As he was growing up, my father did a lot of different things. He and Walter worked on building the railroads and also drilling water wells. My Grandfather Thomas owned the water rigs, and Walter and Daddy would help him drill water wells.

When Daddy was about twenty and Mother was about sixteen or seventeen, they got off the farm, which was between Searcy and Kensett. And they went over to Judsonia, four miles away from Kensett and about five miles from Searcy, to the north. He bought a small store and also worked as a lineman, installing telephone lines, climbing poles and installing lines. Hell, he would put on those leg spurs and climb those telephone poles just like that!

Anyhow, they had bought a little home next to a railroad station in Judsonia. And Lorene and Merle were born there. He became quite prosperous in the telephone business. He put in an exchange and then he put in the rural lines. He was right next to the railroad station, and the main passenger trains and local freight trains all stopped in Judsonia. He made good money there. Granddaddy Fondren had a small grocery store in Kensett and after he died, Daddy became the owner. He and Mother also moved back to Granddaddy's farm for a time. Daddy's two sisters had gone; they wanted to get out of town and seek their careers in the big city, you see. One went to St. Louis and the other went to Kansas City. My daddy's brother, Harry, died as a relatively young man. All the people in town used to tell me, "You look just like your Uncle Harry." And I was so proud of that, you know.

So after my Grandfather Thomas died, Daddy took over the farm. Then my father built a small, frame house in Kensett that was across from the Methodist Church. I think I was born there, although I always said I was born out on the farm [Laughter]. Sybil was born out on the farm; she was two years older than I was. I was just a young boy when we lived in this house, across the street from the church. I used to like to run off with the other boys and go down to the creek and go swimming. The nigrahs used to tell Mother - Mother and Daddy always used to have a lot of help, especially Mother, house help, you know, laundry, cooking and so forth - "That baby of yours, he down at the creek there swimming." Daddy would come get me. Sometimes Mother.

Well, that house burned. There was a lot of talk about that. Of course I was a boy at the time and all this was talk later on. It was an oil stove, a kerosene stove. Kerosene was used quite a bit in those days for cooking as well as heating. And one of the burners malfunctioned and exploded and set the house on fire. And it didn't take long for it to burn. But after our house burned, we moved into what we called the "coffin house." That's what we called it in later years, because we used that house to store coffins.

That's where we were living while Daddy was building the wonderful home we all grew up in. You've heard us talking about it so much - the "big house." Two-story home, with many fireplaces. The chimney was in the center part, a double chimney. There were two fireplaces upstairs, and three fireplaces downstairs, one in Mother and Daddy's room, one in the parlor, one in the dining room. There was a big porch with columns in front. The floor was built above flood level, because we had floods sometimes, maybe one or two feet during the spring.

All during the construction of that home I was a little boy, you see, and I was always in the way of the carpenters building the house. Daddy would watch out for me, but I was there most of the time, watching them. I guess that's where I got started in engineering, perhaps.

So much for the big house....

During this time, Daddy had acquired other property. One of the lots he negotiated to purchase had an old mansion-type house on the front part that was really deteriorating. On the back part of the lot there were stables and barns where they had hogs, pigs. Daddy tore down the old barns and stuff on the back part of the lot, and moved the house from the front to the back.. He and some men jacked it up, you see, and used round wooden rollers to roll it from the sight where it was to the back part of the property. Then he restored the house inside and out and rented it.

But as the years went on, Daddy acquired other property, and did this and did that. Bought the movie business. The first one was "open air." They put 2x4's up and put tin around it. That was the theater. Daddy bought the rights to that; two guys had had it before. That was when he started building some brick buildings, on the piece of property where the old livery stable was.

He rebuilt the house that burned, a frame house, across the street from the church, and rented it. Then he built about two more houses in that direction and about six houses in the other direction. He owned about three-quarters of that block. And the Dickey's owned the other quarter of the block. Daddy built rent houses there on that block, you see, and he made a lot of money out of them. When the big house burned, I had finished the University of Arkansas. And I had all my trophies and books and whatever stored there, and all that burned up too. Plus some things that Merle and Lorene had, all the treasures that we children had. I don't remember how old Blevins was at the time.

Blevins was the baby. I remember a few accidents that happened to him. Lorene had dropped him in the rain barrel - almost drowned him. A pet mule kicked him in the face. Different incidents that happened as we grew up, crises and so forth. Lorene's hair caught on fire. Merle got an infected foot one time, playing basketball. She stuck a needle in the big part of her foot, when she was at school at Galloway. It was a school for women only. All three of my sisters went to Galloway. Merle stayed there and got a degree. Sybil was in the academy part of Galloway; you could go there for 10th through 12th grade. Those that could afford the tuition. The rest of us went to Searcy for the 10th to 12th grade.

You remember me mentioning Fern Cowan? Well, Fern and two of the Williams girls went to Galloway. The Williams had a ranch and they were pretty wealthy. They had a two-story home too, back towards the river. He was in the cattle business; he shipped cattle and so forth. In other words, the girls' family could afford it. We would ride the train together between Kensett and Searcy. The trains ran about every hour or two, and we could take the train, a twenty-five cent fare, from Kensett to Searcy. There was a station at Galloway College, where the girls would get off, and then we would go into Searcy, about another mile and a half or so further, and get off and go to the high school. You know the two-story house that you girls came to in Searcy? The athletic field was right across from there. There were two school buildings back on the back part, the high part, of that property. Of course they are all gone now. They later on built some modern school buildings down at the lower end of it, which was there when you all were there.

Anyway, I was at Vicksburg when the big house burned. I had graduated in 1930 from the University of Arkansas. So it must have been about 1932 or 1933 when it burned. There was a frame house, a rent house, next door to our home. I had helped Daddy build it; I guess I was about 12 or 14. Well, anyway, the guy, the renter, set fire to the house. His wife left him and he set fire to the house to collect insurance on the furniture. If it hadn't been for the marshal, Daddy would have killed him. At that time, Blevins was at Hendrix College at Conway, out from Little Rock.

Well, Daddy was sleeping in the back bedroom, adjacent to the little rental house. And he had heard this car drive up; he was light sleeper. Then he heard it drive away. And he went on back to sleep. Then when he was awakened, the house was ablaze. The marshal lived across the street from us; they had a small hotel there. The custom was, when they had fires, people would shoot guns up in the air. That was the alarm. And that's when Daddy awakened. Of course he knew what it was. The marshal was shooting his pistol, so Daddy was up quite soon. We had water works in the house and I had even put in a fire hose, a big 2 inch line. But some way the hose had been disconnected.

So the house burned. And our home burned. That was a tragedy.

Well, the family moved back to the house that they had rolled. Of course, when it happened I took leave and came home right away. Daddy had lost a lot of money in the bank during the Depression years, and he had sold some of the businesses they had originally owned. The original store of ours was frame also. It had burned, and then we rebuilt it with brick. I helped build that one. That was the one that you saw. But the original property burned. Daddy lost a lot of money.

I was in Leavenworth, going to the CMTC (Citizens Military Training Camp). I hadn't heard about the store, and I was coming home on the train. Here's a young boy returning from military duty; one month, August. And I was so homesick. I just couldn't wait to get home. The train went from Kansas City to St. Louis. I was so anxious, I was peeping out the window as we approached Kensett. The train slowed down, and I could see smoldering smoke coming up. It was about the middle of the day. As the train pulled into the station, I could see my mother, my Daddy, and Merle and Sybil. They were out there rummaging around in the debris where the store was. It was a big mess.

So what did Daddy do? He went down to Little Rock and got some loans, and he rebuilt the store. Piggly Wiggly was coming along at that time, out of Memphis. They had a store in Little Rock, self-service, you know. Piggly Wiggly had already got started as self-service stores. Daddy was seeking a Piggly Wiggly franchise, but was unable to get one. Daddy found out the name of a firm, an independent one, headquartered in St. Louis, and it was there that he got a franchise from them. He had to match their capital.

So we rebuilt the store, improved it. I remember digging the foundation on that store. 'Course I was always nosy when it came to building anything. There was a big lumber mill in Doniphan -- they couldn't keep me away from that place. They cut the logs and planed the lumber and finished it and shipped it out on boxcars. That was a big industry out there. I delivered a lot of groceries out there, in the wagon, and later on, in the pickup Ford.

In front of the store, there were the railroad tracks, and there was branch of a creek between the main street of the town where all the businesses were and down in here was a big drainage area. And the drainage drained to the south. So Daddy put a drain out to the creek to drain our property and got rid of the seepage underground.

I was worried that the foundation wouldn't hold. We had stored some of the iron bed railings out in the old coffin house. And I got some steel rods and these bed railings, and I arranged them across the foundation to reinforce it. As we poured the concrete, about halfway up, I put in another layer of reinforcing. And all over town, Daddy would say, "That boy of mine came up with idea." He would brag on it. I was the first one in town to put in a foundation with reinforcing in it! All the old men in town talked about. Every time you did anything, the old men would come around and see what's going on.

We built the store. Everything was white, shelves and everything. Bought a new big walk-in freezer for the meats. All kind of meats, mainly beef and pork. Not too much chicken. Everybody killed their own chickens. For many years we had that store. It didn't burn. That's the building that still exists.

Well, the company in St. Louis went broke. And Daddy took his lawyer and went to St. Louis. And this lawyer somehow pulled a rabbit out of the hat and Daddy got his capital back, whereas a lot of other didn't. And they operated that store for some time. It served as the first modern, self-service store in the county. People would come up from Searcy and buy things there.

One thing about that building, it didn't want to give up [Laughter]. We tried to sell the building several times, but the buyers wouldn't meet the price. It was Merle that got the lead about a guy down in Houston that had bought the cotton mill from the Mills and he was interested in shipping rice. They didn't have a wharf on the Little Red River at the time, but they were loading rice barges on the White River not too far from Searcy and Kensett at Augusta, Arkansas, just below Bald Knob. The Little Red River came into the White River about ten miles south of Kensett. So the people there were visualizing being more prosperous and developing because they were going to build a port on the Little Red River. It never happened. When they built the dam on the Little Red River in Heber that killed that idea. Shortly after the dam was built, Pearle and I went across the dam together. We went to Heber Springs just the two of us. The Little Red River was always flooding, so they built the dam. Well, that ruined the idea of barges coming in by steamboat and coming in near Kensett. So Blevins, through Merle's acquaintance, got in touch with this guy in Houston who was buying up property and he had visions of Kensett growing. Well, he bought the store and the adjacent lot. We had already sold the lot where the coffin house was. Well, okay, we took a mortgage on it, $40,000 at 10 percent. And then the guy defaulted on his loan. So we got back the property and all the money we had collected on the mortgage. Then it was sold to another guy, who paid off the mortgage.

That left the big house, the two-story house in Searcy, and the property across the street where the apartments were and the movie theater was. Daddy had already sold the garage building and he had already sold the adjoining two-story commercial buildings. Then there some vacant property in there too that we owned. It took quite a while to sell that property - but finally we did. And we got enough money to satisfy Blevins and satisfy all the others.

Well, we finally sold all the other property. Daddy had already sold the coffin house before he died, so that left us with the one property over in Searcy, the two-story house that was my grandfather Blevins' home, and Mother had outright. It was deeded over to her outright. Mother had two step-sisters. You remember Helen. The other one, you didn't hear too much about her. Her son was at Blevins' funeral. I can't remember her name right now. The sisters had many a disagreement about my grandfather Blevins' property on Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena.

My mother's mother died early in life. There was my mother and her brother, and then there was a baby sister that had died. I'm not sure how old she was, two or three, when she died. Buried in Searcy Cemetery. Granddaddy's second wife was a Donaghey. My grandfather Blevins was quite prosperous. They lived in a big home and he had a livery business in Searcy. He had the biggest livery business in the county. About a hundred head of horse were kept there. The main building that housed the horses was quite long, about a hundred and fifty feet long, I guess. Behind that he owned the pasture land.

My mother always resented all the chores as a young girl that her step-mother made her do. But later on, she had a lot of love for her.

Blevins lived with Granddaddy Blevins and my step-grandmother a couple of times when he first went out to California. And Lorene, lived with them when she went to high school out there one year.

So that house that Grandfather Blevins built in Searcy was finally disposed of. Mother needed some furniture to help furnish her two-story house in Searcy, so she got some of Sybil's furniture out of storage.

It was stored in one the old warehouses there on the property. Daddy would use it as a storage house for cotton. It was completely enclosed, where he could store bales of cotton until the market got high. He wasn't about to sell cotton at 25 cents a pound; he'd wait until it was 35 to 38 cents a pound and then he'd take so many bales out of the storage house and take it over to Searcy where they had a big compress. The original bales were quite big, you see, and bulky. And when the cotton was ready to be sold and shipped to places where they would make it into fiber and cloth, they would compress into smaller bales. Buyers would buy the cotton from the farmers in big bales, and they would bring it into the compress place and they would pay rent on the cotton. The buyers would store it in the compress place until the market got to a certain place that they wanted to sell. And then when they sold it, the compress people would take the bulky bales and compress into bales about one-fourth the size of the other bales. It was ready then to be shipped overseas or to New York or Chicago or New England, to people in the textile industry.

Also in Searcy there was a cotton seed industry. When I was growing up, they had big places in North Little Rock built along the river, and they had one in Searcy, where you press the oil out of the cotton seed. It made a tremendous smell, smelled just like country ham cooking.

There were times when I would miss the DK&S, the train coming back to Kensett, sometimes after football practice. I'd have to run back to the high school to change clothes after practice, and then run to catch the DK&S. Many times I'd be running and I'd just barely catch it as it was pulling out. Sometimes I'd miss it, then I'd have to walk home. I'd run or trot half of the way. It was four miles. I was in good shape back then! Many times I'd miss that train.

My Daddy often didn't say what he was going to do next, because he never knew what he was going to do next. Well, not too extreme, you know. Mother took care of the family business and he took care of the other business.

I listened to a few arguments between my mother and father. "Well now, Jim, I guess you just have to have your way," my mother would say. But when she used the word "Jim" out loud, you see, or "Well now, Jim," you knew she had more or less lost the decision. Discussions usually took place in the kitchen. In the big house, we had a big kitchen. Big dining room too, as far as that goes. But most of the action, most of the decisions were made in the kitchen. That is, the family decisions. They had separate bedrooms. There were two bedrooms for the children downstairs. There were three furnaces upstairs, two were in rooms and the other was kind of open where the stairway came up into sort of an alcove or whatever you might want to call it. There was a bed in there you see. That's where I slept most of the time. Until it would get hot upstairs. In hot weather, I'd sleep downstairs on the back porch or in the spring house. The spring house was where we'd do the washing and ironing. It was square and quite large. It was wood and brick, and from about midway up, it was screen. We had one or two trees close by and it was really cool out there. There was a trough about eight to ten feet long, about two feet wide and it was sealed on the bottom so it could hold water. We would put milk in there or anything that needed to be cool that you didn't have to put in the ice box, because the ice box wasn't very big. You needed a big block of ice for the ice box. It was on the back porch, outside the kitchen door. Anything that you wanted to keep cool, like something cool for us kids to drink, Mother would put it in a jar, half gallon fruit jar, with a lid on it and then put it the spring house in the water trough.

And we had two cows, so we had plenty of milk. And most of the time we didn't put milk in the refrigerator because we'd use it up quite rapidly. We used a lot of crock ware, ceramic type jars. You'd use them for slop jars too. The bedrooms had slop jars. Usually you had a little stand for a wash bowl in every bedroom and a pitcher of water, you see, where you wash your face and wash your hands. My job sometimes was to empty the slop jars. I hated that. The girls did their rooms, I did mine and sometimes I would do Mother and Daddy's rooms. The slop jars were used during the night. We had an outdoor toilet. We had a two-seater. [Laughter] That was better than primitive living, I'll tell you.

In Grandfather Blevins' house, there was a wonderful window that both Merle and I wanted. We had great memories of it from when we were kids. There was a large landing where the stairs came up and turned to the right and this is where we kids would look out the window, through the colored glass. And always as children going to see Grandpaw and Grandmaw, we'd have a great time playing games and looking out this window.

Well, we had sold the house, and of course we had rights to remove the furniture and contents of the house, but we didn't have rights to take any part of the building. Well, Merle, using her persuasive powers, talked me into going back over there at night to get the window. I got a hammer and pry bar out of the store. A screwdriver too. The window was mainly on hinges, so you could remove the window and frame by the hinges. Rain had been predicted so I put plywood in its place.

I was going to put the window in the trunk of my car, but Merle talked me into putting it in her car, her new Buick. Well, the next morning, she gets a call from the buyer about stealing the window. We had to go back over to the property to do something else that morning, but the buyers didn't show up on the property. But it was coming back, back to the motel, one of the buyers intercepted us on the street. He kind of blocked us off and hailed us down. And he got out of his car and we were seated in our car and he said, "What do you men by stealing our window?"

Well, we pleaded innocent. Merle was driving - it was in her car - and the guy was standing. And she took off and left him talking. I figured the next time, they would get the law after us. Well, the next morning, Merle took off. I took about four o'clock in the morning and she took off about six or seven, and we were out of town before they could get the law on us about the window!

So Merle ended up with the window. The window and the desk! Suzanne still has the desk. And Elizabeth has the window. Well, we sold the property for about $30,000. So we finally closed out all the property. I wrote the final checks. Merle had died; it was about $20,000 to each one. Suzanne as survivor and Sonny was the other survivor. Merle died in '87. Suzanne took over some of the duties.

I think I wrote the last check in '88.

No one else called it the coffin house but me. We sold caskets too, but most of the people couldn't afford the cost of a casket. Coffins were made of wood, but the caskets were made out of ceramic and I don't know what all.

[Referring to the map of Kensett. See Appendix A]: Here was the bank, and here was the store back over here. Daddy owned all of this in here. Half of this block here. He built the telephone, the hotel and the so forth along here. Back here was the Methodist Church. Granddaddy Fondren gave this land to the Methodist Church. That's where the post office is now. Now the coffin house was in here; the livery stables were here.

The coffin house was a solid building. The joists and everything were hewed, made by hand. The foundation of the house was perfect. The walls were sturdy, and had siding. It had a little porch on the front that was roofed over. This was the first place that Daddy bought. It had windows in the front and windows on the side. Well, Daddy had made a deal to buy coffins and caskets from a distributor in Little Rock. The coffins and caskets would come in by railroad into Kensett, and we'd take then out of the boxcar and put them in that house. In other words, he made that the funeral home. It had a little office space on the side, and that was Daddy's first office space. I think the building is still there.

Later on when I was a big strong boy, I helped take coffins out of the boxcar and put them in the wagon and bring them out and store them in this building. I didn't call it the coffin house back then. But then later on, we made that a storage area. In back we stored pumpkins, produce, onions and so forth, when we'd run out of space in the store. The front part was still the display of coffins. The coffins came in another box, a well-made box made of heavy duty lumber. They'd use the box to put in the grave sites, and then the coffin was put into that.

When somebody died, Daddy would take me to help him. We had to take the coffin out of the shipping box to put the fixtures on the coffin. And as a boy, I helped Daddy do that. I would hold the lamp. You had to put the screws and the handles on and all of that, all the fixtures on the side of the coffin. We didn't have any electricity, but we had lamps that were gasoline, plus kerosene lamps and lanterns. But putting on the fixtures, you had to be able to see because it wasn't marked where the handles go. So Daddy had to mark about where the handles went and then he would use a hand drill to drill through for the screws. I would tighten up the screws, attach the handles.

We did this off and on for about a couple of years. As time went along, he got away from that business. We did away with the coffins and caskets.

For funerals, we had a team-drawn hearse and then we had a regular automotive hearse too. Daddy always had a good team of white horses. I would handle the team of horses. I'd have a reliable black person with me and Daddy would be behind with the other people in the surrey. That's the way we took people to the graveyard for burials in Kensett, Arkansas. So I went to many funerals as a boy. Witnessed many a funeral.

My first girlfriend died. She got a whipping in school and about ten days later she died. Beth. A tragedy. I think I told you about that. She and Fern Cowan were great friends. Fern's father owned the big hotel and Beth's father and mother owned the other big hotel across the DK&S. There was quite a big hotel business in town. Beth and Fern and I were the same age, and we went through all the grades together in school. And as we were growing up, we became pretty close. So that was quite a tragedy.

And one of Bill's sisters died early in life. She was such a beautiful girl. Everyone in town cried over Tolly's death. I can't remember what the cause was, typhoid perhaps. Some of the diseases then, you could die pretty early in life. Tolly was about Merle and Sybil's age, you see. And that was a tragedy.

Many times, death and all those funerals affected me, when I'd start to think back on them. But I finally shook it off. Well, when I got married to your mother, that's when I shook off all that sad memory. It disappeared. That was a closed chapter in my life.

We lived in that hotel that Daddy built. It was two-story. I don't know how it was arranged. We had a telephone exchange in one part of that place and it was kind of set back from the store buildings. Any kind of a justice of the peace trial, civil trial, was held in my Daddy's office. And that's the way he became acquainted with so many politicians, you see. Some of Daddy's boyhood friends became quite prosperous in Little Rock too. One had the Cadillac agency, Bob Cook. They were good friends with Mother and Daddy. And quite often they would go down to Little Rock and have dinner with the Cooks. They had grown up together as young men. I had met the man; he was quite likable. Daddy knew a lot of the lawyers down in Little Rock. He knew all the people in the retail and the wholesale business in Little Rock. So naturally it kind of grew from all this business.

They had a Justice of the Peace in Kensett. The senior Williams was the Justice of the Peace for years. Not worth a damn. They had a court. And also the mayor of the town would hold court in Daddy's business, the dry goods part of the business. Daddy's desk was in the back. The Desk. That's the desk Suzanne had. There was a shoe department, and that took up a lot of space in the back too. As a kid, I'd bother my Daddy at the office, to see what he was doing. I was always in the office, getting in the way. Well, as I told you before, when I was a boy, I watched this doctor kill a guy in my Daddy's office.

The story was that Doc Harrison accidentally ran over and killed one of this farmer's prize pigs. The doctor wanted to settle with him but the man was so outraged by it, he wouldn't settle. And the doctor wouldn't give him the amount he wanted. So it came to court. They couldn't agree. This farmer was kind of an oddball among the farmers in the area. For example, he raised goats. Nobody raised goats in Kensett. Nobody raised goats. And he gave all the neighbor farmers trouble. Well, it seemed like that was the general gossip that I overheard. See, I delivered groceries for many a year, and as I was delivering groceries, some of the people on the farms down there, anywhere from two to three to four miles away, many times they'd get to talking about Dr. Harrison killing this guy, you see. And the thing about it was, the goats survived. And some of the farmers, they went into the goat business.

It was a well publicized incident that happened. This was a Justice of the Peace trial. Daddy was not the Justice of the Peace; he wasn't even the Mayor at that particular time. But the trials were held in his office and the Justice of the Peace occupied my Daddy's chair at the desk. And there were two chairs, where the defendant and the plaintiff would sit.

Dr. Harrison was a well known man in town. The women just loved him. So did my father. He helped bring Dr. Harrison out of Kansas City. He had his office out at Donafan. He was mainly the doctor for the mill, the Donafan Lumber Company. Due to the owners of the mill, Daddy and a few influential people got the first doctor to come and set up practice in Kensett. Dr. Harrison did several successful surgeries on my mother, which was rare for the time. Women died back then, but he saved my mother. So everyone talked about how wonderful Dr. Harrison was. He was a young surgeon as well as doctor. So he was well-liked by all the people in Donafan, Kensett, Searcy, all around. He was the first to have an automobile, a Maxwell. He rented horses from Daddy. I would do a lot of errands for him.

Later on, he set up a temporary office in the hotel, on the second floor. He brought in another doctor and gave him that office in our hotel, and he moved down the street and had an office there. So the two of them had offices in Kensett. Threlkeld was his name. He was crazy about my Daddy and Mother. Eventually Dr. Harrison moved over to Searcy and then he built the first hospital in Searcy. He brought in the doctor that Fern later married and they were partners together in this hospital. Eventually, Dr. Harrison retired. Well, the trial was under way, proceeding in the proper manner. Somewhere in the middle of the trial, the farmer disagreed. Some way word had gotten around town that he was going to kill Dr. Harrison. He had made threats. The farmer came to town in his overalls, with a pistol underneath the bib. And the doctor came to court with a pistol too. The farmer got up out of his chair and turned to Dr. Harrison and pulled the gun out. I was just a kid, sitting up there on the feed sacks. All I remember was "bang, bang." Of course, the story was retold many times. But as the guy was pulling out his gun, Dr. Harrison beat him to the draw. Dr. Harrison put a shot right through his head. Killed him - bang - just like that.

It was self-defense, but they had to go to trial. They had to put Dr. Harrison in jail overnight in Searcy. Oh, White County just raised hell. Putting Dr. Harrison in jail, self-defense - oh, the men and women just raised hell. They threatened to go over and break him out of jail.

Dr. Harrison wound up being one the best surgeons in the entire southwest. He later became one of the chief surgeons for Missouri Pacific Railroad Lines, which was a big job in Little Rock. Then during the war, WWI, he went into the Army as a doctor. They laid out the farmer in our dining room. They put two chairs together and put a plank on top and laid him out there. They put nickels on his eyes. And I took one of the nickels off his eyes, and the maid said, "Miz Fondren, that boy is getting nickels off that dead man's eyes!" That was a story that was told quite a bit in town.

One more story.

We children were whipped from time to time. Mother would whip the girls. Daddy would whip the boys. My daddy would take me out to the barn or the shed. I guess by that time we no longer had the horses back there. One time I got a severe whipping from my Daddy. I can't remember what I did, but I had done something awful. Well, I broke loose from him out through that latch-type door and out across the lot. I was running away from my Daddy. We had two fences, and they were blind fences. The first fence was about four or five feet in height. The second fence was over toward the street and it was maybe six feet high. This was an area where we would let the horses and cows graze. Well, I'm running and I'm at the top of the fence. My daddy grabbed me by the seat of my pants and pulled me back.

He was out of breath. "You thought you could get away!" He pulled me down to the ground. Of course I was crying like a baby. He let me cry it out. I got up and he took me back to the big house, to the back porch and washed my face. We always kept a washbowl and fresh water out on the back porch. Dried me off.

"Go to bed. From now on, you be a good boy." And I was too. [Laughter]. For awhile.

Well, there came a time when I thought I was being mistreated. I got tired of my mother and daddy switching and whipping me. I felt my Daddy didn't love me, my mother didn't love me, my sisters didn't love me, nobody loved me. Trying to get attention from mother and daddy, squabbling with my sisters. Blevins was nine years younger, and maybe I resented the baby brother being coddled. [Laughter] Of course they loved me, but I didn't think so at the time.

I decided I was going to run away from home.

It was after some event when I got a terrific switching for doing something. I don't know what. Well, I'd been catching freight trains and be gone for several hours. Then catch another freight train coming back. We boys used to catch freight trains riding between towns. It was four miles to the south to Higginson and it was ten miles to the other water station at Bald Knob. We would catch the freight train and go up and bum around with the hobos and so forth. That's where the hobos hung out, at the water and coaling station. Every so often, you see, locomotives had to take on coal as well as water. The water stations were closer together; the coaling stations were fifty to a hundred miles apart. Some of the trains stopped at these water towers, and that was how you could get off. You couldn't get off when they kept going twenty or thirty miles an hour.

So catching trains was a great adventure. We'd hop it like a trainman would. They had stirrups on every brake car at each of the four corners of the car, and a steel ladder that you could climb to go to the top of the boxcar. Most of the time we would catch a coal car or a flat car. The coal cars were like open bins. We could climb up and get down in there. There were steel walls around the car and no roof on it, and that's the one we would usually pick out to climb up and get down inside. We could hide in there.

I think that's what I had gotten a whipping about.

Well, I put together a plan. I was really going to run away. I was going to be a hobo. I knew what time the trains came through town and all that. The freight trains usually slowed at the crossing at the depot in town. The main trains, passenger trains, coming through Kensett at seventy, eighty, miles an hour - they would only slow down to about fifty. But what I was after was to catch one of the freight trains. I knew all about the schedules. I'd been going to the depot getting freight as a kid, driving Old Diltz.

Well, I had it all planned. I knew I was going to Little Rock first, but after that I wasn't sure.

I had to get down to the station at about two o'clock in the morning.

I guess I had been acting surly after that time my Daddy caught me by the seat of the pants. And on that particular night, as Mother tells the story, I wasn't laughing and joking like I normally did with my sisters. I wasn't being my sweet self. They didn't say anything, but I guess they could tell by the way I was acting that something was wrong. Years later, my mother would bring up the story. She said, "We figured Price was up to something."

Daddy visualized what I might do. He did.

In the big house, that wonderful home we had, my bedroom was upstairs. I don't know how old I was at the time. I wasn't wearing long pants yet. I was wearing knickers. That was quite the style then for young boys. When you got to be a man, you put on long pants. Of course, we wore overalls a great deal. We didn't have what you call blue jeans back then. But when we wanted to get comfortable, we boys wore overalls. We could get on a clean pair of overalls and go out to dinner, which meant one of your playmates asked you over to their house for supper. It wasn't anything like going out to dinner now.

Well, that night, I went upstairs to my room and turned out the light and waited for things to settle down. I waited for everyone to go to bed and the house to get quiet. I already had my little belongings packed in a pillowcase. Somewhere in the wee hours of the morning, I dressed quietly. I doubled dressed - I had two changes of clothing on my body.

I very silently came down the stairs. We had a big central stairway and I knew all the tricks about coming in late at night with my shoes off. I was going to go down and out through the kitchen and out the back porch and escape. I got down to the first landing and thought, "I've got it made." Well, when I was coming down the lower set of steps, my Daddy's bedroom door opened. Their bedroom was just a few feet from the bottom of the stairs. I looked up and here is my big, tall daddy.

"What are you up to, boy? What's that you got over your shoulder?"

I didn't answer him.

He said, "Come on down here." I came down to the bottom step, and he said, "Now tell the truth. I can see what you're going to do." I didn't answer him. I just had a stubborn look on my face.

"I think you're going to run away."

More silence from me.

He took the sack off my shoulder and took me by the arm and marched me back upstairs. He sat me down on my bed and said, "Now let's talk this over a little bit. Tell me why you are running away from home."

Well, I blubbered out what I had on my mind and so forth. He listened. He asked some more questions about where I was going and what I was going to do.

I said, "I'm gonna catch that freight coming through. Then I'm gonna make my way down to Little Rock." I didn't have any money, but I had some food in that sack.

Well, he kept asking me questions, and the more he did, the more I told him.

I finally said, "Daddy, you've been punishing me too much! Every time I turn around, I have to do something. You always keep me working. You keep me doing this, you keep me doing that!" By that time I'm crying.

He put his big arm around me and said, "Son, it's alright. I didn't realize you're growing up as a man. You're getting to be a young man, and I didn't realize it. I didn't know your thoughts."

I didn't say it, but I was thinking, "That's the trouble!" We didn't tell each other too much. I never did voice my feelings to my Daddy. This was the first time he ever talked to me man-to-man. Very gentle-like, he talked to me as a father. He had me crying and sobbing. He pulled out his big handkerchief and gave it to me. As it wound up, I hugged him and he hugged me. And my Daddy never switched me again. That was it. And that was when he realized I was growing into a young man.

From then on I loved my Daddy.

Our relationship was wonderful from then on. See, I had begun to hate my father. Of course, many other young kids back in those days were going through somewhat the same problem. Back in those days, people were whipping the hell out of their children when they did something wrong. But my boyhood friends weren't working all the time like I was. I was working all the time - store, yard, groceries, horses, mules, cows, dairy, pigs, cutting the wood, bringing it into the house. Of course, my Daddy hired blacks to do most of the work, but I'm doing some of it. Always in the house my mother had a maid, every day, who did the washing and ironing and cooking and helping my mother do washing, ironing and cooking. In the stores, the stables and on the farms, Daddy had hired help, white or black. But I always had to go in and help them do things, you see.

He used to call me "boy." From then on he called me Price.

Another time, Bill Dickey and I ran away and caught a train down to Little Rock and we worked for the circus. Carried pails of water to the elephants, helped drive the pegs to put up the tents. And we got a free pass to watch the evening show. They had matinees and evening shows, and we were working during the matinee.

At the evening show, Bill and I were sitting there, enjoying the circus. My Mother and Daddy had come to the circus, and I guess maybe the girls were with them. And they were seated above. And all of a sudden, here comes my Daddy, "What are you boys doing here? We were worried to death about you!" Boy, did we get the lecture of our life.

I didn't get a whipping though. I don't know what Bill's daddy did. John Dickey. He was big, strong man.

My mother's step-mother had a sister that lived in Searcy, and she never did marry. And her brother, after his marriage, came and they both lived together. He was hired by my Grandfather Blevins. He was a Donaghey. He later moved to California. Well, anytime I wanted to hear stories about my grandfather and step-grandmother, I'd go see Uncle Nunk. I don't remember his real name, but everybody in Searcy called him Nunk. Nunk was known quite a bit. He drove the stage line in the early days from Heber Springs to Searcy. It was about forty or fifty miles between Searcy and Heber. Pangburn was the town where my Grandfather Blevins had stables. He had stables in Heber. That's about a far as he went with his stables. Another stage line took off from Heber and went on to Missouri. This was before the railroad was built. Freight, mail, passengers. They had the stage coach and then later on the surrey type. It was more open, but you had curtains that you could drop down. They would roll up and you could snap them, and during bad weather you could roll them down and snap them down. There was something call Isinglass, a plastic type of material that you could see out of. It wasn't very transparent though. Even automobiles had Isinglass curtains, before they started putting glass in them. At first there was no windshield, in the first automobiles.

I had another uncle Donaghey who was in the construction business down in Little Rock. He was a builder and he became quite prosperous. He built quite a bit of the famous Hendrix College. Hendrix was a Methodist college. Galloway was a Methodist college, meaning endowed by the Methodist Church. But Hendrix was the leading college for men and Galloway was the leading one for the women. My uncle Donaghey in Little Rock built the first major buildings at Hendrix College. In the beginning it just small frame buildings, then they rebuilt the entire campus, more or less. Donaghey got the contract and he built quite a few of the buildings and classrooms and the dormitories, his construction company did. That's were he first made his big money. Later on, he got into the banking business and then bought some farms. Back in those days when people got some money, they put it into a "good-paying farm."

He gave most of his money away. He returned a lot of his money to Hendrix in the form of an endowment program.

He built a modern office building, the biggest and best office building in Little Rock. That's when I was down in Little Rock. It was a nine-story building, strictly an office building, real plush-like for back in those days. Good electricity, good plumbing, good wiring, modern elevators. Some of the buildings in Little Rock had the old style of elevator but this was modern all the way. That would have been in 1922.

A few times Mother and Daddy would go down and have dinner with the Donaghey's. They had a palatial home in Little Rock. You know the first thing people did if they became rich, was they wanted to build a palatial home for the wife and the children. It seems that was part of our history.

I had never met the man. Daddy would say, during the time I was at the University of Arkansas, "Why don't you go down and talk to Donaghey. Maybe when you get out of school, he could find a job for you." This was during the Depression. But I never did, I never met Donaghey. I never knew him personally although I grew up knowing quite a bit about him.

But I met a good friend of his one time, when I was with the Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg. We had a big job and we were quartered out on the river near McGee, Arkansas. I got pretty well acquainted with the business people in McGee, purchasing supplies and repairing the automobiles. Sometimes we worked up and down the river by automobile, sometime we were up and down the river by boat. I was in charge of the whole outfit and usually I went into town with the steward who was responsible for the meals and such.

This man was quite a friend of Donaghey, and he owned a dealership in McGee. He was a great friend of Donaghey's. He told me, "Oh, he'd come down and we go on deer hunts. We don't call them bear hunts anymore. We don't do much killin', but we go through the motions. He's getting pretty old now, but he's a wonderful man." And after I told him of my connection, he said, "You mean to say you never met the man?"

I said, "Well, my mother and father have of course, but I've never met him."

He said, "Well, he's due to come down in a few weeks, so you keep in touch with me. I'll let you know when he comes down. And I'm sure he'll want to see you. He'd be proud to know about you."

This man didn't know my Daddy but he knew some of the men Daddy used to go deer hunting and bear hunting with down to McGee. There's a dismal kind of swamp area down there where they used to hunting, but McGee was the jumping off point.

Well, guess what? Well, the next time I was in town I went to see this fellow. He said, "Well, I'm glad to see you. I was going to call you." Donaghey had died. Before I had a chance to meet this important man, he up and died on me. The Donaghey's were wonderful people.

I went down to Little Rock for my senior year of high school. I had finished my junior year in Searcy, and had talked my mother and daddy into letting me go to down to live with Lorene and Dean Pittman and go to Little Rock High School to play football. The year before that, they had won the national championship. They had a well know player named Douglas Wycoff, who was the fullback on the team. I made the team as a halfback. I was better as a blocker. I was good as a blocker. Douglas Wycoff went on to Georgia Tech and he made history in the southeast conference. I saw Douglas Wycoff a few times down in Little Rock, after he went to work there. Later on he became a wrassler. He was a big man.

When I first got to Little Rock, I had to go get vaccinated. I had come down before school opened so I could get adjusted to Little Rock and help out. Both Lorene and Dean were working so I sort of baby-sat for Betty Dean, who was still a baby then. Little Rock had two weeks of football practice before school opened. I had made the football team. But I hadn't been vaccinated. They gave typhoid shots back then and small pox was a main killer. But I'd already had a bad case of small pox, a terrible case. I survived. [Laughter]. So the deal was just go ahead and get the shot. The shot didn't take, see, but I had to go through the motions. So Coach Quigley was a great friend of the doctor named Smith who was on the top floor of this building, the Donaghey building. Coach insisted we run up the steps. And I'm huffing and puffing and he's not. That's why I remember that building so well, because the coach made me run up those steps. Coach said, "I thought you were in shape. You tell about what all your daddy did up in Kensett up there and all you've been doing. You look in good shape, but you certainly got winded, didn't you?"

So we see the doctor. And of course he knew Dr. Harrison. I had mentioned the name Fondren, and Dr. Smith knew all about my Daddy. He knew Kensett real well. He said, "Oh that's where you came from, that bad railroad town there in Kensett, Arkansas?" And of course, I come up grinning.

Donaghey, before he died, willed the entire building and adjacent property over to a board that founded the first community college in Little Rock.

When I registered for school, I had given the wrong name, address and telephone of where I was staying with my sister Lorene. I don't know why I did that. But I did. I guess I was afraid I was going to be kicked out. But it was a while before they found out what happened to me, that I flunked out. I went to work on construction of a bridge.

Dean had a good job as a wire chief with AT&T. They rebuilt the telephone system in Little Rock, modernized it. Lorene worked at Aetna Life Insurance Company. They had a maid, a girl that would come in and take care of the baby most of the time while they were both working. Well, she wasn't really a baby. I guess she was about two years old at that time.

See, they would take me to the high school. And I had my books. So they would let me out on the edge of the campus, the grounds of the high school, and when they would pull off, I would head on down to the YMCA about 3 or 4 blocks to the north and change my clothes at the YMCA. I had a locker there, you see. I'd get into my work clothes and head for the bridge. You had to be there at eight o'clock and most of the time, I was let out on the grounds about 7:15. Sometimes I was late, and I'd run practically the whole way.

I guess that lasted about two weeks. See, I had already played 2 games. When the first round of examinations came up in, I didn't do so well. We used the quarter system, and if you went out a quarter, you couldn't go back until the next quarter. I had played in the first two games of the season. We won both games.

[How did you travel to high school football games?] Well, from Searcy we would either take cars - sometimes we'd take the train. When we played Helena, Arkansas, on the river, we would take the DK&S to Helena, which terminated at Helena on the river. And another place was Wynne, because it was easy to get to Wynne, because they had trains about every hour on the Pacific line.

And of course when I was at the University of Arkansas, we played Plainfield in Texas, in football. In baseball, we traveled in station wagons. [See more about the 1927 Razorback foot team]

[You played baseball too at the University?] I was captain of the last team, before they quit playing baseball. The next year, they stopped playing because it was too competitive. These Texas teams, they had the weather, and we had trouble beating them. The University needed the money, so they decided to stop baseball. It was taking too much time away from the athletes, not getting a degree. And of course, a lot of the guys went out for track after they stopped baseball.

I had to go an extra year, because of many things, but I had to go an extra year before I got my degree. I skipped a lot of classes. English, Economics. I never did like Economics. I had trouble with Physics. I hadn't had a very good high school education. Well, back to my senior year in Little Rock. They finally got Lorene's number. And I came home with my books. I had come by street car. It took quite awhile, about thirty minutes. If I was downtown, I would quit early enough to get across the river, walk across the suspension bridge and up to the YMCA, then catch a streetcar on Main and go south then make my way home. If I got home in time, I was doing alright. And I'd show up with my books, and I was able to fool them. They didn't pay me too much attention. They didn't worry about me.

Well, anyhow, Lorene was up in arms when I walked in the door. She grabbed me and shook me. "You've been lying and lying and lying. I got a call from school that you haven't been there. Where have you been? What had you been doing all that time?" She couldn't believe it. I told her the truth and she still couldn't believe that's what I did. She thought I had been down knocking around with my uncle. My mother's brother had a tax business in Little Rock too. But I had been going down to the Free Agents and working as a helper, I guess you could say. You'd sign in and sign out any time you wanted to. They had a storage yard where the bridge was being built on the north side of the Arkansas River. I'd help out in the storage yard, hand out materials like reinforcing rods, steel beams, all the material they had to use in building the bridge. It was a concrete reinforced, arched-type bridge. The first arched bridge to put across the river. Still there today. Broadway Bridge. It's been restored and is still there.

They paid me by the hour. Cash. So Lorene said, "I'm taking you home right now. We're going to catch the next train and go home." I said, "No, you're not either. No, you're not."

"Well, what are you going to do about it?"

I said, "I'm packing my little old suitcase right now and I'm heading to catch the streetcar to the train and I'm going home myself. I'm going. You stay here. I'm a big enough boy and you can't boss me around anymore. I'm going home and face the music and tell the truth."

I was worried about my Daddy, you know. He was so proud that I had made the team. We would talk by telephone. By that time we had telephones in the businesses and in the homes.

Well, the trains ran often so I got home before dark. Daddy said, "What are you doing home? It's the middle of the week. Why aren't you in school?"

I told him the truth. My mother had a fit. She finally put her arms around me and forgave me. See, Mother and Daddy wanted all of us to get all of the education we could possibly get because they were both denied that, you see. Mother was fortunate enough to go to a high school in Searcy known as the Academy. She was born in 1880, and Granddaddy had enough money to get her into the academy. Granddaddy didn't have much education, neither did my Daddy. My Daddy had gone through sixth grade, I think. That was during the time when you didn't have to go to school. A lot of the people were needed to work on the farm. The schools would open in late September as a rule, after the harvest was made. Sometimes some of the children were needed on the farm, and they were let out of school before it was closed for the summer period.

So I went back to Searcy. My daddy worked the hell out of me until school opened up. See this was still the first quarter. My mother said, "I guess we can get you back into Searcy." But my Daddy was against it. "I don't want Price to enter mid-year." Maybe they wouldn't let you, I can't recall. But I know I didn't go back to Searcy High School until the following September, after a year had passed.

And my Daddy worked the hell out of me. He gave me authority for a lot of things that he had never turned over to me before. Right in town at first. Then out on the farm. He needed someone to take over the farms, somebody he could rely on. So I was his man. I took care of the farms. See, he had sharecroppers. He never did call them sharecroppers, but that's what they actually were. They lived on the farm, they helped run the farm, plant and harvest the crops and all that, and they would get one-half of the proceeds of the farm income. They got so much a month from Daddy too, that was part being responsible. It was usually one family per farm. On this one farm, we had three houses and there were three families living there. It was a big farm, down in the rich agricultural land. The other farms were not too prosperous. One was toward Little Rock.

Daddy had already sold my Grandfather Fondren's original farm, a hundred and sixty acres. We used to store dynamite out there on that farm. One time I got a hold of some dynamite caps, tested them out, set off some dynamite. I got a whipping for that. It was locked up, removed from the house, quite a distance. I always wondered what was in that damned house and they never would tell me. And I jiggled the lock and found all these boxes of dynamite. And on the shelf, there were dynamite caps. That was what they put in the fuse of the dynamite, it slips in over the fuse of the dynamite and then the cord burns and when it hits this dynamite cap, it sets off the black powder and that has a little fuse that goes in the dynamite, and that's when it sets off the dynamite.

Well, I learned a lesson there. I took some up to the blacksmith shop on the farm. I took a couple of them up there, see what the hell these would do. I had heard about dynamite caps, but I didn't know what they looked like, I had never seen one. The tenants were out plowing, and I took them off the shelf and took a long handled hammer and wham! I guess I knew enough to be cautious. We stocked shotgun shells, bullets, pistol cartridges and so forth. As a kid, we used to get shotgun shells, take them apart and put the black powder in a tin can, and get a kitchen match and set it on fire. And right quick, boom! We didn't do that too often after we got a whipping. But Daddy owned the store that had plenty of shotgun shells.

Kids would go out to the edge of town, down towards the swimming hole, down where the hobos lived, and we'd do stuff like that. We played there. I got hit with an arrow above my eye. There were these cane thickets, what we called cane, something like bamboo, and we'd take the young part of the cane and taper it on one end with a knife, then put bird feathers on the other end and shoot them with our homemade bows. We usually had enough sense not to shoot at somebody. Sometimes we took sticks with a wadding of cloth on it - that was our tomahawk, see. Hit each other on the head. Oh, man, we really had battles. We had a creek, you see, one group would be one tribe on one side, and we'd put on a pretty good Indian battle. We didn't have movies about it at that time, but we had pictures in magazines and books about Indian warfare, drawn by artists and all that. We played Indian warfare. Sometimes, we'd wear a feather. See, there were plenty of birds, and doves and crows and blackbirds. It wasn't any problem to pick up feathers. We'd have different colored feathers, to identify which group we were in. It was quite a deal. We had a good time.

If we had a war, the loser would have to roast the potatoes. Or corn. We do a fire and roast the potatoes without them being peeled. Roasted potato. Light the fire, make a bed of coals. Sometimes I'd swipe some oranges and some apples out of the store, or some grapes. That wasn't any problem. We did as kids do. We did that off and on for several years as I was growing up. I guess I was somewhere between 6 and 10.

We knew how to make a fire without setting the woods on fire. We were taught by all our parents how to not set the woods on fire. Even in town sometimes the weeds and the sage would grow up pretty high in town, and we'd have a pretty good-sized brush fire in town. Sometimes the houses would burn down because the property owners let the weeds and such grow too close to the house and all of a sudden something would set it on fire. Sometimes lightning would set it on fire, or someone would throw a cigar or cigarette and set it on fire. At the time we were playing Indian, we were out of school so it was summer. We had to burn off that energy some way or another. And of course our swimming hole was on down the creek where the water was deeper. And we'd go swimming too down there. Black Creek. Black Creek formed the town of Kensett, came down and formed a gulley between the main street and the railroad track - meandered all over. It came through a piece of farm property where the owner of the farm let the kids play down there a lot. Farmer name of Watkins. Daddy hired the Watkins boys in the store as a clerk. Anyhow, this creek ran through his property. It wasn't too deep. We could chase crawfish. We'd catch crawfish and boil them and eat them. They tasted almost like shrimp. The big ones were good; we didn't mess around with the little ones. One kind was more colorful and the other didn't have too much color. He didn't taste so good. We'd strip off the head and leave the tail. Salt and pepper and some bread. That was mainly on the Watkins farm that we did that. The mother would let we boys go out and let us build a fire out there in the pastureland.

We could mess around down there in the creek, and when the water was clear we could catch a crawfish. The crawfish would build a nest in the ground, sort of cone shaped, wider at the bottom and narrow at the top. We had a lot of fun chasing the crawfish out of his hole. Put our hand over the hole, and talk to the crawfish, "Come on out of there, crawfish." We had a way that somehow or another the crawfish would come out. He'd see us and go back in the hole. A crawfish is pretty quick.

We did a lot of studying in this particular room, when we weren't in class. This was in Searcy, the last two grades. All kinds of tables around, and dictionaries and reference materials. I can't think of the name for it - it was a place we studied when we weren't in class. It had a stage in the background, a small stage for skits and public speaking. I didn't study public speaking. I should have. Wilbur Mills did. Elmo Taylor did too.

Do you remember the photograph where I have roller skates on? I'm down on the lower part of the steps. That was the high school one block from my home, across the railroad tracks. Elmo Taylor is standing up on the steps and he had on one of these celluloid collars and a tie. That was quite unusual, you see. I forgot who the other two guys were on the side of him, but all three of those guys went on to real remarkable careers. Elmo was on of three brothers, the Taylor brothers, and they all three stayed in our home at one time. The girls had gone away to college or somewhere, and Mother rented out the rooms. Well, Elmo and I were the same age. Basketball and football.

Elmo and Wilbur Mills both took public speaking in Kensett. We had a debating society. I joined for awhile, but I got out of that. I made a fool of myself, so I said no more public speaking for me! They would hold these debates about once a month and they'd have to get up on the stage. We had a little stage in Kensett after they built the big school. The school in Kensett was grades one through ten. We had two schools eventually as the town grew a little bit - I think Kensett reached 3,500 at one time. That's when all the mills were going and prosperous, both railroads were running. Daddy had all these prosperous businesses and so forth.

Elmo and Wilbur Mills, well, that's where they got their first training about public speaking and debating. They had to prepare for these debates. They were over issues our country was facing at that time, you see. That's where these two guys got their start. Elmo, after he finished at Searcy, went on to Vanderbilt in Tennessee. That's where his brother had gone. He got his law degree there. Wilbur's first position was county judge of White County. It was an elected position. He got his law degree at Harvard. He got his BS degree at Hendrix, then went on to Harvard.

Elmo reached the position of Circuit Court Judge.

When we were in Searcy, we had one hour for lunch, although we called it dinner. Supper was the evening meal. Sometimes we would skip school, go beyond our lunch break - by the way, Elmo's brother at that time was principal - and we would go to the court house and sit there in the audience and watch all these court trials. Murder trials, divorce trials. I learned a lot about law, in a practical way, what got you arrested and so forth. Of course I was subjected to that with the Justice of the Peace and court trials at my Daddy's office. And see, all these United States senators and legislators would come through my Daddy's business and I'd listen to them talk. And they would light up a cigar. Good thing I cleaned out those spittoons on the floor! It was common in those days. Plug tobacco would come in cakes in a real sturdy box, about knee high. We'd fill the empty boxes with sawdust and put them around the store. The customers could spit when they wanted to spit, in these "spit boxes." The other kind was a spittoon, a brass thing. I hated those things. Those boxes you could take outside and dump 'em, you see, wash them off, let them dry and bring them back in. We had a stack of them out there. That was the custom in those days, at least in our businesses. The health department finally passed a law about spitting. They didn't say you couldn't have a spittoon but mainly about spitting on the sidewalk. You couldn't spit in public. Later on they did away with all of that stuff and did away with spittoons around in businesses.

Anyway, I started out to mainly say that some of these people in Kensett, Arkansas went on to well-known careers. Especially the Taylor brothers. The oldest one became a teacher, first in Kensett, then in Searcy, then he went to Little Rock school system, and then he went back to Vanderbilt and became a professor at Vanderbilt. The second one was a good basketball player and he was our basketball coach, and then he became principal at Searcy for some time. He took his teacher training at Conway. They had three colleges over there in Conway, 30 miles up the river from Little Rock, 50 miles from Searcy and Kensett. I took Ron through Conway on our trip back to Arkansas. We drove through the Hendrix grounds and saw the stadium I helped dedicate. I was there when they dedicated that stadium.

Well, eventually, he became President of the National Teachers Association and he moved his family to Arlington. I went over and visited him one time. Not too long after that he died. He was a wonderful man. And he lived next door to Mother and Daddy when they were living in Searcy in the Market Street house. The Taylor's lived next door.

At that time, Daddy was still in the wholesale grocery business, Milburn and Johnston. It had moved to Searcy. Wilbur's wife, Polly, was part owner of this wholesale grocery firm. Daddy and her father were the salesmen. They were the ones that went out and beat the bushes and got the business. Daddy had done away with all of his businesses except that one. He was part owner of it. Jack Buyer was the bookkeeper, the accountant for Milburn and Johnston.

In my day, throughout the country, the manufacturers didn't sell directly to the retail firms. They would sell to a jobber, or broker, who had huge storage places. They would buy the commodities from the manufacturer and store them and resell to the wholesale people. Then the wholesale people would sell directly to the retail people. It would go through about four different stages before it came to the customer, in those days. I don't know, maybe they still do.

My Daddy's main business was the retail business, you see - shoes, custom-made clothes, dresses, dry goods. We'd buy dry goods out of Little Rock or Memphis or St. Louis. They'd come in huge boxes, heavy boxes. When I was a young boy, I'd help take the material out of the boxes and put them on the shelves. Canned goods would come in cartons. Some of the stuff would come in wooden boxes, crates. I think it was sometime around the 20's that they started making boxes out of pulp wood. So that was a tremendous thing in merchandising. At Milburn and Johnston in Kensett, we had cattle feed, sacks of corn, sacks of wheat, sacks of cornmeal, sacks of flour, sacks of oats, sacks of bran, candy, cigarettes, tobacco. This was the wholesale business Daddy had after we closed out practically all of our retail businesses, you see. After Blevins and I left home, Daddy started selling off all his retail businesses and some of the rental property too. And he whittled it down to mainly that one building there in Kensett, and it wasn't completely stocked with goods, just a minimum amount of goods. Canned goods, a few meats, cheese, salt pork. That was at Fondren Mercantile. And of course they sold feed, cattle feed. Farmers were still buying feed, even though they had a minimum amount of cows, just milk cows, and some hogs they would butcher. We would get all these supplies, buy them from the jobbers or the manufacturers or from the producer, in case lots. Everything would come in by box car, and we had trucks by that time, instead of horse-drawn wagons. It was a big business. From Kensett, we could go in many directions and distribute these wholesale products to these retail stores. Later on, we would ship some of it out up in the Ozarks by railroad. We'd load stuff in a boxcar and ship it to various towns along the railroad, on the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad, the MNA. The DK&S had connections with the Missouri and North Arkansas, and they would switch over at Searcy. They would come in right in front of our house, turn around and go to Donafan, which was about a mile away. They were long trains with flat, open railroad cars and steam locomotives.

When they built the Missouri and North Arkansas around 1900 or so, it was along my Grandfather Blevins' stagecoach route, you see. He went as far as Heber, and then other stage lines took it on from there to go up into Kansas, and Missouri and the north part of Oklahoma. Oklahoma adjoins most of the western border of Arkansas. Up at the top there's a little bit of Kansas, and then the southern part, a little bit of Texas down there, Texarkana and so forth.

Well that's where they would cut timber and bring it in to the railhead, and they would load it on to these railroad flatcars. The people that cut the timber would bring it in by mule or log wagon, unload it there. They had a way to mark the logs so they would know who owned the logs. The mill agents would have the logs shipped into Donafan, where the mill was. There were two big mills there, and they had a place where they would bring in the logs and dump them into the mill pond. That's where they would store the logs before they would cut them into lumber. It was a lake, sometimes a river, a place to store the logs. You've seen finished lumber in lumber yards - see how neat they look and all that? They rough cut it out of the log then they have huge planes to dress the lumber into standard sizes, then ship it out by boxcar. It was very interesting to a boy like me.

So the DK&S was an important railroad. And it was picked up by the Missouri Pacific Railroad. The railroad played a big part in the history of our country.

The stage coach would go where there were no railroads. That's what you had to use to get goods and people from places where there were no railroads. They didn't have stagecoaches everywhere. The stage lines had to be where people wanted to get to but there wasn't any other way to get there. When people would move away to the Ozarks or to Little Rock or gone to Texas or gone to Chicago, and they came back to visit home, they didn't have their horses, so there was no other way except to hire horses or take the stage. The stages would only hold about 6 to 8 people.

We didn't have automobiles then. You had to take a horse or hire a horse and a buggy. A person would perhaps keep the horse and buggy a week or so, then come back and catch the train to go back to where they live. So that's the reason why the livery business was a pretty good-paying business. My Daddy and Grandfather both were in the livery business. My daddy's territory was mainly to the bottom country, to the south and east of the railroads. He'd rent to people in town, too. Sundays were big days. Say you had a sweetheart and you want to take her out for a ride, to maybe kiss and hug, you'd hire a horse and buggy from my Daddy and go out in the rural areas or wherever you wanted to go. Or someone might want to dress up and take his sweetie-pie to church in a horse and buggy. Then after church, they'd drive around a little bit.

Yes, Sunday was a big-paying business as I recall. If you wanted to put on the dog, so to speak, and act like you were real prosperous, you would hire a two-horse surrey, driven by two horses. And it was a double-seater. You could carry four easily. If you wanted a crowd, you could carry six in the surrey. The body of the surrey was made by Fisher Body Company. It was a carriage, well-made. That was a big industry up north. The surrey had a top on it you could fold over. Most surreys had a fixed top. Buggies had a top you could fold back, sort of like a convertible top on a car. You could fold the top on a buggy back and have it open all the way. The top had a plastic type of material for the window part that was called Isinglass. That was the forerunner of plastics.

There was an event that involved my Daddy and saving the lives of horses.

The livery business was a very important business back in those days. In the town of Kensett at that time, we had two livery businesses, one owned by my father and the other owned by a competitor. They were friends and all that, but still they tried to outdo each other: "My horses are better than your horses. My horses can go fifteen miles to such and such stretch and yours can't." Things like that. Booth and Bob Davidson owned the other livery business, which was located across the tracks, closer to the railroad station, in fact, where we built Milburn and Johnston, the wholesale warehouse and offices. Back then, passenger trains were met by one of the livery firms, with a buggy and a horse. Sort of like taxicabs now at an airport.

So they were competitors in the livery business. My Daddy had more horses and a bigger layout than the Davidson's did.

Bob Davidson married my sweetheart schoolteacher. She was a beautiful woman. She was our teacher from the first grade to the fourth grade and we just loved her. And she was a good teacher too. Anyhow, Bob was more tolerant than Booth. Booth was...well, he could be a bad man. All men had guns in those days - and some women did too. Daddy sold shotguns and rifles and pistols. Well, it never did come down to a pistol fight between Booth and my Daddy, but they would argue a great deal. Bob was the mediator. He was a good man. I liked Bob more than I did Booth as I was growing up. Later on, when Daddy got the dealership for the Ford agency, he built a garage building and Booth rented it and became the mechanic to repair cars for Daddy. This was many years after the story I'm telling you now.

Okay, here's the story.

During the flood of the Little Red River, all the creeks and branches backed up and flooded, and quite a bit of it came into the town of Kensett, over the fields and some of the roads. The floods had peaked and the water was just beginning to recede. This salesman, or drummer, as they called him, had arrived by train and wanted to get up into the hills. He had to first go to Judsonia and then go back up in the Ozarks. We tried to talk him into not going, but he couldn't wait. So he hired a two-horse buggy and driver from the Davidson's.

Two miles out of town, there was wide creek with a bridge over it. The water was higher than the bridge because of the flooding, but the driver of the buggy thought he could make it. The bridge didn't have any guard rails and the driver, well, he missed the bridge. The buggy got lodged in the creek and the horses went in the water. As they jerked and tried to get out of their harnesses, they got over into the main stream of the water, in the downstream part of it. The horses were swimming, but still hooked to the buggy. Someone saw it up on the hill, and telephoned into town about it. Daddy took off from the stable and he was out there in nothing flat on his saddle horse. Some other men followed him out there. And I went out there too on my bicycle.

Well, the horses were still hooked to the buggy, about 150 feet from the shoreline. What were they gonna do, what were they gonna do. It was cold weather and the stream was wide and the current was strong. Well, who came up with what to do right quick? It didn't take Daddy long.

"We gotta save those horses. Build a fire," Daddy said. He knew he was going to be cold when this was over.

He stripped down to his long-johns, borrowed a knife from John Dickey and swam out. He started cutting through the thick leather of the harnesses. He cut the collar, then cut loose the hames, and he dove under and cut the belly strap of the first horse. He had to hold onto the horses, because they were kicking and trying to buck loose. And then he cut the strap that fits over the collar, and the first horse was free and he took off up the bank! Then Daddy had to get the other one. That horse was pawing and kicking. Daddy was about to give out. He had to keep swimming all that time, and he was fighting the horse and fighting the current. But he finally got the last strap cut and the horse was free. John Dickey and another man helped get Daddy back to shore. He was pooped. So Daddy was the hero who saved his competitor's horses!

We had harness shop. We called it the harness room. The harness was made of leather, and had metal hooks in it, and fixtures in the straps. The harness would get sweaty. You very seldom put it in water. Sometimes you'd take a sponge to it, one of those natural sponges. Many people used them. We sold them in the store. The sponge would get most of the sweaty part off the harness. Then you'd dress it up with saddle soap. That would keep it from mildewing. You could walk into a place where harnesses were stored and if you smelled mildew, you knew the farmer wasn't taking care of his horses or his harnesses. I remember people being critical of some people that didn't take care of their horses.

There was another part that went over the back of the horse, and a belly strap underneath. And the leather reins went to the back of the horse through the saddle, on top of the horse's back. You could get them fancy and all that, you know. They had rings in it that the leather reins went through and then to the things you wrapped around on the buggy. There was a place on the dashboard on the buggy where you tie the reins. You'd wrap them so when you got back in the buggy you could get the reins and go on.

For a two-horse buggy, you had two reins coming back to the buggy, one on the outer side of each horse. On their backs, you had a cross strap that hooked to the bridle of each horse. If the horse on the right went right, the horse on the left was pulled to the right too. The farmer's would say "hee" and "haw" to get the horses the go left and right. I don't recall saying hee and haw with a horse and buggy. We'd say "giddy-up" and "whoa".

My daddy once made me a horse buggy out of an old popcorn and peanut roasting machine we used to use in the store. It was fairly large, had four wire wheels with rubber tires. It had a boiler on it, with a little steam engine in the back. We had little paper bags for the peanuts - they were in the shell - and we had little white bags for the popcorn, and salt and pepper, and butter. There was a place on the back were you kept the butter warm. We'd cook the peanuts and popcorn in batches. They'd stay fresh for several hours. Well, so much for that.

Daddy made a delivery wagon out of this peanut roasting machine. He took all that out and used the carriage part of it for the wagon. He bought a Shetland pony to pull it, and Daddy and I trained him. His name was Dixie. I guess you could say we were the "express route." We'd use Old Diltz and the big wagon for the big deliveries, but Dixie and I were the express route. Someone would call up on the phone with an order, and they might say, "Could you get Price to bring that around before supper?" And Dixie and I would make the delivery. If somebody wanted something delivered for supper, they'd have to get their order in before 4:00, or they wouldn't have it in time to cook it for supper. Supper was usually around 6:00.

Dixie was pretty good most of the time, but he could have a mean spell. He could get hard to control. I was about the only one who could handle him. You know how a dog will come up and lick your face? Well, Dixie would lick me like that. I'd rub his nose, pet him on the head and back of the ears.

Dixie was quite a fixture as we children were growing up. I'd let the girls ride Dixie sometimes. I wouldn't turn him loose, no. I'd just hold onto him and guide him around over at the park sometimes. I remember one time some kids were up on top of Dixie and were trying to make him run. Well, Dixie had a great way of just putting out his front legs and stopping suddenly. And off they fell! He just looked down at them and shook his head and mane. [Laughter]

He was a powerful little animal too. Sometimes I couldn't control him. One time I was coming back from Donafan and there was a nice little middle of the road that was high and dry. They kept it that way for drainage. I was trying to get Dixie to stay in the middle of the road. I kept jerking on the reins. All of a sudden he got mad, I guess. He started going around and around, hooked to that buggy. And about the second time around, I'm holding on to the reins, he whirled around and bucked and jerked me off of the buggy! Then he came over and shook his head at me. Whenever he got his way, he would do like that - shake his head and make a certain little noise. Whenever he was the victor.

He was smart as he could be.

My Daddy bred horses and we had an Arabian stallion. He was a prize animal. Daddy would sometimes race him at county fairs. Well, I was never supposed to let Dixie and this Arabian stallion get together. They were enemies. Dixie didn't like that stallion. Well, one day, I let both the stallion and Dixie out together in the same lot. I wanted to see them fight. And, boy, they put on a real good fight. The stallion was bloody and Dixie was bloody. But Dixie was winning the fight - he'd get underneath the stallion and bite him, then he'd turn around and kick him.

Well, the stallion was making sort of a screaming sound and someone heard it and went over to the store to tell my Daddy about it. And boy, I got the whipping of my life. But the horses were okay. It didn't harm them much.

Daddy got that stallion out of Memphis; brought it out by train. They would ship them in cattle cars, designed to ship cattle, horses, even chickens.

Chickens became pretty popular; people were buying them, raising them, then shipping them up North. Daddy had an old garage building that he turned into a place to store chickens. People would rent space from him to store their chickens before they'd get shipped up North. This was a good size building, 80 feet long by 30 feet wide. After using it as a storage house for chickens, maybe five years or so, Daddy then turned it into a place to store the city fire truck. He was mayor, so he also built an office there too.

From chicken house to garage to mayor's office. Daddy had a way of moving with the times, adapting from one period to the next. Next to the garage building, Daddy built a 2-story building for the movie house. He bought the rights to the movie business there in town. He operated that theater for quite some time, maybe 10 or 15 years.

The films would come in by express railroad; many times I had to pick them at up the express office. They were heavy, came in tin boxes usually containing three or four reels.

I did all kinds of things in that theater. I had to build the fires; you needed two stoves going in the wintertime. I had to sweep the floors and run the projector. When the film came in, you had to rewind it onto a bigger reel. That way you only had to change reels one time during the movie, provided the film didn't break. We'd patch the film if it broke. You'd take scissors and cut off the one frame at each end, line it up with some sprockets and then patch it together with a special cement. I could patch one in less than 5 minutes. You had to be careful because it would burn if you left it near the light too long. That film in those days was really flammable.

While the film was being patched, we'd run advertising slides - the drug store, the restaurant, the cafe. We'd show them also before the movie started and then again when we had to change reels.

I'd put up the posters outside to advertise the movie. At first, we only had shows on Saturday night. Then later on, we had one in the middle of the week. Then sometimes, we'd have a matinee.

These were silent films. Merle played the piano. We also had a player piano, with rolls of music. I had a switch up in the booth so I could stop and start the player piano. Some of the bigger theaters had orchestras back then. The one in Little Rock had an orchestra. At first, we had a hand crank projector. Then later on, we bought a motorized projector, which also had a better lens. I went over to Memphis to get it. Memphis was the main distribution point for films.

When talkies came in, Daddy was thinking about changing over, but here's what happened. I had already graduated and was at the University, so Daddy had hired a young man to run the projector. One night, Daddy had gone to a football game and couldn't get back to Searcy that night. Well, I guess this young man got excited or something, because the film caught on fire. The building didn't burn down; fortunately by then we had waterworks and they were able to put it out with a hose. But the projector and most everything else burned. Daddy didn't restore the theater. That was the end of it. I think that's about right.

Did you ever hear the story about the football team getting suspended from Searcy High School?

High school teams throughout the state were invited to Conway to attend a football game and dedication of the new football stadium they had built at Hendrix College. It was the first concrete stadium built in the state of Arkansas. Hendrix was playing Centenary College from down in Louisiana. Bull McMillan was the coach at Centenary College. The president of that college became chief engineer of the Tennessee Valley Authority. I met him one time when I came up to Knoxville from Vicksburg.

Anyway, Bull McMillan had been a famous football player - a quarterback - and we boys, the Searcy High School football team, wanted to go to this game. But we didn't have permission. But we football players had gotten together and decided we were going to go anyway. Daddy let me have one of the new Ford touring cars, a four seater, as part of our transportation. Daddy didn't know we didn't have permission. We all went and saw the game. Got there early and saw them practice too.

Well, Monday morning, when we came to school, we were marched up on stage at Searcy High School and the principal announced that the football team was suspended. One week. That's the end of that story.

I had to do a little lying to do what I wanted to do. If Daddy was working down at the store, I'd say, "I'm going down to the store. I have a little work to do tonight." Then I'd sneak off to the pool hall. The store stayed open until 9 o'clock - not every night, no. Especially not on Saturday night. The stores would close on Saturday night. The farmers would come into town on Saturdays, usually in the daylight hours, but men would look forward to Saturday nights. Men that worked in the saw mills, the stave factory, the railroad - many of the railroad men lived in Kensett.

So I'd sneak down to the pool hall. I would avoid my mother; come slipping into the house. Mother didn't run a bed check on everybody, no. She had too many other things to do. At first, I couldn't figure how in the hell she knew where I'd been. And it went on a few times, and I got scolded or punished. Not a switching, but punished by having to do some chores or something I didn't want to do. But if I disobeyed, I got punished some way or other. That's the way all of us were.

And I guess about the third time, I asked her how did she know I'd been in a pool hall? And she said, "I can smell you, boy!" [Laughter] She could smell my clothes were saturated with smoke from the pool hall. Whether it was summer, winter - it didn't make any difference. Guys playing would put cigarettes on the edge of the pool table. Some smoked cigars, some smoked cigarettes. They never did put a cigar on the railing of a pool table. You had to be careful to not burn the cloth. Some people were great cigarette smokers; they couldn't do anything without that cigarette going somewhere, you know.

That's the way I got to be. People in my car pool in the latter years - usually there were five of us - they always saved room for me to sit in the back seat because I was smoking cigarettes. You know those vents in the windows they had back then? I'd open the vent. [When did you quite smoking?] There are two important dates, the year I quit smoking and the year Daddy died. Daddy died in '56, I know that. Well, the year I quit was the year Eisenhower took the oath of office, January 1953. I always liked Eisenhower. As a general, I thought the world of him. McArthur, Eisenhower, they were great generals. Black Jack Pershing, he was a first-rate, young general during the Mexican Uprising. The famous bandit, Poncho Villa, he was raiding up and down the Texas border. He would rob banks, steal horses and cattle and drive 'em back across the border, shoot up the towns. It was quite a group of bandits. So Congress decided they were gonna catch him. They put an expedition together, and Pershing was put in charge. They finally corralled him. Poncho Villa was quite a hero to the Mexicans. He distributed all the riches among the poor people.

Dr. Harrison founded the first hospital in White County, Arkansas. It was a two-story framed building, with four to six rooms downstairs, four to six rooms upstairs. That was where I had my tonsils out.

Dr. Harrison started in Kensett. Later on, he brought another doctor by the name of Rodgers. Dr. Rodgers married my childhood friend, Fern Cowan. Well, right from the beginning, notoriety started. What happened? They caught this new doctor with counterfeit money. He got in with a counterfeit ring printing the money! I don't remember whether they put him in jail or what, but Dr. Harrison and some of the other business people in Searcy and Kensett, some way or another got him out of jail and put him back in business.

So Dr. Rodgers had been put back into good graces, so to speak. He went into partnership with Dr. Harrison again. After Dr. Harrison died, Dr. Rodgers started this modern hospital on the edge of town, and he became one of the most famous doctors in Searcy. He bought one of the best homes in Searcy, got wealthy.

Well, here's the rest of the story.

Some time after Daddy died, we were in Searcy, and Fern had been over to the house with her daughter and with her mother. Pearle and my mother were there too, all together there in my grandfather's home.

The next day, I was working over in the store in Kensett, and I had come back over to Searcy to pick up something at the hardware store, which was across the street from where Fern's home was. It was one of the most beautiful homes in Searcy. Anyway, I was walking down the sidewalk not too far from Fern's home. Here I am dirty, sweaty, and stinky - and here comes Fern walking down the sidewalk toward me, and she's dirty and stinky also! And she had some canned fruit jars in each hand, and she was going down the street to take it to a neighbor's house. Well, we confronted one another, we stopped and looked at each other, and the next thing you know we were hugging and kissing! "Price, I thought you and Pearle had gone!" And we laughed and joked about how dirty and stinky we were. That was the last time I saw Fern.

Well, later on, the tragedy happened. Her husband was having an affair. And then he killed Fern. He murdered her. At the foot of the stairway, he murdered her. Of course he claimed to be innocent. He had a story already built up, that he was not guilty and that someone else killed her. This was in all the papers in the southwest. Well eventually, he was found guilty and they put him in the penitentiary. Merle was really upset; she and Fern had been very close. In fact, Fern and her husband had been down to Houston to see Merle and Wylie. Anyhow, Dr. Rodgers was convicted. They had children, they had two beautiful daughters and one son. The son was in medical school when Fern was killed as I recall. As time went on, the son became a well-respected doctor in Searcy. And he established the hospital out there, Rodgers Hospital in Searcy.

Sybil's husband was working for one of the auto dealerships in Little Rock. He had a good education and knew Portuguese and English. He was a real good fellow. But Sybil gave him a lot of trouble, in the early years of their marriage. When he was sent to Brazil, he had a job with General Motors to translate the catalogs for the various divisions of General Motors - Cadillac, Chevrolet, and Buick. He did all the translations, not only Portuguese, but some of the other countries in South America. They left there and moved to New York when he got an executive job up there.

But they divorced, and after the divorce that was when Sybil had a bad time. I don't know if she took drugs or what. She was in Kansas City for a time with my Aunt Cora. Aunt Cora was in bad health, and Sybil must have slipped into some of the drugs that my Aunt Cora was taking. That's what my mother claimed. And she got Sybil back away from Aunt Cora right quick.

I don't know what all went on. But they divorced. She came back to Arkansas for awhile. Then it was out to California. First stop was Grandpa Blevins, in Pasadena on Orange Grove Avenue. See, Lorene went first to California. She went to high school and got her diploma out there in Pasadena. Then she came back to Arkansas, got married and lived in Little Rock and so forth. The next one to go was Sybil. She stayed with Grandpa until she got a job in Los Angeles. I don't know all the details. The next one to go? Well, Blevins sent me a wire, "I need money - $150. I'm going to California." He had already been in touch with me. See he had been kicked out of school. Blevins had formed a good friendship with the son of Harvey Couch. Harvey Couch was a wealthy man in Arkansas. He formed the Arkansas Power and Electric Corporation. So Harvey Couch's son and Blevins were in the same school and the same age, and they were buddies. They were drinking in the stands at a football game at Hendrix. And knowing Blevins, he was plenty loud. And they got the attention of the faculty, and both of them were suspended. He then called me and said he was going to California. I told him to go home and tell Mother and Daddy, to face the music. I'm his older brother, nine years older. But he wouldn't do it. He wired me back, and I wired him back the money.

So he got to California, and spent some time living with Grandpa Blevins in Pasadena. [Laughter]. Lorene, Sybil and Blevins. Thank god Merle was in Houston!

I was worried about my brother Blevins. What the hell's going to happen to him? He never did get control of his drinking. He drank too much during his lifetime.

Well, it didn't take Blevins very long to get established in California. Lorene and Charlie were in Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara was known at that time as a wealthy city where a lot of people had retired, and had built wonderful homes, wonderful stores. Oh, it was wonderful city to be in. Well, Charlie had the distribution of this company. Apfel it was called, I think. Lorene and Charlie got to know some people in Santa Barbara. Charlie's company distributed to hotels, cafes, doctor's offices and supermarkets. Well, Blevins went up there first, when he left Grandpa. He worked at a supermarket for awhile, as a clerk, whatever. He got tired of that, I think he quit, and came back to Grandpa's. Then a short time after that, Lorene and Charlie moved to Long Beach.

I wasn't out in California during this time. By the time I came out to California, Blevins was with Calavo Incorporated, the fruit company. I visited him in the boarding house he was living in at that time. He had worked himself up to an important position. He met Jerry; they married in Denver. He was in charge of all the distribution of the western half of the United States. Then the war came along. Barbara was a baby when he was with Calavo in Denver. He quit Calavo, and Pop Keith-Smith talked Blevins into pursuing his education. He became a CPA, and had a very important job in wartime production in Cleveland. After the war was over, they went back to California. The Keith-Smiths lived in California. See Pop Keith-Smith was a good father-in-law to Blevins; he insisted he improve himself.

My father visited Blevins in California. Brought a ham. He had met the Keith-Smiths when he visited them in Cleveland, before they went back to California. Then Daddy came to Silver Spring, by himself, and with a ham. Then later on, he and mother came, Merle and Wylie came with Suzanne, Lorene came, Sonny came. Some of them stayed at our house, some of them stayed downtown. That was a great get-together.

[Referring to his drawing of the town of Kensett. At one time I drew a plat of my Daddy's property when I was at school. I'm drawing this more or less the way it was when I was fourteen or fifteen. See we had some fires here and there. But I drew a line here, and the best I can recall, right in that area there; my Grandfather Fondren owned that piece of property. He built a small store there of some sort. It wasn't much. And he sold it - gave it away - and they tore down the little dinky frame store and built the First Methodist Church. And this was the church when I was growing up. Then as time went along, they built another church across this street, and that's the brick church you were in for Mother's funeral.

Here, Daddy first bought a quarter of a block, then when he got more money, he bought more. The Dickey's had a quarter of a block. Then he built rent houses along here.

There was a time that they wanted me to come home and take over the businesses. Mother wanted me to come home with Pearle, said they would build a modern home for us over in Searcy. Of course, the businesses had gone down; Daddy had sold a lot of the properties. The Dickeys had moved to Little Rock, and their home was torn down The Williams home was torn down eventually too.

The hotel we owned was two-story frame, kind of L-shaped. Next to the hotel was the dry goods store, they had shoes, clothes, fabrics. That was a big business. Next to that was the hardware store.

There were two cafes - they put in a diner when I was older. They had great hamburgers.

The railroad was built in my grandfather Blevins' time. See he operated stage lines and passenger lines and freight lines and mail lines up to within 50 miles of the Ozarks.

To the north we had Judsonia, where my grandfather had his farm, and on up to Newport. There was a Five-and-Dime there that became the first store that Sam Walton bought when he was starting out.

To the south, was McRae. Daddy owned some rental property at McRae. The next town was Beebe; Daddy had some rental properties there too. He also had a 20-acre farm out from Beebe. He had a tenant out there, with horses and mules.

Well, back to Kensett. Plackert was a wealthy man in the area. He had a two-story brick building there, and the Masonic lodge was on the second floor, with a stairway in the back. They rode the billy goat up there - that's what I called it. When they initiate members, they had something like a hobby horse It had a head on it like a billy goat with whiskers on it and a little saddle on it and a tail on it. That's all I remember about the Masonic lodge, because you know the Masonic people are very secretive about these things. Daddy never did join them. They wanted Daddy to become a member. Someway or another he didn't approve of it. But so many of his good friends and business people, competitors, they were Masons. Jack Ballard of Milburn and Johnston was a Mason. Jack was trying to get my Daddy to become a Mason. I remember hearing him talk about it. Daddy said, "Jack, no way. You go on and have your fun and be secret. I don't have any secrets. I'm a Methodist."

Well, back to the billy goat. I hid the billy goat one time. I got up there - they kept the door locked, but I used a skeleton key. I had to see what was up there. They had some benches, some chairs, and a little crude table and whatnot. A meeting place. Some stories got out about how they initiated, but that's about all I ever heard about what they did. Secrets. Well, there were several closets up there, and I took the billy-goat out of one closet and put it in another closet and put some kind of blanket or rug draped over it. [Laughs] Well, nobody knew who hid the billy goat.

I eventually told Jack. See he was the main clerk at Milburn and Johnston. He had married one of Polly's sisters. They came from Northwest Arkansas, where they built the dams on the White River, Mountain Home comes to mind. Weir K. Schoonover was from Pocohontas. Weir and I were pretty good friends. I never will forget his home town.

Getting back to Plackert, I remember Daddy borrowing some money from Plackert to do some building. Plackert lived over on the other side of the tracks. He had a nice little home over there. He had money. And he had money in the bank. You could borrow money from the bank or you could borrow money directly from Plackert. Daddy borrowed a lot of money during his time. And he paid it all back. Later on he became a stockholder in the Bank of Kensett. He lost a lot of money there during the Depression, but he recovered and I think he got all his capital back. Daddy was always doing some building in Kensett. He was trying to build up Kensett, see. He was building these rental houses when no one else was building them but Daddy.

We had a lot of fires, and many of the buildings burned. Then we started brick construction. And there was another brick building that we never did rebuild. Even the bricks burned. That was when I came back from CMTC. I think one wall was saved. So eventually Daddy built adjacent to the bank. We had a common brick wall with the bank. Of course the bank was real small. We had a vault in there, a bookkeeping machine.

At first the Post Office was in here, then when this burned, they built the drug store in here, the next building. And there was the Mills property - he had two stores in here - maybe a hundred feet long. The pool hall was first built about thirty five or forty foot frontage, then later on the Mills, Roger Mills, bought twenty more feet. Here this is Mills mercantile if you want to call it. In here was a two-story and the pool hall was there. And I was in the pool hall as many times as I could, especially after dark when I'd get done with my chores.

I had made a promise to Mother and Daddy that I would not go to the pool hall - 'cause bad people hung out there. I guess I was around fourteen or so. After them dragging me out of the pool hall a few times, getting me and marching me back home, I promised them that I was not going to the pool hall anymore. Sometimes I'd get a switching, see. Mostly Mother. Well, okay, I broke my promise. I was winning. We didn't play for money, but we kept score. Man, I was really winning that night, and forgot all about the time. There were high stools along the side where the guys were smoking and chewing tobacco. There were three pool tables. I guess it was somewhere around eleven o'clock or so. I came home - came in through the spring house, came in through the back porch with my shoes off. Everything was dark. I didn't see a light on in Mother and Daddy's room, I thought everybody had gone to bed. Mother and Daddy were waiting for me. They knew were I was, I think Daddy had gone down to see. They decided to wait until I came home.

One time before when I broke my promise, Mother came down and got me. And she marched me home holding my damn ear! I mean, yanking on it too. Then I got a switching. Mother took me out on the back porch and switched me.

This last time I didn't get a switching, as I recall. But I really got a lecture.

I was a strong boy. I could lift a hundred pounds when I was a young boy. Easy. Feed came in hundred pound sacks, flour came in fifty pound sacks, oats came in a hundred and sixty pound sacks. Bran came in hundred pound sacks, corn came in hundred pound sacks, but oats were a hundred and sixty pounds. We had a big warehouse for Milburn and Johnston by the side of the railroad tracks. We'd unload feed from the boxcar and store it in the warehouse. It was wholesale. We'd sell feed retail to the retail stores. This was when I was older, when I was handling the oat sacks.

I was hired by Milburn and Johnston for sixty dollars a month during the summers between university. I made roughly $160 before I went back to school.

A keg of nails weighed maybe a hundred pounds. That was tricky to handle. A lot of stuff came in wooden kegs in those days. Nuts, bolts, galvanized staples. Milburn and Johnston bought a lot of building materials from the manufacturing people. Some products, after manufacturing, went to a jobber. And from the jobber it went to the wholesale people. And from the wholesale people it went to the retail people. The jobber would buy the product in large quantities and store it, see. He had a warehouse for storage. The manufacturer wanted to get out what he was making and give it to somebody. So the jobbers were the first to buy from the manufacturer, then he would set the price of what he would sell to the wholesale people.

Groceries came in cases. We would get a carton of canned goods from the jobber or we get a carload of nails, bolts and nuts, sheet metal roofing and so forth. So we sold that even though we were a wholesale grocery firm. Nowadays all this stuff comes into the supermarkets directly from the jobber or the producer.

We would get stuff that came in by boxcar, canned goods primarily. That was the big heavy part of the grocery business.

It was quite an operation we had there. Of course it started out in Kensett because we had the railroad. You couldn't depend on the DK & S because they charged more to take it from the Missouri Pacific and take it to Searcy. That was another railroad charge on whatever it was from Kensett to Searcy. That was the reason they put in Milburn and Johnston. Johnston had a wholesale firm up in the Ozarks, and Billingsley, Polly's father, had a wholesale firm up around Mountain Home, I believe. Billingsley and Johnston came and put in this wholesale firm; this was before Daddy put his money into it. He later on bought stock in it. He and Billingsley were the two main salesmen. Jack Ballard married Polly's sister. He was a rabid sports fan - he would brag on me.

Every spring was canning season, you see. Canning vegetables, fruits and so forth. Okay, Milburn and Johnston sold all the fruit jars and all the accessories for the jars and everything in connection with canning. Every year. They were bought in great quantities. They came in by boxcar. Half gallon fruit jars, quarts, pints and half-pints. That was a big deal. The fruit jars came in with the top and ring. Later on they became self-sealing. But you always had to have extra lids and extra rings. Well, it was a big operation of Milburn and Johnston every spring and summer.

Sometimes we'd get two boxcar loads of fruit jars, and I mean it was stacked with fruit jar cases. They were light weight so you could handle them fast. By that time Milburn and Johnston had two trucks. We had pneumatic tires. At first the tires were solid rubber, but then we got pneumatic tires. The trucks had open bodies, no roofs. Of course we had tarpaulins in case it rained. The idea was to unload these boxcars as quick as we could. Normally it would take two or three days, and it was an all-out effort.

We sold to a large area. The salesmen had already sold the jars to each of the retail stores, as far as to Jacksonville, which was almost to Little Rock. Little Rock had wholesale distributors also, but we competed with them pretty good. And then the other way, we went 50 to 100 miles down to the bottom country. And the other way we went up into the mountains at Heber Springs and some of those other little villages up there. That's were Mickey Clements' plane went down. It was north of Bald Knob.

But anyhow, we even went into Newport. And we went over across the White River and went over in towards Memphis, selling these goods. We had a large area we sold goods to. To this day I can't understand why.

But here's the thing. We had a little contest going on - who could deliver the most fruit jars in one day. Now this was a one-man operation. Daddy was on one route toward Little Rock, then deviated to the east or to the west a little bit to where the stores were. As fast as we could. We wouldn't have to take the fruit jars all the way up to the front part of the store - you always went into the back part of these stores. And this time the stuff was put down near the back door as quick as possible, and you holler to get someone to sign the delivery slip so you could get back in the truck and head off.

Well, I won the contest that year. I made three trips. In later years, Jack Ballard and I were talking about it. "Jack, even though I won the contest, I think I wore out that truck!"

He said, "I know you did. We had to put it in for repair when you went back to school!"

Jack was the main clerk of Milburn and Johnston. He kept the books, and kept a record of the shipments and the accounts. We had a stenographer, but she took care of the letters. Johnston was the president of course, and he took care of the buying. Jack took care of all the incoming stuff - vouchers, payment to the jobbers and manufacturers and so forth. He had a Burroughs Business Machine, hand crank. Each account had a separate sheet and you would slip it in to the machine, and enter all the debits and credits. It only entered dates and dollars. At times I'd be shipping clerk, and at times I'd operate the Burroughs accounting machine.

When the merchandise came in, we would mark each item. And we would take an inventory and mark what each item cost, and how much we were going to sell it for. That's how we kept up with the business. The major inventory was once a year and that was in relation to taxes. Taxes were low. There wasn't any sales tax.

Daddy also owned the drug store. We had the first drug store in Kensett, Arkansas. We had a druggist. He was a good druggist. The drug store was the half in the back, and the soda fountain was the front part. We had tables up front too. We sold soda and ice cream and milk shakes. We'd buy ice from the ice manufacturing company in Kensett. It was a modern one, the best that existed at that time. Ice came in 300-pound blocks, about three feet long, and was kept in storage in the ice house. Once you get enough blocks in storage, it stays frozen in there.

Joseph T. Robinson went on to be a US Senator, and was Senate Majority Leader. Well, that man was in our store many times, many times, from the time I was a small boy. He was in Congress when I came to Washington. I came to Washington in '35, so he was still in office. Of course I never went to Congress to see him, but when Daddy came to town, he was the first one he'd look up. He and Daddy used to go on deer hunts together - one time, a bear hunt, as I recall - down in southeast Arkansas. Mother used to say, "Get down in those mosquitoes, you'll get malaria and come back!"

But it turned out I was then one who came back home with malaria! After my second year of Corps of Engineers work. Boy, did I have a case of malaria. Oh, man I had a terrible case! I got cured right quick with a new drug that came out. It was a new drug discovered that was developed up in Canada, and it took 15 pills to knock it. And I had been taking all kind of over the counter stuff and doctor prescriptions for it and Quinine. We were taking big doses of Quinine. The Corps of Engineers issued Quinine to people who worked out in the field.

One time Daddy took the family to Helena, Arkansas, on the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad. And we went across the river on the ferry. At Helena, you cross the Mississippi by railroad ferry. That was my first experience to be on the Mississippi. I had seen as a kid the steamboats on the Little Red River down near West Point, but this was my first time to ever be on the Mississippi. And here I wind up working on the Mississippi for five years, and doing a lot about it!

My mother always said I was related to Sterling Price, the famous Civil War general. My mother was a Price. I ran across a Price in Fayetteville when I was at school, and we talked about the Prices. My mother had two cousins, I think, in Searcy. They were sisters and their husbands had died. They were Prices. And in Little Rock there were some Prices, and up in Fayetteville there were some Prices. And that's all I chased down. That's the only memory I have of the Prices. Every now and then there would be something in the papers about them, you know. In my day and time, there were newspapers from practically every county, and that's the way you kept up on events, reading the local paper. My daddy financed and put in the first printing press in Kensett, Arkansas. It was an old-time printing press. They put out a little paper, just one sheet folded.

Daddy built a lot of brick buildings in town. For mortar, we used a mixture of limestone and sand. The limestone would be quarried in big blocks, then it was crushed and fired in a furnace to burn out some of the chemicals. You end up with lime. It was shipped out in barrels.

We'd build a mixing box, put a barrel of lime in it, some water in it, 'til it becomes a gooey mess. Then you add sand to it, you see. You could get good sand out of the Little Red River and the White River, coming out of the Ozarks. It was shipped in by a gondola, which was an open railway car. We had to shovel it out into a wagon back in those days, a big wagon pulled by two horses. We'd shovel it out of the gondola into the wagon, then dump it in back of the store. The brick was shipped in too, of course.

I tried my hand at brick laying, but I never was too good. You had to have a lot of skill to lay the bricks correctly. Mostly I just carried mortar.

Pearle and I visited Wilbur Mills and Polly at their apartment down off Connecticut Avenue. They kept that apartment for many years. Wilbur and I grew up together. His father was a competitor of my father in business. His father didn't have as much of a spread as my father. [Laughter]. Wilbur's dad would come up to my Daddy's office and they would sit and talk about business, whatever. And my Daddy would go down to visit Wilbur's dad at his little office.

I'm a year or two older than Wilbur. In those days, Bill Dickey and Wilbur and I would ride the train together over to Searcy. The DK&S. Bill graduated from Searcy I think, the year I was at Little Rock. The three of us grew up together. Of course we didn't know what the future held for us. Who would dream! Baseball was Bill's main thing, always baseball.

Wilbur talked about going to Hendrix. I had no part of Hendrix, because I didn't like the Hendrix boys. We played the Academy every year. I didn't like 'em. They were too snooty. We had a dislike for the Hendrix Academy football team.

But anyhow, Wilbur graduated from Hendrix, then he went to Harvard. Then he got his law degree. I preceded Wilbur into Washington by a couple of years, I guess.

Well in later years, after Wilbur became so famous, many years after he came to Washington, I went home and here between Kensett and Searcy they had put up a big sign: "Home of Bill Dickey and Wilbur E. Mills" as you approach Kensett. I took offense. Why didn't they say, "and of James P. Fondren"? [Laughter].

I took pride in the fact that I was the first one to graduate from the University of Arkansas Engineering School from White County. I looked it up in the registrar's office. I thought that was quite an honor. I'd already completed my term with the Corps of Engineers, and people in Kensett know all about my career, 'cause I knew Daddy and Jack Ballard told 'em all about it.

I knew when Wilbur was elected. Merle or Mother wrote me. There came a time later when there a crisis about my career and Wilbur looked me up. It was before I married your mother. We talked, and he said, "Is there anything I can do for you?" I shook it off.

The first time I took Pearle over to meet Wilbur and Polly, we had dinner down at the Shoreham, down on Connecticut Avenue. We visited at least one more time. Polly and Pearle really hit it off. Polly was a smart girl. She graduated from some girl's school, I guess it was Galloway.

One time, before I married Pearle, Wilbur and I got together and went to a baseball game, and we went down to the locker room to see Bill. New York was in town playing the Washington Senators. Griffith Stadium locker room. Hot and steamy. And we got together after the game, Wilbur, Bill and myself. We walked across Rock Creek Park. Over the bridge, I remember that. We talked over old times in Arkansas.

Later, Bill and I had a beer together at his hotel. Was it Wardman Park? Anyway, there were some other players there too, having a beer before dinner. One was Earl Combs, centerfielder, and Ben Chapman, the third baseman. There was a third one there, the little short stop, Crosetti. Most of the time, they were kidding Bill and me about being from Arkansas. That was a real treat for me. Then later, Wilbur and Polly joined us and we all had dinner at the Shoreham. That was a great get-together.

One time I looked up Bill in Chicago, and this big guy opened the door and said, "What the hell do you want?" He was taking a nap. In Chicago the games were played in the daytime, so they were getting a nap before going to Wrigley Field. It was about 10 o'clock in the morning.

"I want to see Bill," I said.

"Who are you?"

"I'm from Kensett and I want to see Bill Dickey."

He called Bill to the door and Bill introduced me to Ben Chapman. He stuck out his hand, gave me a big strong grip. I said, "Ben! You're breaking my hand."

Then Lou Gehrig got up off the bed and came over and said, "What the hell is going on over here?" The three of them were rooming together in this suite. They all kidded Bill about being from Arkansas.

I told Gehrig, I said, "If you don't know it, this is one of the greatest events in my lifetime, to meet you." I never knew much about Chapman, except I knew he was a tough guy. I knew that much about him.

"I know quite a bit about you," I said to Gehrig.

"How come that is?"

"My sister told me all about you. Bill didn't tell me, but my sister did." Merle went up to Columbia University in New York one time for a summer course. She was pretty baseball-minded too, and she looked up the history about Gehrig and so forth. Merle knew a lot about all that. Maybe she got it from Johnnie Dickey, Bill's sister. I knew she graduated from Columbia University.

Gehrig was a gentleman all the way. Absolutely.

That was time of Babe Ruth, when they had such great teams. Another time I ran across them in Atlanta. The third time. Bill and I had dinner together. Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth came around to our table. Earl Combs too - I always called him the silver-haired Kentuckian. His nickname was 'Colonel'. He was a good centerfielder, a tall, well-built man. Man, he could go get 'em in the outfield. Well, of course all the Yankees were damn good in those days. This was in the thirties. It was after I came to Washington. I had left the Corps of Engineers. I came to Washington in December '35. So say sometime after 1936. Of course between 1939 and 1940, I was courting your mother, so the hell with baseball!

I recall it was the Biltmore Hotel in Atlanta. It was a plush hotel. One of the major hotels in downtown Atlanta. You went one way and there were movie theaters, down there on Peachtree Street. I stayed there one night when I was with the Soil Conservation Service. We had jobs in the Carolinas, and down in Georgia and so forth. Some in Mississippi, some in Alabama.

Off and on, I was in Atlanta at a field office in the new post office building in Atlanta. Operated out of there for about a year and a half or so. That's how I got acquainted with Atlanta. I had never been there before. The saying back then was you stand on the street corner and watch the pretty girls go by. The Georgia peaches.

Atlanta was not in the majors, it was in the minor league. Little Rock was in the minor league too. Memphis, Atlanta, New Orleans. Some of those baseball leagues we always thought were the best in the country. A lot of good ball players came out of the minor league. Cavanaugh Field in Little Rock. The Arkansas Travelers - that was the name. I had forgotten that. They played at Cavanaugh Field in Little Rock. High wood fences all around. A few times on Saturday, when I was going to school in Little Rock, I remember as kids looking for a knot hole to look through. We didn't have a dollar to get in to the stadium. Lorene gave me 50 cents a day, and that included trolley fare. I had to eat lunch with 25 cents. [Laughter].

Eventually I got in the stadium quite a few times and watched baseball. Or we'd come up from Kensett and go to the ball game. And that's where we played our Little Rock High School football games, at Cavanaugh Field. And you know the pictures of Little Rock High School in desegregation days? You remember the beautiful looking façade of the high school? That was new - I didn't go to that one. That was down near Cavanaugh Field.

My English teacher at the University of Arkansas was Jo Bell Holcomb. She was the leader in getting the amphitheatre built on campus. I made the ground survey before they ever built it - drew the drawings up, shape of the ground and all that, with my prof helping me, Prof Spencer. Eventually the building and grounds superintendent put it under contract. That was in the fall of 1929. The construction started in the spring of 1930, the year I graduated.

She was always coming out to the construction site, during the construction stage. I worked with the contractor - did all the instrument work on the layout of the entire stadium - the seats, the stage and so forth. And I was there when they were pouring the stands, the concrete seats. It was called the Greek Amphitheatre. Ron took some pictures of me sitting in it. They still have events out there.

My junior year at the University of Arkansas, we went on a train trip. All engineering students were required to take this two week train trip. We went to St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Detroit.

In Chicago, we stayed in the central part of town. That was Al Capone's territory in those days. An actual killing occurred in the street not far from our hotel. We didn't see it of course, but we read about it the next morning. They called it gangland warfare. Anyhow, we visited Western Electric there in Chicago. They manufactured telephones and telephone equipment, telephone wiring, cables, whatever. And they had a separate place that they had built where they were researching talkies; motion pictures with sound. Others had developed some early experimental models, but Western Electric was working to produce a better model and getting all the bugs out of it. And they had a huge sign on the outside of this place that said "No Admittance." That's the reason why I remember it.

Two guys who were famous on the University of Arkansas baseball team were Glen Rose and George Cole. George was short stop and I was the second baseman. And I was the captain my last year. They later built a modern stadium on the campus and they named it George Cole Stadium. The other guy, Glen Rose, he was from North Little Rock. Glen and I were pretty good buddies. He was a big, tall guy. We got acquainted when we were in high school. He played at North Little Rock the two years I played football at Searcy. We beat North Little Rock every time. Glen and I would talk over the games. We were roommates on trips. He played first base. He was a damn good athlete. He played tackle and he was very good in basketball. He coached for the University of Arkansas basketball team for about twenty years. George Cole was pretty good. He was too short for a quarterback.

Sometimes as punishment, I had to work on the big farm, which was between Kensett and West Point. We owned land down to the Red River. Back up on the high part of the farm, I'd be up there in the pines, and all of a sudden I'd hear a steamboat whistle. "Steamboat coming up the river - steamboat coming up the river!" Back in those days, when the river was up high, they could cross the rapids up at Judsonia, and there was a quarry out on the Red River, out from Searcy and Kensett and so forth.

For years and years, they went up to that quarry and got rock. Large boulders. The boulders were used to control the banks of a river from eroding by using what was called rip-rap. In the mud flats up and down the river, willow trees would grow one to two feet apart, sometimes six inches apart. They would grow up tall and slender. We'd cut them with one whack from machete. So what the government did, in places up and down the river, where they want to hold the banks, they would put in rip-rap work to hold the banks. And to hold the rocks - the rip-rap - they would use willows, and weave them together, then tie them together with wire, into symmetrical bundles, average length about ten or twenty feet, depending on the cut length of the willow. They were called mats. The way they would sink them would be to put the heavy rock on top. So where did they get the rock? They got most of it from the quarry between Judsonia and Searcy!

As kids we used to go out there. They would blast and get a lot of rock out. They came up with barges, you see, and loaded the barges down with rock. Open barges with a flat deck. The steamboats would handle the barges. And for years, they would come up there to that quarry and come down to the White and then in to the Mississippi with the rock and sink the mats. They had a system of holding them together with cables. After they got the mat loaded to a certain amount, it would sink. It would sink all the way down to the bottom uniformly and cover underneath anywhere from twenty to thirty feet or forty or fifty feet below.

Well, never would I dream that I would have something to do with controlling the Mississippi River banks.

As I was growing up, the steamboat people would come into my Daddy's store and buy provisions. Stock up. They wore a kind of a uniform - not overalls, but some kind of coat. They always had a cap, a seaman's cap, with a bill on it. The captain had "captain" across his. The other would have "pilot" across his. The aristocracy of steamboats. The captain, the pilot and the engine man were the main guys. The rest of them were deckhands and "oilers," who took care of the engines.

Depending on the stages of the rivers, but say about six months out of the year, in and out of our store would be these men. They would tie up at West Point, you see.

When I was a boy, I loved the steamboats. I got to go on them several times. They would buy a wagonload of provisions - meats, beans, dried beans, rice, sugar and salt - whatever. It depended on how long they had been away from the main ports on the Mississippi.

Greenville was the nearest one before they went up the White River. On down the river it would be Lake Providence, Louisiana, and on down to Vicksburg would be the next one. Greenville was quite a thriving steamboat port. Anyhow, if they were out for quite a while, they would run out of provisions if they had to stay out long. Especially sometimes the damn river would go down and the steamboats couldn't get back! They'd have to wait until it rained. Sometimes they'd be tied up more than six months before they could get back. The river would run too low. Most of the time though, they would get back.

We didn't have radio, you see. Daddy had telephones and he did have a line down to West Point. The captain would talk from a store in West Point where the telephone was - most homes didn't have phones then - and send the message through our exchange and then into Little Rock and Little Rock would send the message eventually through back to Vicksburg or Greenville or wherever on the river.

I was on a steamboat a few times, just for fun. When I was old enough, I would go by myself and take the provisions to the steamboats, you see. A big wagon with horses. From time to time, even though they were tied up, the steamboats would make a trial run back and forth, up and down the river. Take about thirty minutes to an hour, to see if everything was working. Keep it in order. That was the first time I got to go out on a steamboat. We went down the river a couple or three miles, and came back and tied up. I guess I was about fourteen or so.

It was wonderful.

Appendix A