Can you tell us about your early childhood and development as a fiddler, Dick?
"My earliest memories pick up at about 1922 or so. My family lived in Quail, Texas at this
time and my father farmed and had a job carrying the mail from the railroad depot to the
post office. I came to be known as "Dick" instead of my given name of "Lloyd" around
this time. My dad had an old horse named Dick that he used to pull the mail wagon with.
He would get home after the morning mail run, unhitch Dick and I would go lay down on
him after the horse rolled and laid down. I spent so much time laying with that horse,
finally the family just began to call me Dick.
time and my father farmed and had a job carrying the mail from the railroad depot to the
post office. I came to be known as "Dick" instead of my given name of "Lloyd" around
this time. My dad had an old horse named Dick that he used to pull the mail wagon with.
He would get home after the morning mail run, unhitch Dick and I would go lay down on
him after the horse rolled and laid down. I spent so much time laying with that horse,
finally the family just began to call me Dick.
"My older brothers helped my dad with his business on the farm, and they played music
with him for dances, weddings, funerals, or maybe just around home at night. When I was
about six, my dad started encouraging me to play the fiddle. The first tune that i
remember learning was "Cindy", and then "Home Brew Rag", or maybe "Gotta See Your
Mama Every Night". I liked this little bit of attention that I got from playing these tunes, but
like most kids, I didn't wanna work at playing the fiddle. I was a whole lot more interested
in playing baseball. In a family with nine kids, there was always encouragement and
torment in equal doses when your were trying to learn something. My family loved
laughter and games, so around this time, I spent most of my time playing ball,
mumbley-peg and other games, and not being terribly interested in fiddle playing.
with him for dances, weddings, funerals, or maybe just around home at night. When I was
about six, my dad started encouraging me to play the fiddle. The first tune that i
remember learning was "Cindy", and then "Home Brew Rag", or maybe "Gotta See Your
Mama Every Night". I liked this little bit of attention that I got from playing these tunes, but
like most kids, I didn't wanna work at playing the fiddle. I was a whole lot more interested
in playing baseball. In a family with nine kids, there was always encouragement and
torment in equal doses when your were trying to learn something. My family loved
laughter and games, so around this time, I spent most of my time playing ball,
mumbley-peg and other games, and not being terribly interested in fiddle playing.
"One morning my older brother Jude came running down the road from town, (Shamrock,
Texas) to where my dad and I sat on the porch. He was out of breath and excited, and
said, "Papa, Papa! There's this fiddler in town that you just gotta hear! You ain't never
heard the like of him! His name is Major Franklin, and I played with him all night last
night!" Well, my dad didn't seem terribly excited to go back to town with Jude, and didn't.
Late that evening, Jude came back to the house with Major in tow, and for the first time,
something was to really light up in my head about fiddling. They spent the night playing
until the wee hours. Major played breakdowns instead of the pretty melodies that I was
used to hearing at home, and he played them with a sound like no other breakdown
fiddler I had ever heard. He was young then, although he somehow seemed old to me,
and his intonation was spot on, and the fiddle really sang like a voice. This made a
lifelong impression on me. Also, his rhythm was incredible. To this day, I do not believe
that I have ever heard a fiddler with finer rhythm, and I still don't really care for fiddling that
doesn't have any real singing tone. You can make noise by rubbing two rocks together,
or scraping a bow across a fiddle, but neither one sounds very musical. The few tapes
that exist of him today were recorded on bad equipment, so it's hard for people now to
understand just what a good tone he produced.
Texas) to where my dad and I sat on the porch. He was out of breath and excited, and
said, "Papa, Papa! There's this fiddler in town that you just gotta hear! You ain't never
heard the like of him! His name is Major Franklin, and I played with him all night last
night!" Well, my dad didn't seem terribly excited to go back to town with Jude, and didn't.
Late that evening, Jude came back to the house with Major in tow, and for the first time,
something was to really light up in my head about fiddling. They spent the night playing
until the wee hours. Major played breakdowns instead of the pretty melodies that I was
used to hearing at home, and he played them with a sound like no other breakdown
fiddler I had ever heard. He was young then, although he somehow seemed old to me,
and his intonation was spot on, and the fiddle really sang like a voice. This made a
lifelong impression on me. Also, his rhythm was incredible. To this day, I do not believe
that I have ever heard a fiddler with finer rhythm, and I still don't really care for fiddling that
doesn't have any real singing tone. You can make noise by rubbing two rocks together,
or scraping a bow across a fiddle, but neither one sounds very musical. The few tapes
that exist of him today were recorded on bad equipment, so it's hard for people now to
understand just what a good tone he produced.
"Major stayed around for several days playing with Jude, and my dad got the bright
idea that he should pay Major to teach me a few lessons. Although he wasn't a
teacher, he was game for this, as he didn't have a job. You have to understand that I
was a little kid of nine years old, and I was so in awe of the sound that he could get out
of a fiddle, that I just sat there with my mouth open, unable to think about really
watching, and he was not a teacher that know to tell me to watch the bow. After two or
three lessons, he told my dad I was unteachable. He didn't realize that I was just awed
into a stupor. It's pretty funny to me now to think about being that little boy, and I have
been frequently reminded of it as an adult when I have had kids burst into tears while
teaching them. I've missed the signs, the same as he did. He went on to a cotton
picking job somewhere and I would not see him again for some time, but that sound
stayed in the back of my mind.
"My dad eventually started a Ford Agency and a wrecking yard in Maysville, Oklahoma.
During the 20's, the country was feeling an inflated sense of its own prosperity, and for
the first time, credit was available to most anyone who was reponsible and worked.
Most Americans worked hard then, including my father. During this time, my father
began to sell Ford cars to people on credit that he knew were responsible folk. In the
mid to late twenties, there were some signs that all was not well with the economy, but
folks did not heed the warning signs because they didn't know how to recognize them.
Most of the country did not understand that agriculture suffered all through the twenties.
When the crash came abruptly in '29, my father, like most other business people, went
broke when his customers could not pay what they owed him. It's hard for people now
to imagine how devastating this time was for families and communities. No one was
operating from a position of strength. My family, like most others in that part of the
country, lost everything and took to the road to pick cotton in order to stay alive. My
father was never the same man after this time. I will never forget leaving town on the
back of a flatbed truck that he managed to save, with all of the kids and everything that
we owned on that truck, not having any idea how we were going to make it. My mother
was a great lady, made of steel. Slight built, and full of guts and passion, she could
outwork us all, and did. Her strength was probably what saved us during this time while
my father tried to recover from his sense of defeat. My father leaned on her and his
religious faith, and became a very philosophical man.
"Music was to become far more important around this time that I could ever have
imagined. Prior to this, it was just something that my family did, and I did not pay a
whole lot of attention to it. After I found out what it was like to pull a cotton sack up and
down a row all day, music was like a warm healing balm to the soul. For everyone.
"All thoughts of any kind of luxury, like going to school, or new clothes, or candy, came
to a screeching halt. Whole families took to the fields, as it took every member earning
to make just enough to eat. My dad was good with mules and trained them to make
extra money, and my brothers brought home whatever money they could make from
music. I helped my mom in the garden and sold produce in town, and swept out the
school to make an extra 25 cents. Some days, I made more that our dad. I didn't even
get to go to the school that I swept, and that was always a disappointment to me that
my education stopped after the crash.
"The crash became the great equalizer of men. Before that in the rural south, there was
in invisible line where race was concerned, although my own parents were not racist.
After that time, white, black, red and yellow men all scratched alike to live. We were
working a field on time with a family of blacks, and there was an elderly black
gentleman who sang in the field. His name was "Amen", and every day I would try to
get the row next to him, so I could enjoy his singing. He never stopped singing or
picking, except when he would see me fall behind, and then he would reach over on my
row and pick a little, and say, "Boy, you sure are a good picker, Dickie Boy. You gonna
be a big man someday. Aamen!" Through his singing began to understand the power
of prayer to get you through the unbearable, and also what a blessing compassion
could be. God bless him, wherever his spirit it. After that time, I never stopped loving
the sound of field singing, or the blues. You have to have lived then and there to
understand that everbody had the blues, because what you saw all around you was
hopelessness. There was no rain and the country dried up, and soon there were no
fields of cotton to pick. When they call it the dustbowl, you better believe it was true.
"I began to see that you could make a little money playing music, as people would
always pay a few cents to have their misery relieved with music, even if only for a few
minutes. I kept learning a little on the fiddle, and the guitar, and I played a few school
house dances with Ernest Tubb back then before he moved on. The door charge was
10 cents, and sometimes, folks would pay a nickel if the band would play a special
song for them. At the end of the dance, I would get anywhere from 50 cents to a dollar
for the job, depending on how many dancers there were. My family and I would play
house dances and make about a buck a piece. You never knew what your
circumstances were going to be as you moved from one farmer's cotton fields to the
next.
Around this time, my oldest brother, Quavo, stepped into the role of family protector,
and teacher of the younger ones. Folks would exploit child labor something terrible
then, and then try to weasel out from under their promise to pay the kid. He made darn
sure that no one ever took advantage of us kids. I scooped oats for an old farmer and
his wife from sun up until dark for two weeks, and she wouldn't feed me anything but
cornbread and milk for lunch and supper, and two eggs for breakfast. Then when I got
done, he didn't want to pay me, said I'd been paid by their feeding me, and I was skin
and bones. My brother was so mad when he saw me. You can believe that when my
brother got done with him, he gladly paid me. I was so happy to get back home for
some of my mother's
cookin'. Quavo was devil-may-care handsome, and a good singer and guitar player.
Since we did not have a radio, or any other way to learn tunes, he would always send
words home for us other kids to learn so that we could play with him when he came
home. Tired of the poverty of West Texas, he went to work in the oil fields in Wyoming.
He still wrote and sent songs home to us from there. He died there in 1936, and we
couldn't bring him home to bury him, or go there. All the years that I roamed around
the West playing music, I always avoided that corner of Wyoming until about 1978. My
sister found his grave in 1970 in Rawlins, Woming. I still have never been able to bring
myself to go visit it.
I've heard some stories about some of your interactions with Major when you were a
kid. Would you share a few of them?
"Sometime in the early 30's, Major came by to get my brother to play guitar for him in a
fiddle contest in Atoka, Oklahoma. My brother had gotten married and moved away
from home, so he took me instead. I'll always remember that trip in a Model T car, with
no windshield and no seats. I sat on the gas tank, and I can't remember what he sat on.
That was one hell of a long trip and I can still feel how bad my butt hurt. I must have
been about fourteen. I'll tell you the rest of this story, but I don't mean for it to embarrass
his family. Times were so hard then, that people would do most anything if it would help
provide. This contest was sponsored by the Oklahoma Farmer-Stockman, and paid
three hundred dollars and a medallion for first place. You were supposed to be a
resident of Oklahoma to play in it, but Major lived across the line in Texas, so he gave
them his sister's address in Sawyer, Oklahoma. You could buy a farm for that much
money then, so by the time we got there, I was a nervous wreck thinking about the
responsibility of helping him to win this thing, and the lecture that he gave me about not
telling anybody that he really lived across the line in Texas. Anyway, he played Billy in
the Lowground and Gray Eagle. I didn't know Billy in the Lowground and he told me, "If
you get mixed up, Lloyd, you just play A minor or C, and whatever you do, don't ever
stop hittin' that thang. You got good time, so keep it." Anyway, he won first place and
went home happy and I think he gave me a few bucks. I heard later that the Oklahoma
Farmer-Stockman found out that he wasn't really an Oklahoma resident and asked him
to return the money, but of course he did not have it to return, and that was the end of
that.
Have you got any more stories that you would share with us about your contact with
him during your childhood?
Well, there are more that I could tell you, but I am reluctant to share some of them, as I
still question how they would be interpreted by some folks. I realize that most listeners
or readers wouldn't have any idea how to put themselves in that time and place. you
have to understand that when you live through that kind of times, the sense of shame
that you felt at being so poor can come back to haunt you at any given time.
Understand that I know my family had nothing to be ashamed of, because they were
very hard workers, but there were things that happened that I don't want to discuss
because I would not want anyone else to be embarrassed.
The rest of us would like to hear these stories, Dick, so that we can learn from them.
We all wish that you would share more of them with us. Will you consider it?
Maybe sometime. I'll have to think about it a little more.
It's my understanding that you have said you would think about it for many years now.
I know that other people have tried to talk to you about these stories. We really hope
that you will be more forthcoming in the future. If you don't want to go any farther right
now with that train of thought, we won't. What else can you tell us about the part that
music played in your daily lives?
"Well, there's not a whole lot more to say except that we played whenever we could, as
that relieved everyone's misery to some degree. Shorty Loder was a good fiddler who
played with Major and my brother Jude a lot, and I got to know him, and also the
Burkhalter family that lived in the Panhandle. They were a family of good musicians. I
met Bill King around that time, too. I would grow to really love him and his wife, Frankie
later on in my life when I spent more time around them. I remember meeting Lewis
Franklin at Major's house in about 1936 or '37. He is Major's nephew, and a fiddler that
I have an enormous amount of respect for. We must have been about 16 and 17. We
didn't know each other yet, and I don't remember us talking about music at all. Just
talking as boys talk. I had a childhood friend named L. C. Boyd, and his dad was the
damnedest square dance caller that I've ever heard or seen. He sang all the calls that
he improvised on the spot, and buck danced all the while he was doing it. He must
have lost five pounds every night he called. I've never again seen a caller that worked
so hard and was so entertaining. I'd like to see a caller like that again before I die. I
just shake my head today when I hear people spouting off about not being able to
dance to Texas style fiddling. I wonder what the hell they think we were doing back then.
"I was growing more and more interested in western swing as we began to hear more
of it. Most of my efforts on the fiddle as a young man were focused on this style of
music and I didn't try very much to play breakdowns. I became fairly proficient at this
style, and still enjoy playing it. Someone gave me a tape of me playing with a band that
was taped in the late 40's a couple of years ago, and it was hard for me to believe it
was me, because I don't ever remember playing that way. I didn't really believe him that
it was me until I started singing, then I knew it was. It's funny how your playing will
change and evolve so slowly over a lifetime that you don't even know that it's
happening.
"When the United States went to war, I was about to get one of the biggest shocks of
my life. I was a farm kid from a kind and affectionate family who was taught to offer
respect and kindness for everyone. Imagine being drafted into the military and being
given a gun and told you are supposed to shoot anyone wearing a certain uniform. I
could only think to myself, "But he hasn't done anything to me." Oh, God! I was an
excellent shot from having hunted game all of my life, so they put me in the role of
sniper for the Combat Engineers. The Combat Engineers always go in first and don't
have any protection much, so after the first couple of shots in my direction, I was
launched out of my state of shock about being expected to shoot others. I finally
learned to shoot back, but it isn't an experience that I think anyone should ever have.
You wouldn't think that much could shock your system after living through the 30's in the
rural south, but that war sure did."
idea that he should pay Major to teach me a few lessons. Although he wasn't a
teacher, he was game for this, as he didn't have a job. You have to understand that I
was a little kid of nine years old, and I was so in awe of the sound that he could get out
of a fiddle, that I just sat there with my mouth open, unable to think about really
watching, and he was not a teacher that know to tell me to watch the bow. After two or
three lessons, he told my dad I was unteachable. He didn't realize that I was just awed
into a stupor. It's pretty funny to me now to think about being that little boy, and I have
been frequently reminded of it as an adult when I have had kids burst into tears while
teaching them. I've missed the signs, the same as he did. He went on to a cotton
picking job somewhere and I would not see him again for some time, but that sound
stayed in the back of my mind.
"My dad eventually started a Ford Agency and a wrecking yard in Maysville, Oklahoma.
During the 20's, the country was feeling an inflated sense of its own prosperity, and for
the first time, credit was available to most anyone who was reponsible and worked.
Most Americans worked hard then, including my father. During this time, my father
began to sell Ford cars to people on credit that he knew were responsible folk. In the
mid to late twenties, there were some signs that all was not well with the economy, but
folks did not heed the warning signs because they didn't know how to recognize them.
Most of the country did not understand that agriculture suffered all through the twenties.
When the crash came abruptly in '29, my father, like most other business people, went
broke when his customers could not pay what they owed him. It's hard for people now
to imagine how devastating this time was for families and communities. No one was
operating from a position of strength. My family, like most others in that part of the
country, lost everything and took to the road to pick cotton in order to stay alive. My
father was never the same man after this time. I will never forget leaving town on the
back of a flatbed truck that he managed to save, with all of the kids and everything that
we owned on that truck, not having any idea how we were going to make it. My mother
was a great lady, made of steel. Slight built, and full of guts and passion, she could
outwork us all, and did. Her strength was probably what saved us during this time while
my father tried to recover from his sense of defeat. My father leaned on her and his
religious faith, and became a very philosophical man.
"Music was to become far more important around this time that I could ever have
imagined. Prior to this, it was just something that my family did, and I did not pay a
whole lot of attention to it. After I found out what it was like to pull a cotton sack up and
down a row all day, music was like a warm healing balm to the soul. For everyone.
"All thoughts of any kind of luxury, like going to school, or new clothes, or candy, came
to a screeching halt. Whole families took to the fields, as it took every member earning
to make just enough to eat. My dad was good with mules and trained them to make
extra money, and my brothers brought home whatever money they could make from
music. I helped my mom in the garden and sold produce in town, and swept out the
school to make an extra 25 cents. Some days, I made more that our dad. I didn't even
get to go to the school that I swept, and that was always a disappointment to me that
my education stopped after the crash.
"The crash became the great equalizer of men. Before that in the rural south, there was
in invisible line where race was concerned, although my own parents were not racist.
After that time, white, black, red and yellow men all scratched alike to live. We were
working a field on time with a family of blacks, and there was an elderly black
gentleman who sang in the field. His name was "Amen", and every day I would try to
get the row next to him, so I could enjoy his singing. He never stopped singing or
picking, except when he would see me fall behind, and then he would reach over on my
row and pick a little, and say, "Boy, you sure are a good picker, Dickie Boy. You gonna
be a big man someday. Aamen!" Through his singing began to understand the power
of prayer to get you through the unbearable, and also what a blessing compassion
could be. God bless him, wherever his spirit it. After that time, I never stopped loving
the sound of field singing, or the blues. You have to have lived then and there to
understand that everbody had the blues, because what you saw all around you was
hopelessness. There was no rain and the country dried up, and soon there were no
fields of cotton to pick. When they call it the dustbowl, you better believe it was true.
"I began to see that you could make a little money playing music, as people would
always pay a few cents to have their misery relieved with music, even if only for a few
minutes. I kept learning a little on the fiddle, and the guitar, and I played a few school
house dances with Ernest Tubb back then before he moved on. The door charge was
10 cents, and sometimes, folks would pay a nickel if the band would play a special
song for them. At the end of the dance, I would get anywhere from 50 cents to a dollar
for the job, depending on how many dancers there were. My family and I would play
house dances and make about a buck a piece. You never knew what your
circumstances were going to be as you moved from one farmer's cotton fields to the
next.
Around this time, my oldest brother, Quavo, stepped into the role of family protector,
and teacher of the younger ones. Folks would exploit child labor something terrible
then, and then try to weasel out from under their promise to pay the kid. He made darn
sure that no one ever took advantage of us kids. I scooped oats for an old farmer and
his wife from sun up until dark for two weeks, and she wouldn't feed me anything but
cornbread and milk for lunch and supper, and two eggs for breakfast. Then when I got
done, he didn't want to pay me, said I'd been paid by their feeding me, and I was skin
and bones. My brother was so mad when he saw me. You can believe that when my
brother got done with him, he gladly paid me. I was so happy to get back home for
some of my mother's
cookin'. Quavo was devil-may-care handsome, and a good singer and guitar player.
Since we did not have a radio, or any other way to learn tunes, he would always send
words home for us other kids to learn so that we could play with him when he came
home. Tired of the poverty of West Texas, he went to work in the oil fields in Wyoming.
He still wrote and sent songs home to us from there. He died there in 1936, and we
couldn't bring him home to bury him, or go there. All the years that I roamed around
the West playing music, I always avoided that corner of Wyoming until about 1978. My
sister found his grave in 1970 in Rawlins, Woming. I still have never been able to bring
myself to go visit it.
I've heard some stories about some of your interactions with Major when you were a
kid. Would you share a few of them?
"Sometime in the early 30's, Major came by to get my brother to play guitar for him in a
fiddle contest in Atoka, Oklahoma. My brother had gotten married and moved away
from home, so he took me instead. I'll always remember that trip in a Model T car, with
no windshield and no seats. I sat on the gas tank, and I can't remember what he sat on.
That was one hell of a long trip and I can still feel how bad my butt hurt. I must have
been about fourteen. I'll tell you the rest of this story, but I don't mean for it to embarrass
his family. Times were so hard then, that people would do most anything if it would help
provide. This contest was sponsored by the Oklahoma Farmer-Stockman, and paid
three hundred dollars and a medallion for first place. You were supposed to be a
resident of Oklahoma to play in it, but Major lived across the line in Texas, so he gave
them his sister's address in Sawyer, Oklahoma. You could buy a farm for that much
money then, so by the time we got there, I was a nervous wreck thinking about the
responsibility of helping him to win this thing, and the lecture that he gave me about not
telling anybody that he really lived across the line in Texas. Anyway, he played Billy in
the Lowground and Gray Eagle. I didn't know Billy in the Lowground and he told me, "If
you get mixed up, Lloyd, you just play A minor or C, and whatever you do, don't ever
stop hittin' that thang. You got good time, so keep it." Anyway, he won first place and
went home happy and I think he gave me a few bucks. I heard later that the Oklahoma
Farmer-Stockman found out that he wasn't really an Oklahoma resident and asked him
to return the money, but of course he did not have it to return, and that was the end of
that.
Have you got any more stories that you would share with us about your contact with
him during your childhood?
Well, there are more that I could tell you, but I am reluctant to share some of them, as I
still question how they would be interpreted by some folks. I realize that most listeners
or readers wouldn't have any idea how to put themselves in that time and place. you
have to understand that when you live through that kind of times, the sense of shame
that you felt at being so poor can come back to haunt you at any given time.
Understand that I know my family had nothing to be ashamed of, because they were
very hard workers, but there were things that happened that I don't want to discuss
because I would not want anyone else to be embarrassed.
The rest of us would like to hear these stories, Dick, so that we can learn from them.
We all wish that you would share more of them with us. Will you consider it?
Maybe sometime. I'll have to think about it a little more.
It's my understanding that you have said you would think about it for many years now.
I know that other people have tried to talk to you about these stories. We really hope
that you will be more forthcoming in the future. If you don't want to go any farther right
now with that train of thought, we won't. What else can you tell us about the part that
music played in your daily lives?
"Well, there's not a whole lot more to say except that we played whenever we could, as
that relieved everyone's misery to some degree. Shorty Loder was a good fiddler who
played with Major and my brother Jude a lot, and I got to know him, and also the
Burkhalter family that lived in the Panhandle. They were a family of good musicians. I
met Bill King around that time, too. I would grow to really love him and his wife, Frankie
later on in my life when I spent more time around them. I remember meeting Lewis
Franklin at Major's house in about 1936 or '37. He is Major's nephew, and a fiddler that
I have an enormous amount of respect for. We must have been about 16 and 17. We
didn't know each other yet, and I don't remember us talking about music at all. Just
talking as boys talk. I had a childhood friend named L. C. Boyd, and his dad was the
damnedest square dance caller that I've ever heard or seen. He sang all the calls that
he improvised on the spot, and buck danced all the while he was doing it. He must
have lost five pounds every night he called. I've never again seen a caller that worked
so hard and was so entertaining. I'd like to see a caller like that again before I die. I
just shake my head today when I hear people spouting off about not being able to
dance to Texas style fiddling. I wonder what the hell they think we were doing back then.
"I was growing more and more interested in western swing as we began to hear more
of it. Most of my efforts on the fiddle as a young man were focused on this style of
music and I didn't try very much to play breakdowns. I became fairly proficient at this
style, and still enjoy playing it. Someone gave me a tape of me playing with a band that
was taped in the late 40's a couple of years ago, and it was hard for me to believe it
was me, because I don't ever remember playing that way. I didn't really believe him that
it was me until I started singing, then I knew it was. It's funny how your playing will
change and evolve so slowly over a lifetime that you don't even know that it's
happening.
"When the United States went to war, I was about to get one of the biggest shocks of
my life. I was a farm kid from a kind and affectionate family who was taught to offer
respect and kindness for everyone. Imagine being drafted into the military and being
given a gun and told you are supposed to shoot anyone wearing a certain uniform. I
could only think to myself, "But he hasn't done anything to me." Oh, God! I was an
excellent shot from having hunted game all of my life, so they put me in the role of
sniper for the Combat Engineers. The Combat Engineers always go in first and don't
have any protection much, so after the first couple of shots in my direction, I was
launched out of my state of shock about being expected to shoot others. I finally
learned to shoot back, but it isn't an experience that I think anyone should ever have.
You wouldn't think that much could shock your system after living through the 30's in the
rural south, but that war sure did."
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