Etcetera
By: Dennis D. Price
etcetera
[et-set-er-uh, ‐se-truh]
1. a number of other things
2. extras or sundries
3. Random
stories from the past told for Christmas, 2018
Seventeen
Dogs
This
story happened before I was born, but I was told the story of my dad owning 17
dogs at one time—many of them hunting dogs. Some were coon hunting dogs. I
think this happened soon after my mom and dad moved to the Rockbridge farm in the
spring of 1947. Mr. Zeno Curnutt, the landlord, said to him, “I never knew
anyone to amount to very much who owned a lot of dogs!” The story goes that my
dad got rid of most of them soon after this comment.
Granger
I don’t know if I remember this or I just remember being
told about it. Granger was a dog that my mom and dad had when I was a toddler
or perhaps a little older. When I was in the yard and started out toward the
barn, Granger would lay down in front of me and not let me go any further. Don’t
know anything else about Granger, but I’ve always been glad Granger was around.
He obviously helped keep me around! [Addendum: I probably shouldn’t tell this
for security reasons, but even now when one of the websites asks me to pick a
security challenge question, I sometimes pick “Favorite Pet” and my answer is
“Granger”!]
Head First
After our house burned in March 1955, we moved into a new
house in July 1955. The new house was built on the same spot of ground on which
the old farmhouse stood. This event probably was sometime later that year. I
was in the basement with a little toy broom sweeping along the edge of the
wall. I heard a noise at the top of the basement steps and ran over to the
staircase. My little sister, Debbie, was falling down the steps. She was only a
couple years old. Miraculously I made it to the steps just in time to catch her
before she hit the concrete. I still remember holding her head when mom heard
her fall and came down to get her.
A Frantic Search
Not sure what day or year this happened,
but it was a frantic search by all of us when we discovered that my sister,
Debbie, was nowhere to be found. We looked all over the house, the barn, barn
loft, and other buildings around the farm. We had a couple of tanks of water
including a concrete tank that we used to play in from time to time. We walked
down there and checked. Fortunately, she was not in or near any of those.
Everyone was getting really worried about her disappearance. One more time, I
went to the basement. We had an old couch down there and behind the couch
Debbie was sleeping on the floor. It was a good place to take a nap for a
couple of reasons: it was cool there and she was effectively getting away from
a couple of teasing brothers. We were relieved and very glad that she was
found.
Dramatic Rescue
I guess it is by God’s grace that we
survived our childhood. There were some close calls. I’ll tell you about one of
them. We had a wagon equipped with a water tank on it that we used to haul
water for livestock. We creatively called it the water wagon! In the front part
of the wagon there was some space that a little boy like me could ride. Many
times, I rode there as dad took water to various tanks around the farm. I
wasn’t very old the day I was riding on the water wagon and Greg was sitting on
dad’s lap while dad was driving the Oliver tractor. We were heading up a hill
by the hedge row when the pin came out of the water wagon tongue and the wagon
started rolling backwards. I don’t know how he did it, but my dad stopped the
tractor, put the parking brakes on, set Greg on the ground, ran toward me and
the water wagon, grabbed the tongue and turned the wagon just before it rolled
into the creek at the bottom of the hill! It was an amazing and dramatic
rescue! There were other close calls that will have to be told by others and at
other times, but this one is my story and I’m sticking to it!
Bert and Mert
My dad’s name was Basil. My mom’s name was
Agnes. If anyone was near the door when my dad came in to get something from
the house, they would hear him call out, “Mert!” That was what he called my mom!
Somewhere along the way, she told us that when they were younger, they went to
a movie where there were characters named Mert and Bert. After the movie, they
decided that they would call each other by those names. Mert stuck. Bert
didn’t!
Exodus 34:21
[Six
days you shall labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest; even during the
plowing season and harvest you must rest. Genesis 34:21]
From just about my earliest memory, my dad
did not do any farming (except feeding and occasionally some “emergency” work)
on Sundays. One time he told me the story of how this practice got started for
him. We have one field of bottom ground on the farm. He wanted to finish
planting that field before the rain, so one Sunday (I think it was during the
1957 planting season), he planted the bottom field. That night it rained four
inches and washed out the seed corn on that field. He had to replant it later. He
decided then and there he would not do any work on Sunday. On our farm, this
has been a five-decade practice. And as Exodus says, it’s been a practice even during
the plowing and harvesting season!
An Accurate Throw
I always liked to hear stories that my dad
would tell about his growing up years. One story I particularly liked was the
one about an accurate throw! He said that his dad was in a nearby field
plowing. This was during the time when a horse pulled the plow, the reins that
were used to guide the horse were slung over the neck of the “plower” as he
walked behind the plow. While my grandpa was plowing, my dad saw a grease
bucket lid on the ground nearby and thought it would be interesting if he could
throw that lid all the way to the field. He threw it like a frisbee and he said
the lid came down perfectly on the back of the horse. Of course, the horse bolted.
My grandpa was thrown to the ground. The plow was bouncing as the horse ran all
the way to the barn. The rest of this story, according to my dad, included a
whipping with a harness strap!
A Dad Joke
Way before anyone heard of dad jokes, we
heard our share of them. One of my dad’s favorite jokes that he told was this
one: a man walked into a restaurant with an onion behind his ear. It never
failed, every day he had an onion behind his ear when he visited the place. One
day, he entered the establishment with a carrot behind his ear. The staff at
the restaurant finally asked him, “why do you have a carrot behind your ear?”
He said, “Because I’m out of onions.” I can still hear him tell it. He thought
it was funny and laughed a long time after telling this joke. We laughed too—at
the joke and at the way he laughed when he told it. If truth be told, I laughed
a bit when I typed it out just now!
It
probably isn’t good to analyze a joke of this type, but it is interesting to
note that the people at the restaurant asked the wrong question. If they really
wanted to know what was happening, they should have asked why he had anything
behind his ear, not just the carrot on that day! I’m afraid this dad joke thing
might have been handed down to succeeding generations!
A Couple of Pranks
Not only jokes have been part of our
family, but pranks and teasing have also shown up from time to time. One time,
my cousin, Mike, was visiting with us. Late in the evening, we were playing in
the basement. Suddenly, there was a knocking on the basement window. It was
startling and scary. But, knowing my dad, we figured it was probably him. We
raced upstairs. My mom and dad were in bed, but not asleep yet. There was no
way my dad could have come in from outside that quickly after knocking on the
basement window. We thought maybe we were hearing things, so we went back
downstairs. After a few minutes, there was another knock on the window. We ran
upstairs again. Dad was in bed. Now we were really scared. In fact, Mike did
not go back downstairs. He sat on the top of the staircase. Finally, we
discovered the truth. My dad had used a fishing rod with a weight on the end of
the line. He opened his bedroom window, reached out with the fishing line and
“knocked” on the window with the fishing weight. Before we ran upstairs, he
reeled in the fishing line, put it under the bed and got back in bed. Pretty
clever!
Another time, dad dressed up as an old
woman and sneaked out the front door (which we rarely used) and came to the
door we always used and knocked. I answered the door and the old woman said,
“Is your dad home?” It scared me just a bit as I hollered for my dad. About
this time, my mom came in (she was in on this, too). Something about the way my
mom looked at me caused me to look again at the old woman. I recognized that it
was my dad and just slammed the door! They laughed at the time. I think I might
have laughed later. Maybe.
A Chiropractic Ride
Occasionally, my dad would have trouble
with his back. He would describe it as his back being “out.” An observer could
tell that it was “out” because while he walked straight ahead, it looked like
he was walking a bit sideways! One time, his back was bothering him so much
that he couldn’t climb on the tractor. He
asked my mom to drive him back to the pond so he could feed the hogs we had
there. She was to drive; he would sit in the back of the feed trailer. My mom
didn’t have too much experience with tractors. I don’t remember her being on a
tractor much at all. On this day she did fine. She got back to the pond in
record time—driving a bit too fast. When she finally stopped, my dad was ready
to complain that she went too fast and the bumps were excruciating. When he
stood up and started his somewhat indignant speech to her, he suddenly changed
his tune and said, “hey, you fixed it!” His back was not “out” anymore, but
“put back in place” by an amateur chiropractor on a speedy chiropractor ride.
A Picture-Perfect Temper Tantrum
I think this story happened on a Sunday evening. My dad
needed some help with some feeding or something outside. He asked me to come
and help him. I didn’t want to. For the next several minutes he kept asking and
I kept saying I wasn’t going to help him. I started crying and refused to get
ready to go outside. At one point he got the camera out and said he was going
to take a picture of me having this temper tantrum. That really made me mad and
I started to run out of the room. In the process, I slipped and fell on the end
table and cut my forehead—just above my eyebrow. I was now crying and bleeding.
My mom called Dr. Baldwin and he met us at the office and I had to have
stitches. It would have been a whole lot better just to have been obedient! I hope my dad didn’t feel bad about all of
this because it was my fault, but I’m sure he did. I don’t like thinking about
this story, but it happened. I’m glad it wasn’t repeated--at least to this
degree!
A Marksman at the Wrong Time
I had a couple of BB guns in my growing up
years. I used the gun to target practice and sometimes I would try to kill sparrows.
My dad didn’t mind us killing the sparrows. They were a nuisance in and around
the barn. However, we weren’t supposed to shoot any other birds, especially the
graceful barn swallow. So we would go up in the hayloft and try to eliminate
some sparrows. I admit it sounds kind of heartless given the witness of the
scriptures that says God knows when a sparrow falls, but in my case, God saw
that I missed 99.9% of the time. I shot tubes and tubes of BBs at sparrows and
missed. One day a barn swallow was sitting on the power line by the barn. I was
frustrated that I couldn’t hit a sparrow, so I decided if I couldn’t hit
anything, I might as well shoot at the barn swallow. Unfortunately, this one
time my aim was deadly. I still remember seeing the swallow falling to the
ground. Probably God notices when barn
swallows fall as well. Dad saw it too. And I didn’t see my BB gun for a few
weeks!
The Grove
My dad always liked pecan trees. He planted pecan trees
between our house and the road in 1969 or 1970. Anyone who drives by the farm
can now see the beautiful, tall, majestic pecan grove that was planted almost
50 years ago. My dad didn’t live to see what this pecan grove looks like today
and the many pecans that it has produced. There is this reality in my dad’s experience
that is embodied in this quote by Regan Sutrefield: “The best of what we sow we
won’t live to reap.”
Vacation Fun
Our family didn’t have very many
traditional vacations. The only time all of us traveled for a few days was in
1958. We spent some time in the Ozarks, toured Marvel Cave, and stayed in a
cabin in Forsyth, Missouri. Another year (1967) everyone but me went back to
the same area. I didn’t want to go, so I stayed home and took care of things on
the farm.
But another vacation week stands out in my
mind. One year, mom and dad decided that we would stay home but consider it a
vacation week. No farm work would be planned outside of normal feeding. The
rest of the time we would do “vacation” things. Honestly, the only thing I
remember was that my dad built a raft during that week. He took four empty 55-gallon
barrels and constructed a wooden raft with the four barrels on each of the
corners. He also built a ladder on one end of it so we could swim in the pond
and be able to get on and off the raft. He also built a bench on it for
fishing. We took it back to the pond and had fun floating and swimming. It
worked great.
Can’t Fool Her
One of the most popular combines in the
1950s was the Allis Chalmers pull-type combine. This means that the combine was
pulled by a tractor. Allis Chalmers or AC as it was called, sold a ton of these
combines. Over the years, they made them a bit bigger and used improved
technology in the mechanics of the machine. However, they looked essentially
the same. My dad had at least one of the earlier models, then traded for the
looks-the-same-but-a-little-bit-bigger-improved model. It was parked in the
barnyard and my dad asked my sister, Debbie, how she like his new combine. She
went to the window, looked out at the machine for just a second, turned away, and
stated in a matter-of-fact way: “you can’t fool me, you just painted it!”
A Lesson Learned the Hard Way
We have almost always had a Ferguson tractor around the
farm. These tractors were small, utility, chore tractors. They were used nearly
every day for something. (While we don’t use a tractor like this anymore, we
still have a 1957 Ferguson that my grandpa bought new.)
A Ferguson is the first tractor I learned
to drive. I probably wasn’t more than six years old. As a matter of fact I was
too small to push the clutch and the brake at the same time, so I had to
improvise by making sure if I needed to stop, I pushed the clutch in to take it
out of gear then shifted my weight over to the brake. I’m not sure how safe
that was, but I distinctly remember doing it.
The Ferguson was the tractor I used when I
started doing field work. I think I was in the fourth grade and one day after
school, my dad had the Ferguson and the culti-mulcher ready for me to use in
one of the fields. After a few years, I spent so much time on the tractor that
I knew all about it—so I thought!
One day I was using the Ferguson to rake
hay, as I remember. Perhaps I was doing something else, but I do know I was in
the field about a mile from the house when I ran out of gas. I thought I had
enough to finish the task, but I didn’t. So, I walked back to the house. When I
got there, I told my dad I had run out of gas. He asked me if I had used the
auxiliary tank on it. As much as I had driven that tractor, I had never heard
of the auxiliary tank. I thought he was teasing me. He said that if you open
the fuel line control knob a couple turns, there is another gallon or so in the
tank. When he took me back to the tractor, he did not take any gas, he just
turned the knob a couple of turns, and the tractor started up. I had enough gas
to drive it home! There was more to learn about that tractor. I have discovered
that there is more to learn in just about any situation in life, too!
Be Sure That the Envelope Says Kool-Aid!
A line in a vintage (probably 1950s era) Kool-Aid jingle
says “be sure that the envelope says Kool-Aid.” Well, one day my mom didn’t.
The back story that you need to know about that day is that my brother (when he
was very little) used to take labels off the cans in the cupboards. He used to
take labels off other things, too. Like Kool-Aid packets. (I guess at the time,
Kool-Aid came in packaging that had paper on the outside of it.) My mom was
fixing a lunch to take to my dad in the field. She fixed the food, then was
stirring up the Kool-Aid. Since the paper had been removed by my brother, she
didn’t know what flavor it was going to be until she poured it in the pitcher.
It was purple that day. She said later that it didn’t look quite right, so she
took a drink of it. Then she took another drink trying to figure out what was
wrong with it. Then she realized she had mixed up purple dye! Her mouth, tongue
and teeth were now purple.
Then she panicked. She stepped outside and
hollered at my Aunt Norma who lived across the field. (Aunt Norma didn’t have a
phone.) Mom said she wanted to let someone know that there was a problem in
case she keeled over dead! She called the doctor and he concluded that the dye
would not hurt her. It didn’t. She lived to laugh and tell about it. But the
jingle was right—be sure the envelope says Kool-Aid!
Always Read—and Follow the Instructions
There is an adage that teaches us “when all else fails, read
the instructions.” A corollary to that adage is “when you read the instructions,
you should follow them.” This corollary
was played out on a cold day on the farm. My dad and our neighbor, Stu
Fitzsimmons, had each bought a new auger feed wagon. They got them cheaper by
buying them unassembled and met at our shop to begin putting them together. A
fire was built in the stove in our shop for warmth and the task began. As the
wagon began to be assembled, the instructions clearly said, “do not tighten
bolts until after certain sections of the wagon were assembled.” However, it
was the consensus that to save time, the bolts should be tightened as they go.
They got to the aforementioned step in the process and it could not be
assembled until they went back and loosened all of the bolts that they had
previously tightened. They finally got it assembled. The assembly of the second
wagon went much quicker because they didn’t ignore the instructions. As a young
kid watching all of this, I learned that instructions should not only be read
but obeyed! Another way to put it: We must be doers of the instructions and not
just readers only!
Church and Community Servants
My parents were good role models when it
came to church and community service. My mom and dad volunteered for many
ministry tasks through our church, the Rockbridge United Methodist Church. Mom
taught Bible School and Sunday School and helped in many other ways. My dad
served as treasurer of the church and also volunteered for things. I remember for
several years he was on the team that erected the elaborate nativity scene the
church displayed out by the highway during Advent and Christmas.
My dad also served on the Fire Protection
District Board and the Greenfield School Board for at least a couple of terms.
I’m not sure exactly what years he served, but it was interesting to see his
picture at least in one of my high school yearbooks as a member of the board!
It has always been interesting and a matter
of pride to see his name on the plaque when the new high school gym was
constructed in Greenfield. This new building was first used during my freshman
year (1965) in high school. Even though it was built over fifty years ago,
people still refer to it as the “new gym.”
Even now, I will occasionally drive by the
building and look at his name, Bail D. Price, on the plaque on the front of the
building.
And another interesting fact is that my
step-father, William Hembrough, was also on the school board at the time and
his name is listed on the plaque, too!
I’m grateful to God for the legacy of
church and community service that has been handed down to my generation and
hopefully will continually be handed down to succeeding generations.
One Last Thing
There are many other stories that have been
told in other writings and could be (and perhaps will be) told in the future. I’m
grateful to God for the memories, experiences, and lessons I’ve learned in
these etcetera’s in my life.
