CHRISTMAS LETTER 2003

by
Fred McCaleb

This is to wish everyone a merry Christmas and happy new year. We haven’t done any traveling past Fayette and Winfield, Al. Which are ten and twelve miles away. I am 87 years old and hope to make it to 88. So will write a little about my passage through life.

I was born in 1916 in the brushbroom area before the use of lawnmowers to cut the grass. A family trying to have their yard looking good on Saturday would have it swept with a dogwood brushbroom. The husband or grandparent had this done with sons or grandsons if they were around. Chickens had the grass already eaten and there was just chicken manure, trash and the ground to sweep. The chickens laid eggs for the family to eat and to swap to a peddler or country store for salt, soda, matches and other little things.

The fastest way of travel was by T Model Fords that cost $400-500 but only very few of the well to do had them. They had to be driven on a dirt road and got stuck if it came a rain. John Tyler McCaleb had one before 1916 but had to use mule or horse power to keep it unstuck. Our family’s fastest way of travel was walking or by mules and wagon. For distant travel the passenger train was available but we didn’t have much money for that. The wagon roads were all unnumbered and graveled and the streams had to be forded instead of crossing on a million dollar bridge.There were narrow wooden bridges across the big streams that cost $500 or less to build. Every land owner that couldn’t pay road tax was required to work on the road several days a year. All our able bodied ancesters helped build roads.

My schooling was in a one teacher church schoolbuilding until 1925. The transportation to school was walking. At the Skimming Ridge school there was a one bannister footlog that spanned Boxes Creek that my dad and Ector Killingsworth had constructed. I never fell off of it but one of my cousins Ola Killingsworth fell just at the edge of the water and skinned her head. The second one teacher one was Clover Hill through half the third grade. That was in the fall of 1925. We moved that year to between Nettleton and Shannon, Ms. And they had a good school there. I failed the third grade under Mrs. Carter. I never failed a grade level after that. We had to walk to school at Shannon. We walked on until 1931 when we moved back to west Fayette County, Al. The toilets were outside. One for the boys and one for the girls in a different direction.
Some of the playthings we had back then was a click and wheel. The wheel was a rim off wooden hub of wagon and the click was a U bent in a heavy wire to make the wheel roll. I had right much fun with that. I tried to do everything my dad did include cut with a chopping ax. Nearly cut the end of my little finger off with that. My dad let us use any of the tools he had and that made me glad. Had to make most of my toys except one little red wagon. It tore up in a month or two and my dad never bought any more toys for me. My grandpa let me plow with a turning plow pulled with his mule when we lived there in 1925. I thought that was the greatest thing I had ever done. There were radios around in the late 1920s but we didn’t own one. My mother did her washing once a week with two tubs and a washpot to heat the water. She got the water from a branch at Grandpa McCalebs when the water was clear. That was a hard job for her. There was no electricity or automatic washing machine and dryer. We had what had been an artesian well in Ms. Which provided good clear water. It had a pitcher pump to raise the water. There was a small water branch that ran between our shack and the well. I was riding one of our mules to water her. Something stung her and she threw me into the water in the branch.

Health care was sort of crude in the 1920s and 30s. My mother was our main doctor. She had a remedy for everything. Some of it must have worked on me or I had plenty of resistance or something. If you took pneumonia though you were a goner most of the time. My grandpa Hallmark died with it in 1927. I recollect being there and his son Arthur trying to give him some sort of medicine. He was already too weak to take it and died the next day. There was no penicillin or sulfa drugs at that time. My little brother two year old Raburn died with membrane croup the same year. He just choked out and couldn’t breathe. Her nursing sister died in Fla. That same year. Things were very sad that year for mother. My brother Hubert didn’t want to go to school at Clover Hill at first. My mother gave him a dose of castor oil and he never got sick at school again. So some of her remedies worked.

The past was an entirely different scene from the post WW2 area. The family got electricity about 1946 or 47. Radios, refrigerators, and electric lights were available to replace the kerosene. Farm tractors replaced mules over the next 20 years. The price for one went from $2000 to around $100000 by 2000. Only the wealthy or credit worthy man can even start to farm now. The small farms have almost totally disappeared. Most of the farmers prior to WW2 grew thier own food with a pair of $300 mules. They made $400 to $500 per year but at least they ate during the great depression. How will they fare during a similar depression? This question worries me.
Fred McCaleb