The boy was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of rural North Carolina on the tail end of the Great Depression. He entered the world in an old cheese factory that had been converted into a dwelling. His mother had a terribly difficult delivery, and it was so traumatic that the boy would be an only child.

Within the following year, the boy and his parents moved into a small wooden shack, and a month after the boy’s first birthday, a devasting flood hit their region. The mountains became so saturated with rain that “bust outs” occurred in the hills surrounding them and destroyed much of their cabbage crop.

The following fall, the boy’s father acquired a heavily wooded piece of land. Cutting trees, pulling stumps, and clearing brush, he managed to chop out enough space to build their family a new home. The boy’s parents planted a small patch of corn and beans in the new ground, and the boy’s father traded his labor in order to borrow a team to plow with.

Around this same time, the boy’s father registered for selective service. World War II was looming, and when the United States was drawn into the fray, he was constantly worried he would be drafted. But his job – helping cut government timber – afforded him successive deferments.

Toward the close of the war, when the boy was around five years old, the family temporarily moved to an adjacent county, where they rented a house and where the boy’s father continued his sawmill work. About a year later, when the boy reached school age, they returned to their former home.

Times were hard for the boy’s parents. His father didn’t earn much money, and he often worked for a dollar a day. For years, it was difficult for them to save a dime. On numerous occasions, the boy’s father borrowed money from people in the community, and he often bought items on store credit. In his spare time, he was able to build a house for a neighbor and was paid with a Chevrolet pickup, the first truck he ever owned.

The family raised their own hogs and chickens. About every weekend, the boy’s mother would kill a chicken for Sunday dinner. She also canned chicken, and, during hog killing time, she scraped the hogs and ground sausage.

Meanwhile, the boy and his cousins would raid their grandmother’s cupboard for leftover biscuits and cornbread and would break into her canned preserves. According to the grandmother, “They’d go out there and open my cans and eat what they wanted and then just close ‘em back up. Well, they’d sour and spoil. I didn’t know what had happened to my cans till after they was married and gone. They let it slip out what they’d done.”

The boy’s parents didn’t need many store-bought goods, but when it was necessary, many of the items were thankfully affordable. Fatback was three cents a pound and sugar about the same. Flour and corn meal were cheap, and gas was fifteen cents a gallon. For fifty cents, folks could buy a pair of overalls, and a good pair of shoes cost two dollars.

The boy was a pretty good kid, although he could be a little lazy, a little spoiled, and a lot stubborn. Although his mother often threatened to whip him, she rarely made good on those threats. On one occasion, though, the boy’s father followed through and punished him for ruining his brand new, white, Sunday shoes while playing in the mud in some swampy woods. On another occasion, the boy got a whipping when he threw his cap into the yard and stubbornly refused to obey his father’s instruction to pick it up.

On yet another occasion, the boy neglected to complete some promised work for his grandfather. When his grandfather asked him about it, the boy made a sassy remark that he didn’t think his grandfather heard. But the grandfather had better hearing than the boy imagined, and the boy ended up going home with more than hurt feelings!

The boy sometimes declared he was running away from home. One time, when his father was away, the boy got mad at his mother over something, and he swore he was leaving. His mother went on with the milking, but she watched him as he went up on the hill and sat on a stump. She knew he wasn’t about to leave home, and in a little while he came back to the house.

When the boy was about seven or eight years old, his father borrowed a stump puller. He was still in the multi-year process of clearing the land around their home and was removing the stumps left by all the trees he had cut down. The more stubborn stumps required blasting with dynamite, and the boy’s father gave instruction for the boy to be kept inside. One stump was particularly large, and the boy’s father heavily packed dynamite around it. Unbeknownst to him, the dynamite was defective, and when it went off, the sound of it was inordinately loud and was heard for miles around. The boom captured the boy’s attention and, leaving his mother churning butter in the kitchen, he went into the yard to see what had happened.

About that time, pieces of stump were flying through the air, and a big chunk caught the boy in his back. The impact caused him to swallow the wad of chewing gum he had in his mouth, and it knocked the breath out of him. The boy’s father ran toward the house and, finding the boy with blood running out of his mouth, thought he had been killed. The boy was rushed to a hospital, and after throwing up some blood, his breathing returned to normal. Remarkably, he only spent one night in the hospital, and by the next afternoon, he returned to school.

Despite never seeming to bring a book home from school, the boy always made pretty good grades. He liked to sketch and doodle, and his fifth grade geography book reflected that with scribbles such as:

“Love is a thing shaped like a lizard

That raps its tail around your heart and nibbles at your gizzard”

“Apples are good

Peaches are better

If you love me, answer my letter”

“Do not steal this book my little lad

For 42 cents it cost my dad”

The boy enjoyed being rough and tumble in the great outdoors, and on a couple of occasions, he rode tires down a hill and skinned his face up. For the longest while, he came home every evening with a patch of hide torn off somewhere. The boy’s father finally told him if he came home skinned up again, he was going to take a switch to him. The very next evening, as the boy’s father was cleaning up some new ground, the boy came walking home. The father glanced at the boy and saw that his entire nose was skinned but never let on that he had seen him. The boy eased near and sat quietly on a log. In a little while, he sheepishly said, “Ho Dad.” The boy’s father finally acknowledged him but didn’t have the heart to punish him.

The boy and his younger uncle were great pals, and the boy’s father built them a one-window cabin in the woods, replete with bunk beds, straw tick mattresses, a small stove, a kerosene lamp, and a table. It was stocked with Louis L’Amour westerns, and the boys enjoyed spending carefree days in the cabin reading, eating, playing “cowboys and Indians,” and listening to the scary night sounds of the surrounding woods.

When the two were around the ages of ten and twelve, and whenever they weren’t busy helping with the family’s bean and cabbage crops, they focused their attention on baseball, hitting rocks with bats for hours on end and imagining themselves to be Duke Snider or Mickey Mantle. They got so good at the sport that hardly any ground or fly balls got past their defenses. The boy’s father started taking them to games, and at about age thirteen, the boy became a first string shortstop. Soon, he was traveling and playing baseball over a three-county area.

This has been an account of the boy’s life through his grade school years, and for now this will suffice. More can and probably will be told by me about the boy…the boy who would become my father.