“I walked not in the way of righteousness...” Part VI

Let me say this about growing up, I was a happy kid for the first eight years!!!! I remember there being a lot of love in our house. I was a very shy but happy little boy. I do have a couple of specific memories of that time.
One was starting school. After I got over crying everyday for the first hour, I rather enjoyed kindergarten. I look back on those pictures and I am smiling up a storm in them. Our teacher was Mrs. Potter and she was a nice, sweet, kind lady. The kids were great also. They would, at times, talk about events that I didn’t understand and that made me feel a little dumb, but it was a lack of my socialization. Even though everyone in our neighborhood was from Kentucky, Tennessee or West Virginia; most all of the kids I went to school with were from higher class neighborhoods. Some had Dads who were executives for Ford or General Motors or other companies. I never went on a ski weekend in Colorado or visited Disneyland. I was sure they had never eaten sweetbreads or killed a rattlesnake in their cousin’s back yard – so it was cool.
I also remember driving all day to visit family in Pikeville, KY. We would load up early in the morning and take off for Route 23 which would take us straight to ‘home’. Home, that is what Momma and Daddy called it. Because it was home to them, it was home to me, even though I had never lived there. We would stay with my Aunt Bootsy. Her house was halfway up a hill (actually it was a mountain, Momma just called it a hill). We would park the car in a community parking lot, walk a piece, then take the 49 steps up the hill to her house. There was a coal tipple at the foot of the mountain, where her hill was. I loved to watch the coal trucks, which came out of the mountain mines, back up the ramp at the tipple and dump their load in the feeder and pull off and down the alley to get another load. After a while the coal train would pull up to the tipple and start taking its load. I would sit on Bootsy’s front porch which was 19 feet off the ground and watch this spectacle everyday that we didn’t have anything to do. My Aunt Maud lived at the bottom of the ‘hill’ and two doors over. At least once a visit we would all get together at her house. It would be all of her kids and their kids, and all of us. Being shy as I was I would find a chair in the corner and watch them all interact. I did not really feel connected to this “crowd”, I was the only one not born in Pikeville, but I felt very proud to be a part of this family that loved and cried, cussed and feuded with each other.

Come Memorial Day we would dress up in our Sunday going best and visit the graves of family who had gone on before. We would once again hear the stories of death, bullets and coal mines. Daddy and Doug would pull weeds and rake around the graves. Momma and Aunt Bootsy would put the flowers on the graves. I would watch and wonder. Was I a part of this loving, caring family? Why did I only feel this way here, at ‘home’?
The other thing I remember is our family being part of the Underground Hillbilly Railroad. After WW II most of the hill people who went to the Detroit area to work in the bomber plants stayed and went to work for Ford or other large manufacturer. Daddy went to work at Great Lakes Steel (GLS) as an inspector. His job was to inspect the steel as it went into the ‘cold mill’ and grade it according to strength and purity. How he did this was always a puzzle to me; but they took his word for it and sold it accordingly. (When Daddy retired, one of the Big Bosses came to his party and remarked that “with Press retiring, an end of an age had come...” It would take two college graduates with engineering degrees and computers to replace him, his pencil and 7th grade education.)
Anyway, as young men in the hills would come to working age they had two choices: 1] work in the coal mines or 2] go north to find factory work. Some of these young men were friends or their families were friends with Momma and Daddy. When they came north, they would seek our house out for a place to stay until they could get on their feet. Daddy or my Uncle Joe, (Momma’s brother who lived 2 houses down from us) would then help them find a job, either at GLS or Ford where Uncle Joe worked. Anytime of the day or night there would be a knock on the door, then a short explanation to Momma or Daddy, then the pot was on the stove, coffee was brewing and the latest update on family and friends in the hills. They would be on the couch a night or two and then be gone. There would be times we would have 5 or more scattered about the floors. It was agreed that we would house them and Uncle Joe would provide the food. At this time Uncle Joe had several teenage daughters; let the reader understand.
This all ended one day when the knock at the door was not a starving hillbilly but a Michigan State Trooper. I was 7 years old and when I opened the door I saw the absolute largest human being I had ever seen in my life before. His fist was as big as my head. He had the nicest smile, like the kind you get when the turkey is brought to the Thanksgiving table. He asked for Myrt. The officer explained that there had been a store robbed that afternoon by two white men. One had been shot in the leg, the other got away. The one who had been captured gave our address as his. The officer came to see if the other man was there or if we had any information on him. Momma and Daddy told them all they knew. The officer was very friendly and continued to called Momma and Daddy by name. Come to find out, he was one of the first to come out of the hills and stay with Momma and Daddy. He was a son of one of Daddy’s black brothers from the construction work he had done when he quit school. After he left, Momma said, “No more; we have to do something else.” Daddy and Uncle Joe rented an apartment for the newcomers to stay in; so we continued in the underground Hillbilly railroad, but at a distance.