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| Memories |
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| Excerpts from an original manuscript by Uncle Blease in 1972. Uncle Blease was born in April of 1915. |
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| One day my dad said "Come on, let's go to the store". We walked two or three miles to Mr. Charlie's store and when we got there I saw a red wagon. I thought that was the prettiest wagon I had ever seen. He bought it for me. It had wire wheels on it and I played with it so much I wore the wheels out. You don't see wheels like that now. They have rubber tires. When I was old enough to go to school I was ,also, big enough to carry a sling shot. My brother, Dexter, and I carried one all the time. We got pretty good with them. We would kill everything from birds to rabbits and squirrrels. Then we got big enough to fight. There were not many days that went by that we would not fight. We wouldn't know what we were fighting about, but we just had to fight a little. One day while we lived in the country, we had an aunt who lived about a mile away. One afternoon, my mother went to visit her and she wasn't at home. She came back sooner than we thought she would and she caught Dexter and me fighting. Along the way, she broke some wild cherry sprouts. She came home and gave one to Dexter, one to me, and she kept one She told us to fight, so we went to work. We had switched each other until we were stinging all over. We thought we were through, but we hadn't had a whipping until mother got hold of us. She really did put one on us and that stopped us from fighting. As the years moved along, we would get into a little trouble at school. We didn't have bathrooms like they have today. We had toilets outside the schoolhouse. The girls and the teachers had one and the boys had one. One day, we boys decided to have a little fun. We saw the teacher go to the toilet and we ran down and nailed her inside. After she yelled a while, we went down and let her out. On the first day of April, which we all call "All Fools's Day", we took the clapper out of the school bell and took it over in the woods and drove it up in the ground. We let it stay there until the end of school. After we hid the bell clapper, the teacher would come out, pick up a rock and throw it and hit the bell. We would then line up and march in. On the last day of school, we turned the teacher's toilet over and let it stay till school started the next year. She tried to find out who got the clapper, but we would not tell on each other. One day Dexter started saving coupons. Back then you could get them on Octagon Soap and Powder. He had saved enough to get a French Harp or Harmonica, so he ordered him one. When it came, he tried to learn to play it. When I was around him, I would get his harp and try to play it. One day, I struck the tune of Home Sweet Home. On through the years, I bought a guitar and learned to play it. Then I bought a mandolin but I couldn't do much with that. My sister, Frances, learned to play the mandolin, as well as, the guitar and we learned to play together and got pretty good. We started going to Fiddler's conventions and sometimes we would win first prize. Back in those days, there was a teacher named Mrs. Bessie. She would write plays and get us to be in them. Once we had a Womanless Wedding and I was the bride. Everyone said I made a good looking woman. My husband was a man named A. J. and he was around five feet tall. My brother, Workman, was the preacher and he married us and read the ceremony out of a Sears Roebuck catalog. When he pronounced us man and wife, I picked up my husband and kissed him on the cheek and then I fainted. We had several plays back then and carried them around to other schools. |
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