11th Post "THE PAST IS MYSELF"

NORTHERN LIGHTS
(There’s more than the Aurora Borealis)

Magnetic North is the way I sometimes think of it, moths being drawn to a flame. Southern Appalachian peoples trying to find a better life than the poor rural south. Poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, the Great American Depression and the absolute need to hear some jingle in the pockets.

Cities like Chicago, Illinois; Detroit and Niles, Michigan and Louisville, Kentucky, along with other points North, became magnets, drawing from the oft times wretched life of the Southern Peoples to fill the need in America’s great expansion.

My father and three of his brothers migrated to Chicago, as did my mother, Mary Lee and two of her brothers, while another of her brothers migrated to Detroit. Not all of the family members spent a goodly portion of their life in the North, only my mother and father.

Then there was the Winstead Family. Old Mr. Ed Winstead had died long before I became a member of the human race, but I certainly knew his wife and his offspring, one especially, who intermarried with the matriarchal family of the crippled grandmother. The spinster school teacher, married up with the bread man, who was a “dyed in the wool” Winstead.

The Winsteads sent forth to the North, ten of Mr. Ed and Mrs. Lizzie’s issue to populate and I’m certain, sometimes infuriate residents who, due to tenure, had seniority in their neighborhoods.

I have never figured in my mind, just why most of these people became involved with “food service” establishments. A&P (The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co.), National Tea Company and other chains like IGA (Independent Grocers Association) were employers of many of the Southern Migrants. Most of the Winsteads worked with A&P while Mary Lee and her siblings were drawn to National Tea.

Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Longbaugh, better known as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, were not necessarily the only “Wild Bunch”, from stories I’ve overheard. In the early 1940s we children were to “be seen and not heard”, by having to “not be heard”, our ears were wide open and we heard much.

Hillbillies courting Northern Women, when taking them home in their Maxwell or Hupmobile Automobiles, would remark, “The snow is on the ground and no girl of mine is going to have to walk up that sidewalk to the door in this weather”, and they would drive across vegetation, shrubbery, dormant flower beds, benches and everything else to deposit the fair maiden, or whatever she was, at the front door of her apartment building.

My father’s twin brother, Lloyd, (my father was Vester Floyd and his twin was Lester Lloyd, they went by the name Floyd and Lloyd), worked at the Wrigley Chewing Gum factory in Chicago, while Floyd drove a “Chicago Motor Coach Company” bus. The Motor Coach Company was owned by the “Fifth Avenue Coach Lines” in New York.

Lloyd lived in a house at the intersection of West 64th and State Street with his wife Julia who migrated North with him, Floyd and Mary Lee lived at 7021 South Wabash Avenue.

Somehow child bearing came into the picture with my family. Mary Lee’s brother, who was instrumental in bringing Floyd out of the tobacco fields and into the industrialized North, married a Chicago Native, and one of the Winstead women married her brother. Sometime in early 1936 something happened to cause passions to rise, impregnation to happen and children to be born.

The Winstead woman had a son and immediately her brother in law, Mary Lee’s brother, had a son born into his marriage and jealousy took hold. Nine moths later Lloyd had a son Harry, and eight months after Harry entered the world, on March 15, 1938, at 10:51 A.M. in St. Bernard’s Hospital, along came me, delivered by Caesarian Section in the eighth month of her third trimester. The hillbillies were expanding.

All of the cousins lived with their families except Floyd and Mary Lee’s son, he was shipped off to Tennessee at age three, so my childhood recollection of Chicago is limited to occasional train rides for a week’s visit. In the 1940s, a family member could just tell the conductor where the young one was going and the conductors would look after the child until the destination was reached and another family member would meet the train. My, those giant Mikado Locomotives with their thundering steam driven pistons were a sight to behold. The ground could be felt shaking as they would thunder into the station with air brakes screeching and enormous drive wheels thrown into reverse.

These excursions for a 5 day visit to the Chicago Parents came only after the climax of World War II. During the Second World War all public transportation conveyed military personnel as the first priority and important business people after that. A country lad visiting his mother and father was of the least importance in the war effort.

The Winstead family in Chicago must have been, from the overheard word of mouth gossip, a study in degenerative human behavior. One of the Winsteads from the Yellow Creek Valley was associated with a burlesque theatre and married a “performer”, came back to the yellow Creek Valley and had a house full of kids, three were my elementary schoolmates.

Back in the childhood of my life, when neighbors went to help neighbors on their farm, womenfolk would prepare dinner and feed the help who came. The “burlesque” lady touched my sympathy one day as I followed my uncle to help in a haying operation on the Winstead Farm. Come dinner time, she didn’t have enough plates to serve everybody and some of us ate on tin pie pans and then others had to wait until plates could be washed and reused by others. Their house was a ramshackle cabin and I knew she was accustomed to something better in Chicago, just like old Colman Jones’ wife Eunice from California had to be in a state of culture shock when she arrived.

Another Winstead got married, sired an offspring, divorced and moved back to the Yellow Creek Valley to become a “Holsum Bread Company” Bread Man and later a thorn in my side.

Eventually, the majority of the Northern Travelers returned to the Yellow Creek Valley, either dead to be buried, sick to be nurtured to health or eventually buried, or alive and well enough to raise holy hell in the valley. Of course the hell they raised was subtle because, “what would the neighbors think”?

The Hunter family had a son who migrated to Michigan for work. Several months passed and he “showed up”, back in the Yellow Creek Valley driving an automobile with jingle in his pockets.
One Saturday, when a group of the farm folk gathered at Uncle Walter and Aunt Annie’s General Store, this fellow came “driving up” in his Michigan Automobile and went inside to purchase a pair of “brogans” with that impressive jingle.

Uncle Walter took the shoe box off the shelf with the size of brogan requested. “How much are those ?”, the Hunter fellow asked. Uncle Walter told him, “Five Dollars”. “Don’t you happen to have any that are more expensive?”, Hunter replied. “Nope, this is all I have and this is the only price” . “Well, I was looking to spend more for a pair of brogans, I was looking for a pair that cost at least twenty dollars”, continued Hunter.

Uncle Walter thought for a minute, scratched his head and said, “Come to think of it, I do have a more expensive pair that a fellow ordered special and I don’t think he picked them up, unless he came when Annie was in the store”, “let me check back under this here counter”.

Uncle Walter bent over and pulled out another pair of brogans, the same kind and the same size, and scribbled on the box $25.00. When he passed them over the counter he told the Hunter fellow, “yes, they are still here but I’m sure you won’t want them because these were more expensive than the price you wanted to pay, these are twenty five dollars”.

The Michigan Traveler was absolutely delighted. “Now we’re talking, this is a much better pair of brogan shoes than those cheap ones, I’ll take them!” So, Uncle Walter collected the price of five pairs of brogans and sold only one. The ego returning with the Northern Traveling Hillbilly was unsurpassed in anecdotal gossip around the valley.

I’m certain they held their heads high, chests out and walked in step to the music created by the jingle in their pockets. Wow, a twenty five dollar pair of brogan shoes, Wow!