Drunken Bastards, Needle & Thread and a 2×4

My Grandma Toots could tell a great story and there were many. One of my favorites came out of her childhood. It was about the importance of the woman’s circle, especially at a time when women had very few rights and were often at the mercy of their husbands, fathers and brothers. She came from a line of independent ladies. There was a great grandmother, half Cherokee, who abandoned her husband for his brother and died on an Indian Reservation.  Grandma’s mother, Tina Lee Jones (left in the photo above), had gotten pregnant out of wedlock (HUGE scandal in the early 1900s) and refused to marry the man because he was an alcoholic. She later married my great grandfather and had five more children with him. She had to remain scrappy as her husband, ironically, became an alcoholic (side effect of working in the coal mines); and, often left her to fend for herself when he would disappear on two week long binges.

Tina (pronounced TIE-nuh) had a good friend who was in a particularly bad marriage with an abusive alcoholic. This man, not only would go off on frequent drinking binges, but he would come home and knock her around when he had had too much. One night, he returned to the house particularly wasted and, sure enough, beat her pretty good, though not anything life threatening, thank goodness. He then passed out in their marriage bed.

At that point, after years of this crap, his wife had had enough. So, she got out her sewing kit, pulled the sheet over the bastard and quietly and quickly sewed a circle all the way around him, binding the sheet and him into the bed. Then, she got a 2×4 and she began to whack the shit out of him. I cannot imagine what it would be like, not only to be awakened by the wicked end of a heavy board, but to find yourself trapped underneath a sheet, unable to escape, inside some kind of womb from hell. After she had beaten him pretty good and he lost consciousness, she quietly removed the thread and left him lying there, a bloody mess. Thank God, he was not dead.

In the morning, he awoke with no memory whatsoever of the incident, though he looked like hell with gashes, bruises and a few broken ribs. When he questioned his wife, she innocently told him that he had come home in that condition and she had no idea what had happened. When he asked his buddies, they said he had left the bar drunk, but not bloody. He had left alone, so they could not account for what might have happened to him on the way home. He assumed he had been attacked on the walk. It shook him up pretty good. The drunken asshole behaved himself for a few months after that, and, although he returned to his old ways eventually, his drinking and violence never quite reached previous levels.

This story was pretty hot in the ladies’ circles at the time, but the men never knew the truth. The confidentiality between women was vital to their survival and these circles were tight. I love that story, but am so grateful that we’ve come a long way, baby. Today, I am able to keep up my own simple rule with the opposite sex: Leave a man BEFORE you commit a felony. Back then; however, it could be your only way to keep sane.

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Bumming

My Grandpa Joe has been dead for over nineteen years, but I still miss him and think about him often. He grew up in a tiny coal mining town, Universal, Indiana, which was known as Bunsen after the Bunsen Burner that coal miners used to light their way in the dark depths of the strip mines. He was a young man during the Great Depression and lived in Chicago during the early part of his marriage to my grandmother before returning to his home state.

He worked hard his entire life and died a card carrying Teamster. Like my grandmother, he was adamant that Franklin Roosevelt was the greatest president the United States had ever known. He was particularly proud of the time he spent with the Civilian Conservation Corps or 3 C’s as he called it, which was one of FDR’s pet projects, an off shoot of the WPA, created to put young men to work.  Grandpa Joe helped build many of the roads and public parks in Kentucky, Tennessee and Indiana that are still used in this country today.

Beginning from the age of twelve until his mid teens, my grandfather did what they called “bumming” back during the Depression. He and his two friends, Burt and Duck (who, ironically, died in a drowning accident) would sneak into open box cars on freight trains and travel all over the country. A lot of men did this looking for work. It was also not unheard of for impoverished families to travel this way, either looking for work or trying to get to relatives who could help them out. With my grandfather and his friends, though they claimed to have been looking for any jobs to be had, it seemed to be more about the adventure.

During the day, he and the other “bums” would go through wherever town they found themselves, offering to do odd jobs or run errands in exchange for money or food. Sometimes a grateful housewife would make him a sandwich or invite him in to dinner. Other times, they were given potatoes, carrots and other raw vegetables, even meat fat. He said it was rare that people didn’t have anything at all. Everyone tried as best they could to help each other out. The boys would take whatever they were given back to the rail yard or “jungle,” where the travelers and hobos put it all together to make Mulligan stew.

One summer, he and his buddies went up to Chicago and stayed in Grant Park, at that time dubbed, “The Hoover Hotel,” due to the number of homeless people living there. As my grandfather was falling asleep near some benches one evening, a fellow “guest” tapped him on the shoulder, warning, “Hey Buddy, you better tighten your laces, tie them together and double knot them or you’ll wake up in your stocking feet.” A good pair of shoes was quite the commodity.

On another of their travels, while heading south in the middle of winter, the three boys managed to hide in the corner of a box car, as workers rounded up all the transients before departure. The boys assumed the railroad was arresting the unauthorized travelers. Managing to avoid detection, they huddled together, shivering, watching the February snow fall through an opening in the sliding door.

The train stopped and they hopped off, nearly frozen, but feeling rather superior that they had managed to elude the railway workers. Much to their surprise, they witnessed all the other illegal passengers, cheerfully stepping out of the rear train car. Instead of arresting them, the workers had invited the desperate travelers to ride in the warm caboose, where all were fed a hot meal. As one of the lucky men strode passed the chilled boys, he laughed and held up partially eaten drumstick, “You hungry?”

That following summer, Burt, Duck and Schnozz (Grandpa Joe’s nickname) heard they could get a ranching job in Montana. Sounded like fun, so they hit the rails again, this time out West, a direction they had yet to explore…

Somewhere in Kansas, my grandfather shot up suddenly in the middle of the night. He found he couldn’t to speak. Panicked, he awoke Burt and Duck. When he tried to explain what was wrong, all he could do was open and close his mouth, as if muted.

Concerned for their friend, they awakened an old hobo to ask for help. The man strolled over to my grandfather, “Hey, what’s wrong there buddy?” In response, the frightened boy shook his head and wagged his mouth incoherently. The old man grinned after staring at him hard: “He’s homesick,” was the assessment.

Grandpa Joe recalled, “As soon as he said that, I started bawling my eyes out.” Once he had calmed down, the old bum explained to my grandfather what trains he needed to get to Indiana.

When he made it back, my grandfather ran home from Clinton where the train had stopped, sprinting up Bunsen Hill, around the bend to his family’s shack in the woods. Discovering his sisters, Mary and Betty, doing the wash in the backyard, he threw his arms around them. They all laughed. The young women made him a nice lunch. He saw his brothers, John, Paul and Chuck.

Once he’d walked the farm and spoke to his father, his sense of adventure soon returned. Three days after arriving home, just shy of sunrise, Grandpa Joe caught a train going north. He said to me smiling as he remembered one of the happiest times of his life, “I was never homesick again.”

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee.