The Joker

I am not sure the draft I was writing about my dad as his family's humorist got published.

(Here is what was in the Draft: Mama was not a big talker, but Daddy usually had the floor when we were in the company of other family members, and it seemed to me that she registered approval on her face at his skill in story telling. His language was clean, and he allowed no swearing of any kind. I believe that was true of all his family. Not even a "darn" could be used. We might have been poor, but we were never "common". Bathroom language was unheard of in our house.

Daddy loved a good practical joke. He tried his hand at raising sheep for wool. Since I was put to work on the farm at a very early age, I sometimes faked a stomach ache to get out of work. One day I started to complain as soon as he gave me a job to do. He said he knew just the thing that would cure a stomach ache, and going into the kitchen first to get a little blue medicine bottle he proceeded to fill it with "pills" dropped by the sheep in the pasture. I watched with disbelief until he asked if I could take them dry, or if I needed to have water to get them down. I could tell by his face that he was dead serious. I began to cry. He reminded me that we didn't have all day and I should make up my mind quickly. Trying to stifle my tears I said, "I'll take 'em with a little water." That broke him up, and I knew then that he was teasing me. He told the story at every family occasion for a long time-the sure cure for stomach aches!

Raising sheep didn't pay during those depression years. Neither did raising the crop of sugar cane for molasses. It was fun to see the baby sheep, and it was interesting to see the mill grinding the cane powered by a mule walking around it in a circle. I really loved the molasses we had all winter. Usually we didn't have a cow, but we used canned milk which I would sweeten with a good shot of molasses.

The old antebellam)

In case you did not read about my dad's cure for stomach ache, please send me an email and I will put it in my next post. I think it is a very funny story, but I don't know what happened. Suddenly the whole page disappeared. I got it back as a draft, but could not add to it. Then when I decided to publish the draft, it didn't seem to work either. HELP!!!

As I was about to explain, the big house in the woods had some features we were very reluctant to leave after our six years there. The best one was the banister which I enjoyed sliding down. Bill had just become old enough to master it. The best thing about the house, though, was the huge pecan tree in the front yard. I remember when Mama learned to drive the first car we ever had. When Daddy was working in a field far enough away that he couldn't see what she was doing, she would get the car keys and drive round and round the pecan tree with us in the car. She had watched how he drove it, and without any lessons from anyone she drove it to town one day and got her license. It was so unlike her, I still can't believe she did it.

Daddy got a kick out of our getting out of bed early, as soon as it was light, to see how many pecans had fallen during the night. Bill and I had our little buckets and I always beat him, of course. One morning we found the ground literally covered with not just pecans, but every kind of nut on the market. Daddy had planned his trick very well, and I can just see him smiling when we came in with our buckets full of walnuts, Brazil nuts, almonds as well as pecans. He was clever enough not to get peanuts, because we would never have been fooled - we grew peanuts and knew they grew underground. We spent a lot of time gazing up into the limbs and branches to see which shell each nut had fallen from. We knew it was a magic tree. We never wondered why it only happened one night, but we knew that it could happen any time! Moving away from the magic tree was the saddest thing that happened to us. I was in second grade and remember the morning Bill and I went out to say goodbye to the tree and hugged it.

Daddy loved to play practical jokes. When I was a freshman in college he played a joke which made him famous in the new home town we had just moved into. Mrs. Helen Wessel had persuaded him to move back to Swansboro where I was born. I don't know if he had lived there long enough when I was a baby to make any men friends. Except for brief leaves from his job, I believe Mama was alone with me. It didn't take him long to get acquainted, because there was a country store in the small village. At night he loved to sit with a few men around the potbellied stove and socialize. One of the leading citizens in the town was a farmer of some means who monopolized every conversation with his plans to buy the first German imported car in our state, a Volkswagen. He had pictures which he dragged out at the slightest provocation, detailing the features, primary its small extremely unusual design and fantastic gas mileage. Gas should not have been a concern, because it only cost fifteen cents per gallon, and was plentiful because the war was over. Night after night they had to listen to the story of the fabulous little car, and his plans to meet the train delivering it.

The day finally came, and everybody at the store got to see it, even sit in it and take a little spin. He could not believe that he had driven it from town and the gas gauge had not moved. After he drove away, Daddy hatched a plan to play his trick. Each night he would sneak up to the Odum farm and pour gas into the tank to refill it. His friends at the store never missed being there night after night, when all the attention was directed to the number of miles he had driven without the gas gauge moving at all. He had begun to assume the gauge was broken, but when he tried to fill the tank it woud not hold any more. A hundred miles to the gallon! INCREDIBLE
Then one night he caught Daddy pouring gas into his tank with a can. Mr. Odum never hung out at the store again, but everybody loved to tell the story around town.

Too bad Daddy wasn't a magician. He would have loved to entertain people. As far as I know he never had an enemy. He had no use for religion. He always said he wouldn't ever critisize anybody's church because it might be the right one, but he wouldn't join one, because it might be the wrong one. I was never in church with my dad until Ted and I took him to the Provo Temple to be endowed and sealed to my mother, as he had promised he would do when she died the year before. A story for another time.