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Edna Ferber - "Buttered Side Down"

T. S. Eliot - "Project Gutenberg surfs with a modem donated by Supra."

Jules Verne - "De la Terre a la Lune"

Jules Verne - "De la Terre … la Lune"

THE LIFE OF ME, AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

C >> Clarence Johnson >> THE LIFE OF ME, AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY




There are times when these odds-and-ends can defy the
imagination. Some of the items I have seen sell at such times
were old saddles, new saddles, lariat ropes, milk goats, six
bantam hens with matching rooster, three quart-bottles of screw
worm medicine, a set of badly used harness, four weaning size
hound pups, and many others.

Well, on this particular day, I was just sitting there being
bored when suddenly here comes a sorrel saddle horse for sale.
The bidding got off to a slow start and didn't speed up an awful
lot. This gave me time to start thinking, but I started in the
wrong direction. True, he was a good-looking animal--beautiful,
not a blemish on him, tall and strong, just the horse for me.

Now, what I should have been thinking was, "If he's all that
good, why isn't he bringing more money? Why aren't more men
bidding on him?" I think I figured out the answers just about
the time I made the final bid on the old horse. I think everyone
there that day, except me, knew the horse, had owned him a week
or two and had brought him back to sell to somebody like me,
someone who had not owned him and didn't know about him. In
fact, I sold him the following week. Only I didn't take him back
to the sale, I sold him to a cow-buyer who didn't know him. And
he took him back to the sale a week later.

Anyway, the bidding had only reached $20 when I offered $22.50.
But just as I announced my bid, something told me I shouldn't
have. And since no one would raise my bid to $25, nor to $24--
not even to $23, I found myself with a horse I wasn't quite sure
I wanted. I really think the owner had bid the $20 and waited
for a sucker like me to raise his bid.

But at home the next day, Dennis rode the horse over to a
neighbor's place and came back with a good report. He said the
horse was lively, spirited, and altogether well behaved. I was
beginning to feel better about my purchase, until a few days
later when Anita tried the new horse.

Now, I'm not altogether sure she really wanted to ride the horse.
It might have been my idea, or maybe it was Dennis' idea. One
thing I do know for certain, it wasn't Ima's idea. However,
there Anita was, up on the horse in our front yard, when the wind
began flopping her neck scarf. And that was when the old horse
began to come unwound.

I was holding the reins and managing to keep his front end fairly
quiet and close to the ground, but his hind end kept bouncing up
and down, getting higher and higher until Anita landed on the
ground right by his front feet. That's when we learned that
anything waving or flopping drove the horse crazy and made him
pitch. He was not a flag-waving patriotic horse.

The man I sold the horse to learned the same thing the hard way
when his hat almost blew off and he reached up quickly to grab
it. He said he barely managed to stay on top, but got off as
soon as the horse stopped bucking, and walked him to the barn.
Next day he took the horse to the cow sale and auctioned him off.

Fortunately, Anita's fall off the horse didn't hurt her, but it
sure scared Ima. And now, 40 years later, she still tells people
how foolish I was for letting Anita get on the horse. But I say,
"Why shouldn't she have ridden any horse she wanted to? After
all, she was thirteen years old, and has been riding horses and
cows for twelve years."

Ima insisted that she was going to rear her children correctly--
protect them, see after them, teach them good manners, good moral
standards and religious ethics. And the thought of all this
brings to memory the time Anita was three years old, went to
sleep in church one night, fell off the seat and broke her collar
bone. Now, the way I see it, the moral to all this is, ride more
bucking horses and stay away from church. At least, if your
pastor can't keep you awake during his talk, sit on the floor.

There seemed to be no end to new experiences and challenges.
When I was working at Carriker's river farm, one afternoon at
quitting time, Calvin told me to let Dennis saddle old Pony Boy
the next morning and ride him over to the river farm.

I asked, "Why not haul him in my trailer as I come to work?"

Calvin said, "He has never been in a trailer, can't get him in
one."

It was a six-mile trip and I saw no need for the horse to have to
go that far on foot when he could just as well ride. So, next
morning I hauled him over in my trailer and Calvin was surprised.
He wondered how I loaded the horse.

I told him it was fairly easy. First I tried leading him into
the trailer just as I would any horse. He was almost through the
loading chute when he decided to retreat. In fact, he retreated
all the way back down the chute and out into the corral. Then I
said to him, "Okay old boy, since you like to back so well, just
go ahead and back."

I backed him across the lot until his tail hit the fence on the
other side of the lot. By this time he seemed to be getting the
"hang" of it and didn't seem to mind backing up. So I backed him
along the fence all the way around to the loading chute, then up
through the chute and into the trailer, and closed the tailgate.
The entire operation didn't take more than a couple of minutes,
and it saved Old Pony Boy a long, hard journey on foot. I really
believe he enjoyed the ride, though he never mentioned it to me.

It seems like I mentioned before, that I had never lost a penny
on a bad debt. However, there might have been a time or two when
I almost did, but it was when I was farming, and not while I was
in business.

Yes, this happened at Royston. Hobb Reed and Hester Hammitt each
owed me two dollars. Hobb had promised to pay me his two dollars
as soon as he got out his first bale of cotton. Well, he got out
his first bale, then his second bale, and still hadn't made a
move toward paying me. So one day, in the store, back by the
post office, I asked him about it. He said, "Johnson, I'm not
going to pay you until Hester pays you."

I asked him, "What if I told Bill Carriker I wasn't going to pay
my grocery bill until everyone else paid him?" Then I added,
"And besides, you promised to pay me when you got out your first
bale of cotton, and you didn't."

Hobb asked, "Johnson, are you calling me a liar?"

I said, "Call it whatever you like, you promised to pay me and
you didn't."

Then he told me, "Johnson, come outside here, I'll just whip
you."

And I said, "Okay, but remember, after you whip me, you still owe
me two dollars."

Then suddenly, he became calm again as he said, "Come over here
to the cash register, I'll just pay you."

Thank goodness we didn't go outside while he was in a bad mood.
He was a lot bigger than I was and he might have half killed me.

While we lived at Royston, Papa had an old Chevrolet car that he
was through with and he wanted to give it to Dennis. It was an
old, old car, just had a seat and a pick-up bed, no cab at all,
tires not worth 50 cents each, all leaking, radiator leaking,
using oil, dripping oil, and no license plates. And besides all
that, Dennis didn't have a driver's license. I didn't want
Dennis to own the old car. But I saw later that I had made a
mistake, and told the family so.

Looking back, I can see why I should have allowed Dennis to own
the old car. But at the time, I reasoned: Dennis couldn't
repair a flat, I would have to do it. With no license, he could
only drive it out in the pasture. Thorns would puncture his
tires. We had no money to waste on the old car. We had a car
and two pick-ups, and Dennis had not shown any inclination toward
repairing nor maintaining the ones we had. Besides, one neighbor
boy had an old car like that, and one day he was driving down the
road and the motor fell out. No kidding, the front end of the
motor dropped down and stuck in the ground.

But who knows, this old car might have been just the thing to
spark Dennis' enthusiasm and spur him on, all the way up to
greasy hands and skinned knuckles. And it might have built up
his confidence in himself. Anyway, I regret very much that I
didn't allow him to own the old car and play with it. Some of my
kinfolks thought I was sort of, if not altogether, cruel to the
boy. They convinced me but it was too late. The damage had been
done, never to be undone.

Years later, after I had made a lot of changes in my way of
thinking, and had repented for many of my shortcomings, there
came a time when a daughter of one of those same kinfolks wanted
to own a saddle horse in the city where they lived. And there
was a time when it looked as though the girl was fighting a
losing battle with her mother, who was not altogether in favor of
her owning the horse in town. The mother was finally getting a
look at a situation similar to the one I had years ago, but from
a different viewpoint--viewing her own pocketbook instead of
mine. I sent word to the mother not to be cruel to her daughter
as I had been to Dennis. I told her, "By all means, let the girl
have the horse, regardless of the cost." The girl got the horse
all right, but he cost a fortune in trouble, money and
inconvenience.

During those last years we lived at Royston, Calvin Carriker
built a new house at his River Farm and wanted to put a butane
log in the fireplace. But he was unable to find an artificial
log that would burn butane, they all burned natural gas. He
searched everywhere, and finally brought home a gas log and asked
me to change it over to burn butane. I worked on it in my spare
time for several days, as well as some time that was not spare.
I even went to junk yards and got parts that I had to drill and
shape and alter until they would do what I wanted them to do.

After a good many days, I had it burning pretty good. Calvin
stopped by the shop one day and left his wife, Nell, sitting in
the car. Then, when he saw how well the log was burning, he
called her to come and see it. She came in, looked at it and
asked, "Calvin, is that the log you bought at Rotan?"

He told her it was, and she said, "Calvin, didn't you tell
Clarence that the factory man said they hadn't been able to make
a log that would burn butane successfully?"

Calvin said, "No, if I had told him that, he might not have fixed
it. He didn't know it couldn't be done."

I remember one day one of Calvin's bulls got through the fence
and into the pasture west of his barn. He saddled a horse and
went into the neighbor's pasture after him. Well, he came back
telling Max and me about a rattlesnake he had seen, but couldn't
find anything to kill it with. He wanted the three of us to go
hunt the snake and kill it. Max took a 22 rifle and Calvin and I
each took a hoe.

It was early spring and the snakes had begun to come out of their
dens in the heat of the day. The grass was short but we took no
chances. We walked side by side, very slowly, and watched
closely. We soon found our first snake, lying at the mouth of a
hole, which was about like a hole a badger might have dug. We
stopped and stood motionless, whispering plans of what we should
do--or at least try to do. We decided that Max was to shoot the
snake, and in case he missed, Calvin and I would cut him to
pieces with our hoes. Our idea was to hurry and try to keep him
from escaping into the hole. Well, we got all set, Max slowly
raised his gun, aimed, and fired.

We still don't know whether or not Max hit the snake. We do
know, however, that the snake went into the hole, along with four
or five or six others. Who knows how many? It all happened so
fast. We just stood there--frozen in our tracks, trembling,
scared and surprised. We had not seen any except the one snake
lying near the opening of the den. We quickly looked down around
our feet to see whether there might be others that we had not
seen. If there happened to be one behind me that wanted to get
into that hole, I sure wanted to jump aside and let him go by.

It was some time before we regained our composure. We were well
aware that we must be more cautious and watch more closely than
we had been. Then we walked forward, more slowly, closer
together, almost stumbling over each other. We walked about 100
yards, moved over a way and took another swath coming back the
same 100 yards--and killed 27 rattlesnakes. There were others,
to be sure, but we had had enough for one day. And somehow,
hunting rattlers was not as alluring as it had been an hour
before. We planned to go back some day, but we just never did
get around to it.

All my life I have seen cattle round-ups, but people always seem
to do things the hard way. And that wasn't for me. A cattle
round-up at our Royston farm was unlike any other round-up in the
world, so far as I know. We had saddle horses but we hardly
needed them. Our cows were in the habit of coming into the feed-
lot to eat bundled feed. By simply closing the gate behind them,
the round-up was ended. The work we had to do next would take a
little more time than the rounding up did. But it was easier and
faster than any system I have ever seen.

At least once each year, we had to brand all the new calves,
those we had bought as well as those we had raised. We had to
reduce the little bull calves to steers, vaccinate all young
cattle against blackleg, both young and old had to be vaccinated
against some other disease--I have forgotten what it was called,
and I'll bet a quarter we farmers didn't call it by the same name
that veterinarians called it. And finally, all calves that had
not been dehorned had to have their horns cut off. I remember
one time we had 25 cows, a large bull, and 55 calves to work.
That meant 135 vaccine shots, 30 to be branded, about 20 to be
dehorned, and maybe 15 little bull calves to be worked on.

Anita was big enough to keep a fire going and to keep branding
irons hot and to hand them through the fence to me. Dennis was
big enough to help drive the cattle into the stanchion, hand the
vaccinating needles to me, bring in more cattle from the feed
lot, and turn out the ones we were through with. I was big
enough to catch the cattle in the stanchion, vaccinate in the
shoulder with one needle, in the hip with another, brand a Lazy-J
on the left hip, cut off their horns, and work the little bull
calves.

We never fooled around with a chute because we found that cattle
were reluctant to enter a chute. That would be too slow and too
much work. Instead, we used a stanchion that was installed
permanently between two small pens. It opened large enough for
the largest bull to go through and it closed small enough to hold
the smallest calf. And it wasn't all that expensive. It
probably cost me $1 for second-hand lumber and 50 cents for a
rope to pull the top ends of the bars together.

It was easy to get the cows to go through the stanchion since it
formed a gate between the two pens. Our milk cows passed through
it every day. Most any cow or calf would be glad to go from one
pen to another, especially if there were some cows in the other
pen.

The system was fast, and by far the easiest I have ever worked
with. We three did the 80 cattle one morning but finished a
little late for dinner. We sat down to a one-o'clock meal
instead of a twelve-o'clock meal.

I mentioned before that we sometimes cut feed for the public. At
first, Ima went along to drive the car. But later on, I build an
iron "basket" at the back bumper of the car to carry the front
wheels of the tractor. Then I could drive the car and trail the
tractor and the binder, and Ima could stay home. One patch of
feed was 50 miles away in Kent County. Where the road was so
sandy that the car couldn't pull the tractor and binder, I would
crank the tractor motor and let the tractor push, with no driver
on it. And we learned that low air pressure in the auto tires
would allow it to go most anywhere in sand. We parked that Buick
on top of nearly every sand hill in Carriker's big sand field.

When the binder needed a repair job underneath, we threw a chain
over the top of the binder and hooked one end to the frame and
the other end to the tractor. Just a little pull with the
tractor would roll the binder over for easy access to the
underside.

By the end of World War II, our old coal oil cookstove was pretty
well rusted out and was looking like a reject from a junk heap.
Ima was looking forward to something better. In fact, she knew
exactly what that something was, a new butane range. She and I
went to Stamford one day to inquire as to whether we would be
able to get a butane tank and how much it might cost. We got
this information from the appliance dealer. He could sell us the
butane and tank, but we might have to wait a year for a permit to
buy a stove. He told us we might go to the ration board and find
out. Now, I knew we couldn't get a permit from the Stamford
board, because that was in Jones County and we lived in Fisher
County.

The ration board was only a short distance away, so I went over
to ask a question or two. But the woman in charge ignored my
questions and, very undiplomatically, ordered me to, "Sit over at
that table and fill out this form."

I filled out the form and presented it to the not-so-friendly
woman. She looked it over, mumbled a few words, which I couldn't
understand, placed another paper before me and said, "Sign here."

I still wondered how long I might have to wait for the lady to
answer a simple question or two but by this time I was afraid to
ask. I sure didn't want to make her mad, she might never answer
my questions. So, when she told me to sign, I lost no time in
signing the paper. I didn't know what I was signing and I didn't
much care. I only hoped that she would answer my questions when
I got through signing all the forms she kept handing me.

When I finally got through signing all the papers and gave them
back to her, she still wouldn't talk to me, but she gave me a
certificate which would allow an appliance dealer to sell me a
butane cook stove without either of us being subject to
confinement in a Federal Penal Institution.

I went back and showed the certificate to the appliance dealer,
and he was really surprised as he asked, "How did you get that?
I have customers who have been waiting a year for one and are
still waiting. Some of them would be glad to pay you $100 for
it."

I told him I just filled out some papers, and the nice lady gave
it to me.

There was no need to lie in filling out the forms. I told the
truth all the way. One question I had to answer was, "Where do
you live?"

My answer was, "On a farm near Hamlin."

If it had asked, "In which county do you live?" I would still be
waiting for the certificate. The lady and Hamlin were both in
Jones County. I lived in Fisher County.




CHAPTER 19

TOUR PIKE'S PEAK, MOVED TO ARKANSAS, WENT TO COLLEGE

As you know, Frank was the oldest in our family, and when I was
growing up, he was away from home a lot. I had long since become
accustomed to his being away from home. He even went to college
awhile, I believe it was Denton State. But he didn't go very
long. I didn't know whether he quit because of a lack of
finances or because of a lack of interest and drive. I was the
only other one of us who ever left home to work or run around--
except Joel. He went as far as Stamford and worked there for
years in a drygoods store. And later, of course, he had his
portable skating rink and he took it from here to there. Then he
settled down with it in Brownwood.

My working away from home never amounted to much. However, I
wouldn't take a pretty penny for the educational benefits I
gained from my traveling around. It increased my desire for more
learning, and it gave me confidence in my ability to do more
things. It made me more mobile and took away my fear of strange
places.

In fact, I thought so much of my education gained through travel
that I wanted us to travel a lot with our children. But we were
poor and couldn't travel first class, which would have pleased
some members of my family. As for me, I would have been glad to
travel second class or third class rather than not travel at all.
As is evident, I have roughed it much of my life. Later, when I
wanted to travel with our kids, I would have gotten a lot of
pleasure from roughing it again, going places and seeing things,
camping out, and visiting the wild. Some of our traveling proved
to be a big failure because some of the family didn't especially
care to put up with some of the roughing they had to go through
with at times.

For instance, we drove up Pike's Peak once in our Dodge Command
car. There was nothing wrong with the car. It was built capable
of traveling across the Sahara Desert trouble-free. It was Army
surplus, four-wheel drive and as solid as they come. Many cars
get too hot climbing the Peak, but this one didn't, although it
was in the heat of summer. It had an army canvas top and
curtains to match. But since it was beautiful weather, we had
the curtains packed away under the back seat. And although it
was summertime at the foot of the mountain, it was not summer on
top.

The weather on Pike's Peak can change from sunshine to snow and
from snow to sleet quicker than perhaps anywhere else in these
United States. And the sky can pour out the abundance of her
elements faster than is sometimes enjoyable to those upon whom
she so recently spread her sunshine. And that is just what she
did to us that day. Her elements were in the form of rain, snow,
and large sleet. The sleet was sort of a cross between pure
white sleet and large, soft hail.

Now, the road up Pike's Peak is, for the most part, void of
suitable parking places, even for emergencies. And all this
sleet and ice falling suddenly out of the sky did create an
emergency. However, before we arrived at an emergency parking
place, Ima was very unhappily sitting in a puddle of snow and
sleet and ice that had fallen into the front seat and had worked
its way down to the back side of her lap.

When we found a little place to pull over and stop, we put up the
curtains. But Ima's unhappiness remained with her much longer
than I had hoped it would. The truth is, she carried a large
portion of it, as well as a little bit of dampness, all the way
back down the mountain to Colorado Springs. And there, we found
the same type of slush curb to curb four inches deep.

I never quite forgave the weather for that little stunt it pulled
on us. It was a long time before I could get the family to go
with me again anywhere outside our home county.

Time not only "waits for no man," it seems to go faster and
faster. We were getting older and our kids were growing up.
Dennis finished high school in Hamlin in June of 1949. In the
fall of that same year he began to hear advertisements on radio
about cheap farm land in Arkansas, and he sent for a catalog of
listings. When it arrived, I had to admit there were some
interesting bargains offered in it. The more Dennis read the
catalog and listened to the radio, the more he was convinced that
out there somewhere in this big country of ours, there was
something we had been missing. Then one day he said to me,
"Daddy, let's go look at some of these places. All we are doing
here is working ourselves to death and getting nowhere."

We talked it over and I agreed that, if it suited the rest of the
family, we would go look. Dennis and I went first, not to buy,
but only to shop around. We went to Ft. Smith, Arkansas, and
looked all the way from 60 miles north of there to 60 miles south
of there. We liked what we saw and the prices were right. Then
we returned home, and Ima and I went to Arkansas, this time not
just looking; we were buying. After looking a few days, we found
and bought a small farm three miles south of Mansfield.

We moved onto the place in the early spring of 1950. Anita
stayed with the Tarlington Willingham family to finish out her
Sophomore year in Hamlin High School. She joined us that summer
and spent her Junior year in Mansfield High School. Then she did
some special work during the next summer and, in the fall of
1951, instead of entering Mansfield High as a Senior, she entered
the University of Arkansas as a Freshman.

Three years later Dennis also entered the University as a
Freshman. Then three years after that, Dennis and Anita both
came to me and told me it was my time next. They promised to see
me through. They would handle the finances; it would be up to me
to make my grades.

One of my dreams when I was 20 years old, was to finish high
school, go to college, and become a school teacher. It was 31
years later that my three children decided it was time for me to
realize that dream. At first I argued against the idea, half-
heartedly, but was pleased when they insisted. And I must admit
that I have thoroughly enjoyed the good life which they have
afforded me, beginning with those first days of college in 1957.
By that time Dennis was a college Senior, Anita was teaching in
college, and Larry was a high school Freshman.

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