I’m sitting on my front porch this morning enjoying a cup of coffee as my mind wanders back in time to a spring morning in May of 1955.
My father, my three brothers and I were heading to Sharps Chapel to help our grandfather, who we called Pap, plant his tobacco crop.
Pap was getting old and couldn’t work as he had in the past.
Dad stopped at Bill Graves’ General Store in the Chapel, pulled up to the only gas pump, cranked up three gallons of gas to the top and let gravity put it into the tank of his 1932 Ford Model A Truck.
Gas in the Chapel was three gallons for 70 cents.
Daddy would coast the A Model down hills to get better fuel mileage. The Model A got twenty-five miles to the gallon on its own, but daddy saved all he could, as he had a farm to pay for and four boys to raise.
Us boys went into the store to look at the things that could be bought. Daddy came in and told us boys to get either a new cap or straw hat to be worn while working this summer and that it had to last all summer.
All four of us selected which one we wanted and placed the headwear on the counter. Our old stone mountain brogans were getting worn and tight fitting, but it would be October before new footwear would be bought.
We looked the store over as we only got to a store a few times a year. We checked out the overalls, the soap display which had Coral Lifebuoy, Lux and Woodbury soap sold as single bars.
The cigarette section had Velvet and Prince Albert roll-your-own tobacco in tin boxes which, when empty, made excellent live worm containers for fishing.
There were Lucky Strikes, Camel, Pall Mall and Winston ready-roll cigarettes. Also, Black Mariah, Days Work and Apple chewing tobacco.
The snuff area displayed Garret, Peach and Railroad flavors. In the medicine section you could find Black Drought, Castor Oil, Cod Liver Oil, Doans Pills, Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Bayer Aspirin, Phillips Milk of Magnesia, Hadacol, Camphor, Tincture of Iodine and Rubbing Alcohol.
Everyday there would be Studebakers, Hudson, Kaiser, Packard, Jeepster, Nash, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Mercury, Desoto and Plymouth cars as well as Ford, Chevy and Dodge stopping to trade or passing by.
There were no Nissan, Toyota, BMW, Honda, Mercedes Benz, Subaru, Kia or Hyundai on roads in the USA.
The farm tractors were either John Deere, Farmall or Case. Mostly tricycle tractors with occasionally an 8N or Jubilee Ford thrown in.
Horse drawn wagons or homemade sleds were still in use and could be seen at the back country stores. Indoor plumbing was rare. Most households’ water was carried from springs, wells or cisterns.
Not all homes in the back country had electricity. The same with telephones.
Entertainment was supplied by AM radios by the Mid-Day Merry Go Round and each morning by Cas Walker promoting the Cas Walker Stores in East Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky.
Lots of young performers on both radio shows went on to Nashville and became famous. Some of them were Cowboy Copas, The Carter Family, Carl Smith, Sonny James, The Everly Brothers, Don Gibson, Dolly Parton, Jumping Bill Carlisle, Archie Campbell, Carl and Pearl Butler, Chet Atkins and Roy Acuff.
A bunch of country heavy hitters got their start on the Mid-Day Merry Go Round or Cas Walker ‘s radio shows.
Saturday nights everyone would tune into 650 AM to the country cathedral The Ryman on WSM 650 AM and listen to the Grand Ole Opry.
Well, back to Pap and Granny Perry’s farm. The first thing us boys had to endure: Grandma would line us boys up. We would stick out our tongues for inspection.
You see, Grandma was a medicine woman. She would check out our tongues, open our mouths and look inside. Then we would begin to worry. If it looked OK, we would take a spoonful of Syrup of Black Draught. If it looked bad to Grandma, we had to take a spoonful of Castor Oil. That wasn’t good by any description.
Then to the nearby creek for a barrel of water loaded with buckets. The barrel was on Pap’s sled being pulled by his mule team to the tobacco field about an eighth of a mile up the hill near the tobacco barn that Pap had built himself years before.
The barn still stands today but needs some TLC.
Then we would take Dad’s 32 Ford pickup truck to Pap’s seedling beds and pull enough plants to plant until dinner at noon. Pap had turned and disked the tobacco field with his mule teams a few days prior to our helping plant the field.
Pap or Dad laid off the rows with a bull-tongue plow and the rows were straight and evenly separated as could be. The morning was spent with two boys dropping tobacco plants along the rows at 18 inches apart—one boy dropping plants and one boy carrying water to the planter as Dad planted.
Pap would assist the two of us dropping plants by planting with a homemade stick planter. We would plant until dinner, go eat, and right back to planting trying to get the field planted by dark. Then back home across Norris Lake to start tomorrow on Dad’s tobacco field. Two weeks later after harvesting our first hay cutting, the tobacco had to be plowed or cultivated, and hoed, and this had to be done almost every two weeks until time to top and sucker in mid-July.
Cutting and hanging the tobacco in the barns was done in late August. We watched the weather and hoped that we did not have a rainy spell or a hurricane coming nearby until the tobacco was in the barn.
The tobacco would cure in the barn until around early November. We would take the tobacco sticks with from four to six stalks of tobacco down so as to keep the tobacco “in case” (that means pliable from moisture so the leaves would not crumble) strip the leaves from the stalks, separate the different grades of leaves, tie them into hands, stack onto tobacco baskets and when done take the crop to the tobacco auction sheds in our area.
From the start—laying the tobacco beds, transplanting into the fields, cultivating, topping, suckering, cutting, hanging in the barns, handing off and grading, tying into hands, packing onto baskets, carrying to auction sheds, waiting for the check for the sale of the crop—it usually took 12 months to raise and receive the money for the crop.
The Federal Government always made much more money from the federal tax than the farmer did raising the crop. This system of raising tobacco lasted in the USA for more than 200 years with very little change until the 1970s when it was mechanized somewhat.
One of the best smells I can remember is that of walking into a barn of hanging tobacco that’s half cured. It’s a very pleasant aroma.
Here are names of products and businesses from this era:
Breck’s shampoo w/ the Breck girls
Brylcreme - A little dab’ll do ya
Vitalis Hair Tonic
Vaseline Hair Tonic - Girls love to run their fingers through your hair.
Pinaud Hair Tonic -Applied by barbers after haircut
Jeris Hair Tonic
Grit Newspaper
Buster Brown Shoes for kids
Ked’s Tennis Shoes
J.C. Penney’s Tuff Nut boys’ jeans w/free pocketknife
Montgomery Wards
Sears Roebuck
Blue Circle Drive-In
Dairy Queen
A&W Root Beer Stands
Morrison Cafeterias
Stuckey’s
Texaco Service Stations - You can trust your car to the man who wears the star.
Greyhound Bus Line
I hope this takes you back to some fond memories and let’s remember Thanksgiving Day and how it used to be celebrated.
See you next month.