(8 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
Those of you that read this regular series know that I am from Hackett, Arkansas, just a mile or so from the Oklahoma border, and just about 10 miles south of the Arkansas River. It was a rural sort of place that did not particularly appreciate education, and just zoom onto my previous posts to understand a bit about it.
Uncle Richard was my father’s eldest brother. He was born in 1900, whilst my dad was born in 1919 (and he was NOT the baby). You can see right away that my grandfather’s family was really spread out over the years.
They lived in Illinois, so I did not see them really often, but they did come to visit enough that I got to know them fairly well. Uncle Richard was a bit talker and a big drinker, whilst Aunt Bess was quiet and dignified. My mum really liked Aunt Bess, and they were close as could be in the early 1960s with expensive long distance and no internet. They communicated mostly by letter, and postage at the time was around 6 cents.
Six cents sounds really cheap for posting a letter, but, adjusted for inflation it is almost exactly 43 cents, remarkably close to the current cost of 45 cents per first class stamp. I remember when postage went from four to five cents, in 1963. It stayed at five until 1968 when it went to six cents. Postage is still a bargain, but suffers from being slow.
Most of this piece will focus on Uncle Richard because Aunt Bess was so quiet. He and she were polar opposites, because he was anything but. He looked a lot like my grandfather, much more than my father did. That man could talk!
You could always tell when he was exaggerating (well, lying). He had a characteristic that gave him away every time he was fibbing: his lips would move and sound would be emitted from them. He had lost the distal two joints of his right index finger to injury years before I knew him, and it was a family joke to flex down the last two joints to let people that you were making up stuff, or to call out someone when you thought that they were.
Uncle Richard drank a lot, and would likely be classified as a functional alcoholic these days. As far as I know, his habit never interfered with his work, and Aunt Bess and he remained married until his death. He also smoked cigarettes like they were going out of style (which they were about to do). At that time the cost of a pack of cigarettes was 35 cents. This translates to $3.53 today, so the cost of cigarettes has by far exceeded the rate of inflation, mostly due to sin taxes designed to raise state revenue in the guise of reducing unhealthful behavior.
There is a wonderful tool on the net here that allows one to convert dollar values from any year from 1913 to any other year. This is how I come up with these figures so easily. However, there is a bit of a rub. In 1964 typically one would use a silver quarter and a silver dime to buy that pack. That year, silver was about $1.30 per ounce troy. Since the combined weight in silver for a quarter and a dime is 0.25318 ounce troy, the actual value was about 32.9 cents Now it is around $32.62. This means that the silver cost of a pack of cigarettes would be around $8.26 now, without additional sin taxes.
One story that he told often was about Rowdy, his hunting dog. Rowdy supposedly treed a coon and Uncle Richard did not think that he got it right.
“Dick, he’s up there!”
“No, he ain’t, Rowdy!”
“Yeah, he is an I’m agonna show ye!”
So Rowdy climbed (“clim” in Hackett talk) the vertical tree to about 25 feet and chased out the coon.
“See, Dick, I tol’ ye!”
Even at my young age I knew that dogs were of the incorrect anatomy to climb trees, but knew better than to question an elder. I just smiled to myself.
He had many more like that, none of which I can recall with any clarity. As I said, they visited only occasionally. I do remember that the more that he drank the louder and more bizarre the stories would become.
I do not if my mum and dad ever visited them in Illinois, but I never went there. I just remember when they would visit us. They were entertaining and always nice to me, and I remember them fondly.
They had a son, Charles. This is NOT the Charles Martin Smith from American Graffiti and other starring roles, but he did move to southern California and did have some bit parts in film and TeeVee. None of them were remarkable. I never met the man, because he was an outcast from the family.
You see, Charles was gay. In those days, being gay (he finally even came out) was not consistent with the Hackett concept (or even the Illinois concept) of how people should be. My aunt and uncle NEVER talked about him, and I strongly suspect that they were quite estranged. My dad always referred to him in very disparaging terms, ones that I shall not repeat here, since we have all heard the words that haters use.
I have a lot of respect for him. He followed his heart in extremely difficult times, and if he were still with us, I would attempt to contact him and say so. Unfortunately he is long dead so I can not do that. My very vague memory indicates that he was a victim of the first wave of what we now call HIV/AIDS.
The last time that I saw Aunt Bess and Uncle Richard alive was in the summer of 1976. After retirement they moved to Tulsa for reasons that are obscure to me. My mum, dad, and I took a really long road trip from Hackett to Anchorage, Alaska that year. I shall describe that in another piece. We took a travel trailer attached to a 1974 Impala, sold the car and trailer there for a nice profit (the Alaska Pipeline was being constructed then, so lodging was at a premium) and flew back to the Lower 48.
It turns out that Tulsa, as an international airport, had really cheap fares from Anchorage. It is also only a very few hours from Hackett. We flew there and stayed overnight with them, and Blind Cousin Charlie came to drive us home the next day. Charlie is also a future topic. To my delight, the former Mrs. Translator, to whom I was engaged, made the trip. Three weeks is a LONG time to be separated when you are 19 and in love! But I am a hopeless romantic, and three hours is an eternity to me still to be apart from whom I love.
Uncle Richard was 76 then, and the years of drinking and smoking had taken their toll. He had a hole in his neck that he had to cover to speak because of the surgery. He took my father and me to his workshop to “talk”. What he really wanted to do was to smoke a cigarette and have a long drink from the bottle of bourbon that he hid there.
The very last words that I heard from him, other the good-byes as we left, were “Don’t you tell Bess ’bout this, she’ll kill me!”
I really liked both of them. Never at any time did they show me anything but love and friendship. I regret that I was not closer to Aunt Bess, but she was to quiet that she was hard to know. I DO remember her holding the small child who became this man and telling me that she loved me.
I got too tangled up with marriage and education to attend either of their services. I regret that now, but honestly as a starving college student could not have gone anyway. I remember them, both, very fondly. I guess that this is a bit emotional, but one thing that I have learnt is not to suppress nor to repress is emotion. Emotion makes us human. As my grandfather Smith used to say, “Your life hangs by a hair.”, so NEVER hesitate to tell someone special that you love her or him when you have the chance; it may never come again.
As for my medical condition, I am making slow progress, but progress every day. It is an aggravating condition. If you are not familiar with my trouble, here is a link to my piece about it. Yesterday and today were two of the best days in months, emotionally. Without going into lots of details, yesterday I helped my good friend and neighbor install his new kitchen range in the morning. He thanked me, and asked what he owed me. I told him that the “thank you” was payment in full, and we smiled at each other. Later that day I helped another good friend and neighbor sharpen his riding mower blades with my auto body grinder. The payment arrangements were the same. Good relationships with neighbors are very good to have.
In these past two days I also have spent HOURS with the two people who are very dear to me. I entertained The Little Girl with antics and earthworms (she squealed at those, but wanted more) and interacted with The Girl in a very honest and chaste, loving way. Actually, I think that The Girl liked digging for and finding the worms more than The Little Girl, and because of my wrist condition did most of the digging. These have been very, very good days. Tomorrow we set up The Little Girl’s new toddler bed at the foot of The Girl’s bed, and I have an invitation to visit later tonight (writing at 6:23 PM Eastern) after they return from some errands. If I am slow to get to comments tonight, now you know why.
If you have any stories about your youth, please feel free to ad them to the comments. I know that I enjoy reading them, and readers say the same thing.
Warmest regards,
Doc, aka Dr. David W. Smith
Crossposted at
Docudharma, and
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remembering distant memories?
Warmest regards,
Doc