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Through my experiences in my dad's store, in church and in school, there were many interesting people with whom I came in contact. Some perhaps made more impression upon me than others but memories of their contacts with me have lingered through the years. Some have been mentioned in previous chapters, including Captain Waters, Charlie Taylor, Layman Redden, Walter Moore, harry T. Moore, and L. T. Orme. From them I learned the meaning of friendship and I was nurtured by their abilities and the way in which they loved and approached life.
There are a few others who were special people in my early years. I'll start with "Uncle" Sam Ewing. he was the drawbridge tender, as you will recall. Long before I began helping at the drawbridge, Uncle Sam and I had contacts. As a small lad, I loved to play hockey with a tin can and a bent oak rib from an old touring car top (shaped much like today's professional hockey sticks), or to push an iron rim with a wooden T-shaped pusher made from pieces of lath. These I would push or hit up and down the concrete road between our house and the river. There were very few autos then, so I practically had the road to myself. Uncle Sam would sit in front of Mr. Pastorfield's store hoping to see a sailboat on the river and he would give me a hard time about the noise made by hitting the tin can or by the iron rim striking the concrete. He would say, "Boy, don't you ever get tired of that **##1! noise?" However, we maintained a reasonably good friendship which was evident later as he allowed me to help with raising the draw.
Grant Roe was another of my favorite people. he was probably in his sixties during my teens and he lived or boarded with the Satterfields, just two houses from us. he was always jolly and good-natured. When he felt like it or someone requested his services, he worked as a carpenter. In the summer, he was a foreman at the Redden Cannery. It was through him that I got my jobs at the cannery. he was regarded by all as a "jolly good fellow" and never treated anyone unkindly. When he wasn't working somewhere he would make at least one, maybe two trips a day to my dad's store for a banana and as he walked along he was always singing one of two songs: "They Oughta Stop Kickin' My Dog Around" and "0 Mary Don't You Weep." I can still see and hear him coming down the path in front of our house singing his tunes. He probably never knew that he was making a lifelong impression upon me.
A current TV advertisement shows a box-like milk wagon being pulled by a horse. It is almost an exact duplicate of one used by Mr. Roland Gary and son when they delivered milk around Denton At the corner of the picket fence around our yard we had a small wooden box for use in leaving the milk and the empty bottles each day In cold weather, we were not so careful about bringing the milk into the house immediately, and I have seen it freeze to the extent that the cardboard cap and the cream would project an inch or so above the top of the bottle (that's when I got to eat the cream above the top of the bottle).
In warm weather, it was my job to watch for the milkman and to get the milk into the ice box immediately. When he returned from Denton, Mr. Gary usually stopped at my dad's store and among other things always bought five or six loaves of bread. He was a small man with a slight limp. Later, after my marriage, we lived at Craigsville, Virginia, and our milkman there was about the same size, limp and all, and reminded me so much of Mr. Gary.
Our mail was delivered under the RFD (Rural Free Delivery) and Mr. Dunning was our mailman Most of the time he used a Model T Ford to deliver the mail but in the winter, if there was much snow, he used a horse and mail wagon (very much like the milk wagon) or a sleigh...
One of my dad's best customers was a Chevrolet mechanic who lived in "Redden Park" in West Denton and worked for the owners of the Chevrolet Garage in Denton. His name completely escapes me, but I do remember how faithfully he came every Saturday night to buy a quantity of groceries for the next week and to pay his account for the items that his family had charged during the week. He was usually about our last customer on Saturday night.
He was also a dedicated volunteer fireman. Another neighbor, Roland Satterfield, who lived two houses south of us, was also a dedicated fireman, and both Roland and the Chevrolet mechanic belonged to the Denton Fire Department. Roland's wife used to say that he kept his boots, rubber pants, coat, and hat beside the bed at night to be ready to dash out of the door as soon as the fire siren sounded uptown inDenton. It surely was true, because I remember being awakened several times at night by the siren and hearing Roland's front door slam almost immediately as he rushed to the corner to catch a ride with the above-mentioned Chevrolet mechanic to the fire station.
Speaking of teaching and of the fire department reminds me of another of my teachers who served both organizations well. He was a Mr. Smith, my mechanical training teacher for five years. I took this class for one period each day in grades seven through eleven. Mr. Smith, in addition to being a good craftsman was also a good musician. He always directed a benefit program each year for the fire department. It was usually a minstrel involving a chorus in which I participated each year for several years. He did an excellent job both as a teacher and as a musical director.
Shortly after I began teaching, I started a shop program for some of the disadvantaged boys in our school and my leadership in being able to do this was a result of the learning experiences under Mr. Smith in my manual training classes in high school My son, Fred, still has a desk that I designed and constructed in one of these classes more than fifty years ago.
Later In my career, I took formal training in industrial arts at a university, taught it for twelve years, moving on from there into supervision of vocational education. Part of the success that I enjoyed in these two fields of education can be attributed to the skills that I learned in that first manual training class and the influence of its teacher, Mr. Smith.
It appears that sometimes, even though one has no direct contact with an individual, the indirect observation and influence of that person leaves some lasting memories. Such was the influence of a farmer from Tuckahoe Neck who was of Dutch descent and who had a rather reckless and adventurous nature. He owned a Dodge touring car and because of his fearless and almost reckless driving had a reputation of being a "flying Dutchman."
His old car impressed me because it was the only one that I can remember that had a silent electric starter. This starter was absolutely silent and would turn the engine over without the slightest bit of noise. One could be standing beside the car and hear nothing until the engine started. It always puzzled me as to the reason why the silent starter was discarded by the auto manufacturer in favor of the more noisy ones now used.
When this "flying Dutchman" came to Denton he always went uptown first and then would stop in West Denton on his return. Fortunately, there were few cars on the road then because he never slowed down as he came from Tuckahoe Neck on the Denton-Easton road and as he made the almost abrupt right turn at the west end of the drawbridge to go uptown.
One morning he turned abruptly and at full speed onto the bridge only to find it very icy. His old Dodge bounced against the concrete sides of the bridge from one side to the other a time or two but he never slowed down -- just kept plowing through. This experience still did not slow him down at all and he continued to make the same kind of approach to the bridge each time he came to town. We all held our breath hoping that he wouldn't collide with the bridge or with another car that night be traveling on the Hillsboro road and approaching the bridge from that direction.
I had another high school teacher, Mr. X, who taught math. He was a brilliant fellow and had helped, in World War I, to develop the method whereby a machine gun on a fighter plane could be timed consistently with the plane's engine so that it could be mounted at the front of the engine's hood and fired while the plane was in flight, allowing the bullets to be ejected between thepropeller blades even though the propeller was turning at a very high speed.
He had been a teacher in another community but had been fired for his consistent drinking problem. Rumors were that even his wife had left him. He had recovered, however, and had been "on the wagon" long enough to get the teaching job at Denton. He had been successful in this position until, for some reason, he moved in with his brother in West Denton. He began to drink again and would occasionally come in to Dad's store at night to chat.
On several occasions his drink began to take effect and he needed help to get home. My dad would call me to help him up the street to his brother's home. Mr. X would beg me not to tell anyone about this and I did keep his secret, even on days in the math class when his hangover caused him to nod in his chair while we were working on a class assignment. I liked him except for his problem and, as you might expect, his and my secret paid off for me when report cards came out. was not all that bad in math anyhow and majored in it in college. His habit got the best of him eventually and he was fired from this job, too. I learned two things from this experience: one, that alcohol is a powerful drug causing an illness that can ruin the life of the most brilliant person as well as his or her relatives, and second, that my dad, while he didn't tolerate drunken people around his store, still had some compassion for those who had become the victims of the disease.
Each of these people, along with scores of others including some already mentioned in previous chapters, had one or more unusual characteristics that have lingered in my memory all these years. Fortunately, I was able in my youth to have the kind of upbringing that enabled me to distinguish the good characteristics in some from the bad in others. I believe that in later life their examples enabled me to profit from the good ones and to avoid falling prey to the bad ones.
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