My life begins read 1st

I was born to Mr. and Mrs. John Vandiver on February 11th, 1934. Being right after the Great Depression, times were extremely hard, as you might imagine. There were 12 of us children because people back then had to have a lot of help to raise a crop. However, I don't remember there being but seven at home at one given time, and we lived just like the Amish people do now, the only difference being that they have money and we didn't have squat. I remember we would go to church in the wagon, and they would wrap me up in a quilt because I was the baby. Of course this was only done in the winter time, because it was extremely cold.

We lived 8 miles south of Leighton, about 2 miles from Old Bethel Baptist Church, and about 2 miles from LaGrange School. For years, there was just a dirt road that led to our house, which turned off of what is now HWY 48. Of course the road ended at our house and if we ever seen anybody coming, we knew that they were coming to see us.

There were a few houses back in the fields, but the people that lived there either walked or rode a horse to get where they were going. I remember there was a man named Waldrep that lived up there in the field and he would pass by our house frequently. He sipped on the bottle pretty often, and if he ever came by and was drunk, he would stop and want to argue about the Bible with my Daddy. For the record, we went to the Church of Christ.

Like I said, we were dirt poor, but at one time had 200 acres of good farm land. Daddy sold some of it, and all I ever remember us having were 114 acres. We would farm it and make about 15 bales of cotton each year, raised a lot of corn to feed the cattle with, horses, pigs, chickens, and of course food for own own use, too. There were probably about 50 acres of timber on it. There was a man there at Old Bethel that had a Grist Mill, and he would grind meal from your corn to make cornbread out of. So, every Saturday morning we had to shell a bushel of corn and take it to have it ground. Fortunately, we had a corn sheller for this task - or it would have taken us half a day to shell that much corn. After it was ground into meal, he would take so many scoops for grinding it - for we had no money to pay him with. In the winter, we would have to go cut enough wood to try to keep warm with until the following weekend. That was me and my sister's job after we got in from school. We had to get that crosscut saw and cut enough firewood to last until the next evening, and then it was the same thing over again the next day. We had a rack to put the wood in to saw it up, and I would have to sit on it while they sawed it up into sticks. When spring came, things got a lot more busy. I think I take this up later - we also had a Molasses Mill, and my daddy could make the best molasses you ever tasted. Everybody in the country would bring their sugar cane for him to make molasses with. We fired the cooking pan with wood, so everybody would bring about 5 wagon loads of wood to fire the furnace with. They would cut it just like fence posts, you couldn't tell the difference and then they would haul in the sugar cane. This happened in about August or September.

This thing was built on kind of a hill. The cane grinder sat up on a flat place, and then the juice would come out of the grinder and go into a barrel. From there, a pipe would go underground - say 30 feet to another barrel, only this barrel was down lower than the one at the grinder and the juice would would run into the top of it. I really enjoyed catching some juice in a glass, then drinking it. Children can be expected to do such things - even back then. Then there was the cooking pan, and you could unplug the bottom barrel and run more juice into the pan to cook. By the way, the cane grinder was pulled by a mule, and it was fixed where that mule would go around in a circle. This mule walked all day long, and there was always somebody there feeding the sugar cane into the grinder.

Usually my daddy would take so many gallons for making the syrup for the customer, and as you might expect - we had it everywhere. Needless to say, we never ran out of home made syrup.... After awhile it would turn to sugar and looked alot like ice cream salt. The only downside was that it caused our teeth to rot out, but we would have molasses, eggs, ham, and lots of biscuits for morning meals. The ham had usually been in the salt too long, and was so salty that you couldn't eat it. Of course we had a smoke house and a meat box for storing 2 or 3 hogs that were killed each year, and we would salt them down to cure so they wouldn't ruin. The only problem was, daddy just didn't get around to doing everything when it was supposed to happen, and the meat was left too long in the salt, which made it too salty to eat. There was a store over at Old Bethel and he would sit over there and talk all day. The fellow that ran the stores' name was Bob Ware, so naturally everybody called it Bob Ware's Store. Stores back then had a smell about them that smelled good. They had some things in bulk - which had a pleasant odor to it. Coffee was one thing, and sugar was another. They also had what they called "rolling stores", but we called them the "Peddler". Boy, it had a good smell too.... He would come down the road and start blowing that horn in time for you to get out and stop him.

We finallly ended up with a T Model Ford, and I would slip around and crawl up on the fender, raise the side, and play like I was working on it. All cars back then had a crank, and a T Model Ford had a Magneeter. (at least that's what I remember it being called) Anyhow, you would have to turn the crank to where that thing (magneeter) would buzz, and then you give it a turn. Sometimes it would crank, and sometimes it wouldn't. Sometimes it would kick backward like a mule, (i'm talking about the crank kicking backward).

My mother's parents lived at Waterloo (which is west of Florence), and it was around 50 miles from our house to theirs. Every so often, we would all load up and go to see them. I can barely remember 1 trip, we would leave our house about sun-up, and would get to theirs about 2 in the afternoon. The reason being - we had those old synthetic tubes in the tires, and because of the heat - you would always have a flat tire on the way. Of course everybody had tire tools and a pump, and also a box of patching on board. So, you would jack it up, fix the flat, and ride until you had another one. Sometimes, the patch would just get hot and come off and let the air out, but you could expect a few flat tires when traveling that far. We would get to Waterloo and where the road forks, we would go to the left about a block, and we would have a good old time. We always left for home early the next morning, and it was the same problem with flat tires all over again.