winter, my mother took me up town to see the big pile of ice that had frozen on the Court House lawn. There was a large round fountain with a spray of water shooting up in the middle. No one had thought to turn off the water when it got so cold. The water kept freezing, the ice kept building up in the middle, higher and higher. I still have a picture my mother made with her camera, a box Brownie made by Eastman Kodak, of me standing on the edge of the ice fountain.

When we moved to New York in 1944, we were told that during that cold winter I remembered, the Home Guard soldiers in Westchester County were training one evening when they marched across the Hudson River, almost a mile wide there, on the thick ice.

My father used to tell me about a big snow that fell in March, 1888 when he was eight years old living on the family place which is now Roanoke, Virginia. The wind blew hard that night, the next morning more than two feet of snow had fallen and the wind had blown it into big drifts five feet deep. One of the men worked his way through the snow, got on one of the horses from the barn and rode around breaking paths in the snow so people could get around the farm to take care of the horses, cows, pigs, chickens and geese. The guinea hens were probably off somewhere in the fields hiding under the snow. Some of the snowdrifts were almost up to the horse’s head. The horse pushed through with the snow up to its chest. That same big snow came all the way up the Atlantic Coast through New York and further north.

The End of World War One

Four days before my fifth birthday, we learned that an armistice had been signed and that the war would end at 11:00 A.M. on November 11, 1918. There was great relief and excitement. I remember how happy people were. Immediate plans were made to celebrate. There were no radios or televisions to tell people what others over the country were doing. The usual way of sending messages long distances was by the telegraph wire, by dots and dashes, a slow process. The telephone was sometimes used, but mostly the telegraph.

On the night of November 11th after dark almost the whole town turned out. We joined the crowd. I was taken by the hand and we walked about a mile and a half up to the top of East Hill, on the edge of town. A big pile of wood had been collected. At the top a scaffold had been built with a cross piece from which were hung stuffed figures representing the wicked, defeated German Kaiser and a German soldier, dressed in their army uniforms, complete with proper helmets. The fire was started; the flames roared high into the sky; and the excited crowd cheered. For such a small boy it seemed the biggest fire, the biggest crowd, the loudest cheers and the most excitement that there could be in the whole world. By re-remembering over the years, I still remember the experience.

At the end of World War II, after the surrender in Europe, called VE Day, with some friends I went to Times Square in New York where I was living. Hundreds of thousands of people were celebrating wildly and I thought of the similar experience at the end of World War I when I was almost five.

We have some New Neighbors

(from a memoir written to a young grandson)

Few people living in Salem really knew any people from other countries. It was not very often during those years that people would move to Salem from another state, much less from outside the United States. Most of the travel being done then involved men going to army camps for training and then to France and Germany to fight in the war.

So it was a big event when a large family moved to Salem from Cuba. They moved into a house just across the street from our house.

The neighbors on Market Street usually referred to them privately as “the Cubans”. Actually their name was Elazaga.

They had come to Salem because located there was a plant which manufactured machinery to process tobacco and make cigarettes. It was called something like the Comas Cigarette Machinery Company. The people in Salem called it the Comas. We were told that Mr. Elazaga had invented something to improve the machinery built by the Comas.

The Elazagas seemed to have more money than the rest of the people in the neighborhood. They also seemed to have a LOT more fun. They were a big family who sang, laughed and yelled so much that it was not thought exactly proper by their neighbors.

They did fun things, like riding a sled down the long front porch steps when there was no snow. When the snow came, the boys really got excited. Coming from Cuba, they had never seen snow. They were like young puppies who have never seen snow and get so excited they don’t know exactly what to do. The first time it snowed, several of the boys went over to the college hill and had a great time sledding down the hill or, as we called it “coasting”.

After all these years, I can still remember some of their names. The smallest one was Margo, who must have been about four or five. Next was Estralita, a little older, and possibly nearest my age. After her were twin boys, but I can’t remember their names just now. Raoul must have been about eighteen or nineteen. For some of the neighbors, he may have been a problem. Their concern was that he was a rather handsome fellow, with curly black hair and a much more dashing manner than most of the local boys. My mother was among those who may have been a little concerned, because I had two sisters then about fifteen and seventeen. As far as I know, there were actually no problems involving Raoul.

Then came Alfredo, who may have been called Freddo; he may have been around twenty, more or less. Because I was so young, he seemed rather mature. The next was Margurita, who I think was a little older than Freddo. There could have been another son, who was old enough so that I didn’t notice him.

One interesting thing about the Elazagas was that on Cuban holidays they had lots of fireworks. But maybe the most interesting thing for the kids was that they had what looked to us as the longest motorcar that we had ever seen. It was what we then called a touring car. It had a cloth top and completely open sides. When it rained, there were side curtains to be put on. There were small cloudy windows which were hard to see out of. It was a good thing there were very few other cars to run into.

Besides the front seat, for two or three people, and a back seat for three, in front of the back seat there were two folding seats which could carry two more people, or maybe crowd in three. When the car came back from a trip and that big family poured out, it looked like the circus comedy act where dozens of policemen come out of a tiny car.

The Elazaga boys were wonderful kite makers. One day I was on the college playing field next to our house trying to fly a kite. It wouldn’t fly at all. One of the twins tied the kite string in the diagonal corners of a pieces of paper like this is written on and it took off into the sky, flying beautifully.

Riding in the Billy Goat Cart

The Elazagas had a pet goat. He was a regular, rough American billy goat with long horns and a beard. They build a little cart which one kid could sit in—I think it had started out a child’s swing with a back and arm rests—put it on wheels and a made a harness so the goat could be hitched up to pull the cart with one passengers. One of us would sit in the cart and drive the goat while the rest ran alongside.

One day we had a wonderful time, running around with the goat through the back alleys and over the fields, frequently crossing the small stream which ran through them. When I came home, my mother was very unhappy because I had just about ruined my expensive and fragile war-time shoes, which were difficult and costly to replace.

After “The Elazagas” had brought some excitement and some additional interest to the neighborhood for about two years, they moved back to Cuba and I never had any news of them again.

Our Swimming Hole for a Few Days

About three houses down the street and across on the other side was a house of the Humphries family. The little brook which ran along by our house ran through their yard. Usually the water was a few inches deep. The kids of the family and some of the neighbor’s kids managed to build a dam across the stream which could hold enough water to be about two feet deep or maybe a little more. We splashed around for hours every day, but not for long. Naturally, the first thunder storm washed away the dam and it was not rebuilt.

Later I learned that when the young man who some years later married my sister had lived in the Humphries house as a boy, he had a pet alligator. The alligator must have been very lazy or a little stupid, because his owner had to catch small fish in the stream, cut them up and feed them to him.

The Motorization of America Speeds Up

I think that during this time one family down on the lower part of Market Street may have had a car. Mr. Kessler was in the wholesale grocery business. He went around to the small stores (no supermarkets) and took orders with his pad and pencil for things the storekeeper needed for his stock to be ready for his customers who came in for a pound of coffee or whatever. Then he would have his man deliver the things ordered from Mr. Kessler’s warehouse to the store in a wagon or later in a Model T Ford truck. About this time, Mr. Kessler bought a Model T Ford car that would seat five people, to use for traveling around to take orders. It was the usual touring car, wide open to the rain. No frills. It was so simple that Henry Ford thought it was unnecessary to have a door for the driver to get in on the left side. To get in on that side, the driver had to climb over the side of the car. It was quite a few years before that model car had a left front door that would open.

People in Salem then never heard of a driving school to teach automobile driving. Usually a new driver had a few lessons from a family member or friend. When Mr. Kessler brought the new Ford home, his upper teenage son was sick in bed. While he was getting well, he read the instructions for operating the car and when he was allowed out, he got in the car and started driving. He probably had seen someone driving only once or twice, but he got along all right.

Having no car, we usually had to travel by walking or riding the street car or the train. These were steam trains which burned coal shoveled into the firebox by the fireman and spewed great clouds of smoke and sharp cinders which came from the burned coal and frequently got into the passengers eyes, including mine. In the summer, with no air conditioning, the windows were open so that the cinders came in all the time.

One train trip we took fairly often was to Buchanan. My grandparents, my mother’s parents, moved there around this time. From Salem to Buchanan was about thirty miles. With a modern car and today’s roads it would take about a half hour or less. Then, my mother and I would get on a street car in Salem, ride to Roanoke (forty-five minutes), walk several blocks to the railroad station, wait for the train, get on it and ride to Buchanan, a trip altogether of maybe two and a half hours. Fortunately, grandmother’s house was very close to the station on that end of the trip. At the end of the day we would bet back on the train for the long trip home.

Winter Food and Summer Ice

(from a memoir written to a young grandson)

Like most people in the country and in small towns in Virginia at that time, we had no real supply of fresh food in the winter, no fresh vegetables and few fruits. Apples kept for some months into the winter. Some fresh meat and chickens were sold at the butchers. Mostly, people vegetables and fruits and “canned” them in glass jars to eat during the winter. Fruits and some vegetables were dried so they would keep for use in the winter.

We had no electric refrigerators or freezers. People usually relied on the cold weather in winter instead of a refrigerator. Very often, people in the country had a spring near their house from which they got water. These springs usually had a small springhouse built over them to help keep the flowing water clean. Usually there was a trough through which the water ran. The farmer’s wife could set milk, butter and other food in the cool running water in the summer when there was no ice for refrigeration. Food stayed good for a few days and milk for a day or so, but not nearly as long as in an electric refrigerator.

Sometimes when there was no spring, people would put the milk, butter and such into a pail and lower it on a rope down into the water in a well to keep it cool. Even quite cool spring or well water could keep milk from turning sour for only a short time.

Some people were lucky and hard working enough to have a good supply of ice for the summer if they had near their house a pond or river and had the horses and equipment that was needed to cut and store the ice.

In winter when the ice was frozen thick, they would use big saws to cut large chunks of ice, load them onto sleds and pull them with horses to the ice house which was near the main house.

The ice house was built, often of thick logs, partly underground, usually into a hill or in a mound of dirt to keep it cool. When a layer of ice blocks had been put inside, a thick layer of sawdust was put around them, with a thinner layer on top, more layers of ice and sawdust were put in and on top of all a lot of sawdust to insulate the ice and keep it frozen until summer.

In the little town of Salem where we lived, there was an ice manufacturing company that operated during the summer. Ice was frozen in 300 pound cakes which were loaded into wagons pulled by one horse for delivery to the houses. We had a square card with numbers in the corners—25 50 75 and 100. This was hung on the front porch with the number at the top showing the number of pounds of ice wanted that day. The ice man would cut off that much, carry it into the house and put it into the “ice” box. Small children liked to run after the wagon, climb up on the step at the back of the wagon and get scraps of ice which had broken off in cutting.

A Special Food Treat

When I was about five or six, we had a meal that I had never had before. I suppose I may have known that some people ate possums, but possum was not on our usual diet.

An opossum, but most people just called them possums, is a wild animal, black and white, really kind of grey looking, with a sharp nose, long course fur and a long tail that is so strong that he can wrap his tail around a tree branch and hang upside down while sleeping. It is sometimes said that a person is “playing possum” when he is pretending to be asleep. This comes from the possum’s habit of trying to escape attack a person or another animal by lying down and pretending to be dead. Even when punched with a stick, the possum may still act as if he is dead.

Anyway, somebody gave my father a live possum which was supposed to be eaten. Since my father had grown up in the country when most animals that could be caught or shot were considered good food, this probably seemed perfectly normal. Wild game was always his favorite kind of meat.

Because of certain dietary habits of the possum, he was put into a big barrel with a cover and fed good food for about a week. When he was fat and in good condition he was killed and prepared to be eaten. I think it was customary to served baked sweet potatoes with possum.

I really cannot remember anything about that meal. I suppose I must have taken advantage of the unusual opportunity to sample possum. Since that time, I have not found it necessary to eat possum again, so I do not know how it tastes.

World War I

While I was living in the Bradley House, I became very much aware that there was a big war going on and that thousands of people were getting killed. The war started when I was about one year old, but it didn’t bother me then. When I was in the Bradley House, people talked about the war all the time. Everyone knew people who had gone to fight and many knew some who was killed.

At that time this was called just “The World War” because there were a number of countries fighting and it was a big war. The people were told that it was being fought to save the world for democracy and this it was the war to end all wars. So when another big war started just over twenty years later, eventually involving many countries and being fought over Europe, Asia and sometimes in other places, that had to be called “World War II” and the other one was then called World War I.

Most of the fighting was going on in France. I am sure that some of the country boys sent off to fight had hardly heard of France or even Europe and had very little idea of where they were when they got there.

At a young age, I had a general idea about the location of Europe. I knew that it was across the Atlantic Ocean and a long way from Virginia.

I heard often about the suffering of the people in Europe. My mother talked about the children in Armenia who had little food and were even starving. This seemed to come up rather frequently when she was trying to persuade me to eat all of the food on my plate. In later years she said that I once said “Mother I am full. If you want to save this for the Armenian children, you will have to eat it yourself.”

I did think seriously about the suffering in Armenia. I thought that some food had to be gotten to them. I do not quite understand why, but I knew in a general way that small streams flowed into larger streams, then into rivers which finally made their way to the sea. Then the Atlantic Ocean connected with Europe and Armenia was in Europe or maybe all the way over in Asia. The weakest point in this was that I was very vague as to whether Armenia had any sea coast on the Atlantic Ocean. Anyway, I thought that I might build a very small boat, put in some food, start if off on the tiny stream that flowed by our house and maybe eventually reach those starving Armenian children.

I never did get started on this project. Possibly I had some serious doubt that it would actually work out successfully.

With all the involvement with the war, my teen age sisters, both of whom played the piano, taught me to sing “Over There” and some other patriotic songs.

About this time a new element of culture was introduced into our life. In spite of wartime shortages, we got a mechanical windup Victrola—a “talking machine”. The quality was primitive and in no way to be compared with modern sound reproduction, because the frequencies it produced were of very limited range. However, speech could be understood and we thought that the music was wonderful. I remember that among the first records delivered with the machine was one of Caruso, the famous opera singer.

There were almost daily stories about the cruel and vicious Germans or Huns as they were called. The stories and cartoons showed that their greatest pleasure was torturing and killing women and children like wild beasts. Of course, this was intended to stir up the Americans and make them want to fight harder and support the war more.

Actually, many of the people living in Salem were descended from Germans, many of whom had settled in Pennsylvania for a while before moving on down to Virginia. Even if someone thought about his German ancestry, he probably didn’t talk much about it at that time.

Because many people and most of the factories were working full time to produce the guns, ammunition, clothes, food and all the other things needed for the war, it was hard for the people left at home to get a great many things.

There was sometimes a shortage of bread. Most of the people in Salem baked their bread at home anyway, but there were also shortages of flour. When flour could be gotten it was sometimes of poor quality. I don’t know what was wrong with it, but after it was made into bred, when it was sliced and pulled apart, there was a stringy, gooey stuff that didn’t look very appetizing.

We had some help with the bread making. My mother had a thing like a big pail with an “S” shaped rod inside attached to a handle on top. Then the flour and other ingredients were put in and the handle was turned, the dough was mixed so that it could be made into loaves for baking.

Among the things we had trouble getting were the shoes I needed. My feet had weak arches so that I had to wear ankle high laced shoes—very common then—with built up arch supports. When shoes could be found, they cost twelve dollars; more than my father earned for a day’s work. There were many other things we could not get or often had trouble finding. We had very little sugar. Even after the war had been over for some months, when a store in Roanoke advertised sugar for sale, my mother and I made the trip on the street car to buy the five pound that were allowed each customer.

People did all kinds of volunteer work to try to help the war effort. Women met in groups to roll up cloth to make bandages to be sent to the army in Europe. A great many people knitted wool sweaters to keep the soldiers warm in the cold winters on the battlefield. I do not know whether any of this ever got to Europe or whether it was done just to make the people at home feel that they were helping.

I learned to knit a little bit. Once while riding on the street car with my mother, I was working on a small piece of knitting on which I had completed a few rows. She asked me what it was and I said it was a cat sweater.

The Flu Epidemic

In 1918-1919, commencing while World War I was going on, there was an epidemic of influenza, or flu, which covered much of the world. It is reported that ten million people died, including one half million in the United States alone. This was a big part of all the people in the United States at that time. I have read that more people died of the flu than in World War I.

During that time my father had the flu and it was thought for some time that he might die. He finally recovered and was all right after a while.

The doctor who was taking care of my father, being very patriotic, wanted us to break and throw away the thermometer we used to take his temperature, because it was made in Germany. It was the only one we had and we could not get anther during wartime, so we didn’t take his advice.

(from a memoir written to a young grandson)

I do not know whether the owner of the Main Street house wanted to live in it or whether my parents just wanted to move to another house. For some reason, when I was about three, we moved to the Bradley House on upper Market Street. It was called “upper” because it was at the end of the street further away from Main Street and up the hill.

Ours was the last house on that side of the street. Next to it there were fields and the open country.

It was called the Bradley House because it was owned by Mr. Bradley. He did not need to use the house at the time, because he was the county sheriff and he and his wife lived in the sheriff’s living quarters which were provided in the county jail building, a rather noisy place. The county jail was in Salem, because Salem was then and for many years afterward the county seat of Roanoke County.

The jail was built onto the back of the court house and just across the street from the Southern Methodist Episcopal Church which we attended. That was not so good for the church, especially during the summer. When the windows were open (no air conditioning) the prisoners in the jail would stand at the bars—the jail windows would be open too—and yell loud, rude remarks while the minister was trying to preach or pray. Sometimes they would sing the hymns—very loud.

Mrs. Bradley cooked for the prisoners. She was paid to buy the food, cook it and feed the prisoners. She probably got about fifteen cents a day for each one and must have made a little profit on that. Of course they probably complained a lot. In those days the people on the outside didn’t think people in jail should be kept too comfortable.

When we moved to the Bradley House, our furniture, clothes and everything were moved from Main Street to Market Street in an open farm wagon pulled by one horse. We walked. The owner and driver of the wagon was a deaf man who could not speak. He could load and unload the wagon and move things around. Everybody called him Andy Brown. He had a family, a wife and children, living on Main Street.

I remember that when one load arrived I was watching from the porch which was on the front of the house and along part of one side. On that load was a rather large round oak dining room table. The top had been taken off and with it was the big round pedestal that went under the middle to hold it up.

This was another two story wood clapboard house, with a decorative wire fence across the front on Market Street and a gate. It was on a rather large lot with a big vegetable garden on the back part.

It was a pretty good garden and my father raised a lot of vegetables, but we did have trouble keeping out the Bermuda grass, which we called wire grass. This grass was tough and hard, one piece sometimes growing eight fee long or more.

Once my father dug up a potato which had a piece of wire grass growing through it—in one side and out the other.

On the back of the lot, behind the house, there was a medium size barn with room enough for a horse and cow, which we did not have. We kept chickens there, with an outside pen for their exercise.

The Pigs

While we lived in the Bradley House we raised pigs. I was a bit too small to be given any duties in caring for the pigs.

Way down on the back of the lot, near the barn, there was a hog pen made of boards, with a rough board floor, big enough for two or three pigs.

Like many women living on farms and in small towns in those days, my mother had to take care of the hogs while my father was working in Roanoke. Lots of water was carried down to the hog pen for the hogs to drink. There was a big pail, which we called a bucket, on the back porch for raw vegetable trimmings, like carrot and beet tops, potato peels and such things, as well as left over scraps of cooked food. All of this, mixed with water, was carried down to the hog pen and poured into their trough as part of their food. This mixture went by the name of “hog slop”. When a person fed the hogs, it was sometimes said that he was slopping the hogs.

To finish out the hog’s diet, different kinds of dry mash and grains were bought from the feed store. The pigs also ate green things like weeds from the garden or fields.

Hog-killing Time

Along about the early part of November, the hogs would have grown large and fat and it was time to prepare them for eating during the winter.

When the weather had gotten cool, my father would hire two men to come and kill the hogs. Cool weather was needed so that the meat would cool fairly quickly while it was still in the best condition. The men would arrive about six o’clock in the morning just about daybreak or a little before it was light. I always wanted to go down to the hog pen and watch the hog-killing, but my mother would never let me do that.

I didn’t want to miss everything, so each year I would get up very early and climb up on the ice chest or refrigerator where I could sit and look out a high window in the kitchen pantry with a pretty good view of what was going on.

The men would shoot a hog in the head for a quick kill.

Before that they would have built a fire and heated a big kettle of water so that it was boiling. This was set under a tripod with pulleys and chains rigged up so that they could pull a hog over to the kettle, put a chain on the hog’s hind leg, lift it up, dip it into the boiling water and lift it out again.

This scalding of the hog was necessary so that the men could use sharp knives to scrape off the stiff hair or bristles from the hog’s skin.

When the hair was off, the men cleaned the hog, cut it into about six big pieces and carried them up to the kitchen in the house, where my mother, and maybe a relative or friend who might be helping, had been working hard building a fire in the kitchen range, getting in coal to keep the fire going for as much as eighteen hours and getting ready for the big job of preparing the meat to be kept for use all winter.

When the big pieces of meat were brought into the kitchen, the long day’s work began. The large pieces were first separated into the different cuts used for various purposes. The hams and shoulders (the large pieces of the back and front legs) were trimmed of some of the fat, then were rubbed and packed with salt, pepper, sugar and spices so they could be hung in the cool cellar, which was like a basement with dirt walls and floor, where they would last all winter until they were eaten.

There were some chops, loin slices and other parts which were packaged separately.

The side pieces were prepared and cured, very much like the hams and shoulders, for breakfast bacon. Other pieces of the side meat which did not make good bacon were cut into strips or chunks call fat meat or steak-of-lean (often pronounced streak-a-lean) meat if there were lean streaks in it.

Among other things, this fat meat was used by putting a piece in the pan when cooking green beans, which were cooked for as much as two or three hours, or with dried beans and other dishes. You could also throw in a piece when you were making soup. This style of using lots of fat meat and long cooking is sometimes called “Southern Cooking”.

Small pieces, scraps and trimmings of lean meat were ground up with sage, pepper, salt and other seasonings to make sausage. This was usually packed in half gallon tin containers or in crocks—stoneware containers—with some lard, made from the hog’s fat, cooked and put away for use during the winter.

Everything had to be prepared carefully to keep during the winter. Houses did not have freezers to preserved food; the ice refrigerators were not very cold and most people did not use their refrigerators in the winter. For one thing, there was not even any delivery of ice in the winter from the ice plant in town where ice was frozen.

When the hog was large or there were two hogs, there was so much sausage meat that it was taken to a butcher where arrangements had been made to have him put it through his large electric meat grinder. Then it was brought home, cooked and packed in cans or crocks for keeping.

Many other kinds of meat were prepared from the hogs. The large hog’s liver was cooked a little and ground to make liver pudding—usually just called pudding. This is a very rich food. When it had cooled, it was stored away for the winter. When needed, it was sliced and fried to make a tasty breakfast dish.

Some of the left over liquid from cooking sausage and other meat and various bits and pieces of meat were stirred into some corn meal. This was boiled for a while, cooled and stored away. It is called scrapple. A few slices browned in a frying pan is good to eat for breakfast.

One interesting food, not enjoyed by everyone, is souse. Some people call it head cheese, but I never thought that was a very appetizing name. This must have been invented because no one could think of any other way to use some of the things left over from the hog. The soft cartilage and little pieces of lean meat from the head, ears, snout and feet of the hog were cut into small pieces, mixed together and cooked. When cooled, the whole thing ended up bound together by the gelatin which came from the cartilage. It was usually eaten cold in small slices, served, usually with vinegar, as a sort of appetizer or relish. People who, like my father, enjoyed this dish, really liked it a lot. Other people, or maybe most people, don’t like it at all and would never think of eating it.

There may have been a few other things that were prepared. One of the last things was the rendering of the lard. All of the left over fat meat, which was many pounds, was put into flat pans, heated and cooked to melt out the fat and that became lard. Lard was used for cooking—even for pies, cakes and cookies. Few people could get anything like peanut oil or other vegetable oils at that time.

(from a memoir written to a young grandson)

I was born November 15, 1913, in the small town of Salem, at the corner of Main and Academy Streets. It was called Academy Street because one block up Academy Street were the Primary and Grammar Schools. In even earlier times, schools were often called academies. Both of the schools are still there and have been changed into condominiums.

Click on thumbnail for a detailed image

Some years later, I learned that there were twenty-six Salems in the United States. This one is in Virginia, in the western part of the state, in a broad valley between ridges of the Appalachian Mountains and the Blue Ridge Mountains.

There were about fifteen hundred people—maybe not that many—in Salem. There were no hard surfaced streets, but some of them were covered with gravel or crushed stone so that they would not get muddy like lots of roads in the country did.

I was born in the downstairs bedroom on the front of the house in the middle of the night. Dr. Darden was called in to see that everything went all right. A fire was started in the kitchen range to heat plenty of water. The main medical equipment on hand, besides the usual iodine, smelling salts, calomel, bandages and such things in the doctor’s bag, were a pot of hot water, a kerosene lamp and some clean towels. It must have worked out all right, because I have survived for quite a while.

I don’t remember a lot about that house. It was a plain wooden clapboard house of two stories, sitting on a medium sized lot. It was there for a long time and until I was much older; so I remember the outside. The yard was about two or three feet below street level. There was a white picket fence up at street level which enclosed the yard. Along the streets were sidewalks made of brick.

Besides the cooking stove in the kitchen, there were stoves in one or two of the other rooms so that, among all the cold places in the house in winter, there were a few places near the stove where we could get warm. That is, there were some warm spots after fires were started in the morning with wood kindling and coal brought in the night before from the outdoor coal house.

Behind the house, facing on Academy Street, was a small building for the coal. It had a small window on the street so that when coal was brought in a horse drawn wagon, the driver could shovel it into the coal house.

Lots of people had to go outside and pump water from a well, or bring it from a spring if they had one, but we had indoor water. If anybody wanted hot water, it had to be heated on the stove.

We also an indoor bathroom, but it didn’t amount to much. There was no regular heat or hot water. At the time lots of people had to go out to a little building in the back yard to go to the bathroom—and in those little houses there was no bath tub or wash basin or much of anything, except a wooden bench with a hole in it and an old Sears, Roebuck catalog to use for toilet paper.

I do not remember whether we had a telephone in that house. There were a few in town then, but I do not remember whether we had one, since I wouldn’t have used it much.

There were so few automobiles that they were more of a curiosity than a part of regular life. If there were two or three on the streets in town at one time that would be a big event.

I am sure that we had no electricity. For light we used kerosene lamps. Most people called kerosene “lamp oil” or “coal oil”. To keep the lamps working properly, the glass chimneys had to be cleaned of smoke every day or two, the burned part of the woven cotton wicks had to be trimmed off and more kerosene had to be put in.

While I was in that house, and for years after, I was often told that a Shetland pony should not be trusted. A short time before were we were living there, two boys who lived nearby were killed while riding on a pony when they collided with a trolley car, which everybody called a street car, that ran along Main Street in front of the house. After that a marble drinking fountain was built on the corner in front of our house in memory of the boys. So I was never allowed to ride a Shetland pony, even if I had an opportunity.

My old sisters went to school one block up on Academy Street.

My father worked for the Norfolk & Western Railway in Roanoke eight miles away, traveling by trolley.

The trip between Salem and Roanoke on the streetcar cost fifteen cents, but there was a strip of ten tickets for one dollar, which made it ten cents for regular riders. At that time, some people worked for fifteen cents an hour or even less. Not long before that, men worked hard digging ditches with a pick and shovel for twelve hours a day for one dollar—especially during the depression of 1898. A friend’s father said that he once saw some of these men working and when one of the workers said, “Hello” to a man passing by, the foreman said “If you don’t want to work, get out of there and I will get a man who does”.

Our family went to the Southern Methodist Church—probably including me at that young age.

People now would think we led a very quiet—and a dull life—no car, no TV, no radio—or much of anything else.

(more to come)