Beginning

The beginning of me was in Flint, Michigan. I didn't stay long, not that I had anything to do with me leaving. That happened four years later when Mom and Dad moved back to Arkansas. Where they were from. After he got back from WWII dad married Mom, he was twenty-nine due to not having gotten married before the war and when he got back most of the available women were quite a bit younger. The ones that met his standards anyway. Mom was nineteen.

Dad and his brother had bought a couple of small pieces of land, one forty acres and the other eighty. His brother stayed home and did all right, the was was a good time for farmers. But once he was back and married times were bad for a while and he decided to go to Michigan and make cars, something a lot of people from Arkansas did. And probably other states. Good money, he sent quite a bit back to my uncle to help out. Things were getting better in Arkansas and my folks were thinking on moving back, and the union situation got worse. Dad didn't hold with union thugs and was ready to get out of that mess, and when some of them shot up a house on our street because a guy crossed a picket line and killed the guy's three year old kid.

Kid playing in the floor while his Mom and Dad watching and a bullet came through the window and hit him in the head. Couldn't have done better if they'd done it deliberately.

Couple of months later we're on the road back to Arkansas. Mom and Dad and two older sisters and four-year-old me and one-year-old little brother. Not having a house we lived in a couple of rented places until Dad bought another piece of land, hundred and sixty acres with an old farmhouse. We lived there until he got a new house built.

There was a patch of woods, about forty to fifty acres, and he was going to clear most of it anyway so he cut trees and took them to a sawmill about four miles away and got all the lumber that way. He and Mom's dad did all the work so it was a pretty cheap house, good one too. That's where I lived until I was about fifteen.

Dad and his brother raised mostly soybeans and cotton and some rice. Cotton was a good deal, could still get it chopped and picked cheap then. The acreage was limited to a certain percentage of a place, and they rented a couple of small farms so they could use the allotment for those pieces. They did pretty well, and eventually sold off several of the smaller pieces when they got the chance to buy a section (640 acres, a square mile) all in one piece. They had borrow some money but didn't have any bad years and got it almost paid off by the time Uncle Jim died. He wasn't healthy and worked himself too hard, had a stroke and never came home from the hospital, died a few days later on my birthday.

Uncle Jim had never married and left everything to Dad. They were pretty close and I remember Dad being kind of down for quite a while. My siblings and I did most of the work, I was driving a tractor before I could drive a car. We had to hire temporary help but didn't have any full-time employees. We still lived on the quarter-section where our house was, about two miles away. That was fun, had a creek and some small ponds, part of it was in an old riverbed, swampy, brother and I used to fool around catching turtles and crawdads, wonder how we didn't get snakebit, place had cottonmouths in the wet areas and their copperhead cousins on the high ground. Few rattlesnakes but not that many.

I guess I was fourteen or fifteen when Dad decided to get out of farming, with all the rigamarole with the government, trying to regulate everything and what he called putting the farmers on welfare. He had all the land paid for no debts at all. It was a good time to do it. Mom and Dad bought a small place about three miles out of town, twenty-six acres no neigbors right next door. He took a job working for another farmer that had a lot of land, and scattered out. He rented Dad's property and hired him to manage it, a pretty good deal.

By that time I was in junior high and got a car when I was sixteen. It was Mom's old car, a '67 Nova, two-door post with a 250-inch straight six and a Powerglide. My cousin that died in Vietnam about that time had a '66 Chevelle with a 396 hooked to a Powerglide. Couldn't break those things, and I tried plenty. My seriously naughty adventures didn't start until my senior year, so those few years were just finishing school and working at the local Kroger store after school and weekends. Pretty good pay in those days, better than the Wal-Mart that came in about that time. Bunch of us high school kids workng there, most of them planned on going full-time after graduation and figured they'd be set for life.

Looked pretty good, guys there making fifteen an hour (like thirty today) and getting five to six weeks vacation. About the time I graduated from school and went elsewhere the Teamsters gouged them again, or tried to. Finally it was too much, and when they threatened another strike the management told the, OK, we'll give you what you want but we're gonna have to close some stores. The Twin Falls was one that got cut.

I visited Flint twice in recent years. Once in the early '90s and about 2011 or so. Each time it was worse. The GM plants were mostly closed (Dad worked in a Buick plant) and the place was dying. A couple of years ago they found that the water supply was poisoning the residents. City government had gone the way of such cities and had neither the mental ability or an inclination to do anything other than loot what was built by their predecessors.