&
Mattie Mora Stringfield
Pursley
1961
1936
much ranked above anybody or anything going on when season was open. When he died in 1978, the funeral home was full of flowers, many in the shape and color of various coon hounds, such as Black and Tan, that had been wired from clubs as far south as Alabama, and as far north as Iowa and Illinois. He was a very opinionated man (he was always right - and if you didn't believe it all you had to do was ask him) and a very staunch republican. Now oddly enough, coon hunters didn't always have the best reputations, but one of Josh's coon hunting buddies was the Governor of Kentucky (when he slummed, he knew how to slum in the right places) and the rest of them were pretty much either lawyers or judges, mostly republican, with a stray democrat here and there.
Josh was famous for playing pranks on his friends, such as writing "INSUFFICIENT FUNDS" across the check of a friend of his, only to have the friend race to the bank to tell the President off, just to find out it was Josh all along. His pranks slowed down when his son Hub painted a goose egg with shoe polish to match the red eggs from Matties hens. Josh ate that egg, and spent 3 days looking for the hen that layed it, while Hub put the word out that it was a buzzard egg. Well, for the next 2 weeks, Josh looked for his son, and tried to die. 2 weeks after the fact, Carl Creek saw him out in the field sticking his finger down his throat trying to vomit. Carl told him that if it hadn't hurt him by now, he would be OK. To which Josh replied,
"Yea? Well I've been standin' here for 2 hours trying
to think of 1 good thing a buzzard ever eat, and every time
I do I get sicker!"
When I think of Josh, I think of the headlines in the newspaper where I first read about the Oleoak White Caps. It said:
...one of the best baseball aggregates at the turn of the century or any other era in Glasgow, was the White Caps of Oleoak who THRILLED the local baseball fans of their day with a fiery brand of diamond action all their own."
And that was my grandfather Josh, fiery with a brand of action all his own.
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