Buford McCain
I was born in Iuka, Tishomingo County, Mississippi on 2 July 1916. My father is William Joseph McCain and my Mother is Georgia Ann Kennedy.
My father grew-up in Counce, Tennessee and farmed land that is presently underwater because of the creation of the beautiful Pickwick Lake. My mother grew-up in Holcut, Mississippi, about eight miles from Iuka the city where I was born.
One of the first things that I can remember in my home was my Brother Barto being very ill from pneumonia. In those days there were no ‘modern drugs’ available to control this type of infection. The only thing the doctor could prescribe, that could give him any relief, was aspirin and Vicks Vaporub. This remedy was of little or no value with his illness. I remember Mother watching over him day and night as she nursed him back to health. During those long days and nights of his illness, she got very little sleep, her primary concern being for him, as he lay there so near death. Eventually Barto began to recover. The family got into the habit of allowing him his way in most things during his recovery. This favoritism continued as he got better. It got to the point in our home that the natural thing to do was to give in to Bart’s demands. He, as any child would do, took advantage of this situation as he got better and recognized that he was being favored. Olga and Maude, my older sisters were mature enough to understand the situation. They had seen Barto so very close to death and then recover and actually return to us. This obvious favoritism however, was difficult for me, my Brother Herb and Sister Montez to deal with since we were too young to understand exactly what was going on. We younger children learned to cope with the situation during our growing-up years. Bart was seriously affected by our doting family and the attention he received. Although it was no fault of his own, he grew to be a selfish, overbearing and very difficult person to get along with unless everything was done his way. Unfortunately Bart never really learned to control this, even during his adult life.
I started to school while we lived in Iuka. In those days, the first year in school was called the primer class. The second year was the first grade, etc. Transportation was difficult in those days, although we accepted our situation, not knowing anything different. There were no cars and we lived about one mile from school. The primer class didn’t start until noon. I would walk to school with the older kids in the morning. I would sit with them in their class until noon, at which time I was expected to go to my class. The first day of school I refused to go. I suppose I was somewhat timid and preferred the comfort of being with my older sibling. The head of the school was referred to as ‘professor’ instead of principal, as we know it today. No one was allowed to address our principal as anything except Professor Howard. Even calling him Mr. Howard would bring a scolding. Professor Howard was summoned when the teacher learned that I had no intentions of going to class the first day. He was very kind and persuaded me to go to class with a ten-cent bribe. I took the money and went to class. The second day at noontime, when I was expected to go to my class, I refused and insisted on staying with my sister. Professor Howard was again summoned; again he solved the problem with a reward. A shiny apple from him convinced me that the thing to do was to attend my own class. The same scene occurred on the third day at noon. Professor Howard was again summoned. I was probably curious as to what I would receive as a reward this third day. When he appeared however, he had a switch in his hand. He said nothing, but communicated his intentions by pointing the switch toward my classroom. Needless to say Professor Howard was not troubled by me again.
About a month into the school year my family moved about five miles out into the country. We children went to a small school called Pumpkin Center. The school only had tw6 classes and two teachers. They simply split the student-body in half. The younger students went to one class and the older students to the other. The two teachers taught the children in their particular class at that child’s grade level, although everyone and every class was co-mingled. My teacher was seventy-five years old. There was no such thing as mandatory retirement or social security. She was old and her methods were out-dated. We learned very little in her class. She did however communicate to us that she loved us and we loved her. Miss Findley retired from teaching after my first year. Although she was not an effective teacher, the students and the community hated to see her go. At the end of my primer class year Miss Findley asked everyone to ‘say a speech’. Those were our directions. We were not told to give a speech or a talk but to say a speech. When I communicated my assignment to my Father he must have recognized that I was concerned about this assignment since I recall that he took time to help me compose and memorize the following:
Tis all around the turkey pen,
Down upon my knees;
I laughed myself to death
To see the turkey sneeze.
This was my first public ‘speech’. There were probably no more than twenty people in my class, which consisted of first through fourth grades. I received first place recognition and was very proud.
My Father, William Joseph McCain was a hard workingman. In fact he probably literally worked himself to death. Papa died in the spring of 1937. It was shortly after I was married. When Papa was a young man he left home and worked by the ‘month’. He simply hired-out as a farm hand for a small amount of pay along with room and board. When his Daddy, my Grandfather, got sick Papa returned to the family and the family farm. Papa’s intentions were to work the farm and take care of his parents until they passed away, at which time he would find a wife and raise his own family. Finally however, at the age of thirty-one Papa decided to marry my mother Georgia Ann Kennedy. Mama was twenty-eight years old at the time of their marriage. Mama and Papa were second cousins. When Papa married neither of his parents had died so he had both of them to support. Additionally, my Mother’s Mother, Grandmother Amanda Eliza McAnally, soon moved in with Mama and Papa. Grandma McAnally lived with us as far back as I remember. She lived with us during all of my growing-up years. She held Buddy before she died. Grandmother Kennedy (Amanda Eliza) was Grandpa Daniel Kennedy’s second wife. She was only eight years older than her oldest step-daughter. Grandpa Kennedy died eight years before Mama married Papa.
Perhaps this would be a good place to record what I remember of Grandma and Grandpa McCain, my Father’s parents. Grandpa McCain was a kindly old man whom everybody loved. He was old, feeble and bent over with age. He was only mobile with the aid of two walking sticks. He did as much as he could around the place and even in the field. He would go to the field with everyone else in the early morning if he was at all able. He would hobble through the rows with his cane, doing whatever he could. When it was necessary to thin the crop or hoe for weeds, Granddaddy McCain would use his hoe to walk with as he made his way through the field. He would locate himself squarely on both feet and hoe as far as he could reach in every direction. He then would use the hoe as a walking stick to maneuver himself a few feet farther down the row and then hoe again as far as he could reach. He was willing to do this every day and without complaint. Everyone in the family who knew him communicated to me that he was a hard worker and insisted on doing as much as he could. The reader must appreciate that the things I communicate about my Granddaddy Samuel Wright McCain are the stories and conversation that I heard from my older siblings and from my parents. I’m sure they are accurate but they are mostly second hand information. Granddaddy McCain died one month before I was born. When Papa talked of his Daddy, it was with deep respect and almost with reverence.
Grandmother McCain was a different personality. My memories of her are very accurate. She died when I was thirteen years old. When I say that she was as mean as a yard dog, I am being kind to her. The family tells of the events leading-up to my Granddaddy McCain’s death. Grandpa was too sickly and too feeble in the last days of his life to even hobble to the field with the men. He was at home with the women and mostly in bed. The day he died, he got out of bed during the day and slowly made his way to the out-house on his two walking canes, in the shuffling manner that I previously described. On his way back to the house, he fell and didn’t have the strength to get up. The women in the house, my mother and older sister included, rushed to him and managed to get him back into the house and into bed. My Mother commented ‘poor old pa, he’s just about gone’. Grandma McCain’s response to Mama’s statement was, ‘huh, he’ll be up from there and married again after I’m dead and gone’. Grandpa died that evening and Grandma lived another fourteen years.
Grandma was always unhappy and very negative. When Papa came from the field each day, totally spent with exhaustion, he greeted her immediately on coming into the room with ‘how you feeling today Ma?’ If, however, he failed to greet her, she was very stern and ugly. Her comment was always the same ‘Will, How’s your Mother today?’ spoken in a very ugly tone of voice. This impressed my young mind. I vividly recall Papa’s coming in from a long hot summer day’s work in the field. To me he appeared near exhaustion, but more concerned about his family’s welfare than his, to be rebuked by his own Mother if he failed, even in his exhaustion, to properly greet her. After Papa greeted Grandma each day, she spent considerable time explaining her various aches, pains and miseries. I don’t recall Papa ever saying a cross word to her. He was always considerate and kind.
I recall another incident that happened before I was born concerning Papa. It seems that Papa had a hernia that needed to be repaired. The doctor came to the house and, using a Barlow knife, with no anesthetic, performed the operation in the house. He sewed Papa’s wound after the repair work and left him to recover. Olga, my oldest Sister, had the assignment of fanning Papa to keep the flies from bothering him. She was not very old at the time, but took her job seriously. She told everyone that she was ‘bashing Papa’. Bashing became the terminology at our house for fanning flies. If Papa had favorites among the children I honestly believe it was Olga and me. She was the oldest and helped as much as she could. I had to take the lead in helping Papa however, since Bart was sickly and spoiled. At a very young age I started to work with Papa and generally was with him. During the summer we were together farming, during the winter we cut timber. I took-on a man’s role at a very young age. The rewards for this were tremendous. Because of the hours I spent working and talking with him I probably was closer to Papa and got to know him much better than my Brothers and Sisters. During the hot summer days in the field I worked beside him and with him. At noon we would find a shade tree to eat our lunch and talk. During the winter, while we worked cutting timber we would build a fire to keep us warm while we had lunch and talked.
Once when I was about eleven years old, Papa and I went to the barn early in the morning to harness the mules. We had a good pair of mules at the time. Their names were Bell and Sally. Papa was harnessing one of the mules while I harnessed the other. Bell and Sally were used to being together all of the time. When Papa got his mule rigged he headed to the wagon to start hitching her up. Papa got the harness on his mule first, of course since he was bigger, stronger and much more experienced than I at this sort of thing. When Papa led his mule to the wagon, my mule got concerned. She wiggled and stomped and moved around. She wanted to be with the other mule, and finally went trotting out to where Papa was almost finished hitching his mule to the wagon. My mule ran up beside the other, positioning herself exactly where she was supposed to be and waited to be hitched to the wagon. I of course was chasing along behind, trying to finish harnessing. By the time I got to them Papa said, ‘huh, the mule is smarter than the boy’.
When I was nineteen years old I joined the Civilian Conservation Corps. My primary motivation in joining the CC camp was the monthly income that it would generate. The CCC provided room and board, plus a thirty-dollar per month salary. Papa had bought a farm. I arranged to have twenty-five dollars of my salary sent home to help him pay for the farm. The other five dollars I received for expenses. The first day that I arrived at the camp, I met Charles Foster. We soon became fast friends. Charles remembers that he taught me to shave with a safety razor. I’m sure that he is right. I traded a pocket watch that I did not need for a pair of shoes that he did not need. Charles eventually married my Sister Maude and became my Brother-In-Law. He continues to be my very dear friend.
The CCC did a lot of conservation work. We fought forest fires and installed many miles of telephone line. I generally worked on a telephone wire crew. My job initially was to clear the way for the wires that were strung from the telephone poles. I climbed the trees that needed to be trimmed and cut away the limbs that were in the way. On each crew there were three ‘climbers’. The climber’s job was to climb the poles using a set of spurs and safety belt, install a set of insulators on the cross-member and attach a previously strung wire to the insulator. The climber’s job was considered to be the best job on the crew since it required a little more skill than most of the other jobs. One of the climbers on our crew became sick and couldn’t work. The other two climbers were instructed to skip every third pole so that they could keep pace with the rest of the crew. After it became obvious that our climber would not be returning, the crew boss told me to go back up the line and start attaching the line to the skipped poles. He didn’t suggest any spur training and I am sure that he knew that I had none. I put on the equipment and started working my way up the pole. It took me an hour to get up the first pole, a task that typically takes no more than a few minutes. After I got to the top settled in and started to do my work. I suddenly realized that I didn’t have the insulators that I needed. I looked down at the ground and saw them lying there next to the pole, shining in the sun. I had forgotten to take them up. Needless to say I soon became an accomplished pole climber. Every morning a driver would take me out from the rest of the crew, drop me off and leave me to attach the wires to every third pole. He would pick me up at noon time, take me to the rest of the crew for lunch and then return me to my work after lunch. This went on for several days as I recall. Soon I saw the main crew working on the horizon. Every day I got closer to them. Eventually of course I caught them. I was the third climber on the crew after that. A climber whose spur became detached from the pole while he was mounted on it had to slide down and start over. There was no way to restart the spur while on the pole. You simply had to grab the pole and slide down. The exercise of sliding the pole was called ‘burning the pole’. Buford Neal was the head climber on a different crew. I recall that he was atop a thirty-five foot pole showing off in front of some young ladies. He lost his footing and had to burn the pole in front of his audience. This story provided some humor for the rest of the crew and was talked about for quite some time.
I first met my wife Lena Mae Herndon when she was bout thirteen years old. I was probably sixteen at the time. I was immediately drawn to her and knew deep down in my heart that I would marry her someday even at this early age. This feeling was confirmed years later when my Son Nolan received his Patriarchal Blessing. He was told that he had chosen his parents before he was born. When I read this I recalled the first time I saw Lena when she was thirteen and I felt that she would be my wife. Neither of us was a member of the church then but the spirit of the Lord communicated this feeling to me. When Lena was about fifteen I tried to get better acquainted with her and I let her know that I would be interested in socializing with her or dating her. She let me know in no uncertain terms that she was not interested in my advances. Two years later when she was seventeen she let me know that she was interested in me and our courtship started then. As I recall it was on an occasion when I was visiting home over the week end from the CC camp. Several people were at my house visiting and socializing. Lena was there and I noticed that her attitude had changed toward me. Every time I said something she giggled and even if it was not meant to be funny. She giggled again and again if I made a joke or said something that really was funny. This was very obvious to me and I thought she might be sending me a signal of interest. Later that evening when she and I happened to be alone I asked her if she wanted to go for a ride in Charles’ old car. She said that she would and on the ride we decided to go steady. I was more serious than her about the commitment however. She continued to date around the community. I know that she went out with my Brother Barto and she also dated G.W. Jamison while I was away. I was in the CCC’s and was only home when I could get away. Lena’s Daddy was an overbearing person. It was impossible for me to call on her at her house because of him. My Sister Maude would sneak Lena away so that I could meet with her and so that we could visit and court. This made an awkward situation for us since we were generally a threesome. In order to make this situation a little less awkward for the three of us I started bringing Charles Foster home with me from the CCC’s. This would make a foursome and together we had some good times. Although it was unplanned by Maude or by me, Charles and Maude soon fell in love and decided to marry.
I think it was on my next trip home that Lena and I became engaged. When I got home I sent Maude down to get Lena, as was the practice. I had decided to propose to her and had intended on at least a two year engagement. That evening when we were alone I slid my arm around her shoulder and pulled her close to me. I said “I wish you belonged to me”…her response was ‘I do too”. I then said “I consider that a promise”. Three months later on January 2, 1937 we were married. Maude and Charles were married a few months prior to our marriage.
Lena got pregnant right away. She and I felt like that it was only fitting and proper for us to be together and we wanted to be together so I rented a farm and mustered out of the CC Corps. My re-enlistment date was April 1st and when I rented the place on March 22 the Landlord wanted us right then. I arranged with the CCC to quit a week before my enlistment was up so that I could move onto the place and we could set up housekeeping. Charles Foster mustered out on April 1st. Lena and I moved onto the place a week before Charles and Maude. The Landlord would only rent us the farm with the understanding that all four of us would live and work on the place. He knew that it would take at least four people to handle that much land. He really wanted all four of us right then but we were able to talk him into waiting a week for Charles. Looking back it was a good year. We were young and in love. Charles and I worked extremely well together. I took the lead in running the place and probably made most of the farming decisions. Charles was always a pleasure to be around. He would try anything I suggested and do whatever needed to be done around the place. My only frustration that first year was Lena. I didn’t think she was taking proper care of herself. She was only seventeen years old and was still a girl in a lot of ways. She would run and play games in the yard with other young people. I was extremely worried. I had no idea that the things she was doing were actually good for here. The doctors in those days told pregnant women to rest a lot and not to exert themselves.
Our Landlord was renting a plantation from another landowner. We were share-cropping a part of that plantation. This was an arrangement wherein we only provided our labor. The landlord provided the animals, seed and implements; we then would share in the profits that were made or we would share in the commodities that were produced. We
Monday, April 6, 2009
Buford McCain Story Part 2
had to provide our own food and feed for the animals under this arrangement. We found out at harvest time, however, that the landlord thought he was dealing with a couple of dummies. His intention when he let us have the land was to beat us out of any profits. I heard Maude say that had it not been for me, the landlord would have been successful. She thinks Charles would not have stood up to him. I think she is right. Our agreement with the landlord was only oral, which was typical in those days. We had agreed that he would get half of the crop. Everything was in his name however. When I became suspicious that we weren’t going to get our share, I confronted the man and demanded our portion. He knew we were serious. Charles was right there with me and was ready to fight or to do whatever I suggested. He backed me every inch of the way. When the landlord realized that his life and limb might be in danger, he gave us half of the crop. Charles and I then split our half, which gave us each a fourth. We had the corn crop and sixteen dollars apiece, after we paid all of our bills. We were satisfied that we had had a good and productive year. That fall I bought a team of my own and used the corn to feed my own animals the next year.
After we harvested our 1937 crop we moved to Shannon, Mississippi and onto some land that Cliff Herndon, Lena’s Brother, was renting. Our first child, a boy whom we named Buford Nolan was born on November 28, 1937 in Shannon, on the farm that cliff was renting. We actually left Okolona before all of our crop was harvested. Lena was due to deliver and we wanted to get moved before she had the baby. There was some cotton to be harvested when Lena and I left. Charles was supposed to finish harvesting the cotton, which would have given us a little more return on our first year’s farming operation. After I left however, Charles didn’t pick another bowl. I guess he needed me there to tell him what to do.
Cliff’s wife had died and he had two little girls to raise. He wanted us to move in with him. I was to share the crop and the labor with Cliff, somewhat like Charles and I had done in 1937. This year Cliff and I had the implements and the animals to farm with, therefore our arrangement with the landlord was a twenty-five/seventy-five percent split. We would share the crop with him based on our doing all of the work using our tools, equipment and animals and would give him one-fourth of the crop as rent. Lena, who was about ready to deliver Nolan, would keep house for all of us. She did the cooking, washing, ironing and house cleaning, not only for the three of us but also for Cliff and his two kids. This seemed like a satisfactory arrangement since we were about to have a baby of our own and Lena would have to stay around the house anyway.
I had made arrangements before leaving Okolona, MS with Dr. Hansel to deliver our first child. When we left and moved to Shannon, I let him know what we were doing and he agreed to come to Shannon, about fifteen miles away, when Lena was ready to deliver. I had already paid him for the delivery in that I had worked that summer for him to offset the $25 charge for the delivery. When the time came in November for her to have the baby I called the doctor on the phone. Keith Barnett was a county supervisor in the area and he had a phone in his home. I used his phone to make the call. Everybody in the entire neighborhood used his phone in a situation where a phone was absolutely necessary. The county supervisor was an elected position and this gave Keith an advantage over his competition in that he could do the people in our community a favor by allowing us the use of his phone. He expected us to vote for him in return for the favor. Dr. Hansel was the only country doctor that I knew of who took a nurse with him when he delivered babies. The doctor came out in the afternoon, the baby was delivered about ten at night as I recall. The baby turned out to be real sick. We could barely keep him breathing. We called Dr. Hansel back the next day. He had to work with Buddy all night to keep him breathing and we were near exhaustion. We didn’t know what to do, except call the doctor back. When he got there he said, ‘When I left here last night I knew that baby wasn’t right and I thought he would be dead before I got home. But now there is nothing to worry about. Thousands of people have lost little babies, and they all live over it. Right now that baby’s life is just as uncertain as if you rolled a set of dice across that floor. You can’t know what they will turn-up. There is nothing I can do. The baby is going to live or it is going to die, but it is probably going to die. The chances are against the baby living’. After the doctor told us he could do nothing about the baby, we didn’t call him back any more. We just did what we could to keep the baby breathing. For days and weeks we had to keep a close eye on him day and night. We couldn’t sleep at the same time. Someone had to keep an eye on him all of the time. He would just stop breathing. We could work with him a little bit and get him breathing again. He wasn’t interested in nursing so we had to force feed him with a medicine dropper. Lena would pump the milk out with a breast pump and force feed him. Once he started getting some nourishment, he started getting some strength. Once he got a little strength, he started nursing and he started breathing better. All of the rest of our babies came out screaming for the tit except buddy.
I had bought a team so was in pretty good shape to handle my end of the arrangements with cliff Herndon, that second year of our marriage. We had a pretty good year that year and as I recall things were satisfactory in our working relationship. Cliff had a habit of saying that he was going off for an hour or two on an errand, but would be gone all day. For this reason I tried to talk him into dividing the land that we were working. He could be responsible for his and me for mine. He was unwilling to do this; obviously he wanted me to do most of the work. His argument was that we needed both teams. He was right in that when we were breaking land, sometimes I would use both of his animals. Sometimes it took four horses to pull a single turning plow in that hard dirt. One of his horses was old and broken-down and sickly and couldn’t carry its share of the work anyway. In fact that old horse died that summer and we ended up using my horses and mostly my labor anyway. The second year with cliff however, the crop-year of 1939 was intolerable. He was gone as much as he was around. That second year cliff bought a pair of young mules so in addition to farming we had the task of breaking these young mules. In the end, the second year was as difficult as the first for my horses, since the young mules were almost more trouble than they were worth. This was my first experience with breaking young mules; I later became accomplished at breaking them. A couple of times I almost had a bad run-away working with those new mules by myself while cliff was gone running around. Lena and I had talked it over and decided that we would make the most of it until harvest and then sever the relationship. As cliff moved-about in the community he bragged that he had me working down there on the place for him and that he controlled me and that I was afraid of him. This kind of conversation of course eventually got back to Lena and me. It didn’t help an already intolerable situation. Cliff was also telling people that he was going to have to whip me to control me. At some point he had decided that he was going to do just that, that is to “whip” me. The situation got to the point where we were openly arguing about the fact that I was doing most of the work. One day I was out in the yard cutting and splitting stove-wood by myself of course, since he was off drinking. Buddy was old enough that he was walking by this time. Buddy was toddling around there when cliff came up with Glover, Lena’s older brother. Cliff and Glover were big buddies and drinking companions. They both had bad reputations in the community for running-around, drinking and spending time with women with questionable reputations, even though Glover was married. Buddy was trotting around there enjoying the attention of his two uncles when Cliff picked-up Buddy and got into a pick-up truck with Glover. They were driving up and down the dirt road in front of the place making noise and acting-up. Lena was crying and worrying about Buddy. I laid down my axe. I went and got Prince, one of my horses. My plan was to ride Prince down the road as fast as the truck on one of their passes by the house, get off the horse into the truck and get my kid back by whatever means. As it turned out that never became necessary. I doubt that they knew what I was doing in getting the horse, but about this time Glover stopped the truck in front of the house. Cliff got out with the baby and came to the house as Glover drove away. Lena was sitting on a piece of wood by the house, a big log actually that we called a back log. She was still crying. He came walking up and saw her crying and said “what the G.D. hell is the matter with you? She started fussing at him for taking her baby and running around while he was drunk. When he started yelling at her I told him to shut-up. When I said that Cliff drew his right fist way back behind him and said to me, what the G.D. Hell have you got to say about it? My response was, “you heard what I said, I said to shut-up”. He then swung at me from way back behind in a hay-maker mode. I had plenty of time to react to his swing. I ducked and when he came by me, I hit him under his chin in an upper-cut fashion. He went down flat on his back of course. My blow was as much a shove as a punch but it was effective enough to knock him off his balance. He staggered back about ten feet and fell on his back. He got up and came at me in the same mode with his right fist drawn back just as far as he could reach. When he got to me and swung I did the same thing. I ducked under it and as I raised up I hit him under the chin with my right fist in the same upper-cut motion. He staggered back several feet and fell on his back again. It was almost like an instant replay. When Cliff got up this time he bent over and started running towards me with his head down. He intended butting my mid-section with his head to knock me down. When he got to me I side-stepped just a little and put my right hand on his shoulder and with my left hand on his chest I spun him as he ran by me. He landed in the same position a third time, flat on his back in the dirt and right at my feet. When he got up that time he was very close to me and started grabbing for my throat to choke me but I got his thumb in my mouth and I held on. That is the position we were in when a neighbor came running to us and broke-up the fight.
The next morning I found and rented another place to farm. Cliff never spoke another cross word to me up until the day that he died after this unfortunate incident. He was very kind and considerate in all of our associations after this. In retrospect and years later, I am of the opinion that the Lord had his hand in breaking-up Cliff and me. Had we been able to get along, or had we settled our differences after the squabble and continued to work together, it might have been difficult for my family to be converted to the Gospel. During this time the Lord was arranging a situation wherein we would be able to receive the missionaries and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I arranged and moved my family, Barto’s family and Charles and Maude along with Mama and my unmarried Sister Montez onto the new place where we started making a crop together the next year.
At this point I should go back to the year 1937 and bring the reader up to date on some of the things in my Brother Barto’s life. When Papa died in 1937, Barto announced that he would take over the home place. Papa was buying a 175 acre farm when I was in the CC’s. I helped Papa pay for this land. Our intention, Papa’s and mine, was that I should have the farm. We had not planned on his dying so soon of course. Barto was not very dependable and Papa and I both knew this. Bart decided at Papa’s death that he should have the place. He was married and when Papa died he moved his wife Wilma into the house with Mama, Herb and Montez. Charles and Maude moved to the place with them about the same time I moved to Shannon to farm with Cliff. This group was going to farm the home place. Bart did poorly from the outset on the home place. He was not much of a leader and Herb was even less of a leader. Mama kept telling me that I should get back and check their crops. She was concerned that they would not make a crop at all and that their investment in the debt payments already made would be lost. When I finally got around to looking at the home place it was too late to save the crop. The cotton had not even been thinned. No cultivating had been done. Barto had gotten mad at some of the family, or all of the family and had run off. He and his family had moved to the delta area of Mississippi where Wilma was from. It was a little town called Rosedale, MS. He had just left the home place. Mama told me that Charles and Herb went to the field every day and wrestled and played after Bart left. When I saw the home place it was a disaster. I had been working trying to make my crop without much help from Cliff. There was nothing I could do to help. The home place was lost. Bart was there for two seasons. I guess he made a pretty successful crop the first year in 1937 but he got mad and took off after the crop was planted in 1938 and let the place go.
My feeling almost fifty years later as I write this is that the Lord put me in a situation to bring that portion of the family together so that we could be taught the Gospel and accept it together. At any rate, after my falling-out with Cliff Herndon, I rented a farm. I moved my family onto the farm. I also moved my Mother, my Brother Hubert, my Sister Montez and Charles and Maude Foster onto the place. I also sent a neighbor who had a pickup truck down to the delta with word for Bart and Wilma to come into the operation with us. I gave the neighbor a calf in payment to haul Bart and his belongings back to the farm in Plantersville, MS. After all of the negative things that I had seen him do and after all of the people I had seen Bart hurt, there was no reason for me to do this, except that the spirit of the Lord was giving me direction. I didn’t know that at the time of course. The Lord wanted him with us so that he could be taught the Gospel and thereby his posterity would be raised in the church and do all of the righteous works that they are now doing today. Bart always wanted people to think that it was he who led the McCain’s and Fosters into the church. This is his personality of course. He believed that he did lead us into the Church and while he was baptized before me, the Lord worked through me to bring the family together so that we could be taught in a group.
This bringing together of our family…this gathering…was in the spring and fall of 1939-1940. We were renting approximately 140 acres of land, including crop land, hay land and pasture land. Our landlord was Doctor Dabbs, who delivered Norma while we lived on his place. Our share-crop arrangements were based on a twenty-five/seventy-five percent basis. We were to provide the animals, tools and implements and our share of the crop would be seventy-five percent of the production. Barto and Charles, along with their respective families, lived in the same house that year. Momma, Herb and Montez lived with Lena, Buddy and me.
I was in a position where I had to run the entire crew. I made all of the decisions about the farm…what we would plant, where we would plant it and who would do what, etc. No one questioned my authority. We worked together in harmony during those years. At least if there was any squabbling I never knew it. Charles was extremely good help as long as he was given direction. Montez, Maude and Lena helped in the field whenever they had to. Herb had a bad back and never was much help around the place but he did what he could. Barto would not let his wife work in the field at all. Charles and I would take our wives with us to the field when it was necessary but Bart insisted that Wilma stay in the house. He would not allow her to be a field hand. Our wives probably resented this and I guess Charles and I did too but we had become accustomed to Bart’s ways and just accepted it as the norm. At harvest time however, Bart insisted on a third of the crop as his share, even though there was no way that he could have done a third of the work. He even took all of the cash money that we generated from our crop one year and went to town and bought him a new suit.
Norma was born in March 1940. Doctor Dabbs, our Landlord, was the physician who came to the house for the birth. It was a little difficult getting him there. I had previously made arrangements to have him deliver the baby. Our agreement was that I would contact him when Lena was ready, and he would come to the house for the delivery. The price was $10.00. When I called, the telephone operator said that Dr. Dabbs’ wife had left word to not let any calls through to his house until six o’clock the next morning because the doctor was sick. When the operator told me this, I kept trying to tell her that I had to have a doctor since I had a baby coming. The operator kept putting me off. She was afraid of Mrs. Dabbs who had a hateful reputation. Mrs. Dabbs thought nobody had ever been sick. Well, I never convinced the operator to put me through so I went home and got old Prince, one of my work horses and rode him to town, right up to Dr. Dabbs house. When I got there he kept arguing that he couldn’t go and I kept telling him that he had to go. He finally said, well I’ll get dressed and be on in a little bit. I told him that I would ride to the edge of town and turn my horse loose. I said that I’d wait there for him to pick me up. I got to the edge of town, several minutes before he did. I got off of my horse, gave him a slap and sent him on his way. I knew that Prince would go straight home although it was several miles. The doctor finally got there and picked me up. When we got to where the horse was however, he stopped and wanted me to get out and take the horse home. I argued that the horse knew how to get home and that when he got hungry he would show up at the barn. His motive in trying to get me to stay with the horse was that we were farming his place. He was afraid that the horse wouldn’t come home and we would want him to buy us another one for the operation. I finally convinced him to go ahead and get to Lena. All evening while at the house, Dr. Dabbs would look at his watch and look out the window and say, “it’s about time for that horse to get home isn’t it?”. The horse was in no hurry. He knew how to get home. He knew there were oats there. He also knew Della was there, but he would stop along the way and graze as he made his way back home. Finally, about daylight, we heard old Prince coming down the lane at a long troy, nickering to be let in with Della and the oats. The doctor gave Lena a shot to hurry the contractions shortly after arriving at the house. He wanted to get through and get back home. He called the shot a three-in-one. He explained that it takes care of three pains in one shot. I thought he was going to kill Lena with that shot. I think a doctor is cruel to do that, just to try to speed up a delivery for their own convenience. Clarence Kennedy’s Sister Cletus died in a very similar situation, wherein the doctor gave her a shot to speed the delivery of her baby. I really almost lost Lena that night. When the shot took effect, she had one solid excruciating contraction that lasted until the baby was born. Norma was born a healthy, normal baby. She didn’t have any sickness at all that I can remember until she was about a year old and got pneumonia. We were afraid that she was going to die then, but she was able to overcome it. It was nice having a little girl around the house. In those days, little girls were dressed like little girls. She was cute walking around the house in her little dresses. The winter after she was born we bought her some overalls to try to keep her a little warmer. She was just as cute as she could be running around there in her overalls but it wasn’t long before we both agreed that we missed having a little girl around. One day I commented that she wasn’t as cute as she had been in her little dresses. Lena said that’s what I’ve been thinking too. She put her back in her dresses permanently after that.
We had three crop failures on Dr. Dabbs place. After working all year to make a crop, nature turned against us three different times. The last year a flood came and washed our entire crop away. We ended up losing everything we had accumulated, which were mostly our animals and farm implements. We didn’t have to pay any cash rent since we were crop sharing with the landlord. He didn’t make anything those years either. Of course it was much more devastating to us than to him. Some important things did happen however while we lived on this place. C.O. Kennedy had accepted Mormonism and was baptized. Now this in itself doesn’t seem particularly spectacular. We knew a little about Mormonism. Uncle Joe Kennedy (my Mother’s Brother and C.O.’s Father) had been a member of the church for some time. We all knew that. We were not particularly impressed with the church however, because Uncle Joe didn’t live the commandments. He believed it, but he did not have the strength to live the commandments. We knew for instance that Uncle Joe would make moonshine all week and preach Mormonism on the week-end. They would sit at home, dipping snuff and drinking coffee until they saw the missionaries coming down the lane. Immediately on seeing the missionaries Uncle Joe would run around emptying ash trays, hiding snuff and putting coffee away. The missionaries weren’t fooled but Uncle Joe didn’t know that.
After we harvested our 1937 crop we moved to Shannon, Mississippi and onto some land that Cliff Herndon, Lena’s Brother, was renting. Our first child, a boy whom we named Buford Nolan was born on November 28, 1937 in Shannon, on the farm that cliff was renting. We actually left Okolona before all of our crop was harvested. Lena was due to deliver and we wanted to get moved before she had the baby. There was some cotton to be harvested when Lena and I left. Charles was supposed to finish harvesting the cotton, which would have given us a little more return on our first year’s farming operation. After I left however, Charles didn’t pick another bowl. I guess he needed me there to tell him what to do.
Cliff’s wife had died and he had two little girls to raise. He wanted us to move in with him. I was to share the crop and the labor with Cliff, somewhat like Charles and I had done in 1937. This year Cliff and I had the implements and the animals to farm with, therefore our arrangement with the landlord was a twenty-five/seventy-five percent split. We would share the crop with him based on our doing all of the work using our tools, equipment and animals and would give him one-fourth of the crop as rent. Lena, who was about ready to deliver Nolan, would keep house for all of us. She did the cooking, washing, ironing and house cleaning, not only for the three of us but also for Cliff and his two kids. This seemed like a satisfactory arrangement since we were about to have a baby of our own and Lena would have to stay around the house anyway.
I had made arrangements before leaving Okolona, MS with Dr. Hansel to deliver our first child. When we left and moved to Shannon, I let him know what we were doing and he agreed to come to Shannon, about fifteen miles away, when Lena was ready to deliver. I had already paid him for the delivery in that I had worked that summer for him to offset the $25 charge for the delivery. When the time came in November for her to have the baby I called the doctor on the phone. Keith Barnett was a county supervisor in the area and he had a phone in his home. I used his phone to make the call. Everybody in the entire neighborhood used his phone in a situation where a phone was absolutely necessary. The county supervisor was an elected position and this gave Keith an advantage over his competition in that he could do the people in our community a favor by allowing us the use of his phone. He expected us to vote for him in return for the favor. Dr. Hansel was the only country doctor that I knew of who took a nurse with him when he delivered babies. The doctor came out in the afternoon, the baby was delivered about ten at night as I recall. The baby turned out to be real sick. We could barely keep him breathing. We called Dr. Hansel back the next day. He had to work with Buddy all night to keep him breathing and we were near exhaustion. We didn’t know what to do, except call the doctor back. When he got there he said, ‘When I left here last night I knew that baby wasn’t right and I thought he would be dead before I got home. But now there is nothing to worry about. Thousands of people have lost little babies, and they all live over it. Right now that baby’s life is just as uncertain as if you rolled a set of dice across that floor. You can’t know what they will turn-up. There is nothing I can do. The baby is going to live or it is going to die, but it is probably going to die. The chances are against the baby living’. After the doctor told us he could do nothing about the baby, we didn’t call him back any more. We just did what we could to keep the baby breathing. For days and weeks we had to keep a close eye on him day and night. We couldn’t sleep at the same time. Someone had to keep an eye on him all of the time. He would just stop breathing. We could work with him a little bit and get him breathing again. He wasn’t interested in nursing so we had to force feed him with a medicine dropper. Lena would pump the milk out with a breast pump and force feed him. Once he started getting some nourishment, he started getting some strength. Once he got a little strength, he started nursing and he started breathing better. All of the rest of our babies came out screaming for the tit except buddy.
I had bought a team so was in pretty good shape to handle my end of the arrangements with cliff Herndon, that second year of our marriage. We had a pretty good year that year and as I recall things were satisfactory in our working relationship. Cliff had a habit of saying that he was going off for an hour or two on an errand, but would be gone all day. For this reason I tried to talk him into dividing the land that we were working. He could be responsible for his and me for mine. He was unwilling to do this; obviously he wanted me to do most of the work. His argument was that we needed both teams. He was right in that when we were breaking land, sometimes I would use both of his animals. Sometimes it took four horses to pull a single turning plow in that hard dirt. One of his horses was old and broken-down and sickly and couldn’t carry its share of the work anyway. In fact that old horse died that summer and we ended up using my horses and mostly my labor anyway. The second year with cliff however, the crop-year of 1939 was intolerable. He was gone as much as he was around. That second year cliff bought a pair of young mules so in addition to farming we had the task of breaking these young mules. In the end, the second year was as difficult as the first for my horses, since the young mules were almost more trouble than they were worth. This was my first experience with breaking young mules; I later became accomplished at breaking them. A couple of times I almost had a bad run-away working with those new mules by myself while cliff was gone running around. Lena and I had talked it over and decided that we would make the most of it until harvest and then sever the relationship. As cliff moved-about in the community he bragged that he had me working down there on the place for him and that he controlled me and that I was afraid of him. This kind of conversation of course eventually got back to Lena and me. It didn’t help an already intolerable situation. Cliff was also telling people that he was going to have to whip me to control me. At some point he had decided that he was going to do just that, that is to “whip” me. The situation got to the point where we were openly arguing about the fact that I was doing most of the work. One day I was out in the yard cutting and splitting stove-wood by myself of course, since he was off drinking. Buddy was old enough that he was walking by this time. Buddy was toddling around there when cliff came up with Glover, Lena’s older brother. Cliff and Glover were big buddies and drinking companions. They both had bad reputations in the community for running-around, drinking and spending time with women with questionable reputations, even though Glover was married. Buddy was trotting around there enjoying the attention of his two uncles when Cliff picked-up Buddy and got into a pick-up truck with Glover. They were driving up and down the dirt road in front of the place making noise and acting-up. Lena was crying and worrying about Buddy. I laid down my axe. I went and got Prince, one of my horses. My plan was to ride Prince down the road as fast as the truck on one of their passes by the house, get off the horse into the truck and get my kid back by whatever means. As it turned out that never became necessary. I doubt that they knew what I was doing in getting the horse, but about this time Glover stopped the truck in front of the house. Cliff got out with the baby and came to the house as Glover drove away. Lena was sitting on a piece of wood by the house, a big log actually that we called a back log. She was still crying. He came walking up and saw her crying and said “what the G.D. hell is the matter with you? She started fussing at him for taking her baby and running around while he was drunk. When he started yelling at her I told him to shut-up. When I said that Cliff drew his right fist way back behind him and said to me, what the G.D. Hell have you got to say about it? My response was, “you heard what I said, I said to shut-up”. He then swung at me from way back behind in a hay-maker mode. I had plenty of time to react to his swing. I ducked and when he came by me, I hit him under his chin in an upper-cut fashion. He went down flat on his back of course. My blow was as much a shove as a punch but it was effective enough to knock him off his balance. He staggered back about ten feet and fell on his back. He got up and came at me in the same mode with his right fist drawn back just as far as he could reach. When he got to me and swung I did the same thing. I ducked under it and as I raised up I hit him under the chin with my right fist in the same upper-cut motion. He staggered back several feet and fell on his back again. It was almost like an instant replay. When Cliff got up this time he bent over and started running towards me with his head down. He intended butting my mid-section with his head to knock me down. When he got to me I side-stepped just a little and put my right hand on his shoulder and with my left hand on his chest I spun him as he ran by me. He landed in the same position a third time, flat on his back in the dirt and right at my feet. When he got up that time he was very close to me and started grabbing for my throat to choke me but I got his thumb in my mouth and I held on. That is the position we were in when a neighbor came running to us and broke-up the fight.
The next morning I found and rented another place to farm. Cliff never spoke another cross word to me up until the day that he died after this unfortunate incident. He was very kind and considerate in all of our associations after this. In retrospect and years later, I am of the opinion that the Lord had his hand in breaking-up Cliff and me. Had we been able to get along, or had we settled our differences after the squabble and continued to work together, it might have been difficult for my family to be converted to the Gospel. During this time the Lord was arranging a situation wherein we would be able to receive the missionaries and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I arranged and moved my family, Barto’s family and Charles and Maude along with Mama and my unmarried Sister Montez onto the new place where we started making a crop together the next year.
At this point I should go back to the year 1937 and bring the reader up to date on some of the things in my Brother Barto’s life. When Papa died in 1937, Barto announced that he would take over the home place. Papa was buying a 175 acre farm when I was in the CC’s. I helped Papa pay for this land. Our intention, Papa’s and mine, was that I should have the farm. We had not planned on his dying so soon of course. Barto was not very dependable and Papa and I both knew this. Bart decided at Papa’s death that he should have the place. He was married and when Papa died he moved his wife Wilma into the house with Mama, Herb and Montez. Charles and Maude moved to the place with them about the same time I moved to Shannon to farm with Cliff. This group was going to farm the home place. Bart did poorly from the outset on the home place. He was not much of a leader and Herb was even less of a leader. Mama kept telling me that I should get back and check their crops. She was concerned that they would not make a crop at all and that their investment in the debt payments already made would be lost. When I finally got around to looking at the home place it was too late to save the crop. The cotton had not even been thinned. No cultivating had been done. Barto had gotten mad at some of the family, or all of the family and had run off. He and his family had moved to the delta area of Mississippi where Wilma was from. It was a little town called Rosedale, MS. He had just left the home place. Mama told me that Charles and Herb went to the field every day and wrestled and played after Bart left. When I saw the home place it was a disaster. I had been working trying to make my crop without much help from Cliff. There was nothing I could do to help. The home place was lost. Bart was there for two seasons. I guess he made a pretty successful crop the first year in 1937 but he got mad and took off after the crop was planted in 1938 and let the place go.
My feeling almost fifty years later as I write this is that the Lord put me in a situation to bring that portion of the family together so that we could be taught the Gospel and accept it together. At any rate, after my falling-out with Cliff Herndon, I rented a farm. I moved my family onto the farm. I also moved my Mother, my Brother Hubert, my Sister Montez and Charles and Maude Foster onto the place. I also sent a neighbor who had a pickup truck down to the delta with word for Bart and Wilma to come into the operation with us. I gave the neighbor a calf in payment to haul Bart and his belongings back to the farm in Plantersville, MS. After all of the negative things that I had seen him do and after all of the people I had seen Bart hurt, there was no reason for me to do this, except that the spirit of the Lord was giving me direction. I didn’t know that at the time of course. The Lord wanted him with us so that he could be taught the Gospel and thereby his posterity would be raised in the church and do all of the righteous works that they are now doing today. Bart always wanted people to think that it was he who led the McCain’s and Fosters into the church. This is his personality of course. He believed that he did lead us into the Church and while he was baptized before me, the Lord worked through me to bring the family together so that we could be taught in a group.
This bringing together of our family…this gathering…was in the spring and fall of 1939-1940. We were renting approximately 140 acres of land, including crop land, hay land and pasture land. Our landlord was Doctor Dabbs, who delivered Norma while we lived on his place. Our share-crop arrangements were based on a twenty-five/seventy-five percent basis. We were to provide the animals, tools and implements and our share of the crop would be seventy-five percent of the production. Barto and Charles, along with their respective families, lived in the same house that year. Momma, Herb and Montez lived with Lena, Buddy and me.
I was in a position where I had to run the entire crew. I made all of the decisions about the farm…what we would plant, where we would plant it and who would do what, etc. No one questioned my authority. We worked together in harmony during those years. At least if there was any squabbling I never knew it. Charles was extremely good help as long as he was given direction. Montez, Maude and Lena helped in the field whenever they had to. Herb had a bad back and never was much help around the place but he did what he could. Barto would not let his wife work in the field at all. Charles and I would take our wives with us to the field when it was necessary but Bart insisted that Wilma stay in the house. He would not allow her to be a field hand. Our wives probably resented this and I guess Charles and I did too but we had become accustomed to Bart’s ways and just accepted it as the norm. At harvest time however, Bart insisted on a third of the crop as his share, even though there was no way that he could have done a third of the work. He even took all of the cash money that we generated from our crop one year and went to town and bought him a new suit.
Norma was born in March 1940. Doctor Dabbs, our Landlord, was the physician who came to the house for the birth. It was a little difficult getting him there. I had previously made arrangements to have him deliver the baby. Our agreement was that I would contact him when Lena was ready, and he would come to the house for the delivery. The price was $10.00. When I called, the telephone operator said that Dr. Dabbs’ wife had left word to not let any calls through to his house until six o’clock the next morning because the doctor was sick. When the operator told me this, I kept trying to tell her that I had to have a doctor since I had a baby coming. The operator kept putting me off. She was afraid of Mrs. Dabbs who had a hateful reputation. Mrs. Dabbs thought nobody had ever been sick. Well, I never convinced the operator to put me through so I went home and got old Prince, one of my work horses and rode him to town, right up to Dr. Dabbs house. When I got there he kept arguing that he couldn’t go and I kept telling him that he had to go. He finally said, well I’ll get dressed and be on in a little bit. I told him that I would ride to the edge of town and turn my horse loose. I said that I’d wait there for him to pick me up. I got to the edge of town, several minutes before he did. I got off of my horse, gave him a slap and sent him on his way. I knew that Prince would go straight home although it was several miles. The doctor finally got there and picked me up. When we got to where the horse was however, he stopped and wanted me to get out and take the horse home. I argued that the horse knew how to get home and that when he got hungry he would show up at the barn. His motive in trying to get me to stay with the horse was that we were farming his place. He was afraid that the horse wouldn’t come home and we would want him to buy us another one for the operation. I finally convinced him to go ahead and get to Lena. All evening while at the house, Dr. Dabbs would look at his watch and look out the window and say, “it’s about time for that horse to get home isn’t it?”. The horse was in no hurry. He knew how to get home. He knew there were oats there. He also knew Della was there, but he would stop along the way and graze as he made his way back home. Finally, about daylight, we heard old Prince coming down the lane at a long troy, nickering to be let in with Della and the oats. The doctor gave Lena a shot to hurry the contractions shortly after arriving at the house. He wanted to get through and get back home. He called the shot a three-in-one. He explained that it takes care of three pains in one shot. I thought he was going to kill Lena with that shot. I think a doctor is cruel to do that, just to try to speed up a delivery for their own convenience. Clarence Kennedy’s Sister Cletus died in a very similar situation, wherein the doctor gave her a shot to speed the delivery of her baby. I really almost lost Lena that night. When the shot took effect, she had one solid excruciating contraction that lasted until the baby was born. Norma was born a healthy, normal baby. She didn’t have any sickness at all that I can remember until she was about a year old and got pneumonia. We were afraid that she was going to die then, but she was able to overcome it. It was nice having a little girl around the house. In those days, little girls were dressed like little girls. She was cute walking around the house in her little dresses. The winter after she was born we bought her some overalls to try to keep her a little warmer. She was just as cute as she could be running around there in her overalls but it wasn’t long before we both agreed that we missed having a little girl around. One day I commented that she wasn’t as cute as she had been in her little dresses. Lena said that’s what I’ve been thinking too. She put her back in her dresses permanently after that.
We had three crop failures on Dr. Dabbs place. After working all year to make a crop, nature turned against us three different times. The last year a flood came and washed our entire crop away. We ended up losing everything we had accumulated, which were mostly our animals and farm implements. We didn’t have to pay any cash rent since we were crop sharing with the landlord. He didn’t make anything those years either. Of course it was much more devastating to us than to him. Some important things did happen however while we lived on this place. C.O. Kennedy had accepted Mormonism and was baptized. Now this in itself doesn’t seem particularly spectacular. We knew a little about Mormonism. Uncle Joe Kennedy (my Mother’s Brother and C.O.’s Father) had been a member of the church for some time. We all knew that. We were not particularly impressed with the church however, because Uncle Joe didn’t live the commandments. He believed it, but he did not have the strength to live the commandments. We knew for instance that Uncle Joe would make moonshine all week and preach Mormonism on the week-end. They would sit at home, dipping snuff and drinking coffee until they saw the missionaries coming down the lane. Immediately on seeing the missionaries Uncle Joe would run around emptying ash trays, hiding snuff and putting coffee away. The missionaries weren’t fooled but Uncle Joe didn’t know that.
Buford McCain Story Part 3
I should explain my statement that something important happened when C.O.Kennedy accepted Mormonism. C.O. was our first Cousin. Papa and Uncle Joe built a house together when I was very young. Our Fathers also worked together at other things such as timber cutting and any task that required two grown men. As I understand it, Papa even financed one of Uncle Joe’s whiskey making ventures, but Papa got beat out (his words) of his investment. C.O. always lived in the same vicinity that we lived in when we were growing up. He was older than my Brothers and me, eight years older than Bart, ten years older than me and was very well respected by all of us. He was not a bully like Bart, but generally was easy to get along with. He was our leader, not self appointed, not appointed by us, but our leader by the fact that he was older than us and by the fact that we respected him and it seemed only natural to follow his lead in all things. When we were children we played ball if C.O. wanted to play ball. If he wanted to climb a tree then that seemed like the most rewarding activity and we climbed trees. If he wanted to go swimming then we all went swimming, etc. Never was his authority questioned. He absolutely became our hero. We respected him and he respected us and did not dominate us like so many would have at that age. Our respect was a reverence that could be described as love for C.O. The point that I am making is that there was no other person in the world who could have brought us the Gospel with the influence, impact and credibility that C.O. Kennedy had…all of us had the same opinion of this good person.
With the above statement made and before I get into the details of our conversation, I should describe some of the feelings about religion that had plagued me constantly for some years. As I look back on my feelings today it is very easy for me to understand that the spirit of the Lord was communicating certain things to me in preparation for me to be taught the Joseph Smith story and the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. I did not understand that however, at the time I had the feelings. These feelings I describe as a confusion in my mind about the doctrine the sectarian ministers were preaching.
I wanted to be involved in religion. I knew that I should be involved and involved to the extent that I needed baptism I felt like I would be damned if I were not baptized but I preferred the prospect of being damned to being baptized by these ministers who seemed so confused about what I thought should be a very fair and loving God.
In July 1941 I was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Prior to 1941 and for several years we occasionally attended different churches in the community. I was concerned and confused with what I learned. When I finally heard the Joseph Smith story I could relate with his feelings since I had experienced many similar feelings. I observed mass acceptance of a very confusing doctrine by the congregations in the churches that I visited. I felt left out because I alone could not accept the teachings of the preachers of the day. Preachers who taught against tobacco, who taught against the use of strong drink, who taught against promiscuity but who suggested at the end of his sermon that “all in the world you have to do to be saved is to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God and you are saved already”. I decided that if I was going to get the answers that I needed that I would have to read and search the bible and perhaps I would find out on my own what the truth really was and how I should go about being baptized into the truth.
I had no organized approach to my search. I started reading the New Testament. I soon read in Matthew 7:13 and 14:
13. Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction and many there be which go in thereat;
14. Because strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life and few there be that find it.
I could relate to the straight and narrow path as the path that I wanted to follow and the wide and broad path as the one those people were being led down by the preachers of the day. My reading led me to realize that I needed to do something on my own to gain the knowledge that I lacked. I read in St. Luke 11: 9&10:
9. And I say unto you, ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you.
10. For every one that asketh receiveth and he that seeketh findety and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.
I knew that to find the truth that I must ask. I knew that the way to ask was to pray. I had never been taught how to pray. I didn’t know how. I was even embarrassed at the thought of someone, anyone seeing me in the attempt or hearing of my attempt at prayer. I was even embarrassed at the thought of my wife knowing that I wanted to pray. As I continued reading I was impressed with Matthew 5:5-8:
5. Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.
6. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.
7. Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.
8. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see god.
These verses convinced me that prayer was absolutely necessary. I knew that I thirsted after righteousness and could receive answers without anyone knowing about my prayers. I prayed in private and I prayed in sincerity. My prayer was simple: ‘show me that straight and narrow way’ was the sum total of my prayer. As I gained confidence it became: ‘show me that straight and narrow way that leads to Jesus and his throne of glory’.
These are the exercises that I was going through when C.O. Kennedy came to us with Mormonism.
At this point I should share C.O. Kennedy’s conversion story. I have mentioned that his Daddy, Uncle Joe Kennedy had accepted the gospel quite some time earlier. As was mentioned, Uncle Joe did not live his religion. This gave C.O. a bad impression of the missionaries and of the church. C.O. really was hard on the missionaries. Every time he mentioned them it was with the expletive, ‘those G.D. Mormon Missionaries’. One day C.O. was on his way home, he had a car then and he stopped by his Daddy’s house for a short visit. Aunt Mandy, Uncle Joe’s second wife had family visiting from out of town. The missionaries had also dropped in. The custom was that when the missionaries came by a member’s home they could expect to be fed and given a place to sleep. Uncle Joe understood this and always welcomed the missionaries. The missionaries also knew that they were welcome there. When C.O. got there he knew that with the number of house guests there were not enough beds to go around. He also knew that his Daddy would give the missionaries his bed and that he would sleep on the floor, rather than require any of his company to sleep on the floor. For this reason and because of the fact that he had an extra bed at his home, C.O. invited the missionaries to spend the night at his house. This turned out to be C.O.’s lucky day. When he got the missionaries home with him he fed them dinner and they all then sat down to visit. During the course of the evening C.O. asked the missionaries in his sarcastic way, but for the sake of conversation, ‘what is God like?’. The missionaries proceeded to teach him about the Godhead. As it turned out, C.O. was converted to the gospel that night. He kept the missionaries up most of the night asking questions and getting impressive answers. When he finally got to bed in the early hours of the morning he woke up his wife Mary and told her of what he had learned about the Godhead. He was very excited about what he had learned and was anxious to share it with Mary. He told her that the missionaries had described a perfect man and sat him right out in the middle of the room for him to see. He further said that the missionaries had taught him a truth about the Godhead. He also commented to her that if they have one truth, they must have others. C.O. kept with his investigation and his reading and was soon converted and baptized. The contrast between Uncle Joe’s conversion and his was that C.O. immediately began to live the gospel. He was a smoker and a drinker and we all knew it, but he gave it up immediately and never went back to it.
C.O. came straight to us to share the Gospel. We all listened because of our respect for him, as was described earlier and which had continued from our youth. I was touched by the spirit. It was a familiar spiritual feeling. I had prepared myself by study and prayer. I was receiving answers to those prayers and I knew it. Bart and I immediately began to read the Book of Mormon. Bart wanted to prove that it was false and I wanted to prove that it was true. In the process of reading and praying we were both converted. It was years however, before I realized that the spirit of the Lord had prompted me to gather the family together on this farm , at this time, to be taught the gospel. It would probably have been impossible to convert us all if we had been scattered or if we had all been converted in different locations, it would have been a time consuming task. Bartow was the first one of our clan to ask for baptism. Because of the fact that he was the first to ask for baptism, he always professed to be the one who led our family into the church. The Elders went with us to the pool to baptize him and Wilma Lee. They ended up baptizing six of us that day. It was in July 1941. Elders Pence and Gowns were the missionaries who baptized us. There were no worthiness interviews that I recall. No formal meeting. We went to the pool in our street clothes. The Elders baptized Barto, Wilma and Herb first. Mama and Montez then decided that they would be baptized so the elders took them out and baptized them. I was still there observing what was going on. I was in a squatting position at the edge of the pool. When Elder Gowns came leading the last one out of the pool that he had baptized, I reached for his hand and he led me into the pool and baptized me. We then all walked to the house where we were confirmed by the same Elders. When they started confirming us they confirmed Barto first. Everything in the house spun around and around when they said to him ‘receive the Holy Ghost’. Everyone in the house was affected the same way. When they laid their hands on my head and confirmed me I never felt a thing. When the Holy Ghost came to Barto that day it came upon all of us at the same time. The balance of the confirming exercise was just routine. Lena wasn’t inspired to be baptized that day. She was baptized a few weeks later.
Shortly after Lena joined the church we were invited to her Brother Ollie Herndon’s house for the week-end. Ollie was always a nice and considerate man. Ollie was sincerely concerned about Lena’s decision to join the Mormon Church. He honestly believed that she would go to hell if he didn’t do everything in his power to get her back into the Baptist Church. He had arranged to have a man named Johnny Lindley who was the local Baptist leader at his house the Sunday that we were visiting. Johnny Lindley had told Ollie that he would straighten Buford and Lena Mae out if he could get us all together on this particular day. I knew nothing of these arrangements until after the fact. I understand Ollie’s motives in doing this. On Sunday morning Ollie said to me, ‘let’s take a walk’. When we went outside I noticed several men sitting under a shade tree in Ollie’s yard. It still never dawned on me that any of this was planned. We walked on out there and joined the men under the tree. We had barely sat down with the rest of the group when Johnny Lindley came along. He immediately jumped on me like a biting sow. I had never, up until that time, felt the spirit of the Lord like came upon me immediately on his starting his conversation/lecture. Every argument he posed about religion I had an answer for. Neither of us had a bible but we were both quoting scriptures. I whipped his ears down on one subject after another. Whenever I backed him into a corner on one subject he would switch to another. This was right in front of all of his friends. Finally he said, ‘I know that you can’t refute death bed repentance’, then he continued…’when the Savior hanged on the cross one of the thieves said Lord, Lord remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom’ and the Savior said, ‘this day shalt thou be with me in paradise’. He was shaking his fist for emphasis. I said he sure did, didn’t he Johnny. Yes sir-ree was his reply. I said ‘Johnny what did the Savior say to Mary three days later when he resurrected and she rushed to embrace him?’. Johnny said ‘I don’t know, what did he say’?. I continued quoting the scripture in St. John…’touch me not, for I am not ascended to my Father’…I went on…now remember Johnny, three days ago he told the thief on the cross ‘this day thou shalt be with me in paradise’. I said now where was he Johnny, where did the Savior go that day because three days later he told Mary that he had not ascended to his Father. Johnny asked, ‘I don’t know…where did he go’? I told him to open his bible to 1st Peter, 3rd chapter, verse 18 through 20 and it will tell you where he was. Neither of us had a bible of course. Johnny’s comment was ‘what does it say?’ I told him:
18. For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the spirit;
19. By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison;
20. Which sometime were disobedient.
I said ‘Johnny that is where the Savior went and that is where the thief went…he did just exactly what the Savior told him,…he went with the Savior to paradise’. I asked him to observe the fact that the thief wasn’t with the Savior three days later. The thief still wasn’t with the Savior forty days later when he carried the disciples out and ascended to heaven. I had spent a lot of time thinking about the fallacy of death bed repentance before and after my baptism and prior to this day. However I actually had no organized approach to the subject. The spirit was with me that day in rich abundance to help me explain this precious principle to these men, but more importantly to teach me the same principle so simply. Johnny’s only argument was that he didn’t say ‘this day’, he only said thou shalt go with me to paradise. I said, ‘well go get your bible and let’s look it up’. He left and was gone for about thirty minutes. When he came back he was obviously humbled and his only comment, in a very soft tone was…’I can’t find my bible’. While Johnny was gone looking for his bible I continued to preach to the men assembled at the shade tree. I guess I was terribly naive because it still had not dawned on me that I had been set-up. My innocent response was to turn to Ollie and ask him to go into his house for a bible. When I turned to him he was sitting on the ground looking straight down. When I looked at him I knew what his intentions were and that he had arranged this ‘chance’ meeting with Johnny Lindley. Without looking up he said ‘it’s in there on the mantle’. I went into his house for the bible. When I came back Johnny Lindley was gone. I looked up the scripture and shared it with the men under the tree.
The missionaries had taught us about baptism for the dead. It was a beautiful principle and we were excited about getting our Father baptized. Uncle Joe soon went to the temple in Salt Lake City, probably in 1942 or 1943 and had Papa baptized along with some other relatives. For some reason however the missionaries failed to tell us about sealing ordinances and temple marriage. I suppose they never dreamed that we would ever have the means to get this sort of work done. Sometime after Papa’s baptism I started having dreams that made no sense to me. These dreams came often. I later learned that Olga was having similar dreams. The dreams were so real that I would wake up and ponder the meaning of them. I knew that there was a message in them but could not figure it out. One such dream I remember very well. We were having a family reunion. All of my Brothers and Sisters along with my children and their children were in a well heated room. I was impressed that we were extremely comfortable and enjoying a good time. My thoughts were that everything is exactly as it should be. In the midst of the celebration I went to the door and looked out. I saw Mother sitting down away from us about forty or fifty feet. Ice and snow was all over one side of her. She appeared to be frozen on one half of her body, from her toes to her head. I ran to her calling for the family at the same time. We all ran to her as if to rescue her and relieve her pain. We picked her up to take her into the house with us. She was very reluctant to go. She fought us as hard as she could. It seemed to take all of us to control her. Her comments were ‘I can’t go in there…you’ve pushed your Daddy off and I have to go with him’. When I awoke from this type of dream I knew that the spirit was telling me that Papa’s work was not complete. When I learned that Olga was having similar dreams we thought perhaps Uncle Joe had somehow mistakenly reported that Papa’s work was done when in reality it may not have been done. When we checked however, we found that indeed he had been baptized which further confused us since we knew nothing of the sealing ordinances in the temple. As soon as we learned about the great sealing ordinances and set goals to go to the temple and started actively making plans for the trip in order to have our families sealed by the Holy Spirit of Promise for time and for all eternity, the dreams ceased. When we finally were able to make the trip to the Mesa Arizona temple in 1949 we were all sealed to Papa except Montez who was then married to D.R. Pratt, a non-member. She could not get a recommend because at that time if one was married to a non-member they were not allowed to be endowed and attend the temple. When D.R. died Mama was too old and feeble to go to the temple for the sealing of Montez to Mama and Papa. Montez had to wait until after Mama died to finally be sealed to Mama and Papa in the Temple. The rest of the family was sealed to Papa that day in 1949. None of us had these strange dreams after having Papa ordained to the priesthood of God and having our family sealed that day in 1949 at the Mesa, AZ temple.
Our plans to go to the temple started as soon as we learned about these sealing ordinances. We had three disastrous crop failures in a row. We left Mississippi and the farm deeply in debt. Barto and I moved our families to Memphis Tennessee, to look for jobs in the many industrial plants in that city. Our brother Hubert was unable to support himself because of a back injury. Since he couldn’t do manual work and didn’t have sufficient education to secure a better job, Bart and I had to support him also. We both secured employment sufficient to address our needs and continued our plans to go to the temple. In 1949 we thought we were doing fairly well, certainly our standard of living had increased, because of steady work and regular pay checks we had retired much of our debt. I had an old car that I traded for a 1941 model ford station wagon. Both Bart and I had become adequate automobile mechanics by this time. Since we had no money to pay for repairing our automobiles we had become accomplished at this type of work. We both knew that the ’41 ford had a good drive-train. The body wasn’t the best in the world, but mechanically, the car was sound. The body on those old station wagons was made of wood. We tore the wooden body off of the car and built a flat bed behind the cab area. After this we built a wooden frame over the bed and stretched a piece of canvas over the framework to enclose the bed. We fabricated a rear door out of canvas and wood so that the entire bed was enclosed with this canvas fabric. We had built side boards up two or three feet on the sides so that those who rode in the back could lean back against the side rails as they sat on the floor. We installed overload springs on the rear and replaced wheel bearings, fan belts, hoses and everything else that might give us trouble along the way. We were confident that we could repair anything that might break-down along the way. We were very intent on making the trip, nothing could dissuade us. Our friends, both in and out of the church told us that our little car could never handle that big load, all the way from Memphis, Tennessee to Mesa Arizona and back. We just laughed at them and told them about our plans to take our tools in case of break-downs. I guess we actually got a little “cocky” in our attitude about making the trip. We had thoroughly prepared the vehicle and had argued against the advice of our friends to the extent that we were over confident. Lena and I with our eight children, Barto and Wilma with their six children, along with our brother Herb all made the trip to the west in our make-shift truck. Coming back there were twenty of us. Mama, who was already there, came back with us. As I mentioned before, we were over-confident to an extreme. We got into the car, on the day that we left for Arizona, and drove five hundred miles without asking the Lord to be with us and to protect us. When we had driven approximately 500 miles, the car started boiling over. We were in Abilene Texas. The Lord showed us that we weren’t as bright as we thought we were.
With the above statement made and before I get into the details of our conversation, I should describe some of the feelings about religion that had plagued me constantly for some years. As I look back on my feelings today it is very easy for me to understand that the spirit of the Lord was communicating certain things to me in preparation for me to be taught the Joseph Smith story and the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. I did not understand that however, at the time I had the feelings. These feelings I describe as a confusion in my mind about the doctrine the sectarian ministers were preaching.
I wanted to be involved in religion. I knew that I should be involved and involved to the extent that I needed baptism I felt like I would be damned if I were not baptized but I preferred the prospect of being damned to being baptized by these ministers who seemed so confused about what I thought should be a very fair and loving God.
In July 1941 I was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Prior to 1941 and for several years we occasionally attended different churches in the community. I was concerned and confused with what I learned. When I finally heard the Joseph Smith story I could relate with his feelings since I had experienced many similar feelings. I observed mass acceptance of a very confusing doctrine by the congregations in the churches that I visited. I felt left out because I alone could not accept the teachings of the preachers of the day. Preachers who taught against tobacco, who taught against the use of strong drink, who taught against promiscuity but who suggested at the end of his sermon that “all in the world you have to do to be saved is to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God and you are saved already”. I decided that if I was going to get the answers that I needed that I would have to read and search the bible and perhaps I would find out on my own what the truth really was and how I should go about being baptized into the truth.
I had no organized approach to my search. I started reading the New Testament. I soon read in Matthew 7:13 and 14:
13. Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction and many there be which go in thereat;
14. Because strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life and few there be that find it.
I could relate to the straight and narrow path as the path that I wanted to follow and the wide and broad path as the one those people were being led down by the preachers of the day. My reading led me to realize that I needed to do something on my own to gain the knowledge that I lacked. I read in St. Luke 11: 9&10:
9. And I say unto you, ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you.
10. For every one that asketh receiveth and he that seeketh findety and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.
I knew that to find the truth that I must ask. I knew that the way to ask was to pray. I had never been taught how to pray. I didn’t know how. I was even embarrassed at the thought of someone, anyone seeing me in the attempt or hearing of my attempt at prayer. I was even embarrassed at the thought of my wife knowing that I wanted to pray. As I continued reading I was impressed with Matthew 5:5-8:
5. Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.
6. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.
7. Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.
8. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see god.
These verses convinced me that prayer was absolutely necessary. I knew that I thirsted after righteousness and could receive answers without anyone knowing about my prayers. I prayed in private and I prayed in sincerity. My prayer was simple: ‘show me that straight and narrow way’ was the sum total of my prayer. As I gained confidence it became: ‘show me that straight and narrow way that leads to Jesus and his throne of glory’.
These are the exercises that I was going through when C.O. Kennedy came to us with Mormonism.
At this point I should share C.O. Kennedy’s conversion story. I have mentioned that his Daddy, Uncle Joe Kennedy had accepted the gospel quite some time earlier. As was mentioned, Uncle Joe did not live his religion. This gave C.O. a bad impression of the missionaries and of the church. C.O. really was hard on the missionaries. Every time he mentioned them it was with the expletive, ‘those G.D. Mormon Missionaries’. One day C.O. was on his way home, he had a car then and he stopped by his Daddy’s house for a short visit. Aunt Mandy, Uncle Joe’s second wife had family visiting from out of town. The missionaries had also dropped in. The custom was that when the missionaries came by a member’s home they could expect to be fed and given a place to sleep. Uncle Joe understood this and always welcomed the missionaries. The missionaries also knew that they were welcome there. When C.O. got there he knew that with the number of house guests there were not enough beds to go around. He also knew that his Daddy would give the missionaries his bed and that he would sleep on the floor, rather than require any of his company to sleep on the floor. For this reason and because of the fact that he had an extra bed at his home, C.O. invited the missionaries to spend the night at his house. This turned out to be C.O.’s lucky day. When he got the missionaries home with him he fed them dinner and they all then sat down to visit. During the course of the evening C.O. asked the missionaries in his sarcastic way, but for the sake of conversation, ‘what is God like?’. The missionaries proceeded to teach him about the Godhead. As it turned out, C.O. was converted to the gospel that night. He kept the missionaries up most of the night asking questions and getting impressive answers. When he finally got to bed in the early hours of the morning he woke up his wife Mary and told her of what he had learned about the Godhead. He was very excited about what he had learned and was anxious to share it with Mary. He told her that the missionaries had described a perfect man and sat him right out in the middle of the room for him to see. He further said that the missionaries had taught him a truth about the Godhead. He also commented to her that if they have one truth, they must have others. C.O. kept with his investigation and his reading and was soon converted and baptized. The contrast between Uncle Joe’s conversion and his was that C.O. immediately began to live the gospel. He was a smoker and a drinker and we all knew it, but he gave it up immediately and never went back to it.
C.O. came straight to us to share the Gospel. We all listened because of our respect for him, as was described earlier and which had continued from our youth. I was touched by the spirit. It was a familiar spiritual feeling. I had prepared myself by study and prayer. I was receiving answers to those prayers and I knew it. Bart and I immediately began to read the Book of Mormon. Bart wanted to prove that it was false and I wanted to prove that it was true. In the process of reading and praying we were both converted. It was years however, before I realized that the spirit of the Lord had prompted me to gather the family together on this farm , at this time, to be taught the gospel. It would probably have been impossible to convert us all if we had been scattered or if we had all been converted in different locations, it would have been a time consuming task. Bartow was the first one of our clan to ask for baptism. Because of the fact that he was the first to ask for baptism, he always professed to be the one who led our family into the church. The Elders went with us to the pool to baptize him and Wilma Lee. They ended up baptizing six of us that day. It was in July 1941. Elders Pence and Gowns were the missionaries who baptized us. There were no worthiness interviews that I recall. No formal meeting. We went to the pool in our street clothes. The Elders baptized Barto, Wilma and Herb first. Mama and Montez then decided that they would be baptized so the elders took them out and baptized them. I was still there observing what was going on. I was in a squatting position at the edge of the pool. When Elder Gowns came leading the last one out of the pool that he had baptized, I reached for his hand and he led me into the pool and baptized me. We then all walked to the house where we were confirmed by the same Elders. When they started confirming us they confirmed Barto first. Everything in the house spun around and around when they said to him ‘receive the Holy Ghost’. Everyone in the house was affected the same way. When they laid their hands on my head and confirmed me I never felt a thing. When the Holy Ghost came to Barto that day it came upon all of us at the same time. The balance of the confirming exercise was just routine. Lena wasn’t inspired to be baptized that day. She was baptized a few weeks later.
Shortly after Lena joined the church we were invited to her Brother Ollie Herndon’s house for the week-end. Ollie was always a nice and considerate man. Ollie was sincerely concerned about Lena’s decision to join the Mormon Church. He honestly believed that she would go to hell if he didn’t do everything in his power to get her back into the Baptist Church. He had arranged to have a man named Johnny Lindley who was the local Baptist leader at his house the Sunday that we were visiting. Johnny Lindley had told Ollie that he would straighten Buford and Lena Mae out if he could get us all together on this particular day. I knew nothing of these arrangements until after the fact. I understand Ollie’s motives in doing this. On Sunday morning Ollie said to me, ‘let’s take a walk’. When we went outside I noticed several men sitting under a shade tree in Ollie’s yard. It still never dawned on me that any of this was planned. We walked on out there and joined the men under the tree. We had barely sat down with the rest of the group when Johnny Lindley came along. He immediately jumped on me like a biting sow. I had never, up until that time, felt the spirit of the Lord like came upon me immediately on his starting his conversation/lecture. Every argument he posed about religion I had an answer for. Neither of us had a bible but we were both quoting scriptures. I whipped his ears down on one subject after another. Whenever I backed him into a corner on one subject he would switch to another. This was right in front of all of his friends. Finally he said, ‘I know that you can’t refute death bed repentance’, then he continued…’when the Savior hanged on the cross one of the thieves said Lord, Lord remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom’ and the Savior said, ‘this day shalt thou be with me in paradise’. He was shaking his fist for emphasis. I said he sure did, didn’t he Johnny. Yes sir-ree was his reply. I said ‘Johnny what did the Savior say to Mary three days later when he resurrected and she rushed to embrace him?’. Johnny said ‘I don’t know, what did he say’?. I continued quoting the scripture in St. John…’touch me not, for I am not ascended to my Father’…I went on…now remember Johnny, three days ago he told the thief on the cross ‘this day thou shalt be with me in paradise’. I said now where was he Johnny, where did the Savior go that day because three days later he told Mary that he had not ascended to his Father. Johnny asked, ‘I don’t know…where did he go’? I told him to open his bible to 1st Peter, 3rd chapter, verse 18 through 20 and it will tell you where he was. Neither of us had a bible of course. Johnny’s comment was ‘what does it say?’ I told him:
18. For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the spirit;
19. By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison;
20. Which sometime were disobedient.
I said ‘Johnny that is where the Savior went and that is where the thief went…he did just exactly what the Savior told him,…he went with the Savior to paradise’. I asked him to observe the fact that the thief wasn’t with the Savior three days later. The thief still wasn’t with the Savior forty days later when he carried the disciples out and ascended to heaven. I had spent a lot of time thinking about the fallacy of death bed repentance before and after my baptism and prior to this day. However I actually had no organized approach to the subject. The spirit was with me that day in rich abundance to help me explain this precious principle to these men, but more importantly to teach me the same principle so simply. Johnny’s only argument was that he didn’t say ‘this day’, he only said thou shalt go with me to paradise. I said, ‘well go get your bible and let’s look it up’. He left and was gone for about thirty minutes. When he came back he was obviously humbled and his only comment, in a very soft tone was…’I can’t find my bible’. While Johnny was gone looking for his bible I continued to preach to the men assembled at the shade tree. I guess I was terribly naive because it still had not dawned on me that I had been set-up. My innocent response was to turn to Ollie and ask him to go into his house for a bible. When I turned to him he was sitting on the ground looking straight down. When I looked at him I knew what his intentions were and that he had arranged this ‘chance’ meeting with Johnny Lindley. Without looking up he said ‘it’s in there on the mantle’. I went into his house for the bible. When I came back Johnny Lindley was gone. I looked up the scripture and shared it with the men under the tree.
The missionaries had taught us about baptism for the dead. It was a beautiful principle and we were excited about getting our Father baptized. Uncle Joe soon went to the temple in Salt Lake City, probably in 1942 or 1943 and had Papa baptized along with some other relatives. For some reason however the missionaries failed to tell us about sealing ordinances and temple marriage. I suppose they never dreamed that we would ever have the means to get this sort of work done. Sometime after Papa’s baptism I started having dreams that made no sense to me. These dreams came often. I later learned that Olga was having similar dreams. The dreams were so real that I would wake up and ponder the meaning of them. I knew that there was a message in them but could not figure it out. One such dream I remember very well. We were having a family reunion. All of my Brothers and Sisters along with my children and their children were in a well heated room. I was impressed that we were extremely comfortable and enjoying a good time. My thoughts were that everything is exactly as it should be. In the midst of the celebration I went to the door and looked out. I saw Mother sitting down away from us about forty or fifty feet. Ice and snow was all over one side of her. She appeared to be frozen on one half of her body, from her toes to her head. I ran to her calling for the family at the same time. We all ran to her as if to rescue her and relieve her pain. We picked her up to take her into the house with us. She was very reluctant to go. She fought us as hard as she could. It seemed to take all of us to control her. Her comments were ‘I can’t go in there…you’ve pushed your Daddy off and I have to go with him’. When I awoke from this type of dream I knew that the spirit was telling me that Papa’s work was not complete. When I learned that Olga was having similar dreams we thought perhaps Uncle Joe had somehow mistakenly reported that Papa’s work was done when in reality it may not have been done. When we checked however, we found that indeed he had been baptized which further confused us since we knew nothing of the sealing ordinances in the temple. As soon as we learned about the great sealing ordinances and set goals to go to the temple and started actively making plans for the trip in order to have our families sealed by the Holy Spirit of Promise for time and for all eternity, the dreams ceased. When we finally were able to make the trip to the Mesa Arizona temple in 1949 we were all sealed to Papa except Montez who was then married to D.R. Pratt, a non-member. She could not get a recommend because at that time if one was married to a non-member they were not allowed to be endowed and attend the temple. When D.R. died Mama was too old and feeble to go to the temple for the sealing of Montez to Mama and Papa. Montez had to wait until after Mama died to finally be sealed to Mama and Papa in the Temple. The rest of the family was sealed to Papa that day in 1949. None of us had these strange dreams after having Papa ordained to the priesthood of God and having our family sealed that day in 1949 at the Mesa, AZ temple.
Our plans to go to the temple started as soon as we learned about these sealing ordinances. We had three disastrous crop failures in a row. We left Mississippi and the farm deeply in debt. Barto and I moved our families to Memphis Tennessee, to look for jobs in the many industrial plants in that city. Our brother Hubert was unable to support himself because of a back injury. Since he couldn’t do manual work and didn’t have sufficient education to secure a better job, Bart and I had to support him also. We both secured employment sufficient to address our needs and continued our plans to go to the temple. In 1949 we thought we were doing fairly well, certainly our standard of living had increased, because of steady work and regular pay checks we had retired much of our debt. I had an old car that I traded for a 1941 model ford station wagon. Both Bart and I had become adequate automobile mechanics by this time. Since we had no money to pay for repairing our automobiles we had become accomplished at this type of work. We both knew that the ’41 ford had a good drive-train. The body wasn’t the best in the world, but mechanically, the car was sound. The body on those old station wagons was made of wood. We tore the wooden body off of the car and built a flat bed behind the cab area. After this we built a wooden frame over the bed and stretched a piece of canvas over the framework to enclose the bed. We fabricated a rear door out of canvas and wood so that the entire bed was enclosed with this canvas fabric. We had built side boards up two or three feet on the sides so that those who rode in the back could lean back against the side rails as they sat on the floor. We installed overload springs on the rear and replaced wheel bearings, fan belts, hoses and everything else that might give us trouble along the way. We were confident that we could repair anything that might break-down along the way. We were very intent on making the trip, nothing could dissuade us. Our friends, both in and out of the church told us that our little car could never handle that big load, all the way from Memphis, Tennessee to Mesa Arizona and back. We just laughed at them and told them about our plans to take our tools in case of break-downs. I guess we actually got a little “cocky” in our attitude about making the trip. We had thoroughly prepared the vehicle and had argued against the advice of our friends to the extent that we were over confident. Lena and I with our eight children, Barto and Wilma with their six children, along with our brother Herb all made the trip to the west in our make-shift truck. Coming back there were twenty of us. Mama, who was already there, came back with us. As I mentioned before, we were over-confident to an extreme. We got into the car, on the day that we left for Arizona, and drove five hundred miles without asking the Lord to be with us and to protect us. When we had driven approximately 500 miles, the car started boiling over. We were in Abilene Texas. The Lord showed us that we weren’t as bright as we thought we were.
Buford McCain Story Part 4
We were stranded there from about 2pm on Saturday when we started having trouble to 1pm on Monday. We couldn’t drive ten miles without the car blowing steam out the radiator, ten feet into the air. We were humbled to the extent that we had started calling on the Lord in prayer for guidance and help. We had our families camped out on the side of the road. There was no money for motel accommodations. We were just stranded there. We had tried everything we could think of to solve the overheating problem, up to and including having the radiator taken-off and boiled out. That Monday afternoon, we had decided that the thing to do was to turn back and head for home. We bought a five gallon can to put water in and a two gallon water sack and started east, toward Memphis. At the rate we had to stop and re-fill the radiator, we figured that it would take us the rest of the week to get back home. We only had a week’s vacation to make the entire trip. When the car would start boiling, we would stop and pour some water in the radiator to cool it off and then we would go on a little further. When the sack and pail were empty, we would have to stop to fill them. We got back to Baird Texas, less than a hundred miles from Abilene, when I told Bart that at the slow pace we were keeping, we would never get home. I told him to drive to the Ford dealership and we would give them one more chance to fix the car. This is where the Lord took over. When the mechanic came out to see what we wanted, I said ‘take the distributor off that car, put it on your machine and set it’. He did exactly what I told him to do. He put the distributor back into the car, we paid him and went on our way. Before leaving there however, we filled our water receptacles, then we headed east. Barto was driving. We had been taking it easy with the thing and going kind of slow, trying to get some range between having to fill the radiator. As we drove east, Bart kept getting faster and faster. We drove for thirty or forty miles without boiling, and started up a long hill. When we got nearly to the top of the hill he stopped the car for me to check the radiator. I got out removed the radiator cap and ran my finger down into the water in the radiator. It was only lukewarm. I said ‘let’s go to Mesa’. We turned around and drove all the way without having any more mechanical problems. We were humbled considerably and continued to pray and ask the Lord to protect us. We drove all night that night, all day the next day, and just after dark on Tuesday night we arrived in Mesa. On Wednesday afternoon all of us who were old enough got patriarchal blessings. We went to the temple again on Thursday morning and started for Memphis on Thursday evening.
On the return trip we had some minor car trouble on two different occasions. They were very simple to find and to solve. The Lord had taken over and helped us diagnose and solve the problems as they occurred. The first little problem was when the motor started missing. Of course being that far from home we thought the worse but when I raised the hood I saw fire jumping from a spark plug wire that had come out of the harness. We repaired that on the spot and continued on our way. Sometime during the night on Saturday the car started to slow down. Even pressing the accelerator hard against the floor the car gradually got slower and slower. It got to the point that with the throttle pressed firmly against the floor we could only go forty miles per hour. If we tried to go up hill it would go even slower. We couldn’t figure this out at first. Barto did about ninety percent of the driving on the trip. He was of the opinion that he was a better driver than anyone else in the world. It made no difference to me. He was a good driver and I was as comfortable with him driving as I would have been if I had been driving. After a couple of hours of this gradual slowing problem, the truck wouldn’t pull itself. The motor ran fine, but we didn’t have any accelerator pedal control. We couldn’t rev the motor at all. The accelerator was laying flat on the floor. When I started to look, I raised the hood and accelerated the motor with the linkage on the carburetor. I then followed the linkage back toward the accelerator pedal and discovered that the linkage had broken where it went through the floor board. The floor board was metal and the linkage had been rubbing there. I stood on the front bumper of the car, lowered the hood down on my back and fed the carburetor by turning the linkage with my hand. Barto drove the car several miles into the next town, with me under the hood. The attendant wasn’t a welder but they had welding equipment. Between the attendant, Barto and me, we got the linkage welded sufficient to get us home. We got back to Memphis on Sunday morning just at daylight. Both Bart and I returned to work on Monday morning.
Donny wrote: This is the last of the document that I was able to help Daddy put together about his life. The following notes are mine and the timeline might be skewed somewhat. The opinions and observations are from my perspective only. I invite my siblings and relatives to add their comments and to correct mine where needed…
We lived on the Whitten place when we made the 1949 Temple trip, then Daddy moved us to Scott Street where I started school. We lived on Scott Street when the Barto McCain’s moved to Arizona. This is the only place that I recall where we had no animals. In every other residence we had chickens, pigs and usually a milk cow.
We then moved to Egypt Central Road in Raleigh in ‘the concrete block house’. This house still stands. We had running water in this house as I recall, but we did not have a toilet. This is where we lived when Mother brush painted an old Chevrolet that we owned. Daddy was laid off for a while here and he sold perfumes soaps and brushes out of his car and door to door. I think it was a company called Stanley Home Products… There was a gas heater in one of the rooms where we gathered during the winter. Mother kept a temporary clothes hanging device in front of this stove. One day the clothes rack tipped over onto the heater for some reason. There was considerable smoke damage in the house and some fire damage in the room where this occurred. Mother and Daddy were away and Norma was in charge. When they left Norma in charge she took charge. She kept us all together when she was in charge and at this particular time we were all playing in the yard so nobody was hurt. I think the fire self extinguished. Daddy was convinced that the Lord’s hand protected us from harm that day and I am sure he was right. This is where we lived when Daddy bought the walk behind tractor from Sears. We kept this tractor for many years and all of the boys took their turn operating it when we got old enough. Heber and I used to take turns driving and riding on the disc for additional weight. At the end of the row the passenger could get off and one of us would get under one handle with the other under the other handle to turn it around at the end of the row. I don’t know why one of us was never hurt on this contraption. Dad must have bought this machine in 1950 and we still had it when I got home from the Army in 1965. I recall chain hoists hanging from trees in the front yard of this house where Daddy ran his no charge auto repair business. We raised pigs in a pen in the back of the lot.
In 1952, less than three years after the temple trip, Daddy bought the house that we all remember as home at 3552 Denver Street. I think the payments on this house were $55 per month and the loan was amortized for twenty years. At 5% interest that would mean that he borrowed over $8,000 on the house. Something in my calculations must be skewed because I don’t think they paid that much for the house. I do recall hearing Daddy say that he used a hog for a down payment. I always considered that he sold a hog for the down payment and I thought he paid less than $5,000 for the house. If he borrowed $5,000 and made payments for 20 years at $55 per month, then he paid over 12% interest…The house had a very deep lot and we always had a large garden in the back of the house. We also farmed a lot about a block away on Tulsa Avenue for a few years. A couple years after moving in Daddy built a chicken house on the very back of the lot. We only raised chickens a couple years and this chicken house became more a play house than anything else. We got into the habit of jumping off the top for some reason…for sport I guess. One fall there was a construction development on land contiguous to our property and contractors were digging a ditch to lay sewer lines through an easement next to our property line. Daddy gave them permission to trespass onto our property if they would leave it as they found it. One Saturday morning Dorr Hatch and I climbed onto a huge crawler dozer that was parked in our back yard and discovered that with the turn of a switch it would start. We took turns moving it back and forth and then it occurred to us that good use of the machine might include tearing down this old, tired and never used chicken house, which we did. Apparently some neighbor saw us operating the crawler and called the contractor who showed up with a low boy trailer and tractor rig and while throwing a fit commenced loading the crawler on his flat bed truck. Someone woke Daddy up and sent him to the back yard to deal with the irate contractor. Dorr and I stood there and watched while this guy railed on Daddy and assured him that he would not return to the project. The only thing left was to level our yard and clean-up his mess. Daddy, in a very firm voice and with his finger in the contractors face told him that he might not come back, but that someone would be there on Monday morning to finish his yard. That is all he said. I don’t remember when they returned to finish the filling and grading, but I do remember that Daddy just went back in the house and back to bed. I expected that I would get at least a tongue lashing in the very near future, but I don’t think Daddy ever mentioned this incident to me.
We ran the woods in and around this house. We picked wild berries and wild plums. Mother made cobblers with the berries. We played in the yard so much that Dad really didn’t have much of a lawn until we were teen agers. Hide and seek…kick the can…etc. The sisters got jobs here and there and the boys got paper routes. Heber and I rode many miles on bicycles every day throwing papers. We had evening routes for a while and we had morning routes for a while. We also cleaned the church two times each week for most of the years that we lived on Denver Street. When we first started cleaning the church the family was paid $8.00 per week. Even at .25 per gallon, I doubt if the $8 covered our fuel expenses.
When Daddy was sixty-two years old he retired from International Harvester with a full pension after having worked there over thirty years. He worked in the machine shop making small parts for agricultural harvesting equipment, primarily hay balers. On a Boy Scout trip to the plant one evening I was able to see him in his work environment. He always chose to work on jobs that paid the machinist based on the amount of parts that he could make on an eight hour shift since he made the most money with this arrangement. He was proud of his work and I think was accomplished in what he did. He often talked about the unqualified foremen who supervised (foman was his pronunciation). We youngsters always thought that IH should just let our Daddy run that plant and he would make everything right. He was laid off once or twice in his early career and on occasion was ‘out on strike’. While Daddy was a union member, he was never a union supporter. He saw too many workers doing too little for the betterment of the company and this aggravated him. He complained about workers who worked to slow things down…he was supposed to call the ‘electriciman’ (his word) when his machine broke down or had problems, but he often got in trouble with the union because he would usually fix it himself…and especially since they were all idiots anyway. He had the same opinion of the mechanics and the set-up people…the engineers were the worse of the lot however since they seldom knew how to set-up a machine to make the parts that they designed. Daddy would often ‘hop-up’ his lathe to make it run faster in order for him to make more parts in a shorter period of time and ridicule the engineer’s specs that required a slower turn on the lathe.
Daddy typically worked the 2nd and even the 3rd shift because there was a shift premium. This premium was a compounded number since it was a percentage of how much he made. Since he was making more production than most he made more money than most so when the shift percentage increase was applied, it amounted to considerably shift differential for him than for others.
During the summer when he arrived home from work in the morning (usually between 7:30 and 8am) he would expect us to be in the garden ready for a long day’s work with him He would go to bed in mid afternoon in order to be up at 11:00pm or so to go to work. He never slept a wink however….that is he never slept a ‘dad-durn wink’…
Daddy was the mechanic for the Ward. Anyone and everyone, including transients who called the Bishop were referenced to Daddy. We worked on everyone’s car. The church member who had a car problem came to Dad and he, Heber, Buddy, Lowell, Robert and or I would fix it. One day Dad decided that he would start charging for his work and the work dried up. Dad’s comment…’when I started charging for my work, the work all dried up’. Some including Fred Carlson and C.O. Kennedy continued to get their work done free. One day our Bishop (Fred Carlson) came to the house late Saturday afternoon. We had finished working on whatever we were working on that day and we were all sitting in the back yard enjoying the evening. Fred roared in and told Daddy that he needed his brakes rebuilt. Dad said not today Bishop we have wound down and have cleaned-up. Fred nagged with ‘I have the brake shoes in my car…it won’t take you long’. Heber and I told Dad that we would go do it and Bishop started playing baseball with the kids who were there. Heber and I went around the corner to the garage and came back in about thirty minutes and sat down. Fred came over and wanted to know what was wrong. We told him that we were done. Fred said that was impossible and Daddy took that personally. Fred wanted us to pull a wheel so that he could see and Daddy refused and just handed him the old shoes. Fred finally left mumbling. Dad knew that we had done the job even though he did not watch us do it and he was not going to let our work be challenged.
Daddy was the Sunday School Superintendent, in the Bishopric or on the High Council during our growing up years. He was a good Home Teacher (Branch/Ward Teacher) in those year. I recall driving all over with him to home teach. We taught in West Memphis, in South Memphis and down into Holly Springs, MS. We even went to Bolivar Tennessee several times to visit a man who was in the state hospital. He used to announce the opening song for meetings…’High On The Mounting Top”. I remember seeing him sitting on the stand one day in his dark suit, white shirt and tie, but with no socks.
We moved to the big time in 1954 when Daddy bought a 1952 Ford flat head V8 automobile. We were proud of this car and I thought we had arrived, but a miss in the engine was diagnosed by Daddy as a cracked block. After not being able to otherwise diagnose the miss he finally took the head off and discovered that the block had a crack between two pistons. He lay down on the grass on his back so sick was he at this discovery. He then blamed Mother for making him buy a car that he didn’t want. The next thing we all knew he had a new 1955 Chevrolet automobile…we knew then that we had arrived.
In 1985 Mother and Daddy were in Decatur, IL when I was called to be Bishop. The stake president asked Daddy to speak. He spoke kindly of me and told stories from my youth as examples of my industry and my commitment to the church and to family…things that I had no idea ever impressed him.
In January 1987 Daddy had open heart surgery to repair a birth defected heart valve in Salt Lake City. Norma and I were there with him and with Mother. We enjoyed the occasion to be together and dragged mother around town to some nice restaurants while Daddy suffered. I don’t think he ever knew what a grand time Norma and I had. I think he was fitted with a heart pace maker at this time and he had to take a blood thinning drug for the balance of his life.
Most of his life Daddy was plagued with ‘the headache’ as he called it and took over the counter prescriptions regularly. These aches and pains prompted him to retire a few years earlier than he might have. Mother and Daddy sold their Denver Street house in 1978 (I think)…a house that he was proud of and that he loved…when he retired and they went to St George Utah to work in the temple apartments. They were there until Mother was too sickly to deal with the hard work and long hours. While Daddy was in St George he was supervised by the Temple President…President Boulder. When we visited there occasionally I saw Daddy interacting with this man. I personally know of no other man who Daddy absolutely loved and trusted like he loved and trusted President Boulder. I was amazed. President Boulder sealed Ron and Lisa while Mother and Daddy worked there.
Daddy was a good man. He mentioned on one occasion that he often wondered why the Lord didn’t bless their farming efforts in the early years of their marriage and help make them successful. Finally the spirit whispered to him that he was blessed with crop failures so that he would raise his family in an organized branch of the church with strong youth programs. This came to him one evening during the performance of a Road Show in our Branch building that Betty Francis had the leading role in and that the rest of us had minor roles in.
February 3, 1990 was a sad day for Daddy. His sweetheart of over 53 years and our Mother passed away in Las Vegas, NV. All nine of us were in town when Mother died. Buddy made a particularly sweet comment about Mother as we preparing for her Funeral…he said “Only the Savior’s Mother could have been so sweet”.
In 2000 we had a family reunion in Wal Doxie, Mississippi. This reunion included a tour of the area where Mother and Daddy grew up and where they were married. We had the privilege of spending some time in local graveyards where many of our ancestors are laid to rest. Tom, Heber and I spent a couple days trekking around northern Mississippi the week before the reunion in order to lay-out the driving tour of family historical places. This was a wonderful two days for the three of us to be able to pick his brain and look through his eyes into the past. The tour included the ponds where Daddy and Mother were born along with the place where they were married. Buddy and his new wife were at this reunion. He seemed happier than any of us had seen him in many years. Buddy died May 25, 2002. He was the first of Buford and Lena’s children to pass away. He was buried in Mesa, AZ.
Daddy worked in the temple for many years. He and Mother loved the temple. On his eightieth birthday in 1996 all nine of his children celebrated the day by attending a session with him in the Las Vegas temple. He was never happy after Mother died. When Buddy died in 2002, Daddy went downhill pretty fast health wise. Later in the year and early in the morning of August 5, 2002, dad died in Las Vegas, Nevada. His Children who were in town celebrated his life by having his favorite breakfast at the local IHOP.
On the return trip we had some minor car trouble on two different occasions. They were very simple to find and to solve. The Lord had taken over and helped us diagnose and solve the problems as they occurred. The first little problem was when the motor started missing. Of course being that far from home we thought the worse but when I raised the hood I saw fire jumping from a spark plug wire that had come out of the harness. We repaired that on the spot and continued on our way. Sometime during the night on Saturday the car started to slow down. Even pressing the accelerator hard against the floor the car gradually got slower and slower. It got to the point that with the throttle pressed firmly against the floor we could only go forty miles per hour. If we tried to go up hill it would go even slower. We couldn’t figure this out at first. Barto did about ninety percent of the driving on the trip. He was of the opinion that he was a better driver than anyone else in the world. It made no difference to me. He was a good driver and I was as comfortable with him driving as I would have been if I had been driving. After a couple of hours of this gradual slowing problem, the truck wouldn’t pull itself. The motor ran fine, but we didn’t have any accelerator pedal control. We couldn’t rev the motor at all. The accelerator was laying flat on the floor. When I started to look, I raised the hood and accelerated the motor with the linkage on the carburetor. I then followed the linkage back toward the accelerator pedal and discovered that the linkage had broken where it went through the floor board. The floor board was metal and the linkage had been rubbing there. I stood on the front bumper of the car, lowered the hood down on my back and fed the carburetor by turning the linkage with my hand. Barto drove the car several miles into the next town, with me under the hood. The attendant wasn’t a welder but they had welding equipment. Between the attendant, Barto and me, we got the linkage welded sufficient to get us home. We got back to Memphis on Sunday morning just at daylight. Both Bart and I returned to work on Monday morning.
Donny wrote: This is the last of the document that I was able to help Daddy put together about his life. The following notes are mine and the timeline might be skewed somewhat. The opinions and observations are from my perspective only. I invite my siblings and relatives to add their comments and to correct mine where needed…
We lived on the Whitten place when we made the 1949 Temple trip, then Daddy moved us to Scott Street where I started school. We lived on Scott Street when the Barto McCain’s moved to Arizona. This is the only place that I recall where we had no animals. In every other residence we had chickens, pigs and usually a milk cow.
We then moved to Egypt Central Road in Raleigh in ‘the concrete block house’. This house still stands. We had running water in this house as I recall, but we did not have a toilet. This is where we lived when Mother brush painted an old Chevrolet that we owned. Daddy was laid off for a while here and he sold perfumes soaps and brushes out of his car and door to door. I think it was a company called Stanley Home Products… There was a gas heater in one of the rooms where we gathered during the winter. Mother kept a temporary clothes hanging device in front of this stove. One day the clothes rack tipped over onto the heater for some reason. There was considerable smoke damage in the house and some fire damage in the room where this occurred. Mother and Daddy were away and Norma was in charge. When they left Norma in charge she took charge. She kept us all together when she was in charge and at this particular time we were all playing in the yard so nobody was hurt. I think the fire self extinguished. Daddy was convinced that the Lord’s hand protected us from harm that day and I am sure he was right. This is where we lived when Daddy bought the walk behind tractor from Sears. We kept this tractor for many years and all of the boys took their turn operating it when we got old enough. Heber and I used to take turns driving and riding on the disc for additional weight. At the end of the row the passenger could get off and one of us would get under one handle with the other under the other handle to turn it around at the end of the row. I don’t know why one of us was never hurt on this contraption. Dad must have bought this machine in 1950 and we still had it when I got home from the Army in 1965. I recall chain hoists hanging from trees in the front yard of this house where Daddy ran his no charge auto repair business. We raised pigs in a pen in the back of the lot.
In 1952, less than three years after the temple trip, Daddy bought the house that we all remember as home at 3552 Denver Street. I think the payments on this house were $55 per month and the loan was amortized for twenty years. At 5% interest that would mean that he borrowed over $8,000 on the house. Something in my calculations must be skewed because I don’t think they paid that much for the house. I do recall hearing Daddy say that he used a hog for a down payment. I always considered that he sold a hog for the down payment and I thought he paid less than $5,000 for the house. If he borrowed $5,000 and made payments for 20 years at $55 per month, then he paid over 12% interest…The house had a very deep lot and we always had a large garden in the back of the house. We also farmed a lot about a block away on Tulsa Avenue for a few years. A couple years after moving in Daddy built a chicken house on the very back of the lot. We only raised chickens a couple years and this chicken house became more a play house than anything else. We got into the habit of jumping off the top for some reason…for sport I guess. One fall there was a construction development on land contiguous to our property and contractors were digging a ditch to lay sewer lines through an easement next to our property line. Daddy gave them permission to trespass onto our property if they would leave it as they found it. One Saturday morning Dorr Hatch and I climbed onto a huge crawler dozer that was parked in our back yard and discovered that with the turn of a switch it would start. We took turns moving it back and forth and then it occurred to us that good use of the machine might include tearing down this old, tired and never used chicken house, which we did. Apparently some neighbor saw us operating the crawler and called the contractor who showed up with a low boy trailer and tractor rig and while throwing a fit commenced loading the crawler on his flat bed truck. Someone woke Daddy up and sent him to the back yard to deal with the irate contractor. Dorr and I stood there and watched while this guy railed on Daddy and assured him that he would not return to the project. The only thing left was to level our yard and clean-up his mess. Daddy, in a very firm voice and with his finger in the contractors face told him that he might not come back, but that someone would be there on Monday morning to finish his yard. That is all he said. I don’t remember when they returned to finish the filling and grading, but I do remember that Daddy just went back in the house and back to bed. I expected that I would get at least a tongue lashing in the very near future, but I don’t think Daddy ever mentioned this incident to me.
We ran the woods in and around this house. We picked wild berries and wild plums. Mother made cobblers with the berries. We played in the yard so much that Dad really didn’t have much of a lawn until we were teen agers. Hide and seek…kick the can…etc. The sisters got jobs here and there and the boys got paper routes. Heber and I rode many miles on bicycles every day throwing papers. We had evening routes for a while and we had morning routes for a while. We also cleaned the church two times each week for most of the years that we lived on Denver Street. When we first started cleaning the church the family was paid $8.00 per week. Even at .25 per gallon, I doubt if the $8 covered our fuel expenses.
When Daddy was sixty-two years old he retired from International Harvester with a full pension after having worked there over thirty years. He worked in the machine shop making small parts for agricultural harvesting equipment, primarily hay balers. On a Boy Scout trip to the plant one evening I was able to see him in his work environment. He always chose to work on jobs that paid the machinist based on the amount of parts that he could make on an eight hour shift since he made the most money with this arrangement. He was proud of his work and I think was accomplished in what he did. He often talked about the unqualified foremen who supervised (foman was his pronunciation). We youngsters always thought that IH should just let our Daddy run that plant and he would make everything right. He was laid off once or twice in his early career and on occasion was ‘out on strike’. While Daddy was a union member, he was never a union supporter. He saw too many workers doing too little for the betterment of the company and this aggravated him. He complained about workers who worked to slow things down…he was supposed to call the ‘electriciman’ (his word) when his machine broke down or had problems, but he often got in trouble with the union because he would usually fix it himself…and especially since they were all idiots anyway. He had the same opinion of the mechanics and the set-up people…the engineers were the worse of the lot however since they seldom knew how to set-up a machine to make the parts that they designed. Daddy would often ‘hop-up’ his lathe to make it run faster in order for him to make more parts in a shorter period of time and ridicule the engineer’s specs that required a slower turn on the lathe.
Daddy typically worked the 2nd and even the 3rd shift because there was a shift premium. This premium was a compounded number since it was a percentage of how much he made. Since he was making more production than most he made more money than most so when the shift percentage increase was applied, it amounted to considerably shift differential for him than for others.
During the summer when he arrived home from work in the morning (usually between 7:30 and 8am) he would expect us to be in the garden ready for a long day’s work with him He would go to bed in mid afternoon in order to be up at 11:00pm or so to go to work. He never slept a wink however….that is he never slept a ‘dad-durn wink’…
Daddy was the mechanic for the Ward. Anyone and everyone, including transients who called the Bishop were referenced to Daddy. We worked on everyone’s car. The church member who had a car problem came to Dad and he, Heber, Buddy, Lowell, Robert and or I would fix it. One day Dad decided that he would start charging for his work and the work dried up. Dad’s comment…’when I started charging for my work, the work all dried up’. Some including Fred Carlson and C.O. Kennedy continued to get their work done free. One day our Bishop (Fred Carlson) came to the house late Saturday afternoon. We had finished working on whatever we were working on that day and we were all sitting in the back yard enjoying the evening. Fred roared in and told Daddy that he needed his brakes rebuilt. Dad said not today Bishop we have wound down and have cleaned-up. Fred nagged with ‘I have the brake shoes in my car…it won’t take you long’. Heber and I told Dad that we would go do it and Bishop started playing baseball with the kids who were there. Heber and I went around the corner to the garage and came back in about thirty minutes and sat down. Fred came over and wanted to know what was wrong. We told him that we were done. Fred said that was impossible and Daddy took that personally. Fred wanted us to pull a wheel so that he could see and Daddy refused and just handed him the old shoes. Fred finally left mumbling. Dad knew that we had done the job even though he did not watch us do it and he was not going to let our work be challenged.
Daddy was the Sunday School Superintendent, in the Bishopric or on the High Council during our growing up years. He was a good Home Teacher (Branch/Ward Teacher) in those year. I recall driving all over with him to home teach. We taught in West Memphis, in South Memphis and down into Holly Springs, MS. We even went to Bolivar Tennessee several times to visit a man who was in the state hospital. He used to announce the opening song for meetings…’High On The Mounting Top”. I remember seeing him sitting on the stand one day in his dark suit, white shirt and tie, but with no socks.
We moved to the big time in 1954 when Daddy bought a 1952 Ford flat head V8 automobile. We were proud of this car and I thought we had arrived, but a miss in the engine was diagnosed by Daddy as a cracked block. After not being able to otherwise diagnose the miss he finally took the head off and discovered that the block had a crack between two pistons. He lay down on the grass on his back so sick was he at this discovery. He then blamed Mother for making him buy a car that he didn’t want. The next thing we all knew he had a new 1955 Chevrolet automobile…we knew then that we had arrived.
In 1985 Mother and Daddy were in Decatur, IL when I was called to be Bishop. The stake president asked Daddy to speak. He spoke kindly of me and told stories from my youth as examples of my industry and my commitment to the church and to family…things that I had no idea ever impressed him.
In January 1987 Daddy had open heart surgery to repair a birth defected heart valve in Salt Lake City. Norma and I were there with him and with Mother. We enjoyed the occasion to be together and dragged mother around town to some nice restaurants while Daddy suffered. I don’t think he ever knew what a grand time Norma and I had. I think he was fitted with a heart pace maker at this time and he had to take a blood thinning drug for the balance of his life.
Most of his life Daddy was plagued with ‘the headache’ as he called it and took over the counter prescriptions regularly. These aches and pains prompted him to retire a few years earlier than he might have. Mother and Daddy sold their Denver Street house in 1978 (I think)…a house that he was proud of and that he loved…when he retired and they went to St George Utah to work in the temple apartments. They were there until Mother was too sickly to deal with the hard work and long hours. While Daddy was in St George he was supervised by the Temple President…President Boulder. When we visited there occasionally I saw Daddy interacting with this man. I personally know of no other man who Daddy absolutely loved and trusted like he loved and trusted President Boulder. I was amazed. President Boulder sealed Ron and Lisa while Mother and Daddy worked there.
Daddy was a good man. He mentioned on one occasion that he often wondered why the Lord didn’t bless their farming efforts in the early years of their marriage and help make them successful. Finally the spirit whispered to him that he was blessed with crop failures so that he would raise his family in an organized branch of the church with strong youth programs. This came to him one evening during the performance of a Road Show in our Branch building that Betty Francis had the leading role in and that the rest of us had minor roles in.
February 3, 1990 was a sad day for Daddy. His sweetheart of over 53 years and our Mother passed away in Las Vegas, NV. All nine of us were in town when Mother died. Buddy made a particularly sweet comment about Mother as we preparing for her Funeral…he said “Only the Savior’s Mother could have been so sweet”.
In 2000 we had a family reunion in Wal Doxie, Mississippi. This reunion included a tour of the area where Mother and Daddy grew up and where they were married. We had the privilege of spending some time in local graveyards where many of our ancestors are laid to rest. Tom, Heber and I spent a couple days trekking around northern Mississippi the week before the reunion in order to lay-out the driving tour of family historical places. This was a wonderful two days for the three of us to be able to pick his brain and look through his eyes into the past. The tour included the ponds where Daddy and Mother were born along with the place where they were married. Buddy and his new wife were at this reunion. He seemed happier than any of us had seen him in many years. Buddy died May 25, 2002. He was the first of Buford and Lena’s children to pass away. He was buried in Mesa, AZ.
Daddy worked in the temple for many years. He and Mother loved the temple. On his eightieth birthday in 1996 all nine of his children celebrated the day by attending a session with him in the Las Vegas temple. He was never happy after Mother died. When Buddy died in 2002, Daddy went downhill pretty fast health wise. Later in the year and early in the morning of August 5, 2002, dad died in Las Vegas, Nevada. His Children who were in town celebrated his life by having his favorite breakfast at the local IHOP.
Monday, February 9, 2009
River Trip - St Louis to Pensacola
Day 1:
Well after three days of being confined to our Marina because they were dredging, we got out on Saturday morning. Our plan had been to take the boat to a repair dock on the MO side of the river on Wed or Thursday. On Friday when we learned that we absolutely would not get out of our Marina we called the repair dock to see if they would lift and inspect our boat on Saturday…they refused.
We finally loaded the boat on Saturday morning with perishables, etc. In the process, one of us inadvertently turned the inverter off, a fact that we did not realize until late Monday evening when we docked for the evening.
We pulled to our Marina’s fuel dock @ 8:30 Saturday morning 18 October 2008 and learned that the automatic CC operator wasn't just broken, it was gone. Of course the marina was not open, shucks it was only 8:30 am, so we headed South.
When we got into the channel of the Illinois River (where Grafton Marina is located) we called the Alton Marina (20 miles downstream) and learned that they were open and had diesel fuel. So our plan was to stop there and top off the fuel tanks…both tanks were barely below empty but we thought we might have room for about one hundred gallons.
Immediately out of our Marina, the Illinois River meets the Mississippi River. At this confluence, I ran aground. When I looked back it was very obvious that I was completely out of the channel. We hit the sand bar so hard that both motors stopped when the propellers dug into the sand/mud.
While sitting high and dry and within sight of our Marina, a Coast Guard broadcast came over the VHF radio announcing that the St Louis waterfront would close between noon and 3pm for the arrival of his Excellency the Savior Barrack Hussein Obama. We guessed that they didn’t want a wake from someone’s boat to splash him as he walked on the water at the riverfront.
So our plan was to hurry and get past the riverfront before noon. It is only twenty-five miles or so, but there were two locks and dams to go through. Commercial traffic always has priority through these locks and we were high and dry on a sand bar.
When we got over our anxiety and could think straight, we decided to use our thrusters, first front and then rear, etc. and we actually freed ourselves including the aid of a nice wind in the right direction, we got into deep enough water that we were afloat and started our motors.
A long discussion ensued between Captain and Crew about our situation and the hope that we could get past the St Louis downtown area prior to the noon closing…a closing that would be in place for three hours. We decided to run at cruising speed (1700 RPM) and about 22 MPH, plus the current in order to get by downtown SL prior to the closing and save the three hour waiting time, which also included a decision to not ‘top-off’ the tanks at Alton Marine.
We then called the Mel Price Lock Master on the cell phone and asked him about traffic, explaining that we wanted to try to make it past downtown SL before the shut-down. We told him that we were over an hour away. He told us to ‘hail’ him on the VHF when we crossed under the Alton bridge and that he would prepare the small lift for us since he had a barge and tow in the main lock. When we got there, we only had to wait a few minutes before he opened the lock.
There is typically a lot of floating debris at the entrance to these dams (on the upstream side) and there seemed to be almost a log jam at this one, which we would have to go through, with some logs and sticks as thick as seven or eight inches in diameter. The way to navigate through these debris fields is to go very slow and nudge your way through…that is to put the motors in gear and start the boat forward, then putting the motors in neutral, thereby floating and pushing your way through the debris. In the process and because the debris field was so deep and long, we hit a log with our port prop really hard.
We got into the lock and he lowered us through. We exited at the same time the tow barge that he previously told us about was exiting the large lock and so were able to get passed him pretty handily. The river is very wide here.
The next lock and dam is only six miles down stream, but we were in a no-wake zone for about the first two miles. We were very good and watched our wake…running about 1100 rpm which is still about ten MPH on this big boat, plus the current was 3 to 4 MPH, so we were still moving along at a pretty good rate of speed. In this section we passed Wood River, IL (Lewis and Clark's 1803 starting point) and the confluence of the Missouri River. The river is very wide here. The water is tepid and turbulent and generally has a lot of floating debris, which we did not see much of on this trip. The MO River confluence also marks the entrance to the Chain of Rocks Canal, the entrance to which is off the main channel at this point.
We then called the Chain of Rocks lock master on the cell and told her our plight. She was confident that she could get us through and told us that she would also put the small lock on the MO side of the river in service if when we got there her main lock was busy. Between these two locks and dams and on the main channel, there is a natural chain of rocks across the entire river which prohibits navigation. General Robert E Lee (Confederate Army Commander during the Civil War)was stationed at Jefferson Barracks at St Louis, MO prior to the civil war and supervised the construction of a three or four mile long canal which in later years would include the Chain of Rocks Lock and Dam, We were able to make good time through the channel and ran at warp speed (as defined above). We passed one South bound tow and barge in the channel. I ‘hailed him’ on the ‘two-way’ (we are learning the language) to inquire as to which side he wanted us to pass him on. He said something about Starboard or Port so I called back and said left or right…he then said something about starboard or port so I said Mo or Ill side…at which point he said pass on either side, I don’t care…which we did.
We then encountered a tug and tow (these things are over 1,000 feet long) going North. When we were mostly passed the barges and approaching the tow boat (we could only get about 100 feet away in the narrow canal) he turned on his side thrusters and was throwing a huge wake vertical to his boat and directly in our path. I just steered into it and increased my RPM’s to about 2000 to give me a little more power and while we rocked and bounced, we zoomed through his insult.
When we got to the chain of rocks lock and dam, the lock master told us to go into the large lock which another upstream tow had just exited. I inquired (for clarification) whether she meant the one with the barge coming out and her comment was…yes and the tow boat too.
We moved in, she lowered us (about 35 minutes) and we were on our way. Just downstream of this lock and dam the canal again converges with the Mississippi River and we were just North of downtown. It was twenty minutes until the noon closure so we poured on the coal.
We flew by Laclede’s landing, the football dome and the Arch. We encountered Coast Guard boats just North of the Poplar Street Bridge (I64, I55, and I70) who escorted us downstream to just under the bridge. We later learned that our two-way had been left on the last lock and dam frequency and was not set on the monitoring channel (16) so we could not communicate with the Coast Guard, which we surmised as being very good.
We then settled into about a 1600 rpm routine and started noticing a very obvious vibration. I went below and determined that the vibration was coming from the left motor (Port). We also now know that our speed apparatus does not work…we have to time ourselves on the chart to calculate speed, and our gps works when it wants to.
Fortunately we purchased a hand held GPS. We also have a road map and a river chart of every inch of the waterways.
We stopped at Hoppies for lunch and filled with diesel fuel (218 gallons at just under $1,000). Hoppies is an old barge tethered to the bank on the Missouri side of the river @ MM 155 @ Kimmswick, MO. It is mostly a fuel stop with sky high fuel prices. They call themselves a Marina and they do have tie-offs and 50 amp service for a fee for overnight travelers. We walked about a half mile into town to a well recommended eating place, but when we got there we discovered that most of the people from St Louis were there. The little town had a fall festival and we couldn’t even get close to the restaurant…oh well, maybe next time. At Hoppies we were tied up behind a 90 foot motor yacht with a crew, etc. We felt like white trash.
We got back on the boat and headed South, dining on bologna sandwiches while driving.
Kerma does most of the driving and I navigate, marking the charts and timing us between markers to determine our speed. We are really trucking and think we are running @ 21 MPH, plus the current of 3 to 5 MPH…maybe we are even running a little faster than that. The boat isn’t taking nearly as much fuel as I had anticipated. It appears we are getting just under one mile for each gallon burned running at these high RPM’s.
We Called Green Turtle Bay which is just below the Barkley dam on the Cumberland river to see if they would lift us on Monday and check our props. There is moderate vibration at every rpm.
We also called the lock master on the Kaskaskia River, a tributary to the Miss @ MM 117 (which is 101 miles from our starting point). We asked the lock master if we could tie-off below the dam and he said that he would have room. He took our name, length of boat, name of boat, etc.
We arrived at the Kaskaskia River and tied-off as instructed @ 3pm.
The only other boat there was the ‘Ebb Tide’ owned by Phil and June Ritchie from Daytona FL. He is a semi-retired physician. They have been on the ‘loop’ since June. They had a small tug style boat built specifically for the kind of travel that they were enjoying. Phil is a physician and they stop every three weeks so that he can fly to North Carolina and work for one week, then they fly back to the boat to continue their journey. I took their dog Taffy for a walk and threw him on our boat where he surprised and met Kerma. You know what a fool she can be for a puppy. Phil told me that they were enjoying about four miles per gallon with his Janmar diesel engine and I just smiled and said good. I never was good at discussing fuel mileage.
We had a wonderful dinner of turkey breast filet and green peas, made in our own galley and we went to bed early. Kerma was thoughtful enough to bring along reading material and we worked long into the night at that chore.
We were curious about the frig and freezer not working, along with some other electrical appliances and lights until I discovered that we had turned off the inverter (a device that makes 120V AC current out of 12V DC current) and the only way to make appliances work if you don’t have shore power…or if you don’t have a generator. We turned the generator on and ran it into the night to charge the house batteries.
We thought long and hard about traveling a little further before stopping, knowing that we wanted to get to Green Turtle Bay Marina in Lake Barkley, KY Sunday evening. The Kaskaskia lock seemed a safe and secure place to stop and we thought we would have no trouble doing 180 miles on Sunday if we got a day-break start.
We slept like babies and giggled a lot during the night at our good fortune.
Well after three days of being confined to our Marina because they were dredging, we got out on Saturday morning. Our plan had been to take the boat to a repair dock on the MO side of the river on Wed or Thursday. On Friday when we learned that we absolutely would not get out of our Marina we called the repair dock to see if they would lift and inspect our boat on Saturday…they refused.
We finally loaded the boat on Saturday morning with perishables, etc. In the process, one of us inadvertently turned the inverter off, a fact that we did not realize until late Monday evening when we docked for the evening.
We pulled to our Marina’s fuel dock @ 8:30 Saturday morning 18 October 2008 and learned that the automatic CC operator wasn't just broken, it was gone. Of course the marina was not open, shucks it was only 8:30 am, so we headed South.
When we got into the channel of the Illinois River (where Grafton Marina is located) we called the Alton Marina (20 miles downstream) and learned that they were open and had diesel fuel. So our plan was to stop there and top off the fuel tanks…both tanks were barely below empty but we thought we might have room for about one hundred gallons.
Immediately out of our Marina, the Illinois River meets the Mississippi River. At this confluence, I ran aground. When I looked back it was very obvious that I was completely out of the channel. We hit the sand bar so hard that both motors stopped when the propellers dug into the sand/mud.
While sitting high and dry and within sight of our Marina, a Coast Guard broadcast came over the VHF radio announcing that the St Louis waterfront would close between noon and 3pm for the arrival of his Excellency the Savior Barrack Hussein Obama. We guessed that they didn’t want a wake from someone’s boat to splash him as he walked on the water at the riverfront.
So our plan was to hurry and get past the riverfront before noon. It is only twenty-five miles or so, but there were two locks and dams to go through. Commercial traffic always has priority through these locks and we were high and dry on a sand bar.
When we got over our anxiety and could think straight, we decided to use our thrusters, first front and then rear, etc. and we actually freed ourselves including the aid of a nice wind in the right direction, we got into deep enough water that we were afloat and started our motors.
A long discussion ensued between Captain and Crew about our situation and the hope that we could get past the St Louis downtown area prior to the noon closing…a closing that would be in place for three hours. We decided to run at cruising speed (1700 RPM) and about 22 MPH, plus the current in order to get by downtown SL prior to the closing and save the three hour waiting time, which also included a decision to not ‘top-off’ the tanks at Alton Marine.
We then called the Mel Price Lock Master on the cell phone and asked him about traffic, explaining that we wanted to try to make it past downtown SL before the shut-down. We told him that we were over an hour away. He told us to ‘hail’ him on the VHF when we crossed under the Alton bridge and that he would prepare the small lift for us since he had a barge and tow in the main lock. When we got there, we only had to wait a few minutes before he opened the lock.
There is typically a lot of floating debris at the entrance to these dams (on the upstream side) and there seemed to be almost a log jam at this one, which we would have to go through, with some logs and sticks as thick as seven or eight inches in diameter. The way to navigate through these debris fields is to go very slow and nudge your way through…that is to put the motors in gear and start the boat forward, then putting the motors in neutral, thereby floating and pushing your way through the debris. In the process and because the debris field was so deep and long, we hit a log with our port prop really hard.
We got into the lock and he lowered us through. We exited at the same time the tow barge that he previously told us about was exiting the large lock and so were able to get passed him pretty handily. The river is very wide here.
The next lock and dam is only six miles down stream, but we were in a no-wake zone for about the first two miles. We were very good and watched our wake…running about 1100 rpm which is still about ten MPH on this big boat, plus the current was 3 to 4 MPH, so we were still moving along at a pretty good rate of speed. In this section we passed Wood River, IL (Lewis and Clark's 1803 starting point) and the confluence of the Missouri River. The river is very wide here. The water is tepid and turbulent and generally has a lot of floating debris, which we did not see much of on this trip. The MO River confluence also marks the entrance to the Chain of Rocks Canal, the entrance to which is off the main channel at this point.
We then called the Chain of Rocks lock master on the cell and told her our plight. She was confident that she could get us through and told us that she would also put the small lock on the MO side of the river in service if when we got there her main lock was busy. Between these two locks and dams and on the main channel, there is a natural chain of rocks across the entire river which prohibits navigation. General Robert E Lee (Confederate Army Commander during the Civil War)was stationed at Jefferson Barracks at St Louis, MO prior to the civil war and supervised the construction of a three or four mile long canal which in later years would include the Chain of Rocks Lock and Dam, We were able to make good time through the channel and ran at warp speed (as defined above). We passed one South bound tow and barge in the channel. I ‘hailed him’ on the ‘two-way’ (we are learning the language) to inquire as to which side he wanted us to pass him on. He said something about Starboard or Port so I called back and said left or right…he then said something about starboard or port so I said Mo or Ill side…at which point he said pass on either side, I don’t care…which we did.
We then encountered a tug and tow (these things are over 1,000 feet long) going North. When we were mostly passed the barges and approaching the tow boat (we could only get about 100 feet away in the narrow canal) he turned on his side thrusters and was throwing a huge wake vertical to his boat and directly in our path. I just steered into it and increased my RPM’s to about 2000 to give me a little more power and while we rocked and bounced, we zoomed through his insult.
When we got to the chain of rocks lock and dam, the lock master told us to go into the large lock which another upstream tow had just exited. I inquired (for clarification) whether she meant the one with the barge coming out and her comment was…yes and the tow boat too.
We moved in, she lowered us (about 35 minutes) and we were on our way. Just downstream of this lock and dam the canal again converges with the Mississippi River and we were just North of downtown. It was twenty minutes until the noon closure so we poured on the coal.
We flew by Laclede’s landing, the football dome and the Arch. We encountered Coast Guard boats just North of the Poplar Street Bridge (I64, I55, and I70) who escorted us downstream to just under the bridge. We later learned that our two-way had been left on the last lock and dam frequency and was not set on the monitoring channel (16) so we could not communicate with the Coast Guard, which we surmised as being very good.
We then settled into about a 1600 rpm routine and started noticing a very obvious vibration. I went below and determined that the vibration was coming from the left motor (Port). We also now know that our speed apparatus does not work…we have to time ourselves on the chart to calculate speed, and our gps works when it wants to.
Fortunately we purchased a hand held GPS. We also have a road map and a river chart of every inch of the waterways.
We stopped at Hoppies for lunch and filled with diesel fuel (218 gallons at just under $1,000). Hoppies is an old barge tethered to the bank on the Missouri side of the river @ MM 155 @ Kimmswick, MO. It is mostly a fuel stop with sky high fuel prices. They call themselves a Marina and they do have tie-offs and 50 amp service for a fee for overnight travelers. We walked about a half mile into town to a well recommended eating place, but when we got there we discovered that most of the people from St Louis were there. The little town had a fall festival and we couldn’t even get close to the restaurant…oh well, maybe next time. At Hoppies we were tied up behind a 90 foot motor yacht with a crew, etc. We felt like white trash.
We got back on the boat and headed South, dining on bologna sandwiches while driving.
Kerma does most of the driving and I navigate, marking the charts and timing us between markers to determine our speed. We are really trucking and think we are running @ 21 MPH, plus the current of 3 to 5 MPH…maybe we are even running a little faster than that. The boat isn’t taking nearly as much fuel as I had anticipated. It appears we are getting just under one mile for each gallon burned running at these high RPM’s.
We Called Green Turtle Bay which is just below the Barkley dam on the Cumberland river to see if they would lift us on Monday and check our props. There is moderate vibration at every rpm.
We also called the lock master on the Kaskaskia River, a tributary to the Miss @ MM 117 (which is 101 miles from our starting point). We asked the lock master if we could tie-off below the dam and he said that he would have room. He took our name, length of boat, name of boat, etc.
We arrived at the Kaskaskia River and tied-off as instructed @ 3pm.
The only other boat there was the ‘Ebb Tide’ owned by Phil and June Ritchie from Daytona FL. He is a semi-retired physician. They have been on the ‘loop’ since June. They had a small tug style boat built specifically for the kind of travel that they were enjoying. Phil is a physician and they stop every three weeks so that he can fly to North Carolina and work for one week, then they fly back to the boat to continue their journey. I took their dog Taffy for a walk and threw him on our boat where he surprised and met Kerma. You know what a fool she can be for a puppy. Phil told me that they were enjoying about four miles per gallon with his Janmar diesel engine and I just smiled and said good. I never was good at discussing fuel mileage.
We had a wonderful dinner of turkey breast filet and green peas, made in our own galley and we went to bed early. Kerma was thoughtful enough to bring along reading material and we worked long into the night at that chore.
We were curious about the frig and freezer not working, along with some other electrical appliances and lights until I discovered that we had turned off the inverter (a device that makes 120V AC current out of 12V DC current) and the only way to make appliances work if you don’t have shore power…or if you don’t have a generator. We turned the generator on and ran it into the night to charge the house batteries.
We thought long and hard about traveling a little further before stopping, knowing that we wanted to get to Green Turtle Bay Marina in Lake Barkley, KY Sunday evening. The Kaskaskia lock seemed a safe and secure place to stop and we thought we would have no trouble doing 180 miles on Sunday if we got a day-break start.
We slept like babies and giggled a lot during the night at our good fortune.
DOWNTOWN ST LOUIS
DOCKED FOR THE FIRST NIGHT-CONFLUENCE OF KASKASKIA RIVER
CHAIN OF ROCKS LOCK AND DAM
Day 2
It is the end of the day on Sunday, October 19th and we are anchored on the Ohio River below Lock and Dam 52 @ MM 939 @ Brookport, Illinois which is across the River from Paducah, KY. We got to this stinking lock about 4pm with plenty of time to get to Lake Barkley before dark @ 6:15. We had a wonderful day, running hard and enjoying the scenery, but got shut down at this lock and dam. One tow boat captain said he had been sitting here since 10AM waiting to get through. The lockmaster told us about dark…6:30…that we would do just as well to pull out of the shipping lane and drop anchor, which we have done since we don’t want to run at night. Our radar, radio and sonar all work exceptionally well, but we are chicken to run at night, even if we could get through the lock…which we cannot.
But back to the beginning...Sunday morning we got up before daylight and made our bed. Kerma cooked breakfast and we read for a while, waiting for the sun to come up. It finally seemed light enough to get underway so we looked out the window and it was so foggy that we could barely see the rail that we were tied to. We went back to bed and even went back to sleep.
About eight o’clock or so we started cleaning and getting things done around the house (the boat). Finally about 9:10 the sun burned through the fog and the fog was gone almost immediately. I was on the bridge when the fog lifted as if by magic and so I started the motors. This of course signaled my first mate and we hurriedly put things away, untied the boat and headed out into the river. Our neighbors Phil and June were leaving at the same time and were right behind us. I sounded my clavicle and he sounded his clavicle and we waived. We never saw them again that day, since they only run about seven or eight MPH. By the time we got around the first curve in the river, they were out of sight. Kerma drove almost all day and I worked to get the GPS going, which never happened. I got on top of the boat and removed the antenna, hoping that if I relocated it that we could get reception…funny how the cheap hand held works just fine… We were underway @ 9:30 and immediately began to worry about whether we could make the 190 miles before dark…a good excuse to go fast.
We pushed a head wind most of the way down the river. When we got in a position where the wind hit us from the side (as we followed the serpentine river, we were headed in every direction on the compass from time to time) we got a pretty good ride. At Tower Rock (Chester, ILL, the home of Popeye) the river was so wide and the wind so heavy that we had to contend with white caps, maybe the waves were three or four feet high. My mate just sailed on through.
Since it was Sunday, we met and or passed several small craft, both pleasure and fishing. We made a point of slowing down to idle speed in order to not expose the small craft to such a huge wake from our boat. We got a lot of waves for the courtesy.
A few miles before the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers (she had driven 118 miles) Kerma turned the controls over to the Captain of the boat. I drove to the confluence and made the turn and into the commercial traffic. We noticed that for several miles north of the confluence of the two rivers the presence of many tow boats with barges tied to the banks. When we entered the Ohio River, there were hundreds of barges, empty and loaded and many working tow boats. It turns out that the locks along the upper Miss and the Ohio River restrict the size of the barge tows that can lock through. 1,000 feet is the limit, so the tows that come up the lower Mississippi River from say Memphis or New Orleans are broken-down into smaller tows to continue the voyage north. So they were busy breaking down tows and making-up new tows, much like a RR yard makes up trains, etc…
It was not an easy task to learn to keep the red buoys on the right after we turned left onto the Ohio River. The rule is red, right; ascending…that is that the red channel marker buoys are on the right bank as you go upriver. That is a rule set-up by the Coast Guard. Green buoys mark the other side of the channel. Coming down river, we had to pass the red channel marker buoys on our left. However, we had to change gears in our heads and keep the red channel buoy markers on our Right side going up the Ohio River…kind of a left brain right brain switch I think.
It was interesting to see some of the familiar sights. ; Chester Illinois (previously mentioned) is the point where Les and I started our bicycle trip across the tip of Southern Illinois, all of the way to Roseclair on the Ohio on the East side of Illinois. When we turned up the Ohio River, we passed the Bunge soybean processing facility. When I worked for Bunge many years ago I had to come to this plant for a few days to help troubleshoot some processing problems…small world. When we floated under the I24 Bridge from Illinois to Paducah (a route that we have taken hundreds of times on trips to Florida and trips South, Kerma observed that the bridge looked much more level than when you go over it. Her impression each time she drove over the bridge on I-24 was that there was an arch (a hill) built into the bridge…funny stuff.
We had bologna for lunch again…I am turning her into a connoisseur of fine bologna…but she fixed a baked lasagna and made her fabulous fruit cocktail for dinner. She even brought parmesan cheese for the lasagna…it doesn’t get any better than that.
The anchor dropped wonderfully and the chain played out perfectly when we were finally told that we could not get through the lock and to anchor. The current was so minimal that the chain hung straight down to the bottom of the lake. The rule is 4 to 1. For every foot of water depth, one is supposed to run out about four feet of chain. This allows the plow type anchor to set itself into the mud, making a fast and secure anchorage. The depth gauge read 25 feet so I ran out 100 feet. Kerma put the motors in reverse to set the anchor, which worked very well. When she shut the motors off however, the boat moved forward and instead of having the chain stretched out in a straight line from the anchor to the bow of the boat, ours pulled us forward a few feet until the chain was hanging straight down into the water. I finally determined that the weight of the chain on the bottom of the river was all that was needed to keep the boat from drifting. We slept as well as can be expected. Our house batteries do not hold a charge very long, which requires that two or three times during the night we had to turn on the generator. The problem is that when the batteries get below 13V (these are 12 V batteries) the CO2 sensors start to make a loud noisy chirping sound to indicate low voltage. We almost wanted to throw them out, but decided against that.
My only complaint for the day is, if the lockmaster had told us to drop anchor when we first arrived at this stinking lock then I might have saved a couple hundred dollars worth of fuel that was wasted as I idled around this stinking red buoy. One other complaint…the tow boat captain’s, while very courteous in conversation with each other are less interested in helping pleasure boats navigate. We don’t even contact them unless we are compelled to for one reason or the other.
Day 3 @ Paducah Kentucky, still anchored below Dam #52 on the Ohio River as before…
October 20, 2008; While we had a wonderful day yesterday and a fabulous dinner last night we woke-up frustrated that we are hanging on our anchor below this dam and they are still not sure when we can get through…
Last night after dinner we settled in to an evening of CSI Miami and some good…adequate fiction and hot showers. When we shut down for the evening and being the good/adequate mariners that we have become we knew that when one is at anchor one has to illuminate an anchor light at the highest point on the boat. I turned ours on at the control panel and we settled into our evening exercises (as above). I intentionally left the two-way on in order to monitor the voice traffic as they worked on the damaged lock and worked the barges through the larger lock. When it was good and dark, we heard some radio traffic between two tow boat captains about a pleasure boat (that is what they call anything non-commercial) at anchor with no ‘anchor’ light. We looked around from the bridge to locate this less experienced mariner so that we could join in chastising him when suddenly the lock master ‘hailed’ us on the two-way to inform us that we were not illuminated. I protested in response that I was illuminated and at the same time tried (in vain) to see the light. He told me to check and so I unzipped the bimini cover and low and behold, our light was not on…of course. We are not as prepared as we thought in that I do not have a step ladder on board, so I stood on one of the seats, hooked my belly over the radar arch, found a foot hold on the bimini support bars and hoisted myself atop the radar arch. I unscrewed and unseated the burned out bulb, then handed it to my first mate. We quickly agreed that we thought we did not have a spare…and we were correct. After taking the cover off several different lights on the boat, we discovered that this particular bulb, while a very common automotive bulb, was unique to the boat and apparently the only one on board.
On the way down from the radar arch, my foot would not make contact with the seat back that I started from. I asked my deck hand how far my foot was from the seat back and she grabbed my foot, yanked on it to place it on the foot back and almost pulled my fat butt to the deck. I was holding my weight and hers for a while and screaming to ‘let go…let go please is actually the way that I gave the order. When she finally did I was holding on by my fingernails. I finally made my way down and contacted the lock master. He told me to turn on my running lights and to otherwise illuminate the boat because at about daylight there would be drunk fishermen in the area and one of them would surely discover us in an awkward and perhaps expensive way. We turned on the logo lights illuminating the rear half of the boat, the navigation lights illuminating the front half of the boat and the back deck lights…we then looked like a Christmas tree sitting in the water.
So today we also need to buy a light bulb. For want of a nail…
Well, I am starting this note @ 6am and while the half moon provides considerable light, it is still quite dark. The anchor held wonderfully with the boat only swaying side to side a little bit, so we did have a peaceful nights sleep. We ran the generator most of the night. The house batteries get depleted pretty quickly. The electrical system is not as sophisticated as that on the motor home…
Today we only have to run about forty miles to our destination with two locks and dams to navigate…
My cook is putting breakfast together, I am about to clean the moisture (I guess it is dew from heaven) from the windows on the bridge and contact the dock master.
One other comment about the culture amongst the workers and boat operators along the river. When a tow boat captain reports to any official (lockmaster for instance) or when they communicate with each other, they identify their boat name on the initial contact by two-way. Thereafter as the conversation ensues between the two parties each is cordially addressed by this name. When I report or call the lockmaster or a boat captain, I always use their format by identifying my boat…pleasure boat 'our world' calling the south bound tow boat at mile marker X for instance. No response from anyone we have talked to ever includes our boat name in the conversation, but rather we are always addressed as the southbound pleasure boat, or the northbound pleasure boat…go figure.
More later…
It is the end of the day on Sunday, October 19th and we are anchored on the Ohio River below Lock and Dam 52 @ MM 939 @ Brookport, Illinois which is across the River from Paducah, KY. We got to this stinking lock about 4pm with plenty of time to get to Lake Barkley before dark @ 6:15. We had a wonderful day, running hard and enjoying the scenery, but got shut down at this lock and dam. One tow boat captain said he had been sitting here since 10AM waiting to get through. The lockmaster told us about dark…6:30…that we would do just as well to pull out of the shipping lane and drop anchor, which we have done since we don’t want to run at night. Our radar, radio and sonar all work exceptionally well, but we are chicken to run at night, even if we could get through the lock…which we cannot.
But back to the beginning...Sunday morning we got up before daylight and made our bed. Kerma cooked breakfast and we read for a while, waiting for the sun to come up. It finally seemed light enough to get underway so we looked out the window and it was so foggy that we could barely see the rail that we were tied to. We went back to bed and even went back to sleep.
About eight o’clock or so we started cleaning and getting things done around the house (the boat). Finally about 9:10 the sun burned through the fog and the fog was gone almost immediately. I was on the bridge when the fog lifted as if by magic and so I started the motors. This of course signaled my first mate and we hurriedly put things away, untied the boat and headed out into the river. Our neighbors Phil and June were leaving at the same time and were right behind us. I sounded my clavicle and he sounded his clavicle and we waived. We never saw them again that day, since they only run about seven or eight MPH. By the time we got around the first curve in the river, they were out of sight. Kerma drove almost all day and I worked to get the GPS going, which never happened. I got on top of the boat and removed the antenna, hoping that if I relocated it that we could get reception…funny how the cheap hand held works just fine… We were underway @ 9:30 and immediately began to worry about whether we could make the 190 miles before dark…a good excuse to go fast.
We pushed a head wind most of the way down the river. When we got in a position where the wind hit us from the side (as we followed the serpentine river, we were headed in every direction on the compass from time to time) we got a pretty good ride. At Tower Rock (Chester, ILL, the home of Popeye) the river was so wide and the wind so heavy that we had to contend with white caps, maybe the waves were three or four feet high. My mate just sailed on through.
Since it was Sunday, we met and or passed several small craft, both pleasure and fishing. We made a point of slowing down to idle speed in order to not expose the small craft to such a huge wake from our boat. We got a lot of waves for the courtesy.
A few miles before the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers (she had driven 118 miles) Kerma turned the controls over to the Captain of the boat. I drove to the confluence and made the turn and into the commercial traffic. We noticed that for several miles north of the confluence of the two rivers the presence of many tow boats with barges tied to the banks. When we entered the Ohio River, there were hundreds of barges, empty and loaded and many working tow boats. It turns out that the locks along the upper Miss and the Ohio River restrict the size of the barge tows that can lock through. 1,000 feet is the limit, so the tows that come up the lower Mississippi River from say Memphis or New Orleans are broken-down into smaller tows to continue the voyage north. So they were busy breaking down tows and making-up new tows, much like a RR yard makes up trains, etc…
It was not an easy task to learn to keep the red buoys on the right after we turned left onto the Ohio River. The rule is red, right; ascending…that is that the red channel marker buoys are on the right bank as you go upriver. That is a rule set-up by the Coast Guard. Green buoys mark the other side of the channel. Coming down river, we had to pass the red channel marker buoys on our left. However, we had to change gears in our heads and keep the red channel buoy markers on our Right side going up the Ohio River…kind of a left brain right brain switch I think.
It was interesting to see some of the familiar sights. ; Chester Illinois (previously mentioned) is the point where Les and I started our bicycle trip across the tip of Southern Illinois, all of the way to Roseclair on the Ohio on the East side of Illinois. When we turned up the Ohio River, we passed the Bunge soybean processing facility. When I worked for Bunge many years ago I had to come to this plant for a few days to help troubleshoot some processing problems…small world. When we floated under the I24 Bridge from Illinois to Paducah (a route that we have taken hundreds of times on trips to Florida and trips South, Kerma observed that the bridge looked much more level than when you go over it. Her impression each time she drove over the bridge on I-24 was that there was an arch (a hill) built into the bridge…funny stuff.
We had bologna for lunch again…I am turning her into a connoisseur of fine bologna…but she fixed a baked lasagna and made her fabulous fruit cocktail for dinner. She even brought parmesan cheese for the lasagna…it doesn’t get any better than that.
The anchor dropped wonderfully and the chain played out perfectly when we were finally told that we could not get through the lock and to anchor. The current was so minimal that the chain hung straight down to the bottom of the lake. The rule is 4 to 1. For every foot of water depth, one is supposed to run out about four feet of chain. This allows the plow type anchor to set itself into the mud, making a fast and secure anchorage. The depth gauge read 25 feet so I ran out 100 feet. Kerma put the motors in reverse to set the anchor, which worked very well. When she shut the motors off however, the boat moved forward and instead of having the chain stretched out in a straight line from the anchor to the bow of the boat, ours pulled us forward a few feet until the chain was hanging straight down into the water. I finally determined that the weight of the chain on the bottom of the river was all that was needed to keep the boat from drifting. We slept as well as can be expected. Our house batteries do not hold a charge very long, which requires that two or three times during the night we had to turn on the generator. The problem is that when the batteries get below 13V (these are 12 V batteries) the CO2 sensors start to make a loud noisy chirping sound to indicate low voltage. We almost wanted to throw them out, but decided against that.
My only complaint for the day is, if the lockmaster had told us to drop anchor when we first arrived at this stinking lock then I might have saved a couple hundred dollars worth of fuel that was wasted as I idled around this stinking red buoy. One other complaint…the tow boat captain’s, while very courteous in conversation with each other are less interested in helping pleasure boats navigate. We don’t even contact them unless we are compelled to for one reason or the other.
Day 3 @ Paducah Kentucky, still anchored below Dam #52 on the Ohio River as before…
October 20, 2008; While we had a wonderful day yesterday and a fabulous dinner last night we woke-up frustrated that we are hanging on our anchor below this dam and they are still not sure when we can get through…
Last night after dinner we settled in to an evening of CSI Miami and some good…adequate fiction and hot showers. When we shut down for the evening and being the good/adequate mariners that we have become we knew that when one is at anchor one has to illuminate an anchor light at the highest point on the boat. I turned ours on at the control panel and we settled into our evening exercises (as above). I intentionally left the two-way on in order to monitor the voice traffic as they worked on the damaged lock and worked the barges through the larger lock. When it was good and dark, we heard some radio traffic between two tow boat captains about a pleasure boat (that is what they call anything non-commercial) at anchor with no ‘anchor’ light. We looked around from the bridge to locate this less experienced mariner so that we could join in chastising him when suddenly the lock master ‘hailed’ us on the two-way to inform us that we were not illuminated. I protested in response that I was illuminated and at the same time tried (in vain) to see the light. He told me to check and so I unzipped the bimini cover and low and behold, our light was not on…of course. We are not as prepared as we thought in that I do not have a step ladder on board, so I stood on one of the seats, hooked my belly over the radar arch, found a foot hold on the bimini support bars and hoisted myself atop the radar arch. I unscrewed and unseated the burned out bulb, then handed it to my first mate. We quickly agreed that we thought we did not have a spare…and we were correct. After taking the cover off several different lights on the boat, we discovered that this particular bulb, while a very common automotive bulb, was unique to the boat and apparently the only one on board.
On the way down from the radar arch, my foot would not make contact with the seat back that I started from. I asked my deck hand how far my foot was from the seat back and she grabbed my foot, yanked on it to place it on the foot back and almost pulled my fat butt to the deck. I was holding my weight and hers for a while and screaming to ‘let go…let go please is actually the way that I gave the order. When she finally did I was holding on by my fingernails. I finally made my way down and contacted the lock master. He told me to turn on my running lights and to otherwise illuminate the boat because at about daylight there would be drunk fishermen in the area and one of them would surely discover us in an awkward and perhaps expensive way. We turned on the logo lights illuminating the rear half of the boat, the navigation lights illuminating the front half of the boat and the back deck lights…we then looked like a Christmas tree sitting in the water.
So today we also need to buy a light bulb. For want of a nail…
Well, I am starting this note @ 6am and while the half moon provides considerable light, it is still quite dark. The anchor held wonderfully with the boat only swaying side to side a little bit, so we did have a peaceful nights sleep. We ran the generator most of the night. The house batteries get depleted pretty quickly. The electrical system is not as sophisticated as that on the motor home…
Today we only have to run about forty miles to our destination with two locks and dams to navigate…
My cook is putting breakfast together, I am about to clean the moisture (I guess it is dew from heaven) from the windows on the bridge and contact the dock master.
One other comment about the culture amongst the workers and boat operators along the river. When a tow boat captain reports to any official (lockmaster for instance) or when they communicate with each other, they identify their boat name on the initial contact by two-way. Thereafter as the conversation ensues between the two parties each is cordially addressed by this name. When I report or call the lockmaster or a boat captain, I always use their format by identifying my boat…pleasure boat 'our world' calling the south bound tow boat at mile marker X for instance. No response from anyone we have talked to ever includes our boat name in the conversation, but rather we are always addressed as the southbound pleasure boat, or the northbound pleasure boat…go figure.
More later…
Day 3
October 20, 2008; Sitting @ Green Turtle Marina on Lake Barkley, Kentucky. We just returned form dinner with a couple whom we met as we passed their Carver on the Cumberland River this morning and with whom we locked through the Barkley lock and Dam. This lock is a 57 foot lift. We were amazed.
We had a peaceful night on the Ohio River last night ‘on the hook’, which means that we were at anchor. We reported to the lockmaster at Lock and Dam 52 this morning at about six AM and asked about the rotation and when we might have a turn through the lock. She called the next scheduled tow boat and explained to him that we had been waiting since 4pm the day before and that she was legally required to lift a pleasure boat every third lift. He agreed that he would allow us to lock through in front of him, but he told the dock master that he would continue moving slowly towards the lock gate. She then ‘hailed’ me on the two way and told us to pull into the lock as soon as the gates opened as she was letting a tow through that was at that moment exiting the lock on the upstream side.
I tidied things up and pulled my anchor (we have anchor control switches on the very front of the boat, which allows me to watch the anchor and chain retrieve as I operate it). I got a water hose ready but there was no need since the chain came up clean as a whistle…
My deck hand came to the bridge about the time I started the motors and we started to move into position. The tow that was to lock through behind us was off to our starboard about a thousand yards, slowly moving upriver to the lock gates. I started moving slowly to the gate as well, knowing that it would be as much as an hour before she locked through the tow that was being lifted, emptied the lock and then open the doors to allow us to come in. Kerma was convinced that the approaching tow on our starboard was going to crowd us out of the next entry slot. I could tell this because that is the way she is and when I stepped away from the helm, she stepped-up and started moving our boat a little more aggressively into position. I took back over the helm and she then started chanting…’he is going to move right in there when the lock opens…see he just keeps moving…I know he is going to crowd us out and make us wait…and on and on, finally betting me $100 that the tow would block our entrance into the lock. I repeatedly told her that the lockmaster had ordered us into the lock next and that the tow captain had agreed, etc., but nothing worked. Finally by the time the lock started to open, he had stopped about one hundred yards shy of the lock gate and I then pulled in front of him to stage through. As we were preparing to enter, another pleasure craft came up and staged through with us. We had waited 28 hours to get into the lock and he drove around all of the commercial traffic and went right through. There is nothing fair about the process by which one progresses through the locks on the inland waterways.
The lock master was the same one who had been on shift the night before. She was very nice and very apologetic about the hectic events that required our anchoring overnight. She lifted us and sent us on our way. We pulled out of lock 52 on the Ohio River at MM 939 @ 8:13 am and were on our way…again.
My first mate was driving and we ran pretty hard the last few miles on the Ohio. Just 16 miles from lock and dam 52, we exited the Ohio and entered the Cumberland River. Now we are only thirty miles from Lake Barkley and 31 miles from Green Turtle Bay, our home anchorage for the next couple days.
The Cumberland is beautiful. Pristine is probably a good word to describe its beauty. The only debris on the river seems to be us. There is very little commercial traffic on this river and not very much pleasure boat traffic. We cut our speed back somewhat and Kerma settled in to about 1300 rpm, running right in the middle of the river. This river reminds Kerma of the movie ‘Deliverance’, but it kind of reminds me of home.
About mile 18, we were approaching another pleasure boat. I suggested to my First Mate that she cut back her speed and just follow the smaller boat, about a 34 foot Carver…a little older vintage, but a very nice aft cabin boat. My suggesting that she cut back and follow provided a double challenge for Kerma…challenge one was the fact that there was a boat in front of her and challenge two was that I had made a suggestion…away we went, right up to their back door, over their wake and around them. I announced to them on the two-way that we were passing on their starboard side. We met Pete and Linda Blosser at MM 18 on the Cumberland. They kicked-up their rpm’s and followed us to the dam. We chit chatted along the way and after learning that they were from St Louis and were headed to the same marina as us, we decided to have dinner together.
PASSING THE CATRINE ON THE CUMBERLAND APPROACHING LAKE BARKLEY
As I write this, we are anchored next to them @ Green Turtle Bay Marina on Lake Barkley and we have just returned from dinner @ Patti’s 1880’s settlement where I had a two inch pork chop and a piece of coconut crème pie. Pete is a pilot for American Airlines and Linda is a financial analyst. They are long time boaters and have made this trip many times before over the years. One of Pete’s friends (another AA Pilot) lives here (Burke Robinette and his wife Diedra) and they took us to dinner. The marina has courtesy cars for transient boaters. Pete and Burke originally worked for Ozark Airlines and survived the sale to TWA, then they survived the sale to American Airlines. Both are looking forward to retirement and both are very interesting guys. We may spend some time with them over the next few years…both are boaters as well.
LOCKING THROUGH ON THE OHIO
CAPTAIN KERMA DOING HER THING
MEETING A TOW ON THE TENNESSEE RIVER
We filled the boat with fuel when we arrived…400 gallons. One tank took 175 gallons and the other took 225 gallons. I am assuming that the generator runs off one tank, thus the difference in the amount of fuel to each tank. Just as we pulled into the marina, our Radar stopped working.
I went over to the service department and finalized arrangements to get the boat lifted and the props checked tomorrow. I met an interesting guy (the service agent) who is actually originally from Collinsville, IL, just down the road from our house. Spent too much time jaw jacking, but am comfortable that he can do what needs to be done with the props and getting my bottom pressure cleaned. I then called an electronics repair store in Paducah. He cannot be here until Wednesday, so we will stay tonight, tomorrow night and Wednesday night before leaving.
We were also told that one should not run on the Tom Bigbee Waterway on weekends. It is a smaller waterway with lots of pleasure boaters and lots of summer homes along the way. These homes are used on weekends more than during the week. One guy told a story about shot guns being used by homeowners to slow fast moving boats…go figure. We will probably lay-over the week-end at Pickwick Dam.
I spent the afternoon fixing my anchor light. As it turned out, the bulb was bad, but the wiring was also wrong. When the boat was damaged in the storm of 06, the workers did not take the time to separate the circuit and had tied the anchor light to the running light…at any rate, after borrowing a ladder from friendly boaters and after accessing the ship’s store for small parts here at the marina, the light is fixed.
A 58 foot Azimat yacht just pulled in beside us. We first met them when they spent the night at our home marina (Grafton Harbor) on Friday night. They are from Chicago and are headed for Clearwater FL. The Captain moves boats back and forth each season. He is a rent-a captain and he has a foul mouth…nice boat though. This particular boat has never been out of the Chicago/Wisconsin area. It is Italian made and beautiful. From our bridge we look directly over their boat. It is low and Italian sleek. The owner arrives tomorrow from Chicago to finish the trip and there was a lengthy and loud discussion on their bridge late into the night about who was in charge. The foul mouthed captain boasted that I give all orders and am in charge of anyone (owner or not) who sets foot on this boat. If you don’t like it then just get me a plane ticket to Chicago. His crew member is an employee of the owner and is a very nice guy. I think there was some alcohol in the ‘I am in charge boasting’.
Last Monday we helped a transient couple out of our Fairview Heights Marina, through the mud and debris with our seadoos. Their boat is a 48 foot Selene trawler type hull. It is beautiful and has one engine. Probably a two million dollar boat. He is a retired dentist from Newport, R.I. They are mild mannered and very nice. When they saw us pull in today, they ran over to greet us…small community of boaters.
Day 4
7am on Tuesday 21 October 2008…Green Turtle Bay, Barkley Lake
I just helped Pete and Linda untie and cast off the Carina on their Southern voyage. They are going to Columbus, MS and tie-up for a few days stay where they will rent a car for the trip back to St Louis. He has a flight the first week of November. They will continue their trip south the last week of November.
The owner of the 58 foot Azimat ‘Carrera’ just showed up with his trophy wife. He uses a walker because of a stroke a few years ago and I helped with his baggage down the gangway to the dock. His trophy wife is loud and beautiful and garnished with diamonds. He is a dentist and apparently a very successful one. I am sitting on my bridge listening to the loud laughter and loud talk as they hang the stars and bars (confederate flat...tacky) and take down the American Flag. The guy hanging the flag asked me for some nylon ties and a finger nail clipper, which I quickly found and provided. He then said, ‘can I have a couple more ties for the road” so I went back aboard got them and handed them to him. When he finished he put my fingernail clippers in his pocket. No 'thank you'…nothing…typical Chicagoan I think. They use the F word a lot…apparently the trophy wife is driving back to Chicago with the mechanic…go figure. A passer by told the guy hanging the Confederate flag that they would surely get shot at going down river with that flag, while another said that the flag would be protection for them as they go south…They are pulling out soon and I am glad. There will be an empty slip on either side of us when they leave.
Well my cook is up and about and has prepared a fine breakfast of sausage, gravy and biscuits. This is the second time in 43 years that my cook that has prepared gravy and biscuits. Boy I must be doing something right in the way that I treat her. Maybe for lunch she will serve Banana and Peanut Butter sandwiches…we will see. Delicious…
As I wait for the service department, I notice the faint smell of raw diesel fuel. I opened my motor room hatch and could see diesel fuel running down the side of my right fuel tank (that is starboard for you non-mariners). My first thought was to clean-up the mess, which I immediately commenced, then my follow-up thought (it is hard being 64 years old) was…why don’t you fix the leak dummy, then clean up the mess, otherwise you will be wiping up diesel fuel until the tank drains down below the leak. I actually went through that whole process in my head. I very quickly followed the dripping down the side of the tank to its source. On the top of the tank there is a gasketed apparatus that appears to be the fuel level gauge. I found a Phillips head screw driver and tightened the screws, never dreaming that the fix would be so simple. Apparently when the boat was manufactured this installation was never complete and all it needed was to be tightened. Within seconds the leak was fixed, but it took a while to clean up the fuel mess. Yesterday was only the second time we have filled the tanks completely. Each tank holds 400 gallons. I assume after a few hours the heat from the engine room raised the temp on the diesel fuel sufficient for it to expand and put pressure on the tank. I went outside and sure enough there was a little trickle down the side of the boat @ the overflow. I left the engine access door open and turned on the fan. Within an hour or so, the overflow trickle stopped. By then I had the inside fuel mess cleaned up, so I washed the side of the boat with river water so as not to leave a stain. A few months ago I ran into a boater who educated me on an easy way to keep your boat clean. He keeps a hand held pressure sprayer on board (the kind that you use to spray for garden pests), some good quality liquid soap and a soft brush with a telescopic handle. He sprays the mild soap on the side of the boat, rubs the stain or soiled area with his brush, then he dips the brush into the river and rinses…works really well and I do it all of the time. River water is always soft water I learned and typically does not stain…
I am waiting for the phone call from John the service guy to take my boat out. The lift is directly across from us in the bay, about 700 feet. I am cleaning up and replacing inspection hole covers and access plates from the process of taking down the anchor tower and re-wiring same… There is a 90 footer across the marina that came in late last night to just tie-up. He needs two 200 amp electric service lines to his boat and this marina does not provide that sort of anchorage. It is a beautiful boat. It is the same one that we docked beside at Hoppies Marina on the Mississippi River at our first fuel stop. He has at least two on-board generators that run all of the time. They left quite early in order to allow other boats in the marina to move around.
The mechanic who will do the lift stopped by to inspect the boat and to determine whether he would have me enter the repair slip bow first or stern first (I think that means front first or rear first). He is a very nice guy and of course he is not from here. Gary, the service writer, then came by and stayed for a while to talk about Southern Illinois…home town stuff. He says he is almost 68 years old, but he looks about 40 to me. He wanted to know where our spare props were. I revealed my land-lubber mentality when I said ‘what spare props’…he just smiled and talked about what we might find and what our approach to the repair would be.
We were soon hailed over. My deck hand and I untied from the slip and I had previously unhooked the utilities, so we just nudged the boat into the repair slip. Within minutes they had the boat out of the water. The bottom and the props looked shiny and perfect to me. My first mate and I stood there wondering why we had the vibration when Gary and the crew came over and said, well what do you want to do? We said…drop her in the water and we will be on our way. They all just laughed. The damage was plain to their trained eye. They then held a straight edge against the rudder and slowly turned the left prop. Two of the five blades were ¼ inch or so from the gauge and two of them pushed the gauge back about ¼ inches. He told us that was the source of our vibration and then he smiled and said, ‘that is why you need spare props’. We then discussed the fix. It was decided that the props needed to go to a shop in Iuka, MS (200 miles away) for repair and balancing. I called Enterprise car rental, they dropped off a van, the guys loaded the props in the van, gave my mate a map and told her that the shop would be prepared to fix the props first thing tomorrow morning. The guys then inspected the trim tabs and made a small adjustment, then lowered ‘OUR OWN LITTLE WORLD’ back into the water. It is very windy out, so they asked me to go on the bridge and keep the boat straight with the thrusters. With a little 90 HP John boat tied to my aft and my skilled use of the thrusters we began our journey. I held the boat into the wind and he pushed me across the bay and into my slip. I am tied-off with utilities restored and am most comfortable.
Our plan of sending Kerma to MS for the prop repair and leaving me here is because we have an appointment with the Raymarine (electronics) technician tomorrow and she felt like I should be here to interact with him.
We think that Kerma should be back with the props late tomorrow (Wednesday) and probably not soon enough to get them installed. We will have them installed on Thursday morning and leave as soon as we are back in the water. It might be a long shot, but we plan to be in Pickwick Lake, TN by Friday night or mid-day on Saturday for a lay-over. We want to go to the Shiloh National Military Park (a place where Daddy often took us as children)for a visit and hang-out for a few days. My Daddy actually grew-up in Counce, TN and the Iuka, MS area; the area in and around Pickwick lake. The few times that we visited his Uncle Albert in Counce, TN, Uncle Albert would talk about the construction detail of the Pickwick dam which began in 1934. On one trip he actually took Daddy, Buddy, Heber and me on a jon boat ride on Pickwick lake…seems like a small world some time. Uncle Albert (William Joseph McCain’s Brother) lived to be 95 years old and all the while lived in and around the Pickwick lake area. Ninety-five years is a longer life span than a typical McCain male enjoys.
I called my Son-in Law Les Fritz to let him know our schedule since he has planned to ride with us from Pickwick south. He may not ride with us all of the way to FL, since we are not moving downstream as fast as we had thought.
Wow, it looks like about a 120 footer just pulled up to the fuel dock. I will get a picture of this one.
Since my cook went to Mississippi with my first mate, I fixed my own lunch. Peanut Butter and Banana sprinkled with fresh raisins and a large glass of milk…what a feast…nap time.
I talked to Kerma @ 5:30. She is at the propeller shop in Iuka, MS. Gary told me that he would put the props on tomorrow if she returns by 4:30pm, perhaps things will work out after all.
It looks like I will have an evening of fiction....all alone.
I will dine on fresh fruit and cheese…life is good…I am content. I hope my girl friend is not too lonely tonight.
Day 5
Green Turtle Bay on Lake Barkley, KY, 22 Oct 2008
Kerma is in Iuka, MS waiting for the props…I read my book much of the night…
This morning I warmed the left over biscuits for breakfast. I then started dismantling the dash, the covers and mounting apparatus from the several electronic navigation devices in anticipation of the early arrival of the Raymarine Technician from Paducah. I am sitting on the bridge with a good view of the parking lot.
Waiting…
Waiting…
Talked to Kerma and got orders to fix the loose door handle on the freezer. That will take the pressure off for a while.
I went to the ships store and bought a handful of stainless steel screws and repaired several loose fixtures and doors. I also tore-down the dash and opened-up everything that the Raymarine technicians will need to access…
The Raymarine guys finally got here before noon and seem most qualified. I talked to Kerma on the phone and she is planning leaving Iuka sometime after noon with the props, so I talked to the service department and they said that if she is here by 4:30 then they will put the props on. Everything seems to be coming together.
Worked through lunch with the Raymarine technicians…
The Raymarine guys finished up @ 4:30. The Radar control assembly had shorted to the housing, which took them a while to diagnose and fix. The GPS problem had to do with programming the computer. I did not know that I had to program one of the units as the master and the other two as repeaters. They found a bad cable to the on-board cameras and a bad board in one of the computers that was integrated with the cameras, so they moved the camera feed to a different repeater. I now have GPS and radar on the master system. One sub-monitor has sonar on it and the other is a monitor for the cameras, although I can program each computer to do any of the functions. We now will know where we are, how fast we are going, how deep the water is, what the water temperature is and what our speed adjusted to the current is. We can see behind us and we can monitor the engine room…We are ready as to electronics.
We looked around @ 4:30 to learn that the service department guys were gone…so here we sit for another night. Hopefully they can get to us early tomorrow morning. If we are back in the water by noon, then we will head South…should be pretty easy to be in Pickwick by noon Saturday.
My cook is back and we had a lovely dinner of left-over lasagna…
Life is good…expecting rain tomorrow and Friday…
Day 6
Green Turtle Bay @ Barkley Day, KY 23 Oct 2008
Kerma got back to the boat and dropped off the props last evening as previously mentioned. I had been so busy with the electronics guys (Ben and Skip aka Jerry) that I did not follow-up as closely with the service department as I should have…I thought.
What I learned this morning when I went over to service is that they are terribly busy and are not sure what time they will be able to lift ‘Our Own Little World’ and replace her props. They know we are in a hurry and old dumb me, finally figured out that they want some under the table $ and since it is not my idea, it p_____ me off, so I am reluctant to accommodate him. I have a call in to the owner of the entire marina to see what he knows about extortion laws in KY. When Kerma picked-up the props yesterday she gave the little machinist guy a $100 bill in the form of a tip because he worked into the evening, got her out when he said he would, helped her make motel accommodations and map quested her a shorter/quicker way to return to Lake Barkley. That is the way a gratuity is earned, by efficiency and by going the extra mile, not by extortion. The service manager, Gary is on an errand to Paducah for parts and when he gets back, we will have a little conversation. I want to know if he is in on the conspiracy. These guys are so used to dealing with people with deep pockets that there is little respect it seems.
Anyway, we went to bed way too early last night…around 8pm, so we were up early (and often). I finished reading all of the novels we had on the boat and even had to resort to reading the entire book of Alma overnight. Kerma is on her way to Paducah on a Wal Mart run for supplies and reading material, but primarily to return the rental car.
Our firm plan is to meet Les and Theresa in Pickwick Lake, TN on Saturday, with hopes of being in dock by dark on Friday night. Les and Theresa will fly into Iuka, rent a car and meet us in Pickwick, where we will dock over the week-end and perhaps even through Monday in order to sight-see.
David Earl (my main cousin) has me interested in running down to Pontotoc and Tupelo to revisit some of our emotional heritage…and even spiritual heritage.
I spent the morning mounting, adjusting and re-mounting cameras around the boat. I can now see the swim platform which will make backing into a dock much easier. I can see all three motors in the engine room and much of the through hull water lines and I can see the sun bathing platform in the front of the boat…all from the helm.
Kerma got back about 10AM and lectured me because the boat was not ready to go…
I was promised a 10am lift…at 11:30 we saw Gary walk into the repair yard and talk to Bud. Bud was at our dock within minutes with the tow boat to lift us. We were out of there before 1PM. The tab for lifting, removing, repairing and replacing the props was $1300, plus Kerma’s rental car, motel room and the $100 to the efficient prop repairman. Not sure what the tab for the electronics repair will be, but the motors are as smooth as silk and we are on plane and flying down the river @ 23 MPH with 30 Tons of boat, water, fuel, clean underwear, peanut butter and stuff. Huge wake too…
It is raining pretty hard and we are on water that we have never navigated. We purchased a chart for our computer that interfaces with the GPS. Now that the GPS is on line and in conjunction with the radar, we can see shorelines and navigation aids and hazards. It is great and we got used to it really fast. We did have to orient again as to Red and White. Red on the Right returning…or Red on Right ascending. While we are going directly south on the Tennessee River, we are actually going upstream…so the red buoys are to be on the starboard side of the boat. We remind each other of this fact all day long.
We had to cross a canal from Barkley Lake on the Cumberland River to Kentucky Lake on the Tennessee. There was a huge tow barge coming through the canal and since it is only a few hundred yards across, we decided to wait for him to get to Barkley Lake. When we stopped, we felt the affects of the wind however and we were being pushed pretty quickly towards the shore. We quickly learned that when navigating in the wind, you only have control when under power, so we eased into the channel, explaining to the tow captain our situation, which he easily understood.
The channel on the Tennessee River is clearly market. We could generally see the marker buoys, but we also could now depend on our radar to define the channel by reflecting on the buoy markers and our chart/GPS actually showed the location of each navigation market on the river…channels are marked, wrecked and partially sunk ships are identified, etc.
The visibility was good but we encountered quite heavy rain. We learned to adjust the sensitivity on the radar to eliminate the rain clutter on the screen and define the markers…and away we went.
I drove for a couple hours and Kerma took her daily nap on the bridge behind me. When she woke-up, she took over the helm and I became the navigator. She does a fine job. About 3:30 or so, she told me that if I would drive, that she would start the generator and prepare some soup and sandwiches, since we had had no lunch. She was in the galley a short time when she told me that the generator would start but would quickly shut off. We have considerable experience with generators since we have had three motor homes, all of them equipped with generators. I know from experience that the genset will self diagnose and so Kerma took over the helm and I went down below. The program on the genset said that the cooling water filter was plugged-up or the water pump was faulty. Boat motors and gensets have a water cooled heat exchanger instead of a radiator. I went to the river water inlet valve/strainer, shut off the through hull valve and removed the filter from the line. This takes about five minutes. The filter apparatus is an in-line one in the water inlet and the cap is held on with two wing nuts. I removed both wing nuts, removed the filter basket and discovered that it was perfectly clean and looked new. I was impressed/concerned that there was no river water coming into the filter when I opened the valve to check flow. I replaced the filter and took the hose off the inlet side of the filter…got my face down by the valve and blew through the line, which proved that there was no blockage in the line. I then tried sucking on this 1 ¼ inch line but when I was putting the hose to my mouth it got stuck on my cheek. I am lying on the hull of the boat in the noisy engine room with a rubber hose giving my cheek a hickey. I pulled the hose loose from my cheek and realized that with my mate traveling at warp speed, the genset could not pull water into itself because there was a vacuum generated by the boat when on plane that actually pulls the cooling water out of the inlet…obviously a design flaw. I made a note to call Carver and told Kerma that if she wanted soup she probably needed to slow down to 1100 RPM’s or so. She said…I wasn’t hungry anyway and away we went.
We continued to encounter high winds and intermittent rain. We actually ran through white caps at cruise speed of 23 MPH, without having to slow down.
Everything was wonderful until…
We had planned to stop at Pebble Isle Marina at MM 96 for the evening since we had gotten away so late and because some of our friends who left on Tuesday and Wednesday called us to recommend it after having stayed there. Fuel is $3.20 too, which is attractive. We really want to be in Pickwick tomorrow night so running these 65 miles this afternoon would put us back on that schedule. The sun goes down @ 6:15 and it is really dark by 7:00pm, so that was our schedule. At 5pm I told Kerma to take some side marker buoy’s into Pebble Isle Marina…this at MM 93. I actually was completely turned around…the going upstream in a Southerly direction thing had us/me exiting on the wrong side of the river. We followed these small buoys for about 45 minutes until they just stopped. It was a very small channel but there was depth. I called the marina and tried to tell them where we were, but they had no clue. I said there is a church on the bank with a huge lighted cross and the lady on the radio said I have no idea where you are. While talking to her, I was trying to do a 180 with the boat using the thrusters. When the boat got sideways to the wind, we were blown onto a sand bar and held there fast by the wind. Our thrusters did not have power to get us off. I gave the marina lady our coordinates from the gps and additional information so that she could find us and told her that we were high and dry and to send out a tow-boat.
About 30 minutes later and just as the sun was setting a little boat came up the channel. Kerma immediately asked me whether he could get us off and an argument ensued because my response was not what she wanted to hear. He got there, tied a line to us and pulled us off the sand bar and back into the channel. By this time it was mostly dark, but my radar and Kerma’s quick eye, along with the aid of following the tow boat helped us the three miles or so back to the channel. By the time we hit the channel, it was completely dark and we stayed directly behind the tow boat, all of the way to the marina. They tied us up, hooked up our utilities and fed us dinner. Good people and we get fuel tomorrow for $3.20.
It is 9pm on day 6, our bellies are full, and there is no hole in our boat. Fortunately when we went aground the motors were not running and life is good.
It sounds crazy, but we are having a blast and meeting lots of fun people…This is a riot. It is raining like mad outside and we will sleep in each others arms tonight (now there is something to visualize) like babies…
Day 7
Friday 24 October, 2008
We slept a little late this morning. I didn’t get up until 7:30 or so. I immediately went to the engine room to test the genset. The generator will not run and continues to give me the code indicating no cooling water. I took the cooling water pump apart and the impeller was in pieces. This is a neoprene impeller and they are prone to fail. We have spares for the big diesel engines, but they are much too big to use in the genset diesel engine. For ease of repair, I completely removed the pump housing and while inspecting the housing noticed that the discharge side of the brass housing was about 60% plugged with slag from the casting. Apparently when the casting was made, it was not properly cleaned after casting. I tried to clear the passage with a screwdriver and hammer, but was afraid that I might completely ruin it, so I took it to the marina office and asked if there was a shop close buy where I could get the thing fixed. The owner of the marina gave me the keys to his car and directions to a shop that he owned a few blocks down the road, but not before I ate a complimentary hot cinnamon roll that he had just taken from the oven. I accommodated him of course and then I drove over and had one of his guys put the housing in a vice and drill out the stubborn metal. When I got back to the marina I inquired about a replacement impeller and low and behold, the proprietor had an impeller too. I took the repaired housing along with the new impeller and within a half hour I had the genset running, pumping water and generating electricity. I then read the instructions and learned that when a boat is lifted out of the water the genset cooling water supply line needs to be purged of air and primed once the boat is returned to the water. I primed the pump after repairs and everything is fine. Today we had hot soup for lunch while going down the river at 1700 rpm and 23 miles per hour.
We left Pebble Aisle Marina in time to be on the river @ 11:00 am. We are behind schedule because of the time I spent checking the strainers to all motors and repairing the genset. I also took the time to wetvac the engine room of the few gallons of water that were let in yesterday when the electronics guys were checking the thru-hull devices for speed and sound. I checked water levels and oil levels and then took a shower. We pulled the boat over to the fuel dock and topped-off with 130 gallons of diesel. We then went inside and settled up on our towing bills and our fuel, lodging, etc. bill. We said our good-byes to Randy Ashworth and his Friend Terry, along with their entire staff who were so friendly and helpful. We told them that we wanted to make it to Pickwick Lake by tonight and they made arrangements for our dockage at the Grand Harbor Marina on the Tenn-Tom Waterway, just above the Pickwick dam, which is their sister marina. It is interesting that the tow-bill of over $500 will be paid by a towing insurance company that we were encouraged to enroll in last Monday when we filled our fuel tanks in Green Turtle Bay. We were told that if we enrolled with the tow company that we would get a .07 discount. We needed so much fuel that the discount paid for the tow insurance…go figure.
When we got into the channel, I remembered that I had noticed the steering was a little spongy and not responsive. I added hydraulic fluid to the system and bled out the air. I am not sure why these hydraulic systems have to have fluid added like they do. We have three boats with the same brand steering mechanisms and all three have to have small amounts of hydraulic fluid added from time to time. I never see where oil has leaked from the system, but occasionally they have to be bled. Fortunately I had taken this into account and our maintenance supplies included hydraulic oil and a bleeding apparatus so that we can do this on the run. The boat runs very smooth and there is no vibration from the running gear in spite of last evening’s ordeal.
We ran for four miles and saw a very low bridge ahead. I calculated the measurement hash marks on the piling and determined that we were fine to clear with a couple feet to spare. I forgot about the 17 foot VHF whip antenna, which makes us set about 47 feet from the water to the top of the antenna. When the antenna hit the bridge, it sounded like a shotgun went off and we both envisioned having left the $5,000 radar apparatus in the river. I opened the zipper window, stuck my head out and was relieved that the VHF antenna was now at a very pleasant looking angle to the rear of the boat.
It rained very hard all night and some of our charts were in the wrong spot on the bridge and got a little wet so for the first few miles we depended completely on our instruments and less on the paper charts.
Kerma drove most of the day and I did the navigating. We are making very good time and are running at the top of the cruise RPM since we promised Les and Theresa that we would be in Grand Harbor before dark, a distance of 110 miles. 110 miles would be relatively easy but for the fact that we have to slow down so often for traffic and particularly for fishing boats. The main problem of course is the fact that we got a very late start a/c maintenance issues. Our wake at 1750 RPM is huge and would swamp many of the small boats that these guys use. There is not a lot of commercial traffic but there are quite a few fishing boats along the way. We fear that into the early afternoon and evening we will see more and more sport fishermen since it is Friday afternoon/evening.
The boat ran extremely well. The weather moderated and the sun came out for most of the trip. There is a pretty high wind and our moving about the several curves makes for fun steering.
The Tennessee River is beautiful. It reminds me of some of the European rivers. We saw many beautiful houses and small towns crowded next to the bank of the river on both sides. The elevation of the flowing water allowed us to see extremely well on both sides of the river most of the day. We observed farmers in the field and farm buildings. Children playing in yards and parks. Many marinas and marine associated businesses along the way. There were no shacks, although there were several mobile homes on lots along the river. We saw a Canadian flag. We started the genset and had warm soup and grilled cheese for lunch while underway. Towards the end of the day we came upon a small fleet of pleasure boats, all of which had to be carefully passed. We talked to several of the boat captains and we have changed our opinion of them somewhat. They are generally courteous and when they learn that I am not familiar with the terminology, they are accommodating generally. The talk channel is 13 and they are comfortable on that channel with minimal casual exchanges. I make sure that they understand that I need to be told Left or Right, not side 1 or side 2. While I can translate port and starboard after a short pause, I like for them to say things like your left side to my right side when I am meeting them…or pass on my right side, etc.
South of Perryville Tennessee the river became serpentine again, making us aware of the power in the wind.
The river is beautiful…pristine might be the appropriate adjective. I am not sure the beauty that I expected as we planned and talked about this trip over the years, but the scenery absolutely exceeds what I might have been able to imagine. The only debris we see on the river is us.
PICKWICK LOCK AND DAM...53 FOOT LIFT
LOCKING THROUGH ON THE TOM BIGBEE...75 FOOT HATARAS THAT WE RAN WITH FOR TWO DAYS We pulled into the Pickwick Dam at MM 106 at 5pm. It is two hours before dark and we have nine miles to go to our marina, after we are lifted the 55 feet vertically. We called the lock master about ten miles out and inquired about the traffic, letting him know our anxiety about getting to the marine before dark. When we got there, he had the lock doors open and was waiting for us. He lifted us by ourselves and discharged us onto the beautiful Pickwick Lake. We ran with no wake for a few minutes in reverence to the beauty about us. We then headed at warp speed up the river to the confluence of the Tom-Tenn Waterway and our Marina. The setting sun is blinding as we pull into the marina, so the security guard that we were talking to on the phone had to talk us in.
We are tied-up, hooked-up and have met and been greeted by the marina manager. Les and Theresa got here shortly after dark and we went to a nice restaurant.
It is bed time and life is good. That antenna sure looks nice with the rear facing angle.
Day 8
Grand Harbor-Tombigbee River 25 October, 2008
Theresa and Les got here last night about one hour after our arrival, just enough time to anchor good, hook-up the land lines and relax somewhat. We made good time yesterday and got here just at dark, even though we started late in the morning.
We had no problems at all yesterday. We did not run aground, we did not run into a fixed object (other than the bridge) and our VHF antenna base is bent at a backward angle making it look a little sexier than before.
LAKE BARCLAY ON THE CUMBERLAND RIVER (notice the sexy rake on the vhf antenna)We spent the day touring Shiloh Military Park. We watched the same movie that was being shown when I visited here as a child which we learned was made in 1955.
We had Jimmy Dean Breakfast scramble for breakfast; barbeque with potato salad and banana pudding from a vendor in a trailer on the side of the road for lunch and Kerma made a wonderful dish of fried egg plant with tomato and cheese for dinner.
We drove to Savannah, TN to the Wal Mart for supplies. I got some weather stripping and when we got back, I installed it between the canvas windshield and the permanent windshield, where rain and wind had been getting in. I also got a heavy rubber floor mat that I cut to size and put around the captain’s chair. One does a lot of standing when driving the boat and I thought the cushion might help.
We (Les) cleaned and organized on the boat over the afternoon. We watched the UFC fights late into the night.
Midway Marina, Fulton, MS (20 miles E of Tupelo) on the Tom Bigbee River (MM398) 26 October, 2008
We decided to leave Grand Harbor @ Pickwick Lake on Sunday about mid morning in order to get a little ‘head start’ on our trip to Demopolis, Ala.
The plan now is to be in Demopolis, AL (MM 213) on Tuesday Evening, 28 October. We will have our yard man drive from Fairview Heights, IL to Demopolis, meeting us on Tuesday evening. He will spend the night with us on the boat and on Wednesday morning, the five of us will drive back to Pickwick Dam where we will drop Les and Theresa off to pick up their car. Les and Theresa will head to FL and we will drive back to Fairview Heights. We will drive on Wednesday, Oct 29 so that I can attend some meetings in St Louis on the 30th. That is the plan.
We left Grand Harbor about 11 AM and headed down river on the Tom Bigbee. Kerma had prepared biscuits, gravy and sausage for breakfast, so we were in good shape for the trip. Les has been cleaning and polishing on the boat since his arrival (between trips and other events), so the boat is starting to look really nice. The only problem is that his idea of where things should be stowed and my idea of where things should be stowed are not always the same. Now when we tie-up at a dockage, we have to find lines and fenders to tie onto the boat, which previously had already been attached and/or stowed in place for such events…etc., etc., etc.
We had Jimmy Dean Breakfast scramble for breakfast; barbeque with potato salad and banana pudding from a vendor in a trailer on the side of the road for lunch and Kerma made a wonderful dish of fried egg plant with tomato and cheese for dinner.
We drove to Savannah, TN to the Wal Mart for supplies. I got some weather stripping and when we got back, I installed it between the canvas windshield and the permanent windshield, where rain and wind had been getting in. I also got a heavy rubber floor mat that I cut to size and put around the captain’s chair. One does a lot of standing when driving the boat and I thought the cushion might help.
We (Les) cleaned and organized on the boat over the afternoon. We watched the UFC fights late into the night.
Midway Marina, Fulton, MS (20 miles E of Tupelo) on the Tom Bigbee River (MM398) 26 October, 2008
We decided to leave Grand Harbor @ Pickwick Lake on Sunday about mid morning in order to get a little ‘head start’ on our trip to Demopolis, Ala.
The plan now is to be in Demopolis, AL (MM 213) on Tuesday Evening, 28 October. We will have our yard man drive from Fairview Heights, IL to Demopolis, meeting us on Tuesday evening. He will spend the night with us on the boat and on Wednesday morning, the five of us will drive back to Pickwick Dam where we will drop Les and Theresa off to pick up their car. Les and Theresa will head to FL and we will drive back to Fairview Heights. We will drive on Wednesday, Oct 29 so that I can attend some meetings in St Louis on the 30th. That is the plan.
We left Grand Harbor about 11 AM and headed down river on the Tom Bigbee. Kerma had prepared biscuits, gravy and sausage for breakfast, so we were in good shape for the trip. Les has been cleaning and polishing on the boat since his arrival (between trips and other events), so the boat is starting to look really nice. The only problem is that his idea of where things should be stowed and my idea of where things should be stowed are not always the same. Now when we tie-up at a dockage, we have to find lines and fenders to tie onto the boat, which previously had already been attached and/or stowed in place for such events…etc., etc., etc.
OUR OWN LITTLE WORLD...doing her thing on the Cumberland River (before the antenna was adjusted)The river is very peaceful and beautiful and while we encountered some fishermen on the river, we set a pace that would allow us to be at the various locks at particular times, which was a pace slow enough not to disturb docks on the bank or fishermen on the river. On week-ends, the locks are operated on a timed schedule, rather than on demand like they are during the week. The locks are also so close together that the lockmasters communicate with each other so that each knows the traffic coming through, therefore each lock waits for all traffic that was discharged from the previous lock. The result is that the little group of boats that lock through the first lock all have to lock through subsequent locks…the lockmaster simply waits for all of those boats that were lowered through the previous dock. So you can only go as fast as the slowest boat in the group. Unfortunately for us there was a lady in a small trawler type boat who is boating alone (she is from St Louis) and her boat only runs about seven miles per hour. We therefore all ran about seven miles per hours from lock to lock today, resulting in the least productive day that we have had. We traveled less than sixty miles, arriving at Midway Marina in time to back into our slip and get tied up about an hour before sundown. This is a very old marina and mostly ‘home made’. We are actually backed into the lift area since the entire transit dockage area is full.
Tomorrow we will have a similar type day in that we have to go through five more lockages. Today we dropped 150 feet vertically in three locks, tomorrow we will drop a similar distance, but through five locks. We will try to make eighty miles tomorrow, so will have to get up a lot earlier. On Tuesday, we will have only two locks to navigate and only about eighty miles that day. We will leave the boat in Demopolis (if we can make the right marina arrangements). We have been paying between sixty and eighty dollars per night for dockage. I am not sure what we will have to pay for an extended stay. We plan to return to the boat on November 12th to finish the run to Florida. This will allow us to be home by Thanksgiving…a must since all of the children will be there this year.
This waterway is man made much of the way. It was finished in 1958. More material was excavated for the construction of the Tom Bigbee waterway than was excavated when the Panama Canal was built. Because it is man made, it does not meander like the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers. Many of the runs are quite straight for very long distances and then they connect with a huge lake that is formed upstream of the next lock and dam. It is a fascinating project...
We were notified early this morning that the lock and dam just downstream of us will be shutting down @ 9am for repairs and will not open until 3pm or so. We hurried to untie and get underway. From Midway Marina it is only a half mile to the lock and dam and we can actually see it as we enter the river. We got there a few minutes before 9 and learned that there is a tow staged before us. The tow barge captain asked if the lockmaster would lock all of us (there were six pleasure craft waiting by this time) through with him so that we could exit the lock in front of him. He would rather have us leave the lock ahead of him than have us taking turns passing him, making it difficult for him to stay in the channel. The lockmaster consented to his request and we all entered and tied-off together for the lockage.
The signal for entering and exiting a lock is a loud horn sounding. One cannot enter the lock, even though the doors may be open until the horn is sounded. When exiting the lock, one must remain tied to the side of the floating bollard with his radar off until the horn sounds again. When the lock opened, a large Carver that was tied-up behind us actually passed us in the lock, and tried to get ahead of all of the boats. He explained to me as he went by that he needed to be in Demopolis by dark, which is probably where all of us are headed, we told him to go ahead. At the next lock, about ten miles down river, he did the same thing with the other boats and took off. We caught him again at the next dockage, but on the fourth one we were delayed and he was locked through ahead of us. We were following a 75 foot Hataras (Which we have actually been running with since entering the Tom Bigbee day before yesterday. The Hatteras pilot asked us as we exited lock #3 in the series of four this day if he could get ahead of us because he wanted to run a little faster than the fleet had been running, which we consented to. For some reason he did not increase his speed but ran about twelve miles per hour for about an hour. We finally passed him (he wouldn’t answer my radio calls) without talking to him and headed on down the river. The delay behind the 75 footer put us at the next lockage just as the inconsiderate Carver driver headed for Demopolis was exiting the lock. The lockmaster then announced to us that there would be at least an hour’s delay because some state ‘people’ were coming through. The one hour delay turned into a four hour delay and we came to realize that we would need to find a place to stay tonight.
Yesterday we were revisiting our insurance policy and learned that we are not insured South of the 32nd parallel under the end of hurricane season, which is Nov 15. Therefore we cannot go further South than Demopolis, AL anyway. Kerma got on the phone to see if Demopolis would let us berth there from tomorrow until Nov 15th, but they had no room. She then called Pirate’s Cove Marina in Pickensville, AL (just over the state line) and arranged to berth the boat there until the 15th, which means that our day would be shorter than had been expected, so the delay at the last lock was not particularly a problem for our schedule. The wind at this particular point is terrible. We cannot drop anchor this close to the dam because the bottom is covered with ‘rip-rap’, large stones placed in the channel to keep it from eroding. We previously dropped our anchor when we learned that there would be a long wait to lock through, but our anchor, which is designed to set itself in mud, will not catch on large rocks and stones. We had to just maneuver the boat and try to hold it in position into the wind by reversing motors when necessary and by using the thruster. About an hour into the wait the 75 footer caught up and it appears that he is having as difficult time staying in the channel (and off the rocks) as we are. Our boat is over 20 feet above the water line and when you get the thing sideways to the wind, you move very fast towards the locks. The only way to recover is to power out of that 90 degree position and keep the bow to the wind. Fortunately each boat kept its distance from the other so that maneuvering was a little easier. This morning Les and I added some hydraulic fluid to our steering system (it was sluggish) so throughout the maneuvering I was concerned that we not lose our steering. That would be catastrophic in this situation. We have also seen evidence of a hydraulic leak somewhere on the bridge, which will have to be found soon.
Tomorrow we will have a similar type day in that we have to go through five more lockages. Today we dropped 150 feet vertically in three locks, tomorrow we will drop a similar distance, but through five locks. We will try to make eighty miles tomorrow, so will have to get up a lot earlier. On Tuesday, we will have only two locks to navigate and only about eighty miles that day. We will leave the boat in Demopolis (if we can make the right marina arrangements). We have been paying between sixty and eighty dollars per night for dockage. I am not sure what we will have to pay for an extended stay. We plan to return to the boat on November 12th to finish the run to Florida. This will allow us to be home by Thanksgiving…a must since all of the children will be there this year.
This waterway is man made much of the way. It was finished in 1958. More material was excavated for the construction of the Tom Bigbee waterway than was excavated when the Panama Canal was built. Because it is man made, it does not meander like the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers. Many of the runs are quite straight for very long distances and then they connect with a huge lake that is formed upstream of the next lock and dam. It is a fascinating project...
We were notified early this morning that the lock and dam just downstream of us will be shutting down @ 9am for repairs and will not open until 3pm or so. We hurried to untie and get underway. From Midway Marina it is only a half mile to the lock and dam and we can actually see it as we enter the river. We got there a few minutes before 9 and learned that there is a tow staged before us. The tow barge captain asked if the lockmaster would lock all of us (there were six pleasure craft waiting by this time) through with him so that we could exit the lock in front of him. He would rather have us leave the lock ahead of him than have us taking turns passing him, making it difficult for him to stay in the channel. The lockmaster consented to his request and we all entered and tied-off together for the lockage.
The signal for entering and exiting a lock is a loud horn sounding. One cannot enter the lock, even though the doors may be open until the horn is sounded. When exiting the lock, one must remain tied to the side of the floating bollard with his radar off until the horn sounds again. When the lock opened, a large Carver that was tied-up behind us actually passed us in the lock, and tried to get ahead of all of the boats. He explained to me as he went by that he needed to be in Demopolis by dark, which is probably where all of us are headed, we told him to go ahead. At the next lock, about ten miles down river, he did the same thing with the other boats and took off. We caught him again at the next dockage, but on the fourth one we were delayed and he was locked through ahead of us. We were following a 75 foot Hataras (Which we have actually been running with since entering the Tom Bigbee day before yesterday. The Hatteras pilot asked us as we exited lock #3 in the series of four this day if he could get ahead of us because he wanted to run a little faster than the fleet had been running, which we consented to. For some reason he did not increase his speed but ran about twelve miles per hour for about an hour. We finally passed him (he wouldn’t answer my radio calls) without talking to him and headed on down the river. The delay behind the 75 footer put us at the next lockage just as the inconsiderate Carver driver headed for Demopolis was exiting the lock. The lockmaster then announced to us that there would be at least an hour’s delay because some state ‘people’ were coming through. The one hour delay turned into a four hour delay and we came to realize that we would need to find a place to stay tonight.
Yesterday we were revisiting our insurance policy and learned that we are not insured South of the 32nd parallel under the end of hurricane season, which is Nov 15. Therefore we cannot go further South than Demopolis, AL anyway. Kerma got on the phone to see if Demopolis would let us berth there from tomorrow until Nov 15th, but they had no room. She then called Pirate’s Cove Marina in Pickensville, AL (just over the state line) and arranged to berth the boat there until the 15th, which means that our day would be shorter than had been expected, so the delay at the last lock was not particularly a problem for our schedule. The wind at this particular point is terrible. We cannot drop anchor this close to the dam because the bottom is covered with ‘rip-rap’, large stones placed in the channel to keep it from eroding. We previously dropped our anchor when we learned that there would be a long wait to lock through, but our anchor, which is designed to set itself in mud, will not catch on large rocks and stones. We had to just maneuver the boat and try to hold it in position into the wind by reversing motors when necessary and by using the thruster. About an hour into the wait the 75 footer caught up and it appears that he is having as difficult time staying in the channel (and off the rocks) as we are. Our boat is over 20 feet above the water line and when you get the thing sideways to the wind, you move very fast towards the locks. The only way to recover is to power out of that 90 degree position and keep the bow to the wind. Fortunately each boat kept its distance from the other so that maneuvering was a little easier. This morning Les and I added some hydraulic fluid to our steering system (it was sluggish) so throughout the maneuvering I was concerned that we not lose our steering. That would be catastrophic in this situation. We have also seen evidence of a hydraulic leak somewhere on the bridge, which will have to be found soon.
MY DECK HAND HOLDING OUR OWN LITTLE WORLD OFF THE LOCK WALL (THAT BACK COMPARTMENT DOOR KEPT OPENING)After determining that our destination was now Pickensville, AL., Kerma called our friend and yard guy and told him to jump into her car and drive from St Louis to Pickensville, AL., in order to pick us up and drive us back home. The plan is that he will meet us at the marina tonight (Oct 26), spend the night on the boat with us and then drive Les and Theresa back to Pickwick, TN, where their car is parked and then we will drive home.
We got to Pirates Cove about an hour before dark and moved easily out of the river and into their entrance. This is a very old marina, although they are replacing all docks and etc. within the next few months. Some of the new docks were in the harbor on a barge. We backed into our slip and firmly tied-off, knowing that we would be here for a while. We set five fenders on the starboard side and tied it securely with five lines. The proprietor is a man named Ed Orton and he is originally from Ft Walton Beach, FL. He and Les know several people in the community so they took some time catching up on geography and current events. We have a nice propane grill on the boat where Les grilled the most scrumptious steaks I have ever eaten. We had some good French bread, canned asparagus and tender delicious steak for dinner.
David got to the marina about dark. We thought his arrival would be much later in the evening, so we did not wait for him to arrive for dinner, although Les had grilled him a steak. He had a good meal, including cleaning-up the left over’s…you know how young men can eat…
Just at dark, the seventy-foot Hatteras pulled into the slip right beside us. We helped them secure their lines and tie-off. Nobody said a word to us including recognizing our help for tying them off. I suppose he was mad because our boat is faster than his boat.
Tuesday morning, we got up early, loaded the car with things that needed to be loaded, secured the boat and checked and rechecked the mooring lines. Then we headed home. We drove north through Tupelo Mississippi (within miles of where I was born) and right by the hospital where my Daddy said that I had died when I was a toddler, then on north to Pickwick. We dropped Theresa and Les off, then went to Haiti MO, via Jackson, TN and then north to St Louis and home. We got home a little before dark.
We will go back to the boat on the 12th or 13th in order to clean, restock and troubleshoot the hydraulic leak in the steering system.
Sat Nov 8.
We decided last night that we could not stand being away from the boat any longer. We also need to refine the logistics of meeting Theresa and Les at the boat. We need to transport one of Les’s automobiles to FL, via Alabama and etc.
We devised a grand plan.
We will drive the motor home to FL for Kala’s birthday and will stop at the boat on the way down.
WE CANNOT WAIT ANY LONGER...HEADING FOR THE BOAT
Saturday morning I loaded Les’s 4800 pound BMW on my stacker trailer, stocked the motor coach and hooked everything up. Kerma and I left home @ 2:10 pm on Saturday. We drove south on I57 into Arkansas and stopped at the Arkansas welcome center rest stop where we knew we could parallel park the 75 foot rig away from the truck traffic. We set-up housekeeping there about dark. We set up the cable receiver and Kerma watched sit coms while I watched the news and then into the evening and after dinner, we watched a movie.
On Sunday morning we got up about 8am and had breakfast, then we drove to Olive Branch, MS where we parked in the Wal Mart. I unloaded the BMW and Kerma drove back to Memphis to do some Christmas shopping and I did maintenance on the coach and trailer. We both enjoyed the day. We parked about 11:30 am and she was back by about 2:30 PM. We re-loaded the beemer and headed South. We then drove to New Albany, MS and went South to Pontotoc. We took 41 towards Troy, MS (where both of my parents lived when they got married). About seven miles from Troy, we stopped at Pleasant Grove Cemetery and walked by the graves of my McCain Grandparents and relatives and my Herndon Grandfather. We had a tricky time getting the motor coach maneuvered around without hitting anything or hurting someone, but we got it done and back on the highway. We drove by Troy and I could actually see the well house where my Daddy lived when he got married and the lot where their house was…then on south.
MY GRANDPARENT'S GRAVE AT UPPER PLEASANT GROVE CEMETARY NEAR TROY MISSISSIPPI
We stopped in West Point, MS for fresh fruit and a new road atlas. We then drove to Pickensville, AL to the Pirates Cove Marina. We slept in the motor coach in their parking lot. This morning we checked the boat, loaded the supplies and equipment that we had brought on board and headed South to FL.
We left Pickensville and drove towards Theresa’s house, stopping for dinner in Mobile, AL at a sea food restaurant for an early meal.
Florida has the best rest areas in the world and we stopped at the welcome center in the Pensacola area. The guard on duty directed us to a bus parking area where we opened the slides on one side and set up for the evening before 6pm. In this weather (61 degrees outside) the motor home will run on batteries all night long, so we need not use the generator at all.
Sunday Morning
We met Theresa and Kala for Breakfast @ Cracker Barrel in Crestview, FL. Tomorrow is Kala’s Birthday. We then drove to Fort Walton Beach and set-up in the RV park there that we use when we are in town.
Tuesday I did maintenance on the motor coach (Lowe’s is across the street) and Kerma shopped with Theresa. Wednesday I had lunch with Les while Kerma did the pedicure thing with Theresa…dinner at Coach and Four.
Thursday…the plan is to meet Les and Theresa at noon, but last night that was changed to 2:00pm. We expect them sometime before dark…more maintenance and cleaning on the coach and more fiction…4PM and we are out of town. Les and Theresa picked us up and we left town heading for Pickensville, AL, arriving about 10PM after an extended stay at Wal Mart in Demopolis, AL.
Friday morning we got up and ‘got ready’ with the plan to cast off on Saturday morning. I spent some time troubleshooting the steering mechanism but could find no leak, so about ten AM we decided to cast off. We were in the lock (around the corner from the marina entrance) and out the other side by about eleven AM. We only have one lock today so we took off. We ran in a lot of green floating foliage. Sometimes it ran completely across the river from bank to bank and for several hundred feet. It looked like you could walk on it. At first we would throttle back and ease through it but we soon got to where we just varoomed right through at full speed ahead. Weather was perfect and there was minimal traffic so we ran about 100 miles to 218 MM on the Tom Bigbee and arrived at the Demopolis Yacht Basin a few minutes before dark. We will stay two nights here and make another Wal Mart run. Demopolis is small and there were transient boats tied-up everywhere. We were the last boat in and they put us on the fuel dock. We had dinner and settled in for the night. It is Nov 14th and we are just north of the 32nd parallel. Our southern insurance does not become effective until midnight on the 15th, so we will stay here until Sunday morning.
Saturday we signed-up for use of the complimentary marina car for a run to town. Les worked most of the day cleaning the boat, which he has been doing about every minute that he has been aboard. We took a couple trips to town, including walking around the downtown area to read the historical markers. There is also a coy pond in the middle of the town square…just up from the monument honoring the confederate dead who served from this county. I got some nice camo clothes (bib overalls) that Kerma was almost livid about when she saw them. I pointed out that I was the only white boy in the Wal Mart without camo and felt very much out of place, but this made no difference. I sure look good in my new camos and I wore them all day on Sunday. Les and I cleaned the strainers to all three motors and the hvac system but there were relatively clean in spite of having run through all of the plant life.
Sunday morning. The plan was to get up early and start our day as soon as there was enough light, which we did. We ‘hailed’ the Demopolis lock and dam and he told us to come on down (the marina is only a couple miles away and we called while still in the marina). We hurried down and moved directly in the lock with one other yacht from our marina. The lock door would not secure and the operator had to walk up the hill to the office and call for help. About an hour and a half later the lock was secure and they finally let us out on the lower end…so much for the early start. We ran pretty hard once we got around the up stream traffic waiting to go into the lock. There was not a lot of traffic thereafter and we arrived at Bobby’s Fish Camp (one hundred miles downstream) where we had intended spending the night. When we got there it was only about 1:30 and Bobby’s Fish Camp was exactly that…it was a fish camp. All they had was a dock, right in the river, and no electrical. We decided to keep going and spend the night @ anchor. We locked through the Coffeeville Dam, just below the ‘fish camp’ and got some good information from the lock master and from an upstream tow captain about a safe place to anchor. Our two options were MM 63 (about forty miles further) and MM 53 (fifty miles). We decided the description for the 53MM anchorage was the best. It is a canal between the Alabama River and the Tom Bibgee. We left the lock and dam and moved down stream @ 1700 rpm (23 MPH). That is about the speed I was going when I ran aground. The Tom Bigbee gets wide and shallow south of the last lock and dam and one must stay close to the channel that is marked on the charts because the red and green channel marker buoys are few and far between. I took one corner much too close and absolutely ended up high and dry. One depth gauge read two feet and the other one must have been in the sand because it was really confused. Fortunately (Les got a stick and measured the water depth) the bow was in deeper water and the port prop was apparently in water, but the right side must have really been in the sand good. We twisted with the front thruster but there is little or no current and no wind, so it looks like things are going to get desperate. It is about two hours before dark and we are stuck. We turned the boat 90 degrees toward the channel with the thruster and started the left motor. We pushed with the left motor and the thruster back and forth until we finally extracted ourselves. When we got in the channel, we reversed the motors a couple times and everything seems fine, so we took off. We went on plane right away and seem to have no problem. We do have two alerts, one on each motor and the diagnostic code on both monitors indicate that there is a problem with a sensor. It is not serious enough to shut us down so we are flying again. We finally pulled into the Alabama river and set our anchor just as dark set in. It is now about 3am and everyone is awake. I am the only one who has slept; Theresa and Kerma are doing what they enjoy most, putting a puzzle together and watching TV. Les is walking up and down and in and out. Les and Kerma check the anchor line and our fix every few minutes. I think the reason they are awake is some sort of anxiety about being in the dark with the fog and etc. The genset will run all night since we don’t want to take a chance on running-down the batteries. We should be able to make Shalimar tomorrow if there are no more problems.
MOSS ON THE TOM BIGBEE
Monday 17 Nov 2008
We did not get a very early start today. The fog set in and we actually slept in after being up and down much of the night. About 5:30 am I walked to the front of the boat and operated the windlass (anchor motor) for a few minutes. The anchor chain is kept in a compartment immediately in front of the guest suite where Les and Theresa are sleeping. The noise from the chain being manipulated through the winch is very loud and it shook Les out of a dead sleep, as I expected. When I came back into the boat he was walking up the stairs from his bedroom rubbing his eyes and looking at me really funny. I didn’t say a word, just went down the stairs and into my stateroom where I closed the door and went back to bed for a couple hours.
When we finally got started (about 7:30) the sun was up enough to clear most of the fog, leaving only enough to make the travel beautiful for a couple hours. There was fog along the banks in the shade, while on the smooth river it was clear and beautiful. Les has the electronics dialed in sufficient that we need only follow a line on the chart to stay on course (and off of sand bars). We got on plane right away and headed down river. The river is relatively shallow for about fifty miles here and while there are often 30 and 40 foot readings, it is most likely to be 9 and 10 foot readings, so we pay close attention and stay in the channel. There is some traffic (commercial and pleasure) and at our pace, we are passing all of them. Most are very polite and courteous, while others have ‘haughty’ comments. I am thinking of responding with something like…’are you upset because my boat is bigger than yours or because I am better looking’, but I never have the nerve. Typically the tow boat captains are very courteous, but one time I hailed a boat that I was about ready to pass, but not knowing the exact position we were in, I said somewhere between mile 20 and 22…his reply was well is it 20 or 22, so I said nothing and I passed him.
EARLY MORNING FOG
Early in the day we saw small herds of deer swimming across the river. The river is very serpentine and we are often within a few hundred yards of where we were previously by land, but several miles distant on the water. The closer we get to Mobile the more commerce and industry we see along the river banks and each one typically causes us to slow to a crawl in order to minimize our wake when workers are present.
SMALL DEER HERD BLACK WARRIOR RIVERWe learned last night that the Tom Bigbee empties into the Mobile River and that we will be traveling the last several miles to Mobile Bay on a different river. The mileage numbering system also ends on the Mobile River where it empties into the Mobile Bay. Mile marker 0 is actually at the Interstate 10 Bridge over the Mobile River at the entrance to Mobile Bay. What this means is that the 45 miles or so across Mobile Bay represents additional mileage that we had not counted on when calculating our daily travel.
MM 14 ON THE MOBILE RIVER…SWING BRIDGEWe entered the Mobile River and the Mobile ship yard. At this point we slowed to no wake speed and in fact we reduced both throttles to idle…about seven miles per hour. The River at this point is very busy and is a shipping lane. There were huge ocean going vessels at the docks along the way. There were also dry docks with huge cruise ships completely out of the water for repair. We saw some interesting boats and interesting activity. We also heard some negative comments from frustrated tow boat captain’s who think the waterway should be reserved only for them.
The working channel was only about ten miles long, but it seemed like it would go on for ever. At this slow speed, there was little noticeable wind and the sun seemed like it wanted to cook us. We opened all windows on the bridge and got enough fresh air to make the trip comfortable from that perspective.
STRANGE THINGS IN THE MOBILE SHIP YARD
We finally entered Mobile Bay and followed the electronic chart straight toward the Gulf of Mexico. We are now in brackish water and there is a very obvious salt sea smell…very refreshing and pleasant. The open water is beautiful and there is still some traffic in the channel through the bay. As I drove the boat I was constantly correcting to stay on course (we have auto pilot but I do not know how to program it) so Theresa took over. For some reason she can stay exactly on a heading and never divert left or right. When I was driving our wake was a series of s’s, but her wake was a straight line. We saw a lot of shrimp boats and much to our surprise saw numerous oil well rigs in the bay.
The closest distance to the inland waterway across Alabama to the East would be a straight line at a 45 degree angle to our left, but we chose to stay on the charted course and go directly south to a point where the east/west waterway intersects our course then make a ninety degree left turn. We saw several yachts veering off and calculated that their course would probably reduce the distance to the entrance to the east bound waterway by about one half, but we are not familiar with depths, etc, so chose to stay in the channel. When we finally got to the point where the waterway intersected the channel, the chart only shows a dotted line, which is quite fine…we can follow that too.
SHRIMP BOAT…MOBILE BAY
Theresa is till driving and the course is well marked with mileage buoys so the going is good. We entered the waterway and were soon in Oyster Bay, Alabama. Everything along the waterway is beautiful, but we have to respect other boaters, docked boats and businesses so it is slow. Occasionally we can break out and run a little harder. The inland waterway is a partially natural and partially man made waterway that is protected from the gulf by a thin strip of land. The natural lakes and low wet areas along the coast are connected by man made waterways. Most of the southern coast and eastern coast have these inland waterways. There are several marinas along the way. Many houses and properties are for sale and some large business properties are even abandoned and are displayed for sale by banks and lending institutions. You would not need to be a rocket scientist to know that this is a depressed real estate market.
We finally reached Pensacola bay about an hour before sun down and made our way across this large bay by monitoring our charts. We entered the marina in time to be docked and hooked up before dark. It is a newer marina and very presentable. Ron, the dock master was actually waiting for us. As soon as he got us docket and hooked to shore power he gave us a map of the Pensacola waterfront along with codes for the security gates, he left for the evening.
INLAND WATERWAY APPROACHING PENSACOLA BAY
We made our way to a sea food restaurant overlooking the bay. It was a several block walk and the restaurant looked promising, but we must have ordered the wrong thing. We were mostly underwhelmed with our dinner.
Theresa called her children and they drove over to join us for the evening and to drive Les back to Shalimar. Kala and Theresa stayed with us overnight in Pensacola and they finished the puzzle that we started in Demopolis, AL.
Overnight, Kerma and I decided to leave the boat here for the winter, rather than in Shalimar where the dockage is not as modern or accessible.
Tuesday 18 Nov, 2008.
Pensacola FL, Polafax Marina.
We visited with Ron, the dock master this morning and made arrangements to dock our boat here for the winter. We did the paper work, including providing proof of insurance, etc. It is a very windy day, but we moved the boat to the fuel dock and took on five hundred gallons of fuel. While he was pumping I noticed that his prices were pretty high and we actually paid about a buck a gallon more than we have been paying for fuel. We pumped out the black water tanks and moved the boat to its new home. We made arrangements with Ron to have someone clean the boat on the outside.
OUR OWN LITTLE WORLD AT REST IN PENSACOLATheresa’s friend from Shalimar met us a few minutes before noon to transport us to Shalimar and to our motor home. We got to the motor home about three PM and were unhooked and out of the RV Park by about 3:30 PM.
We spent the night in the RV in Northern Alabama in a Wal Mart parking lot, then got up on Wednesday morning and drove home, stopping by Kerma’s hair dresser on the way. He only needed about 45 minutes to make her drop dead beautiful again.
We are at home in Fairview Heights, IL, sorting through the mail and etc…
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