A Nickel Can of Pork and Beans

A Nickel Can of

Pork and Beans

Bryan Davidson

AuthorHouse™

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Bloomington, IN 47403

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Phone: 1-800-839-8640

© 2011 Bryan Davidson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 4/25/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4567-2198-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-1845-9 (e)

Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

SPECIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FROM THE EDITOR

Preface

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

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

CHAPTER FIFTY

Dedicated to

Irene,

My beautiful wife of many years.

And to my three wonderful children,

David, Chris and Denise

SPECIAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I will be forever grateful to one of my grade school teachers, Frank Borders. It was he who took the time to talk with me while we sat in the swing on his front porch. He told me that I could do many things, and I was naïve enough to believe him.

I would also like to thank Mr. Thomas S. Land, who was my broadcast business partner for many years. Without his great help, I would never have had a broadcast station of my own.

***

For many years I have collected sayings and quotes that have meaning for me; and I have begun and ended each chapter with one.

Where possible, I have credited the writer; but most of the origins are unknown to me. I hope the reader enjoys them as much as I have.

FROM THE EDITOR

Although I had heard Bryan Davidson’s voice on the radio for many, many years, I had never met him. On occasion, when he featured open line on his shows, I had spoken with him concerning whatever current topic they were covering. I had always considered him an excellent announcer, with a pleasing voice; and he made his programs interesting with his constantly changing, updated material. When he sold his radio station and retired in 1991, I missed hearing his voice on the broadcasts.

Mr. Davidson had read a memoir I wrote three years ago with and for Dr. S. E. Rubio, a local physician and friend of his. I had remarked that I would not write another memoir type book, for my love is writing fiction, along with writing for the Chicken Soup books and other periodicals, in my own voice. When Mr. Davidson called, asking to discuss with me the possibility of helping him with his book, I hesitated, but only momentarily. I had an edge, actually two.

In the first place, I knew a bit about his history from listening to him on the radio for most of my life. Secondly, he had already written the majority of the book. There would not be weeks of research. The problem was that his story was not written in chronological order, and there was a lot of additional material to compile and insert into the manuscript. I agreed to help him.

In January, 2010, Mr. Davidson and his wife, Irene, went to Florida; and I went to work on his book. The result is the story of a boy with a dream, but very little prospects of fulfilling it. The boy became a man with the same, constant dream; and he had the determination, ambition and perseverance to make it come true. It is a love story, filled with humor, pathos, courage in the face of war, disappointments and illness, all of which became the foundation for Mr. Davidson’s very deep, constant faith in God.

It is my pleasure to have been instrumental in bringing the story of Bryan Davidson to the public. I have found him to be a gentleman with a delightful sense of humor, a compassionate man who loves his family, his home, his church and his community. He is a man worth knowing and worth reading about, mostly in his own words. I wish him continued good health and happiness, as well as good reviews on his book.

Barbara Elliott Carpenter

www.starlightseries.com

www.becblog.com

Preface

Night rain on the roof can transport me back to my childhood about as quickly as any other sound. It doesn’t matter what kind of rain: the pounding that accompanies a summer thunderstorm; the soft steady drizzle of a spring shower; the cold, heavy downpour that heralds autumn in the Midwest; or the icy sheets of winter rain that can turn to snow. Rain on the roof is the catalyst.

Of course, I no longer sleep beneath the tin roof of my childhood home, where the noise was often deafening. It has been a lot of years since those days. I am now in what most would consider the twilight of my life, although I believe, God willing, there’s still some good years in this old boy yet.

The journey from my childhood to present day was many miles, for my current home is a long way from that little tin-roofed house in Alabama. The times and cultures have changed. My attitude toward a number of things has changed. The inventions and status of technology from that former time to now is, to coin a phrase, mind-boggling!

One thing, however, has not changed. My love of radio, the miracle of the way sound can travel through the air and be captured in a box, then transmitted out of that box all over the world, has never wavered. Radio caught my imagination when I was a child, grew exponentially as I traveled through my teen years into young adulthood, flourished throughout my time in the United States Navy during World War II; and it proved to be the means through which I would earn my livelihood. Yes, I think it can be said that I made a career of something I loved.

It is my hope that this effort to record a bit of history, both personal and career-wise, might encourage someone else to develop a love of some skill, hone a talent, or strive to make a living doing something about which they are passionate. I did; and the rewards have been, and continue to be, worth every setback and trial. I would do it all again.

As I tell this story, I am an old man with a selective/bad memory; therefore I make no claim as to the total accuracy of the events I recall. In fact, I’m dead certain that old father time has played a few tricks with that part of my mind where all this stuff is stored.

So—enjoy, but don’t be too picky!

###

Those who have gone before us have left their wisdom in books. We have but to read them.

CHAPTER ONE

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. ~~ Lao Tsa

In the years just prior to and during the Great Depression, nearly everyone in our community was poor; but there are degrees of poverty. Extreme poverty in the south was described as poar; and that’s what we were. My parents, Jesse Wheeler and Parley Beatrice Davidson, originally from a little town in Alabama, migrated to Southern Indiana, looking for work.

For a long time, the Indiana coal miles provided steady employment for miners; and the pay was pretty good. My parents were able to buy a small house in the little town of Franciso, just north of Evansville. I was born there on September 1, 1925. I don’t have a lot of memories of living in that house in my early years. What I recall most is that my maternal grandmother lived with us. Her name was Susan, and she loved me. She was what they called sickly back then, and she spent most of her time in bed.

Grandma Susan dipped snuff, and she spat into a tin can. That didn’t stop me from spending time with her. I talked to her a lot, and she always listened and sympathized with all my problems. Don’t laugh! A child can find lots of problems to discuss with a willing listener, and I really loved my grandma! She didn’t seem to think that I should be seen and not heard, as so many adults did in those days. She died when I was four or five, and I missed her a great deal.

When the mines in Indiana played out, my parents decided to look for work somewhere else. They had family in Alabama, and they knew many people there; so that’s where they decided to go. This would have been about the time the stock market crashed, in 1929. Work was scarce and difficult to find anywhere.

My father was too shy to ask anyone for a job; so when they got to Alabama, he looked up my uncle, Arthur Seale. Uncle Arthur was the job getter of the clan. He had a system. He applied for two jobs at a coal mine, one for my dad and one for himself. Somehow, Uncle Arthur’s job turned out to be the time keeper, an easy task. Unfortunately, my dad had no bookkeeping or literate skills; so his job took him into the mine, where he dug and loaded coal, deep in the dank, dark Alabama mine.

The coal mining companies presented themselves as benefactors to the families of the miners. The main benefit was a company-owned shack, covered with a tin roof; and they called it a house. I think virtually every home in the entire town was owned by the company. Built of crude, rough-sawed boards, none of them were ever painted. They had no electricity, no plumbing, which meant no running water and no bathroom. An outhouse stood behind each dwelling.

We settled into the little coal mining camp/town called Straven. Don’t look for it on a map, because it is no longer there. The locals had changed the name to Starvation, Alabama; and that wasn’t too far from the truth. It was divided into two parts by a natural mountain ridge that ran right across the middle of it. On one side of the mountain was Old Straven, and on the other was New Straven.

Coal was brought to the surface in New Straven and had to be transported across the mountain top, down to the big commercial railroad at the foot of Old Straven. It was a costly way to move the coal, so the company brought in heavy earth-movers, machines that can dig and move thousands of tons of dirt. They dug a huge cut right through the mountain top. It was called simply The Cut.

The depth of the cut varied from practically nothing at the beginning, where one entered it, to as deep as sixty or seventy feet at the center. The side walls of the cut were too steep to climb. The floor of the cut was only wide enough to accommodate the narrow gauge railroad tracks that ran from the mine to the commercial railroad at the foot of Old Straven.

A string of small, open coal cars, called the tram, was pulled along the rails by a steel cable. While the cut was intended only for the transport of those cars, the boys and young men of Old and New Straven soon learned that it was a convenient short-cut through the mountain. The company frowned upon foot traffic along their railway; but boys, then and now, didn’t pay much attention to an old company policy.

Tempting and wonderful as the short cut was, some of us soon discovered a huge problem connected with the use of it. A very real danger existed for white-skinned boys, for the local black boys used the cut as a place to trap and beat the living daylights out of them. Every time I left the house my mother warned me not to go through the cut.

One day the temptation was too great, and I didn’t listen to her. About half-way through the cut, I became filled with terror. Ahead of me the entrance was blocked by several black kids, and they looked huge to me! I whirled around, hoping to run fast enough to escape, retracing my steps. Too late! They had stationed other boys at that end after I entered the cut.

Slowly the two groups advanced toward me. No doubt about it, I was about to get a beating. Please! I begged. Don’t beat me up! Miraculously, one of the boys recognized me. It seems I had done him some small favor by the company store one day. Luckily for me, he remembered it. He began to plead with his buddies.

Come on, he said. This guy ain’t like the others. He’s different. He’s okay! Let’s let him go! That’s what they did. Some of my friends were not nearly as fortunate. Thereafter, we didn’t go through the cut alone; we traveled in groups.

I’m sure experiences like these are responsible for the persistent bit of racism that I have not been able to dispel. I have tried to rid myself of it; but I’ve never been one hundred percent successful. I’m still trying. Unfortunately, I’m not alone with these feelings.

A friend of mine grew up in the poor section of a big city, where he attended an integrated high school. The boys were required to shower after every Physical Education class, and it was there my friend experienced another kind of racial hatred. He said that the black students encircled him in the shower and urinated on his legs. When he told me this story, I reminded him that the event had taken place a long, long time ago, that he should try to forgive and forget. My friend told me that he could not.

I learned a lot about coal mining during those years. There were typically two types of mines: shaft and slope. A slope mine was entered via a narrow-gauge tram car, traveling on a gradual slope. Workers accessed a shaft mine aboard a steel-enclosed cage on a platform that went straight down into the ground. The cage was lowered and raised by a system of pulleys and steel cables, powered by a huge electric motor, located top-side.

In both types of mines the coal was dug out from alleys or mini-tunnels that fanned out from the bottom of the shaft or slope entrance. Wherever an alley was dug, the roof had to be supported with huge timbers to prevent cave-ins. They were cut from poles, tall enough to reach from the alley floor to the ceiling. Other timbers were placed horizontally across the ceilings and reinforced with more vertical timbers.

This was during the 1930’s, a time when many mine companies took advantage of miners with what was known as preparation time. On a preparation day, the miners went down into the mine and drilled holes in the layers of coal, and filled them with charges of dynamite which were then detonated. Since no coal was actually loaded that day, the company refused to pay a full day’s wages. They said it was just preparation.

Coal mines were filled with thick, black coal dust, making the air hazardous to breathe. Most miners developed some degree of black lung, a terrible condition similar to emphysema. Still, mining companies provided jobs; and men had to feed their families.

Several years ago, Tennessee Ernie Ford recorded a song about a mining town’s company store. There is a line in the song that says something about owing my soul to the company store. That wasn’t too far from reality in Straven, as well as other mining towns all across the south.

To begin with, the coal miners weren’t even paid in U.S. currency. They received money, coined and printed by the mining companies. Paper money was called script, and coins were called clacker, because of the clacking sound they made when dropped upon the store counter. The company money was good only in the company store.

It was as simple as 1-2-3:

1. Your money wouldn’t spend anywhere else.

2. They could charge whatever they wanted.

3. It was the only store in town.

For that reason, miners were forced to get by the best they could. We really didn’t steal coal. We just took some, and it was never looked upon as stealing. Lots of coal just lay around, so everyone just kind of helped themselves.

It worked like this: When the tram cars came out of the cut through the mountain and started down the other side, some always fell off. Sometimes it was helped along a bit, for the men who ran the tram were our friends. When they looked down and saw one of us standing there with our tow sack, they knew we wanted some coal.

A couple hundred feet or so before the tram reached us, our friend atop the car started tossing big chunks of coal to the ground. As they roared past, he yelled, Got enough? If we signaled no, he threw off some more. We filled our sacks and dragged them to the house. If there happened to be a company man on the tram, we got no coal; so we folded up our sacks and faded into the brush along the tracks. We needed that coal. We used it to stoke the fireplace for heat in the winter and in the cook stove year round.

We never thought of it as stealing; but looking back, I suppose that’s what it was. I’m fairly certain the company knew about it and just considered it part of the cost of mining coal. The same policy applied to practically anything that was abundant. If an entire field of watermelons was available, we took watermelons. If several apple or other fruit trees were laden with fruit, we took some.

That’s how the system worked. I have spoken with other people my age who remember a similar system where they grew up, generally in the country. Whatever was plentiful was just considered to be community property. I guess we were sharing the wealth.

###

Don’t ask the question, if you might not like the answer.

CHAPTER TWO

Weeds are automatic.

Most people who say they don’t like unions didn’t live back in the days when they were so badly needed. Perhaps it’s true that the pendulum has now swung too far; but back in the days of early coal mining, unions were desperately needed.

Unionization of the mines came about when powerful, well-known union officials came out from the big cities to make fiery speeches to whomp up the workers. Their speeches were filled with strong words and phrases like, Starvation wages! It didn’t take much to inflame the mine workers, many of them sick and barely able to provide food from the company store.

The union organizers brought a quartet of black singers to warm up the crowd before the speakers began their speeches. Hmmm…. Hmmm… They tuned up before they began to sing an old spiritual with a familiar tune, but containing insulting words to the mine owner/operators.

"Why don’t you sit down, Mister Operator? No…you can’t sit down! Cause we done jined the union…you got to walk around! Hmmm…Hmmm….we done jined the union…You got to juss walk around!"

It truly is no wonder the miners were receptive to promises made by the unions. Desperate people and situations call for desperate measures to make it better. Unfortunately, none of the betterment came while my dad worked that coal mine in Straven.

Our drinking water came from a natural spring, located at the bottom of the valley. As I recall, the spring was about a mile from our house. We carried water in two one-gallon buckets, one in each hand. I still remember how heavy those buckets were. The pails left deep red marks in the palms of my hands.

The spring was in a lovely spot. The foliage was so dense around it that sunlight never fell upon it. The water trickled down, falling over big rocks and splashing into a small pool-like area. The best part of those trips to the spring was the reward of all the good, cool water we wanted. That probably doesn’t sound like much of a treat these days, not with the plentiful ice and good water we have at our fingertips.

The spring provided a wonderful place to cool off, even on the hottest summer day. The water was cool, clear and delicious. We lay full length on the ground, face down, and put our mouths right into that cold spring. We sucked up all we could hold for the long trip back home.

Back in the kitchen, we poured water into a bucket, usually galvanized or enamel, with a dipper which we had made from a large, round gourd. To make one, we cut a big hole into the wild-growing gourd and scraped out all the seeds and fibers. The stem served nicely as a handle, and the gourds worked well—lightweight enough to float on the water, waiting for the next person to take a drink.

The other source of water for the Alabama coal miners came from the roofs of their houses, used for everything except drinking. Each dwelling had an open, steel barrel that sat under the drip, the spot where water poured off the tin roofs during a rain. Those rain barrels were not only full of water. They most often carried little aquatic creatures we called wiggle tails, named for the way they propelled themselves through the water. I later learned they were actually mosquitoes-in-the-making, wiggling in the very early stage of development.

Not one of the company-owned houses had electricity. Our home in Indiana had been wired, so we really missed the convenience when we moved to Alabama. The only light we had came from kerosene lamps. In the south, kerosene was called coal oil. Whatever it was called, it was foul-smelling, petroleum liquid.

We bought it at the company store in a one-gallon metal can with a pouring spout, which was supposed to have a cap on it to prevent spills. For some reason, the cap was always missing. The clerk at the store often took a small white potato and crunched it over the hole in the spout to keep the kerosene from sloshing out as we carried the can.

The lamps consisted of flat-bottomed glass bowls that held small metal mantles, which sat just inside the tops of them. The bowl was filled with kerosene, and the wick, a length of flat cotton-like material about a half-inch wide, was brought up through a slot in the center of the mantle. The tip of the wick was lit with a match or a candle and covered with a tall, glass globe to keep any breeze from blowing out the feeble flame.

The thin glass globe was forever becoming smoky and smudged, causing the lamplight to become dimmer. It was necessary to turn down the wick and remove the glass often to give it a good cleaning. The wick had its own problem. It never burned evenly, and it became jagged across the top. It had to be trimmed by cutting straight across the top with scissors. There’s a line in an old hymn that says to …keep your lamps all trimmed and burning, referring to a similar kind of lamp we used back in those days in the mining camp.

Alabama lies in an area called tornado alley; and we had seen the devastation of violent storms while we lived in Straven. Most of the residents had lived in those hills all their lives. They had either witnessed first hand or traveled to the next county to see the destruction of those massive storms. Some funnels stretched as wide as a mile across, crushing everything in their paths. We saw houses lifted off their foundations and blown hundreds of feet away. Seemingly impossible results occurred. It was common to find sticks driven into boards, without breaking the tiny twigs. In one instance, a small chicken was blown into an empty fruit jar.

The fear of tornadoes was so great that each family dug a storm cellar, a few feet from the house. Sometimes two or three families went together and dug a larger one, to accommodate as many people as possible. The underground room was dug right into the earth, probably no more than seven or eight feet deep, just deep enough to provide shelter from the wind. A series of steps dug out of the clay-based dirt provided access to the dugout. Long pine poles were laid very closely together across the top of the earthen room and covered with mounds of leaves, straw and dirt, to keep out as much rain as possible. Since no drain was provided, rain always trickled into the room. There was usually an inch or more of water on the floor at any given time.

While the older folk were terrified of the horrible winds, we children thought that going to the storm cellar was great fun. When a big black cloud appeared on the horizon, someone yelled a warning. Storm’s a’comin’! Better head for the storm cellar! Down we went into that underground room, where we sat on the dirt benches and splashed our bare feet in the water. It was lots more scary when the big wind came up in the middle of the night.

We were really scared while we waited for the storm to pass, so we sang church songs. It helped pass the time and brought a measure of reassurance. Now if the song happened to be Nearer My God to Thee, I’m not sure that I was reassured at all!

We didn’t have flashlights. Our only portable lights were pine knot torches. The hillsides were covered with pine trees. Like all things, the trees eventually became old and fell over. The trunks decayed, all except the areas up and down