Bassfield, Mississippi

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 6^th 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 7^th 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 2^nd 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 12^th 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.