A Case for a Stubborn Heart: The Life and Works of a Country Boy

Dedication

I would like to dedicate this little account of my life and works to the memory of my dear wife and best friend, who passed away on August 5, 2005. My sixty-two years with her were the best years of my life. I would also like for this to be a reminder to my children, Karen Dawn Scott and James David Everson, of their roots, where they came from, and the legacy they are expected to carry into the future. Also, to my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, to let them know that the world I grew up in was quite different from their world of today. If I can inspire them to reach higher and love more fervently, then I will consider this little work a success.

Foreword

I have tried to set down the important events of my life as best as I can remember them, but I am in my eighty-eighth year as I write this little account of my life, and I’m not certain that everything is 100 percent correct. Also, I’m not sure that I have included everything important that has happened in my life—in fact, I’m sure that I haven’t done so. I have tried to set things down just as they happened.

If you, dear reader, are expecting to read an account of some famous celebrity who has been in the iron grip of drugs or alcohol and miraculously delivered from these demons of evil, I’m afraid you are going to be disappointed. When I was a boy growing to manhood, we didn’t even know about the drugs that are so common today. The only drug we had around was moonshine whiskey, and the few who abused it were looked down upon as unworthy citizens. I was not a puritanical goody-goody, but I can, at this late stage of my life, say proudly that I have never been inebriated in my life.

I have not gone from one failed marriage to another failed marriage and after so many failures, finally found the right soul mate. I had only one spouse and I had her for sixty-two years, until God decided that He needed her more than I did. You might call me old-fashioned, but I call it commitment, I call it faithfulness, I call it enduring love.

I am not boasting about any small successes I’ve had, and I’m not complaining about any hardships I have had to suffer. I believe in the old saying Life isn’t fair. I think the preacher said it best in Ecclesiastes when he said that time and chance come to all men. If some young reader can be encouraged to attempt something that they think they can’t accomplish, then I cannot ask for anything more.

Have I ever done a heroic deed? Have I ever saved anyone’s life? Maybe. There was one incident in my life when I might have saved two small children’s lives, but I don’t know. Only God knows. When we were living in western New York State, I stopped a runaway station wagon with two small children in it. My two sisters, Lena and Lillie, were visiting us in Bemus Point, so we had gone shopping in the city of Jamestown, ten miles distant. On our way home we stopped at the Super-Duper grocery store to pick up some items. Everyone went into the store but me. I stayed in the car, probably to listen to a ball game on the radio. A young woman in a big Ford station wagon pulled into the parking spot on my right. She got out and went into the store, leaving a boy about six and a girl about four in the vehicle. As soon as the young woman got out, the boy hopped into the driver’s seat and pretended he was driving the car. He was probably at a racetrack going more than a hundred miles per hour.

The parking lot at the Super-Duper sloped downward to a busy street about a hundred feet away. At the bottom of the parking lot was a sharp drop of about five or six feet down onto the street. Across the street were various business establishments very close to the street. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the station wagon start moving backward down the hill toward the busy street. Immediately, I leaped out of my car, ran around and jerked the driver’s door open, grabbed the steering wheel, and got one foot in on the brake pedal. My other leg was still outside the runaway vehicle and the open door was thumping my leg as it was dragged along. I couldn’t get much leverage in my position, and to make matters worse, the vehicle had power steering and power brakes. Exerting all the strength I could muster, I managed to swing the back end of this wagon around at a ninety-degree angle. Now that the wagon was not going downhill, I managed to stop it. The mother of those children thanked me profusely and I’m quite sure she regarded me as a hero, but I only did what anyone would do. If my children were in the same circumstance, I would expect someone to do the same thing. I was no hero.

I think I have had a good life under the sun, and when I leave this earthbound existence, I pray that I have been righteous enough for the Lord to usher me into that wonderful heavenly home. I can think of nothing better than to spend eternity with my Lord and my family. I truly pray that each of my children and grandchildren feel the same way. I‘ve done some pretty rotten things in my life, but I pray that the blood of my Savior will cleanse me of all my sins.

I have done the best I know how in writing this little account of my life. I am the first to admit that I’m not a famous personality, but I think I did very well with what I had to work with in my lifetime. When I was in my early teens, I wanted to grow up to be a doctor—a surgeon in particular—but I knew that with conditions the way they were with my family, it would never happen. With eight kids and two parents in a four-room house, the odds for success were somewhat harder. It was easy for young men to go to work in the coal mines where no education was necessary and ready cash was a great temptation. What shapes our lives is what really happens, not what should have been. Since that time, I have never sought wealth, fame, or power, and have been content with enough to take care of my family and have a little left over to help my fellow man. There was a time in my life when I was ambitious, but all I got for my trouble was a life of uncertainty and a perforated ulcer. I never knew real peace until I got my life right with my Maker.

Were we poor when I was a child? As I look back on those long-ago times, I guess we were, but we didn’t know we were poor. We were like all the other families in our community, and we thought that this was just the way things were. Some neighbors had a little more than we did, but some of them had a lot less. One thing that most of us had was a father and a mother. So many kids are growing up today in one-parent or no-parent homes and are deprived of the real riches that make a family life. As I reflected on my past life, I was inspired to write a song titled Real Riches, which may be found in Appendix C.

Any similarities to persons living or dead are very real and intentional. These are people I knew, as I grew up in their midst, knowing them intimately, and I was a blood relative to a larger part of them. Most of the rest were almost as close to me. I have described each one as I saw them through the eyes of a youngster growing up in my community. I hope I have been fair to all of them.

I never became rich in this world’s goods. My family and I lived on the minimal salary of a public school teacher, but I was doing what I loved to do. I hope I was somewhat successful as I strove to teach the children in my classes the finer qualities of life. I loved every one of them. Some were a little harder to love than others, but I loved them all. I hope that if some of my former students should happen to read this account of my life, they will realize what they meant to me. … Sometimes, I think they helped me more than I helped them.

This account of my life is now in your hands. I have revealed some things that I have never told anyone before. I hope you enjoy it and are encouraged to try the hard things that need to be accomplished in your life. May God bless you as you travel life’s highway, no matter what your situation might be. If you have been born to affluence or grew up dirt poor as I did, the road of life is a challenge to be faced by all of us. Good luck on your journey.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Chapter One

In the Beginning

It all began on a balmy Saturday evening on May 14, 1921, a sunny spring day in the beautiful hills of north central West Virginia. World War I was a recent memory and the decade of the Roaring Twenties was just in its infancy. The thirty-eight-year-old rawboned wife of a poor coal miner lay on her birthing bed in the living room of their three-room board-and-batten house. She was a rugged individual of Irish and German stock and was used to the conditions into which fate had placed her. The process of giving birth to a baby was not new to her. She had gone through the procedure seven times before, each time in the home. With Dr. Strother and my aunt Rhoda Shockey in command of the situation, I was born at seven o’clock that evening. Dr. Strother smacked me a couple of times on my behind, put some silver nitrate in my eyes, and left the scene in charge of Aunt Rhoda.

It was an exciting year into which I was born. After a costly world war, the country had a new sense of freedom. Times were good, but a recession and depression were soon to follow. The restraints of the war were no longer on the people, and they were ready to enter a new phase of their lives. Although the average annual salary was just a little over two thousand dollars, prices were low. A new car could be purchased for $420, and gasoline was eleven cents a gallon. A gallon of milk was fifty-eight cents, and bread was ten cents a loaf. Coffee was ten cents a cup. The dial telephone had been invented, as well as the video camera. The life expectancy was up to 54.1 years. Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge were inaugurated as president and vice president, respectively. This was also the year that Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. In fact, it was on this very day that he delivered a lecture on relativity. It was a great time to come into this exciting world.

Other exciting events of that year: Emmett Kelley began his career with Barnum & Bailey, the first Miss America pageant was held in Atlantic City, and the top box- office hit was Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan in The Kid. Also to come during the year were the Mounds bar, Eskimo Pies, Arrow shirts, Lincoln cars, Electrolux vacuum cleaners, Betty Crocker, and Drano. It was also the year that Babe Ruth hit fifty-nine home runs. It was really an exciting year.

Aunt Rhoda was the midwife in our community. Dozens of babies were born with her aid, and I was just one of many of her babies in the neighborhood. She wrapped me in a swathing band, placed me in my mother’s waiting arms, and took her leave.

I don’t remember much of the next few weeks. I felt so safe nestled in my mother’s arms and feeding at her breast. All of this was about to change. Just as I was beginning to walk, I contracted pneumonia fever. The fever lingered on and on. I lost so much weight and my body was so sore that my family had to hold me on a pillow. Uncle Roy, my father’s youngest brother, lived close by, and he would come over every day to see if I had passed away. Everyone expected me to do just that. However, I managed to pull through and get well. I had to learn to walk all over again.

During this time, pneumonia fever was not my only problem I was born with a double inguinal hernia. An inguinal hernia occurs when the baby is being formed in the mother’s womb. In the beginning, the baby’s sex is not determined until later in the growth of the fetus. When Mother Nature determines that a baby will be male, what otherwise would be the ovaries in a female start to move down through the inguinal canal into the scrotum, where they become testicles. If the inguinal canal doesn’t close after the testicles have descended, then the baby is born with an inguinal hernia. I was cursed with two of them. As a small child, I had to wear a truss to hold my insides in place until Mother Nature healed the breach. However, Mother Nature didn’t do her job, and mine didn’t heal. I didn’t get them repaired until after I had graduated from high school.

When I was six years old, I contracted scarlet fever. It didn’t give me too much trouble, and I was almost well. I asked my mother if I could go pick up chestnuts under a large chestnut tree that was growing by our pigpen fence. It had rained, and it was wet outside. Initially, my mother said no, and I went into my begging mode.

I’ll put my boots and coat on. It won’t hurt me!

She let me go. It did hurt me big time. I took a back-set on my fever, and the final result was that I had to learn to walk all over again. My mother used to tell her friends I had to learn to walk three times. Child mortality was high then, and it was a miracle it wasn’t higher under the conditions we had to live in in those days.

Of course, in our growing-up years, our activities didn’t help much. As boys, we would get on the edge of a high cliff, reach out and get the tops of saplings, and ride them to the ground. Or we would cut off grapevines to make grapevine swings and then swing out as high as thirty feet over a ravine. We trusted the vine to have a firm grip on the limbs of the tree that served as a vehicle for the grapevine to climb. If the grapevine had come down, we would have been hurt badly in the fall, perhaps fatally. I guess we took many such dire chances with our lives, but most of us lived to become adults.

Even though our power for doing farmwork came via a team of horses, there were many dangers. There were axes, saws, scythes, grain cradles, and various kinds of other tools that could be dangerous if they weren’t used properly. My dad was a stickler for having razor-sharp tools. I recall one time when I could have been badly injured. I was mowing hay on my brother Harry’s farm with Lady and Fred hitched to the mowing machine. The mowing machine had a cutter bar that ran along the ground on the right side when the machine was being used but was held in an upright position with a steel rod when the machine was being moved from place to place. The cutter bar, about five feet long, consisted of triangular-shaped steel blades fastened to a steel bar that moved through grooves in sections that forced the hay to the blades. Everything was going well until I ran the horses into a yellow jackets’ nest. When the yellow jackets began to sting the horses, they went absolutely wild and began to run away. I couldn’t hold them! The first thing that came into view was a large peach tree, so I headed the horses into it, hoping I could stop them. One of Lady’s hames went under a limb, but the limb rose up and the team plunged ahead. The cutter hit the base of the peach tree and skinned most of the bark off. When the cutter bar hit the tree, it threw the mowing machine around so that it was headed in a different direction.

The next thing I saw that could possibly stop the horses was two haystacks. The stacks were built close together so a fence could be built around them and the cows could be turned into the meadow to pasture during the fall. The two horses went between the haystacks in a space that was hardly big enough for one. One wheel of the mowing machine hit one haystack and the other wheel hit the other. The machine came to such a sudden stop that I went sailing over the left side with my left knee plowing a furrow in the meadow sod. Fortunately, the mowing machine was scarcely damaged, but I had a sore knee for a while.

Chapter Two

My Family

My father was James Elmer Everson, coal miner and hardscrabble farmer. He was born January 4, 1882. He was not a large man, but he was very muscular. He was an emotional individual, which he tried to hide by presenting a gruff, tough exterior, but I saw many evidences of his tenderness during my growing-up years. His father, my grandfather David, owned a large farm in Barbour County, West Virginia. Grandfather David died at a relatively young age, and my grandmother Drusilla died soon after that. Grandmother’s will left the bulk of the farm to Uncle Waitman and Uncle Roy. My father received a small parcel of land on one corner of the farm, where he had a small house built. He and my mother were married on July 27, 1902, and I have often heard him tell the story of how the house came to be. He and Mother were living in the Adma community, where he had a job in the Adma coal mines. He said that as he was going home from work one day, he met up with Lloyd Whitecotton, an area carpenter. He asked Lloyd how much it would cost him to build a house on the land he had recently inherited. My father and Mr. Whitecotton agreed upon a price, and the original two-room house cost my father the grand sum of forty dollars. By the time I was born, a kitchen, pantry, and partially enclosed back porch had been added. This back porch, enclosed on three sides, was the place for the wood box and to hang winter coats during the summertime. It was also where the wash pan and a towel were located and where we washed our hands before meals. When I was a young lad, another bedroom was added to the front of the house, adjoining the living room.

My father was a jack-of-all-trades, which was very necessary to do all the jobs required for a family of ten. He kept all our shoes in good order. If one of the kids needed heels or half soles, or if the stitching came out, Dad was there with his shoe lasts, tacks, and needle and thread to make the