I was born on
November 2, 1930, and I am now living in the house where I
was born.
A midwife, Mrs. Leo Blount,
Dr. E. N. Blount’s wife, delivered me into this world.
Dr. Blount was on another house call.
Back in the 1930’s medical services were different from
today. The doctors made house
calls. Dr. Blount was one of two doctors
at Bassfield. When we could not get him,
we would call Dr. Nichols at Carson
which was four miles away and he would come to the house. Dr. Nichols had a very attractive wife back
then. She looked so attractive that I thought she was as pretty as a movie
star. We didn’t have a hospital in the County. The nearest hospital was at Columbia, some twenty miles distant.
In 1931, my mother had an appendectomy and a few weeks later
my sister, Myra Louise, had an appendectomy.
Less than ninety days later, my brother, Charles, who was twelve years
old, had appendicitis and it ruptured.
This was before the day of antibiotics.
Charles died when I was six months old.
The death of Charles greatly affected my Mother. Every time my Grandmother Myra Greer from Monticello and my Aunt
Modena Greer McCullough would visit our home, they would go to the cemetery and
take me with them. This greatly affected
me. Death was something that I got to
fear early in life. Finally, my Daddy
told my Mother to stop taking me to the cemetery and encouraged her to stay
away from same.
When I was very young, my Dad would often take me riding
with him. One day when I was three years
old, Dad told me to stay home. He drove off without me. I got upset at him and soon thereafter I ran
away from home. I went towards downtown
Bassfield about three fourths of a mile from home on old highway 42 and our
neighbor Edgar Reed and his wife Mrs. Sally stopped and took me back home. Old Highway 42 was then a State highway
graveled road and was the main route to Hattiesburg.
During the 1930’s Bassfield was quite interesting. It had
slot machines and things that you don’t now see except around the casinos on
the Gulf Coast. My Daddy gave me a quarter of
nickels and I went to Tommy Hugh Blount’s place on Main Street and played the slot machines
and won $3.00. I thought I was rich.
A friend and I went to a candy store near the depot which
was operated by a lady we all called “Granny Smith”. I spent all my money on
the candy to the glee of Granny Smith.
We all enjoyed it very much. At another place in a service station
operated by Mr. Bud Morton there was also a slot machine and a punch board. I
won on the punch board one time, but it wasn’t much.
My mother was a devout Baptist and insisted on my going to
Sunday school every Sunday. My father was a Methodist and I guess he influenced
me more than my mother as he did not go to church all that much. Back then we
had Baptist services every other Sunday and the Methodist likewise. So I got a
good dose of being a Baptist and a Methodist.
Most of our Baptist preachers in the 1930s based their
sermons on whiskey, and my Grandmother Greer was just as fanatic against it.
She had two sons who lived in Baton Rouge and one, my Uncle Fred, belonged to
the Elks Club which served liquor and the other son, Julius C. Greer, belonged
to the Country Club which also had liquor.
She was very concerned about it. They organized Union National Life
Insurance Company and a few years ago their descendants sold the company for
over $140 million dollars. Apparently their taking a nip every now and then
didn’t affect their business.
Around 1936, my Mother took me on a big trip to Baton Rouge with Grandma
Greer to visit her brother, Julius Greer and his wife, Ann Maxwell Greer and their
daughters, Ann and Carolyn. At that
time, this was the most distance I had ever been from Bassfield, some 138 miles. Spending a few days in Baton Rouge was a memorable event for a
little country boy. I shall never forget
how I looked forward to the ice cream man delivering ice cream door to
door. I also remember our visiting the
capitol building and hearing people discussing Huey Long and showing us where
he had been assassinated at the Capitol.
During the depression, my uncle A. W. Garraway, who worked
with Standard Life Insurance Company in Jackson,
Mississippi had three of my first
cousins, Tom, Fred and Robert who visited us every year around the fourth of
July with their Mother, Anna Belle Phillips Garraway. They always brought a lot of fireworks. I always looked forward to their annual visit.
During the summer of 1939, I took the longest trip then of
my life. My Brother In Law, Paul Deen,
took me on a visit to my sister Myra Louise Deen’s home on Busby Street in Shreveport, Louisana which was over 300 miles
from Bassfield. John William Thompson
also was going to follow us in his car.
Paul told him how far it was and John William didn’t have enough gas or
money to get more gas so they had to get a tow bar from Bud Morton who had a
garage in Bassfield and we pulled John William’s car all the way to Monroe,
Louisana before letting him follow us. Times were hard in the depression. I rode a
Trailways bus back all night from Sheveport and didn’t sleep and Uncle A.W.
Garraway met me in Jackson
and got me on the bus to Prentiss where my parents picked me up. I was so
excited about getting home that I played all day. There was a revival going on at the church
that night and I was so sleepy that I stayed in the car and went to sleep
leaning against the door and when my Dad opened the door I fell out on the
ground. Fortunately I didn’t get hurt.
In 1942, I won $25.00 at Will Kerley’s mule auction and took
these funds and some other money I had saved and went to New Orleans on a Trailways
bus and visited my sister Marjorie Garraway who lived on Prytania Street in a
rooming house.
Marjorie gave me a
complete tour of New Orleans including riding the street cars, visiting the
French quarters and the coffee house by the River.
We also rode a ship on the
Mississippi
River for about 4 hours.
We
also went to the carnival on
Lake
Ponchartrain and I rode
the roller coaster.
It was a great trip
and I enjoyed it immensely. The people who owned the rooming house were from
Monticello, Mississippi and had a son about my age.
One afternoon we rode bikes around the City
and went into the so called Irish Channel area and a gang of boys threatened to
beat us up if we didn’t get the hell out of there. Needless to say we got our
booties out of there in a hurry.
In the 1930s, one of our citizens who had been depot agent
at Wanilla was married to a prominent lady in the Eastern Star and her husband was
also active in the Klu Klux Klan. I recall at a Baptist Revival the members of
the local Klan marched into the Baptist
Church in their hoods and
made a donation to the visiting minister. My Uncle Boon Garraway had been in
the Klu Klux Klan and lost his job as Postmaster at Bassfield because of being
a member. My Father was adamantly opposed to the KKK.
The Eastern Star lady’s husband also enjoyed his happy hour. The members of the
Church later stripped him of his role in the Church as a Sunday School
teacher. On the next Sunday, his wife made
one of the best speeches I ever heard a lady make as she, and others, withdrew
as Church Members. “Because of circumstances beyond my control”… she would say and then eloquently and
logically gave her reasons for withdrawing from the Baptist Church This was the first Church split I ever
witnessed. They went to the Methodist
Church. Needless to say it was also the subject of
much discussion with my Mother’s friends and relatives.
Another discussion was the different methods of Baptizing;
the Baptists immersed you in water and the Methodists sprinkled. Grandmother Greer and my Mother believed it
should be by immersion in the water. I never understood why it made any
difference.
In the depth of the depression the Methodist church had a
pastor named L.L. Roberts. He had the most faith of anyone we ever knew. He
also was a hard worker. One day in
church, which was then a wooden building, Pastor Roberts stated he wanted to
build a new church. The next few days he started the church and he went to my Daddy’s
cotton gin and told him he needed some money and he did this to every other
business man in town. He got the money and built the present Church on
faith.
Legend has it that they started mixing the concrete, which
was then done by hand, and was then poured on the spot. Brother Roberts had hired a bunch of Irish
Catholic gentlemen to assist him with the mixing and pouring of the concrete.
It was a dark and cloudy day and the Irish Catholic foreman told Bro. Roberts
that he advised against pouring the concrete due to the fact that it was going
to rain. Bro. Roberts told him “let me think about it, and I want to do some
praying” so he prayed and told them the Lord said pour the concrete. They
poured the concrete. Then they looked
down the street and it started pouring down rain but it stopped at the place
where the library is now located in Bassfield, which is about ½ block away from
where they were pouring the concrete. I think a lot of the Irish Catholic
gentlemen almost became Methodists after witnessing what Brother Roberts had
done.
Bassfield had one of the larger Catholic churches in the
State of Mississippi
during the depression. Father O’Reily
was a well known Priest. At that time there was also a Catholic School
for grades 1-8. Most of the Catholics
were of Irish descent other than the Faler Family which were German. The white protestants were mostly of Scottish
origin. About half of the area was comprised of Blacks. Most of the people in the Bassfield area
lived on farms. I would estimate there
were 5,000 to 6,000 in our trade area.
We didn’t have swimming pools back in those depression years
of the 1930s. . Instead, we went to
various swim holes and creeks in and around Bassfield. When I was a baby my
mother and sisters went to swim in Holiday
creek south of Bassfield. My mother put me between her legs and started talking
to another lady and became so engrossed in it that she let me slip out and into
the creek. My cousin Cecil Glen Dickson Blount saw me in the creek and hollered
to my mother and they got me out of the creek without my drowning.
Most of the time we went to the Mill Pond on Holiday Creek
which was known as Hatton’s Mill Pond. It
was near Ebenezer church about five miles South of Bassfield. On one occasion Buford Blount was trying to
build a dirt tennis court and he conned me into helping him clean up the site,
by promising to take me swimming in Hatton’s Mill Pond. We did go to the Mill
pond. They had a cable attached to a tree and you could swing out on it and
drop off in the water. The only problem I had was that I had not learned to
swim. Nevertheless, I swung out on the swing and dropped off too quick. I
landed in deep water over my head. I had always heard that if you went under
three times that you would drown. I went under four times and Buford rescued
me. I never swung again.
That evening we
started back to Bassfield but Buford’s pickup had a flat and it was after dark
before I got home. My father and mother were worried sick. I had not told them
I was going to Hatton’s Mill pond with Buford. Not only did I nearly drown that
afternoon but I also got my last belt whipping from my Daddy. So on that day I
nearly drowned and got my butt whipped too. Spare the rod and spoil the child. Apparently
there is some truth to that saying as I never pulled another caper like that. I
was then about 10 years old.
We also went swimming at Dunk Graves swim hole East of
Bassfield and every now and then we went to Strahan’s Mill pond between
Williamsburg and Bassfield Then in the 1940’s after I had learned to swim at a
gravel pit swim hole on Claude Burkett’s land, my school bus driver, Bob Tyrone,
purchased the first steel bodied school bus that was used at Bassfield school.
It was a Bluebird from North Carolina.
Every Sunday for 50 cents he would take us to Bouie River
where we would go swimming in the coldest water I have ever been in at Lone
Star, Mississippi.
We also did a lot of swimming on Choctaw Creek about 2 ½ miles
from the house. Other users on this swimhole were Edmond Fagan and his sisters,
Natalie, Lois and Bernice, Dennis Hannegan and his sisters, Katherine and Joan,
and Conrad Fagan along with other persons. It was a long hot and hard walk to
these swimholes but I did it many times.
A lot of my education, especially concerning sex, was
learned at Bassfield
School. Not in the school
buildings or by any teacher but in the outdoor red painted WPA constructed
outdoor privy toilets where we all met and discussed girls and smoked and put
up with a gosh awful odor from the ten dirty toilet seats. It was so nasty that
I never used it for its major purpose. Also, I got an early education in
watching our cows mate with a bull.
At the end of February a big event was going
barefooted. I went barefooted until
frost. We were then allowed to go to
school barefooted. In the fall I would
get a pair of dress shoes and a pair of brogans. I wore the dress shoes to
Church and the brogans in doing my farm work.
Most of the girls in the 1940s would smooch, but you better
not get your hands below their necks.
We
talked about the ones who knew how to French kiss. We thought they were hot
mamas.
When I was in the fifth grade I
got a girl and tried to pull up her dress in the coat room. Had I done so I
would not have known what to do and was saved from embarrassment by the Teacher
catching me in the act. The Teacher, as punishment, made me stand with my nose
on a circle drawn on the chalk blackboard for an hour.
Today we spend a lot of time weed eating and mowing the
grass. We did not have a lawn around
our house in the 1930s. In fact we didn’t allow grass to grow near the
house for fear of fire. We would scrape off the grass. We would periodically get some dogwood branches
and make a brush broom and would sweep the yard clean with these brush brooms
so there was nothing but swept dirt around the house.
We didn’t have running water. We had a water well which was
200 feet deep. We had a wood casing down into the well. We had a bucket tied
onto a rope and pulled the water up through a pulley with a wooden windlass
with an iron crank in it by hand. It was
a laborious way to get water. In the 1930s, our neighbors, the Holland family
had a cistern but no well. When the water
in the cistern was too low, they would come to our house and get water out of
our well. On one occasion, my Mother
made some tea cakes before we went to Hattiesburg and when we got back they
were gone. Later Doc Holland told my
Mother that he just couldn’t resist the temptation and that he ate all of the
tea cakes.
We also had a cistern and caught rain water from the roof of
the house and used this water to water the animals and to wash clothes. We had a large wash pot and would heat the
water with pine knots and wood till it was boiling and would boil the dirty
clothes. A black lady named Ella Hut washed our clothes every Monday morning in
the 1930s for 50 cents. She would put
some of the hot water from the wash pot
in a number 3 wash tub and with a scrub board get the clothes clean and then
rinse them several times and hang them out on a clothes line and fastened them
to the wire clothes line with clothes pins so that they would dry in the sun.
Times have changed.
In the early thirties we had a dipper in a bucket of water
and everyone drank water from the same dipper.
This later ended when Doctors got wiser and learned of germs and told
people to not do this.
One of the big days was when cold weather arrived. We always had hogs and would feed them corn
and slop from our kitchen and we would buy wheat shorts to get them fat. When it got cold, my Dad would have hog
killing day. He would shoot the hog in the head with his pistol and we would
then drag him to a barrel full of hot water from the wash pot. We would put the
hog into the barrel of hot water and then pull him out and scrape the hair off
him with knives. Then we would hang the hog up and cut out the intestines.
Later my Dad would cut out the hams, ribs, ham hocks, grind
the sausage meat and stuff the sausages in the cleaned intestines and put them
in a small house which we called the smokehouse. We would build a hickory fire
and smoke the meat many days until it cured. Some of the guts were used to cook chitterlings. They always smelled bad but tasted mighty
good. I always liked to eat the liver and lights with rice and gravy. We also cooked the brains and ate them.
Nothing was wasted.
We also bought some Red Devil Lye and cooked it with hog
grease and made lye soap.
We didn’t get our
milk at a store. We had a cow and milked her in the morning and evening.
We would take the milk to the house and drink
some of it and allow the cream to come to the top of the remaining milk and
then we put the cream in a pitcher or churn and made butter. The left over was
clabber which I used to love to drink. We did not pasteurize our milk.
When the cow had a calf we would not milk
the cow dry as the calf had to get its nourishment also. I started milking the
cow in the late 1930s and did it until I went to college.
I did my school work at night under the light of a kerosene
lamp.
We had one Aladdin lamp but didn’t
use same except for special occasions. The Aladdin lamp put out more light but
it was expensive to keep as the mantle didn’t last long.
It was very fragile.
One of my early jobs to which my Mother nominated me was to
draw the water out of the well. It seemed that every time I would relax and
start to read something she would holler for me to get her some water.
When I was 14, I had studied windmills and
looked at one belonging to a Mr. Hatton. My Daddy in the meantime had installed
a hand pump. The windmill did the same thing as my hand did to the hand pump.
I concluded that I could put a barrel in the
air and pump water into it like a windmill and constructed an elevated tank
with four post oak trees onto a platform in the air to put the barrel on so
that it would
be as high as the tank in
the windmill I had studied. It worked. We then had running water. I then
installed a kitchen sink, bathtub, commode and built a septic tank which was
used until we got City sewage a few years ago.
I only knew one Grandparent and that was my Grandmother Myra
Bullock Greer. Grandmother Greer was a
very devout Baptist and lived 28 miles West of Bassfield at Monticello, Mississippi.
We visited her about once a month in the 1930s and early 1940s. Her house was on the bank of the Pearl River. I
always enjoyed visiting her and playing with Tom Jolly and Billy Horn. Monticello
got a new water tank and we had to climb it.
My Mother’s sister, Modena Greer McCullough, was married to Ted
McCullough who was highly intelligent and had a store in Monticello. Many times my Mother and I would ride the
train to Silver Creek or Wanilla and Uncle Ted and Aunt Modena would meet
us. We always had dinner on Sundays at
their house. Their son Ted McCullough
attended Mississippi College along with Dot, their daughter. Uncle Ted had an artesian
well on their property which fascinated me.
Uncle Ted knew that I loved trains and he would take me over to the
Monticello depot to see the steam
engines on the New Orleans and Great Northern Railroad also know as the NOGN
and later became the GM&0 Railroad. Their passenger train known as the
Rebel was the first streamliner in the South and I loved to watch it and hear
its siren like whistle blow
After World War II ended the rural electric co-op put
electricity to our house. We then got an
electric motor and it thereafter pumped water into the barrel in the air. We
later got a pressurized pump which did not require a tank in the air. Later we
got City water.
Our economy hinged on farming and growing cotton as was
indicated by our eight month school year.
Furthermore, our school year began in September with classes commencing
at eight a. m. and ended at one p.m.
so that we could go home and pick cotton.
This lasted through the month of October. In the spring we had a similar six week
period so that we could get the land cultivated and ready for another year. Child labor back then was very important.
We had good teachers at the Bassfield school. When I got to the 6th grade, I
enjoyed Mrs. Bessie McLean telling about her trip to the Worlds Fair in New York City. Miss Frankie Smith taught me in the second
grade and Mrs. Katy Applewhite taught me in the third grade with Mrs. Spencer
Puckett being my teacher in the fourth grade, Mrs. Dot Carraway in the fifth
grade. Miss Austin was my first teacher. Mrs. Gayle Hatton taught me in the 7th
grade and then we went to school in the high school building and had different
teachers at different periods of the school day. Mrs Lela Carraway inspired me to get on the
debate team. Dennis Fortenberry taught
physics. C.S. Miller taught Agriculture.
Mrs. Herman Hendrix taught me typing. These Teachers along with Miss Ruth Boyd at
Hinds Jr. College had a great influence on my becoming a lawyer.
In the 1930s all school buses were privately owned and
contracted out each year. Bassfield
then had one of the largest consolidated school districts. There were about 14 bus routes. Only whites rode the buses. Blacks then went to small schools by
walking. Some of these small schools
were Rosenwald, Ridgeland, Blackjack, Santee,
and Progress. We had separate schools from the Blacks but they were never equal
as was required by the Plessy v. Ferguson U. S. Supreme Court case. For a while Catholics attending their school
weren’t permitted to ride the school buses either. There were some who opposed it on the grounds
that the Church and State should be separate and apart.
Each year, one or two buses would go to Jackson and take people to the State
Fair. One of the buses from the Bouie
community departed from the fair about 12:30 a.m. one year and got on US highway 49 and headed North instead of
South. None of the occupants told the
driver. Consequently, it was mid
morning before they got back to Bassfield when they should have returned within
two hours. At one time the Mississippi
Central ran a passenger train to the State Fair via Wanilla, Mississippi.
I was five when my Mother took me to the State Fair on Mr.
Ollie Stephen’s school bus. She had me
dressed in a business suit and a hat. I was intrigued by the fat lady at the fair
who took off her clothes and stayed there so long that my Mother had to come in
and get me. I also was attracted to some
mulatto girls dancing. Maybe I was
oversexed as a child. On the return to
Bassfield on the school bus I went to sleep and peed on a girl sitting next to
me.
It was my first time in Jackson to eat at a Kystal. I had orange juice and square hamburgers. We
also visited my Uncle A.W. Garraway who worked in the Standard Life
Building. I thought it was a skyscraper.
There were several stores in Bassfield. O. T. Hathorn built a large new store in the
early 1930s. O.T had dry goods in the
front part of the store, groceries and a meat market in the rear portion. O. T. also sold fertilizer from a large
warehouse along the railroad siding. In
the fall O.T’s purchased bales of cotton from farmers bringing same to the
cotton platform along the railroad siding.
In addition to Mr. O.T Hathorn, his son Lavon and son in law Bill
Dorris, along with Sylvester Clark, Mrs.
Lulu Burkett, a lady bookkeeper, Thelma Daniels, Ernest Sylvest, William Clark
and Doc Gardner worked in the store. O.T’s also purchased from the
farmer’s red irish potatoes which were
graded on the cotton platform and loaded onto refrigerated boxcars which had
blocks of ice in each end which came from the Bassfield ice house and were then
shipped all over the country.
Brown Miller bought
cucumbers from farmer’s which were graded on the cotton platform by Mr. Harry
Applewhite and Earl Holloway who took them to
Carson.
Later Brown Miller built cucumber vats in Bassfield and had their own
facility along the Bassfield railroad siding and shipped them to the Brown
Miller plant at Wiggins, Mississippi. Picking cucumbers was a terrible chore.
We picked them every other day during the harvest season.
They were a pretty good money crop.
We grew them every year. I can still
remember how my hands would look rough and stained after picking cucumbers.
We also grew crowder peas which was a labor intensive
job. We picked the peas by hand and sold
them in the rear of O.T. Hathorn Store where they were shipped to the
processing plant at Columbia. We didn’t make much money from growing the
peas.
Until 1937, V. B “Boon” Garraway had a store in Bassfield
and he then moved to Prentiss and became rich.
He was my Uncle. He sold dry
goods, groceries., hardware, and fertilizer.
Lillie Mae Carraway, his son Thomas Victor, and a black man named George
Taylor worked in the Bassfield store.
Boon was very innovative; he would buy a boxcar of flour and sell it
cheap to customers direct from the railroad boxcar. He purchased chickens from everyone and would
truck them to New Orleans. This was before the time of large factory
like chicken houses. Every farmer grew
chickens which were allowed to roam around the home place. Chicken then tasted better than today as they
then had muscle.
Newt McLean owned a grocery
store with a meat market. In the 1930s
our neighbor’s son, Cecil Holland, worked in McLean’s
store along with a black man everyone called “Squirrel”. Cecil was a fox hunter. I went on fox hunts with him several
times. We would hunt until 3:00 a.m. and then walk about three
miles to our homes. In World War two Cecil was in the Army and I would write to
him. He was a great storyteller. Mr. Newt was Mayor of Bassfield while I was
growing up. He was a born optimist and
was once my Sunday school teacher.
After my Uncle moved his store to Prentiss, Mississippi,
Ray Hathorn and his brothers Billy and Kermit operated a store in the old
Garraway building. They operated similar
to O. T. Hathorn. Ray bought cotton in
the fall on the cotton platform. They
also sold VC fertilizer. Mr. Ray was a sports enthusiast. In 1949 he got football started at Bassfield School.
He also managed a semi pro baseball team for Bassfield following World War
2 which had a lot of World War 2 veterans on it.
A.F. Carraway Store was the other big store in
Bassfield. It is still in operation.
Today it is operated by Neil Burns who started to work there 52 years ago. In
the 1930s it was run by A.F.Carraway,
his son A.F. Carraway II, Will Carraway, Rosa Lee Dear, John Baker and Wood
Carraway. They also had a large
fertilizer warehouse and sold Swift and Armour fertilizers. A.F. Carraway II, who was called little Gus,
bought cotton from the farmers at the cotton platform. My Mother worked in the store in the 1940s.
She sold dry goods.
Doyle Sanford and his wife opened a new store in Bassfield
in the 1930s known as a cash and carry store.
They sold groceries.
They
didn’t charge anything.
They were very
successful.
They built an apartment in
the rear of the store and lived there and raised two sons named Billy and
Barney who now live in Denton, Texas and were both very successful working for
The R.J. Reynolds Company.
Bassfield had a drug store.
It was known as City Drug Store and was operated by Mrs. Bessie Puckett.
Dr. Blount had his office on the second floor above City Drug Store. In the 1930s City Drug store had a fountain
and sold cold drinks and ice cream and people gathered there around the tables
and chairs which were under an overhead fan and gossiped. In 1950 Imogene
Blount Smith became a pharmacist and worked in City Drug Store until she
retired. The City Drug Store is now a
florist
The other Doctor was Dr.W.W. Applewhite. He had his own building on Main Street and after he departed this
life his building in the 1940s was converted into a movie theatre by the Rube
family from New Hebron.
In the early 1920s, Bassfield had a Bank known as People’s
Bank and it failed and closed. Bassfield
was without a Bank until the Woods family of Hattiesburg opened a branch office of
Lumberton State Bank in the 1950s. The
Woods family had a brother named Sam Woods,who was a commercial attaché in the
State Department who married Wilhelmina Busch, the last daughter of Augustus
Busch, the beer baron, and they both died and this fortune, consisting of
millions, went to Sams’s brother and sisters.
This Bank later merged with First Mississippi Bank and is now Union
Planters Bank and will soon be known as Regions Bank.
In the early 1930s very few people had electric
refrigerators and bought ice from the Ice House. The Ice House was first owned
and operated by Mississippi Power Company and later by Ruport Stringer. Allen Puckett also delivered ice to people’s
houses. After everyone got electricity, people purchased electric refrigerators
and the ice house went out of business.
Around 1958 after I had started practicing law at
Lumberton, Mississippi,
I attended a young democrats meeting in one of the downtown hotels in
Jackson, Mississippi.
There were about 1,200 people there.
It
cost $25 per plate. Senator John F. Kennedy was there and was running for
President. We had a reception and all of us got to shake his hand and Governor
J. P. Coleman’s.
I was about 300 down
the line.
When I got to Senator Kennedy, I told him I meant this as a
compliment. I said if you are half as
intelligent and diligent as your brother Robert, who had done a great job in
going after the corrupt Teamster, Jimmy Hoffa, you will be a great President.
Then Senator John F. Kennedy said, “That’s the highest compliment anyone has
ever given me since I have been running for President.”
I knew then that he
loved his Brother Robert. Senator
Kennedy then turned to Governor Coleman and said lets take a short break and I
want Mr. Garraway to come with us and I
will introduce him to the Mississippi Congressional Delegation which he did. It
was then that I met Senator John Stennis.
Kennedy then told me if I had any ideas which I thought would be good
for our Country, to write him.
After John F. Kennedy was elected President I wrote him a
letter and urged him to expand the REA concept to establishing rural water
systems. His Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman then got a law passed and
thousands of rural people are now getting their water through these rural water
systems. It’s a wonderful Country where a young lawyer can bend the ear of a
future President and ultimately help so many people.
So you can see that water has been on my brain since the
1930s.
Today McDonalds is world famous, but during the 1930s and
until the late 1940s Bassfield had a restaurant operated by Mrs. Matilda Fagan.
It was better than a McDonalds. It was in a small building on Hawkins Avenue
adjacent to the railroad and had two counters, one for colored and one for
whites. She cooked the hamburgers in the
open on a stove between the two counters and we always watched her make
them. She made a beef hamburger and a
pork and beef hamburger. They were very
good and in the 1930s cost a dime each.
One of the most interesting sights at Aunt Matilda Fagan’s
restaurant was watching a lady during the depression smoking a cigarette in public. This was done by Mrs. Myrtis Faler, wife of
Andrew Faler. Later, I discovered that
my oldest sister, Myra Louise Deen, was secretly smoking cigarettes. She would go to the outdoor WPA two-hole
outdoor privy at our house and do her smoking there.
As the Bible says, your sins will find you out. This happened one day when Myra Louise was
smoking in the outdoor privy. We didn’t
use toilet paper back in those days. We
used Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogs and newspapers. While
smoking Myra Louise set the toilet on fire.
We were lucky and got the fire put out before it burned the toilet down.
Myra Louise never smoked in front of Mother.
During the depression we oftentimes would barter eggs to
Newt McLean or to O.T. Hathorn & Sons who had a meat market in their stores
so as to have some steak.
Usually it would be round steak which my Mother would cook
with gravy and make some rice. This was always a treat. We also had chicken and dumplings and fried
chicken with rice and gravy. We raised our own chickens and put them in a pen
and fattened them up for ten days prior to killing them. I sometimes had the
unpleasant chore of wringing the chicken’s neck before it was cooked. I can still see those chickens with broken
necks jumping all over the place before they expired. I was the last child in our family of
four. My sister Marjorie, who was the
real baby of the family, had the pick of the pulley bone and the chicken
breast. Every other family member had his or her pick. I wound up with a
drumstick and foot. So being the youngest
wasn’t necessary the best when it came to eating chicken.
Every year in the 1930s and 1940s, a carnival would come to
Bassfield. It would have a Ferris wheel
and various games where you could throw a ball and knock down certain objects
and win a prize. Several times when the
carnival was visiting in the 1930s there would be one or two airplanes which
for a nominal fee would take off and fly over the town for about 10 minutes. My Dad was going to take me with him and we
were going to fly in the plane when he noticed that the other plane had hit a
power line and crashed. He took me out
of the plane and got his refund. I was
very disappointed and it was not until 1946 that I first flew in a Bell Aircrobra
out of a cotton field southeast of Columbus, Mississippi. We
also had tent shows come to Bassfield and they stayed about two weeks in the
1930 and 1940s. In Prentiss there was a
theatre known as the Ritz and every now and the then we would go see a movie
there. We rode there during World War 2 on a school bus driven by Billy
Hathorn. This was where I got to see a
lot of movies, mostly Westerns with Gene Autry and Tarzan shows. After World
War II the Rube family out of New Hebron put a movie house in Bassfield in the
former Dr. Applewhite building. Then movies were just a jump away.
During the depression, around 1935, many Bassfield people
were drinking Jamaican Rum. Bassfield
was then dry. The rum was bootlegged. Jamaican rum was cheap and contained 70 %
alcohol. A new chemical was put in some
Jamaican rum. It was bad. A number of our citizens drank some of this
bad rum and about two weeks later their toes started getting numb and then
their legs and they became cripple for life.
It made the front pages of the New Orleans Times Picayune. It was called jake leg.
Some 50,000 people got the jake leg in the United States
but Bassfield ranked high per capita. It
was a strange sight to see so many young and old men get paralysis from
drinking the rum who had previously been perfectly healthy. It also made me
afraid of alcohol and I never have craved it.
Jake leg, more than the hundreds of sermons preached against liquor by
Baptist preachers, influenced me for life.
Later in the 1980s,
when I was Mayor of Lumberton, Mississippi, I welcomed the South Mississippi
Alcoholics Anonymous Convention to Lumberton and related the above to the
members at the meeting and when I finished the introduction one of the
gentlemen in the audience asked the chairman to speak for a moment, and told
everyone that I had sent cold chills back into his memory. He said that he
drove a dry cleaners truck during the 1930s for Phoenix Laundry of Hattiesburg,
Mississippi and on Mondays he traveled to Kiln, Mississippi (where Brett
Farve was raised) near the Gulf coast
and got laundry and also got some bootleg whiskey which he delivered to other
places to supplement his income. He
stated that he went to Bassfield on Tuesdays and that he went to Joe Dear’s Pure Oil Service Station on Main Street where
he took some bootleg liquor and that some guys there were drinking Jamaican rum
and offered him a drink, which he took, and that after those guys got the Jake
leg he was afraid he was going to get it and that the first thing he did every
morning was to feel his toes to see if they were numb. He didn’t get it. He later came from Hattiesburg
where he lived and had me to write his will and when he died I probated his
will for his daughter to whom he left a sizeable estate.
In 1948, Bassfield,
Mississippi, made national
headlines. Southeast of Bassfield about
three miles on Black Creek, the corn fields of the Hathorn Family were attacked
by billions of grasshoppers who ate
everything in their path. Radio was then
popular and WWL in New Orleans,
a CBS outlet, sent its famous radio announcer, Henry Dupree, to visit Bassfield
and the grasshopper fields. The grasshopper event was caused by a weather phenomena
according to some. This was the first time anything like this had occurred in Mississippi. Poison got
rid of the grasshoppers.
Violence doesn’t just occur today. In 1939, I was in downtown Bassfield on Hawkins Avenue
across from City Drug Store and two men were arguing. One was a Mr. E. W. Bell and the other was a
Mr. Ulmer Magee. Mr. Magee had hired one
of Mr. Bell’s sons to cut some wood for him and didn’t pay the son. Mr. Ulmer
Magee claimed that Mr. Bell owed him money and he should pay the son. They got in a heated argument. I was standing in the street barefoot watching
them argue. I saw Mr. Magee stab Mr.
Bell with a knife in the stomach. Some
other men then broke up the fight. They
took Mr. Bell upstairs to Dr. Blount’s office and he later died in Columbia.
Percy Courtney was in a fight with Clyde Hatton and got
killed by getting his throat cut.
Charlie Joseph operated a store in Bassfield. He had a problem with his brother in law,
Forrest Bass, and shot and killed him on Hawkins Avenue. Mr. Bass reportedly had threatened him. After
this was over, the Joseph family moved to Corpus
Christi, Texas. One
of the Joseph boys would occasionally return to Bassfield on a Harley Davidson
motorcycle.
Mr. Doc Broom, who lived in the Broom Town Community Southeast
of Bassfield was murdered by L.P. Phillips on Monday morning, November 16, 1942,
by Phillips hitting Mr. Broom in the back of his head with an axe that he had
got from the wood pile in the yard and was assisted by John Loveless who acted
as watchman. They went there to rob the
old man, but Phillips said he didn’t find any money. After
he was murdered, they burned him in his house which they set afire. In 1943, Phillips was hung for his crime.
Loveless served time in the penitentiary. This was the last time anyone died by
a death sentence by a jury in Jefferson
Davis County
for a crime they had committed.
The Blacks living in the Bassfield community also had a lot
of violence. Most of it was over women. Not only did they kill, but they also
used knives against each other. They
kept Dr. Blount busy, especially during revival meetings
In the 1930s J. J. Newman Lumber Company had a huge lumber
camp about two miles South of Carson. Many people worked for Newman. They were
cutting the virgin pine forests. The
Newman Company had a dummy line that ran from Carson to the Camp and beyond almost twenty
miles to Oakvale. They had a bad wreck between two trains on the dummy line
below Carson
which killed several people. Each day
Newman had a train operated by a Mr. John Sartin, who took the logs to their
sawmill at Sumrall fourteen miles East of Bassfield over the Mississippi
Central Railroad by our house. The Newman Camp was constructed in 1916 and was
abandoned and/or moved to Hickory Grove Community in Lamar County or Perry
County in the mid 30s. One of our neighbors, Frances Cavanaugh, married and
bought one of the boxcars and lived in it as their first home. Later, James Carraway and wife Mary, bought
one of the houses left on the premises and remodeled it into a nice home.
After J.J.Newman Company cut the virgin forests, they sold
the land but reserved the oil gas and minerals. The Company was from Pennslyvania and was
aware of the importance of mineral rights as that was where oil and gas was
first discovered. In selling the land J.J.Newman Company sold same for about
$15 per acre on liberal terms under a contract.
It also designated certain areas for Black people and other areas for
white people. Between Bassfield and Carson
Newman built a spur dummy line several miles long and North of the Granby community. The Company sold this land to Blacks. East of Bassfield, about five miles on the
Mississippi Central railroad, the Company built a dummy line North several
miles to what they called Cantwell Camp now on Graves Keys Road. Most of this land sold to Blacks. J.J. Newman also built a dummy line South off
of the Mississippi Central Railroad at the same place where the dummy line went
to Cantwell to a Camp near Bunker Hill and
this line went close to the front of Bethel
Baptist Church
in the Broom Town Community. This land
sold to Whites as did most of their land in adjacent Lamar County
In the early 1930s radio became very popular. We listened to WWL in New Orleans a lot. Every day at 12:30 p.m. they would have Esso news. We listened to Lum
and Abner, Walter Winchell and I listened to the Lone Ranger. Getting a battery operated radio was a big
event.
The economy of Bassfield during the 1930s and 40s was based
on the farmers growing cotton. It was their money crop. A farmer with a mule could grow ten acres of
cotton and twenty acres of corn. If the
farmer had good land, he could get a bale of cotton per acre. Back in the 1930’s, during the depression,
cotton got very cheap; five cents a pound was the lowest it got. A bale weighed five hundred pounds and was then
only worth $25.00. Money was then as scarce as hen’s teeth.
When Franklin Roosevelt was elected President, there were vast reforms instituted through
legislation. Roosevelt’s
laws limited the number of acres of cotton a farmer could plant and subsidized
the price paid for cotton. Every year
the farmer’s acres were measured by a member of the USDA and if it exceeded the
allotted amount, then the excess acreage had to be plowed up.
My Daddy had a cotton gin in the 1930s. He bought farmer’s allocations during the
depression. To do this he had to go to Corinth, Mississippi
on the Tennessee
border, which to hear him tell it, seemed like it was on the other side of the
world. The steam gin was a fascinating operation. There was a big boiler room and on the South
side a water pump and concrete holding tank for the water. The water was very
cold. A Black gentleman named Luke Oatis
fired the boilers with wood. When he got
the steam up, it would turn a huge wheel which had belts that turned the
various parts of the gin which had four stands where the lint was separated
from the cottonseed. Outside the gin
there was a suck pipe which sucked the cotton into the gin from the wagons
hauling the cotton. The cottonseed were
blown in a pipe to a cottonseed house adjacent to a railroad siding. There was a compress which compressed the 500
pounds of cotton into a bale. The farmer
then took the bale of cotton to the cotton platform across from the depot and
sold the cotton and it was then shipped out by rail in boxcars The cottonseed
was taken to pay for the ginning costs. When the gin was running low on cotton,
Luke would blow the steam whistle so people would know that the gin needed
cotton.
After I married and my first year at Ole Miss, in 1954, I
measured cotton fields. Mr. V. P.
Shivers was the man who hired me. He
thought the job would last a good part of my summer vacation from school but it
only lasted two weeks. Then I went to New Orleans looking for
work and luckily got employed as a Rough Neck for Humble Oil and Refining
Company which later merged into Exxon.
Many years later an oil company sued one of my clients for
overpayment of $500,000 royalty and due to the fact I had worked with Humble while
in college at Ole Miss and the guy I dealt with had once worked for Humble we
were able to communicate and effected a satisfactory secret settlement. Numerous
Texas Lawyers called me wanting to know how I had effected a settlement but I couldn’t
tell them.
The dust bowls of the West occasionally during the 1930s
caused vast amounts of dust to hover over Bassfield for a day or so.
Everyone ate cornbread in the depression. Every fall we put
our corn in a corn crib in the barn and would shell some periodically and take
it to the grist mill operated by the Faler Brothers in Bassfield. Martin Faler was in charge of the
operation. The grist mill would grind
the corn into corn meal. It would keep some of the corn in payment. The rest of
the corn in the crib was used to feed the mules.
We grew most of our food during the depression. We had a
large garden and had turnips, mustard, butter beans, string beans, black eyed
peas, peanuts, tomatoes, beets, watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers, onions,
peppers, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, radishes and also had about a dozen
peach trees and pear and pecan trees. We also had a smokehouse where we kept
our hog meat and smoked it with hickory smoke and a chicken house which was
divided with a place for the hens to lay eggs and another place for them to
roost. We had a cane patch and in the fall we would
harvest the cane and take it to Clyde Burkett’s cane mill where it was crushed
into juice and then cooked to make molasses. We had molasses with biscuits
nearly every morning. We also picked wild blackberries and had blackberry pie.
Another treat in the fall was scuppernongs and bullis and wild plums. My
Mother was always busy canning various vegetables. So you can see we were never hungry.
Justice Court
in Bassfield, during the depression, was administered on Saturdays by Judge
Lott of Melba, under an oak tree where the post office is now located in
Bassfield. The Town had a jail on Hawkins Avenue. It
wasn’t used that much but occasionally the Town Marshall would place a drunk in
the jail. Mr Roy Courtney was the first Town Marshal I remember. Buel
Letchworth , a Mr.Cosper and Kermit Hathorn also served in that capacity.
World War 2 really changed things in Bassfield as well as
the rest of the United
States. On December 7, 1941, my Mother and I were in Monticello, Mississippi visiting my
Grandmother Greer. Grandmother’s neighbor, Mrs. Hazel Brinson, was the local newspaper reporter for the Jackson, Mississippi,
Clarion Ledger newspaper. While I was at her house an announcement was
made on the radio that Japan
had bombed Pearl Harbor. During the year, the
Army conducted maneuvers in Southwest Louisiana. Hundreds of six by six Army trucks passed
through Monticello
on then recently paved US Highway 84 going to the maneuvers. Some of the soldiers in 1940 going to the Louisiana maneuvers
bivouacked about ten miles from our house at Bassfield near Prentiss. We all
went to Prentiss one night to see the soldiers.
Also around the fall of 1940, the Army announced that Camp Shelby
would be reopened. This caused many
farmers to suddenly become carpenters building the Camp. It became the largest training facility in
the United States.
Over 100,000 soldiers were at Camp
Shelby at one time during
World War II. Over 14,000 tents housed the soldiers. 17,000 construction
workers built 1,800 buildings. Camp Shelby
contained 360,000 acres of land plus 400,000 acres of U.S. Forest land leased
for maneuvers. Others left Bassfield and
went to work at the giant Higgins boat plant in New Orleans whose boats were used extensively
in the D Day invasion. Some went to Oak Ridge, Tennessee
and worked on the construction of the atomic project there. The overall economy
started to improve. It was the beginning of the end for row crop farming in
Bassfield. People realized that more money could be made working in plants than
by growing cotton.
The Mississippi
Central Railroad also rebuilt its 7 mile line from Hattiesburg to Camp Shelby.
It had been abandoned after WW1. The
Mississippi Central demanded the Army give it equal treatment with the Illinois Central which
ran along the west side of Camp
Shelby. The Mississippi Central ran a train to Camp Shelby
each day. An estimated 15,000 cars a
year of freight was to routed Camp
Shelby each year during
the war. Also extra trains were required
when a division moved. Many of these trains were doubled headed by two steam
engines pulling 15 cars full of soldiers going to Wanilla, Mississippi
with 2 kitchen cars or vice versa through Bassfield. These troop trains either
got on or off the Gulf Mobile and Ohio Railroad at Wanilla. Other
trains got on the Southern Railroad at Hattiesburg. The Mississippi Central became a busy
railroad during the war.
There was extensive rationing during the war.
Gasoline, butter, tires, and sugar were
rationed. Everyone got a coupon book with stamps that gave you “x” amount of
the right to purchase the rationed items.
In order to conserve gasoline and extend the life of tires,
the speed limit on automobiles was reduced to 35 miles per hour. At that time
all roads in and around Bassfield were gravel.
After the westbound passenger train collided with a wooden
body school bus with 42 people on board and killed several
students in January 1934, the
Mississippi Highway Department, now called MDOT, constructed Highway 42 direct to Carson so as to eliminate
two crossings over the railroad. One railroad crossing was behind the United Methodist
Church in Bassfield and
the other a mile East of Carson on old highway 42. This train wreck received a
lot of publicity and because of the wreck the Mississippi Legislature later
outlawed wooden body school buses. One
of the cases went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Mississippi
then had a statute that required locomotives to not only blow their whistle at
crossings but to also ring their bells.
Following this accident the Mississippi Central installed a bell that
rang continuously
Mr. Will Kerley had a sales barn for horses and mules in
Bassfield. He would go to Fort Worth, Texas
every year and buy several cattle cars of mules. They would unload them at a stockade on the
railroad siding and then drive them down the main street to his barn. Each year he would have a sale. They also had a drawing for a prize of $25
and when I was twelve I won and took my first trip to New Orleans and visited my sister Marjorie.
One of the first casualties from Bassfield in World War 2
was Clyde Thompson who was killed in action early in the war on the cruiser USS
New Orleans. Another was William Earl
Burkett who was killed in action while serving with the Army near Normandy shortly after D
Day. Claude Leland Burkett was in the marines on Corregidor
when it fell in 1941 and he was held as a POW of Japan and was liberated at Fukuoka, Japan
when the war ended in 1945.
One of Bassfield’s famous air force pilots was Buford Blount
who flew in the Southwest Pacific during WW2; was in the Korean War soon after
its inception, and also flew in the Vietnam War. I shall never forget one
Sunday morning around 1943 I accompanied my father to downtown Bassfield. We
went to the front of the store building of Ray Hathorn, now Dr Randy Hathorn’s dental office, to get a shoeshine. Luke Oatis always shined shoes there on
Sunday mornings. All of a sudden a two engine plane, which was a C- 47, buzzed the Town very low from the North to the
South and nearly hit the water tank. It was Buford He was trying to get the attention of his
girlfriend and my cousin Cecil Glen Dickson.
Later some of his relatives went
to Hattiesburg Airport and he flew them back over
Bassfield. An enlisted man saw him allowing civilians ride in the plane and got
the tail number and reported it causing him to be a 2nd Lt for an
extended time. V. B. Hathorn also had a
son who buzzed Bassfield in a USAFF plane.
I studied the Morse code and oftentimes army airplanes would
be flying at nighttime during the war.
One night there were numerous planes flying South over our house and I
went out in the yard with my flashlight and signaled an SOS. One of the planes
dropped out of formation and circled the house. I signaled for him to disregard
and he went on back towards the formation. That ended my prank. Never again did
I repeat it.
In the late 1930s Bassfield’s public school constructed a
gymnasium. Basketball then became very popular. Everyone went to the
games. The school was then for whites
only. Mr. O.T.Hathorn, a prominent merchant, was a big backer of the teams.
Mr.O.T. was permitted to stand on the floor on the side of the ball court and
watch the games. He always had a big
cigar in his mouth.
The Bassfield boys team were then not too good. However the girls team was very good and went
to the State finals several years. Coach
Hurd Applewhite’s daughter, Kathryn, could shoot a basket by shooting backwards
over her head. Carson,
located 5 miles NW of Bassfield, also had a gym and they had a boys team that
won State.
When I got into high school, I played basketball. I loved
it. My last game was played in a tournament in Carson. I guarded Glen Daley, who later
played for Mississippi
State, and got the ball
away from him on two occasions. Since I did not get to finish the 12th
grade at Bassfield as I completed my work in summer school at Hinds Jr. College
during the summer of 1948, I missed playing basketball my last senior year. The coach, Dennis Fortenberry, had told me I
would be point guard my final year. However due to having pneumonia in my first
year of school, I was unable to pass my first year of school and wanted to get
on with my life and college and thus made up the lost year. So my junior year
at Bassfield High School was my last.
We had an Agriculture teacher at Bassfield, who believed in on
the job training. His name was C. S.
Miller. Some people called him
Cottonseed Miller. One day when we were in his agriculture class, he told us to
bring our brogan shoes and overalls to school the next day, which we did. Accordingly,
we went to his class the next day and then went to John Harrington’s farm. He was one of the first farmer’s to raise
cattle. In a pen by his barn there were
about a dozen bull yearlings. Mr. Miller told us how to surgically remove their
testicles. It didn’t take me long to
realize I didn’t want to be a surgeon.
When I was eleven, I started to work on the farm. My parents did not worry about child labor
laws. I enjoyed working. My Dad was the second largest planter in Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi and owned nearly a thousand
acres of land, most of which was in cultivation in cotton and corn. We had twelve houses for the share
croppers. None of these houses had
electricity or running water. My Dad
furnished the fertilizer, mules, plows and other farm equipment and the
sharecropper furnished all the labor and in the fall, when the cotton was
sold, the proceeds were split one half
to the sharecropper and one half to my Father.
My Father had to borrow considerable money to keep the farming operation
going. In Columbia
there was a store in the depression known as The Rankin Company. Mr. Harry Rankin advanced my Dad monies with
which to farm.
In the spring the cotton stalks had to be cut and the land
broken up with a mule drawn disc or plowed with a two mule middle buster plow.
Then it had to be further cultivated and fertilized. When it got warm enough
that you did not need cover on the bed at night, my Dad would plant the cotton
seed. This was around May l. Once the cotton came up, we had to side harrow it
and thin it with a hoe. We would
continue to plow around the cotton until we laid it by in July. Around August
15 we would start picking the cotton by hand which was an arduous task. The most I ever picked in one day was 255
pounds. We had two Black men who were champion cotton pickers. They were named Luther Reese and John
Spurlock. Luther could pick close to 400 pounds per day while John Spurlock
could pick 600 pounds a day.
John Spurlock was getting on with years when he worked for
my Daddy in the late 1930s. He always came to work with an old Army overcoat in
his arms. One day during noon
hour I asked John why he carried the coat with him all the time. John then
opened the coat and there was a pistol. John said when he was a young man it
became necessary for him to kill a man and that the man’s brother told him that
one day he would kill John. So John was
taking no chances.
I also asked John how had he learned to pick so much cotton
in a day? John said he had spent time in
the State penitentiary at Parchman. That
on the first day he picked about 200 pounds.
That one of the Department of Corrections personnel then whipped him
with black Nellie, a whip and lashed him on the bare back several times. After that he learned how to pick cotton very
fast. All cotton in the Bassfield area during the depression was picked by
hand. 1200 pounds made a bale. John
could pick half a bale a day.
Under Franklin Roosevelt’s administration the price of
subsidized cotton was 32 cents a pound when I grew my last crop in 1948.
However, not all years were profitable. We had crop failures
in 1943-44 due to excessive rain and boll weevils. My Dad never recovered from
these failures and it became necessary to sell the land or be foreclosed.
I then learned what it meant to be poor. We had to sell our 1940 Ford. We then only farmed about 40 acres. Things
changed drastically for us. My sisters
were older than me and had long completed junior college and or business college.
My sister Myra Louise who was fifteen years older than me
eloped in the mid 1930s and married Paul Deen and they lived for a time in Newport News, Virginia
where he sold insurance. My sister
Marjorie Garraway who was nine years older than I attended one year of college
and then went to a business college and became a secretary in New Orleans. My
Mother was nearly forty when I was born.
I don’t think I was a planned child. I was an accident.
My Brother In Law had been a Marines and had guarded the
American Embassy in Peiking China. He
gave me his Marine cap and for years I would play like I was a Marine. When World War 2 started the Deens lived in El Dorado, Arkansas. In 1943 Paul joined the Seabees as a Chief
Petty Officer. Then my sister Myra
Louise and her son, Tommy and young daughter, Ann, moved to Bassfield and lived with us. I can
still see the Allied moving van backed up to our house. They spent the rest of the war in Bassfield. Ann
caused a lot of excitement one evening when she swallowed a chicken bone and Dr. Blount couldn’t remove same and she was taken
by Joe Evans in his Oldsmobile car at 80 miles per hour over a crooked gravel
road some 40 miles to the sanatorium near Magee,
Mississippi where the chicken
bone was successfully removed.
As a child I loved to read.
When Life magazine came out my Mother, bought it for me the entire time
I was growing up. I loved reading it. My
sister Myra Louise would send me comics.
Superman was my hero. I also liked Dick Tracy. As I got older I enjoyed
reading books.
I enjoyed debates and when I got in High school I was on the
debate team. My partner was Iris
Broome. The question was should we adopt
socialized medicine? We did good and
beat a lot of big schools. We were
beaten by McComb which was a large school in the South
Mississippi finals. Our debate Coach was Mrs. Lela Carraway.
I was active in the Future Farmer’s of America. Mr. Charlie Miller our agriculture teacher
was an inspiration for me. On one
occasion, however, he talked me into appearing in a public speaking contest at
Prentiss. We had to prepare a speech
that lasted ten minutes and I only had three days to memorize it. A copy of the speech was given to each of
three judges. I did great until I got
down to the last page and my memory
failed. I then stumbled through the
speech by saying that farming was a great calling.
We had a baseball team and on one occasion we played
Prentiss and I swung at the ball as hard as I could and it sailed away and hit
the high school building and it was a home run.
After World War two, Bassfield had a good semi pro baseball
team. I enjoyed watching these games.
Mr. Ray Hathorn was the manager of the team and most of the players were
veterans of world war two. Several were about as good as pros. In fact one
tried out for the pros.
Working on the farm during the time I grew into manhood was
the best thing that ever happened to me.
It instilled the work ethic in me.
Also I worked and played with a lot of Blacks who worked or lived on our
farm. I think this helped me to accept
integration. Having responsibility also
greatly molded me. I therefore think
that coddling youth today who spend most of their time watching TV is one of the
main reasons we have so many delinquent children. A reasonable amount of work by minors would
be good.
In conclusion, Bassfield molded me for life. It definitely had a tremendous influence on
me.
