Chapter 2: EARLY DAYS

I was born during the depression on a small farm in a very poor section of the state of Mississippi. Being a carpenter, my father did "outside" work. The older children did the farming and provided most of the food we had to eat. My mother did housework and cooked three meals each day. All the clothes washing was done by hand on an old scrub board. Irons were heated before an open fire so that mother could iron our clothes. She always said that being poor was not an excuse for being "tacky," so all of the children had to be clean and neat.

I suppose you could say that I was blessed more than most children of my day since I was raised in a Christian home. Father was a deacon in the local church and served in that position for fifty years. I never heard my father use any curse words.

I don't say that he did not use them. I just say that I never heard him if he did. I never heard him raise his voice to my mother. However, I did hear her raise her voice to him many times. It was my father, though, who insisted that peace be maintained in the home.

My parents were the kind who took their children to church and did not just send them. As for my father, I had a special relationship with him. To me, he was much more than just my father. He was my very best friend. When I had special problems and needed a close friend in which to confide, I could always go to him and he seemed to understand. When I had a need, it always seemed that he was there to fill it. No matter what my request, he tried his very best to grant it, As a youngster, the big social event of the week was attending church on Sunday.

At church we would get to visit and talk with other folks we had not seen all week.

It was not the church service to which I was looking forward, but the chance to play with other children. When the service started, we all had to go inside and sit still while the preacher talked. More often, he was shouting instead of talking.

Have you ever been forced to sit still on one of those slick-board, church benches for more than two hours at a time? If you have, you know what I am talking about and you know what I was going through. That old preacher we had, well it just seemed that there was no end to the wind that would gush forth from his lungs. I was sure of one thing, though. He positively could not tell time! He would take out his old, round, railroad watch and lay it on the pulpit. That would be the last we would see of the timepiece.

As I look back now, I can see the great and tender love in the heart of that preacher. He just did not want anyone to go to Hell. Oh how he longed for and pleaded to each soul, but so many did not hear. I believed all that the preacher said and all that my Sunday School teacher said. When they told me about Jesus, I believed them. When they told me about Moses, David, and Abraham and all the other characters in the Bible, I believed them. I believed that all those characters really did exist and I never doubted the authenticity of that teaching. While at school during the week, my school teacher would tell me all about Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and other great American heroes who were the fathers of this country and who helped forge America out of the wilderness. She told how they helped make what we have today, the greatest nation on the face of this Earth. Never doubting the teacher, I believed in all of those people and believed that they were real. However, in my mind as a child, all of those people lived long ago. They had long been dead and I had a great deal of difficulty relating to people who had long been dead. I could not understand the connection nor the value of their long-ago life to my life today.