Unusual things you did in your youth

As a child I walked a lot in my sleep. One night I went out and got a load of stove wood and put it by the stove before going back to bed without ever waking up. That is just one example of my many nocturnal walks.

When the river would rise and fill the lower places between our house and the river, we would set out trotlines to catch perch and catfish. One evening when I was about eight I went down to where the boat was tied to look the lines. I had taken off a few fish when I came to where there was something big on the line. I slowly pulled the line to the top of the water and saw this huge fish with a great big mouth. It was getting dark and I was afraid to pull the fish into the boat. After awhile of pulling him to the top of the water but not into the boat, he got free. He had swallowed a bream that had gotten caught and was caught himself. I was too ashamed to tell anyone about the big one that got away because of my being to afraid to pull him into the boat. It was a very big fish with a huge mouth. It looked something like a big northern pike.

When I was about 10 my first cousin Phil, who was a couple of months older, and I had a contest to see who could hang from monkey bars the longest. We were very competitive. I went to my limit but would not give up. I have a good size scar under my chin as evidence that I lost.

In summertime in Oklahoma, my siblings and I would sometimes have contests about who could stand barefoot on the hot manhole covers the longest. It was always a pyrrhic victory.

In 7th grade, I figured out that you could make a pretty good profit selling candy at school. I was tripling my money everyday for a few days, and I was selling as much candy as I could bring to school in a bag. The gig ended when an assistant principal found out and stormed down to our classroom demanding to know who was selling the candy.

When I was about 12, we had a barbwire fence about four foot high attached to a gate in our front yard One day instead of opening the gate, I got a running start and jumped the barbwire. Everything cleared except my trailing left arm. That upset me. I knew I could clear the fence. I walked back through the gate and on my next attempt, I made sure my left arm was high enough. I still have a “V” shaped scar on the inside of my left arm. I didn’t tell anyone about my mishap.

In high school a cousin and I hunted alligators at night on a river in Georgia. We used a bateau boat, a headlight, a long pole with a hook on the end and a rifle. We would paddle up close to red eyes glowing in the water and shoot the gator in the head and at the same time hook him under his jaws and pull him into the boat. One time we missed hitting the gator with the bullet but still caught him with the hook and pulled him into the boat. The about six foot gator thrashed about in the boat until he escaped.

When my brothers, sisters and I were kids we would find little doodlebug mounds in dry shady places. We would then get down on our knees, put our mouths near the hole and do a doodlebug chant: "doodleup, doodleup, doodleup," until an ugly ferocious looking little bug (antlion larva) would emerge. I later learned from an entomologist that it was the vibration of our voices and not the exact words that cause the doodlebug to surface.

We tied sheets together and climbed out the windows and off the roof.

(Mom? Dad? Some supervision here.)

Chipping boxes in the summer on our timber farm was very hard and hot work. To get tar from yellow or slash pines, we would use a tool with a cutting edge on the top and a weight on the bottom to cut about a half-inch gash about a foot long in the trees to allow the gum to ooze out. We called this chipping boxes. We would chip the boxes on about 5000 trees every couple of weeks. We would put half-gallon galvanized rectangular containers on top of a spike driven into the tree to hold the “cup” in place under the boxes. When the cups were full we would dip the tar out of the cups into large buckets and when the buckets got full, pour the tar into barrels on a tractor pulled trailer. And then take the barrels to the house and sell the tar to a turpentine company. I remember one time when it was very hot and humid, sweat from my body filled my boots. One time I stumbled over a log and lay there for a while, too exhausted to get up. Another time when my Dad and I were chipping boxes, we were about 150 yards apart and he called for me to come to where he was. There was a very large rattlesnake he had almost stepped on. He got a little stick and dispatched the snake. It is shocking to come upon one of these snakes in the woods.

The water was up in the river swamp and my Dad, Uncle Parley and I were paddling late one evening in high water looking for cows to rescue when we saw a deer swimming a little ways in front of us. We decided to try and catch him. As we were paddling as hard as we could, we went under some low branches and a pretty good size snake dropped into the boat. There was a good bit of scrambling around in the boat and any thoughts of catching the deer vanished. The snake got out of the boat before I did.

One day when I was about 15 we were dragging for shrimp on one of my Dad’s shrimp boats, we hoisted up the net to find a 3000 pound 15-foot shark hanging onto the bag. He must have tried to take a bite of our catch and got his teeth caught in the webbing. We took him back to the dock and took pictures of him.

Before Linda and I got married six months after I took a job with Union Carbide in Charleston, I lived in an apartment with three other boys. One morning I woke up with my car missing. I called the State Police, who informed me that it had been repossessed and told me where it was. My best friend at Carbide, Denzil Walker, took me to the big garage that was holding the new car. They of course did not want me to take the car. I had the key and got in the car to leave but one of the employees blocked the exit. I raced the engine and kept bumping him a little before he moved out of the way and I drove away. My friend was awed by what transpired and loved to tell the story of how I reclaimed my car. What led up to this was on the way to Georgia my old car broke down and my Dad had to drive about 100 miles to pick us up. A day or so later he went to the local Ford Dealer and got me a new Ford Falcon. When I got back to Morgantown I send them a check to pay off the balance. They had added a lot of extra charges which I thought were unfair and I refuse to pay. This led to the car being repossessed and my recapturing it. I sent them a letter in which I use the term “money mad mongrel.” I heard nothing more from them.

One time when when I was a kid and the river was up, my dad nailed a large piece of poultry wire to the side of a bateau boat. We went down the Altamaha River for a ways one night and did what he called slamming. We paddled upstream and would ease the boat up near the hill into a little indentation and then start thrashing the water with our paddles. The fish near the hill would panic and try to jump over the boat but would either land in the boat or hit the screen wire on the far side and fall into the boat. That night we caught about 50 pounds of perch and trout, with the biggest trout weighing about nine pounds. The fish made a distinctive sound as they leaped into the air. The bigger the fish, the deeper the sound. That was a wonderful few hours of fishing. We never did it again and I have never heard of anyone else fishing that way.

I was home the day before I was to graduate from college and took my car to a shop to get the rear brakes fixed. Close to closing time they realized they did not have the parts to fix it. They put the old parts in a bag and I drove away with no brakes. I had to be back in Atlanta the next morning to receive my diploma. I drove the 280 miles that night without a sign of a brake and stopped the car by looking ahead and gearing down. Only once or twice did I roll past a stop sign or a red light. I averaged 50 miles per hour on two lane roads. I made it to Atlanta before the morning rush hour to a shop close to where the graduation was held. That was absolutely crazy and I would not recommend anyone doing that.

When I was between 10 and 13 and living on my grandfather's land, I would climb to the top of tall pine trees to get baby squirrels out of their nests to raise. We would feed them milk from a medicine dropper.

The Darien River was a couple of hundred yards across and had a high arching bridge crossing it. A couple of second cousins and I would climb down under the bridge and while pressing against the sides of the girders traverse the span by crawling over, under and around things while being high above the water to get to the other side. We discovered that pigeons made their nests under the bridge and hatched their eggs and raised their young. We started bringing baby pigeons home to raise. They would become tame and stay for a while even after they learned to fly. We did this in our mid-teens. Looking back on it now, it seems like a very dangerous thing to do.