Bambudder’s Weblog

Christmas has always been my favorite Holiday. It brings back memories of Christmas Past and looking forward to Christmas Future. So I wanted to share my Christmas memories with you and give you just a sense of History and some of my own history.

My first Christmas was probably more memorable for my family than for me.It was right at the end of the depression on Thanksgiving Day that I was born. My parents lived a few miles from my Grandmother and Grandfather Kirk and her brother, Howard and his family. Uncle Howard’s wife was Jewel Culpepper and her parents were pretty well to do farmers on Boone Road in Winston County, Mississippi. Daddy and Mother farmed for Mr. Culpepper. In fact part of their courtship took place on Sunday afternoons in their parlor and their daughter, Stella, Aunt Jewel’s sister became a sort of surrogate mother or wet nurse for me when Mother was in the field. But I get ahead of myself.

That Thanksgiving Day, my mother went into labor and my Grandmother, Ma Carrie Kirk, was called in as mid-wife. Apparently all of the women folk in the family came to prepare Thanksgiving dinner at our house. Mother said she didn’t have a thing to be thankful for that day. She was in labor, food was cooking in the kitchen, noise everywhere,odors were drifting into her bedroom and I just wouldn’t be born. About 1:00 in the afternoon, Ma Carrie had to call in Dr. Young because my shoulders were too wide for me to be born. They discussed breaking my shoulders and some other alternatives, but finally Mother was able to give me a big push and I mad my first appearance on November 25, exactly one month from Christmas Day. They put me in a diaper, weighed me in at 12 lbs and took off a pound for the diaper. What happened after that, they never told me. I suppose all the men folk came in and every body had a big meal and called it a day. Maybe by that Christmas Day, Mother began to feel as thought she could be thankful a little bit.

The next Christmas must have passed uneventfully. The only thing, I know about that year was what my dad told me later. Aunt Stella, as I later called her, was married to a man named Herbert Hisaw or Hubbard Hisaw. I never knew which. At any rate, my uncle, Tommie Lowrey was staying with my parents. Mr. Hisaw apparently had sticky fingers. Daddy had put up a hog that he had killed in his smoke house and sometime near Christmas, Mr. Hisaw slipped in the smoke house and stole one of our hams. So Daddy and Uncle Tommie took it upon themselves to slip down to Mr. Hisaw’s house and steal severalof the items in his storehouse. It seems these kind of hi jinks went on quite often.

By the Christmas of 1939, my mother presented us with a little blonde, blue eyed boy, named Thomas Howard. Mother had what was called Relay fever after his birth on October 25^th, 1939. She was sick and bedridden for almost a month and Aunt Portia, my Uncle Duel’s wife, was the only one who would come and take care of her. Aunt Portia had a daughter, Arsenia and a new little girl, Armerita and had the care of me and the newborn brother as well as her house and ours. Relay fever was a kidney infection, not unlike toxemia or urimia. By the time she was up and about, it was well into the Thanksgiving holiday and soon to be Christmas. And apparently no one knew there was a war looming on the horizon.

Not long after, in the spring of 1940, Uncle Duel, Aunt Portia and their family moved to the Arkansas Delta during the Mississippi floods. Aunt Portia had family there. They had come to Mississippi to tell everyone of the work to be had on the levee and how good the farming was in the rich delta land. Well, they talked Mama and Daddy into going with the. She said that when they arrived in a big tuck carrying everything they owned she was left stranded in the truck with my brother, me and the colored man who was driving the truck. The men had to take a boat across the flood waters to the houses. She said that we had to spend the night in the truck. Next morning the waters had receded enough to get to the houses. They were built on stilts or tall wood foundations to keep the flood water from getting into the houses.

Well, Daddy went to work on the levee and , when the spring came he broke up and planted 7 acres of ground in cotton. Back to the levee he went and out to the field she went.Many days Tommy and I were left in the shade of a stump, while she chopped and hoed that seven acres. Not much was said about what went on between the chopping and hoeing and the gathering of the crop. Daddy stayed on the levee and she gathered all 7 acres of cotton by herself. Because of the World War II beginning to break out in Europe, Uncle Tommie Lowrey had joined the army and had become a drill sergeant at Barksdale Field in Bossier City, Louisiana. He liked to drink and carouse at the NCO Club on the base. On one such outing he had a fling with his Commanding officer’s daughter, Katherine, Newvander. Discovering she was only 15 years old, he figured he had ruined her, so they better get married. Following the marriage, he decided to bring her to see his sister, Hester, in Arkansas. On one of the days that Daddy was working on the levee, Uncle Tommie talked her into picking my brother and me up and going to Louisiana with them. So up she went.I remember waking up in early in the morning in a strange car in my pajamas and Mother changing Tommie and me. I have often wondered how my daddy felt, when he got home and she and both of us were gone with only a note, saying, “I’ve gone to Louisiana with Tommie and Katherine. Once Mother told me that she told Daddy that she was moving to Louisiana and if he wanted to live with her, that’s where he would find her. So that’s what he did. He packed a bag and left everything they owned, quilts, beds, dishes, everything and caught a bus to Louisiana. I am inclined to believe this was the true story because she had already rented a house and gotten a job by the time he came. She later said, she left because he was drinking and she was just going for a visit. At any rate, we were there for Christmas.

The housed she rented was a big old house with just three huge rooms. The middle room is the one I remember. About all that I remember was the big middle room and that one day after a bath Tommie and I ran out of the house nearly naked. He was in a diaper and I was in my panties. The neighbors thought that was scandalous. The only other thing that I remember was seeing Daddy. Right after he got there, he got a job with J. T. Moss Tie Company. They made cross ties fir the railroad. I didn’t find out until years later that a man got caught between trains and died while he worked there and he always believed it was his fault. He mad the great amount of $11.25 a week. We weren’t there very long before we moved to Timothy Street where Mother was working. She worked for Ted’s Bar- B-Q as a car hop. Ted and his wife lived behind their drive-in café and had one child. That child was my first contact with a mentally handicapped child and he was also bed -ridden. He was twelve and had to stay in a baby bed and I can remember thinking how terrible it was for him to have to be in that bed.

Meantime, it seemed I was always getting a new little brother just before my birthday and just before Christmas. In October of 1941, another little blonde, blue eyed brother came along. Wallace was really big boy. By the time he was 3 weeks old, he weighed 15 lbs. A man came by with a Shetland pony and took mine and Tommy’s picture and then he took Wallace’s on a pink plaid blanket. We were at Thanksgiving again.

Two things made that Christmas memorable for me. After Wallace was born, Mother made me several pieces of clothing; some little satin blouses, a little, peach colored-dress and pajamas. She had made pajamas for Tommy as well. Somehow or another, I backed into the space heater with my pajamas on and caught fire to them. I wasn’t burned, but the pajamas were. Soon after, all my little blouses and dress somehow got put into a bag and put out with the trash. In those days, our trash was burned in the yard, so all of my clothes were burned. I mourned the peach colored dress. Mother mourned all the hard work and money lost. She had made button holes by hand and I can vouch for the fact that they weren’t easy to do, because I tried it in later years. That was the first incident.

The second event occurred on a cold gloomy December 7, 1941. I didn’t understand what was going on at the time, but I found out later. We had a new radio and my parents had it turned on and President Roosevelt was speaking. He said that the Japanese had just bombed Pear Harbor and we were at war. Christmas, I don’t remember that year, but I remember that announcement of War.

By now I was four going on five years old. We moved to a place in Caddo Parrish called the Copper Kettle. Lots of things happened that little while we lived there. One thing was a small brush with death that I experienced. Two children I played with were the children of the owners of the area called the Copper Kettle. One early cold morning the parents left their little home just behind their business and opened for work, leaving the children in bed with a space heater on. When the mother went home a little later, she discovered that the heater had gone out and her children had died. It was just before Christmas. I was so young I really didn’t understand what was going on. The only thing I did understand was that my playmates would never be there again.

It was nearing Christmas and my dad’s brother, Robert and my mother’s brother, Rudolph, were living with us for a short time. Both were very young. The only difference was that Uncle Robert had just turned twenty and Uncle Rudolph was just short of eighteen.. At the time, a person didn’t have to have proof of age. So they both joined the military. Uncle Robert joined the army, crossed the Rhine River and fought in the corn fields of Germany. He was wounded and came home from the war with what we now call “Traumatic Stress Disorder”. Then we called it shell shock. He spent most of his life in a hospital, not getting out until shortly before his death. Uncle Rudolph joined the air force and became a tail gunner. He flew 75 missions over Germany, coming home as a war hero. He received two awards for his service, one of which was the Silver Star and one was the Distinguished Flying Cross. He was given a Hero’s welcome with a parade down Texas Avenue in Shreveport.

Just before I was five years old, we moved to Curtis Park and while there, I experienced black outs that the government felt was necessary to protect the country from enemy aircraft. My mother became what we now call ‘Molly the Riveter”. However, she was the only lady welder at J. B. Baird Corporation in Shreveport. They made weapons for the soldiers during the war as well as ammunition. When she and Daddy worked nights, she took us to stay with an older black couple named Rosie and Tom. We loved their old house and we loved them. Tom would go fishing and when he brought back cat fish he would get a little balloon like object and he told us it was the blubberer and we could play with it. The lived in an old house with big rooms and they scraped their yard like my grandparents did because they didn’t have a lawn mower, but they had beautiful flowers or so I thought. One of them was a plant called milk weed. When the leaves were pulled off the plant bled a white thick substance which looked like milk. Their neighbor had a China Berry tree in the yard. It had green berries on it with really pretty leaves. I thought it was just beautiful, but I also thought the tree smelled bad. One of the little boys where they lived taught us two new games. One game was where you got inside a rubber tire and someone would push you round and round. Another game took a molasses can top nailed to a stick and when it was pushed, the top would spin like a tire. I started first grade there at Curtis Park and we had a maid named Lessy Bea. She took us to the movies, called picture shows the time. Because she was a black lady, we had to sit in the balcony. We thought that was the neatest thing. It cost a nickel to get in and a nickel for a coke and a nickel for candy and popcorn. And a little Mouse called Sniffles. I remember one of the stories about Sniffles. The little girl whose house he lived in knew he was a magical. He showed her some amazing things. When she joined him in his adventures, she would say, ”Piff, Poof, Piffles,Make me as small as Sniffles. In the story he took her to broken toy land and the toys all told her how their owners had torn them up and left them alone or threw them away.

After that episode, whenever I tore up one of my toys or dolls, I would think about Sniffles and that little girl. Either Mother or Lessy Bea walked me to school bus stop early every morning because we were on daylight savings time and it was dark. I also remember Mother taking me to get a permanent. The beauty shop operator had a hair dryer that had rollers on rubber strings hanging down. She rolled my hair on those rollers and put me under that dryer. It burned my hair to a fair you well. Shortly thereafter, we made another move to the New Minden Road. The reasons for so many moves during the war, was that many Landlords didn’t want large families or soldiers living in their rental property.

Finally, at Minden Road, in property owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Pitchford, we felt like we had a home and Lessy Bea went with us. I thought it was somewhat a fun place to live. It was a little square white house with four rooms, a living room, dining room, one bedroom, and a kitchen. There was a big back yard with an old shed of some kind at the back. Tramps came by looking for food. There was a big rock where I used take a pair of Mother’s high heels and go and stomp as hard as I could, pretending to be Ginger Rogers or Rita Hayworth dancing and singing. Once in a rain shower Mother let Tommie and me get in our underpants and play in the rain. I also remember taking my doll under the house and stripping all her clothes off, leaving her in the dirt and going in for the night. Boy did, I get into trouble for that. The Pitchfords also had a cistern, which I thought was pretty neat because it furnished all their water and it was cold. I didn’t realize it was dangerous, but I climbed to the top once and looked down. It was deep, deep and cold. If I had fallen in, nobody would have known to look for me there and I would have drowned. Lots of things were going on. One was that I had another new little brother. Only this time, he had brown hair and looked like me. My other two brothers looked like Lowreys with their blond hair and blue eyes. I had brown hair and brown eyes. Johnnie made and appearance on December 5, 1943 and he had brown hair and brown eyes. Mother’s niece Johnnie Mae came and took care of mother after Johnnie’s birth. Women stayed in bed for at least nine days then after babies were born. While she was there, she met a man named J. W. Gardner. She was only sixteen, but I guess that didn’t matter, because she kept seeing him. She was my favorite cousin. She took me places, let me spend the night, and I loved her. I guess J. W. did too, because somewhere along the line he got her pregnant and they had to get married.

Anyway, Daddy went to work for McCullogh Tool and Mother managed the café next door. That was the first Christmas that I truly remember what was happening. I was in first grade and my teacher was Miss Stockstill. She had short dark hair on her head and long dark hair on her legs. I really thought that was ugly. My mother nor any of the ladies I knew had hair on their legs. She gave me the start of my love for reading and books. She taught me about Dick and Jane and running and squirrels going round and round and scampering to the ground. She also spanked me in my hand because I made my 2’s like z’s and my 5’s like backward 5’s. I made an “F” on some papers, and when I got home I got spanked for making “F’s”. By Christmas she had taught me some bigger words than “Run, Dick. Run Jane. Run dick and Jane. Now I was reading “an, was, saw, and, the, were, her, yes, no, now, here, there.” I was all the way up to words like “nowhere.” I was going to school during the Huey P. Long era. His Son, Ear, was governor. We got pencils, paper, colors, scissors, tablets and such for free. We also got lunch for free except for milk. I had gotten a new coat and one day when it was rally cloudy, cold, and raining outside, I left my coat in the lunch room. When I went back to get it, the coat was gone. Needless to say I got another spanking.