padgett's my name - by d.d. padgett, as told to his daughter ruby p. herlong

The name of this book is not PADGETT’s My Name but rather

Padgett’s MY Name. Pronounced with the stress on MY, the title of this book about Davenport Padgett captures his personality in his standard greeting, not so much announcing himself to you as inviting you to share your name with him, thus initiating a conversation in which he would focus on learning as much about you as possible.

Meeting him was an unforgettable experience, as attested to by so many in this book which covers the fascinating history of nine generations in the small farming community of Saluda and the surrounding areas in South Carolina. Padgett was no ordinary man. He had a sharp eye, a good ear, an astounding memory, and the ability to weave into this book all the elements of a great Russian novel: geography, generations of family, character development, history, good farming habits, morality, human nature, politics, race relations, love, and a good smattering of common-sense philosophy.

James Boswell, biographer of Dr. Samuel Johnson, first lexicographer of the English dictionary, could not have known that his volume would still be read three hundred years later by those wanting to understand the heart and soul of England during the Age of Reason. Three hundred years from now historians may find in Padgett’s My Name a similarly valuable tool for understanding life lived during a time fast passing away. And they’ll have a wonderful read, as well, in this personal journey of one of the most admired men in our part of the country—the lyrical recounting of the life, laughter, and love of a family rooted in the red earth of South Carolina’s Piedmont. Bettie Rose Horne, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus, Lander University October 2008

Padgett’s My Name

www.PadgettsMyName.com

[email protected]

Padgett’s My Name

One Man’s Story of Growing Up and Growing Old Among Family and Friends in

Rural South Carolina 1894–1989

by

Douglas Davenport Padgett

(as told to his daughter Bela Padgette Herlong)

Preceding Page: "Padgett's Place," an ink-wash drawing done by Wade Harris, depicts the

Davenport Padgett house on Mt. Willing Road in rural Saluda County.

Copyright © 2008 Ruby (“Bela”) Padgette Herlong Saluda, South Carolina 29138 All Rights Reserved ISBN: 978-0-557-02101-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2008910795

In memory of my father and mother, who taught us to love others and believe in ourselves.

A FATHER’S LOVE

You are like the father in the story. If I’d been lost, you’d meet me. You’d run the whole way with arms outstretched. You’d hold me with those gentle, strong hands scarred with a thousand batterings, from a plow suddenly broken, a fence snapping, or a ball thrown wild. I’d need no robe nor ring nor shoes to know I was home. Bela Padgette Herlong

LESSONS OF LOVE

Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer never told me what my father taught: “Buckle down,” he’d say as we hoe’d the corn. “Stand hitched,” he’d advise as we picked the cotton. Faulkner, Emerson, Thoreau never taught me what my mother believed: “Do your best,” she urged as she helped me with Latin or algebra. “Study hard,” she cautioned as we scrubbed the clothes in the washtubs. My parents drew a picture of love – shaded by poverty and anger lighted by hopes and dreams framed with unselfishness: A masterpiece for me to study. Bela Padgette Herlong

ix

Contents

Introduction ....................................................................................... xv

Second Introduction ........................................................................ xxi

1 1894–1902, Eight Happy Years .................................................. 1

2 1902–1904, Ma’s Illness and Death ......................................... 14

3 1904–1907, Batching in the Country ....................................... 18

4 1908–1909, Grandma Sue and Curtis Die .............................. 28

5 1910–1911, Out on My Own .................................................... 38

6 1912, Living in Georgia ............................................................ 50

7 1912–1913, Coming Back Home ............................................. 58

8 1913–1914, Living at Mt. Willing ............................................ 62

9 1915–1916, We Get Serious ...................................................... 74

10 1916, We Get Married ............................................................... 82

11 1916–1918, Madaline’s Born; Pa Dies ..................................... 87

12 1918–1919, Farming Rented Land ........................................... 95

13 1919–1921, My Son and My Land ........................................... 98

14 1922–1929, A Mule for a Model T ......................................... 108

15 1929–1931, Banks Break; Bela’s Born .................................... 119

x

16 1932–1933, Madaline Goes to College .................................. 133

17 1934–1936, A Job and a Second Son ...................................... 143

18 1937–1938, Finally, A Clear Title ........................................... 159

19 1939–1940, A Trip to Annapolis ............................................ 169

20 1940–1942, Curtis Returns; U.S. at War ................................ 179

21 1943–1945, War Years ............................................................. 189

22 1946–1951, A Wreck; Two Graduations................................ 207

23 1951, A Summer To Remember ............................................. 229

24 1951–1952, Gladys’ Inheritance ............................................. 237

25 1952, Bela’s Home Again ........................................................ 265

26 1953–1955, A Granddaughter and a Wedding .................... 275

27 1956–1959, Graduations and Grandsons ............................. 286

28 1960–1962, Another Grandson and a New Room .............. 296

29 1963–1965, Five Big Events .................................................... 309

30 1966–1967, Celebrating Fifty Years Together ...................... 314

31 1968–1969, Three Deaths and an Accident .......................... 321

32 1970–1973, Seeing Loved Ones Suffer .................................. 331

33 1974–1979, Gladys’ Illness and Death .................................. 345

34 1985–1987, Looking Back ....................................................... 359

35 1988–1989, Nearing the End .................................................. 375

Epilogue—He Died As He Lived, With Courage, Love, and Joy, Bela Padgette Herlong ............................................................ 383

xi

Appendix

Family Connections Douglas Davenport Padgett .................................................. 403

Douglas Davenport Padgett: Reflections on the Life of a “Grand” Man – by his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces, nephews, cousins, friends, and acquaintances ..................................... 424

A Card and a Letter from Madaline to Her Father Madaline Padgette Boney ................................................. 425

My Father: A Friend to All Curtis Davenport Padgette ............................................... 427

My Father: A Stalwart, Loving Gentleman Ruby Euela (Bela) Padgette Herlong (with two letters to her mother and father) ................... 431

A Letter to My Father: A Man I Love and Respect Douglas Donald Padgette ................................................. 435

Letter in a Time of Rejoicing Harold Abner Boney ......................................................... 438

Thoughts about Grandpa Bettina Davenport Boney Beecher ................................... 439

Granddaddy: The Real Thing, the “Genuine Article” Harold A. Boney, Jr. ........................................................... 439

Memories of Granddad Robert Lewis Padgette ...................................................... 453

My Time in the Country with Granddaddy Edith (Deedee) Padgette ................................................... 455

Grandpa: Always the Same James Edmund Herlong, Jr. .............................................. 456

xii

Memories of Granddaddy Gladys Madaline Herlong ................................................ 462

Granddaddy: What You’ve Meant To Me William Davenport Herlong ............................................ 465

Granddaddy’s Still Visitin’ Alice Herlong Powe .......................................................... 467

Memories of Granddad Stephen Rogers Padgette .................................................. 471

My Grandfather’s Gifts to Me Mark Douglas Padgette .................................................... 475

Great-Grandfather: His Gift of Stories Charles Douglas Pearce .................................................... 476

My Memories of Great-Grandfather Padgett Scott Pearce ......................................................................... 477

Memories of Grandpa James Kirk Herlong ........................................................... 478

Granddaddy: He Lived with Faith, Love, Humor and Gusto – Joan Egan Herlong ....................... 481

A Nephew’s View of Uncle D. Horace Davenport Padgett ............................................... 482

Memories of Uncle Davenport Sarah Minier Padgette ....................................................... 488

Davenport: “A Man to Match the Mountains and the Sea” — Margaret Lindler Austin ...................... 489

A Gift in Honor of Davenport and in Memory of Gladys – Kathleen Lindler Sansbury ......................... 490

Davenport: “A Man for All Seasons” Isabel Etheredge Mayer .................................................... 491

Davenport: A Generous, Gracious Cousin Eva Sue Etheredge Butler ................................................. 493

xiii

Davenport and the Old Landmarks and Touchstones Maylena Padgett Jordan ................................................... 494

On the Occasion of Your Golden Wedding Anniversary Jackson Long ...................................................................... 494

Thoughts on My Visit with Davenport Laurie Patricia Gamble Juliana ........................................ 495

Mr. Davenport: My Would-be Grandfather Dibbie Shealy ...................................................................... 496

Musing upon the Passing of Davenport Henry Fletcher Padget III ................................................. 498

A Pastor Remembers Mr. Davenport Reverend John Griffith ...................................................... 498

Words from Friends upon the Death of an Aged Parent Dora and Sidney Hare ...................................................... 501

Celebration of a Good Life Bettie Rose Horne .............................................................. 501

Mr. Davenport Padgett Harvey Driggers, Midlands Outdoors ............................... 502

People Await Results on Courthouse Lawn Cathy Collins, The State ..................................................... 505

Padgette Scholarship Established at Newberry College — Saluda Standard-Sentinel ................................. 506

High Schoolers Register to Vote Saluda Standard-Sentinel .................................................... 508

Students Honor Citizens Saluda Standard-Sentinel .................................................... 508

Padgette Gift Dedicated at Emory Saluda Standard-Sentinel .................................................... 509

Emory Chimes Dedication Saluda Standard-Sentinel .................................................... 509

xiv

Tid Bits, The Chimes Ralph Shealy, Saluda Standard-Sentinel ............................ 510

Nine Generations of Padgett(e)s: A Genealogy Compiled by Bela Padgette Herlong .................................... 511

xv

Introduction In 1976 when my father was eighty-two, I said to him, “You

have told me so many stories about the past—stories I want to put down so that those who come after us can know what life was like for you. Would you be willing to talk about your life and let me write down your words?” He didn’t hesitate; he said he’d like to tell his story—that he’d write it down himself if he could write as well as I could.

So that’s how this book began. Every chance I got, I would take down my father’s words as he talked about his life. By this time my parents were eating dinner with us every Sunday since Mother was changing from the capable, strong woman she had always been—one able to tackle any job and do it well—because of the dementia that was slowly affecting her mind. I would usually have a meal that I had prepared before I went to church, so we’d eat and talk a while. Mother and I would wash the dishes and put them up—I didn’t have a dishwasher at that time. Then I’d get my legal pad and tell Daddy where he’d left off the Sunday before. He’d begin and tell every detail in chronological order. I had no trouble at all taking down his words. I still have my handwritten version of this book. He told me the first part straight through in chronological order as he had lived it. I typed eighty-five pages of that and read it back to him. But I knew many, many stories that he had not included—stories about his own life and that of his family and friends. I made a long list of what I wanted him to tell and he thought of others. Once again we began—this time he started with stories he knew about his ancestors, and then when I’d remind him of one that I’d heard him tell, he would immediately launch into that one. I had him tell me exactly what

xvi

year each one had happened in order to fit them into the chronological story.

It took me ten years of constantly listening to and writing down his words to reach an end, and even when he knew he was dying from lung cancer in 1989, several times he wanted to tell me something that he had forgotten. At that time he told me the poem that begins this book—just talked it to me, and he told me about Posey Padgett and James (Boy) Jackson who came to visit him just before he went to the nursing home the day after his 95th birthday. The blind John Milton had his amanuensis, a man who came at daybreak every morning and took down the lines of Paradise Lost—lines which Milton had composed in his mind during the night. Davenport Padgett had incredibly good eye sight, but he had never written anything except the necessary things required of a farmer and a husband and father, so he would never have written down this incredible story of his long and interesting life—a life lived in joy and giving, but he was always eager to begin his dictation to me.

I am thankful that I began early and kept on until his death. I have written as an epilogue my version of his death. He was ever the same man, in life and as he faced death, a man stalwart and strong, faithful and true—“a man for all seasons.” He was a family man; he loved his wife and children beyond belief; he loved his extended family; and he loved his friends. He helped everybody and loved to visit and talk to everyone—men and women and children. Everyone felt comfortable in his presence. He never tried to “put on” or be something other than what he was. My son hit it right when he said, “Granddaddy was comfortable in his own skin.”

As you read his words—and they are his words in his own unique style—you will get to know a man born in 1894 before the advent of automobiles, airplanes, television, computers, and interstate highways. He travelled by wagon, buggy, or on horseback until he was thirty years old when he bought his first car—traded a mule in on the Model T. He was a farmer, and he

xvii

loved the land he lived on and was proud that it had belonged to his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather before him. You will feel the strength of his character and learn of the difficult childhood he had. His mother died when he was eight years old, and his father had bouts of depression and left his sons to work the farm alone while he was postmaster at Saluda.

When he began, my father first gave extensive background on his ancestors before him, and there were many. His father was one of twelve children. His mother was one of three sisters, all of whom died early and left small children. He felt close to all these people because they lived in the Mt. Willing area. He was thirty-one years old when his grandfather Mahlon Padgett, who’d been born in 1838, died, and since he’d lived less than a mile from him all his life, he knew all his grandfather’s stories too. Of course, his grandfather Mahlon knew well his own father, William Padget, who was born in 1800. Mahlon also knew about his own grandfather, Job Padgett, who was the first Padgett to come to the Mt. Willing area before the Revolutionary War and who had died in 1837, the year before Mahlon was born. It was a close family, and Daddy felt that closeness even though his own family had been fragmented when the mother he loved and respected died at 42. This very dense section has been placed in the Appendix and entitled “Family Relations.”

Daddy begins the story of his own life with the statement, “I’ve always had a collective mind,” and indeed his story shows he had an incredible memory of large events and of details. But perhaps more importantly, his story shows that he also had a unique ability to put everything into perspective. When I asked him how he bore losing his mother when he was eight, he answered, “I’ve always had a habit of making things good for myself.” It was fortunate that he was able to do this because often he had no one to care about him or see to his needs. Yet, he was never angry that his father neglected him and his brothers, and he always respected and loved his father in spite of his neglect. In fact, he said that he

xviii

tried never to hold it against anyone for being who he was. He just accepted what was and went on being himself.

My sister and my brothers and I know how fortunate we have been to have the parents we had. Davenport and Gladys Padgett(e) always loved each other. (Mother added the e to her name and to their children’s names and Daddy never complained.) They disagreed often because each of them was strong-minded, but in the end, they were a team that pulled together. Mother taught school for forty-five years, but she also worked on the farm whenever she could, and she was a fast worker in whatever she did. She and my father were both highly intelligent and also intellectually curious—a great combination. Both of them never had the opportunities to do what they might have done. Daddy would have made an incredible lawyer with his ability to read people and reason out any problem. Mother wanted to go to college when she finished high school but had no money or support. Nevertheless, by sheer determination and will-power, she finally got her degree from Newberry College when she was fifty-eight, and Daddy was all for her going to school. He never once belittled her ambition and her love for teaching. He said he loved her from the time he was eleven and she was seven—the day she made a speech at Children’s Day at Emory Church, where both their families were members. He said he knew then he was going to marry that little black-eyed Wightman girl.

I will never write a Padgett history, but I offer my father’s words as my contribution to the history of the family. It is his autobiography offered to you as a way to learn about the most remarkable man I have ever known. I have written of his death as an epilogue, and I have included photographs of his family—both past and present—and a short genealogy beginning with the Padgett ancestor who settled at Mt. Willing. I have also included letters and essays that people who knew him have written about him—his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, in-laws, nieces, nephews, cousins, friends, pastor, acquaintances, and

xix

reporters who encountered him along the way. Each of them shows a different side of this remarkable man, but their words, together with his own, form an unforgettable portrait of Douglas Davenport Padgett, who lived ninety-five years at Mt. Willing on the little “postage stamp” of earth that he treasured—sixty-four of those happy years with the wife he loved more than life itself.

Today in 2008 his descendants are spread over the United States. Four children, eleven grandchildren, twenty-six great-grandchildren, and eight great-great-grandchildren carry his attributes to generations down the centuries. In the poem he dictated to me, he said: “We’ll live on in children and grandchildren and those too far for me to see.” What a legacy to pass on to future generations! As I have worked on this book, I have felt as if he were talking to me again. I hope that you can hear his voice also as you read his words and come to know and appreciate this unforgettable man who blessed all he met with his strength and unconditional love.

Bela Padgette Herlong Saluda, South Carolina July 2008 [email protected] www.PadgettsMyName.com

xxi

Second Introduction In July 1982, I was leaving Saluda to drive to Chicago to marry Joan, my college sweetheart, and begin law school at Northwestern. At eighty-eight, Granddaddy was not up to the trip, and so, on my way out of town, I drove through the country and by his house to say goodbye. We stood in the front yard underneath the huge oak tree. It was early in the morning but already warm. I was anxious to get going since I had such a long way to go and I was eager to be with my bride-to-be. Granddaddy was happy for me but sorry he couldn’t make the wedding. He had met Joan and thought we were perfect for each other and I took great comfort in that fact. (I am touched now that in this book he spoke of us that way.) It seemed that he “blessed” our union, which was important to me. We “squatted” down and Granddaddy began to talk about marriage. Marriage was a wonderful thing, he said, even if there could be some really hard times. He talked about his Gladys, my grandmother, the little black-eyed girl he met and decided to marry when he was eleven, as you’ll learn when you read this book. It was obvious he had loved her more than life. I had long before absorbed that knowledge, but it was remarkable to hear him say it plain and simple. Then, in downright earthy language, Granddaddy began to talk about another part of marriage, the physical aspect. This was a side to Granddaddy that I had never before known or sensed and would have been afraid to wonder about. But the message was not prurient. It was that the physical love between a husband and wife was part of marriage too. Not a by-product. Not an accident. Not something to underplay. But a fundamental and

xxii

essential part of what God had made. And, as he put it with an impish grin that tickles me to recall even now, it was a whole lot of fun! His specific words were, “if the Lord made anything better than [that] he kept it for himself.” In one short, grown-up conversation, my grandfather stepped down from an Olympian pedestal and became a completely real and authentic person for me. He had the same feelings and fears, and drives and desires as everyone else. While he was a remarkable man–widely loved and respected, utterly fair and even-handed, deeply Christian without sanctimony or self-righteousness, a gifted storyteller with an amazing memory–he was as human as the rest of us. Few among us could ever write or dictate their story as he has done, not even with the help of a child as committed and talented as my mother. But, as amazing as the detail and scope are, the greatest triumph is how the story reveals the man. Davenport Padgett bled real blood and cried real tears. He had major triumphs and painful failures. He loved and was loved. Most of all, he was true; he was real; he was authentic. The only pedestal was in my childhood mind.

William Davenport Herlong

Greenville, South Carolina October 2008

[email protected] www.PadgettsMyName.com

xxiii

A Look Back

I walked down the road straight, and if someone had followed me, they wouldn’t have lost the way. And that’s something to say. It’s sad to have to say goodbye to everything and everybody. But you have to do it. Everything looks so good when you know you have to leave it.

I sit here in my chair and look out the back window at the Rocky Ridge, the field I’ve plowed so many times, where I’ve hoed cotton and picked cotton, and I wonder what will happen to it and the rest of the land I’ve worked so hard to get. I look around at this house where Gladys and I lived from 1919 until she died in 1979, and I know it never pleased her. She wanted to fix up the Mt. Willing house, and I wouldn’t do it.

She was a good wife and a better mother, a helpmeet if there ever was one. She loved us all, and she loved her students. I loved her from the time she was seven and I was eleven. But she wanted a better house, and when each of our four children was born, she declared she’d send them to college if she had to take in washing.

We had life, and we loved life. We’ll live on in our children and grandchildren and those too far for me to see. I reckon we did all right. Anyway we did the best we could with what we had, and we had a good time!

Douglas Davenport Padgett

Chapter 1

1894–1902

Eight Happy Years

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Note To Reader: When my father began his story, he told first about his ancestors who had lived in the Mt. Willing area since before the Revolutionary War. He was proud of his heritage and felt that whoever read his words needed to know about those who had come before him to understand who he was. This portion of the story is in the Appendix and entitled “Family Relations.” Padgett’s my name—Douglas Davenport Padgett. Most people call me Davenport, but a few of my buddies have called me “Dave.” My father was Walter Joseph Padgett, born on the east side of old Edgefield District. My mother was Euela Davenport. She was born at Dead Falls in Newberry County. My father and mother married in 1884 when my father was working at Ridge Spring as postmaster and running a store. My mother was a milliner in Batesburg before she got married.

My father went broke in 1893. He had already bought a farm in Edgefield County, though, right in the midst of the old William Padgett estate. (William was his grandfather.) He borrowed money to build three houses and a store in the fall of 1893. He moved his family from Ridge Spring, where he’d had bad luck, to

2 Padgett’s My Name

this farm where he’d been raised. Curtis and Jouette, my older brothers, were already born, Curtis in 1886 and Jouette in 1890. I was born after we moved back. I was born on the next to the longest day of the year, June 20, 1894—one year after the panic of 1893 when my father lost his money. I was a three and three-fourths pound baby because I’d been born early. My nurse—Dora Padgett (her father, Wash Padgett, had been my granddaddy’s slave)—she said I was the ugliest baby she ever saw. They couldn’t get anything to agree with me at first; then when they gave me black coffee and brown biscuits, I started growing. That’s the way I came into the world—in the house my father had built on Padgett land.

I’ve always had a collective mind. I’ve always remembered everything that happened to me after I was three and a half years old. And I’ve remembered a lot that’s happened to other people and most of the things I’ve read and plenty of what people have told me. One of my daughter’s friends, Blanche Yarbrough, a history teacher, said to me one day when I met her in the grocery store, “Mr. Davenport, it’s not often that you can talk to somebody who remembers your great-grandparents.” She was right. I remember a lot of the old people born before the Civil War. Most of what I’m going to write down is from my own memory.

I go back a long way, and a lot of things have happened in my lifetime. I’m not going to talk much about big events because you can find out about them easy. They’re in all the history books. I’m just going to tell you about what’s happened to me in my life. I’ve spent most of it right here in the Mt. Willing section of what was Edgefield County when I was born and what became Saluda County when I was two years old.

I can remember the first train I ever saw. It was at Chappells, and I was four years old—lacking twenty-two days. It was the spring of 1898. That was also the day I saw my first potted ham and soda crackers. We went on a wagon with two horses hitched to it in 1898 to Chappells to meet Aunt Eva, who was coming home from Greenville Female College. Uncle Luther, Pa’s brother,

Eight Happy Years 3

went to meet Aunt Eva, his sister, and he wanted me to go along for company. Ma let me go, and I was as happy as a June bug. The train was late, and we had to wait. Uncle Luther bought soda crackers and potted ham. I thought it was the best food I’d ever eaten. I can see that train now as it was coming into Chappells. It was so big and so loud I was scared to death. The railroad station was right down by the river, and when Uncle Luther looked around for me, I had run up the hill and stopped and was watching the train moving off—but I was watching it from what I thought was a safe distance.

We were living in the country then. In fact, we lived where Edison Hurt lives now—on the hill above this house where Gladys and I have lived since we bought this place in 1919. Uncle Wash lived back in a small house where James Pou’s son lives in his brick house now. Uncle Wash worked his hands and his children hard. That’s the reason that when he died he owned a lot of what had been Grandpa’s land.

Uncle Wash’s children—Clara and Henrietta and Milton—took consumption. (That’s what people used to call tuberculosis.) I don’t know where they got it. A lot of people died with it back then. My mother went to their house every day to see about them. She bathed them and kept them clean. They improved some, but then when we moved to Saluda, that made it worse. There was nobody that took care of them like Ma did. Their mother was dead, and they were all grown but not married. Ma got it from them. These three died, and Ma died too. Ella and Eliot, Uncle Wash’s children too, lived in that same house all their lives and never did get the disease. Curtis, my oldest brother, got it from Ma. He died at 23. He gave up his mail route in 1907 and died in December, 1909. He graduated from high school in 1903.

Yes, we lived in the country then. My father was the first master of the new Saluda County, formed in 1895, and he also acted as coroner. In 1898 he became the second postmaster of the town of Saluda. For four years he would leave our home in the country on Monday morning and not come back until Saturday


night. In the fall of 1902, when I was eight years old, we moved to Saluda to be with him. My mother was already sick when we moved.

Back to 1898 when I was four years old. I remember that my first cousin Grace, Aunt Ella and Uncle Joe Etheredge’s daughter, lived with us for a while about that time. Ma and Pa were taking care of her because her mother, Aunt Ella, who was also Pa’s sister, had a nervous breakdown. She stayed at Glenn Springs, above Laurens, for sixty days. When she left, she could hardly get in the buggy. Uncle Joe carried her to Chappells and put her on the train. When she came back, she was fat and healthy, and she stayed healthy for years and years and lived into her nineties. When Grace stayed with us, we were the same age. I can remember playing with her, and she’d get mad real quick. She was a pretty little girl, and she grew into a beautiful woman, but she had the temper of her great-grandmother Peggy; she was a fire-eater. Yes, Grace was a special first cousin to me because of those early times together.

I also remember the winter of 1899. We had the biggest snow we’ve ever had in this part of the world—except for the one in the spring of 1973. Yes, that snow was bigger than the snow of 1899. Jouette, my older brother, to the day he died in 1969, said I didn’t remember that 1899 snow. I do remember, though, that they were tracking rabbits in that deep snow. I was going with them, but I fell on a rock, cut my head open, and didn’t get to track rabbits. I was five years old.

When I was just eight years old, my mother was raising geese to get feathers to make feather beds. She would pluck the down from the geese in the spring, and we would take them to Augusta to sell them. The Gentiles didn’t buy them; it was the Jews who liked them. That spring we carried two loads of geese in two different wagons. There was just this certain time of year that we sold them. At that time Augusta had streetcars. When we got on Broad Street in Augusta, a streetcar was coming up the street making all kind of noise. The horses turned the wagon over on its

Eight Happy Years 5

left wheels, and the damn geese jumped and flew out. We had put the side planks on the wagon before we left home, but when the horses tipped the wagon, the geese got out. The devils flew out all along Broad Street. I don’t see why they didn’t break the plate glass windows on the stores the way they flew against them. I reckon they saw their reflection, and it turned them crazy, or maybe they were so upset from getting dumped out of the wagon after being shut up all the way from home to Augusta, a distance of about forty miles. People were nice though. Lots of folks came out of the stores and helped us catch them and put them back in the wagon. I remember one man there on Broad Street bought three geese, and we put them in a little box behind his store.

I was happy as a little boy. On June 20, 1900, I was six years old. How well I remember that my mother gave me a birthday party that year. I had been born in the evening about eight o’clock, so Ma had my party in the evening too. Grandmother and Grandfather Padgett and Uncle Luther came over for a big supper. Their house was just across the woods from ours. Each one of them gave me presents, and I felt like a big man. They sang “Happy Birthday” to me. Ma and Pa gave me a little True brand knife. It didn’t have but one blade. Of course, they had to take it away from me. I was peeling a peach, and the knife slipped and cut my finger to the bone. Pa was keeping post office in Saluda at that time.

I loved everybody. I never held grudges. People that did me wrong I didn’t hold grudges against. I learned early in life that hating someone hurts you more than it does them. I never was sensitive like my wife, Gladys, and her mother and her brother Cantey and the rest of her family. They got their feelings hurt awful easy. If anyone hurt me, I’d laugh it off and try not to pay any attention. It’s hard to be that way, and my brother Jouette wasn’t that way. He always held a grudge against Pa. Ma kept Jouette at the house to help her clean up and cook dinner one morning, and he didn’t get to the field to work until late. Pa whipped him unmercifully for being late. Jouette never got over


that. Ma always gave Pa a hard time about it too. I was six years old—it was 1900—and Jouette was ten, but I remember how Ma and Pa fought over that whipping.

But Jouette never quite forgave Pa. Dora, who had been my nurse, quit us when I was seven, and we could never get another woman to suit Ma. That was why Jouette was helping her. Dora ran off and got married. She’d been married to a Dozier fellow the first time, and her husband had beat her so bad that she left him and came back home and brought her children and lived with her pa, Uncle Wash. She cooked for my mama and helped my daddy work. She was my nanny. She took care of me and I loved her. I used to go to Mt. Moses Church with her. I felt all right as long as I was beside Dora, but I wouldn’t let none of the other Negroes sit by her. I thought she was special.

Dora quit Ma and run off like a chap and married Bub Matthews. She went with him and lived down where Jake Boland lives now. It was the Wheeler place then. On the first Saturday when she came back to see her folks, she came by to see Mrs. Ela, my ma. Ma asked her, “Dora, how do you like your black husband?” Now Bub was outside listening; he didn’t come in the house. Dora told Ma, “Miss Ela, the only objection I got to that man is when he gets in my white bed and puts his head on my fine white pillow cases, he looks like a fly in a bowl of buttermilk.” Dora was very light skinned; her daddy was Uncle Wash, and he was half-white. His daddy was Grandpa Mahlon’s brother, Dr. Elbert Padgett. Uncle Wash’s wife was black as soot; she was Aunt Emmaline. Wash’s mother was named Dinah.

Church has meant everything to me—and Emory Church in particular. I told someone the other day that when I don’t go to church, I feel like I’ve missed something. I ought to quit going now because I can’t understand a word the preacher says. I can hear him all right. I just can’t separate the words. I can still understand the Sunday school teacher though, and I love to hear the choir sing. I especially love to hear Ralph Shealy sing. He is Rufus and Eugenia’s grandson and a fine young man. Another

Eight Happy Years 7

thing I remember real clear was when my oldest brother was baptized. He had so much Baptist in him that he wanted to be immersed. Now you know the Methodist Church is real accommodating that way. The whole congregation just went down to Richland Creek and ducked Curtis under the water, head and all. I cried because I thought they were going to drown him. I would ride to church with Pa and Ma in the buggy. One Sunday morning we were all ready to go and I was peeling a peach with my knife. Ma called to me to get in the buggy, and I let the knife slip and cut my hand, and none of us got to church that day.

I also remember, by golly, one time I sat on the third seat at Emory on the old pine benches that they got rid of when they remodeled the church. That day for some reason Ma and Pa were sitting on the first seat. I got so lonesome back there on that third seat, and I could see Pa and Ma up there on the front seat. So I got down on the floor and crawled under the benches to them. I thought I’d die if I didn’t get there in a hurry. Ma picked me up and hugged me. I couldn’t have been much more than four years old. I don’t know why I got on the third bench to begin with.

Will Yarbrough preached a series of services at Emory. That was the first night protracted meeting at Emory that I remember. Of course, they had them before that, but I wasn’t old enough to remember. Will was Mott Yarbrough’s brother, and he was a stomp-down good preacher; he could make you see hell wide open. Jouette and Curtis would go up to the altar, and I didn’t feel inclined to go. I thought I was going to hell before breakfast. I’ll never forget that feeling.

Another feeling I remember real clear was one I had later. It happened on the fourth Sunday in May in 1902 when we were still living in the country. Jouette and I went to church without Pa and Ma. They were staying home because old man Jim Pou and his wife Lucretia were coming for dinner. On that Sunday the preacher opened the doors of the church, and I went up and confessed my sins and joined the church. Mr. and Mrs. Pou were at our house when we got home from church. And as long as Mrs.


Lucretia lived, she talked about how happy I was that day. Sometimes I’d go to Sardis where Grandpa Mahlon went. I’d go in Mrs. Lucretia’s Sunday school class, and she’d tell her class that she remembered how happy I was when I joined the church. I’ve never been that happy since.

I don’t remember much about it, but Betty Wheeler gave me a newspaper clipping that belonged to her mother-in-law, Cora Lake Wheeler. It was about a medal contest at Sardis “under the auspices of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.” Grandpa Mahlon conducted the exercises and introduced the speakers. It had to be before Ma died. I didn’t win a medal for saying a speech called “College Oil Cans,” but Cora did win for hers. I always have loved to speak. I’ve taught a Sunday school class at Emory for fifty-eight years. Cousin Fan Riser was my first Sunday school teacher, and Mr. Henry Bodie was my second. They taught me a lot as a little boy, and I’ve remembered it all my life.

Another thing I remember that happened before we moved to Saluda was the dark day. I was almost seven. I was dropping corn the seventh day of May, 1901. The chickens went to roost. My mother took window lights and smoked them for us to look at the eclipse. It got as dark as night. We unhitched and brought the mules to the house. It lasted a good while. From the time I could remember the State came to our house, and Pa had read about the eclipse in the newspaper. One time Pa got mad with the State and took the Atlanta Constitution for a while, but he didn’t like it and went back to the State.

In 1900 Pa was working in Saluda, as I told you. I didn’t see it happen, but I heard enough about it that I feel like I was there. It happened at the courthouse, which was brand new. (It was built in 1896-97 and opened for court in the spring of 1897.) Old man Sing Banks was choking George Wheeler to death. They had fallen out about politics and were fighting. People took their politics seriously back then. Several people were trying to help pull Sing Banks off. Somebody called Pa from the post office, and he came running—all 203 pounds of him. He was much of a man. He hit

Eight Happy Years 9

Sing Banks, and he didn’t pay a bit of attention. George Wheeler’s eyes were beginning to pop out. Then Pa took his knife out and cut Sing Banks twice in both lungs. He still wouldn’t turn loose. Pa dropped his knife and hit Banks’ head with his knuckles and knocked him loose and down the steps to the first landing. There was a long flight of steps outside on the front toward Church Street. Then Pa picked his friend George Wheeler up and helped him home.

Some other people took Sing Banks down to the Walton House where he stayed for forty days in critical condition. But he eventually got well, came back to town, and sat on a stump in the middle of town with his 32 rifle across his lap. He was back of what is James Pou’s jewelry store now in what was then the wagon yard and George Wheeler’s stable. He was looking for Pa and George Wheeler and Ed Turner, George Wheeler’s half-brother. Nobody came out so that he could see them. They were afraid to. Before that he had killed a Negro in the town of Ward just because the Negro quit working. He was as mean as a snake and as big as an ox. And he was after Pa. He sat there on that stump for an hour and nobody showed up. They knew he’d kill them. Then it was all over. He got up and left and decided he shouldn’t live in Saluda. He moved to Ward.

In 1900 I started to school at Oak Grove School where Cousin Callie Padgett started teaching that year. She had a congestive chill and died, and Miss Lula Bouknight took her place. Miss Lula was mean as hell, a redheaded woman. She married Edwin Watson. We had speeches on Friday afternoon then, and the first speech I ever said I still remember: “Had a little sister; her name was Peep, Peep, Peep / She waded through the water—deep, deep, deep / She climbed up the mountain—high, high, high / Pore little creature didn’t have but one eye.”

Uncle Ernest was going to school there at that time, and he was much older than I was. By the time I got to the end of my speech. I was crying. Uncle Ernest pointed his finger at me, and I thought he was ashamed of me for crying. In 1901 I went to Sardis School


because Aunt Eva was teaching there that year. She was a good teacher. At least she was a lot kinder than Miss Lula had been at Oak Grove. That year I said another speech. And I still remember it too: “You scarce expect one of my age/ To speak in public on the stage. / If I chance to fall below / Demosthenes or Cicero / Don’t view me with a critic’s eye / But pass my imperfections by.”

Sardis School then wasn’t the one that’s abandoned now down in James Pou’s pasture, the one he uses for a barn. No, it was the house Harvey Bladon lives in now. It was behind Sardis Church just where it is now. In my second and part of my third year I went there. Mrs. Sue Brockington was my third grade teacher. She had come here just to teach school. She wasn’t a local person. When Dr. Brockington in Greenwood operated on me, I asked him if she was kin to him. He said she was his aunt and that she was still living at that time in 1954. I told him then that she was a darling person. And she was good to a little third grade boy.

I remember my first taste of wine too. It was in 1901. Ma was making a wedding outfit for her cousin Ora Schumpert. She was going to marry Rubie Bouknight. They needed two spools of thread. I was seven years old at the time, and they sent me to the Mt. Willing store to get the thread so they could finish the outfit. When I got to the store after I had walked the mile of dirt road, Rob Brown and Miles Riley were just opening a barrel of cider and a barrel of wine. They were clerks in the store, and Miles owned part of it. Rob asked me if I wanted to taste the cider after they bored a hole and put a bung in it. Of course, I was ready to taste anything. I drank half a glass of cider. Then Miles gave me the glass of wine that had been collected when they opened the barrel.

I got the thread and started home. I got about halfway there and got limber-legged and swimmy-headed. I didn’t know what the heck was the matter. I crawled up the bank by the road and lay down. When I didn’t get back with the thread, Ma sent Negro Ben Smith, who was plowing by the house, to come look for me. He found me asleep, and he woke me up and brought me home on the mule. Ma said, “Poor little thing, he got tired of walking.”

Eight Happy Years 11

They don’t know ‘til yet what was really wrong. I knew, but I didn’t tell them.

Another big thing happened when I was seven years old. Ma let me go with all the men on a cow drive to Augusta. I walked all the way there—forty miles or more. Curtis was in one buggy driving Fan, and Pa was in another buggy driving Queen, a beautiful bay mare Pa owned at the time. Jouette and Fletcher Padgett and I were walking barefoot behind the cows with the hands that were driving them. When we got to Augusta, we all went to the wagon yard where we could put the teams and the buggies and hold the cows ‘til Pa could sell them. Pa rented a room there for us to stay in. He found out that cows had gone down to 2 1/2 cents a pound, so we drove them over to the stockyard and left them there with a man on consignment. While we were gone, someone stole Pa’s suit of clothes and the pistol he’d left in his room.

We started home next morning and got to Johnston. We’d been traveling along together. Pa had me in the buggy with him, and Curtis, Fletcher, and Jouette were in the other buggy. Pa stopped at the oil mill to see about trading cottonseed for meal and hulls. He always fed cows each winter to get the manure in the spring to spread on the land to fertilize the crops. Curtis and Jouette and Fletcher didn’t stop; they went on toward home.

After Pa got his business tended to, we thought we’d drive fast and catch them, but even though Pa pushed Queen, we didn’t catch up with them. We didn’t know it, but they hadn’t gone straight; they went by Ward. They drove Fan, and she got sick and died at Mr. Joe McCrite’s house. We got home and went on to bed thinking they’d be home in a little while. Pa went to sleep, but I didn’t. (I’ve always had trouble going to sleep.) I heard Ma about twelve o’clock say, “Get up, Walter, and go look for those boys.” Curtis and Jouette were still out. Pa got up, and he had to go out in the pasture and catch a mule to ride. We’d driven Queen so fast that he was scared to ride her anywhere that night. While he was in the pasture, one of Mr. McCrite’s hands brought Jouette and


Curtis home. He’d already dropped Fletcher at his house. Mr. Joe McCrite had sent the boys home. As soon as the man left the boys, he turned around and went back.

When Pa got to the house with the mule, he saw Curtis, and Curtis told him what had happened—that Fan was dead at Mr. Joe McCrite’s house. Next morning someone opened the door for Queen to exercise, and she ran out of the stable. She had the blind staggers and died that day. That trip was an expensive trip. Pa had set out to make money on his cows, but he had lost two good horses, a fine suit of clothes, a pistol, and he’d had to leave the cows on consignment. In a couple weeks he got a check for the cows. They brought only two and 1/4 cents per pound, and he’d been expecting four or five cents a pound. He’d lost money on them too.

I was prone to bite when I was little. They never let me forget one stunt I pulled. Cousin Sadie Culbreath (who married Joe Culbreath, my Pa’s first cousin) always came from Tampa, Florida, where Joe was editor of the Tampa Times, and stayed during August and September because she couldn’t stand Florida in those two months. Tom Manley was living here where we live now, and he had typhoid fever. Fifty people in the community came and picked his cotton. Eric and Bolie (Sadie’s boys) and I were picking along with the rest of the crowd. Those two boys jumped on me and we fought. Jouette was older and he was there, but he didn’t part us. They were seven and eight, and I was seven. They were giving me the devil. I got Eric by the shoulder and Bolie by the neck. I bit a piece of flesh out of Eric’s arm and spit it out. Jouette kicked me in the seat and said, “What in the hell have you done?” They cleaned the wound off, and we went back to picking cotton.

When we got home, my Ma whipped me good. Cousin Sadie was staying with us a week or two, and then she’d go to other kin people’s houses. Ma thought I had really done bad to treat my company like that. Eric got killed in World War I. When we found it out, Jouette said, “Ain’t you shamed—the way you bit that boy’s arm?”

Eight Happy Years 13

I said, “Yeah, I am a little shamed.” Yes, I was hell to bite when I came up. Ma and Pa loved us all a

whole lot. They were strict—both of them. They wanted us to grow up strong and able to do for ourselves. But I still can’t understand one thing Ma did. I had a pet pigeon that I loved and played with a whole lot. One morning Ma was in the kitchen, and I was playing in another room. I heard Ma call to me in a loud voice, “Davenport, come here quick!”

I was busy and I answered, “In a minute, Ma.” She didn’t say anything back right straight, but in a minute she

said kinda quiet like, “It’s too late now. The cat got your pigeon.” Of course, I ran fast, crying as I ran, but she was right; the cat had killed my pigeon and was playing with it on the ground. Ma had seen it out the window and tried to warn me. If she did it to teach me a lesson, she was successful. I have never forgotten the sight of my pigeon in that cat’s mouth.

I knew my ma was sick, but I didn’t know how sick she was. My first eight years in the country were filled with lots of comings and goings. I learned to work hard; I learned to love and trust others; I learned to read and write; I learned to fight and defend myself; I joined the church and was baptized; and I learned to obey in a hurry when someone calls you. Most of what I remember about my mother was from those early days because she died soon after we moved to Saluda. She made a great impression on me. She would never let us play on the beds in the daytime, and she always had a white tablecloth on the table with white napkins in silver napkin rings. We ate three meals a day at the table in the dining room.

Chapter 2

1902–1904

Ma’s Illness and Death

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In the fall of 1902 when I was eight years old, we moved to Saluda to be with my pa, who had been postmaster there since 1898. My mother was already sick. She had tuberculosis, a lingering kind of disease. Within six months of her death, she’d make clothes and hats. I remember peddling the machine for her to sew. I took the driving rod and turned it for her. She constantly sang the song “I’m Going Home to Die No More.” That song impressed me as a little eight-year-old boy, and it makes me sad even now.

When we moved to Saluda, we moved into what they called the Saluda House—right where the Agriculture Building is now. We lived there all of 1903 and part of 1904. We moved there on December 22, 1902. The ordeal of moving was so great that my mother got sicker. My little brother Gus was just eighteen months old. Carrie Coleman, my mother’s niece, came to see my mother when she was so sick. Carrie took Gus home with her to care for him. My mother gradually got better, but again she got worse the last week in February. She told my father, “Walter, hitch up the buggy and go to Carrie’s and get my baby. I’ve got to see him.” Jouette and Curtis hitched up and went eight miles out in the

Ma’s Illness and Death 15

country. It was between one and two o’clock on a cold, drizzling, sleety February morning that they got back—and they brought Gus with them.

My mother got better then. She lived until May 12. She died in the Saluda House. Before she died, she called her three boys in to the foot of her bed. Realizing that she was dying, she gave us all a good talk. Gus was too little for her to talk to. My father walked in, and Ma said to him, ‘Walter, where is that cold wind coming from?”

He took her hand and said, “Ela, that’s not wind. That’s death. Are you afraid?’

“Not a bit,” she answered. She called over Mrs. Sally Walton, who was staying with us (she ran the Walton Hotel next door), to put her teeth in her mouth and to take the pillow out from under her head. She breathed her last breath right then. A big hearse from Newberry pulled by two big grey horses came to the house in Saluda where we were living. The men put Ma’s body in the hearse, and it carried her out to Emory Church. My father and my three brothers (Grady was dead and Gus was just eighteen months old) followed in buggies. Preacher Counts was the preacher at Emory then, and he preached my mother’s funeral. I can remember how big the casket looked up there at the front. Ma died and left us—a husband and four sons. My Grandma Susannah Padgett and Aunt Pearl, my father’s old-maid sister who lived with Grandma, took Gus to raise. He lived with them six years—until 1909 when Grandma Sue died.

We three boys—Jouette, Curtis, and I—stayed with my father at the Saluda House until the spring of 1904 when we moved to the Dave Busby place right behind Emory School. In Saluda we all went to school in the Ben Edwards house, which is now in front of Whitehall, the old Alvin Etheredge house—just where it was then. Professor Cogburn taught five grades, and Miss Mattie Sloan taught four grades. I was in the third grade. My friend Claude Wheeler was in the fourth grade. We had a family of Creeds then that lived in Saluda and ran the cottonseed oil mill. Alvin


Etheredge owned the oil mill. Eulie, Walt, and Joe were the three Creed boys, and they couldn’t learn and created trouble all the time. Miss Sloan would send them to the professor, and he’d whip them, and they’d laugh. Their sister Mary was studious and made good grades. She was in my grade.

Those Creed boys, after the oil mill burned, moved away. Jim Saddler kept in touch with them. Two were firemen on a freight train, and one was a conductor on a passenger train. In my older years I went to Columbia to see someone in the charity ward at the Columbia Hospital. I looked on the foot of the next bed and I saw the name Mary Creed. She was sick, but I talked to her. She remembered me—Davenport Padgett. I asked, “Mary, what has life been for you?” She said she’d never been married and had nothing and was in a charity ward. I felt so sorry for her. Of course, I wasn’t much better off financially, but I did have my family.

Even though my mother had died, life was not too bad for me. I always had a way of adapting myself to conditions and making friends wherever I was. We had a Negro woman cooking for us there in Saluda, but Jouette caught her stealing two or three times, and he ran her off. Then Jouette took over as cook. He could cook as well as she could, but he always said in later years that that was a foolish thing he did because then he had all the housework to do. In September after my mother died in May, we were sitting in the house, and the walls commenced to cracking and shaking. Pa said, “It’s just an earthquake. It won’t be bad.” Curtis and I were afraid, but Pa and Jouette weren’t. They wouldn’t have been afraid of the devil himself.

The big earthquake came eight years before I was born, but I remember people talking about it. It was on August 28, 1886. Pa was postmaster at Ridge Spring and also the manager of the voting boxes at Ridge Spring. The earthquake happened on Wednesday night and shook everybody up a whole lot. They were supposed to carry the boxes from Ridge Spring to Edgefield soon Thursday morning to be counted and certified. Pa asked Louis

Ma’s Illness and Death 17

Boatwright to go, and he said, “No, Mr. Padgett, I’m not going. It might come another earthquake.” So Pa went. We’ve never had another earthquake like that one, and it’s been nearly a hundred years.

Curtis graduated from Saluda High School in 1904, the year after Ma died. He, along with L.E. Wheeler, got a scholarship to the University of South Carolina. It would have paid him $40.00. Pa wouldn’t let Curtis go. He didn’t think Curtis needed any more education. He said he was too smart anyway. All of them were smart but me.

Curtis was so upset he ran away; he got as far as Greenwood. How well I remember when he came back! He had pawned my mother’s wedding band. Ma gave it to him the morning she died. She gave Jouette her druggist’s badge. Jouette Davenport had given it to her as an engagement present when he and Ma got engaged. That was before she knew Pa. Jouette died with typhoid fever when he was twenty-two years old. So they never got married. Ma prized that druggist’s badge. That morning before she died she gave me her cameo ring. I’m still foolish about cameos; it’s scandalous how many I’d a bought if I’d had the money. I did buy Gladys one before we married. Uncle Mahlon, Pa’s brother carried my ma’s cameo ring with him to the state fair, and it got lost out of his pocket. That was the last of what I got from my mother.

Chapter 3

1904–1907

Batching in the Country

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Curtis came back home and stayed. Pa bought the Dave Busby place near Emory Church in the spring of 1904. Austin Carter lives in the house now. We three boys—Curtis, Jouette, and I—moved there. I was ten, Jouette, fourteen, and Curtis, eighteen. We started batching and farming. Curtis was overseer for Pa. We had forty-five colored people living on the place. We also farmed the land where John Chapman lives now.

The year after we moved back, Miss Carrie Bouknight, who would marry Pa in 1915, was my Sunday school teacher at Emory. That year I was eleven, and I made an important decision—maybe more important than joining the church had been. Gladys and Mary Alice Wightman were in a program for Children’s Day at Emory. They recited together a little piece I still remember: “Little drops of water, little grains of sand make this world like a heavenly land. Little deeds of kindness, little words of love make this world like the heavens above.” I wasn’t anything but a boy, but when I saw that little black-eyed girl up there speaking, I said to myself, “I’m going to marry her.” And marry her I did in 1916.

My father was postmaster still. He’d always had a desire to be in government. In the spring of 1904 Curtis stood the civil service

Batching in the Country 19

exam for the first rural mail route out of the town of Saluda. A good crowd of people stood the exam. Foster Smith got the highest score and the route. It was twenty-four miles long and paid thirty-five dollars a month. Curtis made the second highest score. Smith rode that route from May to October when we had a bad rainy spell. Smith wouldn’t get back to town until way in the night. He didn’t have but one horse. The last week in October he got back to the post office a long time after dark. Pa, who was still postmaster, was waiting for him. Mr. Smith pitched him the mail sack and said, “Mr. Walter, I’m through. I’d have to have two horses to ride this route, and I can’t make ends meet as it is.”

My father left town and walked the three and one-half miles to Emory where we were living. He carried Curtis back to ride the mail the next day. Some of the high scorers on the civil service exam raised particular hell. They didn’t know that if it hadn’t been a year since the last exam, you didn’t have to hold another exam. That’s why Curtis got the route. He carried the mail until the fall of 1907. He died with tuberculosis when he was twenty-three years old. By that time he had a wife (he’d married Hattie Long) and two little girls—Ela and Minier.

We three boys batching out in the country and bossing forty-five hands did as we pleased except for work. We worked hard! Pa could keep us working and be at Saluda keeping the post office. It was the funniest dang thing—he always knew what we could do, and I asked Jouette later why we didn’t get into trouble. We played cards, gambled, drank whiskey (Pa had it in the house all the time), but we were never bad. Jouette said Pa kept us working too hard.

At nine years old in 1903 I became a wagoner. I was driving a two-horse wagon to Ward, Batesburg, and Ridge Spring. Me and Sheck Padgett were the two smallest boys to drive wagons. Old man Jim Fulmer said he couldn’t see me in the wagon if we had the side planks up. I’d go to Batesburg to the gin and bring back pure seed to plant.


Curtis and myself hauled the first windmill to Saluda. We hauled it from Ridge Spring, where it came in on the train, to B.W. Crouch’s house in Saluda. He wanted to have water in his house on that high hill in the town of Saluda. We bogged up with that windmill on the wagon. We were in Rodgers Town—on the road back from Ridge Spring. Old man Sing Banks, a giant of a man (I told you how Pa knocked him off of George Wheeler), came to help us. He put his back to the wheel, and Curtis hollered at the mules, and the wagon came out of the mud that was up to the axles.

Mr. Banks knew we were Walter Padgett’s sons, and he’d given my daddy trouble in the election of 1902, but he respected Pa any-way—probably because Pa had been strong enough to knock him off of George Wheeler. I was scared of that man, but he was big enough to get us out of the bog. B.W. Crouch had his windmill, so he fought the water works when they were coming to Saluda. He asked his Aunt Ida Crouch to vote against the town’s having water works, but she told him she was going to vote for it and when she got water in the house, she was going to have a bathroom downstairs and another one upstairs. She did too!

My brother Curtis loved Hattie Long from the time they were in third grade at Oak Grove School right back of Joe Shep Lindler’s house. They’d been sweethearts all that time. They married April 15, 1906. Jim Ridgell, Justice of the Peace, married them at his store the same day that Butler Hare, who was to be our congressman for years, and his wife married at Nazareth Church. Ridgell’s store is still standing about a mile from here. Nobody has run it in over fifty years, but it’s still there at the crossroads.

Jouette and I stayed on at the house out in the country and batched. Pa got tired of the post office and quit on the sixteenth day of September, 1905. Curtis at that time was riding the mail and living with Uncle Pink and Aunt Mat Lindler. She was Pa’s sister. When Pa quit, he recommended that Mrs. Pearl Herbert be appointed postmistress under Inspector Knight. Mr. Knight was


nothing but an overgrown chap when he insulted my pa—Pa nearly threw him out the window. That’s really why Pa quit.

Pa came home to live with me and Jouette in September 1905. Jouette decided he had too hard a time managing the farm, so he went to Newberry and got a clerking job at Cousin George Davenport’s store. My father sent for him and made him come home. While he was gone, there was nobody at home but Pa and me. Jouette was a good cook, so I was proud when he came back. I cooked then cause I was hungry, and I still do at eighty-two.

After Jouette came back home, I did something (I forget just what it was), and Pa whipped me. I never would stand to take a whipping. He put my head between his legs and beat me. I bit him and wouldn’t turn him loose. Pa had a belt and I just didn’t want to take a whipping with a belt. He’d always used a switch before. He turned that belt loose and choked me off. He said, “You little devil, you, why did you bite me?”

I said, “I’m not ever gonna take a whipping with a belt.” And I haven’t. I was eleven years old, but I was still bad to bite when I was pushed in a corner.

In 1905 when we were living right by Emory School, the chain gang camped in the schoolyard while they were working on the roads in that section. Mr. Tom Banks was the sergeant, and Bunyan Amaker was a guard. There were three white men serving on the gang at that time: Clarence Thrailkill and Ruff and D.D. McCormick. The McCormicks had cut a Negro man all to pieces on Cloud’s Creek bridge, and they served five years on the gang. Mr. Thrailkill was accessory before the fact when his father killed a man in Ridge Spring. He was walking along side his father when his father shot the man. His father got life in the pen, and the son got a year on the gang. Jouette invited these five white men to supper. Pa wasn’t there; it was just Curtis, Jouette, and me. After we’d all eaten a big supper, I said, “Let’s give them a little of Pa’s good whiskey.” I got a pitcher and poured from Pa’s gallon jug and gave each one of them a glass about half full of whiskey. They enjoyed it, and then they went back to where they were camped.


The next morning I poured a pint jar nearly full of Pa’s liquor. I knew Mr. Tom Banks was working on the road down by the creek and that we’d go right by there on our way to the other place where we were working. We were gathering corn and hauling it back home. I was in one wagon, and Jouette was in another. It was a cold fall morning. When we passed the gang, I said, “Mr. Tom, would you like to have a drink this morning to sorta warm you up?”

He said, “I sho would, Boy.” I stopped the mules and jumped off the wagon. I handed him the pint, and dog gone if he didn’t turn up the jar and drink every last drop of that liquor. Then he looked down at me and put his hand on the top of my head and said, “Sonny Boy, I saw you drinking your Pa’s liquor last night, and I didn’t like the looks of it. Don’t do like I’ve done. I’ve been drinking all my life.” He and his brother were both drunkards. Mr. Tom died drunk. I guess he did me a favor when he drank all my liquor that morning. I had to stay warm without it.

I was smoking on the sly while we were living in the Busby House. I was eleven years old, and I saddled a horse and went to Mt. Willing store to buy a package of Dukes Mixture Smoking Tobacco. There was a crowd shooting Crackaloo at the store. Shooting Crackaloo is throwing nickels or quarters at a crack in the floor. Whoever hits the center of the crack gets all the money.

When I walked in the store, they were fussing about who was closest to the crack. I said, “Wait a minute and I’ll show you.” I threw my nickel, and it centered the crack. There were seventeen playing, and I took 85 cents the first time. I shot ten or fifteen times, and I was lucky every time. My luck was so good I had two coat pockets full of money.

I looked up the road and saw Uncle Joe Long, my grandmother’s brother, and Mr. Jim Fulmer coming, and nobody gambled in front of them. I ran out the door and jumped on my horse and rode him home. I didn’t even get my tobacco. Jouette was cooking dinner when he looked out the front door and saw


me coming. By the time I got to the back door, he was there, and he said, “What in the hell is the matter?”

I said, “Come look.” And I showed him my pockets full of change.

“Where did you get it? Did you steal it?” he asked. “No, I won it. “ I answered. At that point I didn’t know how

much I’d won. He said, “Come on inside and let’s count that money.” I poured it all out on the dining room table, and we counted it.

I had won $16.80 because I counted $16.85, and I had had one nickel to start with.

We had already been gambling at home when Pa wasn’t there, and that was almost all the time. Jouette and Curtis and I gambled. I won once $101 from Curtis and $35 from Jouette. Curtis wanted me to give him back his money, but Jouette was willing for me to keep his $35 just so I would keep Curtis’ money too. Curtis had made his money on the cotton patch Pa let him have of his own. He had made two bales of cotton and sold it. Jouette had made his money picking cotton over his task. Everybody had a task back then, even the hired hands. Pa set 140 for Jouette’s task, and he didn’t pay him anything for the first 140 pounds he picked every day, but he gave him forty cents a hundred for all over 140 pounds. And Jouette was an awful good cotton picker. He could pick 300 pounds as easy as I could pick 150. So Jouette had made his $35 that way. If you didn’t pick your task, you got your butt put over a log and whipped. I gave Curtis and Jouette their money back. Curtis said to me, “What would your Papa think if he knew his baby boy gambled?”

Jouette spoke up and said, “What would Pa think if he knew his oldest boy taught him how?”

Aunt Ella was my favorite aunt because right after my mother died, she watched out for us boys. She’d send me a piece of cake to eat by Padgett or Grace, two of her children. If I didn’t have the proper clothes, she saw that Walter bought them. She always thought I was wild though, not fit company for her son Padgett,


who won a scholarship to Clemson and finally got his Ph.D. in chemistry from M.I.T. and was on the Atomic Energy Commission. However, in Aunt Ella’s old age, she said to me one time, “You turned out so much better than I expected.” And she gave me a five-dollar bill for a birthday present. I must have been thirty-five or forty at the time. I’ve forgotten exactly how old I was. It meant a lot to me even then. Aunt Ella was the “queen bee” in her house. There never was a man loved a woman more than Joe Wolfe Etheredge loved Ella Padgett Etheredge.

I was twelve years old in 1906 when I killed my first bird. We were still living at the Busby Place. David Herlong, Ernest Anderson, and myself were rabbit hunting. A bird got up, and I shot him. I went to pick him up, and Ernest (he was twelve too) said that I couldn’t pick him up because he’d killed him. I didn’t pick up the bird, but I wouldn’t let Ernest pick him up either because I knew I’d killed him. David said it was a pop shot, that we’d both hit the bird at the same time. When David said that, then I let Ernest pick up the dead partridge.

That year we had a wet spring and couldn’t plant corn early. We planted three or four acres of corn on the branch in front of the house on the ninth day of July. Everybody that came along the road said, “Walter, you’re just wasting your seed; you know it’s too late to plant corn.” But it rained a lot, and that corn matured fast. About like Jack’s beanstalk. So when fall came, that corn had made a big crop, and we had to gather it. But it was raining again, and the field was boggy.

Now Grandpa Mahlon had Dixie, an old Persian horse with big feet that could walk where our mules couldn’t. So we hauled corn out of the bottom in a one-horse wagon with old Dixie pulling it. Then we loaded it on a two-horse wagon and carried it to the barns. I had Pa’s old double-barrel shotgun on the wagon. We had two wagonloads of corn, and I was in the back wagon. Old Dave Perry was in the front wagon, and he stopped the mules and pointed toward the ditch.


I saw something speckled, and at first I thought it was a snake. Then I realized it was a covey of partridges. I got down on the ground and unhitched. I shot and killed eleven birds with the first shot. The birds flew and went in a tree. I shot again and killed two. I’d killed thirteen birds with two shots. Killing those birds gave me a hankering for hunting. I’ve killed lots of birds in my time. I’ve hunted more dogs than the law allows. I’d have to be a rich man today to have the dogs I did and hunt the way I did. I’ve trained a lot of dogs too. You’ve got to make a dog mind to train him, and you’ve got to kill birds when you’re hunting him so he’ll know what your purpose in the woods is.

One thing that happened to me in 1907 when I was thirteen was something I’ve never been able to forget. My neighbor, Joe Traywick Herlong, had gone to the sand hills to buy a home, and Bettis Herlong and I stayed with his family while he was gone. Viola, Joe Traywick’s wife, got up early and cooked breakfast and we ate. She wanted to go to her mama’s and spend the day, but she had to wash clothes first. She went out in the yard to build a fire around the wash pot and left Bettis and me washing and drying the dishes.

Isabel, her little three-year-old girl, was supposed to be in the bed asleep. We heard screams and rushed from the kitchen to the living room where there was a fire in the fireplace. Isabel was there, and her little outing gown was on fire. Her mother was trying to beat out the fire with her fingers, and the fire was all around her face. The mother had heard the screams and beat us to the child. Right straight I pulled off my coat and wrapped it around the little girl, and the fire went out. We finally located her father down in Edgefield County. He got home about three o’clock, and Isabel lived ‘til about midnight and died. Bettis and I didn’t go to school that day. That little girl was in horrible pain, and she was spitting up raw flesh. Mrs. Emmie, Bettis’ mother, came on over there, and they did get old Dr. Kirksey, but he couldn’t do anything. There was nothing to do. Dr. Wise didn’t come; he had started practicing in 1904 when he hung up his


shingle on a wooden building on the west end of where the Agriculture building is today. Isabel’s death affected me awful. Spitting up the flesh was the worst . . . I can still hear her just whining.

Jesus Christ, I just remembered—I put out another child; this time it was a little Negro girl. I had the same experience in 1910. We were plowing right by a tenant house in Johnston right where the Reigel plant stands today. A little seven-year-old girl was playing by the wash pot. It was a cold April morning, and I had on a coat. I put that child out too, but she was burned bad. I went after a doctor to talk out the fire. That Negro man opened the Bible and read something and ran his hands over that child’s body—she was skinless—and if that child’s body didn’t turn a different color, I hope I may die now, not week after next, and she hushed crying right then. But she died that night.

Back to 1907. In August of that year Reverend Will Allen held a meeting at Sardis, and he did wonderful preaching. On a Thursday evening he called mourners (people coming to the altar to be prayed for), and nobody came. Then my great-uncle Joe Long, Grandma Sue’s brother and Aunt Betty’s husband (he was a good singer), got up in the back of the church and began to sing “I’m Bound for the Promised Land.” The church people all began to sing with him and to go to the altar. Uncle Will’s text that night was “When, What, and Where?” Uncle Joe Long was as mean as the devil, but that sermon stirred him up. He died the next year of kidney colic—a terrible death.

The only hanging that ever occurred in Saluda County was in 1908. Major Herring (his daddy tied grain for me one year) killed a white man—a Mr. Piper—when he was picking cotton with his wife, and his little boy was playing around them. Mr. Piper had whipped Major Herring about something he’d done, and that made him mad. He shot Mr. Piper with his family looking. He was tried at the Saluda courthouse and sentenced to death. They hanged him right back of the old jail. Ben Sample was the sheriff then, and he couldn’t pull the trigger. So Jim Padget (he was a


descendant of Josiah) pulled it. A crowd of people went, but I didn’t want to go. I went rabbit hunting with David Herlong and a Robertson boy. We were hunting between Frank Long’s and Jouette’s when Ad Minick, Rob Brown, and others came back by from the hanging. One of them had a piece of the rope. I asked for a little bit of it, and they gave some to me. I kept it for years. I don’t know why.

In 1908 I was fourteen. That fall I had begun to feel like I was sort of a man. I thought about running away from home. I’ll never forget what a father can see that you think you’re not letting him see. Pa said to me, “Davenport, I can discern you’re thinking about doing the same thing your brothers did.” I can hear his words now, and they echo back through the years: “The road is twenty feet wide, and it will accept you, but I want you to remember—Everything that glitters is not gold, and a poor home is better than a rich ‘broad.’” How true! How true!

Chapter 4

1908–1909

Grandma Sue and Curtis Die

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So help me God, my father got sick in six weeks, and in two months I had to go out into the cold, hard world. Jouette married Mrs. Emmie Grigsby Herlong, a widow with five children, and lived in her house. I found out that few people care anything about you. I was whipped from pillar to post.

My own people treated me so sorry that Mrs. Carrie McCarty Harrison, Mr. Ben’s wife and my son-in-law’s grandmother, wanted to take me in to raise, but she decided that since she had nothing but girl children, it wouldn’t be wise. She was so dang right. Me and Ethel, one of her girls, was sorta sweethearts at that time.

I worked that whole year for Uncle Mahlon Padgett, Pa’s brother. I went to Uncle Oscar’s first, but Uncle Mahlon’s crop got eat up with grass, and he came by and asked Uncle Oscar if I could help him. He was living at the Courtney Place in Trenton. I went down there and stayed the balance of the year as a wages hand. All the pay I got out of it was a three-dollar-and-a-half suit of clothes, my last pair of short breeches. Pa was staying at Aunt Ella’s house in a dark room upstairs. He wouldn’t talk to anybody but Aunt Ella and Frank Cannon. He’d slip out and go to the field

Grandma Sue and Curtis Die 29

where Frank, a close neighbor, was working. He got better, and I came home. Home wasn’t the big, two-story Dave Busby house anymore; Pa moved us to the little house I live in today. It was just four rooms then. It was one of the houses Pa had built for hands to live in when he left Ridge Spring and came back to his farm in 1893.

This was the same year that Grandma Sue died and Aunt Pearl and Uncle Ernest moved to Edgefield. Aunt Ella and Uncle Joe Etheredge came to live in the home place with Grandpa, and Gus came to live with Pa and me—right here in this house where Gladys and I have lived for over fifty years.

Grandma Sue got sick in January of 1909. They had doctors from Saluda, some country doctors, a doctor from Johnston, and one from Newberry. Finally Dr. Strother from Johnston pronounced that she had yellow jaundice. When she didn’t get better, they sent for Dr. Mayer in Newberry. He came in a buggy and charged $25.00. Pa paid him, but he didn’t want to. He’d been in a murky spell. Dr. Mayer said she had the fast kind of cancer. That was the first time I’d ever heard of cancer. She lived about six weeks. She died on March 9, a warm, fair day.

That night it turned cold and rainy, but I had to make two trips to Saluda in a buggy to bring folks back. One time I went to get Aunt Matt’s children, Edith and Lillie, and bring them back. Aunt Matt was already with Grandma. It had been raining cats and dogs, and the Little Saluda River was up where we crossed it down below where the Milliken Plant is now. Lillie was about nine years old, and she was scared of all that water. When we drove into the water, she tried to jump out of the buggy. I grabbed her and pulled her back. Both of us got soaking wet. It was a cold March day, and I knew we had to get dry before we went any farther. We stopped at Cousin Luke Grigsby’s house just up the road. He lived where Charles Johnson’s big house is now on Highway 378. He had a big fire going in the fireplace in the sitting room, and we stayed there and dried by the fire.


After we got to Grandma’s house, she was getting worse and worse, but her mind was still clear as a bell. Every one of her children was there—all except Aunt Mame from Leesville. Just as the sun was going down, she had Aunt Matt pull up the shade so she could watch the sun setting. Then she asked Oscar, Mahlon, and Ella to sing her favorite hymn, “When the Sun is Sinking in the West.” There was a big crowd in the room—children, in-laws, and grandchildren. As the sun went behind the horizon, they finished singing, and Grandma Sue passed on into the next world just as easy—not even a short breath. She had five sons and one son-in-law for pallbearers. Joe Oscar, Aunt Ella’s son was bad sick with pneumonia, and Dr. Wise wouldn’t let Aunt Ella go to the burial. But the next morning before the hearse carried Grandma to Sardis cemetery, all the family except my father gathered round the bed and sang a song, and Grandpa Mahlon prayed.

After Grandma died, Gus came to live with Pa and me, and Pa bought a farm in Edgefield County right out of the town of Johnston, but we couldn’t move there because Curtis was too sick. That spring Curtis, Hattie, Ela, Minier, Pa, and I were all living together in this same little house I am living in today. Curtis was dying of consumption. That spring Pa sent Cousin Joe Padgett over to talk with Cousin Billy Long, Hattie’s father, and to ask him if he would help support Hattie and Curtis in a separate house. Curtis was too sick with tuberculosis to work. Cousin Billy sent him word that he wouldn’t give a penny to help them.

That night Pa bought a house and twelve acres of land where the Whittles live now. Hattie and Curtis moved there and stayed in that house from April until August. Then she took the girls and went home. One morning in August, I saw Hattie walking back to Cousin Billy’s house. She left Curtis because her family was afraid that she and the children would catch tuberculosis. She had no means of support, and Curtis had no money to give her or to leave her when he died. She was totally dependent on her father, and she had to do what he said. He told her he’d support her at his


house and nowhere else. So she had no choice. She left the man she loved.

I saw her leaving, so I unhitched the mules from the plow and came on back to our house. There was nobody here. I went to Mr. Luke Hawkins house and asked him if he knew where Pa and Gus were. He said they were over at Mose Long’s place. I went on over there, and we all ate dinner. Cousin Billy had brought Hattie back, and she was there too. After dinner he said, “Hattie, if you’re going with me, get in the buggy, and let’s go.” Hattie went home with her father. She had no choice. Right then Cousin Frank Long, as peculiar as he was, won a piece of my heart. He looked at Curtis and said, “Curtis, mighty little I’ve got at my house” (he was sure right about that), “but if you go home with me, I’ll share it with you.” Well, from that day until the day he died, I took a lot off of Cousin Frank, and I watched after him because I remembered what he’d said to my dying brother. Curtis didn’t go back to the little house Pa had bought because he couldn’t take care of himself, so we brought him back here where Gus and Pa and I were living. And I took care of him until he died in December.

A few nights before he died, Curtis sent me over to Cousin Billy’s to ask Hattie to come and bring the little girls for him to see one last time. She couldn’t come; she had no choice. She was dependent on her father, and he told her she couldn’t come and then come back to live with him. Next to the last words Curtis ever said were, “Tell Hattie I love her.”

In 1909 I helped Uncle Joe Etheredge, Aunt Ella’s husband, build the Chappells bridge. A sign on it now says “Dangerous Bridge,” but that bridge has been there since 1909. There was a fellow Blalock, an infidel, who owned a forty-horse farm up above Cross Hill. One of his Negroes married a Negro woman down here in Saluda. That Negro man came visiting in Saluda and heard of Pa and came to see him and asked him for a crop. Pa hired him. I fed him dinner that day he came. It was the last week in August. Pa wrote Mr. Blalock and told him that if he’d let the man move,


he’d pay his bill. Mr. Blalock wrote Pa that the man owed him $26.80. He’d been working for wages for Mr. Blalock.

On the second day of September, I hitched up the mules and took one of our wages hands and went to Cross Hill to move the man. It was 36 miles. We left before day. We stopped in Cross Hill and bought something to eat and got directions to Mr. Blalock’s house. We didn’t feed the mules. It was a Saturday afternoon, and everybody was picking cotton.

We drove up to the Negro’s house. His wife and two babies were there, and we began to load the wagon. It was half full when I saw a man coming through the cotton field on a horse. That horse was single-footing and knocking the cotton out as he came. It was Mr. Blalock. He told the Negro to put the furniture back in the house. I told him that the furniture was in our wagon and that the wagon was in a public road and that he’d said the man could move if we paid what he owed and that I had the check my father had written. I said, “I believe you believe in the old saying, ‘An ought’s an ought, a five is a figure; all for the white man and none for the Negro.’” He didn’t like what I said and told me I was talking mighty smart for a chap. He wouldn’t let them put another stick of furniture in the wagon, and I wouldn’t let them take a stick out. So we sat there. I told him I’d like to go home. I said to him, “Mr. Blalock, you don’t know my father, do you?”

He answered, “ Never heard of him.” I told him my father was six feet three inches tall, ramrod

straight and much of a man and that he said what he pleased and meant what he said.

At that moment I looked up and saw Pa round the corner of the piazza. He drove the buggy up the path with Pat and Bess pulling it. Curtis was in there with him, and the poor boy was dying. He should have been home in bed. Pa didn’t do a thing, and I was beginning to regret what I’d told Mr. Blalock. Then he asked me, “Davenport, what’s the matter?”

And I answered, “He wouldn’t let me bring them back.” Pa asked, “Did you give him the money?”


I told him that I’d tried to and Mr. Blalock wouldn’t take it. Then Pa looked at Mr. Blalock, and he said kinda quiet, “Mr. Blalock, I want to tell you something. You’ve been keeping hands in peonage. If you don’t let that hand go, you’ll be in a federal jail before midnight. I’ll go and swear out a warrant for you.”

Suddenly Mr. Blalock changed his mind and accepted the check and rode off. We loaded the rest of the furniture and that Negro man, his wife, and his two children got home about daybreak. I took them to the little house that Pa had set aside for them to live in. They didn’t have a penny of money and no sheets or blankets or clothes. And they didn’t have a thing to eat. Pa went to the store and bought sheets and blankets and food for them.

They stayed with us for a couple of years and made good crops. When they left, they left with a good bit of money and plenty of food and clothes and some new furniture. Mr. Blalock didn’t treat just Negroes bad; he treated whites bad too. Rob Brown from here in Saluda got a job thirty years ago overseeing for Blalock, and even though Rob was an intelligent white man, he still had a heck of a time getting away.

My pa treated everybody fair—black or white, rich or poor. He taught me that. He was stern and he was hard on us boys, but he was always honest and he was always fair. I can say I learned a lot from him.

He had to bring Curtis with him that day because there was nobody at home to take care of him, and by August he couldn’t take care of himself. I guess the trip didn’t make him any worse; he died that December. He’d been sick a long, long time.

Another thing that happened that summer happened to Gus. He was riding in front of Luke Hawkins’ house and showing off in front of Mr. Hawkins’ girls. He was riding our horse Pat home from Mt. Willing, and he had buttermilk and butter that he’d bought from Cousin Fanny Long. He had the butter in one hand, and he pulled the lines tight so that he could stay on the horse. When he did that, the horse tore out home. Gus fell off the horse and hit his head on a rock. Mrs. Shadie Hawkins and Bunyon


Reynolds, our mail carrier, picked him up and brought him home to us. Somebody went to get Aunt Ella. We worked with him for hours.

Aunt Ella finally said, “Walter, get the doctor; this boy isn’t coming to.”

Pa was already worried, and he said to me, “Go out and catch Pat and put a safety saddle on her; then go to town and get Dr. Kirksey or Dr. Wise.” It couldn’t have suited me any better. I’d get to run Pat all the way to Saluda. He’d hurt my baby brother, and I’d get him back. When I got to Jouette’s, he was on a gray horse fixing to go possum hunting. The moon was shining bright. They said they heard me when I crossed the river bridge. Jouette didn’t go possum hunting. He went to see about Gus. I went on to town and found Dr. Kirksey. He went right straight to see about Gus, but he made me let the horse rack back home. That’s sort of a switching gait that’s easy for a horse. Foam was standing up on Pat when I got to town; it’s a seven-mile ride from where we lived to Dr. Kirksey’s house.

When we got home, Dr. Kirksey looked at Gus, but he didn’t do anything. Just about daybreak all of us were sitting around the bed watching Gus. He come just to twitching his body. Then he rolled his eyes and opened them wide and said, “Lord, I’m so hungry.”

Dr. Kirksey said, “He’ll be all right. I’m going home.” I was so glad Gus was all right, but I was also glad that everybody was going home too because I didn’t want to cook breakfast for the whole crowd. They scattered out, and Gus lived to be 73 years old.

That same summer Aunt Ella’s daughter had her roommate from South Carolina Central Institute or SCCI, where she was going to school, come to visit. She was Janie Reel, who lived at Cleora eight miles on the other side of Edgefield. I fell in love with her. She was my age—fifteen—and the prettiest girl I had ever seen in my life.

One Sunday after she’d gone home, I left here and rode horseback all the way to Cleora. The reason I rode horseback


instead of going in the buggy was that when I went to get in the buggy, I found that it was covered with mites. The chickens had been roosting on it. I had to go back in the house, strip naked, bathe, change clothes, and start again. I saddled Vesta and rode her all the way to Cleora. I left home at eleven o’clock. I’d cooked a hen for Pa and Gus, and we ate early. They were going to church that afternoon (we had preaching at Emory on second Sunday afternoons and fourth Sunday mornings); so they were glad to eat dinner early. It took me four hours to ride from where I live now to Cleora.

I was having such a good time at Janie’s house that I stayed too late. Instead of coming round by Johnston, I cut through the woods on a shorter route that led across Stephens Creek. When I got to the creek on what was no more than a narrow path, I looked up and it looked like there was a woman beside the road with a long flowing white gown on. I couldn’t get Vesta to go on to find out what was really there. I hitched the horse and walked closer myself. The night was pretty dark, but what little light that was there was shining on the white. As I got nearer, I saw that the woman in white was nothing but a big spider web across a persimmon tree about as high as my head. I was glad to find out that it wasn’t a ghost, but Vesta still didn’t know it. I pulled off my coat and put it over the horse’s head and led her. She went by it and didn’t even know it. I haven’t been that way over Stephens Creek since that night. It’s probably grown up now.

I was beginning to like parties and dancing and visiting girls, and even though Curtis was so sick, I went visiting and to parties. Mike Herlong’s and Ethel Harrison’s birthdays are on the ninth and the eleventh of October. Ethel’s mother, Mrs. Carrie (she’s the one that thought about taking me and raising me when I had to go out and work when my daddy was melancholy), gave a party on the tenth of October to celebrate both birthdays. I was staying down there in Trenton with Mr. Mike Herlong and Mrs. Ida and all their children. I didn’t have a decent pair of shoes to wear to the party. Joe Herlong told me to try his tan pair. I tried them on,


and they fitted perfectly. I wore them to the party. That night Ethel, Mrs. Carrie’s daughter, and I were sitting in the window, and Joe stepped up on the outside and said, “Dave, don’t have too good a time in my shoes.” Mrs. Carrie wouldn’t let us dance. She was against dancing; she thought it was a sin. But she’d let us play twist. There’s no difference really. You played twist in a long line, not in squares like square dancing. We played on the front porch—promenade, swing your partner, back and forth. It was a great night, and I did have a good time in Joe Herlong’s shoes.

Another time Carl Buster and I had been to John McCarty’s house. He lived where his son Harold lives today—on this road where I live but just before you get to Highway 378. Carrie Mae McCarty and Ella Banks were there, and we had a good time. Carl left me at my house, and he rode on home to where he lived—on this road too, just before you get to Highway 178. In 1909 we didn’t have a well at this house, so I had to water the mule at the branch before I took it to the house and put it in the stable. The time was between eleven and twelve o’clock at night. Everything suddenly got as light as day. I heard something hit the ground, and then I heard a hiss like something hot had rolled into the water. The mule raised up and whirled around and ran to the house. The next day when we got the newspaper, Pa was reading about a meteor that had fallen the night before. I told him that it fell in the branch about twenty-five yards below where I was watering the mule. We went down there and looked because he didn’t believe a word I was saying, and, sure enough, the grass was burned.

I was just fifteen then. I cooked for two brothers—Gus and Curtis—a father, and two wages hands, worked in the field myself, and waited on my dying brother. My family felt bitter toward Hattie, but I never did. Somehow I could see her position. I’ve always had a sixth sense for what was going to happen. I didn’t judge until I felt like I was walking in other people’s shoes. Curtis died December 12, 1909, and we buried him at Emory. Hattie and her father, Cousin Billy, went to the funeral. Curtis was


23, and Hattie was the same age when he died. They went to school together. She lived into her nineties, and when she died, her daughters buried her at her father’s plot at Travis Park Cemetery in Saluda. She had chosen not to be buried by Curtis. I always regretted that.

Chapter 5

1910–1911

Out On My Own

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Pa and Gus and I immediately moved to Johnston that December. We had stayed on in this house even after Pa bought the farm in Johnston because Curtis was too sick to move. We waited for him to die. After Christmas Gus and I started to Johnston School. I was fifteen and Gus was eight. I was in the seventh grade. It was embarrassing. I was five feet eleven inches tall. I thought I was grown (which I was), and lots of the children in that school were small. They had to look up to see me, and I had to look down to see them. I was way behind in my lessons. I could learn. I had no trouble there. I’d just never had the time.

We farmed that year—1910—and made a good crop. All that whole country down around Johnston grew lots of sweet potatoes, and they sold them in March in Augusta, just peddled them out there. I remember that on that trip to sell potatoes Cousin Irvin Smith, Aunt Ada’s son and my first cousin, had two loads he was taking; Uncle Oscar, Pa’s brother, had a four-horse load, and Uncle Gamewell Smith had four loads. The first thing that happened to me (I was driving Uncle Oscar’s wagon) was that I had to help Cousin Irving’s wagon out of a bog. His wagon had bogged up

Out On My Own 39

going downhill on the only hill between Trenton and Belvedere. It was red clay and sandy and wet. I took my lead mules out and hitched them to the end of the tongue of his wagon. His two mules and my two mules pulled him out. Pa and Uncle Oscar were in a buggy, and they drove along with us. There was a regular wagon train of us going to Augusta. When we got there, we unloaded the potatoes wherever we could sell them. Three of us sold them at one place. I remember that I saw the man buying our potatoes had a half-bushel basket specially made, and it held more than one-half bushel. I was just sixteen, but I told him to his face, “You’re stealing.” But it didn’t matter; he didn’t get another basket.

He said, “That’s the way I buy them if you want to sell them.” I told him, “I’d let them rot before I’d sell them to you if they

were my potatoes.” When we got through unloading potatoes, I didn’t have a

penny. I put the mules and the wagon in the wagon yard and came back the two blocks to Broad Street. I couldn’t find Pa or Uncle Oscar anywhere, and I was so hungry I could have cried. We’d eaten breakfast at daybreak, and it was three o’clock. I sat down on the curb there on Broad Street and hoped someone would find me. Sure enough, Uncle Oscar came along and asked, “Davenport, what is wrong with you?” I told him I was so hungry I was about to cave in. He asked me why I hadn’t told him I didn’t have any money.

I said, “You and Pa got away too quick.” He gave me two one-dollar bills, and I went to a little cafe called The Hole in the Wall. A sign on the wall said, “Buckwheat cakes and maple syrup: fifteen cents a serving.” I ate three servings—forty-five cents worth. I’ll never taste any rations that good again. When I finished, I felt like a different fellow.

When we were hauling potatoes another time, I had Laura, Fancy, and Pet as three of the four mules. Going into Augusta there were two sets of streetcar tracks over the Savannah River bridge. One streetcar was coming toward us, and one was behind


us. Old Pet was sorta skittish, and just as we got to the middle of the bridge, she reared up. She was the lead mule on the right side. She got her right front leg hung up in the next to the top railing. She was hanging up there and standing on her hind feet, but the wagon was still level. I had a good wagon whip, and I whipped her over the head until she wiggled herself around and got her feet back on the ground. A fellow who was watching the whole show said to me, “Be damned if you don’t know what to do—for a chap like you are.”

I said to him, “A whip will move most anything.” Another thing that happened to me the summer of 1910 made

me the tiredest I’ve ever been in my long life. It was like this: Gus and I went to a Harmony Church picnic at Smith’s pond below Johnston. We drove a wild mule hitched to the buggy, and we should have been home plowing. So I was the cause of our cotton being eat up in grass. I’d been to a picnic instead of plowing, and I’d killed a fine mule in the bargain. When we got to the picnic, I wouldn’t unhitch the mule because I didn’t think I could hitch her back up down there at the picnic. When I got back to the tree I’d hitched her to, she’d dug a two-foot hole all around that tree. If it hadn’t been a big tree, she would have pulled it up. When I untied her and we got in the buggy, she loped home for five miles. She hit the gate and tore it down and broke the buggy shaft. That night she took the colic.

I went and got Will Satcher, who was supposed to know something about doctoring sick animals, and he helped me drench her. He used plain old table salt, and we got some of it in her lungs. She coughed three or four months. Cousin George Wheeler heard her and told Pa to bring her up to his stables and he’d do something with her. Well, he did something with her. She fell in love with a mare they had, and they’d have to take that mule out with them every time they used the mare.

One day Cousin George put steel bits in her mouth and put a trace chain through the big steel bits. When she pulled, she couldn’t budge the chain, but she broke her jaw. Cousin George

Out On My Own 41

had to shoot her. So that’s how I killed Pa’s $350 mule. And on top of that, going to that picnic cost us our cotton crop except for seven acres, and I saved that myself.

On the first week in August we had the cotton sorta half way worked out. The hands wanted to come up here to Saluda to Rock Hill Church to a revival meeting on the first Sunday in August. Of course, they wanted Saturday off too. Pa said he wanted a seven-acre field of cotton plowed. The Negroes wouldn’t plow it, so he told me he’d give me a ten-dollar bill if I’d plow it. Pa was coming on to Saluda from Johnston, and he told me he’d get the ten dollars and leave it for me at Jeff Lewis’ store so I could get it after I finished plowing on Saturday night.

I wanted that ten dollars mighty bad, so I got up at daybreak and took Vesta, a five-gaited Kentucky saddle mare, a horse that didn’t have a bit of sense, and I plowed from daybreak to sundown. I plowed that seven acres. I came to the house, fed the horses, and went inside and fixed supper for myself. I was sixteen years old, and I was the only one at home. I got a pan of water, washed my face and hands and body, and I put one foot in the wash pan on the back doorsteps.

When I went to wash my foot, I leaned back on the floor and that’s the last thing I knew. I slept until Sunday after sundown. I never waked up, and there was not one soul to wake me up. I was foolish feeling when I woke up. I didn’t know where I was or what was the matter. If we hadn’t had an eight-day clock, I wouldn’t have known whether it was Saturday or Sunday or Monday. But I had plowed that seven acres of cotton in one day.

That was some plowing, and I was some tired. I didn’t get over it for a week. I never got my money that Saturday night like I’d planned; in fact, it was the next week before I got the money. I saved those seven acres of cotton. They made better than one-half bale to the acre, and we wouldn’t have made anything on it if I hadn’t plowed it that Saturday because it rained on Monday.

I can still shut my eyes sometime and feel how I felt that night. I just couldn’t move. I don’t reckon I’d a got up then but I was


hungry. I don’t remember what I fixed for supper. It was probably eggs. They’ve always been my stand-by. I was so tired that I felt like the skin was fastened to my ribs. Fact of the business, I couldn’t have plowed so much if I hadn’t had hold of the plow stock. It was like one of those walkers that old people have today. It kept me up.

Gus and I didn’t have fit clothes most of the time, but there was one time we got “sho-nuf” dressed up. Saluda County had made an agreement with the Southern Railroad to build a railroad to Saluda from Ward. The only hitch was that Saluda had to raise fifty thousand dollars to give to Southern Railroad before they would start building the Augusta Northern road to Saluda. My father believed that the only way Saluda could ever become important was for it to have a railroad, so he rode all over the county collecting money. We were living at Johnston then, but that didn’t stop him. He still had Saluda in his heart. When he’d collected all he could collect, then he gave four hundred dollars himself. Now that was a lot of money back then. You could have bought a nice-sized farm for that amount.

When I found out that he had given that much money, I raised hell. I told him that his two children didn’t have decent clothes to wear and he wasn’t taking care of them. He was giving his money to get a railroad to come, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to them in the end. He must have been ashamed because he told me to go to Wright Brothers in Johnston and buy clothes for myself and for Gus. I went the very next day and bought a brown suit for myself, a brown hat, a pair of shoes, and a pair of socks. I bought Gus an outfit too, and I charged it all to Pa.

At that time we had a racehorse, Old Pat, that had one big ankle. We tried to make him a 215 racehorse, and he wouldn’t go but 218. Cousin George Wheeler wanted Vesta. (Pa had bought her on credit for five hundred dollars.) Will Crouch owned the land where the Nantex is now. The Nantex used to be Wheeler Hardware Store. George Wheeler wanted to buy that land from Will Crouch, but Will Crouch wouldn’t sell his land, but he would

Out On My Own 43

deed it to George Wheeler for Walter Padgett’s saddle mare, old Vesta. George Wheeler came and asked Pa to sell the mare back to him. Pa didn’t want to let him have it, but I said to him, “Let him have the mare. You don’t need it.”

George Wheeler said he’d tear up the note for $500 and give Pa twenty-five dollars to boot. Pa agreed, and George gave him the twenty-five dollars. Claude Wheeler, George’s son, rode the mare back to Saluda, and Cousin George went on back in the buggy. Will Crouch got the mare, and George Wheeler got the land he wanted right on Main Street.

Vesta ran away with a buggy right straight and went through a barbed wire fence and cut herself pretty bad. Bub and Willie Harmon bought her from Will Crouch. She got over being cut and calmed down. In 1920 Dewitt Mitchell cut two or three thousand feet of timber and sold all the heart lumber to the planer mill in Newberry. Willie and Bub Harmon sent twenty-three four-horse wagonloads of heart lumber to Newberry, and Vesta was the lead horse on those loads. She made the finest kind of wagon horse. But they got scared and wouldn’t work her to a buggy anymore because they were afraid she’d run away and tear it up. I could have broke her, but Pa wouldn’t let me.

We had three Kentucky bred horses in 1910, Vesta and Pat and Bess. They were all trotters. We’d hitch Bess to the buggy and wrap our hands around the lines, and she’d pull the buggy with her mouth—the traces were slack. Pat and Bess were racehorses. Pat was nine years old and Bess was four. Pa would drive them double late in the afternoon when he’d go out to ride.

Aunt Ella and Uncle Joe Etheredge sent Grace to SCCI in Edgefield then. I always did think Aunt Ella got money from my daddy to send her. When Uncle Joe and Aunt Ella took Grace to Edgefield, they came by our house. That would be just like my daddy—to give her money to send her children and not let his own children go to school. Aunt Ella vowed she’d educate her children. My father was so smart that he didn’t think his children needed any education. He told Ella that she couldn’t educate her


children because she had no money. They were renting land from us. But dog gone if she didn’t get them educated—every last one of them—at South Carolina Central Institute at Edgefield and at Clemson and Winthrop. I loved Aunt Ella and all her children. Padgett brought me cake at Sardis school the fall of 1908. In a way, Aunt Ella looked out for us, but she could do just so much with Pa. Maybe if Ma had lived, we would have all had a chance to go to school. She had her own land that she called her children’s land, and before she died, she made Cousin Ora Etheredge and Uncle Luther promise that they would keep Walter from selling it and spending the money. He did sell it, and he did spend it. I didn’t inherit a dime from my mother or my father. What I’ve got, I bought myself.

That fall of 1910 Pa was called as a juror to the Federal Court in Greenville. He had determined to send us regularly that fall to school, but I got suspended because I wouldn’t take a whipping. I refused to tell on a classmate. Franklin Perry made a sulfur match explode. He punched it in a hole he’d bored with his pocketknife. Miss Eva Rushton, our teacher, demanded that Professor Curry whip me. Franklin was sitting by me in my desk taking Latin over. I smoked cigarettes, and Mrs. Eva knew I did. She assumed that I’d made the match explode. Here’s the funny part. She made me go to the superintendent’s room and tell him. I went and when I came back, she asked me what he said. I answered her, “Nothing.” (I’d just gone and stood at his door; I didn’t ask him anything.) When I told her that he’d said nothing, she carried me herself. That’s part of the reason she demanded that I get a whipping. And I refused to take it. I was suspended from school for that week. That ended my school days until I was nineteen years old. Gus kept on going that year.

One night during that time I was walking the railroad track to see my sweetheart Mary Johnson, who lived a mile and a half down the track. We sat and talked in her parlor until pretty late. When I got ready to come home, instead of walking up the track to our house, I came around by the road. There was a path leading

Out On My Own 45

from the road across the railroad to our house. I was coming down that path thinking about Mary and how pretty she was when all of a sudden I walked up on a great big black bear. I hollered and jumped and thought the end of time had come when that bear raised up. A man got up and said, “What’s the matter?”

I hollered, “Hold that bear.” He answered, “He’s chained, and he wouldn’t hurt you

nohow.” He was a dancing bear that the man carried from place to place. The man would play an organ, and the bear would dance, and then he’d pass the cup. I’d seen a monkey and an organ grinder before, but I’d never seen anybody use a bear to get money. Anyway I went on home and went to sleep, and the man and the bear were gone in the morning when I hitched up the mules and started plowing.

My father got sick—really sick this time. He had consumption too like Ma and Curtis had had. He went back to Aunt Ella’s. She was living in the old home place—the one William had given to Grandpa Mahlon and Grandma Sue to take care of Peggy. That left Gus and me dangling at Johnston by ourselves. Gus went to stay with Uncle Jake Smith and his wife, Aunt Ada, another one of Pa’s sisters. That left me in that house all by myself. I stayed there from December, 1910, until the first of February, 1911, not working. The farm we were living on was where the Reigel plant stands now.

After Christmas Uncle Mahlon, Pa’s brother, bought my father’s place—where I was living—and moved into the house and hired me for wages at ten dollars a month. One dollar of that went to Aunt Motlena, Uncle Mahlon’s wife, for my washing and ironing, and I helped do the washing. I also helped make homemade soap.

The first month I worked for wages was a dream come true. I’d wanted a tricycle and didn’t get it. I’d wanted a bicycle and didn’t get it. When I went to work, I even quit smoking cigarettes to save money to buy that bicycle I’d always wanted. The first money I made in February I went to Van Edwards’ store the first of March and bought a Wonder bicycle for $25.00. I paid five dollars down


from the money I had made in February, and I was supposed to pay $2.50 a month. The next month when I started to Van Edwards’ to pay that money, I met Buster Moyer, and he told me there was a poker game going on back of the blacksmith shop. I thought I’d win enough to pay for my bicycle that evening. Instead I lost my ten dollars in ten minutes—a whole month’s wages.

After my part of the game was over, I went up to Mr. Edwards’ store and just hung around for a while. I finally got up enough courage to tell him I didn’t have the money. I remember what he said when I wanted to tell him why I didn’t have the money. He said he didn’t need to know why. I told him I’d like for him to know. He said for me to go ahead and tell him. When I told him I’d lost it in a poker game, he said, “You’re one in a thousand. The other 999 would have been going the other way. And here you are telling me about it.” I managed to pay him that year even if I did make a bad start.

That debt caused a wonderful thing to happen. As long as Van Edwards lived, whatever he had to sell, I could get on credit. That was in 1911. In 1932 when times were bad, I was running around cotton stalks, and Ben Lindler, my neighbor, came along with a load of wheat going to the flour mill in Johnston. He asked me to ride down there with him, but I couldn’t go. I told Ben to go to Van Edwards’ Hardware Store and ask him to send me a steel beam middle buster, two single trees, and a double tree. Ben said, “You know he won’t send them, Mr. Padgett—not on credit.”

I said, “I bet he does.” I was eating dinner at twelve o’clock, and I saw the handle of the middle buster tied on Ben Lindler’s car as he came by the window. When I got outside, I said, “Ben, tell me what happened.”

He answered me, “I was talking to one of the younger Edwards boys, and he was sorta hesitant to send the things, and Mr. Van overheard him and asked him what was wrong. When the clerk explained, he said, “Send Davenport Padgett what he asked for.”

Out On My Own 47

When Mr. Van died, I read about his death in the paper at twelve o’clock. I went to Saluda and bought flowers and went to his funeral. Gladys told me I didn’t have any sense—that Van Edwards didn’t need my flowers. But I told her, “Van Edwards was my friend—first, last, and always.”

I made Uncle Mahlon twenty-two bales of cotton and 175 bushels of corn for my fifty dollars wages. It was 1911, a dry year; and we made the biggest crop around Johnston. We just happened to have a few showers. It did not rain until the fourteenth of June to bring most cotton up, but ours had already come up.

On the first day of July there was no more farm work for me to do since it was lay-by time, so I stayed with Jouette and his wife, Mrs. Emmie, for a while. Jouette’s step-son, David Herlong, and Alvin Padgett, my first cousin, and I drove a mule and buggy up to Barney Pugh’s to work building the Augusta Northern Railroad from Ward to Saluda at $1.25 a day. We were beating up rocks with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer. That was hard work.

The last week in August—about the twentieth, I’d say—I had to go back to Uncle Mahlon’s to gather that big crop. The day after I got back home—the only home I had—at Uncle Mahlon’s, we were pulling fodder when Mr. John Marsh, cotton buyer at Johnston, came out to our place to try to hire me to oversee his seven-horse farm at the old Henry Conrad Herlong brick house. He said he’d pay me eighteen dollars a month and give me my room, board, washing, and ironing. Uncle Mahlon told Mr. Marsh he needed me to gather the big crop we’d made.

After supper that night we were still sitting at the table. I can see Uncle Mahlon now. He looked worried, twisting around—he’d look at me; then he’d look off. He looked directly at me and said, “Davenport, I can’t knock you out of eight dollars a month. Call John Marsh and tell him to come after you.”

And so at seventeen I was overseeing a seven-horse farm. I lived in that big old house as one of the family. Henry Conrad Herlong, my wife’s great-grandfather, built it before 1833 when he sold that place and moved up here near Emory. Mr. Marsh was


austere, but Mrs. Marsh was a darling, sweet woman. They had two sons, John Fleming and Theodore. John Fleming was all right, but Theodore was like his father. I worked night and day, but I got paid for it. They were good to me too.

One Friday we were hauling hay in a little bottom below the Henry Conrad Herlong house and putting it in a cow barn real close to the house. Tony Turner and Hillary Crouch, two big men in Johnston who were playing the stock market, set out to go to Columbia right after dinner. Their Model T turned over in a sand bed. The two Negroes that were stacking hay for us went and pulled the car off the two men. The car cranked, and they went back to Johnston with oil dripping from the car, but they weren’t hurt.

On Sunday morning after that Friday I started down to see Ethel Harrison at Trenton. We’d been sorta sweethearts since 1908 when Mrs. Carrie wanted to adopt me. A car came along the road, and the mule I was driving ran away and tore up the buggy. I left the buggy at the blacksmith’s shop. A Negro came along with a road cart, and I bought it for $7.50. That was the way I went on to see Ethel.

It was Mr. Marsh’s buggy. Mr. Marsh had the blacksmith fix it. One shaft was broken, and one wheel was torn down. I visited Ethel, and we had a good time talking with all the young folks that were at her house.

When I got back to Mr. Marsh’s house, I went to bed. I smelled something burning. I knew immediately that it was the hay that we’d put up on Friday. I waked Mr. Marsh. You could see the fire at the back of the barn. I pulled the hay away. I was scared as the dickens. Mr. Marsh had water works run by electricity (Johnston had electricity then; Saluda didn’t), and he got a hose and we put out the fire between one and two o’clock.

My father had always told me about spontaneous combustion. I hadn’t believed that it was true, but I found out that night that he was right. That hay had been green, and it had been heating up since Friday, and it finally got hot enough to catch on fire. Another

Out On My Own 49

thing my father told me is that you’ll never see the streak of lighting that hits you, so there is no use to be scared. But I was scared of lightning anyway.

I stayed with the Marsh family one year, and I learned a lot from them and from being in charge of that big farm.

Chapter 6

1912

Living in Georgia

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Uncle Mahlon bought land in Hawkinsville, Georgia, that fall of 1911. On January 1, 1912, I left the Marsh family and moved with him to Georgia. Uncle Mahlon and Aunt Motlena and their children went on ahead. I went individually in a covered wagon and carried a Negro family with me through the country. The trip took us one week. We cooked beside the road. Aunt Motlena had fixed some things for us to eat, so we didn’t have to cook everything. The Negro family was Dave Perry, his supposed wife, and two children. Mostly, we slept in the back of the wagon, but twice we stayed in empty old houses. On Tuesday when it had rained all day, we were camping in a house, and we met a family from Augusta that were also camping there. We decided to travel along together for a while. Everybody was going to Georgia, which seemed like the Promised Land to us. The land agents were advertising ex-Governor Joe Brown’s land. He had turned it over to real estate agents to sell. The posters made it sound like heaven sure enough.

We were still traveling on Friday, and it was blizzardly cold and fair as a lily. As we passed one man’s house, he came out and tried to get us to spend the night with him. He had a Negro on his

Living in Georgia 51

place that the colored people could sleep with. It was too cold to sleep out. The family I was traveling with didn’t want to spend the night in the house. Mr. Faircloth (I found out later that was the man’s name) said he had a house he was building and we could sleep in that if we wouldn’t sleep with his family. We went to that nearly finished house and built a big fire in the fireplace and cooked supper. The house had two rooms with no windows in them, but we stayed in the other part.

Just about time we’d got settled, Mr. Faircloth came in and said to me, “Young man, the school teachers have arrived at my house for a party. Come join us.” I’d been traveling in that wagon for a week, and I felt caked with grime. I went to the branch near the house, brought back water, heated it on the fire, bathed and put on my Sunday clothes, and went down to the big house where all the lights were.

When I got there, I saw the biggest table I’d ever seen. Mr. Faircloth had three daughters, and there were four schoolteachers boarding with him. Boy, that was a wonderful party. There were lots of food, lots of warmth, and lots of light. People gathered in, and it turned out to be a big square dance—something I dearly loved. Beulah, one of the Faircloth girls, was a real good dancer, and I was too, so we had a great time dancing. I was talking with her when the man I was traveling with hollered in to me, “Mr. Padgett, let’s get to moving.” It was about one-thirty, and I sure wasn’t ready to go. But we left and traveled the balance of the night and all that next day, which was a Saturday.

About eight o’clock Saturday night I reached my destination, Brownsdale, Georgia. Mr. DeLigney, the man I was traveling with, went to Pelham, Georgia. Uncle Mahlon and Aunt Motlena had already set up housekeeping in a house on the 250 acres of land he’d bought. He had bought Pa’s place in Johnston for $7,000 and sold it for $11,000. He made a $4,000 profit. He paid down $2,500 on the $12,500 he agreed to pay for the 250 acres of land in Georgia. They gave him bond for title according to Georgia law. Uncle Mahlon had a dream that when the railroad went through


that part of Georgia, it’d balloon out into a city and he’d be sitting pretty to make a fortune. I was getting twelve dollars a month for wages—six dollars less than at the Marshes. But everybody was excited about the good times coming.

On the very next day, Uncle Mahlon and the big children went to church. It was a good old Baptist church, and Mr. Crow was preaching. While they were gone, I pushed the baby, little Eva, all over the whole place in a pushcart. That night at the supper table I told Uncle Mahlon that his dream would never materialize. He didn’t believe a word of what I said. And anything in the God’s world that Uncle Mahlon wanted, Aunt Motlena was willing to go along with. Then she’d tell him after it was over, “I knew it wouldn’t work out.” Old Dave Perry, who came in the wagon with me, was working for wages too. We had a big crop—fifteen acres of cotton to plow and thirty acres of corn. Uncle Mahlon was a gentleman farmer—just like his brother-in-law Frank Herlong (my son-in-law’s father). Both of them liked to tell other people what to do.

Pretty soon I took the measles. I was in bed sick at Uncle Mahlon’s house where I was living. I couldn’t work for a while, and Aunt Motlena took care of me. I thought I was about well, and I wanted to go out and see some people. Aunt Motlena raised sand; she was afraid that it would come a shower and I’d get wet. Everyone knew that if you got wet right after you had had the measles, you would die. Anyway it was as fair as a lily, but she made me put on an overcoat before she would let me go out of the house.

I went over to this house where a new family had just moved in. They didn’t act like they had good sense. They didn’t introduce themselves, and they were just sitting around on fifteen or twenty sacks of cottonseed. They had put up one bed and the kitchen stove. I sat down and tried to talk to them. A little girl about three years old got up on my lap and started talking to me. I enjoyed playing with her, but in about twenty minutes she gurgled a little and just died that quick right there in my lap.


I took the little dead girl in the room where the mattress was. I found her a clean undershirt. I got a rag and some water and bathed her face and arms and laid her out on the bed. The whole family was going crazy with screaming and hollering. They acted like they didn’t know what to do.

The little boy came and got on my lap when I sat back down, and I talked to him. And the same thing happened; he come just to gurgling and was dead. I took him into the bedroom and bathed him and found a little suit of clothes in their things, and I laid him out by his little sister. A woman who was in the house said, “Young man, I don’t know you, but is there anything you can’t do?”

I said, “Yes, Mam, I can’t have a baby.” The children had gotten wet. They had come to Hawkinsville

on a train in a boxcar. Their name was Kiker. They were moving from north Georgia to south Georgia. They had bought a place and put up $1000. It was some of ex-governor Joe Brown’s land that everybody was going after just like the Oakies went to California. They had left the boxcar somewhere between Hawkinsville and Brownsdale and come on in a wagon. They ran into a shower of rain, and the children and everybody else got wet. The only trouble was that the two little ones were just getting over the measles. The little girl was four, the boy five, and I was seventeen. This was in the spring before I turned eighteen in June. They had three or four other children.

The next morning they went to town and got two coffins, and they carried those children back to north Georgia to be buried where they had come from. Yes, they packed up everything they had and went back on the same boxcar the next day. I went and asked Mr. Regan, the salesman, whether he gave them the $1000 back. He wouldn’t answer me then, but finally he came to me later and told me that he sent them their money. They had lost enough in south Georgia following a dream; they sure didn’t need to lose their money too.


Long after Gladys and I were married and living in this house, our good neighbors Eva and Kenny Hawkins had two children to die from measles and whooping cough and diphtheria—all together. Christine died in my arms. I’ve seen a lot of death in my time. Thank God, none of our four children were ever very sick, and they are all still alive.

On the twelfth day of April, 1912, the year the Titanic sank, we were cutting cordwood when three fellows came along. One of them said to me, “Sonny, do you know where any birds are?”

I replied, “The woods are just full of birds.” He said to me then, “We’ll give you three dollars a day to go

with us hunting and show us where to find birds.” I was tickled at the offer, and I told him, “I’ll have to run to the

house and get my gun.” Another man said real quick, “You can’t carry a gun if you go

with us.” And I answered, “If I can’t carry a gun, I can’t go. I sho ain’t

going hunting without a gun.” Another man whispered to the first fellow, “Let him get his

gun; he can’t kill birds anyway.” The three men were from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Old man

Regan had invited them there to hunt. I went home and got my gun. We went one hundred and fifty to two hundred yards from where we were cutting wood, and the dog pointed a covey of birds. The men had pump guns with ivory sights. When they lifted the guns, they looked like crow’s wings against the sun—sorta bluish. I couldn’t hardly do anything for looking at their guns.

They emptied the guns when the covey got up, and they killed nothing. Then they shot at a single bird and missed him. When they got through shooting, I killed the bird. I had Pa’s old 32-inch barrel hammer gun—best gun I ever saw. Pa never shot it five times in his life. He bought it to kill squirrels out of the piney woods, but I saw him kill a goose with it one Sunday morning. Ma


said he shot at the lead goose and the back one fell out of the drove. Of course, I couldn’t argue about where he aimed.

One of the men said, “Looks like we’ll have to let him kill our birds for us.” We hunted for three days and killed eighty-two birds. I killed fifty of them. They had a bird supper at Mr. Jenkins’ house where they were staying. He had a piazza around the whole house. They put a wire against the posts and let the birds hang by their heads for three days. Then they hired a Negro woman to clean them. They asked me to come and eat supper with them.

I said, “No, I can’t come. Those birds are rotten.” They laughed at me and said they were just mellow. Mellow, hell, they were rotten after hanging on that porch for three days in the sun. They had Mr. Jenkins meet us each day at dinnertime with a willow basket of food that Mrs. Jenkins had fixed. She was a good cook, so I got my nine dollars and three good meals and would have had another meal if I’d been willing to eat “mellow” birds. I left my gun there in Georgia when I came back home. I told Frank Herlong to bring it home with him. He hunted with it the whole time he was over there, but he didn’t bring it home.

People were dying like flies with typhoid fever where we were in Georgia. There was a Price boy about nineteen years old who was so mean and ugly that he’d cuss his daddy. I told him, “I don’t care what my daddy did, I wouldn’t do what you do.” And he cussed me. The last of May he died of typhoid fever. That Price boy’s mother was a Williamson from Sumter, and I’ve always believed he was kin to my daughter-in-law Edith, my son Curtis’ wife, because her mother was a Williamson from Sumter too.

It got awful dry and Dave could work the crop by himself. They didn’t really need me on the farm. I asked Uncle Mahlon to let me get a job carpentering. He willingly did. But I had to get a boarding place. Aunt Motlena was pregnant and didn’t need to cook for me. I got a job—$1.25 a day—building a depot, big store, cotton platform, and double-suction gin. I’d been working for two weeks when it happened. Mr. Jenkins, the man who had the


contract to build all the buildings, held back one week of everybody’s pay. On the third Monday I told the sixteen boys that smoked cigarettes that if I was Mr. Jenkins, I’d turn them off for wasting his time. We were working from sun to sun; we didn’t know anything about any eight- or ten-hour day. That very afternoon about two o’clock, Mr. Jenkins came driving up, and there were three or four boys standing up rolling cigarettes. He made the statement that the next man that rolled a cigarette at work would lose his job.

I was measuring two-by-fours that would go between the sill and the plate for the gin house, and I reached over on the sill and picked up a Piedmont cigarette and lit it. (Piedmont was one of the already-made cigarettes you could buy.) One or two of the boys hollered out, “Padgett’s smoking.” Mr. Jenkins came running around the gin house and immediately fired me. I asked him to pay me off knowing full well he couldn’t. I told him what my father would do in such a case—he’d pay off. But I had to wait until Saturday and go down to Hawkinsville and get my pay for the last week’s work and for the part of Monday I’d worked.

If you ever heard tell of or ever thought the Lord was guiding somebody, He was really guiding me that day. I stood in the middle of a forty-acre sand field, and I realized that I had played the devil. I opened my pocketbook and I had two dollars in it. I said, “Dear Lord, please let me keep two dollars.” I made a vow that I’d never ask another man for a job. If I couldn’t make it on my own, I’d just perish. Boy, I felt little too. Don’t think I didn’t.

When I got to the boarding house where I was staying, there were two men sitting in a buggy asking Mrs. Winn, who ran the boarding house, to give them lodging for that week. She turned them down because her daughter was convalescing from typhoid fever and she already had six boarders. I was close enough to hear the conversation, so I told her to take them, that I’d help her cook since I’d just lost my job. She did just that. I found out then that the two men wanted a flagman. In less than ten minutes I was holding the flag to survey a town—that town that Uncle Mahlon


had been dreaming of, that town that never did materialize. I had five days work. When we finished on Friday afternoon, they paid me fifteen dollars. And I had time to help Mrs. Winn too. She said I was good help in the kitchen.

The following Saturday morning I went to Hawkinsville to get my back pay from Mr. Jenkins. He paid me and asked me why I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t been rolling a cigarette. I said to him, “Mr. Jenkins, I’ve been pushed around so much that I’ve learned to take care of myself. You came around like a Jersey bull, and I lost my reason.” He was man enough to ask me to come to work. I told him, “I can’t saw to a line or drive a nail straight.” (And that still holds true, and I’m eighty-two.)

He told me, “But you can work, and you can get other people to work. I’d like for you to come back. What will it cost me?”

I said quickly, “Two dollars a day.” He answered, “I’ll give you $1.90.” I was there when the gin house, the store, the platform, and the

depot were all finished. They’re still there. The train ran, and they used the store some. Uncle Mahlon and Frank Herlong, his brother-in-law, ran the store a little. Frank came to Georgia when he left Wofford, and he lived with Uncle Mahlon. At that time I was boarding with Mrs. Winn. Mr. Mike, Frank’s father, bought him a place in Georgia—about one hundred and twenty acres. It was right on the railroad tracks too. Frank wasn’t married then, but he got married to Roseva Harrison the following Christmas, and she came back with him. That’s when Frank and Mahlon farmed and ran the store for four years. They mostly played checks and bird hunted. Finally they had to run a pair of mules out of Georgia to have something to farm with in South Carolina. They lost all the money they had put down on the land.

Chapter 7

1912–1913

Coming Back Home

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I got a letter from my father asking me to come back so that my baby brother Gus would have a home. Nobody wanted him. My father was upstairs at Aunt Ella’s again. This time he was melancholy. His tuberculosis was better, but he was very depressed.

I came back to give Gus a home—the second time in my life. We had our furniture packed up and stored in what we called the “Jack” house, a small tenant house on the place my father still owned, the one he’d bought before he got married and put in my ma’s name. It was right close to where Aunt Ella lived. Pa refused to go to housekeeping when I got back. Negroes were working the land and living in the big house Pa had built for Ma in 1893 when he moved back from Ridge Spring. Gus had stayed with Aunt Ada in Johnston the fall of 1911 and the spring of 1912. Then he came to Aunt Ella’s where Pa was. Pa paid board for both of them all the time they were there.

After I returned, I was at loose ends because I had no home. Pa wouldn’t leave Aunt Ella’s. I worked around by the day and stayed with Cousin Frank Long. I ended up picking cotton by the

Coming Back Home 59

hundred pounds for him. Gus had come to Cousin Frank’s too and was picking cotton with us every day. That was the fall of 1912.

When we got through gathering the crop, Cousin Frank put me to breaking up a dry pasture with a Bluebird plow with a dull point. It took me nearly two days to break it up—just two acres. When I finished I went in the house, bathed, shaved, and packed my clothes. Just as I was ready to leave, Cousin Frank walked in, and I really let him have it. “Anybody that would put a motherless boy to breaking up a dry pasture with a dull-pointed plow would do anything in the God’s world,” I said to him. He put his arm around me and cried and begged me to forgive him and stay. Gus was still staying there, and after we picked all the cotton, he went to school at Emory. Frank lived then where Valmore Kirkland lives now.

I didn’t stay. I went down to Cousin Mose Long’s that night. He was Frank’s brother. I had told Cousin Frank that I was going back to Georgia and going right away. I spent that night with Cousin Mose.

The next morning Pa and Grandpa came to Cousin Mose’s house early. Pa asked me to go back with him and start back to housekeeping. I agreed and we went straight on over to the “Jack” house. It wasn’t but a mile from where Cousin Mose lived at that time. We went and got Gus and brought him back to live with us. On the Thursday after Christmas we waked up and the ground was covered with snow. I couldn’t work then, so I started back to school at Sardis after that snow, and I went about two months. I was going to be nineteen years old in June. After a while the Negroes moved out of the big house, and we moved back into it. This was the fall of 1912 and the spring of 1913.

We ran a two-horse farm the summer of 1913. In August when Pa, Gus, and I were living in the big house, I nearly caused a disaster. My good friend Emmett King had taught me how to clean my own clothes and press them because I didn’t have the fifty cents it cost to get them pressed. (Emmett King was Nancy Edwards’ brother—she lives in Saluda now.) We used lanterns for


lights in our Bachelor Hall. We got our kerosene for the lanterns from Jim Ridgell’s store in quart liquor bottles. Gasoline, at that time, was hard to buy but good to clean clothes with. I had bought a quart of gasoline and it was in a quart liquor bottle too.

One rainy morning I’d been cleaning and pressing my Sunday suit. I’d left the bottle on the table where it stayed all day. Pa was bad to read, and that night the lantern he was reading by had a sooty chimney. He cleaned it and filled it with kerosene—he thought. But it happened to be the gasoline I’d left in the quart bottle on the dining table.

I was visiting over at Aunt Ella’s house when he was doing the lantern cleaning. That meant I was about a half mile away. It was between sundown and dark that he cleaned the lantern and poured gasoline in it. He struck a match to light it, and it just went PH—OO-OO—SH. He lit it again, and it did the same thing. He scraped the wick off, and then the third time he put a match to it, the whole lantern went to the ceiling.

I was on Grandpa’s and Aunt Ella’s front porch, and I immediately knew what had happened. I jumped off of the piazza and ran home as fast as I could, not knowing the fire was already out. My father had the foresight to throw a quilt over the burning lantern, and naturally it went out. He really raised hell with me. If I hadn’t been grown and he sick, he would have whipped me.

My first cousin Padgett Etheredge, Aunt Ella’s son, had gone to Clemson and it set me on fire. I wanted to go to school too. That fall of 1913 I had my trunk packed to go to Greenwood to Bailey Military Institute, the college that had been SCCI in Edgefield and had moved to Greenwood about where Greenwood Hospital is now. Pa was almost willing to let me go; in fact, he had promised to pay my way if he could get somebody to take my place at home cooking and working in the field.

I had already been on my own working at Johnston and in Georgia, but I had come back home when Pa wrote me after Grandma died that nobody would take Gus and that I needed to come home and help him take care of my little brother. I did that

Coming Back Home 61

twice. I always loved Gus and felt sorry for him because he didn’t even have any memories of Ma. He couldn’t see her in his head and hear her call his name like I could. I could remember just the way she would say “Davenport” when she was pleased with me and also the way she’d say it when she was upset with me. Pa couldn’t hire a Negro to cook—or at least, he always said he couldn’t. He hired everybody else he wanted to hire. Negro Dave Padgett, Uncle Dink’s son, had been living with us and working by the day and cooking for us. He got a better job and quit us, and Pa couldn’t get anybody in his place. So Pa wouldn’t let me go.

I had to stay home and cook and work. It wouldn’t have cost much for me to go to SCCI, but I had no way to get the money if Pa wasn’t willing to send me. It cost Padgett one hundred dollars a year to go to Clemson, but he had a scholarship that paid half. Lord knows where Aunt Ella got the other fifty dollars. She probably borrowed it from Pa too—like I think she did for Grace. When I had to unpack my trunk, I felt like I was going to die, damn it. I started to leave home again, but I didn’t have anywhere to go. That fall my father had his good friend and cousin George Wheeler cut four mules and two Kentucky horses out of a drove and leave them in our lot. I can prove that because Claude Wheeler, George’s son, is still living.

That fall Pa bought the Mt. Willing place and also the Luther Padgett place. Pa always did have money, but he didn’t leave me any. He did more than leave money; he left me something you can’t buy and sell. He left me with the knowledge that if I wanted to be a man like him, I couldn’t be bought. He couldn’t be bought. He’d stand hitched.

Chapter 8

1913–1914

Living at Mt. Willing

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The fall of 1914 we sowed one hundred acres of oats with two-horse plows, grain drills, and section harrows. After Christmas we moved to Mt. Willing. We had twelve head of mules and horses, seventy-five cows, and one hundred hogs. The panic of 1914 hit, and it was awful. We made a good grain crop that spring—2,240 bushels of oats and 120 bushels of wheat. But that was a drop in the bucket for the acres we had planted. That fall you couldn’t give any of it away. Times just got worse.

I was twenty years old and still living at home and working for Pa. We moved into the old house that had been built in 1779. It had four big rooms downstairs and a big hall that ran all the way through the house. The rooms were sixteen by sixteen and the hall was ten feet wide. There were two rooms and a hall upstairs, too, and they were the same size as downstairs. There were six fireplaces in that house, four downstairs and two upstairs. Oh, it was a fine house, a fine house in its day. I always knew that Jacob Smith built the house back before the Revolutionary War, and I told my children that James Butler Bonham’s mother grew up in it, but they didn’t seem to care.

Living at Mt. Willing 63

Now, in Saluda County we’ve always been mighty proud of James Butler Bonham and William Barret Travis, our two native sons that died in the Alamo fighting for Texas independence. Anyway Jacob Smith’s daughter Sophia married James Bonham, and their son was James Butler Bonham. They were big folks back in those days. Why, James Butler Bonham even went to South Carolina College. Of course, he got expelled though. He was high-spirited even then. I always said Sophia Smith probably walked under that arch between the front and back hall in the Mt. Willing house to marry James Bonham. I don’t know the exact day, but it was a long time ago.

The Jacob B. Smith that lived in the house and owned the land in 1843 when he deeded some to Emory Church was the first Jacob’s grandson, and he was living there when my grandmother’s brother, Uncle Frank Boyd, came over from Dead Falls in Newberry County to clerk at the Mt. Willing store. Gladys’ sister’s children gave me the account book that Uncle Frank kept at the store in 1851.

Anyway that house wasn’t like Flat Grove, the first house that Jacob Smith built. Flat Grove was a dog trot house. By the time Uncle Frank and Aunt Carrie lived in it though, that big wide hall had been closed up. The Mt. Willing house always was closed up. The stairs went up from the back of the hall, and they weren’t fancy either—just little square banisters to support the stair rails.

Now the arch that separated the front hall from the back hall was fancy. It was hand-carved and beautiful even when I knew the house. It also still had two fancy hand-carved mantel pieces in the two front rooms downstairs when I lived in it, but Miss Carrie sold them in 1930 for $250.00 each to a man with a fine house between Johnston and Trenton. I asked him one time if he ever put them up in his house, and he said no, that they were still in a barn. They were heart pine too, so I guess they’ll last forever.

Yes, Mt. Willing was fine. Now we had lived in some good houses. My pa built a fine house in Ridge Spring in the 1880s, and when he went broke, he came back to some land he owned near


Mt. Willing and built a house there in 1892. That was where I was born. Then we were living in the Saluda House on Church street in Saluda when Ma died in 1902, and that was a big two-story house. The Dave Busby house by Emory Church was a big, two-story house too, and we also lived in a good house in Johnston for a while. I lived with Uncle Oscar in the big, nice, two-story house that’s still standing on the road between Johnston and Trenton, and then when I was overseer for Mr. Marsh when I was seventeen years old, I lived just like one of the family in that fine house that Henry Conrad Herlong built before he moved up here in the Mt. Willing section and started Emory Church.

But next to the Marsh house, the Mt. Willing house was the best. The six main rooms—four downstairs and two upstairs—had wide wainscot made out of a single plank, a chair rail, and a baseboard. Above that the walls were plastered on little strips. The hall had wide boards on the wall, and some time or other it had had wall paper on it. The floors were heart pine boards too, wide and tight—no cracks between them. All the lumber was planed with a water plane. I gave my daughter the wainscot out of what we used as the kitchen when I lived there, and when we took it down off the walls, we found out that it had only been planed on one side. She’s got it on her living room wall right now. One craftsman that made her a corner cabinet out of some more of that lumber told her it was 500 years old when it was cut and, of course, it had been in that house more than 200 years. When we moved into the house in 1914, the old kitchen had been moved out to the right of the house in the edge of the field. It had three rooms and a little porch and, though I didn’t know it in 1914, I was going to live in that old kitchen for a while.

Back to my story. I got carried away talking about the Mt. Willing house. When we moved into it, the plastering was off half of the house, and you could see the little boards where the plaster had been. After we moved in, we plastered it again. That’s how I happen to know when it was built. When I was plastering up in the corner of the room we used as a kitchen—that was the back


room on the right—I saw the date 1779 carved in the wood. We were working on it and trying to fix it up. It was in pretty bad shape then. And one thing I never could stand about the place was the water. The well was a big, dug well, and it had plenty of water, but it was lime water, and it tasted awful. I guess all the people that lived there just got used to it.

When we first moved in, you could walk in after it had been quiet in there for a while, and there’d be fifty big brown rats along the edge of those little plaster strips. Those rats would be sticking their heads through the slots where the plaster had been. I set traps and caught a good many, but I didn’t make a dent in the drove that was there. It was awful.

One night I was coming in the house from the lot. I’d been milking the cow, and I had a bucket of milk. Just as I passed a lumber pile in back of the house, I saw something run under the planks. It was a white rat. At the supper table, I said, “Pa, I saw something I never saw before when I came in the house from the barn; a white rat went under those pieces of plank that are right behind the house.”

Pa said, “Let’s go out there and see if we can find it.” We went, and he moved the planks. The second one he moved, the white rat ran out from under the lumber pile and went under the house and then on into the house. It looked just like the brown rats and was the same size they were, but it was white.

It wasn’t long before all the brown rats were gone, and we caught the white rat in a trap we set. Pa said he’d always heard that brown rats were scared of a white rat and wouldn’t stay around where one was, and he believed that was true after our experience.

We killed four hogs one cold winter day in 1914. The last one we tried to kill was a big old sow. She was in good shape, not too fat, just right for good meat. She hadn’t had but two pigs, and Pa swapped them to Dick Fulmer for a houseful of oat straw to feed his cows through the winter.


When we went to kill the sow with the ax we were using, she jumped out of the pasture. Pa ran in the house to get his pistol to shoot the hog, and his pistol wasn’t there. He came running back, and when he got nearly to the lot gate, he said, “Davenport, where is my pistol?”

I said to him, “I don’t know.” He answered, “It’s not at the head of my bed where I keep it.”

About that time Cousin Joe Padgett grabbed the sow by the tail and slowed her down enough for Cousin Frank Long to hit her in the head. Then I ran up and stuck her with the knife so she’d bleed and the meat wouldn’t be ruined. When we got enough steak cut out of the hog for dinner, I went in the house and fried it for all of us to eat. That’s the best part of a hog, the steak you cook on the day you butcher. We left two colored women outside working with the entrails to stuff the sausage in.

Everybody came in the house and we sat down to eat dinner. Pa asked the blessing, and then he turned to me and said, “Davenport, I think you lied today.”

I shook my head and said, “No, I didn’t. I don’t know where the pistol is.”

He said, “You just as well to have lied. You evaded the question.”

I answered, “I didn’t do that either. You always carry a blue-back speller and a dictionary with you. Look in that dictionary and see if I evaded the question. I really don’t know where the pistol is.”

With that he dropped the subject then, but that night after supper Gus went on upstairs and built a fire in the bedroom. Pa had a good fire in the living room, and I went in and sat down. I said to him, “Pa, I’ll tell you about the pistol if you want to know.”

And he said quietly, “I’d like to know, Son.” I said, “I carried it to Dean Chapel on the second Sunday in

September to a tent meeting. I put it under the buggy cushion because it was so heavy it was about to pull my britches off. And my best friend’s brother stole it. He sold it the next day to a fellow


at Batesburg. Luther Corley knew who stole it, who sold it, and what he got for it. Matt Gentry saw him sell the pistol two days later in Batesburg, and he told me he’d swear against the thief for $15.00.”

Pa knew the boy who stole it, and he knew his parents too and loved them. He said, “Mary and Jesse wouldn’t want to know that their son stole a pistol. Just forget about it.”

He lost a pistol because I took it to church with me. And he cared enough about how his friends felt that he wouldn’t accuse their son of stealing. Yes, like I told you, Pa was much of a man.

In the summer of 1914 I went to Charleston. I got on a train in Batesburg with Johnny Herlong and Greg Forrest. We went to see the ocean and have a good time. I had a pint of liquor in Batesburg and took it on the train with me. Johnny and Greg got on the Augusta Northern at Bell station in the new Saluda County and rode to Ward and then to Batesburg, where I got on. I was a little high already. On the train a lady looked at me and asked me who I was. I told her I was a Padgett. She asked me if by any chance I might be Walter and Ela’s son. When I told her I was their son Davenport, she grabbed me and kissed me. She really liked my ma and pa.

She wasn’t the one I was looking at though. There was a boy on the train who had three girls traveling with him. I thought that was too many girls for one man to have, and I would have been glad to help him take care of them.

When we got off the train in Charleston, we went to the Mosler House and paid for three night’s lodging. It was a good thing that our room was paid for as you’ll see. We went out to the beach, and I wanted to rent a bathing suit and go in bathing. But Johnny and Greg were afraid that they would look stupid. I told them to go to hell, and I rented a suit and went in the water. A man was close to where I was, and I asked him what those white things in the water were. He thought I was being a smart alec, and he said, “You damn fool, they are waves.” About that time a big wave came and turned me upside down.


When I came up, a girl was sitting on my leg. And she was one of the three girls who had been on the train that morning. I spoke to her and told her my name, and she told me hers after she quit sputtering. That night we went to the pavilion at the Isle of Palms. I saw a boy dancing with a girl and another boy tapped him on the shoulder and took the girl and danced off. The first boy came and asked if I wanted to dance. He told me that I had to pay a dollar to dance with twelve girls. When I left there that night, I had thirty-five cents. I had set up every girl I had danced with. I had had me a fine time. I asked Johnny how much he had. He told me he still had forty dollars. He hadn’t spent a penny. He loaned me $2.50, but I had to give him my gold tie pin as collateral.

Next morning I had $2.85 to stay in Charleston for two days. I knew that wasn’t enough to have the good time I wanted to have. I decided to look up Mr. and Mrs. Cato, the couple on the train who had been so glad to see me because I was Walter and Ela’s son. I’d find out just how glad they were when I asked to borrow some money. I had a time finding them, but when I went to the best hotel in Charleston, I found them and told them what I had done and that I needed ten dollars. Mr. Cato let me have it because I was Walter and Ela’s boy. I sent them their money when I got home from Charleston. I enjoyed my two days in Charleston and went home without a penny. I always knew how to have a good time.

But that’s not the end of the story. One day in 1945 I sat down to the dinner table at home to eat the two fried eggs I ate for dinner every day when Gladys was teaching school, and a fellow came up in a Model T. He said he wanted some Texas Red Rust Proof oats and that in Saluda they’d told him I was the only man in Saluda County who had them. I told him I did have some to sell. He went with me to the barn, and the seventeen-year-old hand he’d brought with him sacked up the oats. It was about dinnertime, and I asked him to eat with me. I had known in a minute that it was Mr. Cato, the man who’d been good to me in Charleston. I threw my dinner in the slop and fried ten or twelve


birds for him to eat. He told me I shouldn’t go to all that trouble for him. I said to him, “Anybody that would let a wild nineteen-year-old boy have a ten-dollar bill in Charleston deserves the best.” He hadn’t known until then that I was the person he had lent money to in 1914—thirty-one years before.

It’s not just your sins that’ll find you out, but what you do good will come back to you too.

You’ve heard of Ten-Acre Rock, I know. It’s down near Beulah Church. People don’t go there much anymore, but when I was growing up it was a gathering place. Churches and schools would go down there to have picnics. Oh, it was a great attraction. What I’m going to tell about next happened in August, 1914, and it beat any damn thing I ever heard of.

We were living at Mt. Willing, and we had a mule named Kate. She would not pee in harness; I never knew why. That morning Pa made us go to Batesburg with two three-horse wagons and get two tons of guano. We did—Gus and I. By that time he was thirteen years old. We got back to Mt. Willing and found out that Dandy Trotter’s daughters from Columbia were visiting old man Konce Ramage. Those girls were close connected to us. Pa’s sister, Aunt Mame, had married a Trotter.

It was this way. Now Dandy Trotter married Queenie Riley. They ran off from her folks and got to my granddaddy’s house and asked him to marry them. Dandy was drunk, and Grandpa wouldn’t perform the ceremony. He put Dandy to bed and gave him hot coffee to sober him up. When he got sober, he got out of the bed and came out in the hall and looked up the road and saw Mr. and Mrs. Riley coming from towards Henry Temple’s house. When Mr. Riley got there, he forbade Queenie to marry Dandy. Grandpa hesitated, and Dandy asked old man Riley why he objected. He said, “Well, you’ll have a crowd of chaps, and they’ll be hungry and you’ll be drunk. I don’t see any future.”

Dandy said to Mr. Riley, “If you will give your consent for me to marry Queenie, I’ll buy every damn Riley by name if I don’t take care of her.” Mr. Riley must have believed there was


something different in his voice because he gave his consent, and Grandpa married them right then and there. Dandy lived up to that promise. He moved to Columbia, put up a livery stable and rented horses. He always drove a dapple-gray horse hitched to a fine buggy. He made money. His two daughters live in front of the Veterans Hospital in Columbia today.

Anyway, back to my story about that August day in 1914. I pulled the gear off Kate and put buggy harness on her and hitched her to the buggy and fed her. I fixed Gus and me some dinner. Then I went out and got in the buggy. I went to old man Konce Ramage’s house and got one Trotter daughter. Sardis Church was having a picnic on Flat Rock. It’s down right in front of a Negro church, and it really does cover ten acres of land. As I said, I got one of the Trotter girls, and we drove to Flat Rock. The people already had the dinner spread out on white tablecloths on the rock itself. I drove up on the rock and stopped. There were all kind of buggies out there

Thank God, I didn’t drive too close, but as soon as I stopped, Kate spread her legs and went to peeing. That urine twisted and twisted and was going under the dinner on the tablecloths. Some people pulled up the cloths and held up the rations. Pee went right smack under them.

I felt like I could run, but I didn’t. Everybody ate, and we just ignored the pee. People back then weren’t as finicky as they are today. When you rode behind mules and horses all the time, you had to expect some trouble. But that was embarrassing to me that day—and me there with a pretty young girl too.

I carried the Trotter girl back to old man Ramage’s house late that evening. We’d had a good time talking to all the Sardis people. I went to Columbia to see her a time or two on the dang train. Those two women are as rich as cream today and as ugly as the devil. We went by to see them a few years ago. They never married. Yes, that day at the picnic was the dangest mess I ever saw.


At that time I didn’t know that Pa had marrying in mind. He’d been a widower for a long time, but on December 30, 1914, my father married the second time—after waiting twelve years. He married Carrie B. Bouknight, an old maid. She was old Rubie Bouknight’s sister. She played the organ at Emory where we all went to church. She’d been my Sunday school teacher one time too. I was glad Pa was getting married. Hell, I helped make the deal.

It was this way. It was 1914, and Tom Manley’s folks lived where Lafonde Lindler lives now. Sheck Padgett came to Mt. Willing, and I let Gus go with Sheck over to Tom Manley’s to go bird striking with Mr. Manley’s boys. Pa came in, and they were gone. He asked me why I didn’t wait and ask him if Gus could go. I spoke up fast and told him I didn’t ask him because he wouldn’t have let Gus go. Pa got mad and demanded an apology from me. I wouldn’t apologize, and he ran me off from home.

I went over to Joe Padgett’s. He took me in. It was raining and sleeting. I was making arrangements to go back to Georgia where wages were higher than they were in South Carolina. Looking back, I can see that I still saw Georgia as the Promised Land and thought I could make my mark down there. On a Sunday night I left Cousin Joe’s and went over to Jouette’s house. By then Jouette’s stepdaughter Eugenia had married Rufus Shealy, and they were living in Jouette’s house while Jouette and Mrs. Emmie were living in Batesburg where he rode the mail for eight years.

I’m gonna stop here and tell you about Jouette. Ma died when he was just twelve years old, and he and Pa seemed to always be crossways or something. I guess they were a lot alike except that Pa had had Grandma Susannah and Grandpa all his life to kinda keep him in the right road.

Anyway after Johnny Herlong died (he had married Emmie Grigsby and they had five children—David, Bettis, Mary Ellen, Eugenia, and Carrie), Jouette and I would go and play with David and Bettis. Remember I told you about Bettis and me spending the night at Joe Traywick Herlong’s house when little Isabel caught on


fire and died that night. Now Jouette always loved to play the piano. He’d never had any lessons, but he could play anything by ear. Mrs. Emmie encouraged him to come and play the piano at her house. Pretty soon he was going regular, and then the next thing we knew he told Pa he was going to marry Mrs. Emmie. She was 34, and he was seventeen. Pa begged him not to, but he was determined. They were married, and he became a stepfather to five children when he was just seventeen years old. His stepson David was fifteen then. Jouette and Mrs. Emmie had four children of their own—the twins, Wallace and Walter, and then Nellie and Kathleen. They all grew up and married, and all of them had children except Wallace and Kathleen. She spent her life nursing, and she was a crackerjack good nurse. Those two sets of children—the Herlongs and the Padgetts—got along well and have always been real close. In fact, they have a reunion together every year now.

Now back to my story about Pa getting married. David, Jouette’s stepson, was home, and we decided to ask Gladys Wightman (she was the little girl I’d said I was going to marry when I was eleven and she was seven) and Vera Webb for dates. Gladys wouldn’t date, so David and I pulled out from her house and went to old man Lott’s house up above Saluda to see his girls, Dell and Babe. So many Colemans and Crawfords were there that we hardly got to speak to the girls.

We came back to Rufus’ house and found out that all that night Pa had been trying to get in touch with me to come back home. I went back. What he wanted was for me to make arrangements for him to marry Miss Carrie Bouknight. I felt so sorry for him when I got back home. He was cooking a cornbread hoecake on the fire. He and Gus hadn’t had any breakfast. I cooked breakfast, sorta halfway cleaned up, and went to see Aunt Ella’s daughter Grace. I arranged for Grace to take Miss Carrie to the moving picture show that Eugene Able had on the third floor of the new Able Building he’d built in Saluda.


Old Mrs. Bouknight just let it happen. I guess she trusted Grace, but Grace and Miss Carrie weren’t about to go to the picture show. Pa met Grace and Miss Carrie at the forks of the road (near where Katie Lee Lester lives now). Pa and Miss Carrie went on and got married. You know the Smith women have always been boss in their families, and old Mrs. Bouknight was a Smith before she married, and she was boss in her house. She didn’t want her daughter Carrie (who was an old maid by then) to marry Walter Padgett. She had seen what had happened to him in the years since his wife died, and she didn’t like what she saw.

Chapter 9

1915–1916

We Get Serious

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

But they did marry, and we all lived together the year of 1915 at

Mt. Willing in the old two-story house Pa had bought in 1913. I was twenty-one years old and still working for Pa and being treated like a child. He gave me money, and that he didn’t give me, I took. I became twenty-one the twentieth of June. The reason I’ve always been so careful to have an understanding about money is that my father didn’t pay me anything for working the last part of 1915—just a little pittance. He promised me seventy-five cents a day, but I never saw that money.

Something happened in the spring of 1915 while I was still just twenty years old. I went to the graduation at Saluda High School. There were only fifteen graduates, and I knew that little black-eyed Gladys Wightman was one of them. I had two girls I was entertaining that night, Vera Trotter and Grace Etheredge. Both of them were my first cousins. Vera was Aunt Mame’s daughter, and Grace was Aunt Ella’s daughter. When the class came out on the stage, durned if Gladys wasn’t the head of the whole class, and she had to make a speech. She was always good at making speeches.

We Get Serious 75

I told my two cousins as I pointed to Gladys, “See that little black-headed girl standing at the head of the class? I’m going to marry her.”

Grace laughed and said to me, “You don’t even know her.” She was wrong. I did know her. I fell in love with her when she

was seven and I was eleven and we were both going to Emory Church. She said a speech then on Children’s Day like we all had to do, and I liked the sparkle in her eye and the smile on her face. Then over the years I saw her often at Emory Church where she went with her family. Her mother had been Lydia Herlong, and her father was Sherard Wightman. They were poor because Mr. Wightman wasn’t any farmer. He’d been cut out to be a teacher or a preacher. All his folks had been college teachers and Methodist preachers. His uncle was a Methodist Bishop and the first president of Wofford College, and his father was an ordained Methodist preacher and taught at Cokesbury. They were big people in the Methodist Church. In fact, I think his great-grandmother sat on John Wesley’s lap when she was a little girl in Charleston when Wesley came to this county in the late 1700s. Leastways, that’s what the Wightman family history says, if you want to believe it. Gladys’ father had volunteered for service in the Civil War as soon as he turned sixteen, and he was in a lot of battles, was wounded, and then in a prison camp. When the war was over, he walked back home to South Carolina.

Anyway, I knew I was going to marry her, but she didn’t know it at that time. She was awful pretty to a lot of people. She had dark complexion and black eyes and thick wavy black hair that she wore tied up. I’d never seen it down around her shoulders until our wedding night. Times then sure weren’t like they are now. I never did think she was quite as pretty as other people thought, but one thing I knew for sure: she was quality and she was smart. She could do anything, and she could learn anything. She was no more like her sister Mary Alice or her brother Cantey than May is like November.


In those times lots of people did not get the chance to go to high school because there was just one real high school—one that could give a state high school diploma—in these parts, and that was in Saluda. Children couldn’t get to town every day from way out in the country, so they just stopped their education with the schooling they got at the country schools scattered all around the county. I think that there were thirty-two of them then. Today if you look at the names of the voting precincts in the county, you’ll be looking at the names of the old country schools that passed out of existence when the school bus became a part of the school system.

Gladys was smart, and she had been going to Emory. She had learned out there all the teacher could teach her, but she was still going and helping with the little ones. Then one Sunday afternoon her half sister Sue and Sue’s husband, George Crouch, came out to see Mr. Sherard and Mrs. Liddy (as everybody called her). Sue was running a store in Saluda, and she needed someone to help her with her babies at home. She told Mr. Wightman that she would keep one of the girls—either Mary Alice or Gladys—and let her go to Saluda to school if she would help her in the afternoons and on Saturdays with the children at home and do all the housework.

Of course, Mr. Wightman appreciated education because of his background, and Mrs. Lydia had graduated from Leesville College herself in 1880. (Her Herlong family believed in educating their children too. Mr. Vastine and Mrs. Mary had moved to Leesville so that their children could go to college there.) Mr. Wightman and Mrs. Liddy didn’t even have to talk it over; they thought it would be great for one of their girls to have this opportunity. Naturally since Mary Alice was older, they offered it to her.

Now, you’d have to know Mary Alice to appreciate her reaction. She was scared of everything ‘til the day she died in 1976. Poor girl, she never got married. In fact, she had mighty few dates in her life. She just stayed at home and waited on Mrs. Lydia

We Get Serious 77

and Cantey. But she could have left if she’d wanted to. She just didn’t want to. But not Gladys! When Mary Alice turned the offer down, Gladys jumped at it. She went back with Sue and George that very day, and she started to work and to school. Knowing the way she could work, I can imagine that Sue was never sorry for the bargain she made. She had a good maid and a baby-sitter, and someone that the children loved.

Gladys always knew how to handle children. She taught school for forty-five years, and she never had to whip many children. She lifted their hearts to make them want to learn like she did; she didn’t have to beat their behinds. You can ask anybody she taught, and she taught a lot of Saluda folks—course most of them are dead now—and they’ll tell you Mrs. Gladys was the best teacher they ever had, barring none. She loved to teach just like she loved to learn. She was always helping somebody learn something.

Back to my story. Gladys went to live with Sue and George, and she stayed there until she finished high school—summers and winters; that was part of the bargain. They got her free in the summers—just for her board and room, and she already had that at home. But she didn’t mind work, and she was glad to go to school, no matter how. Graduation was in May. She thought sure she would get the county scholarship to go to Winthrop. Yes sir, in 1915, Saluda County gave a full scholarship to a Saluda County girl to go to Winthrop College, and since Gladys was the head of her class, she thought she’d get the scholarship and get to go to college.

It was not to be. Right after she graduated from high school, she took the whooping cough and was so sick that when the scholarship exam came around in June, she was not able to go to Saluda to stand it. I really think that changed her whole life. Because she didn’t get a college education then, she was always uncomfortable around those who did have a degree.

She almost died with the whooping cough. She had a bad case even for those times. And her father did die that summer. He was a lot older than Mrs. Lydia; she was his second wife. The first time


he married, he married Carrie Bodie, Mrs. Lydia’s first cousin, and she died after she’d given birth to his eight children. Then he married Mrs. Lydia and they had three children—Cantey, born in 1894; Mary Alice, born in 1896, and Gladys, born in 1898.

Mr. Wightman was a great speaker, and that July day he’d been to a barbecue and stump meeting at Mt. Willing, and he’d made a speech—a good speech. Everybody knew he could stand up and make a speech at the drop of a hat. And he’d say something worth hearing too. I don’t think I heard him that day. Pa had me working; I was always working in the middle of the day. It was a rare thing when we got to go to barbecues and campaign meetings.

Mr. Wightman was on the way home from the meeting, and he was in the buggy with his son George, who was running for the state Senate. They were talking about his campaign, and Mr. Wightman said to George, “Well, Son, if you have to go down, go down game.” And with those words, he slumped over. He’d had a massive stroke. George rushed him home and put him to bed. He died that night.

They buried him at Emory by his first wife. It didn’t rain for a month, and Gladys told me the hardest thing of all was to go out in the cotton fields around the house where Mr. Wightman had plowed the days before he died and see his footprints still there.

The family had to make all kinds of adjustments. The place they were living on belonged to Mr. Wightman’s first wife and by rights to the eight children he’d had by her. Carrie Bodie’s mother, Susan Herlong Bodie, had died when Carrie was born, and Carrie Herlong Boyd, Susan’s sister, raised Carrie Bodie. When Carrie Bodie married, her Aunt Carrie, who was like a mother to her, gave her a part of the Flat Grove place that Carrie Boyd’s father, Henry Conrad Herlong, had bought from the Bonhams in 1856.

That left Mrs. Lydia and the three young ones out in the cold because Mr. Wightman didn’t leave them a dime. Of course, he was a Confederate soldier, so Mrs. Wightman did get a small pension when she became a widow. It wasn’t much, but it helped

We Get Serious 79

them to survive. Also Mrs. Lydia had a place of her own that she’d inherited from her mother, Mary Weaver Herlong. It was part of a land grant that King George had given to the Weavers when they came to this country from England. That piece of land had a tiny little house on it, and Mrs. Lydia’s sister Alice, who lived in Greenwood and didn’t have any children of her own and was well-off, helped her to fix up that house fit to live in and to move there.

After Mr. Wightman died, I decided I’d go calling. About August 15, they were having a big barbecue at Kinards. I decided I’d make the plunge. All those years little Gladys Wightman and I had been making “goo-goo” eyes at each other. Her father was gone, and I felt like maybe I had a chance.

I sent my friend David Herlong to carry a note to Gladys. He’d been sorta sporting my girl himself, but he carried the note and delivered it to Gladys. She asked her mother, Mrs. Lydia, who was very hesitant about letting her baby girl go to Kinards to a barbecue with Davenport Padgett. Her sister, Alice Herlong Brooks, who lived in Greenwood, happened to be spending a few days with her, and she asked Mrs. Lydia who the boy was. When Mrs. Liddy told her that he was Walter and Ela’s son, Mrs. Alice said, “Let her go.” That was the way Gladys got permission to go with me.

The next morning I hitched up the buggy and went to Gladys’ house and took her to the barbecue at Kinards where Backman Derrick lived where this road I live on today crosses over the road from the Circle to Prosperity. We had a most wonderful day. I bought two barbecue dinners, and we took them to the buggy and ate sitting in it. Finally all the campaign speaking was over. I hadn’t listened to a word they had said that day, but I was really interested in the campaign, and so was Gladys since her brother George was running against Ed Reedy for the state Senate. George got elected.

Late in the afternoon, Gladys and I started home. We got in a terrible rain—one of the worst I’ve ever seen. We stopped at her


cousin Henry Herlong’s house and stayed ‘til nearly dark when the rain finally stopped. Then I carried the little girl home. From that day Gladys and I went together regular. Like I told you, she had just finished high school at Saluda. She was smart, and she would have done well in college. If she had had a chance to try for the scholarship, she would have won it for sure.

All that happened the summer Gladys graduated from high school, the summer of 1915. After she got over the whooping cough and she knew she couldn’t go to college (Mrs. Lydia thought they were going to starve to death), she worked in the house and in the fields when there was work to be done. In September she was out in the field picking cotton when Mr. Frank McGee, who was a trustee at Willow Branch, a little school about five miles from Gladys’ house, came and asked her to teach the school. When the teacher resigned late in the summer, Mr. McGee had gone to Saluda and asked the county school superintendent, Frank Black, if he knew where he could hire a teacher. He told him that 28 had stood the teacher’s exam and Gladys Wightman was the only one who made a first grade certificate. (I told you she is smart—smart as a whip.)

Mr. McGee went riding straight to Mr. Wightman’s house. He went to the front door and asked for Miss Gladys. She and Mary Alice and Cantey were picking cotton. Mrs. Lydia went out to tell her that Mr. McGee had come to talk to her. Gladys went in the house, washed her face, combed her hair, put on a different dress, and met Mr. McGee. He asked her if she would teach Willow Branch School. He told her that Mr. Frank Black had said she was good. She accepted his offer; she said she would teach. He told her that she could board with his family, that she could have what they called the parlor. That was on Saturday, and she was to start on Monday a week. That gave her one week to get ready. That next Sunday Cantey carried her in the buggy to Mr. McGee’s house. Mr. McGee couldn’t read or write, but he was a trustee. Mrs. McGee would read the paper to him at night.

We Get Serious 81

Gladys had a room full of students of all ages—from first grade to adult. She wasn’t but seventeen, and she had students older than she was. One of the older girls helped Gladys teach the little ones. She married just as school was out. It was Gladys’ job to teach them all from the youngest ones (people could send the children at five years old because there was no law then) to the oldest ones. She never had any trouble making those students behave. She could manage them just like she managed all the rest the forty-five years she taught school. I always thought Gladys was so interested in teaching them that they didn’t dare not learn.

I courted Gladys down at Mr. McGee’s house. We’d sit on the front porch when it was warm enough and in Gladys’ room when it was too cold to sit outside. There was a little sofa and a fireplace in it because it was the McGee’s parlor when they were not boarding the teacher. That was the only privacy she had. Gladys had long black curly hair that she wore up on her head. I wanted to see it hanging down her back worse than anything, but, like I told you, I never saw it down until after we were married. We wrote letters to each other that winter, and we’ve still got them. Those are the only letters we ever wrote to each other because we’ve never been apart since we married in 1916.

Chapter 10

1916

We Get Married

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After Christmas in 1916 I moved out of my father’s house at Mt. Willing and over to the Luther place which my father owned. That’s where Ben Lindler lives now. I worked that place for Pa that year for part of the crop. I was living in a right nice little three-room house on the place. After a month or six weeks of batching there—though I’d been batching since I was nine years old—I got tired of cooking for myself and eating alone and living alone. I was getting really serious with that little black-eyed girl, and I popped the question down there at Frank McGee’s in that little parlor. I just asked her would she marry me. I didn’t do like Hancock Herlong did Dora DeLoache—give her three days to answer and have her say, “I don’t need three days. I’m decided now. No.” Thank the Lord, Gladys said she would marry me.

I happened to think about an engagement ring, and I wondered how I’d manage to get one. I remembered how I’d always loved cameos because my mother always wore a cameo, and she gave me hers the day she died. I hope all the people that read this, whoever they are, will remember my good friend Tuck McClung, the druggist at Pitts Drug Store in Saluda. He was a good man, and he trusted me. He sold me a cameo ring for $7.50 on credit. I

We Get Married 83

gave her the ring down at Mr. McGee’s. Over sixty years later as I look to my right, I see that same cameo and that same black-haired woman’s face. The gold on the cameo is not so shiny now, and the black hair has turned gray. Mighty few couples ever live to celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary, but we did—on April 16, 1976. Right after her school was out (the state didn’t pay for but five months then, and Gladys’ salary was forty dollars a month), Gladys and I got married on April 16, 1916.

On May 20 we went to a school entertainment at Sardis. The school was full and there weren’t any seats left so Gladys and I sat in a window. Years later, Mrs. Ruth Mitchell told us that she was there that night and that she couldn’t keep her eyes off of us because we were the happiest looking couple she’d ever seen. I reckon we’ve been pretty happy over the years. Of course, we’ve fussed like hell at times, but through it all we knew that we loved each other. I have been faithful to her with my body and my heart; I never wanted another woman. And I know she has been faithful to me.

Back to the beginning. I decided I had to have some money to get married. I went to two people—Cousin Luke Grigsby and Mr. J.W. Fulmer (my friend Dick’s father)—and asked them to sign a note at the bank for sixty dollars. They wouldn’t either one of them do it. My oldest brother, Jouette, put up his horse and buggy, and he and my Uncle Ernest signed a note for sixty dollars at the Edgefield County Bank, twenty-five miles from where I lived.

I married in a borrowed suit of clothes—black alpaca. It belonged to Rob Brown. I also borrowed a buggy from Sidney Shealy to go to get my bride. I borrowed two dollars from Mrs. Carrie, Pa’s new wife, to pay my Grandfather Mahlon to marry us. He was a Baptist preacher. Mrs. Carrie was willing to lend it to me because she was crazy for me to get married. She thought the world of Gladys. What was so awful was that my grandfather took my two dollars instead of marrying us for free.

I went to Mrs. Wightman’s house just a little before sundown on April 16. We had supper—the whole family together—Cantey


and Mary Alice, Gladys’ brother and sister, Mrs. Wightman, Gladys, and me. Gladys looked like the Queen of Sheba. She wore a light tan suit trimmed in brown satin. We journeyed on over to my Aunt Ella’s house. She had moved from the old home place out in the country to the Milledge Pitts house on Main Street in Saluda so that she could keep boarders and serve dinner to tourists. The Pitts house was where First State National Bank is today—on the northwest corner of Highland and Main Streets.

Gladys and I got out of the buggy and went into the house. Of course, all of Aunt Ella’s folks knew we were getting married. They had told some of my classmates. They were there, and at the time we didn’t know how they had found out about our getting married. Willie Crout was there; she was Gladys’ friend. They had studied together when Gladys was living with her sister Sue and going to high school. Also John F. Taylor was there. He was living with Frank and Roseva Herlong and running a bowling alley in Saluda. John F. and I had boarded at the same place when we were both living in Brownsdale, Georgia, in 1912.

Grace, Aunt Ella’s oldest daughter, took Gladys upstairs. Then someone played the wedding march (I think it was Eva Sue, also Aunt Ella’s daughter), and Gladys came down and met me at the foot of the stairs. My grandfather came out of the opposite room with a Bible in his hand. He had a long, flowing, white beard—he was seventy-seven years old at the time. The rest of the family were gathered in the parlor in a half circle—Aunt Ella and Uncle Joe and their three daughters, Eva Sue, Isabel, and Grace. Joe Oscar, one of their two sons, was fighting down on the Mexican border keeping Mexicans out of Texas.

Grandpa pronounced us man and wife and said, “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” And God knows we’ve been together these sixty-one years.

After we were married, John F. Taylor carried us all down to Pitts’ Drug Store and set us up to chocolate ice cream sodas. I’ll never forget that. I guess you could call that our wedding party. All of a sudden John F. got up and sauntered over to the clerk. I

We Get Married 85

can see his walk now. Right there he purchased six silver iced-tea spoons—the only wedding present we got. We still have them. Fifty years later on our golden wedding anniversary, he sent us a set of gold-plated steak knives from Orlando, Florida. He became a millionaire, and I was so durn pore I stunk. He got to be a millionaire gambling on anything anywhere anytime—and almost always winning.

Gladys and I didn’t go on a trip. I had to work. She had already finished her school year at Willow Branch. School didn’t run but a few months back then. We went back in the borrowed buggy to the Luther place where I’d been keeping house by myself. To my knowledge five couples have started in that house. Today it sits lonely way off in a field where Ben Lindler moved it when he built his new house back in the forties right after World War II was over. He stores hay in it now.

I bought an old stove from my father. John Foy worked it over; he put a new grate in it. It was a real good four-eye stove. I’d bought a bed, mattress, and springs from May, Speigel, and Sturn. I bought a dresser and four chairs from Isaac Edwards. Rufus Shealy made me a table for $1.25. After we married, Gladys bought a bedroom suite with the last $40.00 she had earned, her last month’s salary. Her mother gave her twenty dollars to help pay for it—a bed, mattress, springs, bureau, and a washstand. Her mama also gave her a hen with twelve biddies.

Did you know that at that time in life—I was 21 and Gladys was 17—I thought it wouldn’t be long before I could gain the world and keep a big part of it for myself? But I soon found out that that was a fancy dream that all young couples, I hope, have. To tell you what I did about it, I worked ten acres of cotton, twelve acres in corn, helped harvest one-hundred acres of grain in the mornings, and in the afternoons I drove a four-horse load of lumber twelve miles to Batesburg to keep our place running. I got seventy-five cents a day for hauling the lumber, and I had to load and unload it.


When we’d been married about a week or ten days, I was planting cotton in the field beside the house. I left the mare in the field hitched to the cotton planter, and I went into the house for water and something to eat—and also to see my pretty wife. When I came back out of the house, the mare was going across the field with the planter. She’d lost all my seed. I caught her and whipped her and cussed her as I whipped. All of a sudden, I realized that that was the wrong way to live and act. And it came to me—something—I don’t know what to call it. Whatever it was, it changed my life that morning where I was standing by the barn where the mare had dragged the planter. Since that day I’ve tried to do what was right by my fellowman.

When I married, I bought a cow for thirty dollars on credit. After I’d paid all my debts when I gathered my crop, I couldn’t pay but fifteen dollars on the cow. I bought me a mule too. Luke Grigsby, who was supposed to be the best mule-buyer in the state, had promised he’d pay for a mule for me. But when he saw the mule I was bidding on, he didn’t like that particular mule, so he wouldn’t pay for it. Naturally I had to quit bidding. His brother Jake found out what had happened, and he volunteered on Sunday morning at Emory Church to pay for me a mule. I went to Batesburg the next day to an auction and bought a mule. It was the twenty-second day of November, 1916.

Chapter 11

1916–1918

Madaline’s Born; Pa Dies

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That fall of 1916 my stepmother Carrie sold the place I was living on. Pa had used some of her money and given her mortgage over the land. My father was very sick with tuberculosis, so I had to move back to Mt. Willing and live in a tenant house to help take care of Pa. The house we lived in had three rooms. It had been part of the old kitchen at the Mt. Willing house and somebody had moved it off down in the field where it was when we lived there. One thing I’ll never forget about that house happened early one morning. We were sleeping in what we called the bedroom, and it had a fireplace in it. I waked up hearing Gladys scream. She was pointing to the mantelpiece, and she was as white as a sheet. A big old snake was on that mantelpiece. It was so long that its head hung off one end, and its tail hung off the other. I always kept my pistol close by, and I picked it up and shot the head off that snake. Of course, back then, we didn’t have any screens to keep anything out, and that old kitchen was getting in bad shape, and my father hadn’t fixed it up for us. A few people had windmills so they could have water in the house, but we didn’t have one at Mt. Willing. Pa did have a telephone up in the big house where he lived though, but we didn’t.


In that deal I found out that a poor white man was in far worse shape than a free Negro. My own kin people wouldn’t rent me a place. Cousin Joe Padget (Merchant’s and Bub’s father) wouldn’t rent me a place. He’d rather have a Negro to work for him than to have me. From that time I started renting land. We rented from my father and lived at Mt. Willing. We lived there from January to the first Monday in December, 1917. Pa got better, and we moved to Gladys’ mother’s farm into a tenant house on Mine Creek. This was the same dang thing it’d been with my father—only worse.

On a beautiful fair afternoon in March, 1917, while we were still living at Mt. Willing, Gladys and I went to ride selling All-Round Oil trying to get a set of dishes. We’d had company for dinner earlier, and by golly, we didn’t have enough dishes to set the table. We saw an advertisement in the paper that said anybody that sold so many bottles of oil would get a set of dishes. Of course, we wanted the dishes, so we were selling oil. We worked the east side of Richland Creek—we didn’t miss a house selling that oil. Then we decided we’d go over the creek and try on the other side. We crossed Richland Creek at Flatty Grove graveyard in front of Uncle Frank and Aunt Carrie Boyd’s place. (It’s now in Buddy Unger’s pasture.) We were driving a right young mule. There wasn’t any bridge, and the bank was right steep. You had to climb it. It was about as far as the top of the window from where we were sitting in the buggy. That mule looked up and saw tomb rocks and tried to turn around in the cut where the rain had washed out the road banks. Gladys jumped out of the buggy over the wheel and went up the bank. I caught her by the coat tail and got her back in. I said, “You’re crazy.”

“No, I wasn’t. I thought that mule was turning around and would turn this buggy over,” she answered shaking all the time. Gladys always was skittish. She was scared of nearly everything.

Well, I got the buggy turned around, and we went on to see Bettis and Thelma Herlong, who were living at Jouette’s place. (Jouette and Mrs. Emmie were still living in Batesburg.) They hadn’t been by to see us in about a month, and we thought we’d

Madaline’s Born; Pa Dies 89

play rook with them, but they weren’t there, so we headed back home and went to bed. About twelve o’clock Gladys jumped up out of the bed and said, “It’s it.”

“For God’s sakes, Gladys, go back to bed,” I told her. “It’s six weeks ‘til you’re to be confined.” She got back in the bed and we both slept through a big rain.

At six o’clock she jumped out of the bed. This time she knew something was wrong. Our first baby wasn’t due, but there were signs that it had decided to come early. Rufus and Eugenia Shealy’s baby, Alton, had just been born, and Dr. Waters was their doctor. When Rufus went to get him, he wouldn’t come; he said he was sick with a headache. Rufus then went to Dr. O.P. Wise, who wouldn’t come either because Eugenia wasn’t his patient and because he thought Dr. Waters just didn’t want to come and had made up the headache. Anyway Rufus had to get a midwife to deliver Alton.

I sure didn’t want that to happen to Gladys, so I made it my business to go to town and talk to Dr. Wise. I asked him if he might do me like he did Rufus and Eugenia. He said, “Hell, no, Davenport, she wasn’t my patient. I’ll come to your house if the water’s from Ben Padgett’s to Luke Hawkins.”

The way it was raining that morning, I thought he just might have to swim. It had come a three-inch rain. We didn’t have a phone, but my daddy had one up at the Mt. Willing house about 200 yards from us. I opened the shutter (we didn’t have any window panes in that little house that had been the Mt. Willing house kitchen) and called to Mrs. Carrie from one house to the other and asked her to call the doctor. She called Dr. Wise, and he said he’d be there as quick as he could. By that time Gladys’ water had broke, and I was scared he would be too late. Dr. Wise got there about eight o’clock. When he walked in the door, he was wet to his knees. When he’d got to Ben Padgett’s over there across the creek, he met Bennie’s boys, Benny and Buck, who had gone down to the creek to see how high the water was. They stopped Dr. Wise and told him he couldn’t cross the creek.


He said, “I got to cross the creek because Davenport Padgett’s wife is having a baby over there. “

Ben said pretty quick, “Well, you sure can’t cross in no buggy.” “Do you have any clean crocus sacks?” Dr. Wise asked him. When Ben said he had plenty. Dr. Wise said he needed three

sacks and some twine. He gave Ben ten cents for each sack and then he tied them together with the twine. He took the horse out from the buggy and put the sacks on that horse’s back. He jumped on him and rode him down to the creek. The creek was so high and so wide that when he tried to hold his feet up beside the horse to keep them from getting wet, they got soaked anyway when he got so tired he dropped them down in the water. When he came in the house, the water was sloshing out of his shoes. He said, “Mr. Davenport, you’ll have to excuse me. I can’t help it. I couldn’t hold my feet up no further. The creek is higher than I’ve ever known it to be.” He didn’t have to swim, but he was just about as wet as if he’d been in the water.

He turned around and said to Gladys, “How old are you. She said, “I’ll be nineteen the 14th of June.” I can hear him right now when he said to her, “I’d heap rather

deliver a girl your age than a 35-year-old woman.” He looked at me and asked me, “Davenport, who in the hell told you to have a bucket of hot water on the fire and a wash pan and a Turkish towel? How’d you know that I need to clean out from under my finger nails and wash my hands?”

“I don’t know, but I’ve done it,” I answered. We’d already called Mrs. Shadie Hawkins, who always helped

when babies were born. She lived where Avery and Thelma DeLoache live now, right across the road from Mt. Willing. She had come, and we had plenty of water boiling. In ten minutes after Dr. Wise went to work, a baby girl was born. She had a full head of hair, and she was tall. Dr. Wise said, “Davenport, you got a bath scale?”

“Yes, I got a dab burn new one—a draw scale,” I said. He told me that would be all right. We put her on the scale, and she


weighed three and one-fourth pounds. That was Friday morning when she was born. We named her Gladys Madaline after her mother and her Grandmother Wightman, whose name was Lydia Magdaline. When Gladys asked Dr. Wise if the baby was all right, he hesitantly said, “Yes.” Right then, just after she’d had that baby, Gladys made the statement that she’d educate her if she had to take in washing. Gladys was always set on education—maybe because she didn’t get to go to Winthrop herself like she’d wanted to do.

Madaline was premature. She was due the twentieth of April, and she came the twenty-third of March. She weighed a little over three pounds—just what I weighed when I was born. We could put her in a big shoebox. She looked like an old, old lady—real wrinkle-faced. Mrs. Emmie, Jouette’s wife, came to see us on Sunday. She went back and told Jouette that Gladys and Davenport had a baby but that they wouldn’t have her long. Eva Hawkins stayed with us all the first day trying to teach Madaline to take the breast. Nobody had a nipple or a bottle back then. Every mother had to breast-feed her baby. Eva had a baby four weeks old, and she was stronger than Gladys, so she was helping. Late that Sunday afternoon Eva felt Madaline draw a little on the breast. She felt her “take hold,” as she called it. Eva had been milking it into her mouth. From that moment when Madaline took hold, she began to grow. She was still and quiet for five weeks, but then she was just like any other baby except she was smaller than most. She was always a good child.

I can’t leave out one thing that happened. Gladys has never let me forget it. Madaline was born on Friday, and the next Thursday night I went fishing and left her and Madaline with her mother, Mrs. Wightman, staying with them. Gladys still holds that against me.

That summer after Madaline was born, we lived at Mt. Willing, and I worked a crop on halves there for my father. We made a fairly good crop. That fall, sometime about the last of November, Gladys went back to teaching school. She filled out the unexpired


term at old Centennial School when Frank Herlong got a job in Washington. I kept Madaline, and Gladys taught school. We moved up to Centennial into a little house on the Walton Place. Gladys could walk to school from there. That’s when I really got in the habit of bird hunting every afternoon after Gladys got home from school. I went with Shep and Andrew Gardner. That winter was snowy and icy. The wind blew so hard that the house we were living in would rock. It was weather-boarded on the outside, but there was no ceiling on the inside. The weatherboard was put on straight up and down, and it was nailed on to the two-by-fours and was all there was between us and the cold. We had a fireplace to keep us warm, and we cooked on the stove we’d taken with us. Gladys finished the school year in April, 1918, but we had already moved on the first day of March into another sorry little house on Mrs. Wightman’s place.

That spring my father died. I thought my father was as mean as the devil when I was growing up. But when I got grown, I realized he wasn’t. On Sunday evening before he died on Wednesday, May 31, 1918, a whole crowd of people, the biggest people in the county—first class people, no second class—came to see him. After they all left, I decided I’d go into his room a little before sundown. He asked me, “Davenport, have you ever seen anyone die?”

I answered, “Gracious, Pa, I’ve seen Ma and Curtis and a lots of others die.”

He pulled out the skin on his arm. He was so thin that the skin went way out. He said, “I’m going to die.”

“Are you worried about your soul?” I asked him. He said real quick like, “No.” I let him know I was worried about his soul. (I thought I had

religion then.) He looked at me and said, “I believe that heaven is a place of rest. And if it isn’t, I’ll be disappointed because I’ve had to scramble to make a living in this world. It’s been a trial to me.”

I thought he was a nonbeliever. He continued in the same serious vein he was in. “Davenport,” he said, “I’ll tell you. I’ve


never had but two women in my life, and each of them was my wife. I’ve treated every man as my brother and every woman as my sister.”

“How about when you nearly cut Mr. Sing Banks to death at the Courthouse,” I asked.

He thought a minute and then he said slowly, “The Bible says that a friend is closer than a brother. George Wheeler was my friend if I ever had one. And Sing Banks was choking him to death. I cut him to get him off my friend. Another man and I took him from the courthouse to the Walton Hotel where he lay for six weeks. But he didn’t die. And George Wheeler didn’t die.”

I could see that Pa thought he was right in what he had done. And I quit worrying about his soul.

When my daddy died, he owned 400 acres of land, 263 hogs, 75 cows, twelve mules and horses, and all the implements you could dream of—a binder, cutaway harrow, Acme harrow, section harrow—you name it and he had it. And Mrs. Carrie got it all. She had been my Sunday school teacher, and I trusted her. Pa trusted her. We all did. And I believe that she thought she was doing what was right. When Pa and Mrs. Carrie got married, he owed $2400, and he borrowed it from her and made the land over to her. He thought she’d divide it with his children when he died. Everything was in her name. I don’t really understand why. But it was. It was sure worth a lot more than $2400.

That was the second time we boys were done out of our inheritance. The land that had been my mother’s, Pa sold when I agreed—against my will. When Ma died, she told Pa’s brother, Uncle Luther, and her niece, Cousin Ora Padgett, “Promise me that you’ll make Walter take care of my children.” She owned the place where they’d lived out in the country before they moved to Saluda. She told them that he wasn’t to sell the place unless it was for the benefit of his children. When he went to sell it, Uncle Luther wouldn’t help me keep it; by that time he was crazy. That was after his little boy had died of meningitis and he’d watched the doctor saw his head open to see what was wrong with his


brain. He never got over that. So he wouldn’t help. Cousin Ora was willing to help, but she wasn’t enough without Uncle Luther. Pa sold it every bit. And we had not one penny of our father’s money nor one foot of his land. That’s one reason I’ve worked so hard to get a few acres of land and a few dollars in the bank. And I’d never consider marrying again after Gladys died. I don’t want to happen to my children what happened to me.

Chapter 12

1918–1919

Farming Rented Land

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When we moved to Mrs. Wightman’s place, I thought we were

getting up in high cotton. We had rented land for the year. I was to pay Mrs. Wightman 700 pounds of lint cotton. Before then I’d been working for wages or for part of the crop. That year I made a dandy crop, six hundred pounds of lint cotton—mind you, lint cotton—to the acre. For those of you who don’t know cotton, lint cotton is cotton after it’s been ginned—after the seeds have been separated from the lint. And I had nine acres of cotton planted. Cotton was bringing thirty-three cents a pound. It didn’t cost me much to raise it either. I had my own mule by that time.

Something funny comes to my mind. I had just ginned a bale of cotton that year (I had pure Cook seed) over at Powell’s Gin on the Johnston Highway. The bale weighed 575 pounds. I brought it home. I had to unload it to get the seed out of the wagon. Cantey informed me that the rent came first. I didn’t like it. I went up to the house and asked Mrs. Wightman about it, and I politely carried my bale of cotton with me.

When she agreed with Cantey, I put the bale in her barn. The next bale I ginned I paid Mrs. Wightman for 125 pounds of lint cotton in cash. Mrs. Wightman kept that first bale a year, and it


lost fifty pounds and dogged if they didn’t dun me for the lost weight. I paid Gladys’ mamma 700 pounds of lint cotton to work part of her land. Cantey, Gladys’ brother, didn’t pay a penny, and Mrs. Wightman paid for his guano too.

I never saw Gladys hitched wrong but once. We were living at Mrs. Wightman’s the fall of 1918. Cantey and I were pulling fodder from the corn. I’d helped Cantey, and we’d finished his. We’d begun pulling mine. At dinnertime Cantey said at the dinner table, “I don’t see why Mary Alice and Gladys can’t help us pull fodder. The corn is good, but it is low stalks and the leaves are easy to pull off.”

I didn’t like the idea when he said it, but I didn’t say anything. Then when we started to the field after dinner, Gladys and Mary Alice got ready and went with us. Gladys left our baby, Madaline, with Mrs. Wightman. I didn’t tell them to go, and Cantey hadn’t said anything except those words at the table. When we got to the field, Gladys pulled about thirty yards. I was watching her. Gladys stopped and looked at her hands, and she said, “This stuff hurts my hands.” Now everybody knows that dried corn leaves are sharp and will cut tender hands.

I said, “Let me see your hands.” She held them out, and I looked at them. They were almost bleeding, and she hadn’t pulled more than thirty yards. I kissed her hands and turned her around and gave her a little kick and said, “You go on back to the house and tend to the baby. You’ve got no business pulling fodder. That’s man’s work.” And I told Mary Alice to go on too. That’s the first and the last fodder that Gladys ever pulled.

While we were living in the house at Mrs. Wightman’s, one day Mary Alice, Gladys’ sister, was holding Madaline, who was still a baby at the time. She was standing right by the door when Gladys walked by them carrying a pan of boiling starch she had just taken off the stove. Little Madaline threw her hand into the starch and burned it something awful. She had on her little baby ring, and when Gladys pulled it off, skin came with it.

Farming Rented Land 97

I ran to the stable, put the bridle on the horse and didn’t take time to put on the saddle. I rode bareback the two and a half miles to Saluda to get a doctor. But there wasn’t a doctor in town. Mrs. Sallie Brown’s son had been burned bad a week before, and the druggist said Mrs. Sallie would know what the doctor would do. I rode to her house, and she told me to get Ungentine salve and rub the burned place with it. When I got back home, Cousin Carrie Stone had talked the fire out of the burn in Madaline’s hand, and the baby was quiet and peaceful. Cantey had run to get her. They said Mrs. Carrie took Madaline in her arms and before she got half-way round the house, that child had stopped the screaming she’d been doing every second since she’d put her little hand in the starch. The burn still had to get well, but the pain was gone.

Chapter 13

1919–1921

My Son and My Land

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In December of 1919 I left Mrs. Wightman’s and quit renting land. I bought a place—forty acres at thirty dollars an acre. It cost me $1200. This is how it happened. In 1919 Cousin Frank Long bought 182 acres of the place I live on now. Before Pa died, he had already sold sixty acres to L.D. Collum. I was bird hunting at Shep Gardner’s place when the bankers sent for me to come to town. They told me that Cousin Frank had bought it from Pa. They wanted me to be willing because I was an heir.

I raised hell at the bank, but finally I gave in and let them sell it. I thought a lot of Cousin Frank and wanted to live by him. However, Mansey Rowe offered him $1000 profit on the place, and Frank Long took it, but he did let me have forty acres of my father’s land at prevailing prices—then thirty dollars an acre. I made a terrible mistake that was going to cost me a lot of trouble that I couldn’t know about at the time. I did not insist that we have the two pieces separated when I bought it. It had a broken link in the title—a situation that was to cost me great pain. B.W. Crouch said that it would never be lower than thirty dollars an acre.

That was in December 1919, and in December 1920, you couldn’t sell land. Some sold on the courthouse square for $2.50 an

My Son and My Land 99

acre. The next year was 1921, the year the boll weevil came. Fletcher Padgett in 1919 had gone to Mississippi to see what the boll weevil had done. He said the cotton out there was as high as a man’s head and had a square once in a while. In 1921 it took three of us to make a bale to go to the gin; in 1922 it was no better.

In 1923 it was better. We made a pretty good crop. I poisoned the cotton for the boll weevil using arsenic mixed in molasses. Gus was working for part of the crop for Sam Addy, and he didn’t poison his cotton one bit. Sam said, “We demand here at the bank that all our customers poison their cotton.” Gus said he wasn’t going to poison. That fall Mac McGraw lived where Zonnie Hawkins’ place is now; he was working for the bank too, and they bought a poison spreader. Gus ginned his fourth bale, and Sam asked him how many he was going to make. Gus told him seven or eight. Mac MaGraw made two. We decided it was no use to poison. In 1923 I paid off the $400 I owed from the 1920 debt on my crop.

Back to 1919. We moved into another little tenant house. This time we were buying it. We’d never be renters again. Just like the others, this house had no inside walls, just outside weatherboard nailed on two-by-fours. This house had no windows, just wooden shutters. My father had built it in 1894—the year I was born—for hands to live in. Before we moved in, we put overhead ceiling in it. The boards we used were not good dry, and they shrank and left cracks. The smut from the chimney would sift through the cracks down on the floors and beds and everything. Gladys had to work like the devil to keep the place clean. But she did!

In 1920 I farmed my own place and lived in my own house. Of course, it was the house I’d lived in before and the one my brother Curtis had died in back in 1909. It hadn’t seemed as bad then as it did in 1920. I guess it was because we didn’t have any woman living there in 1909. Now I was seeing things through Gladys’ eyes.

That year we really made a good crop. My better judgment told me to sell my cotton, but everybody else was holding theirs. So I


joined the crowd and kept mine too. I came out pretty good that fall, but the bank made me sell my cotton in May 1921 since I still lacked four hundred dollars paying up my 1920 farming expenses.

Farming was just part of my life. Something else very important had happened. On the sixth of August, 1920, on a Friday morning about four o’clock, our first son was born. We named him Curtis Davenport. I named him for myself and for my dead brother Curtis. He was born in the same room that my brother had died in and at the same time of day that Curtis had died. Gladys didn’t teach during this time. She started back in the fall of 1921. Dr. Wise came when Curtis was born, and he didn’t have to swim the creek this time. Curtis grew and was a good child—obedient, loving, and a real worker. No if’s or and’s about that. He was smart too, very apt like the uncle he was named for. Curtis came in with the boll weevil. The next year—1921—is the year they ate up everything. The year Curtis was born Gladys picked a bale of cotton just picking in the field right around the house. Madaline was just three and a half years old, but she was so dependable that she watched after her baby brother in the cradle. One time she was rocking him trying to get him to sleep, and she rocked too hard and turned the cradle over. She cried like her heart would break, but Curtis wasn’t hurt.

That fall I gave Madaline a switching that Gladys never forgave me for. She could cry in a minute when she thought about it. I was just young and didn’t know any better. We’d all been picking cotton over on the Rocky Ridge, the field on the hill behind the house. (Curtis always said that anybody that plowed the Rocky Ridge knew he wanted to go to college and get away from farming because it was tough plowing where all those rocks were.) Madaline must have been about four and Curtis was just a baby, so she had been playing with him on a blanket while Gladys and I picked our cotton.

When night came, I had a basket of cotton—about a hundred pounds—to carry to the house. Gladys was carrying Curtis. Madaline got to crying and cutting up because she wanted me to


carry her home. She was tired. I told her to sit down and wait until I’d taken the cotton to the house and I’d come get her. When I got back, I cut a little hickory and switched her and drew blood from her legs. Gladys wanted to fight me when I carried Madaline in the house.

One time the tables were turned though. Gladys always was strong on slapping. Madaline says she always ducked when Gladys moved her hand. One time she slapped Madaline on the face so hard that I got as mad as the devil. Yep, Gladys slapped first and thought later. Doug says that one Saturday night when he was a senior at Clemson, he started out the kitchen door at home, and Gladys asked him where he was going. He gave her some smart remark because he thought he was grown. And she slapped him. She let him know pretty quick that he might be six feet three inches tall, but he wasn’t too big for her to slap. Our oldest grandchild Bettina used to say, when Madaline would fuss at her, that she was going to tell her grandpa and he wouldn’t let her be spanked. I learned a lot as I grew older. I learned that there wasn’t any sense in hurting your children—no matter what they did.

That same fall on the first Monday in December I went to Saluda with one nickel in my pocket. Christmas was coming, and we needed some clothes. I asked Curg Forrest, who ran a dry goods store, for credit. I’d been trading with him all my life. He said he was sorry but he was not putting any out, that he was at the bottom end of his business. I walked on over to my brother-in-law’s store. George Crouch, Gladys’ sister Sue’s husband, sold everything—clothes, shoes, socks, everything. Madaline and Curtis needed some clothes. He turned me down too and said he wanted that $9.60 that I owed him. I got mad as hell and told him that if he lived ‘til sundown the next day, he’d have his money.

I went from George Crouch’s store on over to the courthouse square where a whole crowd of people were milling around. Cousin Jim Padget had pigs in a pen, the prettiest registered


Berkshire pigs I’d ever seen. I said, “Cousin Jim” (his mother and my mother were sisters), “what’re you asking for those pigs?”

He answered, “Four dollars apiece.” I told him, “I’d like to have three of them.” And he answered, “You sho’ can get them.” I laughed and said, “With a nickel? That’s all I’ve got.” Cousin Jim answered, “I’ll sell them to you on credit. You can

go down to my house and get a box to put them in to take home.” I went to his house, and his wife, Cousin Pearl, gave me a box. When I got back to the square, I put the three pigs in the box, and before I left there, I asked Cousin Jim whether he’d like to buy some corn. He said he’d be glad to take as much as I could bring. I didn’t ask him how much he’d give me for it, but I knew it was worth a dollar a bushel.

I stopped by Gus’ house and asked him to go home with me and help me load up a wagonload of corn. He went, and we built a pair of side planks twenty-six inches wide to go on the wagon. When Gus got in the wagon, he said, “Those sure are pretty Berkshire pigs. Will you sell me one?” Gus gave me four dollars for one of the pigs, and we left it at his house.

When we got home, old man Sam Turner was talking to Gladys in our yard; he was living with our neighbor Mansy Rowe at the time. When I took the box out of the wagon, he said “Those are the prettiest pigs I ever saw. Would you sell me one?”

I said, “I’d sell you both of them.” He answered, “I’ll take them if you will carry them to the

house.” He paid me, and then I had $12.05 in my pocket. Before that I had traded an old mule to Uncle Jake Culbreath

for a mare. She was a good mare and would pull anything, but she’d stumble in spite of the devil. I expected her to fall down and break her leg or the tongue of the wagon. So I saddled that mare and rode down to Will DeLoache’s. He traded in horses. I asked him how old the mare was. He looked in her mouth and said, “Nine years.”


Then I asked him, “What is this mare worth.” He told me she’d be worth about $85.00. But I couldn’t sell her to him without telling him the whole truth about her. I just blurted out, “She’s a stumbler.”

That changed the picture. I said, “Give me fifty dollars, and you can have her.”

He said, I ain’t got $50.00, but I have got a brand new pearl handle 32 Smith and Wesson pistol with a 3 1/2 inch barrel. I’ll give you that for the mare.” He went in the house and got the pistol, and I looked at it real good. I knew that he’d drawn a pistol on Sheriff Trib Davis and that this was another pistol. I put the pistol in my pocket and pulled the bridle and saddle off the mare in one strong jerk and gave her a kick. She ran in Will DeLoache’s lot, and we’d made a deal.

Just about that time, Henry Moss drove in Mr. DeLoache’s yard selling beef. I bought a dollar’s worth of steak. I put my saddle and bridle in the foot of Henry Moss’ buggy and rode back home with him. Then I put out to Saluda with that big load of corn that Gus and I had loaded. I weighed the corn on Walter Duffie’s platform scales when I got to town. He didn’t charge me anything. They’d charge you today.

It was thirty-two bushels of corn that I took to Cousin Jim. I owed him $12.00, so he paid me the difference—twenty dollars. Then I had $31.05 in my pocket. I set out to go to George Crouch’s store. I said to him, “Let me sell you a pistol.” I told him that it was too dangerous for him to be running a store without some protection. A Mr. Rudolph had been robbed on Saturday night in Trenton going home from his store, and he lost his month’s work.

That set George Crouch afire for the pistol. He said “I’ll give you $19.00 and a receipt for the $9.60 you owe me.”

I answered, “You just got yourself a pistol.” So now I’d paid George Crouch what I owed him, I’d got shed

of a horse that nobody would have bought from me; I’d sold 32 bushels of corn, and I had $50.05 in my pocket. Dr. Dowling came out when he saw I was uptown with a load of corn. He wanted to


buy some. Times weren’t then like they are now. We didn’t have a Farmers Mutual like they do today where you can sell your corn and wheat and oats. We just had to peddle our crops out. Now we could sell cotton like that. Cotton buyers came from all around. I told him I’d bring him some corn.

But before I went home, I went to the bank with five warehouse receipts for five bales of cotton I had put in the warehouse. I told Sam Addy, ‘I’ll trade you these receipts for the mortgage on my crop.”

He said, “What have you got on your mind.” I said, “If you’d take these receipts, then I could sell the cotton

today and pay my debts.” And Sam said, “I’m going to do it.” I tore up the receipts and

dropped them in the stove. Then I said, “I’ve got three or four hundred bushels of corn to sell. And I couldn’t sell it until I had the mortgage paid off on my crop for the year.”

The next day Gladys, Madaline, and I went to Columbia, and we splurged. I bought Madaline a $4.75 doll from Bon Marche, a fine store in Columbia. She was mighty proud of that doll and played with it for a long time. I didn’t spend any other money though.

A year later, 1921 it was, Gladys was fortunate to get a job teaching at Sardis School. She started work October 13. I kept the two children. 1921 was the first year after I was grown that I owned a bird dog. I bought him as a puppy for five dollars from Alvin Padget.

Just before Christmas Curtis (he was just seventeen months old) took the flu. Oleit Forrest gave him the flu. At Emory Church Gladys had to play the organ. Oleit was kinda sick, but she didn’t know it was the flu, and she held Curtis while Gladys played for the congregation to sing. He took the flu from her. We carried him to Dr. Wise on Saturday, and the little fellow fainted in my arms. Madaline took it on Saturday after we got back from the doctor. Then on Monday James Ridgell brought Gladys home from school. She was coming down with it too. She wanted to be sick in


the back room, but by that time I was so sick I prayed I’d faint so that I wouldn’t have to move the bed from the front room to the back.

That Monday night and all day Tuesday it snowed. And all four of us were sick, sick!! We didn’t want a thing to eat. We were sick all that week. Cousin Frank Herlong was riding the mail then, and he would stop and leave food for us on our doorsteps. His wife, Roseva, fixed the food and sent it by Frank. Gradually Curtis and Madaline began to get better, and they got hungry. I got up to fix them some grits, but when they looked at it, they were too weak to eat. On Wednesday our neighbor, Mansy Rowe, called through the window and asked what was the matter. I told him we had the flu. Flu was everywhere then. Mansy went back to his house, and his wife, Mrs. Clara, made soup and cooked cornbread, and he brought it to us. But we couldn’t eat a bite of that either.

Then Thursday morning my good Negro neighbor, Henry Moss, came over to our house, and he didn’t hesitate. He opened the door and came on in—flu or no flu. We were a little better by then. Henry had had the flu in 1919 when the terrible epidemic hit. He asked if there was anything I could eat. I said I thought if I could just have some hot tea and toasted light bread, I could eat it. He said he’d go get some. He rode the ten miles to Batesburg and the ten miles back and bought tea and a loaf of bread. He came in the house and made a pot of tea and toasted the bread. I was so ashamed—we couldn’t eat that either.

By that time we’d had the doctor twice. The second time he came he talked about Santa Claus. On Saturday, he told me that if I would be particular, I could go and find old Santa Claus and talk to him for the children. Saturday was December 23; Sunday, the twenty-fourth, and Monday was Christmas Day. We had more money to spend, but we were too sick to go to town. I asked Dr. Wise if I could go, and he said, “It won’t hurt you if the weather is pretty.”


Well, the weather was pretty, and I put on extra clothes, hitched up Laura, and went to Saluda and bought some stuff for our Christmas. Christmas then wasn’t like it is today when everybody gets a whole pile of stuff. The children got raisins and oranges and apples and a few firecrackers in their stockings, and Santa Claus always put a little gift for each one in a shoebox that each child would put near his stocking.

When I got back home and ate a little dinner, I still felt pretty good, so I decided I’d go over on the Rocky Ridge behind the house and kill some birds for Christmas. My little old setter pointed one time. I shot one time, and the dog brought me the bird. I was so weak, and the gun seemed like it knocked me down. I thought I was going to die. I took that bird and went back to the house. That was the end of my hunting then. I was not as well as I thought I was.

That night after supper my nose started bleeding, and I couldn’t stop it. Gladys thought I was going to die. Blood was everywhere. The moon was shining, and we heard Uncle John Graham, an old colored man down the road, over at his house singing, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Mansy Rowe happened to come down to our house to check on all of us. He saw the fix I was in, and he went over to Uncle John’s and asked him what to do. He had a reputation for home remedies. He said to put vinegar up my nose. I did. Durn if it didn’t nearly strangle me to death, but it stopped the bleeding. And we had a good Christmas—just Gladys and me and Madaline and Curtis.

We got well during the Christmas holidays. We went to Mrs. Emmie’s and Jouette’s on Christmas Day. Poor little Madaline got sick again. This time though it was just a bad cold. Thank God it wasn’t the flu again.

The year the boll weevil came to South Carolina was 1921. It took three of us one-horse farmers together to put enough cotton together to gin out a four hundred pound bale of lint cotton. Uncle John Graham, who owned his own farm, and Cousin Frank Long went in with me to go to the gin. The boll weevil did everything


but pull up the stalks. It took me four years stinting and saving to pay the hundred dollars I’d borrowed and the interest on it. In 1925 when I’d finally paid up what I owed for 1921, we had a dry year. It rained on the twelfth day of May, showered on the fourth of July, came a light hail storm on the eighth of September, and rained a real rain on the fourteenth of December. And that was all it rained from May on. That was a year lost as far as farming was concerned.

Chapter 14

1922–1929

A Mule for a Model T

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

By the spring of 1922 we’d been at the place we’d bought for three years. We didn’t make any cotton on account of the boll weevil, but I made a good wheat crop and a good corn crop. Gladys was still teaching at Sardis. We still lived in the four rooms—two big front rooms and two little back rooms. We had a fireplace in the sitting room and a stove in the kitchen. We still cooked and ate in the same room, one of the little back rooms, but it was bigger than the other one. We used two rooms for bedrooms.

I sold my first dog to Jim Crouch in 1922 for $25.00. It was the same one that I’d given Alvin Padgett $5.00 for as a puppy. That dog was a whiz too. I had found out that I was good at training dogs. I made them mind me, and I gave them plenty of instructions and plenty of opportunity to hunt. There were birds everywhere around here, and I hunted a little bit every day. I’ve sold $2800 worth of dogs in my life. That money helped us to get by.

Something big happened in 1924. That was the year we bought our first car—a Model T Ford. We paid cash for it. I sold a mule for two hundred dollars, and Gladys put $162.00 of her teaching

A Mule for a Model T 109

money on it. The car cost $362.00. We didn’t buy a battery though, so we had to crank the car with a hand crank. We bought it on my birthday—the twentieth of June. I was thirty years old. Not too awful many people had cars. Certainly not many poor people like us. Gladys had walked to Sardis School in pretty weather (a distance of about two miles), and I carried her in the buggy when it rained.

The fall of 1924 Gladys was changing schools—from Sardis to Fairview, which was seven miles from where we lived. If Gladys was going to stay at home, we had to have a car. After we bought the car, I drove Gladys back and forth to school the first month. When we got through gathering the crop and sowing grain, all four of us moved into Mr. John Matthews’ house, which was just about a mile from Fairview School. The first Monday in March, 1925, I left Fairview and went to Saluda and bought soda to put on my grain. I talked too much to everyone I met, and so I was late leaving town.

I got home and started putting out soda. I looked up from where I was in the field and saw Gladys coming up the road in that Model T. Ford. She had gotten a colored man to crank it for her the first time. She drove that car from Mr. John Matthews’ place to our house. She had to get it out from under the shed where we kept it at Mr. Matthews’ house where we were living. That shed was small and had ruts in it up to the axle of the car. She wasn’t afraid. Oh yes, she said it scared her a little to go around all the farm machinery that was on the road. From that day on she drove every day wherever she wanted to go. We immediately moved back home, and she drove back and forth to school. Spring broke and the roads got better, and that helped considerably.

I told you we didn’t buy a battery for the car at first, but in the fall of 1925 I had Sam Goff and Heyward Auld put a starter and a battery in the car. Then we carried Milette and Grady Snelgrove and Madaline and Curtis to the state fair in Columbia. As we were getting ready to leave home and we didn’t have to crank the car,


Curtis looked up at me and said, “We’re getting up in G, Daddy, getting a battery in our car.” He was right. We were “getting up in G.” I’ve already told you about the summer of 1925. That was the year it didn’t rain. Once we were visiting at Cousin Joe Padget’s for the day. We had let Cousin Joe and his wife Rosa Mae have our new car to go to the Merchant reunion (Rosa Mae had been a Merchant) while we stayed with their sick son, Sheck, who had Hodgkin’s Disease. He died eight years later. He was their second child, and they’d named him for Rosa Mae’s cousin, Sheck Shealy. All that day while they were gone, it looked a little like rain, and we prayed and hoped rain would come. A few drops did fall over at Cousin Joe’s (that’s where Jack Black lives now), but when we got back home we hadn’t had a drop.

Grandpa Mahlon died the spring of 1925. He’d been sorta at loose ends since Grandma Sue died in 1909. Aunt Ella and Uncle Joe had moved in with him and taken care of him after Grandma died, and he’d lived with them after they moved to Saluda in 1913. When he died, he’d been living with Uncle Ernest and Aunt Pearl in Edgefield. Aunt Pearl had bought a house. Uncle Ernest had had two wives, and both of them had died, so he’d come back to live with Aunt Pearl. He was in bad shape mentally even then. Both Ernest and Pearl worked in the Edgefield Bank as bookkeepers. Aunt Pearl made a lot of money. She bought the house and a place out from Edgefield.

Grandpa had been sick a good while before he died, and Aunt Mame had not been able to come from down toward Batesburg where she lived to see him because her husband, Uncle Pope, was dead, and she had no way to come. The family brought Grandpa back to Sardis where he’d been baptized and where he’d preached and held the prayer meeting for so many years. Uncle Ernest was peculiar; he didn’t want to open Grandpa’s casket. I reckon he kinda thought he was boss since just before Grandpa died, he had been living with him and Aunt Pearl. Aunt Mame asked the undertaker to open the casket so she could see her father one last time. Uncle Ernest jumped up and said just as the undertaker was


opening the lid, “Close him up.” Then he turned and said to Aunt Mame, “You didn’t come to see him when he was sick.”

I went to the front of the church and said to the undertaker, “Open the damn coffin.” And he did. Uncle Ernest was mad as hell with me for a while, but he finally got over it.

We were generous with our car. We let Leroy Matthews, Gladys’ sister Anna’s boy, have our car on a Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving to carry a schoolteacher to Blaney, South Carolina. Leroy was supposed to come back on Thursday night, but he came driving up about midnight on Sunday night. We had about died worrying over the car. Leroy had just decided to spend the weekend, and he never one time thought about maybe we’d be worried.

That year I sold 100 bushels of oats in Augusta, and Luther Turner delivered them for $10.00. I got $1.10 a bushel, so that amounted to $110.00. I bought a pistol—a 22, 7 shot, 3-inch barrel—at a pawnshop for $7.50. George Crouch (another George Crouch, not Gladys’ sister’s husband) was teaching school for his mother, Mrs. Sophia Crouch, who was sick. (She could snore at our house, and it could be heard a quarter of a mile away; she sounded like a buzz saw.) George had a male pointer that was part gun-shy, but he was supposed to be a good dog too.

He said to me, “Mr. Davenport, what will you give me for the puppy?”

I told him, “I’ll give you a pistol.” He looked at me and said, “It’s a deal.” He went by my house,

and I gave him the pistol, and he left the dog with me. I named him Ben and soon broke him from being gun-shy by hunting him.

After I trained Ben, I advertised him for $60.00 in 1927. A Mr. Musty and a Mr. Minor, who ran a circle saw shop in Columbia and was rich, came over home and tried the dog out between sundown and dark. Birds got up and flew against the sunset. I killed two of them. Ben got the first one, and when the second one ran, he ran after it and brought it back. That set those men afire. I said, “He ain’t about to mash birds in his mouth.” They thought


the knots under the dog’s penis were growths. I told them they were just natural, and they believed me. Anyway, they bought the dog. They knew a Mr. Spigner who had registered Gordon setters, and every time I’d see them after that, they’d tell me that those setters were no good compared to old Ben.

Yes, I sold Ben in 1927 for $60.00. Then I went to Spartanburg with Gladys and the children on Thanksgiving night to see her sister Sue, who by that time was living there with her husband and children. We came back by Greenwood to see my cousin Nora Long, who held the second mortgage over my place. I gave her a check for $740 and all the cash money I’d got for the dogs—sixty dollars. I had made $740.00 that year and the year before and had it all in the bank. But I didn’t have any money to pay the interest on the $800.00 at 8%. I owed her $64.00 even though I’d had the money only six months. She wouldn’t give me the note until I paid the $64.00. I came home and borrowed $64.00 from the bank and went back up to Greenwood and got my note. I told her she was the hardest-boiled businesswoman I knew.

I got the second mortgage paid off. Then I couldn’t get the land separated. You remember that I didn’t get a clear title to it when I bought it since the Federal Land Bank held a mortgage over it and Mansy Rowe’s land together. I had borrowed $800 from my first cousin Nora Long, and she took a second mortgage. That’s the $800 I had just paid off. As long as Mansy Rowe had lived on the other part of the place, it was all right. But when Curtis Temples moved there, he went to Columbia and assumed the whole mortgage and thought he could tell me to move.

Another dog I had was Beulah. One day I went over to Jake Grigsby’s to hunt with him, but Cousin Ada, Jake’s wife, told me Jake was at his brother Luke’s house. So I went on to Luke’s. Then Jake, Luke, and Luke’s son, Robert Lee, and I went hunting. I had Beulah with me. Cousin Luke had Old Joe, a registered setter, and Cousin Jake had Queen, a good dog too. My dog would point the birds, and Old Joe would run them up. I got tired of that. I said,


“Cousin Luke, if you’ll let me, I’ll fix that dog so he won’t run up birds. I’ll shoot him.”

Cousin Luke said, “Go ahead. Just don’t hurt him any.” The next time he ran up the birds, I put a load of shot in him. He ran by me, and I grabbed him by the ear and mashed his ears and talked to him. And you know, the next time he pointed the birds, he held just as firm as Beulah did.

That day a squirrel ran out of one tree and jumped across to another tree. I killed him in the air. Cousin Luke said that was the best shot he’d ever seen. Cousin Luke had a gift I didn’t have; he could take anybody’s dog and hunt him. One day we went hunting down near Lucius Denny’s house (he’d married one of my old sweethearts—Thelma Etheredge) and something happened to our dog. Cousin Luke went up to Lucius’ house and borrowed his bird dog. Lucius wasn’t home. That dog hunted for us just as well as he would have hunted for Lucius. We hunted him all day and killed a crowd of birds. Then we took him back to Lucius and thanked him for letting us borrow him. He was home by that time. Of course, we knew all along he wouldn’t mind if we took the dog, or we wouldn’t have done it.

Frank Herlong gave me a dog one time, and that dog would never walk a log. When Frank gave him to me, I felt that dog’s head. I could tell that the dog didn’t have a grain of sense. Well, one morning I went out to the pen, and the dog was hanging. He’d put his head in a crack and, instead of pulling the right way, he went down where the crack was little. He was stone cold dead.

I left him there until Frank Herlong came along on the mail route. I showed him that dog. I told him to begin with that that damn dog didn’t have no sense. I’m glad that I didn’t buy him. Frank probably knew it already or he wouldn’t have given him to me. He was just hoping that I could do something to help the dog. I had trained enough of them. But I couldn’t train a dog unless he started out with sense. Then I could teach him to hunt and retrieve birds.


I had a cancer in my lip that bled all the time. Doctor Wise sent me to Columbia, and I had it cut out. When I was able to travel, I came back on the train to Batesburg. Wightman Matthews, another one of Gladys’ sister Anna’s boys, came in our car to meet me at the train. Instead of coming straight home, we had to go by Fairview School to pick up Gladys. She was teaching night school to adults who couldn’t read and write. Some old fellow at the school was interested in what had happened to me, and he was asking me all about my operation, and I was telling him the details. Gladys heard me tell part of it.

When she finished locking up the school, she got in the car. Wightman was driving because I wasn’t able to. We got about six hundred yards from the school coming this way, and Gladys fainted. We were right in front of a little house where we stopped, and Wightman took Gladys out of the car and laid her straight out on the front piazza. It happened that Negro Mary Gant was living there at that time. She came to the front and fanned Gladys along with the rest of us.

She looked at me and said, “Mr. Davenport, how often do she have them spells?”

Gladys was coming to and she raised up and said, “No time.” It seemed that she was all right. We waited a few minutes and then helped her up and led her back to the car and started home again.

Just before we got to Cousin Mattie Matthews’ house—we’d gone about two miles—she went dead again—“sho nuff” dead. Her eyes rolled back. We pulled up in Cousin Mattie’s yard, and this time I picked her up and took her in the house and laid her on Cousin Mattie’s bed. Cousin Mattie and I were rubbing her and fanning her when Cousin Mattie’s son, Lamar, and his wife, Viola, who lived in the other part of the house, came in. Lamar said to me, “I’ve got some of John Merchant’s good homemade liquor. That ought to help her.”

I said, “Get it and we’ll try it.” He got it and Cousin Mattie got a tablespoon. I gave Gladys four tablespoons of that homebrew,


and she came to. We brought her on home, and she was feeling good. That four tablespoons of liquor had made her a little drunk. That’s the only time she’s ever had a “spell” like that. I reckon it was thinking about that operation and all that blood.

When I was in the hospital that time, Thelma Etheredge, who had married Lucius Denny (the one whose dog we borrowed), came to see me. Lucius had gotten rich from selling real estate. You’ve heard of Denny Terrace in Columbia. Well, that was an early real estate development he was responsible for. Now Thelma was another pretty woman. She and I’d been sweethearts for a long time when we were both young, but I never did ask her to marry me. I knew I was going to marry Gladys. That time she leaned over to kiss me, and I said, “For God’s sake, kiss me on the cheek. You might bust my lip open again. She laughed and kissed me on the cheek. I didn’t get to go to her funeral when she died, and I’ve always regretted it.

In 1926 the roads were awful in this part of the country. Bettis Herlong and I hauled rock to put on the road so Thelma could get to Sardis to teach school. Warren Henderson was the sergeant of the chain gang. They were camped by Dora Stone’s house up near Mine Creek. I went up there and asked him to come down into our section and fix the roads down here. Instead of going to Fruit Hill like he’d planned to do, he camped at Ben Padgett’s and worked all the roads in this part of the county. He stayed here six weeks.

My friend Elliot, Uncle Wash’s son—the one who lived all his life right behind where I live now—didn’t want you to touch a foot of his land. Warren Henderson wanted to change the road so it wouldn’t go over one bad boggy place, and it was on Elliot’s land. I told Warren to go ahead and change the road. Elliot didn’t like it, but he wouldn’t say anything to me. One day Elliot came and sat down by me and Warren where we were talking. Warren said to Elliot, “Wasn’t it your bullet that killed that Negro at Pleasant Hill and another man took the blame for it?” That made me mad for Warren to bring up something like that just because


Elliot didn’t want him to touch his land. Elliot got up and walked off.

Next morning I saw Warren Henderson at my spring at the foot of the hill below my house. He was getting water for the day. I said to him, “Didn’t you run up to John Buzardt after you had shot him in the head?” Old man Will Henderson had shot his right arm off. He fell face down, and Warren Henderson came up and shot him in the back of the head. He lived seventeen days and got gangrene because nobody knew he had the hole in his head. Warren Henderson didn’t say a word. He just walked away from me.

Years later when Warren was the policeman in Saluda, Cousin Mose Long was drunk up town. He was in Hunter Ridgell and Ben Pugh’s store, and they wouldn’t let the police come get him. Mose ran out and grabbed me around the neck. Warren came up to me, and I said, “I’ll take care of him.”

Later in 1926 I asked Warren why he didn’t get Mose from me, and he said, “I saw your daddy in action once, and he wouldn’t get back for nothing.”

In 1927 I advertised a cow I had for sale in the Sunday’s State. I didn’t dream of a fellow coming all the way from Vaucluse to see about the cow. (Vaucluse is down near Aiken.) When he came on Monday after the advertisement came out on Sunday, I wasn’t at home. When I advertised her, I’d said she was bad to jump out.

The man came back again on Tuesday. He’d seen the cow the day before when I wasn’t home. He saw the cow again on Tuesday. When I wasn’t at home on Tuesday, he went to Saluda and parked in front of the bank. A man walked out of the bank and he asked him, “Do you know a man by the name of D.D. Padgett?” The man coming out of the bank said, “I sure do.”

And the other guy said, “Can you believe what he tells you about a cow?”

The man answered, “Yes, sir, and if it isn’t right, I’ll make it right.” That man from Vaucluse came back on Thursday, and this time he caught me home. The cow was out again—lying under a


persimmon tree on the Rocky Ridge. We went over there. I told him the calf she had was her second calf and that the calf was sorry because it had had too much milk. I had thought it was going to die, but it didn’t. It was drinking all the milk the cow was giving.

He said, “If I could get the cow to Vaucluse, I’d buy her.” I answered, “I’ll deliver her for $7.50.” He pulled out $157.50 in

cash right there and paid me. Then he left, and I told him I’d bring the cow to Vaucluse the next day.

I went over to J.L. Grigsby’s house. I knew he hauled cows in his pick-up truck. We carried that cow in his pick-up on Friday. When we got to the man’s house, I saw that he had four pens six feet wide and ten feet long. He had ten or twelve Beagle dogs in one of the pens—the pen he was going to put the cow next to. Yes sir, he was going to put that fine milk cow next to all those Beagles.

And in the next pen he had eight or ten foxhounds, and running all over the yard were five shepherd dogs barking for all they were worth. You couldn’t hear a thing for all the racket those dogs were making. I said to the man when he came out to meet us, “Mister, if you put the cow in that pen, she’ll go dry as a bone in a month, and the calf will die. If you’ll give me the $7.50 I paid to haul the cow, I’ll carry her back home. I don’t want you to be dissatisfied with a cow you bought from me.”

He said, “You must be like the man at the bank said you were.” He told me about asking a man about whether you could believe what I said about a cow. He told me then, “I’ll risk it. I never saw anybody advertise a cow like you do.”

For years he’d write me every time he needed a cow. I’d tell him, “I’ve got a cow, but she’s not like the first one I sold you.” That first cow was a wonderful milk cow. She gave four gallons of milk a day, and one and a fourth pounds of butter every day. He said he paid for her pretty quick selling butter and buttermilk.

In Saluda County, if it hadn’t been for the timber, the Lord only knows what people would have done from 1920 until 1930. At one


time there were 107 sawmills in the county. It saved the day for us until we learned to fight the boll weevil and make crops again. We tried all kinds of poisons—dusted with hand dusters and also used arsenic with molasses. We used buckets of the stuff and dipped mops into the buckets and went up and down the rows mopping the sticky stuff on the leaves and the stalks.

Even though we didn’t make any cotton, those were good years for us at home. Gladys was teaching first at Sardis and then at Fairview. Madaline turned five in March of 1922, and she started to school at Sardis that fall. All our children started school when they were five years old, and every one of them always led their class all through college even. God blessed every one of them; they could learn just like Gladys and I could, and every one of them loved to learn just like she always did. Curtis was five on August 6, 1925, and he started to school at Fairview. Gladys took both of them with her wherever she taught, and she’d changed from Sardis to Fairview in 1924.

Madaline and Curtis were always good children, and both of them could and did work hard in school and on the farm. I never had any money to pay them any salary for working in the fields, but they seemed to know that we were all working hard just to make a living. Lots of people around us owned their land, but most everybody worked as hard as we did. That was just the way it was then. Gladys was busy always. She kept the house and cooked and saw to the children and helped me in the field when she wasn’t teaching. She had to study a lot because she was teaching algebra and trigonometry and Latin to the older students at Sardis and at Fairview. They couldn’t give students a high school diploma, but they could teach the subject matter if the teacher knew enough, and if Gladys didn’t know it, she’d sure learn it. Of course, Gladys enjoyed teaching and studying just like I enjoyed farming and hunting.

Chapter 15

1929–1931

Banks Break; Bela’s Born

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In 1929 the panic hit, and in 1931 the banks broke. People got

up well-to-do and went to bed paupers. The stock exchange broke. Cotton went from fourteen cents a pound to four and a half cents. And danged if it didn’t affect me. The fall of 1929 I made twenty-nine bales of cotton.

That was the year I won an automobile and got a hammer out of it. My nephew Leonard Matthews, Leroy’s brother, was working for wages for me. In Batesburg Mike Rutland had a house and land sale where he was giving away a Model T Ford Roadster as a door prize. Leonard had the idea that if he got to the sale he’d win the car. He talked me into the notion of carrying him; in return I was to get half the car if he won it.

I’ll be danged if he didn’t win it. In the car was a hammer they’d used putting up signs all over the country advertising the sale. That hammer was all I got for my half of the car. On top of that I lost a good hand because Leonard quit working for me. But of all the good times anybody ever had, that boy had it. Right after Leonard got the lucky number, D.D. Smith offered him $550.00 for the car, which would have been $275.00 each for Leonard and me.


But Leonard said it was his car and he wanted to ride in it. And I don’t blame him.

That fall of 1929 two hurricanes hit our cotton right after it had opened. When the hurricanes were through with it, a man couldn’t pick more than fifty or sixty pounds a day whereas in good cotton, a man could usually pick three hundred pounds a day. The burrs were so rotten and cracked that a person had to pick each lock of cotton out individually. We finally finished picking, and I had to sell what I had made for four and a half cents a pound. We gathered the corn and started to sowing grain. I didn’t get much grain sowed because it started raining and there was no more plowing until spring.

But Christmas came anyway—and even with all our bad luck, there still was a Santa Claus in our house that year and a whole lot of happiness. Madaline was twelve and Curtis was nine. I always loved them so much it hurt me sometimes. I wanted them to have an easier start than I had had. One thing for sure, they had the best mother in the world, and she was alive to take care of them. And take care of them she did.

We started the new year—1930—like all other poor farmers. We’d go broke one fall and get a lien and start over in the spring—just hoping to be able to pay our debts and have a little left over to live on. All we had was hope, hope to go on. I had bought Frank, a 1300-pound red horse, in 1922. I bought him from Luther Wheeler for seventy-five dollars. He was as good a horse as ever lived, and the best plow animal that I ever put in the field. Madaline loved to ride that horse.

In the summer of 1929 she had two girls visiting her—Millie Rikard and Rebecca Spearman. They were spending the week. All three of them were taking turns riding old Frank. Madaline was showing off. They were riding from our house to the top of the hill at Mt. Moses Church. When Madaline turned Frank around at the top of the hill, she started him to galloping fast, and she fell off him coming down that hill. Frank came tearing on to the house, and I nearly had a damn fit when I saw Madaline wasn’t on the

Banks Break; Bela’s Born 121

horse. I ran down the road to find her, and I met her walking back home. Thank God, she wasn’t hurt.

Gladys was principal now at Sardis School. She had come back from Fairview the fall of 1929. Thelma Herlong and Sophie Crouch taught with her. Bettis Herlong, Thelma’s husband and my old buddy (Jouette’s wife’s son by her first marriage), thought Gladys would run her watch up every morning and run it back in the afternoon so that school would last a long time. Gladys was always one to get to school early and stay there late. Thelma was gone too long, he thought. He didn’t know that Thelma would stop here at our house on the way home to talk and eat. Bettis Jr., Bettis and Thelma’s youngest child, hadn’t started to school yet, and Bettis’ mother, Mrs. Emmie, was keeping him. Thelma would leave here late and then stop by Mrs. Emmie’s to pick up Bettis Jr., so she would be night getting home. But Bettis was just as good a cook as Thelma was, so he’d have supper ready when Thelma got there. He was a good fellow, and he was always good to Thelma. He loved her.

Spring 1930 came, and our hopes multiplied. We had a right sharp rain that year. Our cotton wasn’t too good, but we had a wonderful wheat and corn crop. We as a people learned and learned fast to tighten our belts and live on what we had. Of course, for our family, we had never had much, but we still felt the pinch. The only way we poor little farmers could get any money was to borrow it through the Seed Loan, a federal agency established even before the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It helped farmers get from one year to the next.

That spring of 1930 I went to Johnston on Friday to look at mules to buy. I priced one particular mule that I liked the looks of. If I paid cash, I could get that mule for $160, but on credit it would cost me $200. I had $80 in cash, so I needed $80 more. On Saturday morning I stopped at Cousin Will Padget’s office and asked him to lend me $80. (My mother and his mother were sisters.) He said he didn’t have the money. I did everything to convince him he did have it. Finally I cussed and told him, “If it hadn’t been for my


father and mother, your ma and pa couldn’t have raised you. You were raised the poorest of any white folks in this country.”

He shook his head and said, “I know it; I know it.” I told him, “I saw my father take a cap off Jouette’s head and

put it on yours because you didn’t have a cap to cover your head.” He looked pained, but he didn’t change his tune.

I went on up town to Ben Crouch’s office and asked him to loan me the money, and he wouldn’t. I really didn’t expect him to. When I came down the stairs to the bank, Cousin Neal Able, Thelma Herlong’s mother, was sitting in her new Oldsmobile right in front of the bank. I walked up to her and asked her if she’d lend me eighty dollars. She hummed and hawed and refused me. I said to her, “I want to tell you one damn thing that you need to know. One Sunday morning your husband sent old Jake Little to our house on a mule with a note that was to my father. It said, ‘Dear Walter. Please send me a thousand dollars. If you don’t, I just might lose everything I have.’

“Pa wasn’t going to do it, and I turned to him and said, ‘You and Cousin Eugene have been friends for a mighty long time, and you have the money lying in the bank not earning a penny of interest.’ He got his checkbook and wrote out a check for $1000 and sent it.” What I said and what Pa did didn’t matter to Mrs. Neal; she didn’t let me have the money.

I went on to Johnston and bought Laura, an 1190-pound, eighteen-month-old mule, on credit. I didn’t pay a cent then. On Monday morning Cousin Irvin Smith (another first cousin—Aunt Ada’s son) came with the truck that delivered the mule. I said to him, “Is Cousin Will Padget broke?”

He said, “Why do you ask?” I told him that I’d tried to borrow eighty dollars and he’d said

he didn’t have it. Cousin Irvin said to me, “I don’t know whether he’s broke or not, but I can tell you for a fact that he bought a mule from me in November when the first carload came in and he hasn’t paid a dime on it. And the first week in January he bought


two mules for your brother Gus to work, and he hasn’t paid a dime on them either.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. “I’ve got to go and apologize to my Cousin Willie.” I made a special trip to do just that. When I went in his office and before I saw Cousin Will, Ray Berry, his clerk, caught me and said, “I didn’t dream Mr. Willie would take a cussin’ like you put on him.” I told him that I’d been wrong, and I was going to apologize. I went on in and told Cousin Will that I was sorry about the way I’d talked to him, that I didn’t know he was telling me the truth. He said that he’d tried every way he knew how to convince me that he was telling the truth. And he had. That was just before he started getting rich.

On a Monday in April, 1931, I caught Frank out and put the gear on him. I had left my plow stock in the field on Saturday. When I put the gear on the horse, he flinched a little, but I led him on to the field. I hitched him to the plow stock and told him to get up. When he moved and the back band mashed down on his withers, he almost went to the ground. I stopped him, and I looked all over him, but I couldn’t see a thing the matter. I tried again and he did worse because I had the plow a little deeper in the ground. I brought him back to the house and hitched him under a shade tree.

I walked down to see Uncle Tillman Bosket, who lived by the creek and doctored on horses some. Uncle Tillman walked back with me and looked at Frank. He rubbed his hand over the horse’s back and got to the place that was sore. Frank went down again. Uncle Tillman said, “Mr. Padgett, this horse has been snake bit. Let’s go look in the stable. The snake may still be there right now.”

I cut a stick about four feet long. I’m scared of snakes and always have been. I went to the stable, and Uncle Tillman went with me. There was a plank lying on the ground. I knew it was there, and I hadn’t picked it up. I raised it now, and there was a highland moccasin as big as my arm. That kind of snake doesn’t get long, but it was plenty big. Uncle Tillman said sorta soft, “There he is. That’s what’s the matter with your horse.” I killed the


snake with the stick. Uncle Tillman told me then, “Your horse will get all right now, but from now on every year at this time the horse’s withers will swell up, but they’ll get all right again. When it swells up every six months, then your horse will die.”

I kinda laughed and said, “Uncle Tillman, for God’s sake, that’s nothing but an old wives’ tale.”

He just nodded his head like he could do and said, “Wait and see.” The next year in April it swelled up and was awful sore, but it got all right again. That was 1932; then it swelled again in 1933 in April and in 1934 in April. Then in September of 1934 it swelled again, and sure enough Frank died.

When I saw Uncle Tillman, I said, “It’s hard as hell for me to believe what happened. But the horse is dead, just like you said.” I was working with the government cows, but I thought so much of old Frank that I hired Elliot Padgett and Wade Lott to drag him off and dig a deep grave on the Rocky Ridge to bury him in. But they didn’t dig it deep enough. The dogs dug him up, and they and the buzzards cleaned his bones. The hole is still over there now.

1931 happened to be a dry year, but I had my corn up early and so I made out. I didn’t make much cotton though. In May, June, and July, the banks broke. We’d wake up, and they’d be tumbling. Then in the fall of 1931 the Western Carolina Bank broke, and that was big news. A few days later our neighbor Curtis Temples went to the gin. After he came back, his daughter Martha came down to fit a coat suit Gladys was making for her. She said to Gladys, “Papa said the bank at Saluda wouldn’t open in the morning.” Mr. Bub Addy, who was first cousin to Sam Addy, vice-president of the bank, had told Curtis at the gin. Gladys called me to the house from where I was picking cotton in the field beside the house and told me what Martha had said. I told Gladys that Sam Addy and Ben Crouch would keep that bank open ‘til the Rock of Gibraltar fell. I went on back to picking cotton.

Madaline and Curtis came home from school in the car. They were going to Saluda High School, their first year there, and they had to drive our car since there were no buses down our way.


Madaline had stood her exams and gotten credit for the high school year she’d spent at the country school with her mama teaching her. She had gone into the ninth grade at Saluda. Eighth grade was the first year of high school then. Curtis was three years behind her; he was in the sixth grade. Anyway, when they drove up, my cotton sack came off my shoulder.

I walked straight to the house and called Gladys to tell her I was going to see Sam Addy. The nearer I got to Saluda, the faster the car went. It got so fast I couldn’t hardly stop it when I got to Saluda. I parked and jumped out and ran into the bank. Mike O’Brien was taking the money for two bales of cotton from his brother-in-law, Alvin Hazel. Sam Addy was inside the closed-off area of the bank walking the floor with a roll of money in his left hand. I told him I wanted to see him a minute. God knows I didn’t intend to get out the little money I had in that bank. But when I looked around and saw Will Padget’s face—he’s a first cousin of mine—I knew what I’d heard was so. I grabbed a blank check and wrote it to cash for $120.00—all the money I had in the bank, a fortune to me then. When Sam came back by the window and I shoved the check at him, he said pretty short, “That’s what’s the matter now.”

I said pretty even to him, I think, “Sam, my children will have to stop school if I don’t get my money. I’ll tear this damn building down if you don’t give me my money.” He gave me six twenty-dollar bills. I thanked him. Arthur Crouch had pulled the shades down on the tellers’ windows. Mr. Hazel and I had to go out the back door; the front was already locked. The clock in the bank read seventeen minutes until four o’clock.

I walked up the street and met Cousin Luke Grigsby, cotton buyer, stockholder and director in the bank, the same man who wouldn’t lend me the money to buy a mule he didn’t like. That day I asked him to buy five or six bales of cotton for me the next day. He said to me, “You can’t buy it.”

I asked him, “Why?”


And he said, “You can’t get the money.” I told him I had the money in my pocket—$120.00. I walked into Cousin Hardy Crouch’s store, and one of the big Negro farmers in Saluda County, Mr. Tom Hill, was asking Cousin Hardy wasn’t there something the matter with the bank. Cousin Hardy was stuttering and making excuses. I had killed too many birds on Tom’s place to lie to him. I said, “Uncle Tom, the bank’s broke; it won’t open tomorrow.”

“My God, Mr. Padgett,” he said real soft, “I just put money for six bales of cotton in there. I’ve been putting it in all day long.” That was the beginning of Tom’s losing a six-horse farm up Pencreek Road.

Of course, he wasn’t the only one. All of us were on the verge of bankruptcy. We would have lost our land if it hadn’t been for the Federal Land Bank. The reason the bank in Saluda broke was lending money on moonshine—lending money on property—three times as much money as the property was worth. Henry Bell White borrowed $19,000 from the Saluda Bank. He couldn’t pay it back, and he lost his place. He was a well-to-do man and a Baptist preacher.

I could have bought the Dink Padgett place—112 acres right behind my place—for $500.00, but I didn’t have the five hundred dollars. I tried to get Gladys’ mother to buy it. She’d had $1,100.00 in the bank, and the bank eventually paid off fifty percent on the dollar, so she got back five hundred and fifty dollars. But she wouldn’t put the money in that 112 acres of land.

That afternoon I had to bring that one hundred and twenty dollars home with me. Later I went up to Curtis Temples’ house for something. His son-in-law James Burton asked, “Mr. Padgett, did you get your money?”

“I sure did,” I told him. After I got home, we all ate supper. Then we went to bed. I

couldn’t think of a thing but how Will Padget’s face looked. I had just sold a pair of dogs to Shep Griffith, chief-of-police in Columbia, for $150.00, and I still had most of that money in my


pocket. That with the $120.00 I’d drawn out of the bank was so much money that I was nervous keeping it in the house.

After we had lain down and I’d tried to go to sleep, suddenly something knocked at the front door. I hollered “Hello” and nobody answered. Every once in a while, it’d knock again. I got more and more afraid. Gladys woke up and whispered, “What is the matter?” I told her as I got my gun. She held on to me and begged, “Don’t go out there. They’ll kill you and steal our money.”

I pushed her away and said, “I’m going no matter what happens.” I walked through the living room and opened the front door. There as big as you please was a big black cat sitting on a pillow in one of the porch rockers. She’d scratch herself and because the chair was on a pivot, it would sound like knocking. The cat jumped out of the chair and ran off the porch. That was the end of the knocking, but it wasn’t the end of the night. I didn’t sleep anymore. I watched the sun come up.

The next morning Madaline and Curtis went back to school, and I went to Saluda with them. I got out at the warehouse and bought six bales of cotton at four and seven/eighths cents a pound. I kept it at the warehouse and sold it the next July for 7 1/2 cents a pound. With part of the profit I bought a suit of clothes, a hat, socks, shoes, and underclothes. I hadn’t had anything decent to wear in God knows when.

We hadn’t had any children in eleven years. Curtis was eleven in August. But in that panic summer of 1931 my wife was pregnant, and on July 29 a beautiful baby girl was born into our family. Gladys, as before, asked Dr. Wise if the baby was all right. When he said she was, Gladys said she’d educate her if she had to take in washing to do it. That was the third time she’d said that. And I wondered how we’d keep them in grammar school the way times were—much less send them to college.

When our little girl was born, the whole community was proud because we hadn’t had any children in so long. Madaline was fourteen and Curtis was eleven then. Two hundred and two people came to our house in three days to see the new baby. On


Sunday night so many people had held our baby that she came just to jerking, and we were all scared she was going to die. But she calmed down and was all right.

We named her Ruby Euela, Ruby for Gladys’ schoolteacher friend Ruby Riser, and Euela for my mother. She was the fifth one named after my mother. Aunt Eva was the first one named for Ma. Pa was already going with Ma when Aunt Eva was born, and Grandma Sue named her baby after Ma. Then Cousin Luke and Julia Grigsby named one of their daughters Helen Euela. (Julia was Ma’s niece.) My oldest brother Curtis named his oldest daughter Euela Davenport and called her Ela, and my youngest brother, Gus, named his only daughter Grace Euela. Our little girl’s name got cut short to “Bela,” and now everybody calls her Bela. I think it’s an improvement over Ruby Euela. Of course, we all called her Ruby Euela until her friend Ellie Maude Pugh, who couldn’t say Ruby Euela, cut it short and said RuBela and then just Bela.

When we had all that company at one time, Frank and Roseva Herlong, Hugh and Cora Wheeler, and Joe Shepherd and Mae Lindler were all there. We men walked down to the pond where the children were bathing. (I had dug a pond in my pasture and run a spring into it, so we had a real swimming pool not far from the house.) I got in the water to help some of the little ones. When I took my clothes off, Joe Shep Lindler looked at the double truss I was wearing, and he said to me, “I don’t see how you do as much work as you do—ruptured like you are.” They’d call what I had then a hernia today, and I guess I’d have surgery to correct it. Back then I just wore a truss and worked on. I’d been ruptured for so long that I’d gotten used to it.

One thing I’ve got to make you understand is what a strong and good woman Gladys always was. There’s never been and never will be another one like her. She would help anybody anytime. I want to tell you how she was willing to help my first cousin Grace Gamble when she needed somebody to keep her boys when she couldn’t take care of them herself.


Remember I told you about my ma and pa taking care of Aunt Ella’s four-year-old daughter Grace while Aunt Ella was sick and for that reason Grace was always a special cousin to me—more like a sister really. You may remember too that she was with me the night I went to Gladys’ graduation in Saluda, the night I said I was going to marry that black-eyed little girl. She was also the one who went to SCCI in Edgefield. After she graduated, she taught school in Sardinia and met and married Lynwood Gamble there. They moved around a lot, and while they were living in Columbia, they were mighty good to Gladys and me when our Madaline was in the hospital. Old Dr. Wise thought she was going to die of diarrhea and sent her for treatment. She was awful sick, and Grace gave us a place to stay and a shoulder to lean on.

Madaline got well, but Grace had her troubles. Lynwood found another woman when he moved to Greenville, and Grace and her three boys came home to live at Aunt Ella’s. She’d had four boys—James L., Norman Etheredge, Billy Dave, and Joe, but Joe was already dead. He’d burned to death just like the two little girls I told you about—his clothes caught fire from the fireplace. Lynwood had been working for the Virginia Dare Flavoring Company, and they thought so much of him that they offered Grace a job in New York if she’d come up there. This was 1930, and jobs were scarce. Now Aunt Ella had arthritis, cramps, and was getting old. She asked me and Gladys to keep the children that summer. Grace went to New York and stayed six weeks, and she saw that she could make enough money to keep her boys at Long Creek Children’s Home up in the northwest corner of South Carolina. Gladys and I, Grace and the three boys, and Madaline and Curtis carried them up there in a Model A Car. That was the fall of 1930. We kept the three boys the summer of 1931 too after they’d finished the school year at Glenn Springs. We went to the school to get them and brought them back with us. That’s what I want to tell you. We lived in a four-room house with our two children; our baby was due in July, and we kept Grace’s three boys the entire summer. They were there the night Ruby Euela was


born. Madaline took them down to the pond to get them out of the way. There was no extra room in our house.

Gladys never complained. We always had a big garden, and she worked the garden, picked the vegetables, and canned all she could. She’d put on my overalls and long-sleeve shirts and go down in the pasture and pick bushels of blackberries. They were everywhere back then. Of course, there were plenty of red bugs too. That’s why Gladys wore the heavy clothes. That was the only time she ever wore pants. She’d can those blackberries, and they’d be so good when she opened them for dessert in the wintertime.

Grace was still in New York, and early that summer she got a better job—this time with a bank. She’d found out she could make ends meet if she had her boys with her, so she wrote us to send them to her in New York. I took them to the depot in Columbia, put them on the train, and they went to New York. They looked awful lonesome when they waved good-bye to us out that train window. Of course, they were glad to be going to live with their mother. They’d missed her something awful.

We didn’t see much of them after that. In 1941 when the war came, James L. and Billy Dave went to war. Norman Etheredge couldn’t go because of his scars—where he’d been operated on sixteen times from falling on cement steps in Dillon when he was awful little. When we got word that James L. had been killed in battle, we were grieved just the same as if he had been our own. We remembered that young boy who’d been so easy to get along with in 1930 and 1931 when he’d stayed with us. Gladys never did mind work, and she had Madaline, who by that time was fourteen and could do most anything in the house. She didn’t mind work either. In fact, all of our children could and did work. And, so far as I know, none of them ever fussed about what they had to do either.

Gladys was some woman. She could turn off work so fast it would make your head spin. Another thing, her mother got bad sick that summer and the doctor came time and again. Even though Gladys had her hands full at home, she had to help Mary


Alice take care of Mrs. Liddy. I told you Mary Alice was scared of everything, and she was scared she’d do something wrong. Gladys always had plenty of self-confidence. She’d just go ahead and do what needed to be done.

That fall of 1931 Dr. Wise sent Gladys’ mother to Columbia to the hospital because of intense pain in her stomach area. Cantey was too stingy to hire an ambulance to take her, so I made an ambulance out of my Model A Ford and picked Mrs. Wightman up and put her in my car. I didn’t give my rupture a thought. In fact, I always pretty much lifted whatever I pleased and never worried about the consequences. Besides that, Mrs. Wightman was a little woman; she never weighed much over a hundred pounds in her life.

When we got to Columbia, I got her out and carried her into the hospital where I put her in an empty room. Gladys was right beside me, and we went by the admitting room, but there was a crowd there. I had her in my arms, so I found an empty room and just put her down on the bed. Gladys stayed with her, and I went back to the desk and admitted her. After a while Dr. Bunch came in the room and examined her. He looked at her hard. Then he turned to me and asked, “What is her name?”

I told him, “She’s a Wightman.” He looked at her again. “She rings a bell. Who was she before

she married?” I told him she was a Herlong before she married. Dr. Bunch said, “Is she any kin to Jehu Herlong?” I told him

she was Jehu’s sister. Gladys spoke up then and asked Dr. Bunch, “If she was your

mother, would you operate on her?” They’d found out she needed her gall bladder removed—a serious operation then.

Dr. Bunch looked right straight at Gladys and said, “I would. And not only that, I’ll watch after her. Jehu Herlong gave my brother a job bookkeeping at his sawmill in Alabama when you couldn’t get a job. He was willing to turn logs, but Jehu hired him as a bookkeeper.” He added, “If you don’t operate, she won’t live through tomorrow. But then she’s liable to die on the operating


table. It’s a chance we all take. I’ll do my best.” (Remember I told you that your good deeds come back to you too—and sometimes someone else’s good deeds help you, like her brother’s helped Mrs. Liddy.) For seventeen days she lay between life and death. All that time they’d put her head up for thirty minutes. Then they’d put her feet up for thirty minutes. Then her head, and so it went. She got well, came home and lived to be 89 years old. If Dr. Bunch hadn’t looked after her like he did, she wouldn’t have had those twenty years.

That was the year that I carried Carrie Elizabeth and Miriam Wightman, Gladys’ brother Wesley’s daughters, to Ware Shoals and paid a week’s board there for them to work in the mill. Wesley didn’t have a dime, and the girls couldn’t get a job in Saluda. Gladys and I helped them all we could. I was going to carry Jouette’s daughter Kathleen to Spartanburg and help her go in nurse’s training, but she got a notice that Greenwood Hospital would train her free and give her a place to live and pay her a little salary. Of course, she went to Greenwood. Gladys made all her uniforms for her, and we took her to Greenwood to get her started.

Chapter 16

1932–1933

Madaline Goes to College

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Gladys didn’t teach school the year after Bela was born—1931-

32. She enjoyed that year. Madaline and Curtis were going to Saluda to school every day. Madaline was in the tenth grade, her junior year in high school. South Carolina didn’t have but eleven grades back then. In fact, they didn’t add on the twelfth grade until 1948. (Bela was in the last class in South Carolina that graduated with just eleven grades, and she graduated in 1947.) Gladys would tell about how that winter of 1931 Bela loved to go outside right after dinner and sit in her lap against the cotton house in the sunshine where the wind didn’t touch them. Bela crawled real early and walked when she was eight months old. She was talking pretty quick too. You never saw a sister and brother love anybody like Madaline and Curtis loved that little girl. I don’t think they ever said a cross word to her.

Something happened during the summer of 1932 that Gladys never forgave me for, and she never let me forget it either. For years and years on the Butler Charge of the Methodist Church, Emory had preaching on second Sunday afternoon. That was because the preacher had to preach at four churches. He’d preach at one in the morning and one in the afternoon. He couldn’t get


from one to the other fast back then before he had a car. That way we had preaching just twice a month—on second Sunday afternoon and on fourth Sunday morning. We just had Sunday school on first and third Sundays.

We weren’t going to a regular service that hot afternoon in July—the one Gladys would never let me live down. Somebody was being buried at Emory, and we had to go because everybody who died was somebody we’d known all our lives. I can’t remember who was being buried that day. Ruby Euela was a baby—she must have been about a year old. Gladys wanted to stop at Homer Calk’s store and buy a dime box of vanilla wafers. I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t buy anything on Sunday. I thought buying on Sunday was a sin. The Bible says “Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy.” Plus, there was always a crowd around the store on Sunday, and I wasn’t going to sacrifice my principles for a box of crackers. When we got to church, Gladys found out she had to play the organ for the service, so I kept the baby. I entertained her so that we didn’t need the Vanilla wafers. But Gladys never did let me forget that incident.

Another thing that happened in the fall of 1932 happened to Uncle John Graham, the old colored man who lived right down the road from us and who knew more than anybody around. He taught me and Jouette how to tie grain so it wouldn’t come apart. That day in 1932 I was plowing getting ready to sow grain in front of the house at the top of that big hill across the little branch. I kept hearing somebody hollering. I thought it was Joe Shep Lindler calling hogs. About sundown—maybe not quite sundown; I’d been hearing it for a long time—Mrs. Clara Rowe came from her house to the top of the hill where I was plowing and told me that Uncle John had fallen in the pasture. He’d been cutting grain on halves for Joe Shep. When he went to get on his horse to go to his house, he fell. I had been hearing him hollering, what I’d thought was Joe Shep calling hogs. I thought about Uncle John over there on the edge of the pasture on the ground and calling for

Madaline Goes to College 135

help. He was nearly a hundred years old, and he was still working.

I took out the mule and went on over there. He was lying in the woods. Elliot, Wade Lott, Clarence West, and some other colored fellows were standing all around him and doing nothing to help. I said, “Boys, go over to Uncle John’s house and get a homemade chair and a plow line.” Not a damn one of them would go. They were scared. So I went and got what I needed. We put Uncle John in the chair and tied him in so he couldn’t fall out. He was conscious then, but he couldn’t move. We took him to his house. I had to stay all night. Nobody else would touch him. They didn’t even like carrying one side of the chair. I bathed him—cleaned off the vomit and the mess and everything else. Then I put clean clothes on him and put him in his bed.

Colie, his grandson came that night. We wanted Uncle John to go to the poor house, but Uncle John didn’t want to go. (The house he lived in belonged to old man Wade Crouch, but he’d given Uncle John a lifetime home there because Uncle John had been Wade Crouch’s slave.) Colie carried him to his own house down on Cloud’s Creek. Minervy, Uncle John’s old maid daughter who’d always lived with Uncle John, had to go too. She wasn’t able to take care of herself. She was just like a child.

On Christmas Day, 1932, Mrs. Wightman, Cantey, and Mary Alice were spending the day with us. After we ate, Gladys fixed Christmas dinners for Uncle John and Minervy, and Cantey and I took them down to Colie’s house. When we got there, we saw that Colie and Minervy had gone off and left Uncle John sitting up in a chair all alone. He’d fallen out of his chair and messed all over himself. The fire was about gone out too. That was a good thing though; he might have burned up. I sorta mended the fire, got a bucket of water, heated it, bathed him head to foot, put clean clothes on him, and put him back in the bed. Cantey said to me, “I don’t see how you can do that.”

I told him, “Uncle John is a Negro, but he’d do that for me or you.” And he would have too; he’d helped a whole lot of people in


his time. He was a good man. I fed him his dinner. When Colie and Minervy came in and took over, we left. Uncle John did not want to go to the county home or the poor house, as we called it. He thought it was a disgrace to depend on the county to support you. The only thing the county had was three houses, two for whites and one for colored people. People who were down and out could go there and stay and get three meals a day. There wasn’t any social security or welfare like we have today.

Uncle John died down at Colie’s, and they buried him over here at Mt. Moses Church. Long before, Aunt Margaret, Uncle John’s wife, had died just a little after sunup one morning, and they buried her at Mt. Moses just before sundown the same day—just like Uncle John wanted it. They’d been married a long time, and he was lost without her. He didn’t live long after he went to Colie’s.

In 1932 we poor folks all had a belief. A man who was reared in a millionaire’s home had a desire to be president of the United States—Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He got the nomination and then was elected. The American farmer—at least the ones we knew about—got a new hope in life. Roosevelt was the only man that was ever capable, or in my opinion, will ever be capable of being elected President four times. By the time he quietly left this world at Warm Springs, Georgia, seventy-five percent of the people that seemingly didn’t have a home in 1932 were well-to-do. Whether the change was good or bad is for history to say, but he made the promise that everybody would have flour in the bin and two cars in the garage. You can look and see today that around these parts, that prediction has come true.

Just as I left the church yesterday, Laurie Edwards was asking me about trying to cheat the government or how could I keep from paying so much tax on the timber I sold. I told him, “For God’s sake, let’s don’t cheat the government. Without F.D.R. we’d none of us have anything.” I told him I’d just pay the taxes. And that’s exactly what I did. Back in 1932 we all had a belief that our government was going to do something for the South—something


the government had never done before. What really and truly was the biggest savior of the South, though, was the little income the Southern people got from the pine and old oak lumber that was on the land. Also the federal subsidies helped—the subsidies the federal government planned out to keep us ignorant people from depending on a one-crop system of cotton. We learned to diversify.

Back in 1914 the county agent the federal government sent to us hadn’t made any difference. He had helped in the way he could, but you can’t help people without money. For the average person he wasn’t worth a tinker’s damn. The only thing J.M. Eleazer taught me (he was one of the first county agents) was that rows of corn are always twins. An ear of corn, he said, never has an odd number of rows on it. I didn’t know that, and I’d been working corn since I was five years old. Eleazer was county agent from 1918—after World War I—until 1924 or 1926.

Gladys went back to teaching the fall of 1932. I was keeping Bela while she was at school. That was before Doug was born. I wanted to go hunting (I’d always loved to hunt), so I’d take Bela with me. I rode Frank and carried Bela in my arms. The dogs went on ahead of us. When the dog would point a bird, I’d stop the horse, get down and set Bela down on the ground at my feet. She’d hold on to my leg, and I’d kill a bird. Frank and Bela were used to the sound of the gun, and they wouldn’t even flinch when I shot. I killed a lot of birds that way right here around the house. I never went far. Every winter we ate a lot of birds with grits for supper. Gladys always fried the birds, cooked grits, made gravy and biscuits, and usually had cabbage slaw—a balanced meal, she said.

I enjoyed hunting with Elgin Crawford and Shep Gardner, two of my friends who lived close to Centennial School where Gladys was teaching. Ruby Euela and I would ride to school with her in the morning and stop at either Elgin’s house and leave Ruby Euela with Elgin’s wife, Nancy, or at Shep’s house and leave her with his wife, Lizzie. Both of those women loved Bela and seemed to enjoy


keeping her. Sometime all three of us men would hunt together, and we’d get back to the house just before Gladys would come. Nancy always changed Bela’s little dress and combed her hair and she looked like a little doll. She got so much attention up there she looked forward to the days I’d take her and my gun to the car and ride with Gladys. Of course, Gladys didn’t want me to go too often.

That winter I advertised a pair of dogs for $150.00—Bob and Mack—in Sunday’s State. (Times were beginning to get better.) On Monday morning—it was about the last of November; bird hunting season had already come in—a woman and two men (one was her brother and the other was a dog trainer from Augusta) came to the house. They were interested in the dogs I had advertised.

I took Bela over the hill to Mrs. Leila Hawkins’ house and asked her if she would watch her while I took these people from Augusta out to look at the dogs I had advertised. Mrs. Leila was always obliging, and she loved Bela. She just had two boys—Harold was grown and Frontis was the same age as Curtis. I knew Bela would be happy there till I could get back to take her home.

Anyway I was able to carry the woman and the two men along the branch in front of the house, and the dogs pointed a bird. The bird got up, and I killed it. It fell in the briars. Bob went in the briars and got him and came back to me with the bird in his mouth. The lady said, “He won’t chew the bird?”

I answered, “No, he’ll stand there until I take it.” She told the men, “It’s no use to go any farther; I’ll take both

the dogs.” We walked back to the house, and she wrote me a check for $150.00, and they put the dogs in the back of the car and left.

On Friday evening Sam Addy, president of the Saluda County Bank, brought me her check. It had been turned down at the bank in Augusta. The next morning I told Gladys I was going to Augusta. She said she’d go with me because she’d been wanting to


buy Christmas gifts for her school children and for our own children.

We took Bela and left her with Gladys’ mother and then we went on to Augusta. I put Gladys out on Broad Street, and I went straight to the address where the woman lived. It was on top of a hill beyond Smith’s stockyard. Before I got there, I could hear old Bob and Mack barking and cuttin’ up. They heard my car and recognized it. I drove out to where the dogs were in two doghouses. It was cold, I remember. I turned the dogs loose, and they jumped in my car. I was fixing to drive out of the yard when the woman came running out in the yard. She said, “Mr. Padgett, what are you gonna do?”

I said, “I’m gonna carry my dogs home. Your check was turned down, and I’m out $150.00.”

She said, “Wait a minute.” She went tearing in the house. I thought she was going to get the money. But she came out with a fur coat on, and she jumped in the car with me and the dogs. She said, “I’ve got $50,000 in that bank. I told you that.”

I said, “Yes, you did, but you didn’t give me a check on it.” We went to the C and S Bank on Broad Street and went to a teller who just happened to be Kempson DeLoache, a fine young man from Saluda. I didn’t even know he was working there.

The woman said, “Mr. DeLoache, why didn’t you cash my check to Mr. Padgett.”

Kempson answered, “You didn’t have any money in that account.”

She said, “Well, give me a check on an account I have got money in.” He gave her a check, and she wrote it to cash. She handed it to Kempson, and he gave her cash, and she turned around and gave it to me.

After she gave me the money, she said, “You act like you know this teller.”

I said, “I reckon I do. I watched him grow up.” Going back to her house, she was mad. (I’ll always believe she meant to beat me.) The dogs looked like they’d been whipped to death. They’d


been hunting down in Georgia and been through briars and were cut up. I told her going back through town that I ought to have charged her more since I had to make a trip to get my money. She didn’t pay me another penny. Furthermore, Gladys spent a lot of money that day buying Christmas—a lot of money by our standards anyway.

In 1933, the first year of F.D.R.’s first term, we plowed up cotton and sold it to the government for so much per acre, pounds estimated. I sold six acres that was estimated at three hundred twenty five pounds of lint cotton per acre. When I got time to plow it up, I can remember well the bolls bruising my legs. It was five hundred pounds per acre if it was a pound. I worried about the loss. But the price we got for ours over what we would have got if we’d sold it made up the difference.

We still had to borrow money from the Seed Loan to run our crops. The government would let a farmer have from fifty-five to one hundred fifty dollars per plow. That was the year Madaline graduated from high school and went to Winthrop—1933. I sold my first bale of cotton and wanted to keep a little of the money to pay a few bills for things Madaline had to have before she went to college. The clerk that paid me for the cotton wouldn’t give me a check. The government had passed a rule that the seed was all the farmer could get until he paid his bills. The clerk—it was Mike O’Brien—and I were fussing about it. Luke Grigsby (he was married to my first cousin Julia Long, Aunt Betty’s daughter) came in and heard the discussion. He told Mike, “Give B.R. the check.” (He always wanted to call me B.R. Pa had wanted to name me Benjamin Tillman, but Ma despised Ben Tillman and wouldn’t name me that.) I got my check and paid the bills.

You may be wondering how anybody as poor as we were could send a daughter to college. In 1933, Gladys got Madaline through her first year at Winthrop College by delivering State of South Carolina school claims to the college. The claims were vouchers for money the state owed her and couldn’t pay because there wasn’t enough money in the state treasury. Many teachers were


forced to cash their vouchers as soon as they got them, and some rich men would give a poor teacher ten cents on the dollar for her claim. She had to have a little money to eat. He could then hold the claim until the state got money. Of course, he was taking a risk too. In 1933 the teachers also took a cut in pay. They went from $120 a month down to $60 a month, and then the state couldn’t pay the sixty. Gladys had held on to her vouchers because we could eat what we raised on the farm, and we just did without everything but what was necessary. Winthrop accepted those vouchers at face value because it was a state school.

So Madaline went to college. She turned sixteen in March of 1933, was in the senior play (I remember they called it One Delirious Night), graduated with honors that spring, worked in the fields and the garden and taking care of Bela that summer, and then went to Winthrop that fall. Gladys hadn’t taken in washing like she said she’d do if she had to, but it was money from her teaching that sent Madaline to get an education. She sure wouldn’t have been able to go on what little I made farming. Madaline got work at Winthrop too with the NYA—the National Youth Administration—which was a part of Roosevelt’s “New Deal.”

Curtis was three years behind Madaline; he graduated in 1936, but he had to wait a year until Madaline got out of college before he could even think about going. There were no federal or state grants back then. Mostly children of wealthy people went to college. Grandpa Mahlon had a brother who went to the University of Virginia and another who was a doctor. My brother Curtis got a scholarship, you remember I told you, to go to the University of South Carolina, but Pa wouldn’t let him go. Lots of people back then just studied with a doctor or a lawyer; they didn’t go to school like we do today.

Gladys’ people went to college too. Her grandfather, James Wesley Wightman, they say, had a Ph. D. from Randolph Macon. Her mother and her aunt graduated from Leesville College in the 1880’s. Gladys’ wish was coming true: her daughter was going to Winthrop—where she’d wanted so bad to go in 1915. She did go to


study centers for teachers that Winthrop College offered beginning in the 1920’s. They’d offer these courses all day on Saturdays at Saluda or Batesburg, and Gladys would go to earn what she thought was college credit. She learned a lot, and you know how she loved to learn. She worked hard, but then that was what she wanted. I always kept the children and encouraged her to go.

Chapter 17

1934–1936

A Job and Second Son

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When 1934 came, we were feeling a little better. Madaline was a

freshman at Winthrop, and we knew we had her first year paid for. 1934 was an election year, and South Carolina had to elect a governor. Olin D. Johnson offered for governor for the second time. Everybody thought he had won the last time, and we believed Charleston stole the election and Johnson didn’t get the job. His opponent insinuated that Johnson was a “linthead,” or someone from the mill village, but the little man was for him. We believed he would do a hell of a lot for us.

Within ten days after he was elected governor in 1934, my wife’s school vouchers were worth one hundred per cent on the dollar. Also we’d been paying two, five, and seven dollars for automobile licenses in South Carolina. Johnson persuaded the South Carolina House and Senate to cut the price down to one dollar a license. He was good for his kind—poor whites and Negroes. He was one of the first governors who really put forth a great effort to improve the schools of South Carolina. In his administration teachers’ salaries went from sixty to seventy dollars a month and then up each year. He was such a good governor that he was elected for a second term. Then he was


elected to the United States Senate. What he promised he did if it was possible. He served as South Carolina’s Senator until he died. One of the regrets of my life is that I didn’t get to go to his funeral. I couldn’t find my hat so I couldn’t go. I watched the funeral over television.

My friends around Homer Calk’s store teased me so about Olin Johnson that I told them Johnson helped oil my wheels. And he did. He got me started, got us all started on the way back up. Gladys lost two brothers that spring. Frank died on April 13, and Wesley died on May 18. She was close to both of them even though they were her half-brothers, and they were young men in the midst of life. Wesley and his family lived in the house Gladys grew up in—the one Mr. Wightman’s first wife had inherited from Aunt Carrie Boyd. Wesley bought it from the other children. It was just about a mile from this house and right by where Gladys’ sister Anna lived. Frank and his family lived in Newberry. Both men just keeled over dead with a heart attack. They didn’t have any warning, and back then there wasn’t anything you could do if you did have a warning and live to tell the story. Gladys’ brother George had died the same way in 1933. Her father had died suddenly too; but he’d had a stroke and died that night.

1934 was a bad crop year for Saluda County. We got our cotton and corn up and worked it out. Our cotton was awful grassy. Curtis was fourteen, and he could work as hard as any man from sunup till sundown. One day he got sick and turned all ashy colored and wasn’t able to go back to the field. We thought he’d be all right in a day or two, but he wasn’t. I took him to Dr. Wise, and he examined him and said he needed to lie around for several weeks and that if he didn’t, he could damage his heart. I think he had what they call rheumatic fever today. He did rest, and he soon got better and went back to the field. We found out later that he did damage his heart. He had a heart murmur that would cause him a lot of grief later on.

If you ever saw a couple blessed by God though, Gladys and I were that couple. Three years after Bela was born, in that summer

A Job and Second Son 145

of 1934, Gladys bore our fourth and last child, a second son, Douglas Donald. He has my name Douglas and my initials—D. D.—but we’d already named our first son Curtis Davenport, so I couldn’t use Davenport again. We made it Donald. For the fourth time Gladys asked the doctor if the baby was all right and he answered, “Fine.” And for the fourth time, she said she’d educate him if she had to take in washing. Today, every one of our children has a college education; two have doctor’s degrees, and one a master’s degree. All that education came about by the determination of their mother. I didn’t get much education when I grew up. My mother died when I was eight, as I told you, and my father got sick when I was fifteen, and that was the end of my schooling. I had to work hard for a living, and I early found out the hard-boiled world doesn’t care about you. A good way to find out is to get cast out early; even your own kinfolks can’t do for you what needs to be done.

Anyway, Doug was a beautiful baby and good. Bela loved him and begged to take care of him when he was born. Madaline was seventeen that summer and had already finished one year at Winthrop. Curtis was fourteen, and he was working hard alongside me in the fields. Madaline took care of Bela and helped take care of Doug. I remember that before Doug was born, Bela would skip around the house saying, “I’m going to have a little brother.” I don’t know why she thought it would be a brother, but she turned out to be right. The night he was born, Madaline took Bela in the bed with her to keep her from being afraid when she heard her mama crying. Course, Gladys never had much trouble giving birth, and Dr. Wise was a mighty good doctor. In fact, Gladys was good at most things—except pulling fodder, like I told you.

Out West it was dry that summer of 1934, and they had awful high winds. But there was plenty of grass here in South Carolina. That was the year the federal government shipped cows to South Carolina from out West, and farmers pastured them for fifty cents a head a month. The government also sold farmers wire at cost if


they needed it to build pastures. Rounding up and managing government cows was the first time I’d worked for someone else since I lost that job in 1912 for rolling a cigarette at work—something I didn’t do. I was overseeing the cows in Saluda County. The government shipped 3375 cows to South Carolina. Farmers boarded the cows, and it helped the farmers have a little cash. That was the year you couldn’t get rid of teachers’ vouchers unless you sold them for fifty cents or less on the dollar to rich people.

Thank the Lord for that government job making me a cowboy. Gladys, Bela, and Doug stayed five days a week with Gladys’ mother and paid her brother, Cantey, one dollar a day for the use of his car to drive the five miles to the school where she was teaching that year—Centennial—a mile or so above Saluda. She paid Mrs. Wightman, her mother, seven dollars a week board. Of course, Gladys wasn’t getting a dime of real money for her work—just those vouchers. With the little salary I drew and the four cents a mile, we kept two families going. Cantey needed the money, and that is why he let Gladys have the car.

They brought the cows in on the train and unloaded them in pens where the locker plant is today. They hadn’t tested them before they sent them here, so the first thing they did was test those cows. Any that showed up positive for any of the cattle diseases, they shot and shoved them into a big hole they dug right near the pens. I imagine there are lots of bones in that hole that somebody will find one day and wonder why they are all there in one place. I had to check on the cows all over the county.

One day I was tending cows up on Halfway Swamp—up the Chappells Road. A cow had just drowned. Those cows shipped from Kansas were used to shale bottom water, and hell, they’d walk in any water and drown. We’d already buried three cows right there. When I got there that day, I saw the dead cow, and I put Jonathan and Rufus Smith to digging the grave for the cow. I was sitting on my feet and talking to Grady Wertz. I was right on the edge of the grave the men were working in. Grady was teasing


me about being such a good shot with a shotgun. I told him I could shoot the side pocket off a fly with a shotgun, but I couldn’t shoot a rifle or a pistol much. I told him I’d give my dog and gun to any man who could beat me killing birds with a shotgun.

Well, I was sitting there on the side of the grave. One of the Negroes in the grave said kinda quiet-like—and his eyes were as big as saucers, “Mr. Padgett.” It seemed like a week before he said anything else. Then he kinda whispered, “There’s a highland moccasin between your legs.” I didn’t know what to do. I cut my eyes down and saw that great big snake down between my legs; he was flicking out his tongue. Remember that I was squatting on my feet. I told the Negroes to get out of the grave. They did—sorta crawled out easy on the other side and got out of the way. I made a leap and jumped across the grave, and as I did, I wheeled and shot the snake’s head off with a 32 pistol that I had in my right pocket of my hunting britches. Grady Wertz cussed me out for telling him a lie. He said, “Anybody that can shoot a pistol better than that I don’t want to be around when he shoots.”

I got two dollars a day and four cents mileage for my car and my work. I had to work night and day seven days a week. I was happy—happy as a June bug. I was working making a living, feeding my family and Mrs. Wightman, Cantey, and Mary Alice.

Another time when I was working with the cows, I was up at Claude Wheeler’s butcher pen. He would let us butcher cows in his pen. We’d butcher the cows and give the meat away to people who didn’t have money to buy meat, and that was mighty nigh everybody. We carried the meat to the cannery at Johnston to make hash out of the stuff so we could save it and give it to people all along instead of them having to eat it all at one time. We didn’t have refrigerators in our homes then.

One afternoon when I drove up to Claude Wheeler’s pen where the hands were working, Claude was mad, and I mean really mad. He came just to cussin’ my Negroes out. Cal Johnson and Johnson Smith were the ones, and they were as good Negroes as ever lived. Claude said they stole his rifle the evening before. I told Claude he


was going to mess around and say too much, and I was going to whip him in his own yard. He knew I could and would. I’d done it many a time when we were going to school together. He finally quieted down.

When I got to town that night, I told James Davis, a white man who worked with me, to find out who stole Claude’s rifle. I told him I knew those Negroes didn’t steal the rifle. The next morning when I got to town, the first thing he said to me was “Well, Mr. Padgett, I found out who stole the rifle.” He told me the name of a young man in the community, a prominent man’s son, a boy that would steal anything anytime.

I told him, “I think I knew it before you started looking.” I made a special trip to Claude Wheeler’s right then. I said to him when he came out of the house, “Claude, I want to tell you something. I found out who stole your rifle.”

He said, “I did too.” I asked him, “You going after it?” He grinned and said, “Hell, no. That man would burn up my

house.” I told him, “I’d insure my house and go after that rifle.” But he

never did. I finished with the cows the first day of January 1935. We gave

account of all the cows but one. The last we heard of her she was going a tilting through Edgefield County. We reported her gone wild. I came home and went to bird hunting. I’d always been bird hunting a lot every winter since I was a chap, but that winter I hadn’t been hunting except once. I’d been too busy with the cows. The day I left my job, I came home to try out my dogs. I had sold three dogs for forty-five dollars apiece. (That was a lot of money in 1934.) One of the dogs I sold I got a dog in exchange too—Rudy, a puppy. I had to train Rudy, so I went back to bird hunting when I finished that government job with the cows.

Gladys and the children came back home from Mrs. Wightman’s. Of course, Curtis had been at home with me the whole time. He was a junior in high school. We hired Hannah to


keep Ruby Euela and Doug, who was still a baby. She was sixteen and pregnant. She didn’t want to go outside, so she scared them of mad dogs. There were mad dogs around, but they weren’t so bad that Hannah couldn’t have taken the children into the yard when it was pretty and sunny. I got suspicious of her with Bela and Doug, so one day I came home and peeped in the window. Hannah was asleep, and the children were on the floor. Doug wasn’t a year old, and nobody was looking after him. It scared me to death. I went in and told Hannah that she needn’t come back. I kept the children from that day on.

I told you that Gladys paid Mrs. Wightman seven dollars a week, which wasn’t much. It didn’t pay for them keeping the children and for Gladys staying there, but it helped keep food on the table. Mrs. Wightman wasn’t used to spending money (she’d never had any since she was married); so she kept what Gladys paid her until she had enough to buy a writing desk and bookcase together. It sat in her living room, and she used it until she died in 1951. Then after Cantey died, Mary Alice was scared to stay out there in the country by herself, and we moved her to Mrs. Hyler’s boarding house in Saluda where she’d be with other people. We cleaned out the house too, and Bela got that writing desk. She has it in her living room in the house her husband built for them in 1954. When we moved that writing desk in 1968, I saw the price written in chalk on the back—$18.50—and it’s a good piece of furniture. Mrs. Wightman had wanted a writing desk all her life, and she felt like she’d earned that money, so she bought what she wanted with it.

That was the year—1934-35—that we had a hard time keeping Madaline in college. We didn’t have to borrow money. We all just did without everything. I sold three dogs, and that helped a whole lot. I think Winthrop cost about two hundred dollars a year. Madaline was lucky enough to get a job at Winthrop to help out. Dr. Keith, her history professor, gave her a job. He was writing a book, and she helped him do research. She made $103.


In 1935 I realized that we weren’t producing enough money for the expenses we had. I bought another place on credit and enlarged my farming. That other place was the Mt. Willing place, which was less than a mile from where we were living. I had moved there in 1914 when Pa bought the place. He died there in 1918, and his widow Mrs. Carrie got it all. I told my step-mother then after my father died, “Mrs. Carrie, if you can take Ela Padgett’s money, there ain’t going to be no place in heaven for you and me both, and I’m going.” When I told her that, she fainted dead away and fell on the floor. I started to walk out, but I thought she might be dead. I turned around and picked her up and put her on a little leather couch my daddy had bought for us. I don’t know how I knew to slap her, but I just slapped her face until I saw the color coming back. She’d been as white as a sheet. I saw a bottle of camphor on the table, and I got it and poured the whole bottleful on her face. She came to, and I walked out.

I swore I’d never give her air if she was in a jug; and I felt that way for two years. But on Saturday before Mother’s Day two years later (that would have been 1921) I was plowing in the bottom on the forty acres I was buying of what had been my grandfather’s and my father’s land, and I thought to myself, Davenport, you owe Mrs. Carrie something. She took care of your father when he was dying. I told Gladys at dinner that I was going to Saluda. She said, “I thought you were behind with your crop.”

“I am,” I said, “but I’m going anyway.” I told her what I was going to do, and she said I was crazy to go see a woman who had taken my inheritance. But I went to town anyway and bought a two-pound box of candy, the best I ever bought. I took it to Mrs. Carrie, who by that time was living in Johnston and married to Edwin Watson. I told her I was bringing it to her because it was Mother’s Day, and after I’d thought about it for two years, I wanted her to know I felt a little close to her because she had waited on my father. She took the candy and was proud of it. In fact, she cried a little bit. After that I visited her every once in a while and took my family to see her too.


Years later in 1935 I heard that she was sick. I carried Gladys’ brother, Cantey, and we went to see her. By that time she was better. Cantey and Uncle Bob, Mrs. Carrie’s third husband, and I went and sat by the fire. Uncle Bob said to me, “Let me sell you the Mt. Willing place.” That was the place that had been my father’s. I told him I’d give him $1000 for it. When Mrs. Carrie came in the room, Uncle Bob told her, “I just sold the Mt. Willing place.” She was glad. She’d sold it to Luther Turner the year before, and he’d never paid a penny on it, and he’d ruined the beautiful old house there—the one that had been built in 1779. He’d taken the top floor off it and sold the wood to someone to make a barn, and he’d put back on it the ugliest roof you ever saw.

Uncle Bob and Mrs. Carrie said they’d come to Saluda on Saturday morning to fix up the papers. When I learned that Luther Turner’s wife had never signed her dowry, I knew they had to go easy because Luther did not want me to have the place. I told Uncle Bob to get Mott Yarborough, the lawyer, to fix up the papers and to get my brother Gus to go down to Luther Turner’s house and ask Mrs. Turner to sign the dowry. Luther had already written Mrs. Carrie that he’d deed the place back to her because he couldn’t pay for it. I told them not to tell Luther that they were selling it to me.

They did what I asked, and Mrs. Turner signed the dowry. That was in November, 1935, and I got the place to occupy it on the first of January, 1936. On Monday morning I took a two-horse wagon and three bushels of oats and drove over to the Mt. Willing place. I was going to sow some fall oats to gather in the spring. Luther was in his yard, and he said, “What are you going to do?”

I said, “I’m going to sow grain.” He snapped back, “Not until January, you’re not.” I sowed in

January, and I might as well have been bird hunting because I didn’t make anything. It was too late and too cold to be sowing grain.

That was also the year Aunt Pearl killed herself, and that was hard for all of us to take. She was the baby of the Mahlon Padgett


family. She never married. After she and Uncle Ernest moved to Edgefield and she went to work in the bank, Aunt Pearl was supposed to get married. She even bought the license. You can see it on the records at the Edgefield Court House today if you go and look for yourself. But she never did get married; nobody really knows what happened. She was a beautiful woman and a smart woman, and she was well off. She’d saved her money and bought her a nice house where she and Uncle Ernest lived. She drowned herself in the rock quarry near Edgefield. The morning it happened, Aunt Pearl carried the paperboy on his whole route in her car because it was drizzling a little bit. Then after she took him home, she drove out to the rock quarry, put the car between two trees, hung her fur coat on a tree, and then lay down in five feet of water and drowned herself. She had been blue, but nobody expected her to kill herself.

It hit me pretty hard. I was already worried about money, and Aunt Pearl’s death didn’t help any. I knew my pa had had those spells when he didn’t want to see or talk to anybody, and Jouette had them too. I didn’t want to suffer like that myself. Pa always said it came through the Longs; he remembered that his grandfather, Reverend Joe Long, had shot himself because he was so worried about his sons and sons-in-law in the Confederate army.

About that time we added a kitchen and a big front porch to the house. Gladys never did like the way the porch looked. She said it looked like a brooder house where you raised chickens. She was glad to get a new kitchen though. Of course, it just had the weatherboard between us and the weather. But we had a good cook stove, and we got Mr. John Matthews to build us a kitchen table with two big bins under it—one for flour and one for meal. Before then we’d had to cook and eat in the same room. Now we could cook in one room and eat in another.

Between my farming and Gladys’ teaching we were able to send our children to college—except for Curtis. I’ll always regret that he had to borrow money. He was smart just like the rest of


them, and I’ve already told you how hard he worked. He graduated from high school in 1936. I remember we gave him a birthday party on his sixteenth birthday—August 6, 1936. He had lots of friends, and they played games out on the porch. We churned ice cream, and Gladys had made a cake.

We were proud of our first son. I knew he was strong and good inside. He proved it to me many a time. One Saturday night he went to Saluda to see his buddies. He loved Doris Duffie then, but he didn’t date much. They were just sweethearts. I was awake when he came in early. The next morning, this neighbor came down to our house early and told me that a bunch of Saluda boys had stopped some boys when they were headed up the road toward McCormick. The Saluda boys were mad because those fellows had been flirting with the Saluda girls. They stopped them and beat them up.

My neighbor told me that Curtis was one of them. He knew it because he had seen Curtis hanging out with the other Saluda boys on Saturday night. I told him I knew that Curtis didn’t do that. I went right straight in the house and woke Curtis up and asked him if he had anything to do with beating up some boys from Edgefield. He said, “No, Daddy, I didn’t.” He told me he’d been with the Saluda boys when they were making their plans, but he’d told them he wasn’t going to have any part of it. He said he’d got out of their car and got in our car and come home early. I was so proud of him I could have cried. I’d known all along he was the kind of man who would stand hitched.

In 1936 we had a dry spring, and we didn’t get our cotton up until the last of June. It rained on the twenty-second day of June and brought it up. And did we have boll weevils! What few stalks came up early were a sight to see; they were pathetic looking—like in some desert. The drought was in northern South Carolina and southern North Carolina. That was the year the United States made its biggest cotton crop ever. And that was the year our second child—Curtis, who’d graduated from high school before he was sixteen, wanted to go to college. We didn’t have the money,


and we couldn’t borrow it. Madaline had one more year at Winthrop, and we had all we could do to keep her there.

Curtis stayed out that year and worked. He was lucky enough to get a job helping Johnny Herlong survey land, and then later he worked on the highway. At that time they were paving the Ridge Spring highway, that is, the road from Saluda to Ridge Spring. What Johnny Herlong was doing was working for the government surveying land. The government measured your cotton land to see if you had too much. They were telling you to plant just so much. That was the beginning of the support programs. And God knows, we needed support.

At Christmas of 1936, I went to get Madaline and the other Saluda girls who were at Winthrop and bring them home for the Christmas vacation. Madaline was dating Harold Boney, the football coach at Rock Hill High School. She was the cause of the wreck we had. She wanted to give Boney (everybody always called him that) a present, so we stopped in Chester at his house and left him the gift. If we hadn’t, we’d have been earlier, and we’d have missed the truck. When we got on this side of Chester, I went to pass a truck of Negroes, and the driver turned left right in my path. Instead of hitting him or him hitting me, I took the field. I tore down a fence and mired the car up in mud. Six men in the truck picked up the car and set it back on the road, and we went back to Chester, and some mechanics at a station there worked on the lights so we could get back to Saluda. The lights were all crossways so we had to go real slow.

When we finally got home way after midnight, Gladys and Curtis were so mad because we’d torn up the car. I got mad too, and I told them both, “You’d better damn sight be glad we didn’t get killed.” The car was a 1933 Chevrolet. We drove it to church the next morning, and then on Monday I went to Jasper Nichols’ place in town, and he let Bill Blease, who was his mechanic, go to Vaucluse with me, and we bought the parts to fix the car for ninety dollars. They’d have cost twice that much if Bill hadn’t bought them from a junkyard.


That was the best pulling car I ever had, but it took a quarter’s worth of gas to crank it up and shut it down. I bought it from Jasper Nichols, who had the Chevrolet dealership in Saluda. Cousin Luke Grigsby had traded it in on a new car. It would have pulled a section harrow across a plowed field, I believe. That was the only second-hand car I ever bought. We bought it in 1935 and kept it until 1939 when we bought a 1939 60 Ford. We kept that little car until 1948, longer than we kept any other car except the Chevrolet Impala. A damn broom straw would choke that 60 down. You had to really get up speed to go up a hill.

I traded that car for a 1948 V8, not a 60 this time. And that dang car would just fly. That’s the one Pete Keisler took. He allowed me $800 on it, and then he sold it for $2200. I cussed him out, but it wasn’t worth a damn. That was when I traded for a 1951 Chevrolet. Then I traded for a 1954, a 1956, and a 1958. I traded every two years until I realized I didn’t have any sense. I was just throwing my money away. I kept the 1958 five years and bought a 1963 Impala, which I drove until 1979 when I got the Chevrolet Classic I’m driving today at ninety years old. I didn’t trade the 1958 when I bought the Impala. I kept it and used it as my knock-around car. Well, more like a pick-up. I sold the 1958 and the 1963 after Gladys died. The Crouches that live beside Mt. Moses Church bought the Impala, and every time I’d see it after Gladys died, I always thought of her because she claimed that car because she said she had paid for it. We were going to Greenwood in that Impala when we first got it, and we saw that 1939 60 Ford. It was still going strong in 1965.

I inherited one car. Joe Oscar Etheredge, Aunt Ella’s son that was gassed in World War I, willed it to me. I kept it for a while, and then I gave it to my granddaughter Bettina for her to drive back and forth to college where she was living in Savannah. She and her husband just had one car, and he had to drive that to work. When she went back to Armstrong College to get her degree, I gave the old Chevrolet to her. I always thought they frisked me in that car when they traded it for a Volkswagen, but


they said it drove so hard that Bettina couldn’t drive it. When I told Isabel, Joe Oscar’s youngest sister, that I gave the car to Bettina to go to college, she burst out crying and said, “Wouldn’t Joe Oscar be happy to know he was helping to send somebody to college!”

The fourth Sunday in August of 1936 there was a crowd at Mt. Moses, the Negro church over the hill. There was no water at the church, and the Negroes would get water out of my spring down at the foot of the hill between the church and our house. Pa let them do it, and Grandpa had let them do it, and I let them do it too. But that spring was the only water we had. We didn’t dig a well up on the hill here where we live until 1941 because I was sure that we would get lime water, and the water at the spring was freestone and good and cool. I kept the spring clean and brought water in buckets from the spring to the house all those years—from 1919 until 1941. Gladys either had someone else to wash our clothes, or she had to wash them at the spring. Ella, Elliot’s sister, washed for us for years, but she had to wash at the spring.

Anyway on this Sunday in 1936, the Negroes were cutting up down at the spring. They were cussing and drinking and hollering down there, right below my house. Most of my life I’ve been able to control myself, but that was one day I lost my temper. I went down to the spring to try to run them off. Gladys begged me not to go; she knew the Negroes were drunk and might kill me, but I didn’t care. I went anyway. Bubba Jackson was drunk and lying on the ground in his own vomit. Jim Etheredge, who lived on Hugh Wheeler’s place, was hollering and cuttin’ up; he was too drunk to know what he was doing. Then there was a Negro there by the name of Rance Green. He’d come down to the August big meeting at Mt. Moses from up in the Coleman section of Saluda County. I’d never seen him before. He was in a Model T Roadster Ford. He went to step out of it to protect Jim and Bubba; he wanted me to let them alone. I was going to run them off my property because that was the only place I had to get water for my family.


When that Negro man started to get out of the car, I told him if he put his foot on the ground, I’d put a load of shot in him. I had my pistol with me. He got back in his car and rode up the hill toward the church. Elliot Padgett, who’d lived beside me all his life, told me next day. “You were fooling with fire when you threatened Ransome Green. He’s mean as a snake.” I got so mad that Sunday that I went back to the house and sat down and cried.

The fall of 1936 Gladys was still teaching at Centennial. She loved the Crawfords and the Clareys and the DeLoaches and all the rest of the people up there. She had taught up there in 1917-18 filling out the term of Frank Herlong. Remember I told you about that little house we lived in that was just weather-boarded on the outside and had no ceiling. After we bought the car in 1924, we never had to move out of this house we live in now. Gladys could just drive wherever she went. At Centennial Gladys was the principal and taught the upper grades, and Grace Coleman was the primary teacher and taught grades one through four. I was keeping the children again. Now one of the things I always liked to do was to go to court whenever court was held in Saluda. I enjoyed hearing the lawyers present their side of the case. I guess I would have enjoyed being a lawyer. Of course, you have to be educated to do that, and I didn’t get much education. Anyway, I told Gladys that I wanted to go to court. Bela had turned five in July, and Doug had turned two in June. I told Gladys that I could take Doug with me but I couldn’t handle both of them in the courtroom. I wanted her to take Ruby Euela with her to school for a few days. I was sure court wouldn’t last more than three days at the most. She said she’d ask Mrs. Coleman about having Bela in her room.

When Gladys did talk to her, she told her to bring Bela on, that she could play at the sand table and look at books. When Monday morning came, we all went to Saluda in the only car we had, and Doug and I got out at the courthouse. Gladys and Bela went on to Centennial. The end of the story is that court lasted all week, and Bela went to school the whole week. She was already reading


some, and she could keep up with the first graders, who were also learning to read. She loved going and thought she’d be going on the next Monday morning.

Gladys was determined that Bela and Doug would not start school at five like Madaline and Curtis had done, so she didn’t wake Bela up to go to school. Bela waked up just as Gladys was pulling out of the yard, and if you ever heard any crying, Bela did it. She cried off and on all day. When Gladys got home that afternoon, Bela was still upset. She hadn’t forgotten what school was like. Gladys didn’t take her the next day, but she did talk to Grace Coleman about whether she thought that Bela could do the work. Grace told her she was as ready as any of the other children. There still wasn’t any law about how old a child had to be to start school, so the next day Bela went to school, and she’s been going ever since.

Chapter 18

1937–1938

Finally, A Clear Title

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The spring of 1937 we had high hopes. We had the Mt. Willing

place then, and we planted an extra big crop for us—nineteen acres in cotton, twenty in corn, thirty-five in oats and wheat. On the twentieth day of June, Mr. Guy Webb, supervisor of the highway department in Saluda, came by and offered to hire Curtis back to work through the summer. He wanted him to start the next day. So Curtis went to work for the highway department the second time. I attempted to work all that crop by myself. I didn’t have a wages hand. I’d take two mules to the field. I’d plow one until it got hot; then I’d plow the other.

I worked so hard that I really didn’t realize I was nervous until Curtis got his cousin Henry Long, Frank and Mary Anna Long’s son, a job working with him on the highway. He started on Monday and worked until dinnertime. They ate dinner, and then Henry crawled up on a truck. The truck started off, and Henry fell off. The truck ran over him and killed him. Curtis wasn’t on the truck, but he felt awful bad about the whole thing since Henry was one of his best friends and he’d helped him get the job. When I looked at that boy’s body on the cooling board at Ramey’s Funeral Home, I realized I was nervous. I knew then without a


doubt that I had worked too hard. For seven or eight months I was so nervous that I was miserable.

But I lived through it. During those bad days and months whenever I drove our car, I was in such bad shape that when I met a car at night, I’d come nearly to a stop until the car got by me. My whole family was upset with me for doing that, but I couldn’t help it. Every time I’d see those car lights coming toward me, I’d remember that truck that turned in front of me when we were coming home from Rock Hill, and I’d almost freeze at the wheel. I was mad at myself, but I couldn’t do a thing about it.

Something else that made everything worse was that I was in bad shape from back trouble, and that summer I was really down in my back. I hurt my back loading a stump when I wasn’t but a boy. We were living at Mt. Willing. Pa had Negroes to dig stumps in the cotton fields in July and August during lay-by time. Stumps were trouble when you were plowing and working the crop, and so Pa tried to get rid of them. After the stumps were out of the ground, we would haul them out of the field. We’d drive across the field and pick up one stump after another. One time I had one side of a big stump and the wages hand had the other. It was too heavy to bring up level with the wagon and put it in the wagon body. We got it about two-thirds of the way up, and the other fellow turned his side loose. I couldn’t turn the thing loose. It would’ve broke my leg all to pieces. We made the mules back the wagon up, and I held the stump ‘til they could maneuver the wagon so the stump would be level and I could get it in. I hurt my back bad, but instead of Pa doing something for me, he thought I’d be all right. I lay around the house for three solid weeks, and I’ve had back trouble ever since.

That summer of ‘37 I was down in my back for sure. While I was at the house for dinner every day, I’d lie on the hard floor and have one of the chaps rub where it hurt with Sloan’s liniment. I think that summer was the lowest point in my life. I can laugh about it now, but it wasn’t funny then. While Gladys was cooking breakfast every morning, I’d sit in a chair by the kitchen stove

Finally, A Clear Title 161

with my head in my hands. Then somehow I’d make myself get up and go to work, and I worked till dark every day.

The last time I saw Sam Addy, the banker, before he died, he said to me “Davenport, do you ever feel bad?”

I kinda laughed and told him, “I remember the old saying, ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone. If you got troubles, keep them to yourself. Other people got troubles of their own.’” And that’s the truth. Who wants to hear somebody growling and grumbling all the time? Most of the time I have enjoyed life. But that time in 1937 when Henry died and I had worked so hard, I got depressed and thought I was no good to anybody. I decided I would kill myself and get out of everybody’s way. That shows you I was in bad shape.

Of course, we didn’t have any money for a psychiatrist and didn’t know what one was anyway. My brother and my father and several of my uncles had gone to the state hospital for treatment for depression, but I wasn’t going to do that. I walked over to the John Graham place. Nobody had lived there since Uncle John died, and there was a big old open well in the yard. I thought I could jump in that well, and nobody would find me for weeks or months or maybe even years. I went to the well and opened up the cover and looked down into the water below. There were rocks all around the sides, and the place smelled dank. I thought to myself, “God Almighty, there may be snakes in that place.” I always was afraid of snakes.

So I went on back home and started getting better. Our daughter graduated from Winthrop in May, 1937. By that time I was a little better, and we were all proud that she would be a college graduate. Gladys felt like that was the most wonderful thing in the world. Her dream was coming true: her first child had an education, and it was paid for. That’s how come we were about to send Curtis that fall. Of course, Gladys didn’t have any vouchers for his first year, so we didn’t know where we would get the money.


Something peculiar happened to us at Winthrop the day Madaline graduated. Annie Cromley, my good friend Mac Cromley’s wife, and Gladys went up and spent the night before graduation. Mac and Annie had a daughter—Dorothy—who was graduating too. Mac and I went up together the next morning. When we got on campus, we saw a man get out of his car. That man had a thousand red moles on him. We dodged him, but in less than twenty minutes he was on the piazza of Main Building entertaining a whole crowd of people. He was the most entertaining fellow I’d ever laid eyes on. I’ve never heard but one fellow in all these years who could equal him, and that was Jimmy Byrnes, who stopped traffic in front of the bank in Saluda one time because so many people had gathered there to listen to him. I didn’t know that fellow’s name—I never learned it. He had a daughter to graduate there that day.

Madaline graduated with honors. She majored in history. She’s taught history all these years, and she ended up teaching history and history teachers at Armstrong College in Savannah. The fall of 1937 she went to teaching school in Greenbrier High School in Fairfield County. She taught there just one year. While she was there, she fell in love with a man named Bill Estes and gave back the ring she’d been wearing from Harold Boney, the football coach at Rock Hill. You remember—the one we’d stopped in Chester to leave the present for—and caused the wreck I told you about. But the Estes business didn’t last long.

While it lasted though, Madaline invited Bill to come for supper to meet her family. She was crazy about him at that time, and she wanted us to make a good impression. Gladys fixed a good supper—I remember we had fried chicken and rice and gravy and lots of good vegetables. After Bill arrived, he sat in the living room with me while Gladys and Madaline put supper on the table. Of course, Bela, who was six, and Doug, who was three, stayed with Bill. Now, I’ve never told you about my nose, but all of you who know me know I have an uncommonly big nose and that it has a crook in it. Well, I can’t help how big it is, but I’m the


cause of the crook. When I was just a chap, I kissed Hester Berry at school, and she picked up a piece of stove wood and hit me in the face. She broke my nose, and it’s been crooked ever since.

Now Bill Estes had a big nose too. Madaline hadn’t prepared us for that. I doubt if she even realized it—she was so smitten at the time. Now, I’m getting to the point. Doug was sitting in my lap while Bill and I talked. Suddenly he slid down out of my lap and went over to Bill and crawled up in his lap. I was worried about that to begin with, but then he looked up at Bill’s nose and said just as cute as you please, “Your nose is big.”

You can imagine how I felt. Bill didn’t laugh a bit, and he didn’t say a thing. I tried to make it all right. I told Bill that Doug had heard Gladys talking about my big nose so much that he’d just got hipped on the idea. I went on talking about something. I forget just what, and the women came in to call us to supper. Madaline and Gladys didn’t know a thing had happened. Bill hid it pretty well. Of course, I told them after Bill was gone. By the time the school year was over, Madaline and Bill weren’t going together anymore. I don’t know whether Doug had anything to do with that or not. I know for sure he didn’t help matters any.

When Madaline came home for the summer, she took what was left of the money she’d made teaching school that year and bought a real sofa and matching chair for our living room. Sometime back in the twenties we had bought a little black leather loveseat and three matching chairs, but she wanted an upholstered set. I think she was ashamed of what we had. That summer of 1938 while she was home, she made up with Harold Boney. He had quit coaching football and gone to work for Hartford Fire Insurance Company in Atlanta. He was a smart fellow; he’d sent himself through Furman on a football scholarship. If anything, his family was poorer than we were, but they were ambitious. Boney had graduated Summa Cum Laude, whatever that means. He wrote me a letter and asked for Madaline’s hand and said how much he loved her and promised that he’d be good to her and take care of her. Yes, he loved Madaline a whole lot, and they were married on


Christmas Day 1938 at Emory Church right after the regular service.

Madaline always was a pretty girl and a beautiful woman, with dark hair and high cheekbones. I think she took after Gladys; at least she had dark complexion and black, wavy hair like her mama. She looked happy on her wedding day and she was a beautiful bride. The ladies of the church had decorated our little country church with Southern smilax, and it looked real pretty. We didn’t have any reception for Madaline and Boney, but all of the groom’s family came to our house for dinner. Ladies in the community cooked the dinner that morning while we were at church, and they served it so Gladys could sit at the table. Before the wedding, we’d had the Matthews brothers, who were good carpenters, enclose part of the big front porch to make us a dining room that was connected to the living room with two French doors. Gladys was mighty proud of that. Of course, we still didn’t have a well or electricity or any inside plumbing.

I remember that Christmas Santa Claus brought Bela a little kerosene lamp just like the ones we used to light our house. He brought Doug a Dick Tracy cap pistol. Of course, they always got some oranges and apples and a few sparklers in my boot socks they hung by the fireplace on Christmas Eve. I did what I did every Christmas morning. I got up early and made a fire in the fireplace and one in the kitchen stove, and then I waked up the children so they could come in the warm room and see what Santa Claus had brought them. Bela wanted me to light her lamp right straight, and Doug started shooting that cap pistol. He used every one of the caps that day.

The newlyweds spent their honeymoon in Atlanta in Boney’s apartment. They went over there on the train because neither one of them could afford a car, and then Madaline came back on the train to Monetta where she was teaching then. She finished out her year there and then went to live in Atlanta. Boney had a little furnished garage apartment behind this beautiful home in a really good section of Atlanta, and they lived there until after their first


child was born in 1940. It was crowded, but it was nice, and it was inexpensive.

Our son Curtis got to Clemson the fall of 1937. With mine and his mother’s signatures, he was able to borrow $300 from my cousin Will Padgett—the man who wouldn’t lend me money for the mule when I asked him back in 1930 because he didn’t have it. Remember I told you he was going to get rich. Well, by 1937 he was on the road, and this time he did lend Curtis money. Madaline sent Curtis five dollars a month from the little salary she was making teaching at Greenbrier, and his mama furnished the rest. His bill was $525 for the whole year. He decided to major in chemistry, and he studied hard and made good grades. Of course, back then Clemson was a military school, and Curtis didn’t like the hazing that the sophomores put on the freshman. He had to take it when he was a freshman, but he said that when he got to be a sophomore, he would let freshmen stay in his room to save them from getting a beating by some of the bad rough sophomores.

Gladys had changed schools again. She didn’t want people to get tired of her teaching. She had gone back to Fairview this time, and she took Bela with her. That year Bela was six and in the second grade. Mrs. Milette Snelgrove was the primary teacher, and she taught Bela that year. Doug was three. He started when he was five too—the fall of 1939. He was the only one of our children who got to go through the twelfth grade, so he didn’t graduate until 1951. South Carolina added the twelfth grade in 1948-49.

Back then school was the center of the community. Every country school had entertainments, and Gladys could put on some good ones. She had plays and singings and musical programs. One time the Old Hired Hand and His Boys, a musical group that played on the radio every day, came to entertain at Fairview. You never saw such a crowd in your life. Gladys had all the performers for supper here at our house before the program, and they were a bunch of nice fellows. They played good old country music. The “old hired hand” was Byron Parker, I remember. I think he played the guitar, but I wouldn’t swear by it. Anyway,


school wasn’t just what happened in the daytime; the teachers were responsible for a lot of things. They always had a Christmas program and a program at the close of school where students would sing and say speeches and the ladies of the community would sell things to make up money for the school.

Of course, none of the country schools had any kind of a library where students could look up stuff, and the students had to buy their own school books if they were going to have any. Gladys had a couple of shelves with a few books on them, and every one of those books had a sticker in it that said “A Gift of the Lend-A-Hand Book Mission, Boston, Mass.” The North was sending books to the poor, ignorant South. Gladys said that every year, her students would read them.

The schools didn’t have any hot lunches either until after Roosevelt came in with his New Deal. Then the government started buying up what they called “commodities” and sending them to the schools. At first they were dry things that wouldn’t spoil—like prunes. Then they sent things that had to be cooked like lima beans and canned tomatoes. Mrs. Daisy Pratt, who lived close to Fairview, was the first cook the school ever had.

In 1938 I hired two wages hands to help me. Yep, Curtis went to college, and I hired hands—one regular, Ernest Gantt, and one part-time, H.D. Dozier. On the twenty-eighth day of June, 1938, it came a hailstorm and destroyed my crop. Talk about sad, we were all sad when we looked out at the fields after that terrible storm. Gladys and the two little chaps had been crying. Gladys was crying because she knew money would be awful short again, and the children were crying because their mama was crying. The cotton looked like it was green lace. Yes, it was destroyed and all our hopes for a big crop that year were gone with it. But we lived through that too.

The year 1938 turned out to be an important one for us as far as our home place was concerned. Remember I told you I’d bought a place with a joint mortgage from the Federal Land Bank. Mrs. Carrie had put the mortgage on it. She had sold the whole 182


acres to Frank Long for $5000. I raised the devil, and Cousin Frank told me he’d let me have any part of the place I wanted at what he gave for it. I bought forty acres on the south side of the place in 1919. It took me nineteen years to get it separated from the original mortgage at the Federal Land Bank. It cost $1200. I owed the federal Land Bank $400—one/fifth of the $2000 loan. I paid interest on that. Cousin Frank first sold the 142 acres to Mansy Rowe, and then Mansy sold it to Curtis Temples. Mansy Rowe and then Curtis Temples paid interest on four-fifths of the loan. Like I told you before, I had borrowed $800 from Cousin Nora Long to pay Frank Long, her brother, in 1919.

One day in the fall of 1938 Gladys was coming home from school with Bela and LaFonde Lindler in the car with her. LaFonde, Ben and Leta’s oldest child, was riding with her and going to school at Fairview. Anyway when they got nearly home, right in front of the Jack House just before you get to Curtis Temples’ house, his wife, Mrs. Sally, flagged Gladys down. Gladys stopped, and Mrs. Sally started telling her that they were going to put us out, that we didn’t own that forty acres and the Federal Land Bank would let them have it. She said the same thing over and over again, and finally Gladys had had enough. She said to Mrs. Sally, “Davenport Padgett will never leave that house until he goes feet first.”

I knew it was time to get things straight when Mrs. Sally talked to my wife like that. I made it my business to go to Jeff Griffith, who was my friend also—first, last, and always—and asked him how far he’d go with me in court and how much would it cost me to get the place clear. He said, “I’ll go to the Supreme Court, and it won’t cost you a penny.”

The next day Luther Wheeler carried me to Columbia and to the Federal Land Bank. I offered them $600 in cash for my part of the mortgage if they’d give me the release papers. I got to talk to the head lawyer, Mr. McGowen, and I told him the whole story. He thought I was just an ignorant farmer, which I was, but I could always learn. He asked me, “How do you know you don’t owe but


$302.00?” He couldn’t believe I could work out compound interest. I worked it out right there. I said I wouldn’t give them even one nickel more than $600. The bank wanted me to pay $700 and Curtis Temples to pay $900. What they did was let you have the land. Then they charged 4 1/2 per cent interest, but they collected 6% and put 1 1/2 % on the capital. The next day they sent a man to appraise all the land. We owed them $1500 in 1938. They wanted me to pay $700 on forty acres and Curtis Temples to pay $900 on 142. I offered $600, and they wouldn’t take it. I told Mr. McGowen I was never going to pay any more. He said, “We’ll sell it, and we won’t let Mott Yarborough buy bid it.”

I said, “I’ll make you sell the Mansy Rowe land.” I left them crying I was so mad. The next day Mr. Murrow from Federal Land Bank sent me word that my release was down there. I went back to Columbia and gave Federal Land Bank a check for $600. The reason they wouldn’t release it was that Mrs. Carrie wouldn’t sign it. She’d sold the land to Frank Long subject to the mortgage. Then Frank Long sold it to Mansy Rowe and me. I made Mansy sign a contract that he’d assume four-fifths and I’d assume one-fifth. After Gladys told Mrs. Sally Temples that they’d never get me to move out, somehow or other Mr. Curtis and Mrs. Sally changed their tune and were willing to get the land separated. So that’s how it happened. And I was mighty proud to know the land was mine.

Chapter 19

1939–1940

A Trip To Annapolis

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Curtis went to Clemson two years, 1937-38 and 1938-39. Then he got an appointment to Annapolis the summer of 1939. The morning that Curtis found out he had received the appointment (Bela brought the mail to where Curtis was helping me plow grassy corn down in front of the house) I was talking about what life would be like on a ship. I didn’t want him to accept the appointment and go into the Navy. I wanted him to be close to home. I asked him, “What are you going to do when you look out and see a torpedo coming and you know that ship’s gonna sink and you with it?”

Curtis answered without batting an eye, “I’ll thank God I don’t ever have to plow another row of grassy corn.” I knew then there was no need to try to keep him home.

We carried him to Batesburg that June to meet the train at four o’clock. He’d never been on a train before in his life. I went inside with him and showed him where to put his bag. His girl friend Doris Duffie (Boyd Duffie’s pretty daughter) told him that when he got to Annapolis, he’d never come back to see her. I knew she was probably right. It was a sad day for me when I put him on that train. I knew he’d never come back to stay. And he didn’t.


He stayed at Annapolis for two years. We went to see him on Labor Day, 1939, in our new 1939 60 Ford. He’d just been there for the summer, but we were mighty anxious to see him. Madaline, Boney, Bela, Doug, Gladys, Thelma Herlong, and I all went to Washington and Annapolis that weekend. Curtis didn’t have classes on Labor Day, and even though he was a plebe or a freshman, he would be allowed to visit with his parents for a little while because it was a holiday.

We left home about four o’clock Sunday morning. We hadn’t had much sleep because Thelma came to our house after she finished her work at the theater, which her mother owned and operated in Saluda. So it was nearly twelve o’clock before we got to bed.

As I said, we left early Sunday morning with Boney, Thelma, and me in the front seat and Gladys, Madaline, Bela, and Doug in the back seat. Bela was eight, and Doug was five. We drove all day and stopped at a tourist camp just before dark on this side of Washington. I got to talking to a young couple from Pennsylvania while we were eating our supper. We invited them to come to South Carolina to see us, and danged if they didn’t come the next summer. I remember they were impressed with the cotton blooming and the fresh vegetables we picked from the garden.

The next morning we got up early and went on to Annapolis and met Curtis. I think Gladys cried a little because she was so glad to see her son. He did look great. I remember we were walking on a sidewalk on the campus when an upperclassman came along and told Curtis to take his arm from around his mother. I guess that must have been against the rules. They did let him eat lunch with us at a little cafe there in Annapolis. I also remember standing on the dock there that afternoon as a destroyer was coming in. Hitler had just gone into Poland. (Remember this was Labor Day, 1939.) We all knew that war was coming and that Curtis would be in it all. But he loved Annapolis and the life there. He was just as smart as anybody up there and smarter than most. And it wasn’t costing him any money to go. In

A Trip To Annapolis 171

fact, he was getting $75.00 a month put up for him. At Clemson he had had to borrow to get an education.

We left him at Annapolis that Monday afternoon and went back to Washington and spent the night. The next day we went to see the Smithsonian and the Jefferson Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial. We also climbed the Washington Monument. People on the ground looked awful little from the top.

On the way home a funny thing happened. Boney was driving, Madaline was sitting in the middle of the front seat, and I was on her right side. For some reason Boney had left his driver’s license at home, so he was driving without a license. As he came over a big hill somewhere in Virginia, he saw patrolmen checking licenses down at the foot of the hill. It beat anything I ever saw, but before we got to the bottom of that hill, Boney had put Madaline under the wheel, and he was sitting in the middle. When she stopped at the checkpoint and the officer asked for her license, she reached in her pocket book and pulled it out as pretty as you please. She didn’t even seem nervous either. She was pregnant then with their first child. Bettina was born on February 20, 1940—as pretty a baby as you ever saw.

We never forgot that trip to Washington. It was the only one we ever made to Annapolis. Gladys hadn’t had to miss a day of school to go because back then the country schools would have school during lay-by time in the summer and then not start in the fall until October, so the children had time to pick out some of the cotton crop. During the war, even Saluda High School let out school the first six weeks at twelve thirty so students who lived in the country could go home and pick cotton and town students could go on the buses out to farms to work also.

Some of you may not know that lay-by time was after the cotton and corn had been worked out and had grown too big to plow any more. You just had to wait and let it grow and mature, and then in the fall you had to pick the cotton and gather the corn. Of course, the gardens produced in the summer, and we canned tomatoes and beans and corn, and some people dried butter


beans. Gladys’ mother did, but I never liked butter beans, so we didn’t ever try to dry them. We did can peaches and blackberries, and Gladys made all kinds of jelly and pickle. You should taste her peach pickle.

We came back from that big trip to Washington and went to work picking cotton. That was as far away as we’d ever been from home. Ordinary people like us didn’t travel back then like they do now. Curtis had left in June to go to Annapolis, and Madaline had married the Christmas before and was living in Atlanta, so the house seemed pretty empty. We’d had them all at home every summer since they were born. Now we just had the two little ones. We sent Madaline packages to help them out. I remember one time we mailed her a cured ham. They were so durn poor that Boney had to walk to work to save the ten cents.

Gladys wanted to go to Atlanta to visit Madaline and see how she was doing. Her baby was due in February. Madaline wanted us to come too. So we went over to spend Sunday with her and Boney. We left early that morning, and Ruby and Willie Riser went with us. They were always our good friends, and they loved Madaline a lot. Gladys and Ruby between them had fixed a good picnic dinner that we carried with us. We knew Madaline and Boney didn’t have the money to feed all of us. We had a good day and left early enough to get home before dark. Of course, the days were long because it was summertime.

What was so hard for us was that we left Bela to spend the week with Madaline. She was going to ride the bus to Saluda the next Saturday. Madaline would put her on the bus in Atlanta, and we would be at the station in Saluda to meet her. She wouldn’t have to change buses and the bus driver would look out for her. Gladys worried about her because she was just eight years old. I didn’t say anything, but I was mighty glad when we picked her up the next Saturday. Her eyes were shining when she got off that bus in Saluda. She was all excited about all the things she’d seen in Atlanta. She’d even been to the Fox Theater and seen all the stars overhead.


Doug started to school that fall. He had turned five on June 29, 1939. He was a happy little fellow with a head full of curly brown hair, and he was a quick learner like the other three. He pretty soon was reading everything just like the others had done. I suppose some children are just ready to go to school earlier than others. Our four certainly did all right all the way through, and they started early. I never heard one of them complain about going to school. They all read every book they could get a hold of. We had a few books here at home, and they read them early. Gladys was a reader, and I always loved to read myself. Of course, I wasn’t a fast reader like she was because I always mouthed the words, but when I got through, I knew what I had read. We took the Saturday Evening Post and Life and Good Housekeeping and the Reader’s Digest, and our mail carrier brought us the State newspaper every day along with the mail. Gladys and I always taught adult Sunday school classes, and we would study them separately and then talk about the lesson on the way to church every Sunday morning. I’d be driving, the children would be in the back seat, and Gladys and I’d be sharing our ideas about the lesson. We didn’t always agree, but we enjoyed arguing.

That year when Bela was in the fourth grade and Doug was in first grade at Fairview, something happened that I have never forgotten. Gladys was having a big entertainment for the community one Friday night. She wanted me to take her and the children to school and then come back when school was out and get Bela and Doug and take them home and give them supper and then bring them back to the entertainment. I told her that she could just go on and drive to school that morning and I’d hunt down to Fairview—it wasn’t but about seven miles from home—and I’d get there in time to bring the children home like she wanted me to do. She had to stay there all afternoon and get ready for the event that night.

I started out pretty soon after she and the children left, and I had hunted all day when I got within a mile of the schoolhouse. Suddenly I heard all kind of noise. Then I saw a man hollering


and jumping around a stump and then fall on the ground. I ran up to him and saw that he had cut his foot with the axe. He was cutting lightwood from pine stumps to use for splinters to start fires with that winter. The boys from the CCC camp had been thinning timber where he was, and there were lots of stumps left.

I put my gun down, picked up the man and carried him to his Model T Roadster that had the keys in it. I cranked it and carried the man to the CCC camp at Tom Etheredge’s house. I took him out there and laid him flat on the ground. I pulled his boot off and his sock and saw that he just did scratch the skin. He saw blood and fainted dead away. He hadn’t really hurt his foot at all, and there I’d carried him all that distance. When Mr. Etheredge looked at it, he fainted dead as hell. I was disgusted with both of them. They couldn’t stand the sight of blood. They should have had my lip to contend with. I went on back to Fairview like I had planned to do and brought Bela and Doug home and fed them. Then I carried them back to the entertainment that night.

I’ve already told you that our first grandchild—Bettina Davenport Boney—was born on February 20, 1940. Of course, we didn’t have a telephone. Nobody in the country had telephones at that time. They did have them in Saluda though. Harold Boney, Madaline’s husband, called one of my cousins in Saluda, and he came down to our house and told me. I caught a ride and went down to Fairview School to let Gladys know that we were grandparents. She was teaching school so she couldn’t go to help with everything when Madaline came home from the hospital, but we went that weekend to see the baby. She was a darling. I didn’t know how much I was going to love that little girl. We kept her when she was a year old for three months while Madaline taught school in Atlanta. I had a mule then that would throw you in a minute, but Bettina would climb up on the lot fence, and that old mule, Laura, would come and let Bettina pet her. Bettina had the first playpen I ever saw. I told Gladys that we ought to have another baby since playpens were so wonderful. She spent a lot of


time with us later on, and I would take care of her just like I had taken care of our four.

That summer Boney had appendicitis and Madaline needed help, so Gladys rode the bus to Atlanta and stayed for a week while Boney was recuperating. Doug and Bela stayed with Mrs. Wightman and Cantey and Mary Alice. I was working my crop and couldn’t take care of them at home. I went up to see them on Wednesday night, and they were as glad to see me as I was to see them. I was mighty happy to meet Gladys at the bus station too and bring her and the children back home where they belonged. Course, I was glad Gladys could go to help Madaline too.

In 1940 Gladys’ mother’s sister, Aunt Sis, died in Florida. Someone called her other sister, Aunt Alice, who lived in Greenwood, and told her that Aunt Sis was dying and she’d better come if she wanted to see her alive. Aunt Alice got me word. She had called the county agent in Saluda, Mr. Rothell, and he brought me the message. Aunt Alice wanted me to drive her to Ft. White, Florida, in her brand new 1939 Plymouth. Gladys couldn’t go because she was teaching, and Bela and Doug would stay with her and go on to school as usual. I went to tell Mrs. Wightman and Mary Alice that Aunt Alice wanted me to drive them and her to Aunt Sis’ funeral and that we’d be back to get them in an hour or two.

Gladys took us all to Aunt Alice’s house in Greenwood in our car so that she could bring it back home and drive it to school every day. Aunt Alice was ready when we got there, and we left right straight for Florida. I know I had the worst cold I ever had in my life, but I managed to keep going. We got somewhere down in Georgia, and a patrolman on a motorcycle stopped me. I was going through a town, but I couldn’t see any town. When that speed cop stopped me, I said, “I wasn’t breaking the law. I was just going 55.”

He looked at me kinda funny and said, “You’re going through town.”

I looked around and asked him, “Where in hell is the town?”


He sorta smiled and said, “You’re right in the middle of it.” Then he added, “But go ahead this time.”

I drove out of that town and got on a two-lane road to Tampa, Florida. It wasn’t nothing but a sixteen-foot road. It was dark, and we were going through one hell of a storm. I drove about two miles, and it looked like every car and truck I met I was going to knock the paint off my car. The storm got worse, and the rain was so heavy I couldn’t hardly see the road. I told Aunt Alice, “The first motel I find, I’m going to stop, and Aunt Sis can be dead for all I care.” Every time we’d go over a bridge where there was water, Aunt Alice would duck her head. She and Mrs. Wightman were both in their seventies and scared.

I found a motel and we put up for the night. It was still pouring down rain when I went to sleep, but when we woke up next morning, it was fair as a lily. A great big tree—as big as the big oak in my front yard now—had blown down in the motel parking lot.

My cold was worse, and I went across the road and bought a bottle of liquid aspirin to carry with me. I found out when I walked back to the motel that Aunt Alice couldn’t get up. Every time she’d try to raise her head, she’d have a dizzy spell and fall back on the bed. I made her take a tablespoon of liquid aspirin, and it helped her feel better. She was able to get up and get dressed. We all four walked out of the place where we’d spent the night and crossed the street to a little cafe where we ate breakfast. I had a little old suitcase that I had my stuff in, and I carried it with me rather than putting it in the car.

We finished breakfast and left the cafe. We got in the car and pulled out to go to Ft. White. If we’d been five minutes later, we wouldn’t have had to go clear to Homestead like we did. Aunt Sis was already dead. When we got to Homestead, we went to the undertaker and saw her body. The family was all gone. They told us at the funeral home that Aunt Sis was to be buried at four o’clock in Jacksonville. We turned around. I discovered that I’d left my suitcase sitting under the table in that cafe where we’d eaten breakfast. It had Pa’s straight razor in it, and I sure didn’t want to


lose that. It was about all I had left that had been my father’s. We’d got about 25 or 30 miles back towards Jacksonville when I thought about my suitcase. I went back that thirty miles and got the suitcase with the razor in it. It was sitting just where I had left it.

We headed back over those same thirty miles to Jacksonville. When they got Aunt Sis’ body, it was just about sundown. The cemetery where they were burying her had broom straw knee high. They had just cleaned off a little place to put Aunt Sis’ grave. I set the cemetery on fire to let those folks know what I thought about what a bad condition it was in. Of course, I stomped it out right straight. I said to some men who were working there that anyone that had a public cemetery and kept it like this ought to have to burn it off. I’ve often wondered if they kept it clean after that. I did the same thing at Baptist Good Hope cemetery one time, and they’ve kept it immaculately clean ever since then.

We spent that night in a motel too and drove all the way back to Greenwood the next day. I called one of my friends in Saluda to tell Gladys to meet us at Aunt Alice’s house late that afternoon. I knew I could drive that car straight back to South Carolina in one day. I was glad to get back to Saluda and my family. I always thought a lot of Aunt Sis, so I was glad I had the opportunity to go to her funeral. She had married Tom Wooten in Florida and raised a crowd of children. She’d come nearly every summer on the train and stay a while with her sister Alice in Greenwood and then with Mrs. Wightman in Saluda.

The summer of 1940 Curtis went on a three-month cruise as a part of his training. I think they mostly stayed in the Caribbean Sea and close to South America. We got picture postcards from him regularly showing us the places he was seeing. He was like the rest of us—he’d never traveled very far from home before. We were glad that he seemed to be happy with what he was doing and was looking forward to his career as an officer in the United States Navy.

When he’d come home for Christmas in 1939, he’d worn his officer’s uniform to preaching at Emory. He was a handsome


young man if there ever was, and I’ve already told you how strong and good he was. Gladys and I were mighty proud of him. I wish we’d saved his letters. He always wrote every week, and he told us about what he was doing. When it was time to take him to Greenwood to go back to Annapolis after Christmas, Gladys was sick with the flu and couldn’t go to the railroad station with us. She told me later that she cried the whole time we were gone. She thought she just couldn’t stand to see him go back. She knew that he would be involved in the war that was coming.

He came home again for Christmas in 1940, and this time we had Bettina with us. Bela was nine, Doug was six, and Bettina was almost a year old. Santa Claus came to see all three of them at our house. We gathered around the fireplace and looked at what he had brought and then opened the rest of our presents. We didn’t have many like people do today, but we always had a lot of love. Most of all, we were glad to have all our children and our grandbaby with us.

Chapter 20

1940-1942

Curtis Returns; U.S. at War

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The last of February, 1941, Madaline got a job teaching school

in Decatur, which was really just a part of Atlanta. She and Boney needed the money so bad that they tried to figure out some way for her to take the job. Madaline knew that Cora, Posey’s wife, lived right behind us and that she had kept Bela and Doug at times and was a wonderful nurse. Madaline called my cousin in Saluda and asked him to get us to telephone her. We did and found out that she wanted us to ask Cora to come to Atlanta and stay with them and keep Bettina. I went to Cora’s house and talked to her. (Her grandfather was Wash Padgett; so she’d always been close to us.) She was just like everybody else and needed the money. She agreed to go and stay until school was out. Her children were older, and the whole family all lived with Dora, Cora’s mother—who had been my nurse, you remember.

Madaline needed a car to drive to school if she was going to work, so Gladys and I went on a note to help them buy a little blue Ford coupe. They came home with Bettina and carried Cora back with them. She stayed about two weeks and got homesick and wanted to come home. She told Madaline that she had to go


home, but that she’d keep Bettina at our house every day while Gladys was at school.

Madaline and Boney thought they’d die if they had to do without their baby. By this time she was a year old. Gladys agreed to keep the baby when she was at home, and Cora would keep her while Gladys was at school. The bulk of the work would be on Gladys, but, like I told you, she wasn’t one to complain. She treated Bettina just like she’d treated every one of our four. She loved them, and she made them mind. I remember one night at the table Gladys was holding Bettina and feeding her while she was eating her own dinner. Right in front of Gladys was a pound of fresh butter. Gladys had just churned the milk and made the butter. It was still soft and yellow and pretty. Bettina reached out as fast as anything and stuck her hand in that pound of soft fresh butter. Gladys didn’t think; she just popped that little hand just like she would’ve done if Bettina had been her own baby.

Madaline and Boney brought Cora home and spent the weekend. Madaline cried when she had to leave Bettina Sunday afternoon and go back to Atlanta. We were all glad to have that little girl in the house. She had started walking when she was seven months old, and by the time she was a year old, she was talking up a blue streak. I can remember we’d watch for that blue Ford on Friday afternoons, and Boney would be driving pretty fast for the dirt road we lived on. He and Madaline couldn’t wait to get back to Bettina. They came every weekend to see their baby girl.

That was a hard spring for them and for Gladys because she had the responsibility of the house and the baby and her schoolwork, but she was strong and able, and she’d always loved babies and children. Anybody that was around her for a little while would know that. When Madaline’s school was out, they came and took Bettina home, and our house seemed empty with her little voice and her happy little laugh gone. She has always been special to us, I reckon, because she stayed with us then and another time later on.

Curtis Returns; U.S. at War 181

Everyone knew war was coming, and Roosevelt was helping England every way he could in 1940 and ‘41. The United States wasn’t ready to declare war then, but the military was getting ready. They were training officers and men as fast as they could without declaring war. About that time, the “Ninety-day Wonders” came to Annapolis preparing for World War II. They were men who would be trained for officers in three months. They put the regular midshipmen upstairs—six stories high—and put the new men on the lower floors. I don’t know whether that had anything to do with what happened, but we always thought it did.

About the middle of April, 1941, we got a letter from Curtis saying that he’d passed everything on his annual physical check-up. Then the next day we got another letter from him saying that his heart had gone to the bad: the murmur was loud and it was painful. Gladys brought the letter to Mt. Willing where I was working so that I could read it right then and not have to wait until I came home for dinner.

They kept him in the hospital for six weeks. He was a sad young man. We knew that he had a heart murmur when he was fourteen. You remember I told you how he was sick for three weeks when we were hoeing grassy cotton in 1934. He came to the house one day and felt so bad he couldn’t go back to the field. The doctor stopped him from work when we took him to see Dr. Wise that night. He made Curtis lie around and take it easy.

When I went to pay Dr. Wise for his examination and his advice, he said to me, “Davenport, keep your money. Let’s just hope we can do something for him, and that’ll be plenty pay for me.”

After three or four weeks, Curtis seemingly got well, and he went back to working on the farm, hard work too, cutting grain and hauling in grain. He finished high school before he was sixteen like I told you, and stayed out one year, and then in 1937 he went to Clemson. When the appointment to Annapolis came vacant in South Carolina, he was second runner-up, but his grades


were so high that Jimmy Byrnes gave him the appointment. But he had to go to Annapolis to stand the physical exam, and we had to borrow the money for him to go.

The same Dr. Wise examined him then, and he found the murmur still there. But then he knew what to look for. He wasn’t satisfied, and he brought the county nurse down here with him and had her examine Curtis. She couldn’t find that murmur at all. But Dr. Wise still wasn’t satisfied. He knew our financial condition, and he didn’t want us to waste that money for Curtis to go to Annapolis if he wasn’t going to pass the physical examination. He insisted that we carry him to another doctor in Greenwood. We followed his advice and carried him to old Dr. Scurry in Greenwood, who examined him twice. The second time he said, “He’s almost a perfect specimen of humanity.”

I said, “Examine him again.” He cussed me and asked, “What is it?” I answered, “Chest.” When he finished this time, he said, “I’d certainly send him if

he were my boy. Nothing but a little whipper-snapper of a doctor would turn him down on that heart. It may sound a little funny, but it’s all right.” Curtis went and he passed every physical exam for two years. Until that spring physical in 1941.

Curtis came home from Annapolis. I met him at the railroad station in Greenwood. He was so down and out when he came home that I was worried about him. He made the mistake of looking back and thinking about what might have been. He was sad.

The Saturday after he’d come home, his big cruise box came in with all his things from his two years at Annapolis, all his things from the life he’d been planning for himself as an officer in the United States Navy. I went to Saluda and got it that Saturday morning. I brought it home and lugged it up on the front piazza. He looked at it and just left it there. After dinner we moved it in the house, and he started to unpack, but the house was so little we didn’t have much place to put all those navy clothes.


Gladys took the towels and the sheets and the bedspreads and put them in the closet. Some of them may be there yet—stamped with his number, a big 2040. Since it was Saturday afternoon and back then everybody went to town on Saturday afternoon, we all got in the car and went to Saluda.

Curtis met Bettis Herlong, Jr., who was a little younger than he was and a football hero, and they were walking down the street. All of a sudden Curtis fell in the street like someone had hit him with an axe. Bettis, who was much of a man, picked him up and ran seventy-five yards to the doctor’s office. Luckily, Dr. Wise happened to be in his office (which at that time was just a tiny little room behind Hunt’s Drug Store), and he examined Curtis and said that it was just shock from seeing the cruise box and thinking about what he was going to miss. The truth of the business is that he missed getting killed in World War II. I’ve seen him take his Annapolis yearbook and point to the men in his class who didn’t come back. Madaline’s husband helped Curtis get a job with Southeastern Underwriters in Atlanta. He lived with Madaline and Boney for a while and worked there in Atlanta. One little lady thought for sure she was going to marry him, and her name was Estes too—Carol Estes—but Curtis left Atlanta to go on to Tampa to work there with the Underwriters, and he never did marry Carol.

That summer of 1941 I had Ernest Gantt working for wages for me. I had 35 acres in oats, and I was down in my back again. The only way I had to harvest those oats was to cut them by hand with a cradle and let Ernest tie them and shock them in the field. I’d always done it that way, but that summer I wasn’t able to swing a cradle all day long day after day. One of my neighbors had a binder that was pulled by mules. It cut the grain and tied it in bundles with binder twine. Somebody had to follow behind it and shock the bundles in stacks so that the rain would run off them and they wouldn’t rot before you had time to haul them in and store them in the barn.


One man in the community owned a thresher that was also pulled by mules. It would separate the grain from the straw and the chaff, and the owner would pull that thresher from farm to farm with a hired crew and thresh oats and wheat for a certain percentage of the bushels threshed. When the thresher came was always a big day. All the men on the farm had to haul the bundles out of the barn to the thresher, and all the women had to cook a big dinner for all the extra hands working on the thresher. That meal was part of the pay.

I asked my neighbor if he would cut my 35 acres of oats for me. He’d finished cutting his grain and hauled up the bundles. He and his sharecropper went and checked the land my grain was planted on to see if it was smooth enough to run a binder over. He knew that Ernest and his brother Little Bit had sowed my grain in 1940 and 1941 and they had put it in pretty rough. He didn’t give me an answer right away, and my grain was ready to cut. On Monday morning when I was going to the field about sun-up, he was coming along the road, and I stopped him and asked him what he’d decided about cutting my grain. He said they’d looked at it and he couldn’t see that it would benefit him any to cut it. He said to me, “I tell you what you do. You break up your land this fall and put your grain in real smooth, and I’ll cut it for you next year.”

It made me mad. He was supposed to be my friend. I said to him, “Hell no, you won’t! I’ll have a damn binder of my own next year.” I did buy a brand new binder that fall from International Harvester in Columbia. I sold a mule for $175 and put that money on the binder, and I used that machine as long as I planted grain.

Later on when that same neighbor got old, he had to go to the doctor pretty often, and he wasn’t able to drive anymore, and his wife never had driven. Several men in the community drove him for a while, and they quit when they saw it was a gratis affair. I don’t know whether I volunteered or not. But I did it. And I don’t regret it one bit. He did me a favor back there in 1941 even though


he didn’t intend to. He forced me to buy a binder, and I made enough grain to pay for it.

Everyone remembers what happened December 7, 1941. That Sunday Gladys and I along with Doug and Bela went to church at Emory like we always did, and then we went to Gladys’ mother’s house for Sunday dinner. After we had eaten, we sat down by the heater in Mrs. Wightman’s bedroom where they sat every day. Cantey turned on the radio like he always did, and that was the first we’d ever heard of Pearl Harbor. The news of the surprise attack was all that was on the radio, and we knew that war had come. I remember we all just sat there quiet—kinda stunned to think that Japan, who was supposed to be our friend, had attacked our ships in the harbor and our planes on the ground. We heard Roosevelt talk about a “day of infamy.”

Little did we realize then what that war would cost us in lives of young men who had already known the hard times of the depression. We didn’t know then that life for all of us would be different from then on. Mrs. Wightman had been born in 1862 and was a baby during the Civil War, and Gladys’ father volunteered for the army when he was sixteen—in 1863. She had heard about war first hand from him, so she might have had some idea, but she didn’t say anything that day.

Curtis had been living with Madaline and Boney in the duplex apartment they had moved into, and Madaline was teaching school that winter in Decatur. Boney had started going to law school at night. He always had a lot of ambition. Then Curtis was transferred from Atlanta to Tampa, Florida. After December 7, he kept trying to volunteer for the service—the Marines, the Army Air Corps, the Coast Guard, everything—but they wouldn’t take him. Finally his number came up at the draft board here in Saluda, and he came home from Florida to go to Fort Jackson (it was Camp Jackson then) to be drafted, and they turned him down too.

I remember that day when he came home. He got a ride from Saluda after he’d got off the bus from Fort Jackson. He got out of the car at the mailbox and walked up to the house. It was about


dusk, and we were out in the yard. Gladys was gathering eggs from the hen nests, and Bela and Doug were with her. When Curtis came up, he put his arms around her and cried as he said, “They don’t want me either, Mama.” I think not being able to serve in World War II affected his life. When he walked down the street, people stared at him because he looked perfectly healthy and yet he wasn’t in uniform. One man in Saluda said some ugly things to him about being a draft-dodger, and Curtis has never forgotten it either. He’s made a good life for himself, but it wasn’t the life he was planning on. We don’t always get what we’re planning on.

In 1942 the government began rationing gas and sugar and some other things. They got the teachers to issue the ration books with ration stamps according to how many people were in a family. Gladys and Milette Snelgrove were teaching at Fairview then, and on certain designated days, the children would stay home, and the adults in the community would go to the school house where the teachers would issue their ration books. Tires were awful hard to get too because every bit of the rubber was going into the war effort. People were collecting scrap iron for the war effort too.

We had a radio then, and I listened to the news in the morning, at dinnertime, and at night. It looked awful bad for a while. Our troops took a beating for a long time; we just weren’t ready for war. One thing though, once we got into the war, everybody pulled together. There wasn’t any of this protesting you saw in the Viet Nam War. I guess we knew what was at stake, or thought we did. Hitler had already taken all of Europe, and it looked like he might take the world with the help of Japan and Italy.

Everybody from 18 to 35 had been drafted if they hadn’t volunteered. I was too old, Doug was just a little boy, and Curtis wasn’t able, so we didn’t have anybody in our immediate family in service, but Gladys and I both had plenty of nephews in service and scattered all over the world. Frank Long’s two boys met each other in North Africa. They were in different branches of the


service, and they were walking down a street and ran into each another. Jouette’s son Wallace was nearly too old, but he was drafted, and Gus’ sons, Horace and Gus Jr., were both in service. All you’d see on the streets of Saluda on Saturday afternoon were women and young boys and old men. Roseva and Frank Herlong had two sons in service—one of them would be my son-in-law one day.

I remember that Ruby and Willie Riser’s son was overseas, and they hadn’t heard a word from him in six weeks. We went to visit them several times during that period and just sat with them. There wasn’t much we could say. But one day they got a pile of letters all at one time; George William was fine. You never saw anybody any happier than Ruby and Willie were when they found out he was all right. We went to Phillip and Alma Pou’s son’s memorial service at Sardis. They had three sons in service, and one was killed. I know Phillip never got over losing his boy. Phillip was renting the Buster place over by Mt. Willing at that time—where LaFonde Lindler lives now—and he would come by our house in his wagon every day to get to his crop. We always talked a little when I saw him, but he was a hard worker and didn’t waste too much time talking.

Those early war years everybody talked about the “duration.” Everything was for the “duration.” That meant for as long as the war lasted. Men didn’t sign up for a tour of duty; they weren’t drafted for a certain length of time. They were in for the duration—for as long as the war lasted.

Gladys was still teaching at Fairview, and Bela and Doug were still going with her. She drove our 60 Ford and picked up a lot of children on the way. I don’t see how she got all those children in the car, but she did—every day. Ben and Leta’s children were going—LaFonde and Betty Jo. Ben brought them to our house every morning. Gladys drove about five miles before she picked up the Miller children—Ed, Jewell, and Evaughn. Next she stopped for Jolene, Elizabeth, and George Matthews and Minnie Lee and Evelyn Black. Remember she was driving, and Doug and


Bela were in the car too. The last two miles she didn’t stop. All the children that close walked to school.

Gladys was the principal and also taught fifth, sixth, and seventh grades and the high school grades if any students came. I know Ralph Bedenbaugh went to her through the tenth grade. She loved to learn and she loved to teach. We put those words on her tombstone where she’s buried in the Emory cemetery. Bela arranged it, and I thought it was worded wrong, but Bela told me it was right. It sounds a little odd to me—“Gladly did she learn and gladly teach.” It sounds like something’s left out, but it sure does describe Gladys. She helped everybody any time they needed help. And she enjoyed doing it too.

Chapter 21

1943–1945

War Years

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bela finished the seventh grade at Fairview in the spring of 1943, and her whole class—all nine of them—went to Saluda High School that fall. That was the year the high school dismissed for six weeks at 12:30 so the students could help pick the cotton crop. It was a part of the war effort. Everyone was doing what they could to help. Bela was twelve on July 29 and started to high school the first of September. She took algebra and Latin and all the other courses, and she made good grades. In fact, she made all A’s through high school. Madaline and Curtis had too. Curtis said that if he brought home a hundred on a paper, his mama would say, “Do you really know the material?” She wanted them to learn all they could. I told you she believed in education and was set on them going to college. She wanted them to be prepared.

That summer of 1943 we let Bela go to what the church called the Lander Assembly. It was a week of worship, study, and recreation for Methodist young people from all over South Carolina, and it was held at Lander College in Greenwood. Gladys and Doug and I took Bela to Greenwood and left her in that big dormitory. She looked awful lonesome when we kissed her good-bye that Sunday afternoon. We got a letter from her on Tuesday


telling us she was homesick and asking us to come to see her. She wanted to come home. We thought she was just too young to go away without her family. The only time she’d ever been away from us was when she stayed in Atlanta to visit Madaline.

We went to see her on Wednesday night. She was glad to see us, but by that time she had adjusted some, and we encouraged her to stay. When we went back on Saturday to pick her up, she wasn’t ready to leave. She’d met a little boy she liked. She’d always had a boy friend from the time she was a little thing.

I told you that Boney was working in the daytime and going to law school at night. He graduated in the spring of 1943. Madaline accepted his diploma for him after he’d gone to Washington. He didn’t take the bar exam then. He was so durn smart that his professors recommended him to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to be an agent. Because he went into the FBI, he never did get drafted. He had to train at Quantico, Virginia, and then he spent twenty years with the Bureau. They lived in Oklahoma City, Dallas, Philadelphia, Syracuse, Baltimore, Charleston, South Carolina, and finally Savannah. After he retired, he did take the Georgia Bar and practiced law until he died at the age of 57. He had burned himself out with the FBI. He didn’t ever know but two speeds, and they were Stop and Go. He was a hard man to live with (I don’t see how Madaline put up with him; course, he loved her better than anything else in the world) but he was one of the best men I ever knew. I used to tell him off all the time about how he was treating his wife and children, and he never did get mad. Course, it didn’t do any good; he never did change his ways.

He had a heart attack right after he retired—in 1966 in fact, and he died in 1971. Madaline has been a widow since then. But she stays busy. She didn’t retire from teaching until she was sixty-five, and she plays a lot of bridge and is president of this and vice-president of that, and she is big in the Baptist Church. That’s one of the things she did for Boney. She changed her church. She was a Methodist like we’ve all been. But Boney was such a big Baptist

War Years 191

that she changed to try to please him. Now she’s a deacon in the Baptist church in Savannah where she stayed after Boney died.

Sometime in 1942 Curtis was transferred from Tampa, Florida, to Raleigh, North Carolina. He rented a room from the Wootens there in Raleigh, and he met their daughter Edith, who was a little younger than he was. Mr. Wooten was a college professor there in Raleigh, and they were a lot better off than we were. I remember when Curtis told us he was going to bring Edith home to meet us, he also told us that he had saved enough money to give us to have our little tenant house painted. It had never had a drop of paint on it. It was made out of heart pine since Pa had it built in 1893 when he moved back to Saluda, so it wouldn’t rot in a thousand years. But Curtis wanted it to look better than it did. We hired Eddie Griffith to paint it. That heart pine soaked up the paint, but the ninety dollars Curtis gave us paid for the paint and the labor. Poor Eddie got killed on a motorcycle a few years later.

Anyway when Edith came, we could tell she wasn’t looking at anything but Curtis. Our favorite Saturday night supper was oyster stew, so that’s what we had when she came, and she didn’t eat oysters. She didn’t seem to mind that though; she was just glad to be with Curtis.

She and Curtis were married in Raleigh on June 12, 1943. We didn’t have the money for all of us to go to the wedding, but we put Gladys on a bus so she could go. She went to the Lena Ann, a good dress shop here in Saluda, and bought two dresses. They probably weren’t the right kind for the wedding, but she didn’t know. After we put her on the bus in Saluda, Bela, Doug, and I worked all weekend on the corn right by the Mt. Willing house. The two of them put out soda around the corn, and I ran a middle buster between the rows and threw dirt over the soda. After it didn’t rain for two weeks, I took a cultivator and spread the dirt out.

It didn’t bother me too much because I couldn’t go to the wedding. I’ve never been one to worry about what couldn’t be helped. Curtis was my first-born son, and I loved him a whole lot,


but we didn’t have enough money for all of us to go. We’d met Edith when she came to visit us, and I could see how much she loved him and he loved her. I knew she was from a good family, and I hoped that they’d be happy together. They seem to have had a good life. They’ve brought up two fine children—Bobby and Deedee. Both of them are doing well. We did go to Deedee’s wedding in Atlanta in 1974, but we didn’t get to go to Bobby’s wedding in Connecticut when he married Carolyn. We were too old by then to go that far. He has two fine children too. Course, I haven’t seen them since they were babies.

Gladys changed schools again in the fall of 1944. She’d been at Fairview since 1937, and she was ready for a change. Bela rode the bus to Saluda, and Doug went with his mama to Pine Grove, which was on the Ridge Spring highway. She could go through by Emory Church on a dirt road and get there quick, or if the road was bad, by this time she could go on Batesburg Highway up to the forks just about two miles out of Saluda and then turn back on Highway 39. The school was right on that road.

Doug was in the sixth grade, and it wasn’t easy for him to change to Pine Grove. The students there had been together all their lives, and he was the teacher’s son, so they gave him a hard time. Carrie Belle Long Waters was the primary teacher, and Gladys was the principal. We’d known Carrie Belle all our lives. She was my second cousin—Aunt Betty and Uncle Joe’s granddaughter—and she’d grown up right near Mt. Willing. She and Gladys made a good team.

In fact, Gladys never had any trouble working with any of the teachers she taught with, and she was always the principal as well as a teacher. Ruby Riser taught with her at Fairview for a long time, and she loved to tell about the year when Gladys had grades seven through ten and she had fourth, fifth, and sixth, but she had more students than Gladys did. After Christmas her sixth grade boys came back with whooping cough, and she thought she was going to lose her mind. She said that Gladys promptly switched her seventh grade for Ruby’s sixth grade and took those whooping

War Years 193

boys into her room where they behaved like angels. Of course, they still whooped until spring, but Gladys could handle them. Ruby said Gladys never let things get to her, that she was always cheerful. I know Gladys always said her students got better every year. She gave her best to her children—her own and other people’s, and she expected and got the best from them. I know for a fact that she was always cheerful. I can hear her now humming a little tune to herself. She was never blue or depressed, and she didn’t think much of people who allowed themselves to get blue. She didn’t have any sympathy for Jouette or Frank Long or Frank’s son Waldo, who used to come to see us every Sunday night with my brother Gus after Gus’ wife died and Waldo moved back to Saluda. All three of them had been depressed more than once. She believed they could do better if they tried.

I also know Gladys loved to teach. When we first married, she wanted to teach me what she knew. I’m sure I could have benefited if I had let her, but somehow I never could settle down and study like she wanted me to. I’ve always said I knew how hard studying is because I tried it one time. But I didn’t try studying with Gladys. I knew she was the best teacher around, but by then I thought I was too old to be studying out of children’s books.

In September, 1944, our second grandchild was born—Harold Abner Boney, Jr. Madaline and Boney were living in Oklahoma City at that time. Boney was still with the FBI. Later he was transferred to Philadelphia and then to Syracuse, New York. That was during the war, and he couldn’t find any housing for his family. Madaline came home and stayed for about six months. We enjoyed having her and the children, but Madaline was eager to have her own home again.

We didn’t have any conveniences then—no running water or bathroom, no central heat. We didn’t get electric lights until 1941, and that same year we punched a well in the back yard, and for the first time we could draw a bucket of water from the well instead of bringing one up the hill from the spring. All the heat we


had in the winter was the wood stove in the kitchen and the heater in the little room we sat in and a fireplace in the living room. We just had two little bedrooms and one nice-sized one. Madaline took the little bedroom next to the den because the heater in the den warmed it up some. Bettina slept with Madaline, and Harold slept in the crib in the same room. He was bad to spit up, and the doctors said he had a pyloric valve that didn’t work right. They treated him, and he soon outgrew his problem and could eat anything. When Boney finally found an apartment and came and took his family to Syracuse, the house felt empty.

All of us loved Madaline in a special way. For Gladys and me, she was our firstborn, and she was like another mother to Bela and Doug. In fact, she was better in some ways than a mother because she never thought they did anything wrong so she never fussed at them. They cried when the car pulled out of the yard. I remember that was a lonesome sound. Gladys and I shed a few tears too.

In the 1940’s the state of South Carolina was trying to improve the education children were getting. The first place they started was with the teachers. Back then, a teacher didn’t have to have a college degree to get a teacher’s certificate. She just had to pass the state teacher’s exam. Of course, some of them had finished college, some of them had a year or two of college work, and some were like Gladys—what college credit they had, they’d earned through Winthrop’s study centers.

The state made a rule that every teacher, whether she had a teacher’s certificate or not, had to be recertified, and in order to be recertified, that teacher had to take and pass the National Teachers’ Exam. A teacher’s pay would depend on what she made on that exam and on how much college credit she had. You can imagine what a shock that was to Gladys and all the rest who had been teaching for years—those with college degrees and those without. But they had no choice; if they wanted to continue teaching in the public schools of South Carolina, they had to take the exam.

War Years 195

That Saturday in the spring of 1945 when Gladys stood the exam, she was so nervous that I was worried about her. It took all day, and when she got back, she thought she’d failed for sure. She didn’t have as much confidence in herself as I had in her. I knew how smart she was. Anyway, weeks later on a Saturday Bela went to the mailbox to get the mail, and she brought it to Gladys, who was ironing in the kitchen. Madaline and the children were still at home then.

Gladys saw an official-looking letter addressed to her, and she was scared to open it. When she tore into it and tried to read it, she couldn’t understand what the numbers meant. She handed it to Madaline and told her to read it. Madaline put Harold down and studied the paper. In a few minutes she said, “Mama, if I’m reading it right, you made an A on the exam.” Gladys thought she had to be wrong, but it turned out that Gladys did make the highest grade possible. I’d always thought she was the smartest person I’d ever known—and that exam proved it to the world.

Gladys’ Aunt Alice died on September 11, 1944, in Greenwood. We knew she had been ailing, but we didn’t know she was that sick. Her stepdaughter, Cousin Jennie Monroe, who lived with her in Greenwood, hadn’t even let Mrs. Wightman know so she could go to see her. After Aunt Alice died, Cousin Jennie called somebody in Saluda to get in touch with us and tell us when the funeral would be. We all went up to the funeral home that night for the visitation. Mrs. Wightman, Cantey, and Mary Alice went with us and Doug and Bela too.

All of us loved Aunt Alice. She never had any children of her own, but she raised her husband’s little daughter Jennie, and then after Jennie married and divorced, she also raised her two step-grandsons, Jack and Brooks Monroe, Jennie’s boys. She was good to Mrs. Wightman and to all of us. One time when she and Cousin Jennie came to spend the day with us, she brought Doug and Bela a big, shiny new tricycle. They’d never had one before, and they were tickled pink. Aunt Alice always had a fine car, but she never learned to drive. She and her husband had run a store in the


country, and then after they moved to Greenwood, they bought a lot of real estate. Yes, Aunt Alice was a wealthy woman.

Gladys taught for a little while the morning of Aunt Alice’s funeral and got the school going and the substitute started; then she and Doug and I went by the high school and picked up Bela, and we all went to Greenwood. Cantey drove Mrs. Wightman and Mary Alice in his Model A Ford, the one he was going to trade in soon. He didn’t know it then though. They buried Aunt Alice by her husband, Uncle Pet Brooks, and her mama and daddy—Vastine and Mary Weaver Herlong. Aunt Alice had gone to Florida on the train when her daddy had a stroke and brought him and Mrs. Mary back to Greenwood and taken care of them. He died in 1904, and she died in 1910, and they’re both buried in Greenwood.

In 1908 Mrs. Mary was sitting on the porch in her wheelchair. She’d had a stroke by then and couldn’t walk. Cousin Jennie was sixteen years old, and she was staying with her while Uncle Pet and Aunt Alice went to Greenwood to buy supplies for the store they ran out in the country. A Negro man came up to the store, which was right in front of the house, and asked if they would sell him some fat back. Cousin Jennie went right on out to wait on the man and get him what he wanted. Mrs. Mary, who was sitting there watching and listening, heard Cousin Jennie scream and saw the Negro run, but she couldn’t do a thing. Luckily someone else came up right straight, and Mrs. Mary told him something was wrong. He rushed into the store, and found Cousin Jennie lying in a pool of blood with her throat cut from ear to ear. The Negro had used the butcher knife they sliced meat with to cut her. The man got the doctor and Uncle Pet and Aunt Alice. The doctor sewed up her throat, and she lived. But she had a scar all her life from ear to ear. The community hunted the Negro down and hanged him. They say that was the last lynching in South Carolina. I don’t know for sure myself. I know it affected Gladys and her family something awful.

War Years 197

After Aunt Alice died, all Cantey could talk about was the will and who would inherit Aunt Alice’s money. Well, it turned out that Cousin Jennie got a home and a nice little sum and the rest of her estate was divided between her two sisters and her four brothers. Mrs. Wightman got about $25,000—a whole lot of money back then—and each of the other heirs got the same amount. Of course, they were all dead, and some of their children were dead—but the living children and grandchildren became the heirs. It took a couple of years for the estate to be settled. One of the Florida grandchildren—Sydney Herlong, Jr. (he became a congressman from Florida)—came to Greenwood himself to check out what was going on. He was Vastine Jehu’s grandson—or Brother Jehu, as Mrs. Wightman called him. He was a lawyer, and his father, Sydney, Sr., had sent him. When the money was finally distributed, Mrs. Wightman gave Cantey enough to buy him a brand new Ford automobile, which he drove as long as he was able. He never bought another car.

Bela and Doug were growing up. They’d been working in the fields and the garden since they were little. Gladys and I were always working beside them. I didn’t do much chopping or hoeing cotton because that was done during the spring and summer when I had to plow. As soon as Doug got big enough, I taught him to plow too. Curtis was gone, but Doug was taking his place. Bela never did plow but one time, and that was because she begged me to let her try. She and Doug had brought me some fresh water and butter and sugar biscuits to the cotton field behind the house where I was plowing that morning. They always brought me something in the middle of the morning and in the middle of the afternoon. The cotton had been chopped and hoed, and I was center-furrowing it—that is, running a furrow right down the middle between the rows to let air get to the roots. While I was eating my biscuits, Bela begged me to let her try to plow. I didn’t see how it could hurt anything if Gladys didn’t know about it. She’d raise particular hell if she thought I’d let her daughter plow cotton.


I let Bela take a hold of the plow stock and clicked my tongue and said to the mule, “Get up, Laura.” Doug and I watched as Bela kept that plow right in the center between two rows. She had plowed nearly to the end of the row when all of a sudden that plow hit a little stump that was just under the ground. It knocked the plow handle into Bela’s stomach and caused her to fall to the ground. I come just to hollering at the mule to stop and running toward Bela. The mule did stop, and when I got to Bela and picked her up, she was crying but I could see that she was all right. That was the last plowing she ever did. I learned my lesson.

When cotton-picking time came, we were all in the field together—Gladys, Bela, Doug, and I, and any hands we were lucky enough to hire. Now Gladys and Bela could pick cotton. Doug and I couldn’t hold a candle to them. My back caused me trouble when I tried to bend over to reach the bolls, so I sat on my cotton sack and picked. Doug just plain didn’t want to pick. He did it because he had to, but he hated it and he never put himself out any. We’d all start on rows at the same time, and Gladys and Bela would get way ahead and finish their rows and turn around on our rows and help us out.

We’d pick from early morning until dark. We’d tie the cotton up in the cotton sheets we’d been emptying in all day and then weigh them just before dark. Sometime we’d have to use a flashlight to read the scales. Whenever we had enough in the cotton house to make a bale, we’d load it on a wagon with high side planks on it, and I’d set out at daybreak the next day to take it to town to the gin. It was an all-day job because you’d have to get in line with all the other wagons and wait your turn.

Cousin Frank Long’s son Jack became a vice president of Hunt Foods, and he started out right in the cotton fields on his daddy’s farm. I heard him say one day when he was sitting at my dinner table that plowing a mule all day long made anything else you had to do look easy. I guess he was right. All four of our children worked hard on the farm, and they didn’t complain. They learned that lots of times you have to do what you don’t want to do. That’s

War Years 199

a pretty important lesson to learn early in life. I think it’s served me pretty well—and them too.

Bela has never let us forget something that happened the summer of 1944. She had finished her first year at Saluda High School, and she had made friends with Ida Webb from up near Chappells. That little girl had been going to the beach all her life, and she asked Bela to go to Pawley’s Island with her family for a week that summer. It so happened that the week they were going to the beach was the same week we’d be having our revival meeting at Emory. It started on Sunday night, and we had two services a day, one in the morning and one at night, from Monday through Thursday. Now Bela had never been to the beach, had never even seen the ocean, and she wanted to go. Gladys and I decided that we couldn’t let her miss church that whole week just to go to the beach.

It so happened that Ida’s father had to work (he was a mail carrier) and would be going down on Friday night and coming back Sunday afternoon. They wanted Bela to come for the weekend if she couldn’t come for the whole week. We agreed to that, and we took her to Saluda to meet Mr. Webb on Friday afternoon. I’d known the Webbs all my life. They owned a lot of land along the Saluda River at Chappells and had always been well off. We met Bela again in Saluda on Sunday afternoon. She had a great time and told us about swimming in the ocean and getting turned upside down by the waves. I think she was glad to be back home, and we were glad to have her back.

We didn’t miss a single service at Emory that week. Bela had joined the church in 1943 when she was twelve. We’d had a big revival meeting in August with Reverend Lloyd Bolt from Edgefield Methodist Church doing the preaching. He was good, and a lot of the children joined the church that week. Bela was playing the piano some already. Of course, Gladys played most of the time—Gladys and Sudie Grigsby.

When Bela was ten years old and in the sixth grade, she started taking piano lessons from her mama. Gladys was willing to teach


anything she knew, and she could read music and play the piano. We borrowed Mrs. Wightman’s organ, and Gladys started teaching her on that, but before long we took it home and went to Shealy’s Furniture Store in Batesburg and bought a used, upright piano. Bela practiced every day. Gladys saw to that. When she went to high school, she took lessons from Miss Bishop all four years. Doug still complains about his mama letting Bela quit picking cotton early and go to the house to practice the piano when he had to stay in the field and work.

Our children grew up going to church every time the church doors opened, and sometime we opened them ourselves. Gladys played the old pump organ, and I took care of the babies. She taught a Sunday school class, and I did too. I taught fifty-eight years and quit, and they gave me a London Fog overcoat. Then they asked me to teach one Sunday a month, and I did that for another seven years. So in all I taught sixty-five years. When I quit that time, they gave me a big-print Bible and named the Sunday school class the Davenport Padgett Class. I wonder if I did anybody else any good. I sure helped myself by studying the Bible and the Sunday school material.

Gladys and I worked with the Epworth League when Madaline and Curtis were growing up and then with the Methodist Youth Fellowship after they changed its name when Bela and Doug were in high school. One time I had to jump in Plunkett’s Pond down below Ridge Spring to save two girls who had fallen in when we went on a picnic there. Gladys taught Bible School and worked with the choir and everything else they had at Emory. She loved the church and the people as much as I always have.

Yes, our children grew up going to church. They always said if they weren’t too sick to go somewhere on Saturday night, then their mama and I knew they weren’t too sick to go to church on Sunday morning. Of course, none of them are at Emory now, but they always go when they come home. They were all baptized there, and my two daughters were married there.

War Years 201

I’ve seen the church change. First we remodeled the one big room and cut off part of it to make Sunday school rooms. When I was growing up and for years after that, we had all our classes in that one big room. Gladys taught in one corner, and I taught in another. The children had their classes in other parts of that big room, so we were all together when we were teaching and learning. A good many years after we made Sunday school rooms in the church itself, we added on a fellowship hall and more Sunday school rooms. Later we redecorated the sanctuary and added the stained glass windows. You’ll see they were put there in memory of Henry Conrad and Magdaline Minick Herlong, Gladys’ great-grandparents. He was one of the founders of Emory back in 1843. When I was a boy, there was a big crowd that came to Emory. Then for a while it looked like the church would die. Sometimes there wouldn’t be anybody for Sunday school except J.L. Grigsby and his wife and children and our family. Some new folks came into the community, and the church got new life, and now we have a steady congregation that comes every Sunday.

I was talking about Doug before I got off on the church—how he always loves to tell how Bela got out of picking cotton to practice the piano. Another thing Doug loves to tell about happened when he was little. I don’t know exactly what age he was—probably about ten. That would make it in 1944.

One day we were coming back from Saluda—just Doug and me. I was driving and he was sitting on the front seat beside me. When we passed Jouette’s mailbox, we met a Negro walking toward town. I looked at him and kinda said to myself, “That’s Bub Dit.” Now Bub Dit was a man who lived right near Homer Calk’s store, and everybody in the community knew him.

Doug piped up as big as you please and said, “Daddy, that wasn’t Bub Dit.”

I felt sure I knew who it was, but I said to him, “Well, who was it then?”


He stuck to his guns and answered, “I don’t know, but it wasn’t Bub Dit.” By that time we had reached Calk’s store, and I whipped in there and turned the car around.

Doug tells now that when he saw I was going to turn around and go back, he got to questioning himself whether it was Bub Dit or not. But he didn’t say a word. When we got back to where the man was, I pulled up beside him and said kinda joking, “Bub, I just wanted to check and see if it was really you walking down this road.”

He looked at me funny and said, “Yes sir, Mr. Davenport, it’s me all right.” With that I turned around again and headed toward home. I didn’t say anything and Doug didn’t say anything.

When we got to the house, I got out of the car and cut a little switch off the tree in the back yard and told Doug to come and get his whipping. He didn’t whine or cry. He just took it like a little man. It’s stuck in his mind all these years. In fact, it’s one of his favorite stories. I probably wouldn’t do it again, but I felt like then that Doug needed to learn to listen to me, I reckon. I guess I should’ve been glad that he had his own ideas. Anyway it happened like that, and I can’t do a thing about it now. Thank God it didn’t keep Doug from being willing to stand up for what he believed. But maybe he learned too that you can be wrong sometime when you’re sure you’re right.

In May of 1945 the war in Europe was over, and everybody we knew rejoiced. We couldn’t be too happy though because our service men were still fighting and dying in the Pacific, and it looked then like it’d be a long time before we beat the Japs. A lot of the men who had fought and won the war in Europe were sent to the Pacific Theater, as the news reporters called it then.

I had a big crop at home and at Mt. Willing. Doug wasn’t but eleven years old, so he couldn’t do the work of a man. I had been hiring H.D. Dozier to help me with my crop for several years. He was good help, and he didn’t mind work. He came early in the morning and had an hour for dinner. Gladys fed him good rations and plenty of iced tea. Every day when we came to the house for

War Years 203

dinner, I’d jump in the car and run over to Ben Lindler’s store to get a nickel’s worth of ice so we could all enjoy cold tea for dinner. (We didn’t have a refrigerator then even though we did have electricity. We couldn’t afford to buy one.) Then we’d both go back to the field and work till dark. That was the way people worked on the farm. I usually stretched out on the floor after I ate and took a short nap. My back hurt me most of the time, and sometimes I’d get Bela or Doug to rub it with Sloan’s liniment, which seemed to help a little.

Gladys always taught Bible school at Emory every summer, and Bela and Doug went there for a week, and they’d go to Sardis Baptist Church with Ben and Leta’s children for their two-week Bible school. When the children weren’t working, they were reading or playing together. When they were little, H.D. and I had built them a playhouse in the back yard. It was a right nice little house with a low roof—kinda like a chicken house. It had a door on one half of the front and a screen wire on the other half where the light could come in. The only problem was that the water poured in when it rained, so they couldn’t ever keep anything in it. But they played many a day in that little house.

Doug got an air rifle for Christmas one time, and pretty soon he was out in the yard shooting it. He aimed at a little bird that was sitting on the electric wire coming to the pole in the back yard. He had no idea he was going to hit that bird, but he did hit it, and it fell down on the ground right in front of him. He picked it up, and instead of being happy about his good luck, he cried. I think that was the first and last bird he ever shot. You know how I’ve loved to hunt all my life. Well, neither one of my sons is a hunter. They just weren’t interested. I tried to get them to go with me and let me teach them what I know, but they never wanted to learn.

The summer of 1945 the little Webb girl asked Bela to go to the beach again, and this time it wasn’t the week of our revival at Emory, so we let her go. The week before she left for the beach, the United States dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We didn’t see any pictures because we didn’t have television back


then, but I remember the sound of the news reporters’ voices on the radio. They were kinda breathless—like they couldn’t believe what had happened. We’d never heard of an atomic bomb, and we didn’t have any idea what devastation one could cause. What we did know was that Japan surrendered in days after the bombs fell and suddenly the war was finally over—four years for the United States and a whole lot more than that for the people in Europe.

In the big cities there was dancing in the streets because people thought the world was free again. Hitler and Tojo were gone, and now we’d have peace. Of course, things were pretty much the same out in the country where we were. We didn’t hear any sirens or whistles blowing. All the celebration was in our hearts. We knew the soldiers would be coming home; the war was over; the “duration” was over. The Japanese surrendered the week Bela was at the beach. When she came home, she told us that there was no big celebration at Pawley’s Island either. It was just a small family beach.

It seemed like we could breathe easier then. It was almost like we’d been holding our breath waiting for the end to come. Life had gone on as usual, but we knew that men were suffering and dying every day. Gladys’ father, who’d been in so many battles in the Civil War, said Sherman was right when he said, “War is hell.” We didn’t see the suffering like the Southern people did in the Civil War, but we heard about it on the radio and read about it in the newspapers, and we saw it in the faces of those who lost their loved ones over there.

Times began to get a little better. Crops on the farm in South Carolina brought good prices, and the poor farmers (which included me) began to get a fair share of the economy. I managed to pay for a good little amount of land I’d bought on credit. I’d come close to losing it when times were hard. I decided to go into the chicken business on the side. I loved farming so well, but I needed something else to sell besides cotton and corn and oats. I built a brooder house, and I put in a thousand baby chickens. I tended to chickens morning, noon, and night. We had built the

War Years 205

house almost in the yard, and they were easy to get to, but those chickens took more time than the cotton crop did—and it took plenty.

That was the lift that got the Southern farmer across the great chasm. We had learned to “diversify,” as the government called it. Some had chickens; some had peaches; some, asparagus. There had to be something extra for all the farmers. You couldn’t make it on row crops alone. Most of us farmers nearly got out of debt about this time.

In 1945 when the war was over, everybody thought everything would go down and we’d be in bad shape again. Instead it reversed itself. It kept climbing. I remember my neighbor Ben Lindler, who lived in the three-room house Gladys and I had started in, wanted to build him a new house, but he waited a while after the war for things to go down. But then he needed the house so bad that he went ahead and built. It’s a good thing too. He’s been living in that house forty years already, and so far as I can see prices are still rising. The price of labor has climbed completely out of reason as far as I’m concerned.

That fall of 1945—October 2 to be exact—our third grandchild was born—Robert Lewis Padgette. Curtis and Edith were living in Salisbury, North Carolina, and he was their first child. Gladys didn’t go to help them, but we did go up the first weekend we could to see that little fellow. They called him Bobby then, but they changed to Bob when he got grown. I’ve never been able to change though. He’s turned out to be a fine man—tall and good-looking. He didn’t get to come to our fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration because he was in college at Duke. Madaline’s boy Harold was the only other one who didn’t come. He was in Pennsylvania at Wharton Business School. They’ve all gone to college—all except Barry, Madaline’s son—and he didn’t want to go.

Also that fall Bela was a junior at Saluda High School, and she wanted to play basketball. Frances Pratt, who’d gone to Fairview with her, was playing, and her brother Conrad was taking her to


meet the bus in Saluda for the games. They went right by our house, and Conrad said Bela could ride with them if she wanted to play. We had a car, but we couldn’t take Bela to town two nights a week for a ball game. The school didn’t have a gymnasium; in fact, it didn’t even have a full-sized dirt court. The players practiced during one period at school every day on a dirt area half the size of a full court with a goal at the edge of it. That meant that they had to play every game at another school’s gym.

J.C. Hatchett, the superintendent of the school, was also the girls’ basketball coach, and he was serious about his basketball. Bela didn’t make the team, but she did get to play some. She was one of the three guards. She could never have been a forward because she could never shoot a ball. She did make the first team her senior year, and they won the district championship and the first game in the upper state play-offs. Gladys and Doug and I went to as many of the games as we could. We went to Johnston to see that district game, and we went all the way to Fairforest in Spartanburg County to see them play for the upper state championship. It was good for Bela to be a part of a team. She had one more year in high school, and then she’d be going to college. By then I knew what that meant; she’d never be coming back home to live.

Chapter 22

1946–1951

A Wreck; Two Graduations

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After South Carolina required all its teachers to take the National Teachers Exam and started paying them on how much college they had and what they made on the exam, Gladys decided in earnest that she was going to get a college degree. She thought she had a lot of college credit because she’d gone to Winthrop’s study centers for years. But when the showdown came, she found out that none of those hours would count toward a degree.

She went to Newberry, the closest college to us, and talked with the people there about how she could earn a degree. They helped her to make out a plan that she could follow. She knew she’d have to take courses in the winter while she was teaching and then go to summer school every summer. I was all for her going to college. She’d wanted a degree ever since I’d known her. In fact, when we married she was still grieving over the fact that she didn’t get a chance to try for the scholarship to Winthrop. I told her later if she’d got that scholarship, we might never have been married, and if we’d never been married, we’d never have had the four fine children God blessed us with.


Anyway, she took a course the spring of 1946. I don’t know what it was, but I do remember the name of the teacher—a Mrs. Guillard. I guess I remembered it because I didn’t know anybody by that name. It met after school in a room at Saluda High School, and there were country teachers from all over the county taking the course. Bela didn’t ride the bus the afternoon Gladys was in class. She’d just wait for Gladys to get there, and she’d sit in the car and study with Doug, who would ride with his mama from Pine Grove. Of course, Gladys made an A on it just like she did on all the rest. She worked summer and winter for ten years taking whatever courses she could get—always working toward her degree, which she finally got in 1956.

The summer of 1946 Bela went to Baltimore to visit Madaline and her family. They had moved there from Syracuse, and that wasn’t nearly as far to go to visit, and besides that, the Silver Meteor went straight from Columbia to Baltimore. You could get on in Columbia and not have to get off until you reached Baltimore. Of course, Bela didn’t go on the train, but she did come home on it. Jim and Hazel Crouch had come home from Baltimore to visit his father and mother (Gladys’ sister Sue) in Saluda and Hazel’s folks in Batesburg. Madaline wanted us to let Bela come back to Baltimore with Jim and Hazel so she could stay a few weeks with her there. Madaline said she’d put Bela and Bettina on the train in Baltimore and tell the conductor to be sure that they got off in Columbia. Bela was still fourteen that June and Bettina was six. Of course, Bettina had ridden on trains all her life, so she was used to them. Bela had never been on a train. She’d ridden a bus once—from Atlanta to Saluda.

Madaline said she would drive to Saluda with Harold, who was just two, and visit a week or so and take Bettina back with her. That way Bettina could have a long visit with us. She loved the country and the animals, and she especially loved Gladys and me. I guess it was because she’d spent so much time with us.

Everything went well. We took Bela to Sue’s house, and she got in the car with Jim and Hazel for the long ride to Baltimore. We

A Wreck; Two Graduations 209

went back home, and the house seemed kinda empty. Doug was almost twelve, and he was working every day along side of me. We missed Bela in the field because she was a good worker just like her mama had always been. She wrote us about what a good time she was having. Madaline and Boney lived in a two-bedroom apartment, but they made room for her to sleep on the sofa in the living room.

She stayed two weeks, and then Madaline put her and Bettina on the train to come home. It got into Columbia about four o’clock in the morning. Gladys and Doug and I were there early. We didn’t want Bela and Bettina to come in and we not be there. We had a long wait, but finally that big train came into the station, and we looked and looked and I know I let out a sign of relief when I saw our baby girl and our grandbaby get off that train. The conductor was helping them. Bela said she was scared to go to sleep for fear she would sleep through Columbia. Bettina had slept most of the way after it got dark.

Anyway we went home and for a day or two everything was just hunky dory. But then one morning, Gladys and Bela were stringing beans out on the porch and Bettina was playing around on the floor. Doug and I were working right beside the house, so we went to the well to get some water. I heard Gladys calling my name in a scary way. I come just to running with Doug behind me. I thought somebody was hurt. When we got to the front steps, they all looked all right. I didn’t see any blood. I said, “What’s the matter, Gladys?”

She was just a-crying—which was unusual for Gladys. She hardly ever cried. She looked up at me and said through her tears, “This child has just said that her mama smokes. She didn’t know she was saying anything she shouldn’t; she was just telling the truth. I can’t believe Madaline would smoke.” Then she put her head in her hands and cried some more.

Now you’d have to know the way Gladys was raised to appreciate how she felt. Her mama and daddy and her grandparents on both sides believed that drinking was wrong


because it was a sin, and they were also against smoking. Gladys accepted the fact that I was going to smoke, but she was against it because she thought it wasted money. She fussed at me every day about “burning up dollar bills,” as she called it. Back then it was accepted for men to smoke (at least it was accepted by most everybody but Gladys—and she didn’t care whether other men smoked), but nice women just didn’t smoke according to what we all believed. I was shocked too when I learned that my daughter was smoking, but I didn’t think it was the end of the world. We didn’t know then how it could damage your health. If Gladys had known all smoking can do to you, she would have tried even harder to get me to quit.

Anyway for the rest of Bettina’s visit, our house was kinda like a morgue. Gladys did all her work as usual, but she didn’t hum like she always did, and she’d cry at the drop of a hat. I think Bela must have been affected because she’s never started smoking. Doug did though when he was younger, but he gave it up, and now he says he can’t understand how someone as intelligent as he is could have smoked cigarettes as long as he did. I hadn’t set a very good example before my children. I started smoking when I was ten years old, and I didn’t quit until I was 75. That means I smoked 65 years.

We got letters from Madaline while Bettina was visiting, and Gladys wrote her, but she didn’t say anything about the smoking. We were all looking forward to Madaline’s visit and dreading it too. We didn’t know how Gladys was going to act. Well, when Madaline came, she knew in a minute that something was wrong from the way Gladys greeted her. She asked what was the matter, and Gladys burst out crying and couldn’t talk. I told her what Bettina had said and how upset Gladys was. Bela and Doug were listening, but they didn’t say a word, and, of course, Bettina was too little to understand. She just accepted the fact that her mama and daddy smoked. It seemed natural to her. She didn’t know any different.


We sat down on the porch, and Bela and Doug took care of Bettina and Harold out in the yard while Madaline told us about when she started. She said the winter after she married when she was teaching in Monetta and Boney was in Atlanta, she was so lonely and sad she thought she was going to die and her roommate at Mrs. Cato’s house where she was boarding smoked and offered her a cigarette. She smoked it, and somehow it made her feel better. Once she got started, she couldn’t stop, she said. She told Gladys and me that she knew we were disappointed in her, but she couldn’t help it now. I assured her I knew how that was. Gladys didn’t say much, and you could tell she wasn’t going to get over it anytime soon. Madaline stayed about two weeks, and we all loved her so much that somehow we got back to where we’d been before. She still smokes ‘til this day, and it’s affected her voice. It’s sorta raspy—not like it was when she was young. But she’s got a lot of company now. A lot of women smoke today and drink too, I’d bet.

That fall Doug started eighth grade at Saluda High School. He didn’t know it then, but he would have to go to high school five years. When he began, eighth grade was the freshman year in high school, but by the fall of 1947, ninth grade was the first year of high school. In that one year the state of South Carolina added the twelfth grade—which was a requirement for all students. They didn’t work it in slowly; they just told those students they’d have to go another year, and Doug and all the rest of those eighth graders had already taken all the freshman year courses like Latin and algebra and general science and history. But somehow the state worked it out, and they had enough to learn to last them five years instead of four.

Bela was a senior and Doug was a freshman. They walked up to the crossroad above our house and were the first ones to get on the Cherry Hill bus every morning and the last ones to get off in the afternoon. It was the last of the wooden buses. The sides were wood; the frames around the windows were wood; and the benches were wood. Wilbur Black drove it back and forth to


school, and during the day he’d get odd jobs in town. He was a good carpenter, and he could pick up jobs nearly every day.

Bela played basketball that year, and once again Conrad Pratt took her and his sister and their friend Mary Rose Pou to meet the bus for two games a week, which Saluda still had to play in somebody else’s gym. It would be 1950-51 before Saluda got a new high school with a gymnasium. Bela made the team that year; she was a first-string guard. She wasn’t a born athlete like Doug was, but she worked hard. We went to as many games as we could. Saluda won the district championship that year and won the first game in the upper state play-offs. We went up above Spartanburg to Fairforest to see them play. They were eliminated in the second game, and the team was pretty disappointed. And so were all the Saluda fans.

Bela wasn’t but fifteen her whole senior year in high school. She didn’t turn sixteen until July 29 after she graduated in May, but she wanted us to let her date that spring. She was making eyes at a big tall boy who was in school mainly to play football. He’d been a year ahead of her, and, of course, she was a year younger than anyone in her own class. We did let her go to the picture show with him a few times, and we let her go to the Junior-Senior prom with him. He drove his Daddy’s new dark blue 1947 Plymouth, the first one to be put out after the war. Madaline and Boney had one just like it except it was dark red. They were good, heavy cars that lasted a long time. People were mighty glad to be able to buy cars and tires again.

Sometime that year Curtis and Edith were visiting us with Bobby, who was about two years old. They still lived in Salisbury then. Curtis was already working for Royal Globe Insurance Company, and he soon got a promotion and moved to Roanoke, Virginia, where he stayed a good many years. Cantey and Mary Alice and Mrs. Wightman were visiting us that day too. Cantey took Bobby for a walk down the hill toward the spring. All our children had called Cantey “Clockoo” because he would take out his pocket watch and let them listen to it tick. I don’t know why


Curtis got so upset, but he went and caught up with them and took Bobby away from Cantey. I told Curtis he was wrong to take him away, that Cantey was just loving the child. He wouldn’t have hurt him for anything in the world. Curtis was just a young father who didn’t want his baby boy to get out of his sight. It’s better to take too good a care of them than to neglect them like some people do. I learned a lot about that after my mother died.

Our life got turned upside down the spring of 1947. On Friday, May 7, I went with my wife to help her take a busload of her school children to Columbia sightseeing as a field trip for the end of the year. Gladys was still teaching at Pine Grove then, and Bela was graduating from high school. That was the night of her Junior-Senior prom. We had a most wonderful day. The weather was good, and the children seemed to like everything they saw. We went to the Governor’s Mansion and to the State House and to a lot of other places. Some of the children had never been to Columbia, much less to the Governor’s Mansion and the State House.

Gladys had been worried about taking such a big group off, but we thought we were all right when we got back into the town of Saluda safely. We had come from Columbia on Highway 378, and we’d stopped in front of Duffie’s Cafe to let off the McCullough boy who had gone with us. When we got to the main intersection in the town of Saluda where Highway 178 crosses Highway 378 right at the court house (there was no traffic light there then), an army truck coming from toward McCormick didn’t stop at the stop sign and plowed right into the right side of the bus. The truck turned the bus over and pushed it on to the courthouse square. It came into the bus right at the level of our feet.

Nobody was killed, but thirteen of us were carried to Greenwood Hospital. The Negro ambulance helped just like the white one, just like our county will do today. I had my foot broke half in two and five ribs broken and two holes punctured in my lung. Everybody thought when they put me in the ambulance that


my name would be in the paper the next day as a has-been, but, thank God, thirty years later I’m still here.

Right here and now I want to say I’d had such a hard time in life trying to get a home that I sometimes felt like no one cared about me. But getting hurt in that school bus wreck opened my eyes to what my county and my community thought of me. My womenfolk couldn’t cook for a week for people coming to the house to see how I was doing. Really and truly my wife was seemingly not hurt. She had a few bruises—one bad cut on her leg—but that wasn’t from the wreck, but from hitting an old barrel hoop when she rushed out in the dark to see about the chickens after she got home from the hospital visiting me. She had a time with that leg for a long time and carried a scar—a bad scar—until she died.

But I think she was hurt worse than the rest of us in a deeper way than physically because she had the responsibility of the whole busload of children, and she always felt that something she could have done would have prevented the wreck. God knows how she thought she could stop an army truck from plowing into us when the soldier driving didn’t even pretend to stop at the stop sign, which was on his side. When the truck hit us, Gladys had just left my side to go to the back of the bus to quieten down two or three students who she thought had gotten too noisy.

For about a year I was in a cast and on crutches. I got awful blue and despondent feeling like I never would be able to work anymore, but God in his wise judgment allowed me to get back to myself. That summer Doug, who was thirteen years old on June 29, had to take over the crop. I’d go to the field on the slide since I still had my cast on my leg and foot, and I’d try to help Doug and explain to him what to do. Poor boy, that was a hard summer for him too. If it hadn’t been for my nephew Wallace Padgett, Jouette’s son, I don’t know what we would have done. Wallace would work his crop, and then he’d come up to our house and help Doug with the work. I guess that summer showed Doug that he didn’t want to be a farmer. What he went through then was a lot like what I


knew when I was a boy except my father never did help me. He just told me what to do, and then he went somewhere else. Doug will tell you today that was the hardest summer of his life.

Life was hard for all of us that year. Bela still liked her big football player, and one day while she was hoeing cotton in the field between the house and the spring, he came by in his daddy’s new car and stopped. She was as pretty as a picture in the big straw hat she always wore to keep the sun off her face, but she was ashamed for him to see her working in the field. He soon drove on off, and she went back to work. I could tell she was upset, and I told her what my daddy taught me, “Anything that is honest is honorable.” I added that she didn’t need to be ashamed of doing good honest work. That didn’t do her much good that day, but she’s never seemed to mind work. She’s got a Ph. D. in English, but she had to milk cows and do everything else when her husband got hurt. She went to the picture show with that good-looking young man nearly every Friday night that summer after she graduated from high school, but she didn’t see him except on the weekend. He never did drive by our house any more. I guess she let him know he wasn’t welcome during the week.

As I’ve told you, our two younger children were born a long time after the others. Bela was born in 1931, and Doug, in 1934. Bela went to Winthrop the fall of 1947. She didn’t have to choose a college. Winthrop was the cheapest college in the state, so that is where she went. It was and is a good college, and it’s still the cheapest in South Carolina. We were fortunate that our children came far apart. Otherwise we never could have educated them. By the time the second two went away to college, the first two were married with families.

Bela was in the last class in South Carolina that graduated with just eleven grades, so she graduated at fifteen. She had started to school when she was five. She loved school as soon as she started, and she’s been going ever since—either learning or teaching or both. She finished Winthrop the spring of 1951, an honor


graduate. When she received her diploma from President Henry Simms, he whispered to her, “Brains.” Yes, she was smart just like the first two.

That fall of 1951, Doug, the last one, started to Clemson. And I had that same feeling I had when Curtis left to go to Clemson in 1937 fourteen years before. I knew that Doug wouldn’t be coming back home either. He was going to major in engineering, and that would take him far away from Saluda County and Andy Branch and the little bit of land that I’d managed to buy back of the fifteen thousand acres my great-grandfather William Padgett had owned back in the early 1800’s. I had managed to buy and pay for 360 acres of land, and I wanted one of them, maybe both, to stay on the farm with me. Their mother vowed she’d educate them if she had to take in washing, and she succeeded. I probably wouldn’t have pushed like she did. But she believed in education. She didn’t get to go to college, and that was the bane of her existence. She wanted her children to get a college education. And they all did—too much education, if you ask me.

Back to the forties. I got carried away there. The summer of 1948, after Bela finished her freshman year at Winthrop, Gladys went to Newberry College to summer school again, and Bela worked at the Nantex in Saluda, a sewing plant that made men’s shorts. She rode with Henry Temples, who lived with his folks in the house I was born in up on the hill. He had quit school and gone to work early. That was the first money Bela had ever earned—$1.00 an hour for forty hours a week. She took her first pay check—it was $40.00—and went down to James Pou’s jewelry store right there on Main Street just two doors down from the Nantex and bought her mama a whole set of plated silverware. I think it cost the full $40.00. We’d never had anything but those six knives and forks we bought after we got married, the six iced teaspoons John F. Taylor gave us, and the six Davenport teaspoons I had inherited from Grandma Hess. I think Bela was just like Madaline—she wanted us to have better things than we had. Madaline had bought us a sofa and chair, and Bela bought the


silver. She wrote her mama a note that Gladys kept in that box. It’s still in it, I reckon. None of our children were ever selfish.

I planted a pretty big crop that year, and Doug worked with me. He was fourteen and full grown. He was playing baseball too. Madaline was still living in Baltimore, and Curtis was still in Salisbury. Both of them came home every summer and brought their families. I just didn’t know how much I was going to love those three grandchildren we had by that time.

They all came home for Christmas too, and our little house was full of children’s voices and good smells. Gladys always made a big fruitcake every year way ahead of time so it would be good and moist when it came time to eat it. She wouldn’t let us touch it ‘til Christmas came. We always had Mrs. Wightman and Cantey and Mary Alice at our house for Christmas, and we went there once during the holidays. We’d always go to my brother Gus’ house (he’d married Essie Stone—Gladys’ cousin—and they had three grown children), and they’d come to ours.

That year Gladys was still teaching at Pine Grove, but she knew that it wouldn’t be open long. You see, the county had started closing all the country schools and busing the students to Saluda for elementary and high school. It was supposed to improve the education in South Carolina—consolidation; that was what they called it. By the early fifties all the thirty-two school houses scattered all over the county were standing empty. Some of them eventually burned; some of them have rotted down, and a few have been made into community centers. James Pou bought old Sardis School and made a barn out of it. Then some people in the Emory section bought the old Emory School that was built in 1889 and made it a community center, and it’s still used today. In fact, that’s the last place Gladys ever went. The day before we took her to the hospital in 1979 we had the Wightman reunion at Emory Community Center, and I took Gladys there. She was so lost she didn’t even know her own kin people. Madaline had come home to help me take her to the doctor in Aiken the next day. Of course, Bela and her family were there like they always were. It nearly


broke my heart to see Gladys like that. Sometimes she didn’t know me either. That night, her last night at home, she wouldn’t get in the bed with me. She said she couldn’t sleep with a stranger. And we’d been married over sixty-three years.

That summer of 1949 Gladys was going to summer school at Newberry College just like she’d been doing. She was working on her degree, but she didn’t have it yet, so she didn’t know whether she’d could get a job when all the country schools were closed. She still wasn’t sure of herself, but once again that summer she made all A’s—as usual. She helped with the garden and canned tomatoes and peaches and beans and blackberries. Yes, we still had a pasture full of blackberries growing wild. That was before we got beef cows and they destroyed all the blackberry vines.

Doug and I were working the crop, and he was playing baseball every chance he got. Like I told you, he was a real athlete. He was about as good a basketball player as anybody I ever saw. Bela spent the summer at home working at the Nantex again—still making a dollar an hour. She’d been awarded a Winthrop scholarship for making the highest grades in her class her freshman year. She didn’t know it until we were reading the paper on the Sunday after she got home. I noticed the piece about awards at Winthrop and glanced at it, and, lo and behold, the name Ruby Euela Padgette just sort of jumped out at me. It said she had won the “Gil-Wylie Scholarship for Academic Excellence.” I’ll never forget those words. That was the way she learned she could get a scholarship for highest grades, so she tried hard and won it for her junior year and her senior year. That money paid for half of the $500 it cost every year. She picked a little cotton before she left for college, and then we got some hands to help gather the big crop we’d made. Doug worked every afternoon after school.

In the fall of 1948 Gladys and I agreed that it was past time for us to have a bathroom. When Bela’s friends had come home with her from Winthrop her freshman year, they’d had to use the outdoor toilet, and we knew they weren’t used to that. We figured


out a plan so that we would make the small little corner bedroom into a bathroom and then enclose the part of the porch in front of the big bedroom. Then we’d have three decent-sized bedrooms and a bath. We told Bela what we were doing, but she didn’t see it until it was all finished. Of course, the only hot water heater we had was a liner on the kitchen stove that heated water when the stove had a fire in it. We were still cooking on a wood stove, but we did have a refrigerator by that time. We’d have ice cream every Sunday too. Gladys would freeze it in the ice trays. Then when we’d come home from church, it’d be like a rock. She’d break it in pieces and let it melt a little and then take the beater and beat it until it was fluffy. We thought it was awful good.

Homer Matthews and his brothers, Noah and Quincy, did the work for us. Gladys had taught Homer and Quincy when she was at Fairview the first time, and they thought the world of her. They were good carpenters, and they did a fine job on the remodeling. They didn’t charge much either. Course, it was a lot for us. As I told you, Bela made the highest average in her class each year and got a scholarship each year that paid about half of her college cost. She worked every year too, and that helped some. So her education wasn’t costing us as much as we’d expected. I was making pretty good crops, and I had chickens and a few beef cows, and I was still training dogs for sale, so things were looking up. That’s how we were able to do a little work on our house.

Madaline and Boney were expecting their last child in December. Barry David Boney was born on December 19, 1948—our fourth grandchild. Boney sent us a telegram that Barry had come and that the baby and Madaline were all right. We were mighty glad that our precious daughter was fine and that Barry was normal and healthy like the other grandchildren. We were sure that their parents would raise them right. Anyway, Gladys went to Baltimore on the Silver Meteor to stay with Madaline for a week to help with the baby. It was her Christmas holiday so she was free to go. It sure made a dull Christmas for us. Madaline and


her family always came for Christmas, and here we were—just Bela and Doug and me.

We didn’t go to Baltimore much, but we did have one fine trip up there. When Bettis and Thelma’s son Bettis Jr. came home from the war, he went to Duke to play football. When Duke was playing Navy in Baltimore, Madaline and Boney asked us to come up for the game. Bettis and Thelma were all for it, and so the four of us drove to Madaline’s and spent the weekend, and Boney and Madaline and the four of us went to the game. It was an exciting time—about the only college football game we ever went to. Of course, I used to go to the Carolina-Clemson game when it was played on Big Thursday. My good friend Jeff Griffith, who was a lawyer and solicitor, would give me a ticket. Gladys was always in school and using the car, but I could find a way there and back. Those were exciting games too when they were on Big Thursday. South Carolina pretty much shut down then. Even the schools had a holiday. It’s still a big game, but it’s on Saturday now, and that makes it pretty much like any other game that’s a big rivalry. I can’t understand people who hate the other team. I always pull for Clemson against Carolina since most of the Saluda men I’ve known went to Clemson, and, of course, both of my sons went there and my son-in-law, but when Carolina is playing anybody but Clemson, I pull for Carolina to win. After all, they are from South Carolina too.

Curtis and Edith and Bobby had moved from Salisbury to Winston Salem where Curtis took a job with Royal Globe Insurance Company. He didn’t stay there but a little while when they promoted him to district manager and sent him to Roanoke, Virginia. We never did go to see them in Roanoke, but Bela did. The summer of 1950 after her junior year at Winthrop, she got a job at the agriculture building in Saluda measuring cotton acreage on a map. Those were the days of cotton allotments and price subsidies, and a farmer’s cotton fields were plotted on a map, and then the fields were measured on the map with a little instrument—the planometer. If the farmer had planted over his


allotment, then he had to plow it up. Bela was one of about five temporary workers who ran a planometer. She enjoyed that work and the people she worked with. That was the summer she got to be such good friends with Mary Helen Duffie, and they’re still good friends all these years later.

I remember one night she and Mary Helen cooked supper down here for H.Z. Duffie, the boy she was going with (Zed Duffie, his daddy, had been my friend all my life and had punched our well in the early forties), and Jimmie Herlong, who was coming to see Bela regular then. After supper they set up a card table out on the porch, and the boys proceeded to teach the girls how to play bridge. Every time I’d look out the door, either H.Z. or Jimmie would be sitting on the arm of his girl’s chair. Before long, I went out there and asked them what kind of game they were playing that they got to sit so close to the girls. They laughed and told me it was bridge and they were just helping the girls play their hands. I think they double-dated a lot that summer. Mary Helen was a permanent worker, but Bela’s job gave out the first of August. By that time, they’d measured all the cotton fields on the maps. That’s when she decided to go to see Edith and Curtis in Roanoke. I think she asked them if she could come. She rode a bus there and back that summer of 1950. We were happy that she got to go. I can’t remember how it all came about, but looking back, I wonder that they invited her since Edith was expecting Deedee in January. What we didn’t know was going to happen was that one of the boys Bela was dating—Lee Wallace, a nice fellow from Johnson City, Tennessee—came over those mountains to Roanoke to see Bela. She had met him at the Citadel when she went home with her roommate from Charleston. He seemed to be serious about Bela, but she broke up with him that fall of 1950 after she’d been to a football game and dance in Knoxville where he was going to the University of Tennessee. He came to Saluda at Thanksgiving that year, and that was the end of it. From then on, it was Jimmie Herlong.


Doug did his growing early. He was over six feet tall when he was in the eighth grade. And he was pretty quick too. He played baseball and basketball and was good at both. We went to a lot of basketball games then. The doctor had told him he shouldn’t play football because of his heart, but he wanted to play so bad that he went on anyway and played his senior year. Bettis Herlong, Jr., Thelma and Bettis’ son (the one we’d gone to see play football in Baltimore) had graduated from Duke and come back to Saluda to teach and coach. He was rough, but he was a good coach. He said what he pleased, and he meant what he said—like my pa. He turned out a winning team that year. Bela was a senior at Winthrop the year Doug was a senior at Saluda High. The Saluda football team played Rock Hill that fall, and we went up there to see them play. We got Bela from the college, and she went with us to the game. Buck George, who was a Catawba Indian from there in York County, was the star of the Rock Hill team. They won, but the Saluda boys made a good showing. Buck George went on and played for Clemson.

Doug made good grades without much studying. He could just figure things out in his head. One time his chemistry teacher, Miss Emmie Walton, had put something on one of his tests—I can’t remember just what—that Doug thought wasn’t right. He talked to her, I think, and she wouldn’t listen; so Gladys and I went to see her about it. We pretty quick found out we’d made a mistake. We were afraid that she’d hold it against Doug that we had talked to her. But she didn’t. He did fine in chemistry in high school and later in college.

Doug had to write his autobiography for his English teacher that year as a senior, and he said that when he was a junior he was on the side lines at a football game when it started raining. (He wasn’t playing football yet.) One of the cheerleaders was standing next to him, and he shared his raincoat with her. He said then that he hoped he’d share his life with her. That pretty little girl was Barbara Rogers, and he did marry her in 1955 when he graduated from Clemson. They’ve been married for many years, and their


two fine sons are grown now. He still loves her as much as he did at the beginning. I’ve never heard him say one unkind word about her. And she’s still as pretty as she ever was.

My old friend Jimmy Byrnes, the man who gave Curtis the appointment to the Naval Academy, came back to South Carolina and ran for governor the fall of 1950. He won on a platform of improving the schools of South Carolina—black and white. I reckon he could see the writing on the wall, and he was trying to do something about it before the courts did. Anyway when he was inaugurated as governor in 1951, one hundred thousand people gathered in Columbia for the inaugural parade. Lots of the colleges had groups marching in the parade. Winthrop, Clemson, the Citadel, and others sent groups. Bela was one of the Winthrop group of over one-hundred girls dressed in navy blue marching in the parade to honor South Carolina’s most famous son, who’d come back to his native state and been elected governor after he’d been everything else—even the assistant to the President of the United States.

I went to Columbia that day to try to see Bela and to see all the goings-on. I tried to get a place on the front row, but there were at least twelve lines of people up ahead of me. I saw a tall fellow standing right on the edge of the sidewalk. I hollered to him and told him I’d give him a dollar for his standing space. He asked me why I wanted it, and I told him that I had a daughter who was going to be marching with the Winthrop girls in the parade.

He said, “I don’t believe it, but I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You come on up here, and if you know your daughter and she speaks to you, then you don’t owe me a penny, but if you don’t see her, then you’ll have to pay me a dollar.”

I agreed to that. I’d been talking to a woman back where I was, and she had a son in the Citadel group, so as I moved up, I grabbed her by the hand and pulled her with me. When we got up to the tall fellow, I said, “Padgett’s my name, and I’m from Saluda.”


He said, “I’m Ben Carter from Beaufort, and I was in service and at Clemson with Jimmie Herlong from Saluda. Do you know him?”

I laughed and said, “I know him too well. He’s in love with that girl that’s going to be coming along in a few minutes.” We talked for a few minutes, and then we saw the parade coming. When the Winthrop group turned the corner, I saw Bela, and as she got right by us, I hollered to her, and she turned and smiled and waved and yelled, “Hey, Daddy.”

Ben Carter said, “Well, I’ll be damned. You were telling the truth. I hope Jimmie marries that girl.” Poor Ben was a lawyer in Beaufort, and my grandson Harold Boney, Jr., who is a lawyer down there, says he was a fine man, but he got to drinking so bad that he finally killed himself.

Jimmy Byrnes had no business running for governor after he’d had everything else. I saw Tom Pope, the lawyer from Newberry, at a parade in Saluda one Saturday. He came over and spoke to me, and I said to him, “Mr. Pope, I want to tell you something. As good a friend as Jimmy Byrnes was to me, and he gave my son an appointment to Annapolis, I got mad with him one time. And that was when he knocked you out of being governor. That was the year for you to be elected, but you didn’t even run because you knew it was no use for you to run against Jimmy Byrnes.”

He said to me, “Mr. Padgett, I didn’t know anyone ever cared.” He made a speech that Saturday morning, and I told him too that he had no business speaking in public without his coat on. It just doesn’t look right. That inaugural parade for Jimmy Byrnes was on January 16, 1951, in Columbia. Our fifth grandchild and second grand-daughter was born on January 19, 1951, in Roanoke. They named her Edith Williamson Padgette and called her Deedee. We didn’t get to go see her when she was born, and so we didn’t see her until they came home to visit and to go to Bela’s Winthrop graduation the first week in June, 1951.


Another thing that was happening that spring of 1951 was that more of the country schools were closing. All the students would be going to Saluda’s schools. This time Pine Grove, where Gladys had been teaching since she left Fairview in the spring of 1944, would be closed after the 1950-51 school year was over. She was afraid she wouldn’t get another teaching job because she still hadn’t finished her degree at that time. She wouldn’t get that degree until 1956. She applied to what was called the Saluda-Batesburg Line School, a three-teacher elementary school in the town of Batesburg but on the Lexington and Saluda County line. J.C. Wise was the chairman of the trustees for the school, and he went to bat for Gladys and got her elected principal and head teacher. I don’t think anyone was ever sorry she came. She was a crackerjack good teacher, and she got along just fine teaching and managing that school. She loved her students just like she always had. One she particularly liked was little Tommie Crouch, whose folks Gladys had known a long time. In fact, most of the children there were from families we’d known all our lives. Some of them were the ones whose parents had gone to Willow Branch, where Gladys had started teaching in 1915. Others had been connected to Fairview or Sardis in the past. One thing she liked was that after she got to the Batesburg highway, she didn’t have any more dirt roads. (The road in front of our house wasn’t paved until later.) Anyway she knew she was going to have to learn a new school, new teachers, and new students, and she wanted to do the best she could—and her best was better than anybody else’s best—at least in my opinion. She never had as much confidence as she should have had because she didn’t have that degree. But she was sure working on it hard!

When June came, we all knew that Bela was going to receive awards, so we all went up for the Saturday awards presentation, where Bela got awards for highest average and most extra-curricular activities. Curtis and Edith had come on Friday and brought Bobby, who was five, and Deedee, who wasn’t quite six months. They wanted to go to Bela’s graduation, so they were


taking their vacation at that time and coming to Saluda first so we could all go to Winthrop together. Gladys’ niece Dora Matthews Edwards (she was Gladys’ half-sister Anna’s daughter) and her husband Bill had always been close to us, and they kept Bobby and Deedee for Curtis and Edith to go to Winthrop that weekend. Bobby was a smart little fellow and good looking too—he’d be the one to carry on the Padgette name. Deedee was a pretty baby and good. She didn’t cry much at all. Dora said she and Bill had a good time keeping them. They always loved children and had three of their own—Joe, Caroline, and Billy. Joe was a year behind Doug in school, but they were about the same age. The other two were younger.

By that time Doug had already graduated in the brand-new Saluda High School gymnasium—the one they still have now—on the last of May, 1951. He was smart and was always in the Beta Club. Bela earned an A.B. degree in English from Winthrop and a South Carolina teacher’s certificate. Doug was going to Clemson, and Bela had accepted a job teaching English at Hand Junior High in Columbia for the next year. She was also planning to work as a hostess at Mountain View Inn in Chimney Rock, North Carolina, that summer.

Gladys and I didn’t much want her to go up there to work. We were afraid that someone would take advantage of her living and working alone in a hotel. We decided that we’d go look the place over. One Sunday that spring Gladys, Doug, and I drove up to Mountain View Inn and talked with the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy. We told them who we were and why we were worried. They assured us that Bela would be safe and told us what her responsibilities would be. We thought they seemed to be good people, so we wrote Bela that she had our permission to accept the job.

What she hadn’t planned on was that she would get a diamond ring from Jimmie Herlong, Frank and Roseva’s son who had been coming around since she was a sophomore. She got the ring the


Saturday night before she graduated on Sunday. Gladys and I both were surprised.

Course, I’d known for a long time he was in love with her. In fact, she won’t let me forget what I said the first time he ever asked her for a date. She’d already finished her freshman year at Winthrop and spent the summer sewing at the Nantex in Saluda making a dollar an hour—her first paying job. She had quit to go back to college, and she was helping me pick cotton a few days before she left. We were picking in the field between the house and the spring when she told me that Jimmie Herlong had asked her to go to the football game in Greenwood on Friday night. Saluda was playing Greenwood. She wasn’t asking me whether she could go. She didn’t have to do that anymore, but I told her that she ought not to date Jimmie Herlong. She said, “Why not, Daddy?”

And then I told her what I knew was true from watching him look at her. I said, “That boy is in love with you.”

She laughed and said, “Oh, Daddy, I don’t even know him, and he’s a lot older than I am. I just want to go to the ball game.”

“Mark my words,” I said. “He wants to marry you.” “That’s the silliest thing I ever heard,” she told me. “You’ll see,” I answered and that ended the conversation, and

she did go to the ballgame with him, and she’s spent her whole life with him. So I was right, and she remembers it ‘til this day.

Anyway, they assured us they weren’t going to get married for at least a year. He’d already been a pilot in World War II and come back and graduated from Clemson. He was eight years older than Bela, and we didn’t like that. We could tell he loved her a lot, and we believed that he’d be good to her. So we just told them we were happy. We wanted her to get out and work a little while before she got married. Bela came home for a few days, and then Jimmie took her to Chimney Rock on the next Sunday.

Little did we know at that point when it was just Doug at home, and he was helping me work the crop and Gladys was


going to Newberry every day to summer school that the summer of fifty-one was going to be one to remember.

Chapter 23

1951

A Summer To Remember

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Madaline had written us that Boney was ill, but we had no idea that he was as sick as he was. We knew that he hadn’t been able to work for a while, but then we got a letter from her telling us that the doctors gave them little hope for his recovery. He had Bright’s disease, which affected the kidneys and was pretty much a death sentence at that time. She wanted to bring him and their three children home where she thought he might get better. Of course, we were happy to have them come. We didn’t have much room in our little house, but what we had we’d share if they wanted to be with us. Bela was working at Mountain View Inn in Chimney Rock, North Carolina; so her room at home was empty, and that gave us a little more space.

Madaline and Boney came with their three children in June as soon as school was out in Baltimore. Madaline was thirty-four, and Boney was thirty-eight—and they were facing what Gladys and I had never had to face. Madaline drove all the way, and Bettina, who was eleven years old, took care of Barry, who was just two and a half. Harold would be seven in September. When Boney got out of the car, he looked like an old man. He was so weak he could barely get up the steps. I knew he was a sick man. I


didn’t think he’d ever leave again. They were all glad to be with us—the children loved to play with the dogs and cats and run around outside.

Boney was hard to get along with when he felt good, and he was hell-to-pay when he felt bad. Madaline took him to see Dr. Wise on Monday morning after they got home, and when he examined him, he told him he was a sick man. Boney said he already knew that, and he asked Dr. Wise if he could do anything for him. He answered that he was sure going to try, and he wrote out several prescriptions that he thought might help him get better. He told us later that he didn’t have much hope that first visit. We bought a long chair for Boney—one that could stay out on the front porch, which was the coolest place in the house and was screened so the flies couldn’t get in. Boney lay on that chair day after day and for a while it looked like he was going downhill. Then after nearly a month, we could tell a difference in the way he acted. He began to be interested in reading a little, and his appetite got better. Madaline was a good cook, and we had plenty of fresh vegetables and the best tomatoes and apples. During the peach season I went to Ridge Spring to the peach orchards and picked fresh peaches right off the trees. Gladys peeled them and put sugar on them and we enjoyed them nearly every day.

I don’t know how Gladys stood that summer. I told you that she was working on her degree in earnest then. She was going to Newberry College every day for six weeks during that summer just like she’d been doing since she decided she was going to get a degree, come hell or high water. She drove the car to Saluda and met several other teachers and some regular students, and they drove from Saluda to Newberry every day. She was taking a Bible course from Dr. Heisey, and she talked about it a lot. She was always interested in learning, and she wanted to make A’s on every course. She studied hard in that crowded little house. After Bela came home, she got an old Underwood typewriter from Jimmie (one that his great-aunt Mae Padget had left him in her will) and typed Gladys’ papers for her. Gladys was also concerned

A Summer To Remember 231

about the new job she was beginning in the fall, but she didn’t have time to worry too much about it with all that was going on at home.

I tried to be strong that summer, but I had the worst case of sciatica I ever had. My back hurt so bad I thought I was going to die, and sometime I wished I would. I went to Dr. Wise too, and he gave me some medicine to take, but it didn’t touch that pain. I took a handful of aspirin every day so I could work my crop. I had got my oats and wheat cut before I started hurting, but I was in the midst of plowing my cotton and corn when I was hurting the worst. Doug was grown, and he could do a man’s work, and he sure did one that summer. He was playing American Legion baseball (he was a good baseball player), and many a time he’d walk to town to get with his team to go somewhere to play. He was dating that pretty girl he loved every Friday and Saturday night, and he liked to see her during the week if he could. I went to a chiropractor, and he didn’t help. The only doctor that did me any good was an osteopath. I’d heard about this man down in North Augusta, and I decided I’d try him. He told me that he was a medical doctor just like all the others but that he had special training in what he called “adjustments.” He said my sciatic nerve was pinched somehow, and if he could adjust the bones so that the nerve was free, it would stop hurting. I went to him several times, and I eventually got well. I don’t know whether he did the trick or it just got well by itself

After Madaline came, she cooked dinner for her family and Doug and me every day while Gladys was at school, and she did a lot of the housework too. We had a refrigerator, but we didn’t have an electric stove, so Madaline had to come back home and cook on the stove we’d had since she was a girl. We did have a sink in the kitchen with running water, and we had a hot water heater that heated the water from the fire in the wood stove. Of course, we had just the one bathroom, and we felt privileged to have that. The children were all good. Bettina was growing up, and you could tell she was sad that summer. Maybe she knew


how sick her father was. We didn’t talk about it, but she knew he wasn’t supposed to be lying around like he was doing every day.

We were all getting used to living together—all eight of us—in that little house with Boney sick like he was and me hurting like I was and Gladys studying like she was and Madaline worrying like she was. Then one afternoon about the first of July, Jimmie Herlong stopped by the house and told us that he’d been to see Bela that weekend and she’d agreed to get married that summer. They’d set the date for August 18. He was to go back to Chimney Rock to get her after the fourth of July. The Kennedys had agreed to release her after the holiday was over. What a shock that was! We knew she and Jimmie were planning to be married, but they’d said they were waiting a year and she had a job in Columbia. It turned out all that was changed. She hadn’t thought about what was going on at home. She was so happy she just thought we’d be happy too. And we were. We just didn’t know how she could get married in six weeks with Boney sick and Gladys in summer school.

When Jimmie brought her home a few days later, she was so excited none of us said a word about how the whole thing was impossible. She already had everything planned. She’d even decided on a pattern for the bridesmaids to use and told them what kind of material and what color they were to wear. A big problem she didn’t know we had was that we didn’t have any money—not even money to buy invitations and mail them—much less money for a reception and flowers and all the other things we didn’t even know anything about. Luckily my nephew Wallace came along and offered to lend her a couple hundred dollars. She borrowed it and promised to pay it back as soon as she started teaching in September.

What a time that was! Madaline started sewing for Bela. Madaline was like my mama; she could make anything and it would look better than what you could buy readymade. One time she ripped apart one of Curtis’ naval academy uniforms and used that blue serge to make a coat, leggings, and hat for Bettina when


she was about three years old—when they were living in Atlanta. She even used the gold buttons that were on the uniform. She made Bela’s wedding clothes except for the wedding dress. Bela had been paid $75 for her month’s work in North Carolina, and she found a dress in Columbia on sale for $35. She borrowed Jimmie’s sister’s veil, so she didn’t have that expense. The only bad thing about Madaline sewing all the time was that Bela had to cook dinner for us every day until the wedding, and she’d never cooked a meal in her life. We didn’t exactly look forward to those meals. I couldn’t help her because I was working in the crop, and Doug was too, and Madaline was sewing and managing her children. Bettina was big enough to help, but Harold was just seven and Barry was just two and a half, so he had to be watched all the time. Of course, Gladys cooked at night, and we had good food then. I felt sorry for Jimmie having to eat Bela’s food the rest of his life, but she learned on us, I think, and she’s turned out to be a pretty decent cook.

Doug’s summer was almost as bad as the summer of 1947, but I was able to work. I just hurt all the time. From the time Bela came home until August 18 when the wedding would take place at Emory Church was just six weeks. Bela drew up our guest list and with Jimmie’s list she sent out about 200 invitations, she said. It was hard to know who to leave out since we’d known everybody around us all our lives. When Madaline got married, she just walked down the aisle after a Sunday service and the people who had come to church were there for the wedding. Jimmie’s family had lived here all their lives too, so what people we didn’t know well, they did, so we had a long list. Bela took some of the money Wallace had let her borrow and bought and mailed the invitations three weeks before the wedding. They planned to have the reception in our yard since Emory didn’t have any fellowship hall back then. Receptions didn’t cost much back then because all anybody had was punch and block ice cream and wedding cake. Even Cousin Will’s daughters had that, and he was as rich as


Croesus. We just prayed it wouldn’t rain since our house was so little it wouldn’t hold our whole family, much less that big crowd.

From July 5 everything was in an uproar. Boney was still on the front porch; Gladys was either at school or studying; Madaline was sewing; Doug and I were working the crop; and Doug and Bela wall-papered the living room and painted the den in preparation for the wedding. Bela picked out the paint for the den, and she had this idea that a dark red would make it look good. The room was too little anyway, and that color made it look smaller. Doug had to repaint it—this time a beige color that looked pretty good. Oh yes, the womenfolk went to a lot of parties and showers, and they even had one here at the house.

Madaline had to make her own dress and Bettina’s dress and Gladys’ dress. Yes, it was pretty much bedlam during those weeks, but everything got done, and the miracle of it all was that Boney was slowly getting better. He wasn’t going to die! You could look at him and tell he was feeling better and growing stronger. He and Barry went to Ruby and Willie Riser’s home and spent the entire weekend of the wedding. They’ve always been our good friends and have helped us out many a time. Little Harold wasn’t in the wedding, but he’s in one of the wedding pictures. He was seven and was standing in front of his mother in the receiving line on the front porch.

It did rain cats and dogs the afternoon before the wedding, but it cleared off before dark, and that August night was cool and pleasant. I had to give Bela away, so she and I were at home after everybody else had left for the church. She was standing in front of my mama’s dresser with the big mirror when I went to tell her it was time to go. She looked mighty pretty to me, and it was all I could do not to cry—not because I didn’t like Jimmie Herlong—but because I knew that they were starting out on a journey that neither one of them had any idea about—just like all young folks. I thought about Gladys and me and the rough road we’d had, but I knew that the joys had far outweighed the sorrows. I wanted to tell Bela something, but there weren’t any words to say what was


in my heart. So I just told her she was pretty and kissed her cheek, and we went on to the church.

The church was about full, and this time it was a fancy wedding, not like Madaline’s had been back in 1938. I did my part and then took my seat by Gladys. Mrs. Wightman and Mary Alice and Cantey were right behind us. After it was over, we rushed home and formed a receiving line on our porch. Everybody came in and we spoke to them. There were friends and aunts and uncles and cousins galore. Gladys was the first one in line and then me. I’m sorry to say that Kirby Able, who took the few pictures Bela has, got just half of Gladys in the picture of that receiving line. Lord knows, she deserved to have the place of honor. She’d never fussed a bit over having all the excitement going on while she was trying to go to school. She was never a complainer. She just put her shoulder to the wheel and did what needed to be done.

After Bela and Jimmie left for their honeymoon, the house seemed empty again—even with Madaline’s five and Doug there with Gladys and me. Gladys was through with summer school, and that next week Dr. Wise told Boney that he was well enough to go back to work. They immediately made plans to return to Baltimore in time for the children to get back in school and Boney to go back to the FBI, where he was an agent.

Before they went though, we all got Bela and Jimmie’s apartment ready for them. We packed up the wedding gifts and moved them and the furniture Roseva and Frank and Gladys and I gave them for their place. We cleaned that little apartment and fixed everything as nice as we could. I had bought them two second-hand upholstered chairs, and that and a couple of tables and lamps were what they had in their living room. Roseva and Frank had given them a bed and a kitchen table. Jimmie had bought a stove and refrigerator and four folding chairs. Of course, it was a whole lot more than Gladys and I had had. And they were lucky to have pretty good jobs. Jimmie was managing a peach farm at Trenton, and Bela had a job teaching English at Batesburg-Leesville High School. She’d resigned the one at Hand in


Columbia and been lucky enough to find one close enough to commute to from Saluda.

Chapter 24

1951–1952

Gladys’ Inheritance

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Pretty soon Madaline and her family left. Madaline had to drive home. Boney wasn’t up to that yet, but he was no longer a sick man. Something had healed him. He always gave Dr. Wise the credit. Something had healed me too. When Bela and Jimmie returned after two weeks in Florida, they came here for a little while and then went home to their apartment in Saluda. In a few days we took Doug to Clemson for his first year there. He was our baby—even if he was six feet two inches tall—and he was the fourth one to go to college. Gladys had got her way. They were all smart; they never had any trouble learning. Doug was no different from the rest. He just didn’t know what he wanted to study then. We weren’t worried about it; we knew he’d find out. We always trusted our children, and they never let us down.

When Gladys and I got back home and went into the house, we were by ourselves for the first time since Madaline was born on March 23, 1917. Yes, 1917 to 1951—thirty-four years of living in the little house on the land that was finally ours and paid for. Things were getting better, and we believed that our life would be quiet from then on with all the children grown and gone. Of course, Doug would be back in the summers, but I’d learned that


they’re really gone when they go to college. They just come back to visit.

Gladys had left Pine Grove School where she’d been teaching a long time. She was to be principal of the three-teacher school that was in Saluda County but on the line with Lexington County in the town of Batesburg. She was a little bit afraid. She’d been principal at Sardis when it was a three-teacher school, but it was a country school near our house, and she felt at home there, so she hadn’t had any problems. And she was much younger too. She felt old in 1951 even though she was just 53. I reckon it was because our last child had just gone to college and the other three were married and we had five grandchildren already—Madaline’s Bettina, Harold, and Barry and Curtis’ Bobby and Deedee. I never have felt old, and I tell you Gladys didn’t act old. She could do as much work as she ever had, and she sure could think as clear as she ever had. She still loved to learn and she still loved to teach. I think she never had any qualms after the first day. She loved the students and the teachers there. Jimmie brought Bela down here every morning since she was teaching eighth grade at Batesburg High School, which was about two miles farther than Gladys’ school. She’d let Gladys out in the morning and pick her up in the afternoon.

When school started, Gladys’ had no idea what was facing her with her mama that fall. Mrs. Wightman was 89 years old on March 26, 1951, and she had a good summer. She was able to go to Bela’s showers and parties and to her wedding, but the first part of September she had some kind of spell. Dr. Wise came and said she had cerebral thrombosis, but he didn’t send her to the hospital like they’d do today. He just told us it was the end but he didn’t know how long she’d linger.

It turned out that she took pneumonia and died on December 30. We buried her at Emory right by Mr. Wightman. His grave has a cross on it because he was a Confederate veteran. Dr. Wise told us just to take care of her and see that she was comfortable. The trouble was that Mary Alice didn’t know how to take care of her.

Gladys’ Inheritance 239

Poor Mary Alice was overwhelmed with losing her mama, and she tried. Lord knows, she tried. But Gladys was the one that had the responsibility. As soon as she got home from school every day, we’d load up the clean clothes she’d washed the night before and hung on the line before she went to school, and then we’d go to Mrs. Wightman’s and stay until late. By then we had an electric washing machine but no dryer. Gladys would change the bed and Mrs. Wightman’s clothes, treat her bed sores, and give her what medicine was necessary. One time while Gladys was at school, Mary Alice put newspapers under her mama, and when Gladys saw them that afternoon, she had a fit because she knew her mama could get blood poison from those newspapers. Mrs. Wightman was so thin that the sores were everywhere, and they were getting worse. I bet she didn’t weigh 65 pounds. You could see her hip bones sticking out through the bed sores. Gladys bought pads to put under her and stayed with her every afternoon and night and all day Saturday and Sunday from the time she got sick until she died. Cantey and Mary Alice were always jealous of Gladys because Gladys could do anything, and they couldn’t. Or, more like it, they wouldn’t.

On September 18 right after Mrs. Wightman got sick, Jimmie got a letter saying that he’d been recalled into the Air Force. He was in the Reserves, and the Korean War had been going on a year, and it looked like we were losing it, so the government was calling up all the reservists. When Bela got home from school, he told her. (He’d already told his parents.) Then they came straight down here and told us.

She and Jimmie had just been married a month when he was recalled to active duty. He had to leave on November 7. I don’t remember whether they asked us or just told us that Bela would be moving back home. Of course, we wouldn’t have considered anything else. Jimmie and his brother Ben moved the furniture out of the apartment they’d been living in. They stored the stove and refrigerator in the back hall at Roseva and Frank’s house and put


some of the furniture there and some at our house. They didn’t have much, and what they did have we’d given to them.

All that was going on and Gladys’ mama was dying. Of course, Gladys had to teach everyday and work on papers every night. But, as usual, she never complained. It made her sad to see her mama so sick and to see Bela sad and lonely. But we all got along and were happy together. Bela was doing her first teaching, and she talked about her students a lot. She’d show her mama and me what they wrote. She was learning to like her work, but not like she did later on. She was just like her mama and her sister; they all loved to study and learn, and then they all liked to teach somebody else what they knew. I understood a little bit how they felt since I’d been teaching the Adult Sunday School Class at Emory for so many years. You know they surprised me later by naming that class the D.D. Padgett Sunday School Class. I’ll admit I was surprised—and pleased!

Something else happened after Bela came home to live that was going to have a big effect on Gladys’ teaching, but, of course, we didn’t realize it at the time. She was just getting used to working at the Line School when the people whose children went there decided to have a vote on whether to go in with Lexington District Three instead of staying with Saluda County. Their children already went to Batesburg High School when they entered ninth grade, and their parents paid a fee for them to go there. If they voted to join Lexington County, then they’d pay their school tax to Saluda County, which would then send it on to Lexington County, and there wouldn’t be any more fees. Lexington County would take over the Line School, which would then be a part of District Three.

The people called a public meeting to be held one night in November at the Line School. Charles Coleman, a young Saluda lawyer who’d been elected Saluda County’s Superintendent of Education, came to try to talk the people out of leaving Saluda County’s educational system. Gladys had to go to the meeting, and Bela and I went with her. We could tell from the first that the


people had already made up their minds. Charles did his best to convince them to stay, but in the end when the vote was cast, they overwhelmingly voted to join Lexington County’s school system. It didn’t make any difference for several years except that Gladys got a little more pay since the teachers were paid according to Lexington District Three’s schedule and not Saluda County’s. Later, though, the Line School became the home for all the first, second, and third graders in the district, and those who had been teaching fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh had to move over to the old building in Batesburg. Gladys was one of those who had to move. They gave her fifth grade, which she taught until she was forced to retire at sixty-five according to the district’s rules. That was in 1963. So she taught at the Line School and at Batesburg Elementary from 1951 until 1963. She was just as successful there as she had ever been in any of the country schools where she’d taught. In fact, she was such a good teacher that Phillip Pou’s son Joe, who was the principal at Ridge Spring Elementary School, made a special trip to our house and asked Gladys if she’d teach for him at Ridge Spring the next year. She jumped at the chance and taught there two years. The pupils there loved her just like all the others had. So she really taught until she was sixty-seven, and then she substituted a lot after that. In 1967 she substituted for Bela at Saluda when Bela was South Carolina Teacher of the year

Madaline didn’t come home that Christmas. Curtis and his family didn’t come either. The only one at home was Doug, and he spent as much time with Barbara as possible. Bela was with Jimmie going back and forth to Tyndall Field in Florida, where he was stationed. He could go where he wanted to go, but he had to sign in every three days, so they made several trips to Florida. When they were home, they divided their time between us and Frank and Roseva’s.

Mrs. Wightman was buried on December 31, 1951. Curtis came from Roanoke where he was living then, and Madaline came from Baltimore, and, of course, Doug was home from Clemson. Bela and Jimmie had gone to the Gator Bowl game in Jacksonville.


Clemson was playing, and they were down there with Ben and his wife. Jimmie was going to leave after the game and go back across Florida to Panama City, where Tyndall Field is located. Bela was going to come back home with Ben and Caroline and teach school the next day. Gladys never said a word about Bela not coming back to her grandmother’s funeral, but I knew she missed her. Bela told us later that she had been seeing her grandmother every day, and she knew she’d be home the next day to be with her mother, so she decided not to come. She’d have had to come on the train to Columbia to get home in time. I think Gladys would have liked to have her four children walk with her beside her mama’s casket. The funeral was at the Presbyterian Church in Saluda, but she was buried at Emory. B.W. Crouch talked Cantey into leaving the Methodist Church during the “Unification” mess in 1939 when the Southern Methodist Church went back together with the Northern Methodist church. They’d separated in 1842, and Gladys’ grandfather’s brother, William Wightman, was the clerk for the session where the Southern Methodist seceded. They said they couldn’t live in the South and belong to the Northern Methodist, which was against slavery. It took them nearly a hundred years to get back together. Mr. B.W. pulled out of St. Paul and founded the Saluda Presbyterian Church, and because Cantey was going with him, Mrs. Wightman and Mary Alice went too. Mrs. Wightman had been a Methodist all her life; her father and her grandfather were both Methodist preachers. Her grandfather founded Emory in 1843 .

Gladys and Bela went back to work the next day. Bela had got home late the night before, but we were all up bright and early to start a new year. Gladys didn’t take any time off because her mother had been sick and died. That was just like Gladys; she went to school when she was sick even. She didn’t want to miss a chance to teach her pupils what they needed to know. Doug went back to Clemson to finish his freshman year. We found out pretty quick that Jimmie and Bela had decided that she’d resign after first semester and go to Florida to live with him while he was in

A Padgett(e) Photo Album: Glimpses of the Padgett(e) Family

Davenport, 71, and Gladys, 67, celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary on April 16, 1966

Walter and Euela Padgett sit for a portrait with their son

Curtis (standing), Jouette, and Davenport, on Ela’s lap, in 1895

Douglas Davenport Padgett in 1895

Gladys Elizabeth Wightman, on the right, stands by her brother, Cantey Kennerly, and her sister,

Mary Alice

Sisters Gladys and Mary Alice Wightman

pose in Greenwood in 1915

Douglas Davenport Padgett poses for a

portrait in Augusta in 1917

Davenport stands beside his new

Model T Ford in 1924

Gladys drives the Model T Ford to Fairview

School, where she teaches

Gladys Wightman, 17, and Davenport Padgett, 21, married at his Aunt Ella’s home in Saluda on April 16, 1916. Soon after, they had these portraits made at a studio in Batesburg.

Gladys, 64, had this portrait made in 1962

when she was nominated for S.C. “Mother of the Year.”

At his daughter’s request, Davenport, 64, had this Olin Mills portrait made in 1958.

Ella Padgett Etheredge, “Aunt Ella”

Eva Euela Davenport Padgett, Davenport’s mother,

1895

Walter Joseph Padgett, Davenport’s father, 1895

Susannah Long Padgett,

“Grandma Sue”

Hester Boyd Davenport,

“Grandma Hess”

Mahlon Demarcus Padgett,

“Grandpa Mahlon”

Margaret Denny Padgett, “Great-Grandma Peggy,” wife of William Padgett

Lydia Herlong Wightman,

Gladys’s mother, “Miss Liddy”

William Sherard Wightman

Gladys’s father, “Mr. Wightman”

A Girl in 1917 A Boy in 1920 Another Girl in 1931 Another Boy in 1934

Madaline, 8, and Curtis, 5, attend

school at Fairview in 1925 Gladys Madaline, 4 years, and Curtis

Davenport, 9 months, have their first picture

Douglas Donald Padgette, 3, and Ruby Euela (Bela) Padgette, 6, have a portrait made in Columbia the Christmas of 1937.

Bela was in second grade at Fairview School

Gladys smiles at Doug, her second

son, born June 29, 1934.

L to R: Curtis, Davenport, “Miss Liddy,”

the baby (Bela), Gladys, and Madaline

Left: In 1919 Gladys and Davenport bought forty acres of land and moved into this house, built for

hands by his father in 1893. Here Davenport is

holding Madaline, and Gladys has

Curtis on her lap.

Above: Davenport, Gladys, Madaline, Curtis, and Bela enjoy the spring-fed

pond Davenport dug in his pasture for his family and friends in the early 1930s.

Below: In 1940 Gladys holds Bettina as Curtis, Davenport, Bela and Doug watch.

Left: In 1940

Madaline holds Bettina

as Harold, Davenport,

Gladys, Doug and Bela pose for a family

picture

Saluda Vacation

L to R: Harold Jr., Madaline, Barry,

and Harold Boney, Sr., visit Gladys and Davenport

The Summer of 1959

on Andy

Branch

L to R: Doug, Davenport, and Curtis Padgette stand tall

together.

L to R: Edith and Curtis Padgette stand

with their children Deedee and Bob.

L to R: Little Madaline, Bela, Jimmie, Jim Ed, and

William (in Bela’s lap) squint in the sun.

L to R: Barbara, Doug, Gladys, Madaline, Davenport, Edith, and Curtis visit in the den.

Doug and Barbara Padgette help

one-year-old Steve to walk.

On their front porch

Gladys and Davenport, together 64 years

In front of their home

At a neighbor’s wedding

In Bela’s kitchen

Above: In their side yard

Left: Under the Mt. Willing arch between their living

room and dining room

After two years at Clemson, Curtis received an appointment to the

Naval Academy in 1939.

Madaline graduated from

Winthrop College in 1937 and taught high school history.

Bela graduated from Winthrop College in 1951 and

taught high school English.

Doug graduated from

Clemson in engineering in 1955 and went into the U.S. Air Force

“Right then, just after she’d had that baby, Gladys made the state-ment that she’d educate her if she had to take in washing. Gladys was always set on education . . . .” (Chapter 11, p. 91)

Madaline, 16, holds Bela, 2, as they pose with Curtis, 13.

Below: Davenport swims with friends in 1933 in the spring-fed pond he dug in the pasture for his

family.

Davenport sits in the double door

of the old Mt. Willing house.

Davenport accepts a gift from the D.D. Padgette Sunday School Class as he retires after 58 years.

Above: Davenport and Gladys lived in this house from 1919 until her death in 1979, and he lived there alone until 1989. They remodeled and enlarged it over the

years.

Davenport and Gladys were lifelong

members of Emory Methodist Church.

Two Big Events for

Davenport and Gladys

Family and friends celebrate with Gladys and Davenport 50 years of marriage. Seated L to R: Doug, Mark, Madaline B., Davenport, Gladys, Bela, and Curtis.

Standing L to R: Barbara, Steve, Harold Sr. (“Boney”), Barry, Bettina, Jim Ed, Madaline H., Jimmie, William, Deedee, and Edith. Harold Jr. and Bob were away in college.

L to R: Madaline Boney, Curtis, Gladys, Madaline Herlong, Bela, William, Jim Ed,

Jimmie, Davenport, Barry, and Edith celebrate Bela’s being chosen South Carolina Teacher of the Year for 1967.

Gladys and Davenport celebrate 60 years of marriage.

Great-grandchildren Lisa and Bryan Boney sit with them.

Madaline, Doug, Barbara, and Bela

attend Bettina’s wedding.

Deedee swings as Madaline

sleeps in their grandmother’s lap.

Davenport opens a gift as Joan, William’s

wife, looks on—Christmas 1982.

Harold Jr., and Bettina sit on their steps in Baltimore as Barry rides his tricycle.

Davenport in Action Right: Davenport and family endow a scholarship at Newberry College in Gladys’s memory. Below: Davenport and Ruby Riser, interviewees, are honored at the Saluda High School Oral History Tea.

Davenport enjoys Edisto Beach in 1981.

Davenport registers Saluda High School students to vote in 1976.

In the fall of 1980

Davenport travels with

Alice and Bela to the

University of Virginia to

visit Madaline in law school

and William, a senior in the

undergraduate school.

Davenport laughs with Alice at Emory Church as

she poses as “Miss Saluda County” in April before he died in August 1989.

Davenport continues to read and study.

In June 1989, Doug’s son Steve comes from St. Louis to visit his grandfather in his last illness.

Davenport celebrates his 90th birthday with family and friends.

Davenport celebrates his 92nd birthday with family and friends.

Davenport and Gladys’ Family Children, Grandchildren, Great-Grandchildren, and

Great-Great-Grandchildren

B E L A’S FAM I L Y 2 0 0 1

In 2001 Bela and Jimmie celebrated fifty years of marriage. With them were, L to R seated: Jim, Madaline and Travis, Jimmie, Bela, Alice and Padgett, and William. Standing: Kirk, Wendie, Don, Daniel, James, Jesse, Jack, Blanche, Darcy, Grace, Heyward, Joan, and Charity. Alice’s son Harrison (right inset) was born in 2002. Kirk’s son Zachery (left inset) was born in 2007.

DOUG’S FAMI L Y 2 0 0 5

In 2005 Doug and Barbara celebrated fifty years of marriage. L to R, front row: Alec, Erika, Hannah, and Eric. Second Row: Michelle, Barbara, Lauren and Dominque. Back Row: Mark,

Doug, Christopher, and Steve.

Madaline’s Family

Harold Boney, Jr., Christmas 1999

Harold’s Brian and Lisa, Christmas 1999

Barry and his daughter Brook, Christmas 1999

Barry’s son David

Davenport at 17 months.

Madaline at seventy

(1987)

Doug and Bettina at

Scott’s wedding

Lisa’s daughters: Alex,

McCauley, and Tyler (2007)

Left: Scott and Sharon at their wedding

Right: Scott and

Sharon’s son, Jeffrey (2006)

Curtis’s Family

Curtis, Edith, Bethe, Chris (Eason), Heather, Rob, Becky, Bob, and Deedee

Padgette at Rob and Heather’s wedding, December 16, 1995.

Heather, Cameron, Rob, and Nathan Padgette

Curtis and Edith at their

50th anniversary party

Deedee and Curtis at the

anniversary party


aircraft controller’s school down there. He’d been a fighter pilot and instructor in World War II, but when they called him back in 1951, they retrained him to be an aircraft controller.

January was a hard month for Gladys—harder than losing her mother because, in a sense, she began to think her mother hadn’t loved her. Why was that, you ask? It had to do with Mrs. Wightman’s will. When Gladys found out that Mrs. Wightman had left Mary Alice and Cantey all the money that Mrs. Wightman had inherited from her sister Alice’s estate, all the money she had herself (which wasn’t much), and all the land she owned—a little over a hundred acres and had left Gladys $300, she was hurt to the core. Mary Alice and Cantey had never worked anywhere but on the farm. They had lived with their mother, who had furnished Cantey land and supplies and a place to live and food and given him the only two cars he ever had—a Model A Ford and a 1946 Ford Sedan. Mary Alice just did what Mrs. Wightman and Cantey told her. It wasn’t like she was retarded or anything; she was just scared of everything—scared of life itself.

When Bela named her last little girl Minier Alice, after two old maids—Minier after my dead brother’s daughter and Alice after Mary Alice, Mary Alice got a little gift and wrote on the note that she hoped the baby would have a better life than she did. She did have a sad life, but she could have gotten out if she’d wanted to. Gladys had left home when she went to Sue’s to live when she was just fourteen years old. She earned her living from then on. She got room and board at Sue’s year round for keeping the children and cleaning house and helping with the cooking, After she graduated, she started teaching when she was just seventeen years old, and she taught forty-five years. People used to kid me and tell me my wife made the living. It never bothered me because I knew I was doing all I could, and Gladys loved to teach. She wouldn’t have wanted to stay home even if we’d been able for her to. She never neglected her family though. She worked double time to give them a good home, and we both loved them more than most people love their children I’ve always thought. We always


respected our children and believed in them and trusted them, like I said before.

Anyway, Gladys found out that Mrs. Wightman had made out her will in the thirties when times were so bad—a long time before she inherited any money. When she had the place appraised, somebody told her it was worth $1000. You probably couldn’t have gotten that much for it then. That was when Will Padget nearly lost everything. Mrs. Wightman knew Cantey and Mary Alice had no way to make a living except on the land, so she willed her place to them and gave Gladys what she thought would be a third—$300. But by 1951 times had got better, and the place was worth a whole lot more than that—but it was still willed to Cantey and Mary Alice. Mrs. Wightman still had all the money she’d inherited from Aunt Alice’s estate in 1944 except for what she’d used to buy Cantey the car, but that was left to Cantey and Mary Alice too.

Gladys told Cantey and Mary Alice how she felt, but they insisted that it was the way “Mama wanted it.” Several times they had hard words, and Gladys was torn apart by the joy that both Cantey and Mary Alice felt because now they had something that she didn’t have. Like I said, they had always been jealous. People loved Gladys, and she could teach and make a living, and she had four smart, wonderful, good-looking children, and she was married to a man that loved her better than life itself, and Cantey and Mary Alice didn’t like that. Cantey and Mary Alice were smart too, but they just didn’t reach out to get what they wanted. Both of them were afraid. They lived sad, lonely lives, and they died pretty much alone too. Gladys and I had to take care of Cantey and Mary Alice in the end.

That spring Gladys and I were alone. About time I started my crop, she started feeling bad. I knew she was sick when she told me she needed to go to see Dr. Wise. We went, and he checked her out and found out she had high blood sugar. She’d had diabetes when she was pregnant with Doug, and now it had come back again. Dr. Wise told her to stay away from anything sweet, and


that he wanted her to take insulin shots. He thought she could give them to herself, but she couldn’t. I gave them to her. She never complained and went right on doing everything she’d been doing—and that was always a lot. Gladys was always busy. She had so much energy and determination, and she wasn’t going to let diabetes stop her. Gladys’ sister Anna had suffered with diabetes for years, but she hadn’t lived by the rules and had lots of trouble. Gladys was a stickler for keeping the rules, so she got along well.

She went every week to Dr. Wise for a blood test, and she kept her sugar under control. She lost about twenty pounds that spring. She’d been right plump at 145 pounds, but she went down to 125, and she looked as pretty as a picture—even at fifty-four years old. We were at home by ourselves then. Doug was at Clemson, and Bela had lived in Florida until March when Jimmie was sent to a radar station in Kirksville, Missouri. They came here about the tenth of March on their way to Missouri. Bela was pregnant with their first child, and the doctor had told them they could travel all they needed to but to stop every 100 miles and let Bela get out of the car and walk around for a few minutes to rest. She seemed so happy to be with her new husband and to be expecting their first child. Of course, back then you couldn’t know whether it was going to be a girl or a boy. They got settled in Missouri and, danged if Bela didn’t start right straight to work on her Master’s degree. She had to walk to the State Teachers’ College, which was just about a mile from the apartment they lived in. She was just like her mama—taking advantage of every opportunity she had. And them she didn’t have, she made.

Times were good—1951, ‘52, ‘53, ‘54, ‘55—all were good. I was making good crops, and Gladys was enjoying her work just like she always did. It turned out she felt comfortable teaching and being principal at the Line School. We had a little more money than we had ever had before. South Carolina had raised teachers’ salaries in 1951; a beginning teacher with a degree, a teacher’s certificate, and an A on the National Teacher’s exam got $200 a


month for the nine-month school year. The reason I know that for a fact is that’s what Bela got that year. ‘Course, Batesburg-Leesville gave teachers a $35 local supplement, so she got $235 a month. Gladys didn’t get a supplement since the Line School was in Saluda County, but she got a little more than Bela because of all her years of teaching. Both of them made A’s on the teachers’ exam. A teacher’s college education, her certification, her exam grade, and her years of experience were all considered in calculating her salary. After Bela resigned and went with Jimmie, Gladys drove herself back and forth to school just as she always had.

Chapter 25

1952

Bela’s Home Again

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That summer Doug came home from Clemson. He’d done well at college his freshman year and decided to major in engineering. He’d started out in liberal arts, but ‘til this day he says that he didn’t really know what engineering was but when he heard some boys from Saluda say they couldn’t stay in it because it was too hard for them, he decided he’d take it just to prove he could do what they couldn’t. So that’s what he did. That summer he got a job working at the Milliken plant in Johnston. He had to work nights and sleep days. Remember we didn’t have any air conditioning then, but he got to sleep in the porch room that had five windows in it. It was noisy though because it was right off the front porch, and the front porch was where we lived in the summer time. Gladys shelled peas and strung beans there. She peeled peaches and apples and did whatever else she could on that porch where it was a lot cooler than in the house. It was just Gladys and me in the house then, and we tried to be quiet for him.

I had planted cotton and corn and oats and, of course, we had a big garden as usual. It was lay-by time when we got a letter from Bela in Missouri. Jimmie had received his orders to go to Japan and had to report to San Francisco on the 28th of July. They were


coming home by way of Vermont where Jimmie’s mother was visiting her good friend from the days they had worked in Washington together during World War I. They’d pick her up and bring her back home with them. Jimmie would have a week here before he had to report for duty. Their first child was due September 12, and we knew they were counting on us to take care of Bela and the baby. They never asked us; somehow they just knew that’s what Gladys and I would want to do.

Our house was full again—not as full as it was the summer of 1951 though. It looked like Gladys and I wouldn’t be by ourselves anytime soon. Bela looked mighty pretty when she got home, and she and Jimmie seemed reconciled to what had to be. Neither one of them knew a thing about what taking care of a baby would be like, but they seemed willing to learn. I felt sorry for these two young people having to be apart and not knowing when Jimmie would see his baby. We didn’t know then he was headed straight for a radar station on a mountain just below the 38th parallel in Korea. He knew it, but he didn’t tell Bela. No, he waited until the baby was born to tell her he was in Korea.

Jimmie and his brother Ben fixed up our kitchen before Jimmie had to leave. We already had a sink in the kitchen, but we still cooked on a wood stove. They built cabinets in the kitchen and fixed a place to put Bela and Jimmie’s electric stove that had been sitting in his mother’s back hall for nearly a year. They put in a hot water heater too; it was all a wonder to us—‘specially to Gladys. ‘Course, I didn’t have to make a fire in the cook stove anymore, and I’d been making them all my life. We’d already put an oil stove in the den, and Jimmie hooked up the oil stove they’d used in their apartment in the bedroom where Bela and the baby would sleep. Gladys had already put a front-loading washing machine in the kitchen, so we could take care of the baby’s washing.

Ben and his wife took Jimmie and Bela to Columbia to the airport, and Jimmie flew to San Francisco and then sailed on a troop ship to Japan. He and Bela wrote to each other every day while he was gone. Of course, the letters would pile up and come

Bela’s Home Again 267

in bunches—maybe a week’s worth at one time. Gladys helped Bela make baby clothes and little blankets for the new baby. On their long trip home from Missouri, they not only came by Vermont and picked up Jimmie’s mother but they also stopped in Baltimore where Madaline and Boney lived and saw them and picked up the crib that two of ours and Madaline’s three had slept in—an old iron crib we had bought second hand in 1931 before Bela was born. Jimmie tied it on top on the 1951 Pontiac he was driving and brought it to our house. It was too big for a tiny baby, and we borrowed a smaller one from Thelma Herlong—one she had been storing for her son Bettis and his wife. It was about the size of a bassinet and seemed to be the perfect place for a newborn baby. Jimmie brought it to our house and set it up in the room they’d put the stove in.

As usual, August was a hot month. The cotton opened early, and I started picking by myself. Of course, Bela couldn’t help me like she had when she was growing up, and it was a slow go. I knew I had to hire some hands, or I’d never get through. I made good corn down in the bottom in front of the house and gathered that too. Nobody had cotton pickers or corn gatherers then; they came a lot later, You had to gather it all by hand like people had been doing for thousands of years, and it was still a slow process. The garden was through until we planted turnips and mustard greens and collards for the winter. Doug had gone back for his second year at Clemson, but he came home as often as he could to see the pretty girl he loved here in Saluda—pretty near every weekend. So he was at home a lot still.

One hot day Miss Matybel Lindler (she was principal of Leesville Elementary School) came to see us. We didn’t know why she was there at first. Of course, we’d been knowing her all her life since she had grown up just a mile from us, but she’d never come to see us before. We soon found out that she wanted Bela to teach sixth grade at her school after the baby came. She said she’d get a substitute to take the class until Bela was able to come. Nobody had ever thought of such a thing. We’d just taken it for granted


that Bela would stay at home until Jimmie returned. But Gladys and I thought it was a good idea for Bela to teach. We told her she needed to get out and see people and not stay home day after day. We could get a good woman to stay with the baby, and I’d be around the house most of the time to see that she was doing a good job. Bela took our advice and signed the contract agreeing to come to work five weeks after the baby was born.

Every day Frank and Roseva would stop by when they rode out to the farm Roseva had inherited from the mother—just a mile down the road from us. We were all anxious for the baby to arrive. September 12 came, and there was no sign of labor! Bela took long walks and ate lots of watermelon. The days dragged on until Saturday, September 20, when the pains started. Gladys and I got Bela to the hospital in Greenwood about four o’clock, but her doctor was not in town. The nurses let Gladys stay with Bela until she went into the labor room. I stayed in the waiting room the whole time and Gladys came and stayed with me toward the end. James Edmund Herlong, Jr., was born about eleven o’clock. Dr. Scurry had arrived just in time to bring him into the world. Jim Ed, as they called him, was as pretty a baby as you ever saw—dark skin, dark hair—a fine fellow! Gladys and I sent Jimmie a telegram to tell him he had a son. Then Gladys wrote him a letter and had Bela put a little note at the bottom. She was so groggy that she could hardly write, but Jimmie saved that letter and brought it home with him.

The next Friday while Gladys was at school, our good friend Thelma Herlong and I went to Greenwood in her car and brought Bela and the baby home from the hospital. We got them settled in the room that we’d fixed for them, and Thelma left. I stayed in the house until Gladys got home from school, and then I decided I better not waste the whole day, so I picked cotton until dark in the fields right around the house.

Gladys always knew how to handle babies, and she enjoyed having Bela right in the house with us. Our other five grandchildren were so far away we didn’t get to see them often


enough to suit us. Bela was nursing the baby so there weren’t any bottles to be fixed. Now, Gladys could quieten any baby down just the way she held them. She was a natural-born mother. Yes sir, she loved children from the time they came into this world right on until they were grown.

Lots of people came to visit that week-end. Thelma and Bettis’ son James Robert and his wife came with their seven-month-old son, Robert. They’d almost lost him when he’d been born six weeks early. Cousins and neighbors and others wanted to see the new arrival, and Bela felt well enough to be up and welcome everybody. We didn’t let everyone hold the baby though. We’d learned better than that when Bela was born. So many people came the Sunday after she was born that she come just to jerking and nearly scared us to death. Of course, she got over it with no bad effects.

Everything was fine as long as Gladys was there, but Monday came and she had to go to school. I went out to the field to pick cotton, and Bela was inside taking care of Jim Ed. It wasn’t too long before I heard her calling, “Daddy, please come here a minute.”

I didn’t know what she wanted, but I hollered back, “I’m coming.” I took my cotton sack off my shoulder and left it in the row where I’d stopped picking and walked to the house. When I got there, Bela was crying. She didn’t know how to bathe the baby. I hugged her and said, “I washed you plenty of times and the other three too. I reckon we can do it together.”

She filled the little tub with warm water and put it on the table in the den. The weather was plenty warm, so we didn’t have to worry about the baby getting cold. She’d already put out the clean diaper and shirt and gown along with the band to put around the cord that hadn’t healed yet. I picked up Jim Ed and took his clothes off and showed her how to hold him and wash him off at the same time and then how to put powder on him. I showed her how to wash his hair to keep him from having cradle cap, as we called it. He didn’t cry a bit, and he smelled mighty good when we


got through. She nursed him and he went right off to sleep. I looked at her holding him and thought what a long road she had ahead of her—a long, hard road with lots of joy and pain. But then I thought to myself that that’s what life’s all about.

When we’d finished, I went back to the field to work. When I came in at dinner time, she had put the dinner Gladys had left us on the table. We ate while the baby slept. She was worried about having to leave him in five weeks. I told her that he would be fine and that those sixth graders she would be teaching would have a great teacher. She smiled and said, “I hope so.”

She got a letter from Jimmie nearly every day and sometimes two or three. It took about a week for a letter to come from where he was in Korea. A day or two after she got home, she got a letter written after he’d received the telegram we sent the night the baby was born. He was happy that the baby had arrived and was healthy. He seemed philosophical about being away from home and hopeful that he wouldn’t have to stay so long. He said he was eager to see his son.

About a week later I met Frank Herlong, our mail carrier and Jimmie’s father, at the mail box and talked a few minutes. We’d been friends all our lives. (You remember my story about staying with his folks—Mr. Mike and Mrs. Ida—and how his brother Joe let me borrow his shoes to wear to the party down at Ethel Harrison’s house.) Well, now we shared a grandson—Jim Ed—but he was a Herlong and not a Padgette. Frank gave me a letter from Jimmie and drove on. I looked down at it as I carried it to Bela, and it looked like all the others. But it wasn’t. She was sitting on the porch when I gave it to her, and she tore it open and began to read. I was watching her and I saw her face change. Then she come just to crying. I knew something was bad wrong, but I had no idea what.

“What’s the matter, Bela?” I asked. She tried to tell me and finally I understood that she was

saying Jimmie had written her that he was stationed at a radar station in Korea, not Japan as we had thought. He had waited to


tell her until after the baby was born and she was feeling stronger. At that moment, I just hoped she’d be strong enough! We thought at first that she was all right, but then we found out that she didn’t have any more milk after that day. It just dried up. She had to put Jim Ed on a bottle altogether. That was a funny dang thing to me. It didn’t hurt Jim Ed any. He thrived anyway, but I think it hurt her that she couldn’t nurse him anymore. She wrote to Jimmie every night. She told us she kept him up on what Jim Ed was doing. Of course, he wasn’t doing much then but sleeping and eating. He was a good baby. He grew fast and was laughing and cooing before we knew it.

Those first five weeks passed quickly—too quickly for Bela. It was time for her to go to work. After Jim Ed came, she wished she didn’t have to teach, that she hadn’t signed the contract. Gladys kept telling her Jim Ed would be fine, that she could love him that much more when she was with him. We found a black woman who was willing to come and live with Cora and Posey and keep Jim Ed. (You remember that Cora had kept Bettina in Atlanta for awhile and then here at our house when Madaline went back to teaching.) I had to go get her every morning and take her back every afternoon. Bela once again rode with Gladys to the Line School and then took the car to Leesville Elementary and came back and picked her up in the afternoon. After she got in the habit of going to school, I think Bela never regretted her decision to teach that year. She saved all her money in hopes that she and Jimmie could build a house some day.

Gladys was cheerful and energetic and hard-working like she always was. She never got down and out. She just kept on doing her best at whatever she tried—whether it was washing dishes or correcting papers. She had twice as much work to do with Bela and the baby at home as she would have had otherwise, but she never complained. My cousin Claude Matthews sure got it right about Gladys that fall. It happened like this: I was milking two cows and Gladys made butter from the cream. I sold eight pounds a week to Mrs. Regina Edwards. Tom Coleman and Raymond


Parkman had a hammer mill at Saluda, and one day I decided that I might be able to make my cows give more milk if I took some corn to the mill and had it mixed with cotton seed to feed my cows. I put a load of corn on the wagon and went to town. Somebody had brought too-green corn and choked the mill up. They were working on it trying to get it running again. I waited and waited. Claude Matthews, Cousin Mattie’s grandson, was working for Raymond and Tom then. I said to him, “Claude, when will you get this dang thing unchoked? I’ve got cotton in the field needing to be picked. I had to wait on a woman to grow up so I could marry her, and I don’t want to wait any more.”

Gladys had taught Claude everything he knew down at Fairview school, so he’d known her for a long time and loved her. He’d been drunk all weekend, but he was in fair shape that Monday morning. He looked up at me and said, “Cousin Davenport, it was a damn good wait, wasn’t it?” Poor boy, burned himself up one night when he was drunk. Yes, Claude was right: it was a “damn good wait.” Gladys was worth waiting for.

That fall of 1952 Gladys made me vote for Eisenhower on the “Democrats for Eisenhower ticket,” and I’ve never quite forgiven her for that. That is the only time in my life I ever voted Republican. I told you how FDR saved the little farmer in the South, remember? I’ve always known the Democrats were for the little man. Back then we were called the Solid South because we always went Democrat. That’s changed now though. After integration the South has gone Republican.

The first president of the United States I remember was McKinley. I just remember hearing about him. He was president from 1896 until 1900. Pa was always interested in politics so he talked about him. He got re-elected. I think I remember when McKinley was shot. Teddy Roosevelt got to be president in 1901 and served until 1908. Taft was elected in 1908, and Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Harding was Republican and so was Calvin Coolidge. He said he wouldn’t run again. His son died from an infected blister on his heel. After Coolidge came Hoover. He was


elected in 1928. Hoover got the blame for the Depression, but it had all happened before Hoover got in office. Then in 1932 FDR came in and saved us. When he was in power was the first time the Southern people had any money.

In my book, Teddy Roosevelt was a good president. He did practically what he pleased by sending the fleet around the world. Congress wouldn’t appropriate the money to send them, so he said he’d just send the fleet as far as it would go; then Congress would have to appropriate the money to bring it home.

Jimmy Carter was the smartest president I remember. He was smart to get elected and be a Southerner. That was two strikes against him. He was probably too good to be president. Maybe Woodrow Wilson was smarter, but he got disappointed too. Harry Truman was a smart cookie politically but not so smart in books, though, as the other two. As I said I voted for Eisenhower because Gladys talked me into it. He said he’d bring the troops home from Korea, and I sure wanted that because Jimmie was over there. But I never voted the Republican ticket again. ‘Course, Eisenhower did get the boys home—some of them anyway. Even today we still have troops in Korea policing the 38th parallel.

In 1878 my daddy and Uncle Dave Padgett, my grandpa Mahlon’s brother, were Red Shirts. They wore red shirts and went to Holston’s Crossroads where 250 Negroes with wood billies on their arms were going to vote. Pa and Uncle Dave went to Batesburg and got 24 more men all dressed in Red Shirts. They came down Bates Hill all spread out so that the Negroes thought there were more men coming than there were, and so when they got to the box at Holston Crossroads, there were no Negroes there.

And I gave the box back to them ninety years later. I was appointed to the Saluda County Registration Board in 1963, and a part of our job has been to make a special effort to register Negroes after the Civil Rights Act passed. Well, in 1969 I went to Holston Crossroads and spent several days registering the Negroes who came and also going from house to house trying to get as many as I could to register. Since I’ve been on the


Registration Board for 21 years, I’ve registered many a colored person. And I’m proud I’ve been a part of the change that has come to Saluda County and South Carolina and the South as a whole.

I got carried away there. I told you I’ve always been interested in nearly everything—particularly politics and what’s happening in the county, state, and nation. Anyway, Madaline and her family came home for Christmas that year, and with Doug home from college and Bela and Jim Ed living with us, our little house was full again, but we never felt crowded. Gladys didn’t mind a bit; in fact, she enjoyed the extra work, and we always spent a lot of time talking. We always laughed and said everybody in the family loved to talk so that we had to raise our hands when we had something to say, or we’d never get a word in edge-wise. Yes, we just had a good time being together. Jim Ed was three months old, and Bettina and Harold and Barry thought he was awful cute. Harold was eight years old, and he wrote a poem to Jim Ed on the trip back to Baltimore after the holidays. Madaline sent it to Bela, and she put it in Jim Ed’s baby book. When 1953 came in, we didn’t know then that Jimmie would soon be home and the house would be empty again.

Chapter 26

1953–1955

A Granddaughter and a Wedding

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That winter of 1953 I stayed pretty close to the house to keep my eye on Jim Ed and Pearl, the woman we’d hired to keep him. I remembered that I’d caught Hannah sleeping when she was supposed to be keeping Bela and Doug—Doug wasn’t but a year old—and I didn’t want that to happen again. I hunted a lot in the woods around the house to train the dogs I was raising for sale. I figured Pearl wouldn’t know when I was coming in so she’d be on her P’s and Q’s all the time. It was turning out that she was good help and good with Jim Ed. Bela bathed him and fixed all his bottles every night after we’d had supper and cleaned up the dishes.

Sometime in February Bela got a letter from Jimmie telling her his commission would expire the first of March and if he didn’t renew it, he’d have to come home and be out of the service. He asked what she thought he should do. She wrote right back and told him that if he had a chance to come home to her and the baby, he should come. Evidently, he agreed with her because the next thing we knew he was coming home sometime in March. Bela started singing around the house. You could see a difference in her. When she got word that he was coming on a troop ship to


California and then taking a train home to Greenwood, she made plans to take Jim Ed and meet him at the station. She wouldn’t let us go with her that afternoon. She didn’t ask his parents to go either. She insisted on going with just the baby, and that’s what she did.

I don’t know what kind of meeting they had, but I do know that they stopped by Frank and Roseva’s house to let them see their son who had returned safe and sound from the war. Then they came on here, and we had supper ready. Jimmie seemed tired and sort of strange. He’d been in Korea since August going to the top of a mountain every day to man a radar station. He was one of the controllers who guided the planes as they bombed North Korea—the ones that had to turn around and come back at the China border. You remember that in December of 1950 the Chinese troops had come over the border to help the North Korean army fight the Americans. Later he told us a little about what he saw, particularly about the poor Korean people who had to scrounge around for food since their country had been fought over and pretty much destroyed time after time. Years later when his children didn’t want to finish what was on their plates, I’d hear him talk about the poor Korean children he’d seen and tell Jim Ed or Madaline or William that they ought not to waste food. It didn’t seem like they were too interested in the poor Korean children.

Jimmie had bought a camera over there, and he had a lot of slides of the place and the people. He had also bought a little hand-held projector so that we could look at them. Years later Bela gave him a real slide projector for Christmas so that a lot of people could look at the slides at one time. You could tell he was changed by what he had seen. He didn’t know how to treat Jim Ed. He’d never been around a baby before, and he hadn’t been around to see his son the first six months of his life, so he was a little awkward, but he got used to him pretty quick.

Bela and Jimmie and Jim Ed soon moved to an apartment in an old house in Saluda. We helped them clean it up (and, believe me, it was nasty!) and move what furniture they owned. It sure wasn’t

A Granddaughter and a Wedding 277

much. They took their electric stove that Jimmie and Ben had installed at our house, and Gladys and I had to buy one for the first time. They got their refrigerator and the bed and table and chairs from Roseva and Frank’s back hall where they’d been since the fall of 1951 when Jimmie went in service. They took their two living room chairs (the ones we’d given them when they got married) from our house where Gladys had found a place for them. Then they bought a second-hand sofa from Summer Brothers furniture store and bought material at the outlet at the LaFrance mill near Clemson, and Ben and Jimmie covered it. Those two boys could do anything! Ben had kept the hog farm going, and Jimmie went right back to work with him. They were planting oats and corn too and combining grain for other people. Jimmie acted like he was mighty glad to be working so hard. They planted a big butterbean patch and a corn patch too and lots of tomatoes and okra.

Jimmie brought Bela and Jim Ed down to our house each morning, and Bela went on to school with Gladys. Grace Thomas, who lived on Frank and Roseva’s place, kept Jim Ed at our house. Pearl had got homesick back in the winter and gone back home. (She did Bela just like Cora did Madaline when she’d promised to keep Bettina. You remember I told you about that.) This time Roseva knew that Grace, who lived right down the road from us, wasn’t working and could come and keep Jim Ed. She sure was a huckleberry over Pearl. Grace was smart and kept the house clean and took care of Jim Ed and, on top of that, she was a cracker-jack good cook too. She could cook the best beans and corn bread, and her fried chicken and rice and gravy were almost as good as Gladys’. Bela and Gladys went on to school every day, and when Bela finished her year at Leesville Elementary, she didn’t sign a contract for the next year because she wanted to teach at Saluda High School, which was just two blocks from where they were living in town.

I was still planting cotton and corn and wheat and oats, but I was also beginning to buy a few cows. I’d decided that chickens


were too much work, but I knew I had to have some money crop other than cotton and whatever else I’d been raising to sell. Doug came home from Clemson that summer, but he worked at Milliken again. I couldn’t afford to keep him at home working for me when he could make a lot more working at the plant in Johnston. I got some part-time help, but I had to do most of the work myself. Doug was still working nights and sleeping days, and June, July, and August are awful hot months in South Carolina. Nobody had air conditioning then, so we didn’t really know what being cool was. He was serious about Barbara, the girl he’d been in love with since he’d started dating her in the eleventh grade. She graduated from high school that spring and planned to go to Winthrop College. From then on Doug spent about as much time at Winthrop as he did at Clemson. He saved his money that summer and bought an old Mercury car that he drove back and forth to Winthrop to see Barbara and home to Saluda when she was at home.

We soon got a big surprise from Madaline. She wrote us that Boney was being transferred to Charleston, and she and the children were coming home to Saluda until he could find a place for them to live if it was all right with us. Bela had just moved out, and Madaline was coming back. Our house was going to be full again. She did come and stayed all summer. Gladys was going to summer school at Newberry again, so Madaline was a lot of help to her mama. We treated Bettina, Harold, and Barry just like they were our own—no special treatment in our house. They worked just like our children always worked—doing whatever they could do. Bettina was in high school, and she spent a lot of time with Bela in Saluda. I think Bela kept her busy too. All three of them stayed with Bela and Jimmie in Saluda while they took Red Cross swimming lessons in the pool at Saluda and went to Bible school at St. Paul.

Madaline was a good bridge player and she loved to play, so every week Bela and Lindy and Margaret Griffith would come down to our house one afternoon after Gladys was home from


summer school, and Madaline would teach them to play bridge while Gladys took care of Jim Ed. Gladys and I never did learn to play bridge, but we did play rook when we were young and then later with our children, and after we got old, we played canasta several times a week with Nina and Woodrow Padgett and Lura and Wilbur Crouch. That was mostly after Gladys retired. We’d go to their house, or they’d come to ours.

Boney finally found a house in Charleston sometime in August and moved his family in time for school to start. All their furniture had been in storage all summer, but the two-story house he found was big enough to hold all of it. We missed them, and we missed Doug after he went back to Clemson. I picked some cotton myself, but I hired most of it picked. I was buying land too—land right around me that became available. I didn’t buy the Wade Crouch tract that was over on the hill in front of our house, but I wish I had. Dick Crouch owned it, and I had sort of kept my eye on it for him, and I’d hunted on it every winter. I was working the Mt. Willing place and making good crops, so things were getting better. We had more money than we’d ever had. Gladys was still going to summer school every summer. It takes a long time to start from scratch and get a college diploma. She did that and taught every winter and worked at home in the summers while she was going to school. Yes sir, she did have determination and ambition, and she didn’t mind work. She was smart as a whip too, and that didn’t hurt.

That fall Bela got a job teaching English at Saluda High School, and she’s teaching there yet. Also that fall Jimmie and Bela bought a lot on Hazel Street in Saluda right by Jimmie’s brother Ben, his partner in the farming business. Ben and Jimmie had bought the old Herlong place on Highway 178 from Louis Givens and J.W. Adams—250 acres—and were planting cotton and corn and oats on it. They had got in the farming business big time. They were getting in when I was getting out—of row cropping anyway.

That Christmas of 1953 was the only Christmas Gladys and I ever spent away from our own home in the nearly sixty-four years


we were married. Madaline and Boney were living in Charleston, and they asked us to come and bring Bela and Jimmie and Jim Ed on Christmas Eve and let Santa Claus come to see Jim Ed down there. We could eat Christmas dinner the next day and then come back that afternoon. Bela and Jimmie wanted to go, but, of course, Doug didn’t. He wanted to stay at home and be with Barbara. We hated to leave him, but we’d be back the next day in time to have supper with him we told him. He said he didn’t mind.

Well, when we got to Madaline’s house in Charleston, she came to the door and was glad to see us, but she was so pale and weak-looking that we knew right straight that she was bad sick. As soon as Gladys and Bela got there to look after the children and the meal, Madaline went to bed. She had what looked like the flu to me. We ate without her, and she didn’t want anything herself. She got up after Barry and Harold and Jim Ed were in bed to help Boney see about Santa Claus. Bettina was nearly fourteen and too big for Santa Claus. We were mighty glad we were there to help out with everything. It was Madaline and Boney’s fifteenth wedding anniversary. (You remember they got married on Christmas Day 1938.) Boney gave her a whole set of crystal. Somewhere around here is a picture he took of her holding up one of the glasses after she opened the big box. She looked like death itself in that picture.

Gladys and Bela fixed a good Christmas dinner, and Madaline was feeling a little better, so she ate a little. We hated to leave her, but Boney was home since it was Christmas Day. But we knew he could be called out any time since he was an F.B.I. agent, and they’re on call all the time. Madaline got all right; it wasn’t the flu like we’d had that time when Curtis was a baby. We never left home again for Christmas. No, I’m wrong about that. Bela did convince us one time to eat supper with them on Christmas Eve like we always did and then to spend the night and get up the next morning at their house and see what Santa Claus had brought the children. Yes, we did that one time. Ever after though, we’d come home after we’d opened the presents on Christmas


Eve, and then Bela and her family would come down and have Christmas dinner with us along with any of the others that could come for Christmas.

Madaline and Boney didn’t stay in Charleston but one year—1953-54. Madaline taught school on James Island. When Boney got transferred, they moved to Savannah the summer of 1954 where Boney eventually retired. He died there in 1971.

After Christmas was over and 1954 had begun, when there wasn’t much farm work to do, Jimmie and Ben started work on Bela and Jimmie’s house on the lot they’d bought next to Ben and his wife. Ben had built his house himself, and he told Jimmie he’d help him build his. They did most of the work themselves, but they did get two bus drivers—Grady and Wilbur Black from the Sardis section—to work between the time they drove their buses to school and when they had to go back to take the students home.

Bela had studied house plans and picked out one she thought (and Jimmie agreed, I hope) would be right for them. It was a story and a half, and they could finish the first floor and save the second to be finished later. Ben and Jimmie worked all the free time they had that spring and summer, but just the three back rooms were finished when they moved in the middle of September 1954 just before little Gladys Madaline was born on October 1—our seventh grandchild. I was mighty proud they named the baby after Gladys and after our daughter Madaline. Both of them deserved it; they had always loved Bela a whole lot—just like I had. Curtis was eleven and Madaline was fourteen when Bela arrived, so we’d waited a long time for her.

Jimmie had borrowed $6000 from Cousin Will Padget to build their house. You remember he was the one who was broke when I asked him to lend me some money, but I didn’t know it and cussed him out for not helping me. I did go back and apologize when I found out he was telling the truth. But later he got rich buying timber and land and selling enough of the timber to pay for the land. Oh, he was smart, and he was willing to take a risk. He built a mansion for his family up on the Greenwood Highway


just out of the town limits of Saluda. It’s still up there. His only son, Joe Wise, died in World War II when a Kamikaze pilot hit the ship he was on and it went down within minutes with all on board. Will grieved over that the rest of his life. He died fairly early from heart trouble, and his two daughters had to hire someone to take care of their mama in that big house because she had some kind of hardening of the arteries—she got so she couldn’t take care of herself. She’s dead now too, but the girls still keep the house up. They both married Lutheran preachers. One lives in Columbia and one in Pennsylvania.

As I said, Cousin Will let Jimmie borrow the money, but he didn’t let him have it straight out. Jimmie had to take his checks each week to Cousin Will, and he would countersign them with Jimmie. The $6000 Jimmie borrowed built the shell of a big house (five bedrooms) and finished the back three rooms. Then he finished the front bedroom before Doug’s wedding in August so that some of Doug’s friends in the wedding could stay with them. And that’s what they lived in until 1958 when Jimmie had it refinanced. The Farmers Home Administration that refinanced it made him finish the living room and dining room and build steps in the back and front. They’d just had some wooden steps in the front and none in the back. But at least they had their own house. Bela didn’t teach that year because she didn’t have a job since she was pregnant when school started. She needed a job and worked at the agriculture building measuring cotton land with a planometer from February through July.

Something big happened in May of 1954: the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that “separate but equal” schools were not acceptable anymore because Negro schools were separate but never equal—in the South anyway. That decision meant that schools would have to integrate. Black and white children would have to go to school together. You know what all happened as the result of that decision. Everything in the South had to change. We always got along with the Negroes around us; I’ve told you that already. My grandfather gave land for Mt. Moses Church, and I


gave land for Mt. Moses School. Both places were strictly for Negroes, and we believed that they wanted to worship and go to school separately. We had learned different—that what they wanted was justice, that is, just as good schools as whites had. Since the only way that was going to happen was to go to the same schools, the Supreme Court had ruled that was what had to happen. We didn’t know when or how or which ones first, but we knew that things would be different. Gladys had taught all those years in white schools, and now that was finished. It was a shock to all of us. But we knew we had to abide by the law of the land. It had been decided. It came pretty quick to some schools, and some violence occurred that filled the television screens on the evening news, but it was sixteen years before it was to come to Saluda except a few that came under the “Freedom of Choice” concept, which didn’t last long.

Because Doug was in the R.O.T.C. at Clemson, he had to go to summer camp the summer of 1954, so he wasn’t at home. His last summer at home was the summer of 1953. He drove that old Mercury loaded down with riders all the way to some place in Alabama where he continued the military training he’d started at Clemson. He was great on getting riders to pay him enough to buy gas for his trips to Winthrop and anywhere else he went.

Little Madaline was born on October 1, 1954, a dainty little blonde baby that never caused any problems. Let me tell you what happened after they brought her home. Jimmie brought Bela and the baby to our house so we could take care of them and Jim Ed too—he wasn’t but two years old. We’d taken him to a football game in Ninety Six the night Madaline was born. Back then women stayed in the hospital a week, and Bela was no different. We kept Jim Ed during that week, and the day that Jimmie brought Madaline and the baby here, I had to go to town to the hardware store to get some part or other, and I took Jim Ed with me—he was just two years old. He was the cutest little fellow you ever did see, and he loved to go anywhere anytime. Well, I was in a hurry and somehow I forgot I’d taken him with me, and I left


him in Saluda in Williams Hardware Store. When I got home and went in the house, Bela said, “Daddy, where is Jim Ed?”

And I said, “God Almighty, I left him in town.” It’s a wonder that car didn’t tear up—I drove it so fast back to town. I was scared to death something would happen to that baby before I got back. God knows, I was so proud to see that chap when I walked back in Williams Hardware that I could have cried. Our neighbor and good friend Freida Bouknight (she was one of the ladies that took care of Madaline’s reception in 1938 and helped with Bela’s in 1951) had been in the store and seen Jim Ed by himself. When I got back there, she was taking care of him, and he was happy as a lark. They knew I’d be back. I’d learned my lesson though. I’d never leave him or any of the others again.

Doug was a senior at Clemson that year, and he graduated on June 5, 1955, in textile engineering. Three of our four children were already educated, and we went to Clemson to see the last one get his diploma. I’ll never forget what he told his mother. He placed us on the seats saved for us and then he said, “Mama, I made it—cum laude.” How he did that was a mystery to me! He matriculated at two schools. His sweetheart was a sophomore at Winthrop—the girl he married that summer—Barbara Rogers—the prettiest girl you ever saw. She’s been his wife now for thirty years or more, and she’s still beautiful. Anyway he went to Winthrop every weekend to see Barbara. He’d worked hard and saved his money when he worked in the summers at the Woolen Mill at Johnston. He was a sweeper, and he had to work nights and sleep in that hot front bedroom in the daytime while all of the life of the house went on around him. Like I told you, he took his money and bought him a second-hand car—an old Mercury. And at Clemson he played basketball for the textile mill teams around Clemson to get extra money. He ate at the basketball table at Clemson for two years, but he didn’t like Banks McFadden, the coach, and he quit trying to play for the college and played for the mill teams to get money to spend to go back and forth to Winthrop to see Barbara.


Doug graduated from Clemson in June 1955, and Barbara finished two years at Winthrop that same June. They got married on July 30 at St. Paul Methodist Church in Saluda (where I was almost a charter member). Gladys had a new dress, and she was about as pretty as the bride, and that’s saying a lot considering what a beautiful bride Barbara was. She’d asked Jim Ed to be the ring bearer, and Bela had made him a little white suit with short pants. He wore a white shirt and a black bow tie. The only trouble was he wasn’t quite three years old. He did pretty good to be so young. After he got to the altar, he stood by his mama, who was a bridesmaid, but then he started to fidget and ended up standing on the front bench looking back at me and Gladys. I reached over and got him and put him between us, and he was fine then.

Doug had been in the Air Force ROTC at Clemson, so he had to go in the Air Force where he stayed for three years and became a pilot. He said he didn’t want to be a pilot really, but he had to be just as good as Jimmie Herlong, his brother-in-law and Bela’s husband. Jimmie had flown airplanes in World War II, and he loved to fly better than he loved to eat. Doug figured if Jimmie could fly, then he could too, and he did.

When he graduated from Clemson, he went to work for Western Electric in Burlington, North Carolina, and came home to get married. After they came back from their honeymoon, he took Barbara back to Burlington where they lived for a few weeks until he went into the Air Force. He stayed for three years and flew big planes. They sent him to Winterhaven down in Florida and then out to Enid, Oklahoma, San Antonio, Texas, and probably some other places I can’t remember. When he got out of the service, he went back to Western Electric as an engineer, and he’s still with them although he’s left them twice for greener pastures that didn’t turn out to be so green after all.

Things in general had begun to smooth out. By this time our children were all educated and married off. As the little girl had said to Curtis when he went to Annapolis, “You will be gone.” So also were our children gone. Our little house felt pretty empty.

Chapter 27

1956–1959

Graduations and Grandsons

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I’ve lived a long time. I’m ninety now, and I’ve seen a lot of things happen and I’ve known a lot of people. You know it’s funny—the more people you love, the more joy your have and also the more you can get hurt. A lot of things have happened to me and to all the people I love. Nothing ever stands still. The world just keeps on turning. I hope I get to see it turn for a long time yet.

I told you about what happened when Gladys’ mama died in December 1951—how she left Gladys just $300 and left Cantey and Mary Alice over 100 acres of land and all the money she had and that included the $25,000 she had inherited when her sister Alice died. Well, one bad thing that Gladys had to put up with in the fifties was the way Cantey and Mary Alice, her brother and sister, acted toward her. After Gladys’ mother left her just $300 and left the land and the rest of her money to Cantey and Mary Alice, Gladys was awful hurt and she told them so. They got so mad they wouldn’t speak to any of us. You would have thought we were the ones that had hurt them.

Well, one day Cantey fell out of his wagon and broke his tail bone, he said. We never did really know what happened. Mary

Graduations and Grandsons 287

Alice got the ambulance and sent Cantey to the hospital. They didn’t tell us a thing—not a word—because they were so mad with us about Mrs. Wightman’s property.

Willie Stone, their closest neighbor and a cousin, took it on himself to come to our house and tell us about the accident. It was about the middle of the afternoon. Of course, we immediately went on up to see about Mary Alice. She was out in the yard hollering and bellowing like a damn bull—like she had no sense. We told her we wanted to carry her to Columbia to the hospital to see how Cantey was doing. She wouldn’t go unless we’d promise that we’d go get Sue, Gladys’ and Mary Alice’s half-sister who lived in Saluda. We did get Sue and headed out for the hospital. We got there about six o’clock. When we walked in, the first thing Cantey said to Gladys was, “Well, Gladys, I made my will, and I willed everything I have to Mary Alice.”

Dr. Taylor came in just at that time. I don’t know why, but he thought Cantey was my brother. He said to me, “If your brother is still living in the morning, I am going to. . . . “

“Living—hell!” I blurted out. “He ain’t about to die.” Then I told him what Cantey had just told Gladys. The doctor did operate the next morning, and Cantey got better and didn’t die until 1962. I carried Gladys and Mary Alice and Sue down to Columbia nearly every day. Mary Alice would go to see Cantey, but she wouldn’t speak to me and Gladys then. Finally, they made a kind of peace after Cantey got better and came home from the hospital. We would go to see them, but they never got over feeling guilty about the place and the money. They knew their mother didn’t realize what she had done. She loved Gladys just as much as she loved them. She was proud of Gladys and what she had done with her life, and she wanted her to share equally. The fact that she gave her the $300, which she thought was 1/3 of the value of the place when she made her will, proved that. She was too old to even consider the money she’d inherited from her sister Alice or the fact that by 1951 when she died the land was worth a whole lot more than $900. When Mary Alice died in 1976, it sold for $30,000.


Mary Alice left half of the place to Gladys and the other half to Connie Maxwell Children’s Home. That was another proof that she realized she and Cantey had done Gladys wrong.

When Cantey got to the end in 1962, he was in terrible shape with cancer. I went to see about him every day. I killed a mule that summer working a corn crop for Cantey so he’d have corn for the next year to feed his stock. I went every morning and bathed him, shaved him, and changed his bed with Laurie Edwards’ help. He would hold Cantey, and I’d feed him. I’d take care of the colostomy too. Mary Alice had a damn mess when she tried to tend to it. When I saw what she was doing, I knew I had to take over. She wouldn’t use the colostomy. About a month before he died, I told her to get the bag and put it on him. I told her I was tired of her messing around trying to fix it every morning of her life. She did put the bag on, and after that, we could keep his bed clean. When he died, Mary Alice was left alone for the first time in her life. She was scared to death to stay out there in the country by herself, and Jessie Mae Stone, Willie’s wife, said she would hear her screaming outside many a time. Jessie Mae was good to her, but Mary Alice just didn’t have any strength or know-how.

Mary Alice lived alone in that house for nearly a year, and then we talked with her about living at Mrs. Julia Hyler’s boarding house in Saluda. She was ready to go, so Gladys and I got her packed up and moved her to Saluda where she’d be with people and feel safe. Mrs. Hyler charged her a reasonable amount and let her work around the house some. Mary Alice stayed there as long as she was able—about five years.

Dealing with Mary Alice and Cantey was never easy. They had always resented Gladys because she was so smart and could do anything, and she’d work her fingers to the bone. Neither one of them ever got out and tried to do anything. Cantey did date Miss Moye for a while, but he was scared to get married and leave home.

One mighty important event occurred the summer of 1956—Gladys graduated from Newberry College with honors. It had


taken her a long time because she was working full time and mostly going to college in the summer time—and doing all the work at home. Well, I helped her a little. I didn’t mind washing dishes and washing clothes too. By that time we had a washing machine—our first one, a front-loading Bendix that we installed in our little tiny kitchen.

Gladys always loved to learn, so she enjoyed every course she ever took. She was always talking about the professors and what she was reading. I felt like I knew Dr. Derrick, Dr. Hiesey, and Dr. Setzler. I even knew that Dr. Setzler had written the grammar book the class studied. I also remember that Dr. Hiesey had said that somewhere there is an affinity for every individual—a perfect match for him or her. I think Gladys was certainly my affinity. Oh, we fussed a lot, but in the end we always pulled together. And our children sure turned out all right.

Yes, Gladys had always wanted a college degree and felt inferior to those who had a degree. Now she had graduated too, but I don’t think she felt any different. Madaline and her family and Bela and her family went with us to the graduation ceremony on Saturday. I’ll never forget how pretty Madaline looked. She wore her black hair back in a bun, and her high cheek bones and dark eyes and happy smile seemed to light up the place. Of course, Gladys was as happy as I have ever seen her, and she was pretty too. She was 58 years old, but she had finally realized her dream. She didn’t need that degree to be the smartest person in any room, but she’d always thought she did. It didn’t change her one bit though. She was always the same—honest and true and loving. Oh, she had a temper, and she’d tell you off in a minute, but she was good-natured. She just stood up for what she thought was right.

On Sunday we had a big picnic at our house for Gladys. We invited all our old friends, and they came and rejoiced with Gladys and with all of us who loved her. We had hash and barbecue and lots of other good foods that all the folks brought to help out. Gladys was surprised. She had no idea that we’d


planned such a big day for her. She never thought she deserved much. She just worked hard and tried to do for others more than she tried to do for herself, so she was shocked when others did for her. It was a great day—my brother Gus and his wife, Essie, and their family, Frank and Roseva Herlong, Jeff and Betty Griffith, Milette and Grady Snelgrove, Willie and Ruby Riser, Nina and Woodrow Padget, Fletcher and Olive Padget, and all the Emory Church people and a whole lot of others came. Some people brought gifts. I remember Frank and Roseva brought Gladys a big silver platter. She was tickled with that.

One thing she wasn’t happy about I was responsible for. We took out all the chairs we had, and we still needed more. So I had the bright idea of taking the sofa out of the living room and putting it near the tables so people could use it to sit on. It didn’t look so bad inside the house where the light was dim, but out in the bright sunshine, it looked its age, and it was nearly twenty years old. Madaline had brought it and a matching chair in 1937 with the first money she made teaching school. We’d just had a little leather loveseat, and Madaline wanted a sofa. It was covered with a dark red material, and it was worn awful bad. I saw Gladys’ face as she watched us bringing it out, and I knew I had played hell. She was ashamed of that sofa. The very next week I took her to Ninety Six to Pee Wee Ellison’s furniture store, and we bought a new one, and it’s still in the living room. That didn’t undo what I had done though.

Gladys was still teaching in Batesburg. Of course, she had changed schools. After the Line School became a part of the Batesburg system, the Board decided to make it a school for the first three grades. That meant that Gladys might lose her job. She was worried to death, but she didn’t lose her job; she was transferred over to the Batesburg Elementary School, where she taught fifth grade until she retired in 1963 when she was sixty-five. (She didn’t want to stop, but that was the school’s policy.) She was just as good at Batesburg Elementary as she had been everywhere else she had ever taught, and her students loved her


and learned from her. One little boy had been a holy terror in other teachers’ classrooms, but when the principal put him in Gladys’ room, he sat down and behaved himself and got on with the business of learning. He was from one of the best families in Batesburg, and his mother came to Gladys at the end of the school year and thanked her for what she had done for her son. I’m proud to say he grew up to be a fine man, and I believe Gladys was the one that set him on the right road.

One night we had her principal, Frank Thomasson, and his wife, Edith, and their little girl, Margaret Ann, for supper. Margaret Ann was four years old, and she’d been born with cerebral palsy. They put her on the piano bench and she could play tune after tune. She has struggled all her life, but she finished the University of South Carolina in music and has taught school herself. That night Gladys invited Bela and Jimmie and Madaline—but not Jim Ed. Madaline was older than Margaret Ann, and Gladys wanted Madaline to make sure that little girl had a good time. Gladys thought the world of Mr. Thomasson. She said he was a great principal

I was still planting cotton and corn, but I was buying cows and land too so I’d have enough pasture for my herd. I bought a place on the creek for $670 and sold it later for $6500, and I sold $400 worth of pulpwood from it before I sold the land. I thought I’d done well. But Mr. Livingston, the man who bought it from me, later sold the timber for $13,000 and there is that much on it now—on just 31 acres of land. It was supposed to be 23 acres when I bought it, but it had been surveyed low, and when I had it surveyed it turned out to be 31.

The year 1958 brought us two new grandsons. On May 29 Stephen Rogers Padgette, Doug and Barbara’s first child, was born in Burlington, North Carolina, where Doug was an engineer for Western Electric. He’d started there in 1955, and when he got out of the Air Force, he went back to his job there. The day they brought little Steve home from the hospital, Jimmie drove Gladys and me, along with Bela, Jim Ed, and Madaline, to Burlington. Jim


Ed was six and Madaline, four. Gladys stayed a week to help take care of the baby, but the rest of us came home the next day. I’ve forgotten where they put all of us, but we got along fine. We were all excited about having another smart Padgette baby. And he was beautiful and good too. They never had any trouble with him, and he’s turned out to be a fine man. Gladys rode the bus home. Doug tells how she got ready first thing the morning she was to leave because she couldn’t wait to come home and also how happy she was to get on the bus. I was mighty happy myself when she got off that bus in Saluda.

Then on November 29, 1958, our ninth grandchild came into this world—William Davenport Herlong—the second one named for me. (You remember our first grandchild was Bettina Davenport Boney.) They’d named William for both his grandfathers; Jimmie’s father was William Francis. Little William was about two weeks late, and he almost didn’t make it. He was a breech baby, and something was wrong with his lungs, plus he had a terrible rash all over his body. The doctors that were working with him, though, managed to get him straightened out before he left the hospital, and he’s been healthy ever since. This time Bela and Jimmie brought him to their house instead of to ours. I guess they thought they knew all they needed to know since they’d already had two. Bela didn’t go back to work that year, and they had a lady who came in to help her when the baby was little. William was smart right from the start. Somewhere there is a picture of him sitting in the white chair in their den holding the newspaper in front of him like he’s reading it. He must have been about fifteen months old. Jim Ed started to school that year, and Madaline was four years old—she’d wanted to name her little brother Timmie after the little boy in the television show she loved to watch—the one that had the big collie dog just like the ones we’d had at home. I named every one of my dogs Dan, and they helped me get the cows out of the pasture and to the house.


Also in 1958 our oldest grandchild got married. Bettina married Chuck Pearce. She was just a baby, but she’d met Chuck at their church and fallen in love. He was stationed at the air base there in Savannah. Madaline thought she was going to die to see her little girl get married and throw away all her opportunities to go to college. She was so upset she looked like hell warmed over at the wedding. Bettina had been to Furman one year and done well, but she didn’t want to go back. She thought she’d found her future when she met Chuck. I always thought it was kind of on the rebound. She’d gone with a real nice boy all through high school, and they’d broken up when she went to Furman. Anyway she married in the little chapel at First Baptist Church in Savannah, and they had a small reception afterwards. It was pretty sad to see our first granddaughter—one we’d always felt so close to because she’d stayed with us so much when she was little—married at eighteen. Of course, Gladys wasn’t but seventeen when we got married in April 1916. (She was eighteen the fourteenth of June that year.) But times were different back then. Gladys didn’t have many opportunities. You can bet your boots that if Gladys had had the chance to go to college, hell nor high water could have kept her away.

We spent Saturday night with Madaline after the bride and groom were gone, and we all felt like crying, but we just hoped for the best. The next day we came back home. Oh yes, Fletcher and Ruth DeLoache Thompson had a party for Bettina. Ruth was from Saluda—Jim and Mary DeLoache’s daughter—and Fletcher was an F.B.I. agent and worked with Boney there in Savannah. We’ve got pictures taken at their house.

Gladys had developed diabetes in the early fifties, and she had to watch what she ate. You remember the doctors started her on insulin shots. She couldn’t give them to herself, and I had to give them to her. It turned out she couldn’t take insulin though, so they tried Oranase, which she took by mouth, and that worked; it kept her blood sugar under control. She never let diabetes bother her. After she stopped eating much sugar, she lost weight, but she


never had been big. I guess she always worked too hard to gain weight. Yes sir, she could forever work—and move! She would get through doing something before most folks could get started. She could cook a meal in no time flat—and make biscuits too

I guess it’s the pictures we have that keep one particular week sharp in my mind—a week during the summer of 1959. Boney was the photographer, and he took pictures of every family. In those pictures, Doug and Barbara are holding little Steve as he’s walking along between them. Jimmie, Bela, Jim Ed, and Madaline are standing around the little chair where baby William sits. Edith and Curtis stand with Deedee and Bobby, and Madaline and Boney are with Harold and Barry. Bettina was married and living in Florida. She couldn’t come. Steve was just over a year old, and William was about nine months that summer when all our family gathered at our house for a good time. It was a rare occasion when everybody was together. Doug and Barbara were still in Burlington, and Curtis was still in Roanoke. He was promoted again and again with the Royal Globe Insurance Company, and soon he was sent to their home office on Henry Street in New York. He commuted from New Jersey each day. Madaline and Boney were still in Savannah.

We didn’t do much that week—just talked and talked, didn’t solve the problems of the world, but we tried. Padgetts have always been known for their love of real conversation—“argument,” in the old sense of the word. As far back as I can remember—and that’s back to Grandpa Mahlon, who was born in 1838—our family has talked about ideas. We enjoy taking different sides of a question and presenting different points of view. Sometimes onlookers call us “fussing,” but it isn’t fussing; it’s just discussing. One time Gus’ son Horace came by Bela’s house while I was there, and we immediately got into a heated discussion about some topic—I can’t remember what. William was there—home from college—and he was a little worried about how strong Horace was in his opinions. When Horace was leaving, he said to William, “Don’t take it too seriously, William. Sometime I don’t


agree with myself.” I’ve always enjoyed Horace’s visits; we can get into some good arguments. William’s pretty good too. He’s a lawyer now, but he’s been a thinker all his life. He could ask some hard questions when he was just a little fellow.

People look back at the fifties today and say they were peaceful. I reckon they were pretty peaceful for us. Of course, we were fighting the Korean War when they started and right up to the time they finally signed an uneasy peace treaty. Our boys are still in Korea today trying to keep the North Koreans on the other side of the 38th parallel. I imagine that’s a lonely job. We were facing the Russians everywhere; we thought they might bring nuclear war over the North Pole—the closest route to the United States from Russia. We knew the Communists were a threat then just like they’ve been ever since. William went to Russia in 1977 after he graduated from Westminster School in Atlanta. He was a member of the Westminster singing group that was chosen to go to Poland and Russia to sing. He told us about what Moscow looked like then—so dreary and bleak—and how their guide was afraid to say anything except the canned words that had been given to her. He had the audacity to argue about the Communist system with a girl from East Germany who was traveling in Russia. They met at the ballet. That’s William for you. When 1960 came I was sixty-six years old. It’s never been hard to remember my age. I can just add six to the year—since I was born six years before the turn of the century. I have never felt old—not even now.

Chapter 28

1960–1962

Another Grandson and a New Room

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When 1960 came around, we were getting in pretty good shape

financially, and Gladys decided that she wanted to work on the house. We had a little extra money since all the children were educated and out on their own. Gladys had always wanted a better house. She’d never forgotten what my cousin Julia Long Grigsby had said to me the first time she saw it—that the best thing we could do was stick a match to it. We hadn’t taken her advice, but I know Gladys would have liked to start over, but we never had enough money at one time, and she used to say, “The house can wait; the children can’t.”

It wasn’t much, but it was all we’d had for forty years. Now it was time to make some changes. I guess in a way Gladys had already started. She’d had two pieces of furniture refinished in the fifties—my Grandma Hester’s sideboard, which she willed to Ma and which my ma willed to me, and also the marble top dresser that had been Pa and Ma’s. The sideboard was heart pine with walnut veneer, and the dresser was solid walnut. Back in the forties we’d given Curtis and Edith the marble-top washstand that

Another Grandson and a New Room 297

matched the dresser and also an eating table we’d had made out of pine. That homemade table was a lot better that the round oak table Gladys bought second-hand from Milette and Grady Snelgrove. That round table was always wobbly, but we used it until Gladys bought a brand-new mahogany dining room table with six matching chairs and a little second-hand china closet that just fitted in our dining room.

We just had one bathroom, and she wanted to add a bedroom and another bath on the front. We hired Harold Bradley to do the work. Always before ,the Matthews brothers had done what little bit we’d had done, but this time they couldn’t come. Gladys drew out a little plan for the new room and bath, and the contractor went from there. He had to tear off part of the front porch—the part we’d made into a bedroom in 1950—and start from the ground. We’d made the part of the porch next to the kitchen into a dining room in 1937, so the porch was getting smaller and smaller. Gladys got what she wanted, and it looked real nice. The room had a private bath and a big closet. It was mighty roomy when our children came home with their families.

I was getting a right nice herd of cows, and I had bought a piece of land that joined the home place to the Mt. Willing place so I could move the cows from the pastures on one place to the pastures on the other without getting on the road. I planted grass that I could cut for hay. Of course, I didn’t have a truck to haul it in, but either Jimmie or my nephew Wallace would haul it in with their trucks. What oats and wheat I had, I’d hire somebody with a combine to come in and cut. We had a stockyard at Saluda with a sale every Thursday, so when I needed to sell a cow, I’d just get somebody to haul my cow to the market. It’d go through the line, and I’d get a check for what it had brought. A steady market was a good thing for us Saluda farmers. I always enjoyed seeing all the folks at the stockyard on Thursdays.

I’m going to stop right here and tell you about Wallace. He was one of Jouette and Miss Emmie’s twin sons—born in 1909. They were as different as day and night. Wallace was a go-getter. When


he was twenty-five, he married Jessie Harmon Hawkins, who was forty-two and a widow with five children. He did like his pa had done except Jouette wasn’t but seventeen when he married Miss Emmie, but she was 34 with five children. Walter married Gladys’ niece Rebecca Brooks, and they had two children. All four of them always lived in the house with Jouette and Miss Emmie. Wallace and Walter were good boys, but they were both kinda wild when they were young, and Walter drank awful bad for years and years. After his mama died, he quit and became a pillar of Emory Church. He taught Sunday School for years, and he and Rebecca brought up two of his grandchildren after his son died and their mother left them.

Walter didn’t have to go in service in World War II, but Wallace did. He was just young enough to be drafted into the Navy—he was thirty-three in 1942—and he didn’t have any children. He’d already bought a farm down on what we called the backwater. It was really the backwater of Lake Murray, which had been built in 1929 to produce electricity. After he was discharged, Wallace came back home and began farming again. He was always a help to me. I thought the world of Wallace. He could make anybody laugh. He did love to tell a good story—and they were all good when Wallace told them. God knows what I would have done without him when I was hurt in 1947. He helped Doug work my crop that year. Every year he hauled my hay in, and he hauled my cows to market. Of course, I paid him, but the fact was I could always depend on him. I never owned a pick-up truck in my life. In my old age, I did keep our old green Chevrolet when we bought a new one, and I used it as a truck, but I couldn’t haul a cow in it. Wallace and Jessie would come by our house a couple times a week, and Gladys would fix supper and we would eat. We usually had birds for supper—ones I’d killed and dressed. Gladys would fry the birds, make milk gravy, cook grits, and make slaw. That would be our supper. Or maybe after we had butchered, we’d have sausage and grits or liver pudding and grits or what we called hog steak and grits.


That’s another thing—during the winter Wallace stayed busy butchering for people. He could kill a hog, clean it, and have it hanging up the fastest of any man I ever saw. He always helped me with butchering, and Jessie helped Gladys clean the entrails to stuff sausage and pudding in. We’d always start early and be through by the middle of the afternoon. We’d usually butcher on Saturday or on holidays because Gladys needed to be at home to take care of the sausage and pudding. Whatever we were doing, with Wallace around, there was plenty of joking and laughter even though he complained a lot about his chest and back bothering him. We just took his complaints with a grain of salt. Poor boy, we didn’t know he was really sick. He died with a heart attack at 71 years old. Jessie lived to be ninety-six, and her mind was still good. Yes, Wallace was almost like a son or a brother to me. Of course, I was just fifteen when he was born.

I’ve been farming since I was nine years old, and I still love the land and watching things grow. One of the happiest times of my life has been on Sunday afternoons in the summer time when the cotton would be about hip high and I’d lead the way, and Gladys and the children would follow down the paths or in the cotton middles, and we’d “walk over the crop” to see how promising it looked. Sometime it’d be heavy with bolls or sparkling with squares, and I’d know I could pay off my Seed Loan debt and make a profit. Then a hail storm might hit or a dry spell or the boll weevil—and the crop would be gone. Or maybe I’d plant and it didn’t come up, or I’d plant and it would rain and rain and I couldn’t get a plow in the field to run around the cotton to get the grass out. To be truthful though, I probably remember the hard times better than the good times, but most years, I’ve ended up with a profit. And we always had plenty of meat and vegetables to eat in the summer and enough canned and frozen (after we got a freezer) to last through the winter. It’s been a joy and a sorrow to be a farmer, but it’s all I’ve known, and I wouldn’t trade it for any other job I ever saw.


Jimmie wanted to be a farmer too. Even though he had a college education and was trained in service as a pilot and an aircraft controller, he came back home and went in partnership to farm with his brother Ben. When Ben got a mail route in 1956, he didn’t want to farm anymore, so Jimmie bought the Tol Herlong place they’d owned together and row cropped it until 1960 when he started in the dairy business. His dream was to have a high-producing dairy herd. He thought he could have a steady income with cows producing milk every day and a truck coming to his farm to pick it up. He borrowed money and had Harold Gibson build his dairy barn and install the latest equipment. Then he bought a herd of Guernsey cows and began selling milk to Edisto Farms Dairy. Jimmie had never milked a cow by hand, and he wouldn’t be doing that now, but he sure had to work on that dairy. He had a 365-day, seven-day-a-week job milking cows. Then, in addition, he had to grow corn for silage and hay for roughage and gather and store it to feed that herd of cows. As always, how much he harvested depended on the weather. Of course, he put in an irrigation system pretty soon in the sixteen-acre field where he grew corn to fill up the big silo he’d built. I could tell he liked what he was doing even if he did have to get up at 4:30 every morning to go milk.

In 1961 our second great-grandson was born—Scott Pearce. His brother Doug was just two years old. Bettina had her hands full. Chuck was working at an airplane plant in Florida, so Doug was born there. They moved out to California and lived out there for a while where Chuck worked at another airplane plant. Then they moved back to Savannah. They had a hard time raising Doug, but Scott was good-natured and easy to handle right from the start. Bettina and Chuck lived together for a good long while, and then they divorced. After they came back to Savannah, she went to Armstrong College and graduated in 1971. We went to see her get that diploma. I felt like I had a little part in it because I had given her a car I had inherited so she’d have a way to get to her classes. My cousin Joe Oscar died in May 1968, and his sisters, Isabel and


Eva Sue, gave me his old Chevrolet—the only car he’d ever had. I didn’t need the car, so I gave it to Bettina. Isabel cried when she found out what I’d done. She said she knew Joe Oscar would be pleased that his old car was helping my granddaughter get an education. Bettina tried teaching, but she wasn’t like her mama and grandmama. She didn’t like teaching and ended up working in an office for a company that built houses out on the beach.

Remember I told you how close we were to Ruby and Willie Riser and their son George William or “Jack,” as a lot of people called him. We went to see Ruby and Willie when they didn’t hear from Jack for six weeks during World War II. Well, he came home from the war and went to work and also learned to fly a plane. He was sweet on Bela for a while, but she always thought of him like a brother, so he saw that wasn’t going anywhere, and he married a fine girl—Eleanor Hare—from down about the circle and they built a house right across the road from Willie and Ruby, and he ran the dairy his daddy had built. Jack and Eleanor had two cute little girls, Donna and Jennifer. Jack was a big, sturdy fellow, the picture of health, but he got sick and the doctors soon diagnosed him with cancer. Gladys and Bela and I went down to the Veterans’ Hospital a week or so before he died. He knew us, but the cancer had come out on his face, and he was suffering something terrible. He was Ruby and Willie’s only child, and his death just tore them up—and us too. He and Curtis had played together when they were little, and we’d been closer to the Risers than most brothers and sisters are. In fact, we named our little girl Ruby Euela because we thought so much of Ruby Riser.

Ruby and Willie had to pick up the pieces and go on just like everybody does. They spent a lot of time with those granddaughters, and Ruby was still teaching and working on her degree. She was like Gladys—didn’t get to go to college. Willie wanted her to teach, but he didn’t want her to take courses, so she was later starting on her degree than Gladys. Finally, the state made a rule that teachers who didn’t have a degree had to be working on one. A happy day for all of us was when she


graduated from Carolina in 1975, the same day that Bela got her doctor’s degree. We all celebrated together. In fact, there was a picture and a story in the Saluda paper about Ruby Riser and her namesake graduating at the same time. She was happy to have a degree, but it never made up for losing her son.

We’d bought a new Chevrolet, and Bela and Jimmie used it to go to Baltimore when they took little six-year-old Madaline to be examined by a woman heart doctor at Johns Hopkins. They were gone for several days, and we kept Jim Ed, who was eight, and William, who was two. The doctor in Columbia had thought that Madaline might need an operation on her heart, and this woman doctor had developed the surgery that he thought Madaline needed. Johns Hopkins was the one place where the operation was done. That woman doctor examined Madaline for two days and concluded that there was nothing wrong with her heart—that it just sounded funny. She told Bela and Jimmie that probably Madaline would have doctors concerned about her heart all her life but that it was a normal heart, that she didn’t need surgery. What a relief that was to all of us! We loved that little girl and couldn’t stand the idea of somebody cutting on her heart. That doctor was sure right; Madaline has always been strong and healthy. Course, she’s no bigger than a minute! She’s got little bones just like her grandma Lydia Magdaline, who never weighed a hundred pounds in her life.

Down at Batesburg Gladys was teaching with Nina Padget, Woodrow’s wife, and Woodrow and I had been friends a long time. We found out they liked to play canasta, and we did too. We invited them to come up one night to play canasta, and that was the beginning of something that lasted as long as Gladys lived—or until she got so she didn’t know one card from the other. Yes sir, we played canasta at least one night every week with Nina and Woodrow from 1960 until about 1975. Gladys died in 1979, but she had started going down in 1974 when she was 76 years old. After she retired in 1965, we played cards with Nina and Woodrow and also with Wilbur Crouch and his second wife, Lura. We’d all serve


ice cream and cookies when we finished our card playing. We lived pretty close together in the Mt. Willing section so we didn’t have far to go. Woodrow was a big farmer, and Wilbur was a little farmer like me, so we enjoyed talking about farming. We’d never had time to do any card playing before that, and besides, Gladys had been raised to believe that cards were the tool of the devil. She finally got over her raising, though, and enjoyed the nights we played canasta with our friends. We’d always done a lot of visiting, and I’d played setback at Ben Lindler’s store, but we’d never played cards much. Course, when we first married, we did play a little rook, but we got too busy to spend much time like that.

Let me tell you something funny. When Jim Ed was nine years old, he already knew he wanted to fish. His Granddaddy Frank had built a nice pond a mile down the road from us on Roseva’s land, and he stocked it with bream and bass. Jim Ed saw his daddy bring home fish he’d caught in that pond, and he wanted to fish too. The fall of 1961 I found out Ben Lindler had a second-hand rod and reel that was small enough for Jim Ed, and he was willing to sell it at a reasonable price. I told Jimmie about it, and he said it would be all right if I told Jim Ed. When I told that little fellow about the rod and reel, it set him on fire. He wanted it right then. I asked him how much money he had saved up. He told me, and I said we’d ask Mr. Ben if he would sell it for that. The next day Jimmie brought Jim Ed down to our house with his money, and then Jimmie went on to his farm. Jim Ed and I went to Ben Lindler’s store. Ben told us how much he wanted for the rod, and Jim Ed’s savings weren’t enough, so I said I’d help him out. He got the rod then, and that was the beginning of all his fishing. ‘Til this day, he loves to fish better than anything else in this world. He can catch fish too! As soon as he was grown and making enough money, he bought himself a big boat so he could catch bigger fish. Bela has a picture Jimmie took of Jim Ed at the beach when he was about ten years old. He’s holding up his rod with a little shark on


it—one he’d caught in the surf. He was proud of that shark—he told me about it as soon as he got home.

Gladys and I had a surprise that year on a Sunday afternoon in 1961 about the middle of April—the one closest to April 16. Bela had a celebration for our forty-fifth wedding anniversary. I think she was afraid we wouldn’t make it to our fiftieth. It was a simple little drop-in, as she called it, and she just invited our dearest friends—about twenty couples, people we’d known all our lives. She didn’t even tell Madaline, Curtis, and Doug about it. It was a sort of spur-of-the-moment thing, she said. She hadn’t even bought a corsage for Gladys, and when Jeff and Betty Griffith came in, Betty was wearing an orchid she’d had for church that morning. (It was Easter Sunday.) She took it off right straight and pinned it on Gladys. I’ll never forget that. Betty’s mother was Julia Long, my first cousin, and she was always good to me. Everybody stayed a long time, and when we got home, we talked about what a good time we’d had. That’s one thing Gladys and I always enjoyed a lot: we loved to talk to each other. We always seemed to have plenty to say, and we talked over everything. I guess you could say we were best friends before we married, and we stayed best friends all our years together. It nearly broke my heart when she wouldn’t sleep with me the night before we took her to the hospital when she’d got so thin and weak that we knew she wouldn’t last long. She said she wouldn’t sleep with a stranger. That was August 6, 1979. Madaline was at home. She’d come to help Bela and me take Gladys to Aiken to see the doctor the next morning. Gladys wouldn’t have gotten in the car if she’d known she was going to the doctor, so we told her we were going to visit our cousin. We weren’t lying either because the doctor was Dr. Raymond Hesse, Gladys’ first cousin’s grandson. That made him Gladys’ cousin too.

Things were rocking along smoothly—Gladys teaching and me tending to my cows and hunting in the winter. The grandchildren were growing up—Bettina married and Harold graduating from high school. But the most important happening in 1962 was the


birth of Mark Douglas Padgette—yes, his name is spelled with an e. I forgot to tell you Gladys added that e on our children’s names when they were born. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. Curtis and Doug have fussed about it a lot—specially after they moved to Atlanta and had to put at the beginning of the Padgetts in the telephone directory: “See also Padgette.” Anyway, Doug and Barbara had named this baby after me, my third namesake—Bettina and William have the Davenport, and now Mark has the Douglas. My name is Douglas Davenport, and Mark is Mark Douglas. Gladys and I named both our sons after me—Curtis Davenport and Douglas Donald. Ma named me after her nephew Doug Davenport, Uncle Belton’s son. She thought a lot of him, and she liked the name. Doug and Barbara were still in Burlington, but Gladys didn’t go up there to help them this time. She was still teaching and couldn’t get off. Mark was our tenth grandchild, and we were mighty proud. He was a handsome little boy. He’s still handsome, and he has integrity. And that’s what counts.

The spring of 1962 somehow or other Bela found out that Jouette had a walnut bed that had belonged to Ma and Pa—the one that matched the marble-top bureau and washstand we had. After the bed got in bad shape, Jouette put it in the old store that Johnny Herlong had run in front of the house where he and Mrs. Emmie lived. Bela asked Jouette if she could have it. He didn’t think it was any good, and he told her she was welcome to it. Wallace came by the house in his truck, and I asked him to take me and go by Jouette’s and get the bed. We had a time getting it out of that old storehouse, but we finally did, and we hauled it to town and threw it off in Bela’s back yard. It was in a lot of pieces, and it looked like it wasn’t worth a dime. Jouette had ridden to town with us, and when he saw that pile of junk in Bela’s yard, he said he didn’t know what in the hell she wanted with that old bed.

The end of that story is she had Bob Sauer, a man who worked on old furniture, glue it back together, and then she refinished it herself, and if didn’t look like new, I’m a monkey’s uncle. You’d never guess what she did then. She told me and Gladys that she


wanted us to use it as long as we lived. We could put it in the room with the bureau that went with it. Jimmie brought it down to our house, and we put it up. He had to fix the railings and screw them in because the supports were too loose to hold the sides. Ma and Pa had two bedroom suits like that. Gus has a bureau and a washstand, and a little marble-top table, and he had had a bed, but it fell down and he cut it up and burned it in the stove. Jouette had the bed Bela got, and I had a bureau and a washstand. Ma had given the other marble-top table to Emory Church just before she died. We put a little marker on it when we gave the little chest to Emory in Gladys’ memory after she died.

Uncle Luther, Pa’s brother, had died in October of 1961. Actually he tried to kill himself—he was so blue after Aunt Sallie died—but he wasn’t successful and died in the hospital. His son Willie had to settle the estate, and he asked me to help him with the house. It didn’t have much in it because they’d never had money to buy anything. Uncle Luther was a reader and a thinker though, and they did have lots and lots of books—books Willie didn’t want. Bela had him and his wife for supper many a night when they’d come from Charleston to see about things. Of course, she always had Gladys and me too. One night Willie asked Bela if she wanted Aunt Sallie’s oak safe and some of the books. She said she’d be tickled to get the books and the safe. She’d got Ma’s walnut table from Gus. He and Essie had used it for years, but it was wobbly, and they’d put it in the attic when they moved into the little house Gus’ son Horace had built for them. They were glad to give it to her. She’d refinished it and was using it in her dining room, but she didn’t have anywhere to put her china. The safe was the answer to that. Jimmie put a piece of plywood over the back of the safe to make it strong and a new shelf in the bottom, and he put glass in the top doors where Aunt Sallie had had screen wire. After Bela refinished it. they put it in their dining room, and it looks good with the dishes in it.

Barry spent the first part of the summer of 1962 with Gladys and me. He was fourteen at the time, and he said he’d rather


spend time out in the country on our farm than do anything else in the world. We kept him pretty busy with the garden and the yard. I believe in keeping children working; that way they don’t get into trouble. Bela and Jimmie had finished their three rooms upstairs during the winter, and they had to be painted. They turned Barry and Jim Ed loose painting those rooms. Barry was just fourteen, and Jim Ed was ten, but the two of them did a pretty good job. Of course, Bela worked too, and when she had to do something else, she kept her eye on them. They would walk to the swimming pool that’s close to Bela’s house every afternoon after they quit painting. Barry seemed pretty steady then; he hadn’t got all mixed up like he was by the time he was sixteen. He’s a good-looking boy, and the girls have always fallen head over heels for him. He’s been married five times now, I think. He’s caused Madaline and Boney a lot of heartache—and himself too. But you have to take the sorrow with the joy.

Out in August before school started, Bela, little Madaline, and William rode a bus to Burlington to visit Doug and Barbara. Jim Ed stayed with us, and Jimmie came down here to eat. That summer Steve and William were both four, and Madaline was eight. We didn’t know it then, but that was the last summer they’d be in Burlington. Doug was such a good engineer that he was one of fifteen from all the hundreds that worked for AT&T who was chosen to go to graduate school in a special program which the company was just beginning. The fifteen that had been picked would be moved to New Jersey where they would also work some at Western Electric Research Lab and go to classes at Princeton for two years to earn a Master’s degree in Operations Research—a field that was just opening up. I never did know for sure what it was all about, but I know it was quite an honor for Doug to be chosen. The company paid for everything, and Doug earned his regular salary. You can’t ask for any better than that, can you? He says now he didn’t know at first whether he’d be able to compete, but he found out pretty quick that he was just as good as any of the rest and better than most.


When he got his diploma in 1965, Gladys and I went up for the graduation. The degree was from Lehigh University since Princeton didn’t offer this degree and Lehigh did. They had the courses taught at Princeton because it was close to the lab where the fifteen would be working part-time. It was a great feeling to see my son get that degree. He’d never had to work hard to learn; it just came easy to him. Miss Emmie Walton, his chemistry teacher in high school, thought it came too easy. I think she really resented how smart he was. He was smart in another way when he got Barbara. She’s the prettiest girl you ever saw, and she’s good too. When he finished his degree, he was sent to work on Broadway at AT&T’s headquarters. He never did like commuting from New Jersey where he lived to New York every day—nearly an hour each way on the train. Eventually he was moved to Atlanta, and he felt like he’d come home. Curtis had been made regional manager of Royal Globe Insurance company for the whole Southeast in 1961 and was sent to Atlanta, but that was years before Doug got there.

Gladys and I never did travel much, but we did go to some of the places where our children were living. We went to Atlanta and Baltimore and Charleston and Savannah to see Madaline and her family. We went to Salisbury and Atlanta to see Curtis and his family. We never did get to Roanoke or New Jersey when he was living up there. We went to Burlington and New Jersey and Florida and Atlanta to see Doug and his family, and we never had to go far to see Bela’s family—just the seven miles to Saluda. It was good to have one of them near enough to see often. Of course, when they’re near, you know all about their problems as well as their joys, and because you love them so much, you suffer along with them just as you rejoice along with them. We’re been awful lucky with our children. They have, everyone of them, been solid citizens. All four of them are true blue; you can trust them. Gladys and I tried to live that way before them. A person’s name is the most important possession he has. It’s easily broken and hard to mend.

Chapter 29

1963–1965

Five Big Events

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The spring of 1963, when it came time for contracts to go out

for teachers to sign to teach the next year, Gladys found out that she was going to have to retire. Lexington School District Three had a policy that every employee had to retire at sixty-five. Gladys would be sixty-five the fourteenth of June, but she wasn’t ready to quit. She loved the students and she loved the work itself. She had no say in the matter; it was cut and dried. Ruby Riser was the same age as Gladys, so she had to retire too. Ruby taught for years after that in a private school and finally got her degree in 1975. The school gave Gladys and Ruby a retirement party, and everyone said they would miss them. There was a long article about each one of them in the Batesburg paper.

Gladys was pretty down-hearted for a while, but something happened that changed her. One day Joe Pou, one of her former piano students, came to see her. (You remember I told you she taught piano lessons too.) At that time he was principal at Ridge Spring Elementary School. She had no idea why he had come, but


she was mighty glad to see him. What he told her was that he had read in the paper about her retiring and that he thought she was too young and too valuable to quit. He wanted her to come to Ridge Spring to teach for him. She didn’t need time to think. She told him she’d be happy to come, and she signed a contract right then. Ridge Spring wasn’t any farther from us than Batesburg, so everything worked out fine. After he left, she was singing fixing supper—her regular song—“Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine.” I knew she was relieved that she didn’t have to stay home and not teach. She just wasn’t ready for that yet. It turned out that she taught two years at Ridge Spring—two good years. The parents and the students loved and respected her. They knew they had an opportunity that few people had—to learn from a teacher who loved teaching and learning. She quit for good when she was sixty-seven, but she substituted lots after that.

Everybody in the whole world knows what happened in November of 1963—and it happened in the South—Dallas, Texas, to be exact. Our young president was shot in the head as he was riding in a parade in an open car down a street with crowds all around him. We’ve seen it on television a thousand times since. We saw his beautiful wife get blood on her pink suit as she grabbed her young husband. We watched Lyndon Johnson get sworn in as president after Kennedy was pronounced dead in the hospital. The whole world mourned that week. We saw Jackie Kennedy and her two small children follow the coffin to the grave. I watched it on the television we’d bought back in 1956—our first one, black and white, of course. It brought everything right into our house. We could see the faces of the mourners. I voted for John F. Kennedy, and I grieved for his family and for the whole nation. I didn’t like all his policies, but I knew that the Negroes had been treated wrong, and he accomplished more dead than he ever would have alive. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in a hurry, and that has made a difference—as much as integration did. Of course, the Civil Rights Act was mainly meant to affect the South, but it’s affected the whole nation. Kennedy got us involved

Five Big Events 311

in Viet Nam, and Johnson got us bogged down, so much so that he wouldn’t run a second time. The sixties were a hard time with the Viet Nam War and the Hippie movement and drugs. Some things that happened are hard to figure out. The war was still going on when Jim Ed turned eighteen the summer of 1970, but he went to college, so he didn’t have to go to Viet Nam.

In 1964 we bought a new Chevrolet, and in 1965 Madaline's Harold drove us in it to see Doug and Barbara and to go to Doug's graduation. (I've already told you about that graduation.) We asked little Madaline to go with us. She was ten years old, and no trouble at all. Harold drove and I sat on the front seat beside him. Gladys and Madaline sat in the back, and Madaline colored and read and drew pictures most of the way up there. Of course, Gladys always knew how to occupy children, and she was probably helping Madaline entertain herself. We enjoyed our visit. The World’s Fair was in New York that summer, and Doug and Barbara took us there for the day. We were walking along, talking and laughing, and suddenly I heard someone say, “Davenport Padgett, what are you doing at the World’s Fair?” I looked up and there was Sue Grigsby Givens from Saluda with her husband Louis. Sue says what she thinks—just like her grandmother Julia Long Grigsby, my first cousin, always did. We exclaimed over seeing each other so far away from home, talked a few minutes, and then went on our way. I couldn’t believe, as small as Saluda is, that two families—kinfolks too—from our little area of the woods were there on the same day and neither knew that the other was coming. It’s a small world, isn’t it?

I’ve already told you that Gladys retired for good in 1965. We were lucky because by that time she had taught 45 years, and that’s the years of service her pension was based on. What she drew each month looked good to us—particularly since it hadn’t been too long that teachers drew retirement. Gladys and I always had separate bank accounts. She knew what she used her money for, and I knew what I used mine for. Since neither one of us threw our money away on trash, our system worked fine. Of course,


she’d always fussed at me for spending money on cigarettes. Nobody knew in those days that smokers were killing themselves. That wasn’t the reason Gladys hated for me to smoke. No, she said I might as well be burning up dollar bills.

For the first time since Bela was a baby, Gladys was home during the day time. I’d always fixed my own dinner every day while she was gone (usually two fried eggs), but after she retired, she fixed it for both of us. I should have gained weight, but I didn’t. I guess I walked it off. Gladys had played the piano ever since she was a girl. She played the old pump organ we had at Emory before we got a piano, and she played the piano there for years. She knew how to play, but she wanted to know more, so after she retired, she took piano lessons from Miss Vivian Ellis. I’d drive her up to the big old house where the Ellises lived on the other side of Saluda, and I’d talk with Hubert Ellis, Miss Vivian’s brother, while Gladys had her lesson. He was a farmer too, but he raised all kind of odd things—like pea fowl, for example. His peacocks strutted around the yard and made their queer noises. He liked to try new varieties of plants too. It was interesting to talk to him. There were three of the Ellises—Vivian, Hubert, and Sidelle—and none of them ever married. I felt sorry for them; they missed the best part of life—having someone you love who loves you and, maybe best of all, having children to fill your life up and carry a part of you down the generations.

In 1965 Boney retired from the FBI. He decided that he’d practice law right there in Savannah where they were living. Madaline had been teaching history at Savannah High School for years, and Barry was still in high school. They’d been having trouble with him since he was about sixteen. He didn’t work hard in school like Bettina and Harold had done, and they took him to a psychiatrist to try to find the cause of his problems. Anyway, Boney had a law degree, but he’d never taken the bar exam. If he was going to practice law, he had to pass it. He went to Atlanta for a while and took the Bar Review course, which was intense, he said. Now Boney was smart—and I mean smart! He’d studied law

Five Big Events 313

back in the early forties and hadn’t seen a law book since then, but after he took that course, he stood the bar exam and passed it the first time. He opened a little office there in Savannah after that. Harold graduated from Furman in 1966 with honors and went to Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He married Tinker Folsom from Columbia the summer of 1966, and he took her to graduate school with him. She was from Columbia and cute as a speckled pig. Her daddy was a banker in Columbia. We went to their big wedding at Trenholm Road Methodist Church in Columbia. Gladys bought a fine new dress to be the grandmother of the groom.

Bela got her Master’s degree in English in 1965, but she didn’t even go to the graduation at Carolina. She told them just to send her the diploma in the mail. Madaline was working on her Masters at Georgia Southern College in Statesboro, Georgia—a trip of sixty miles each way every day. I told you Gladys put the need for an education in our children’s minds. All four of them believe in it—and they’re educating our grandchildren too. I tell you they’re stuck on education.

Chapter 30

1966–1967

Celebrating Fifty Years Together

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In April 1966 Gladys and I had been married fifty years. She

was sixty-seven and I was seventy-one. Neither one of us felt old, and we didn’t look old, if I do say so myself. You can look at the pictures they took at the anniversary party our children gave us at Emory one Sunday afternoon and see we didn’t look old enough to be celebrating fifty years together.

Oh, it was a grand party. Bela took charge and helped us make out the guest list. She sent out over two hundred invitations—every one of them she wrote herself. People came from near and far, and they gave us gifts—china and crystal and lots of other stuff. Bela had picked out the patterns. She said since we didn’t have any gifts when we got married, she thought it only fair that people have a chance to give us gifts on our fiftieth anniversary. So many cousins and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews and friends came that we had a big time just laughing and talking and remembering old times. The reception lasted a lot longer than it was supposed to. People kept coming and they just stayed.

Of course, Madaline and Boney, Curtis and Edith, Bela and Jimmie, and Doug and Barbara were all there with all our grandchildren except Harold, who was away in school at Wharton

Celebrating Fifty Years Together 315

in Philadelphia, and Bobby, who was in school at Duke. It was too far for them to come just for a party. My brother Gus’ daughter, Grace, and her husband did fly down from Chicago just to come, though. They said they’d come to my funeral if I died, and they thought it was better to come to celebrate while we were still alive. I agree with that philosophy. Bela brought Mary Alice from Mrs. Hyler’s house to the party, and she acted like she had forgotten all her anger toward us. (Gladys had long since got over her hurt.) Mary Alice laughed and seemed glad to be with us. Bela had made her a pretty blue dress and bought a hat to go with it, so she looked real nice, and she stood at the end of the receiving line with us.

We got our picture in the papers with a good write-up too. Gladys looked like a bride in that picture, and she could still do anything. She wrote thank-you letters to all the people who gave us gifts—and we got a lot of them. God knows, we had no idea how little time she had left to be smart like she’d always been. I’m glad I didn’t know what was coming.

Gladys had been substituting in the Batesburg schools and at Saluda after she retired. She’d substituted over three months at Utopia down below the Circle for Tiny Holmes when Tiny went to Boston to stay with her son, who’d been hurt so bad in the big truck he was driving. She did a lot of substituting for Bela at Saluda High School during the next school year—1966-67. That was the year that Bela was named the South Carolina Teacher of the Year and one of the top five finalists in the nation. It was the first time Saluda had ever even nominated anybody for the South Carolina Teacher of the Year. Mr. Bradley, the superintendent, had kept asking Bela for information, she said, and she would give him what he asked for. She didn’t really know what he was doing with it. Then one night just before Thanksgiving while she was cooking supper, she got a call from the State Department of Education, and they told her she had been named South Carolina’s Teacher of the year. There was no time off and no money for expenses that went with the honor, but there were lots of


obligations, and one of them was traveling to different schools and meetings and making speeches. Another thing she had to do was prepare a book for the state to send for her to compete for National Teacher of the Year. Yes, Gladys was the substitute in Bela’s eleventh and twelfth grade English classes, and she sure did enjoy working there. There’s a great picture of her in Bela’s classroom; she’s got her hands spread out wide and an excited look on her face.

A week or so before Christmas Bela got word that she was one of the five finalists for National Teacher of the Year and that a big executive from Look magazine would go to all five teachers—whatever state they lived in—and observe them and interview people about them. The whole county was excited about his visit, and the school did a lot of sprucing up. Mr. Jerry Burke seemed to be a down-to-earth fellow to me, even if he did work in New York on Look magazine. He wrote a book about all the teachers he had observed, and Bela is in it. She didn’t become National Teacher of the Year, but she did have her picture in Look when they did an article on the one chosen. She had to miss school a lot, and Gladys taught for her, so the students didn’t miss anything. Gladys was always a good teacher.

As I said, Bela didn’t win the contest, but she had something far better. She found out just a few days before the holidays that she’d be having our eleventh grandchild in July. It was a big surprise since Jim Ed was almost fifteen, Madaline almost thirteen, and William almost nine, but we were all mighty happy. Bela had to fulfill all her obligations as South Carolina’s Teacher of the Year, and she didn’t learn until out in the spring that she wasn’t the national winner, so she hadn’t told many people about the baby until after she found out.

Minier Alice Herlong, our eleventh and last grandchild, was born on July 25, 1967—a fine, healthy baby girl and as pretty as a picture. She was always happy, and she was talking by the time she was fifteen months old. Lizzie Mae Simkins was living on Jimmie’s dairy farm then, and she kept Alice for the six years


before she went to school. This time Bela went back to work when Alice was just a month old. Alice loved Lizzie Mae, and Lizzie Mae loved Alice. Bela did something Gladys never tried to do. That whole first semester after Alice was born, she’d come home at lunch time and nurse Alice and eat her own lunch—in thirty-five minutes. Gladys nursed all four of ours, but she never tried that.

I guess I have more to say about Bela’s children than about any of the rest because I saw them so much. They came down to our house nearly every Sunday for dinner, or we went up to their house. And every Saturday morning from the time Bela came back to Saluda to live, Gladys and I went to her house. I would usually go up town and visit with some of my buddies, and Gladys would wash her hair and then Bela would roll it up. For years before Bela got a hair dryer, we’d just go on home, and Gladys would let her hair dry and then comb it herself. But sometime in the sixties, they came out with a little hair dryer that Bela bought, and after that, Gladys dried her hair there, and then Bela combed it for her. Bela gave her home permanents too. I was glad they were at her house because those things smelled worse than chicken manure

Boney had a bad heart attack that fall. He stayed in the hospital from September to just before Christmas. He tried to come home a couple of times, but they had to rush him back. He took a pile of pills every day just to stay alive, and he looked pale and weak when he did come home. After he got some better, he went to the heart clinic at Emory Hospital in Atlanta. He gradually gained some of his strength back and worked a little at his office. He never was strong again, but he didn’t die until 1971. This was before the doctors had learned how to operate on a bad heart.

That summer of 1967 Curtis’ son Bobby married Carolyn somebody—I never knew her last name. The wedding was in New Jersey, I think. Of course, Bela and Jimmie couldn’t go because of the baby, and Gladys and I didn’t get to go either. Madaline and Boney went, and they were so upset because they’d made that long trip and somehow they didn’t get included in the family section at the wedding. It didn’t seem too important to me, but I


guess they thought it was important. We didn’t meet Carolyn until she and Bobby came to visit the summer of 1969. She seemed to be a nice girl, and she and Bobby had two fine children—Rob and Beth—and then they divorced. Bobby came down here with those children by himself when Beth wasn’t a year old. I remember he fed her fresh peaches. Gladys and I were afraid they’d upset her stomach, but they didn’t seem to hurt her. Bob and Carolyn married after their junior year at Duke, and then went back and finished. Maybe they were just too young. Of course, Gladys and I were young too, but people back then didn’t get divorces. When you married, you married for life—come Hell or high water! Gladys and I fussed a lot, but we never thought of separating. We needed each other too much for that.

I was still doing a lot of hunting in the winter, but I wasn’t training dogs to sell anymore. I had to train my own though. I’ve had some fine bird dogs in my day—good pointers and good retrievers. And I had the birds right around my house to train them with. You’ve got to have birds to hunt if you’re going to train dogs. I trained dogs like I believe you need to bring up children. Let them know what you expect of them and why you expect it, and then practice with them what you want them to do. Dogs and children have minds of their own, and you have to be firm and strong and not wishy-washy, and most of all, you have to respect them and let them know that too. I loved my dogs, and I loved my children and my grandchildren. I always let my grandchildren know what I expected, and I always expected the best out of them. And most of the time they’ve produced the best, I’m proud to say.

Things were going along pretty good for all of us. What I was making off my cows and the pension Gladys was getting plus our social security made us pretty comfortable. We had a little saved up in the bank, and, of course, we had the land. I wouldn’t sell that, though, unless I was desperate. We were comfortable, and both of us were pretty healthy. For two people who started off with nothing and never had any inheritance—Mary Alice didn’t


die until 1976, so Gladys didn’t inherit the $15,000 until then—we had done pretty well.

We were enjoying our days together. We usually had a good time wherever we went, and we still had a lot of places to go. People our age still visited a lot then. One day when we went to see Mary Alice, Mrs. Hyler cornered us, and we found out we had a big problem. Yes, Mary Alice was still living at Mrs. Hyler’s boarding house, and at first, she’d been able to help out some with serving the meals and the cleaning, but Mrs. Hyler told us that Mary Alice wasn’t doing well, that she needed someone to watch out for her, that it wasn’t safe for her to be alone since she was becoming more and more forgetful. We didn’t know much about it then, but it’s what people call Alzheimer’s today. We knew we had to do something; Gladys wasn’t able to take care of her sister, so the only solution was to put her in the Saluda Nursing Center.

One of the things we had to do was to clean out her house. It had stayed just as it was while Mary Alice was living at Mrs. Hyler’s boarding house. But that summer of 1968 Jimmie and one of his hands helped Gladys and Bela and me—with Mary Alice watching—move everything out of the house so we could rent it and help a little on the cost of the nursing home. We knew Mary Alice wouldn’t be coming back and that thieves might break in. We stored some of the furniture in our barn and some in Bela’s basement. She spent a lot of that summer refinishing pieces that she could use.

I had got Mary Alice to give me her power-of-attorney, and I began to take care of her affairs. She had the land she had inherited and some money in the bank. The law said that a person could get government help and keep his home after all the savings had been used to pay for the nursing home. It didn’t take long to use up what savings Mary Alice had—mainly the money she’d inherited from her mother and then that from Cantey. After that money was all gone, I applied for government help for her and got it because all she had left was her home. She stayed in the nursing center for seven years, and she got so bad she didn’t know


anybody or anything. She finally died in 1976, and by that time Gladys had already started down the same road. What a terrible road that was!

Chapter 31

1968–1969

Three Deaths and an Accident

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In March of 1968 my brother Gus’ wife, Essie, died suddenly

with a heart attack. She’d been sick, and Dr. Wise had sent her to the Greenwood Hospital, but nobody knew she was sick enough to die. After a couple of days, she seemed to be feeling better, and Gus thought it was all right for him to go home to spend the night. Before he could get back to the hospital the next morning, they called him and said Essie had died with a heart attack. Everybody was shocked. They buried her at Travis Park Cemetery, and Gus had to learn to live by himself. He was melancholy and felt like he couldn’t go on.

Part of the trouble was he’d never done a thing around the house. Essie had done everything. He didn’t know how to boil water. He had to learn how to fix something to eat. At that time you couldn’t buy much prepared food in Saluda. And he did learn. I remember how proud he was when he made ambrosia one time. All you do to make ambrosia is peel and cut up oranges and put a little sugar and coconut with them and mix it up good. But it wasn’t simple to him! He pulled out of his depression and even got interested in Carrie Mae Coleman—the daughter of the cousin who’d kept him as an eighteen-month-old baby when Ma was so


sick. They just kept company though; they never married. Gus came down to our house every Sunday night from the time Essie died until he died in 1975. Gladys fixed a hot supper, and he seemed to enjoy the meal and just being with us. I was only seven years older than Gus was, but I gave him a home three times in life. After he’d raised a family—a successful family—and his wife died, my wife and I opened our doors to him a fourth time. He came to our house every Sunday night until he died. I still think about him a lot and especially about supper time on Sunday nights. It just shows you how strong a habit is.

Something the General Assembly had done that year affected every county in South Carolina. They changed the way counties were governed. Always the senator and the legislators from a county had had control over the county, but that changed when the legislature passed the Home Rule Bill. Every county would govern itself through a County Council that would be elected by the people in the county. The summer of 1968 was the first time an election was held, and Jimmie Herlong announced that he was running for Chairman of the County Council. Mr. Jim Wheeler, who was eighty years old at the time and should have stayed out of it, also ran for the chairman’s seat. Several others did too, but they weren’t much competition.

Of course, we were all pulling for Jimmie to win, but Jimmie was no politician. He wasn’t one to shake hands and kiss babies or even do much going from door to door asking people to vote for him. He had some fliers printed that gave his credentials. That’s where I came in. I spent a lot of days going around Saluda County giving out fliers and asking people to vote for Jimmie. I’d tell them he was my son-in-law and that he was a straight-shooter and would do what was right. Jimmie would’ve made a good chairman, but people didn’t know him, and they did know Mr. Jim. He’d been state senator several times. Bela did a little campaigning for Jimmie, and somehow he got into the second race—just Jimmie and Mr. Jim—and Mr. Jim won by a narrow margin. Saluda County needed to take advantage of this new way

Three Deaths and an Accident 323

of governing itself, but Mr. Jim was too old to see the needs. He thought things were pretty good as they were—and maybe they were for him.

Like I told you, Saluda had never had a mill in the early days when all the little towns around became mill towns, and people in Saluda kinda looked down on mill towns. Of course, those mill towns had a much stronger economy than Saluda had. It wasn’t until Saluda got some sewing plants in the late thirties that there were any jobs not connected with farming, and then when Milliken came in, Saluda’s tax base went up. Farm land doesn’t create much tax, and you can’t run a county and its schools without a good tax base. Well, anyway, Mr. Jim served a long time, and that election ended Jimmie’s politics. He said he’d learned his lesson.

That summer of 1968 the United States seemed to be in turmoil. College students were protesting the war and “streaking” across campuses—which meant they were running around buck-naked. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated—each one by somebody crazy with hate. It was a terrible time. The Viet Nam war seemed to be bogged down, and we were seeing on our television sets what was happening over there. Our boys were being killed and maimed, and the country was getting tired of the war that seemed to have no end in sight, and soldiers couldn’t tell the South Viet Nam people from the North, and they’d get ambushed and cut off in the jungles. It’d be a while yet before the government gave up and pulled our people out.

Things were going pretty good with Jimmie’s dairy. He’d bought another herd of cows. His Uncle Mike Herlong went out of the dairy business, and Jimmie bought his herd. He was switching over from Guernseys to Holsteins. Jim Ed was in eleventh grade the fall of 1968, and Madaline was in ninth grade. Both of them were doing all right. Jim Ed worked hard on the farm—day in and day out with Jimmie. In fact, he’d been with Jimmie when Jimmie’s finger got caught in the silage harvester. He wasn’t old enough to drive, and Jimmie had to drive himself and Jim Ed


home so Bela could take him to the hospital in Greenwood. The doctors were able to save his finger, but it was touch and go for awhile. Jim Ed loved the farm and the ponds Jimmie had built there—a small one and an eight-acre one to use to irrigate crops—particularly the corn he grew to put in his silo. Gladys and I were slowing down some—not much though. We went everywhere we were invited, and we visited a lot of people when we hadn’t been invited. As I told you, people used to visit like that. Friends were always dropping in on us, and we were always happy to see them. Of course, we didn’t have a telephone until the early sixties, so there was no such thing as calling ahead. We just figured people enjoyed having company as much as we did. Gladys loved to invite people to eat with us—even if our house was little. There seemed to be room for people to crowd around the table, and Gladys’ cooking was always good.

We went to Bela’s house for supper every Christmas Eve, and we’d open our presents for each other. I told you Bela talked us into spending one Christmas Eve night with them so that the next morning we could see the children find what Santa Claus had brought them. We enjoyed that time, but we never did it again because we liked to be in our own home on Christmas morning. Gladys and I always had some little gift for each other. We never believed in spending a lot of money on gifts. We have some good pictures of Christmas Eve 1968. Alice was seventeen months old (she was born on July 25, you remember), and Jimmie was kneeling beside her using his two good hands to wrap and rewrap some pajamas she’d already opened—just because she wanted him to. He opened a lot of Christmas presents after that Christmas of ‘68, but it was the last time he’d ever be able to use both hands.

February of 1969 was a bad month for me. First, my brother Jouette died suddenly. He’d had the hardest time of anybody, and he’d caused a lot of pain too. He was seventy-nine years old. We buried him at Emory on February 21, and I cried—for his life and his death. He was a mother and a brother to me. After he’d come to our house one Sunday morning cussing and raring, I’d had to


sign for him to go to the state hospital because he was in such bad shape. I did it because I loved him and because I knew he needed help. He was just twelve when Ma died, but he took care of me when Pa didn’t. I’ll never forget the time he blessed Pa out because he’d forgot my Santa Claus. That was right after Ma died, and Jouette wasn’t anything but a chap himself. But he was looking out for me. He was just a boy seventeen years old when he married Mrs. Emmie and took on a family of five. He had bouts of depression all his life, but he’d come out of them and go on working. Grady had died as a baby, Curtis had died at twenty-three, and now Jouette was gone at seventy-nine. Gus was the only brother I had left.

My good friend Frank Herlong got sick in January and died in February too. He was feeling good at Christmas. In fact, he was best man at his step-grandson’s wedding to Billy Coleman’s daughter. They got married at St. Paul and had the reception at the Ben Crouch house on the hill. I think Frank had as good time as anybody that night. Ray Hesse had come to live with Frank and his second wife Carrie, Ray’s grandmother, when he was in the eighth grade, and so Frank had a lot to do with the fine man and good doctor he turned out to be. Ray was the doctor who treated Gladys in August before she died in November. Frank and I grew up together, and we stayed friends over all the years. I’ve told you that his son married my daughter, so we were grandfathers to four of the same children—Bela and Jimmie’s. They buried him at Travis Park, the cemetery in Saluda, on February 17—just days before Jouette was buried. Their deaths hit Gladys and me hard. We knew we might be next. As I’ve said many a time, “The young do die, and the old must die.” Gladys and I realized we were getting old. We’d already made our wills, but we decided that we needed to make a list of what things we wanted our children to have. Bela helped us write down a list, and it’s still around here somewhere.

The next thing I’m going to tell you about should never have happened. The first we knew about the accident was a telephone


call late on the afternoon of May 11, 1969—Mother’s Day. Yes, we had a phone by that time. Bela called to ask us to come stay with the children. She said Jimmie had just fallen on a monkey bridge (I’d never heard of such a thing) and that the ambulance was taking him to the Columbia Hospital and she was going to ride in it. She said Caroline had the children. Of course, we told her we’d go right straight to see about them and stay as long as she needed us. We went to Caroline and Ben’s house. (Ben is Jimmie’s brother that lives next door.) Caroline was there with all the children, but Ben had gone in his car behind the ambulance. Caroline told us about the accident. Two older boys and William had built a monkey bridge like the one in their Scout handbook to earn a merit badge. Jimmie had gone with Bela and Alice to look at it, and he’d decided to climb up and walk across. When he got about three-fourths of the way across, the whole thing collapsed, and Jimmie fell on soft grass. The bridge was only about ten feet high, so nobody thought he was hurt bad, but when they reached him, he was unconscious. The men standing around took him into the house next door—Bill and Lois Craven’s house—and someone called Dr. Sawyer. He came within five minutes and examined him and knew he had a brain injury since there was no response in his whole right side. Gladys and I couldn’t believe it was serious. Maybe he was all right by the time we heard the news.

He wasn’t ever all right again. That was the beginning of what was to be a long, long battle. Jimmie had been strong and healthy. He’d worked hard every day and climbed the silo twice a day to get silage down for his cows, so it seemed he could have overcome anything. But his whole right side was paralyzed; he had no feeling and no use of either his right arm and hand or his right leg and foot. He stayed in Columbia Hospital for several weeks and then went to the Veterans Hospital for two months. They were giving him therapy and trying to teach him to walk again and also to use his hand. He came home the first time for the weekend of my 75th birthday—June 20. Gladys was having a small family picnic outside, and Bela brought her family and


Jimmie. He was in a wheelchair, and he felt so bad he couldn’t stay. She had to take him back home.

He got stronger though and did come home to stay on July 18—just five days before his 46th birthday. Poor fellow! I felt so sorry for him I didn’t know what to do. He was struggling to get as much use of his body as possible. He never complained that I heard of, but he couldn’t go out to the dairy and milk those seventy-five cows that had to be milked twice every day. Jim Ed had carried on the milking since the accident—with Lizzie Mae’s two teen-age boys, who alternated night and morning milkings. Jim Ed milked twice every day. He was just a senior in high school, but he had a man’s work to do and a man’s responsibility pushed on his sixteen-year-old shoulders. Course, he stood up under the weight of the burden. As soon as Jimmie came home, Bela began helping with the milking. She had gone to Columbia everyday to be with Jimmie while he was in the hospital. Madaline was like a grown woman; she took care of Alice, who had her second birthday on July 25. Bela had a birthday party for her, and Jimmie was able to sit in the swing with me in the back yard and look on. He couldn’t talk at first, but he had got his speech back, and his mind was just as good as ever—and that was pretty damn good.

Jimmie began taking physical therapy at the nursing home twice a week, and he worked hard. All that winter he went to the YMCA pool in Greenwood to exercise in the water. He thought then that he’d eventually get well. The doctors hadn’t told him the truth, but Bela finally did on August 8. As soon as he knew, he called Bill Craven over. Bill was Jimmie’s best friend and Saluda’s county agent. They began to make plans to sell the dairy and all the cows—everything that Jimmie had worked for. It was heart-breaking, but he said it was like a manufacturing company: it had to be sold while it was still in pretty good shape. Of course, it had gone down during the months since he’d been hurt, but not like it would if he couldn’t ever manage it again. Jimmie’s brother Ben had done all anyone could do to keep the farm and the dairy


going. He was a rural mail carrier, and he spent every afternoon on the farm seeing about the row crops and helping Jim Ed with everything but the milking. Of course, it was all too much for a sixteen-year- old boy—he wasn’t 17 until September 20 that year—and also too much for Ben with all his other responsibilities. Anyway, they had an auction on October 13, and Jimmie lay in a lounge chair and watched it all sold. Everything he had sold to the highest bidder—every cow, every piece of equipment, every needle, everything! People bought and then hauled away what they had bought. A terrible day! I don’t see how he stood it. Bela helped with the concession stand the ladies had set up. They gave all the profits to Bela and Jimmie.

I could spend a lot of time on what happened to Jimmie because I watched it all year after year during the seventies and on into the eighties. The whole thing tore Jim Ed apart. Just before the accident he and his buddies had built a club house on Jimmie’s eight-acre pond—with Jimmie’s help, of course, and Jim Ed loved to fish in that big pond. He’d also loved to shoot doves out there. I went to many a good dove shoot that Jimmie had on his farm as did a lot of other men around here. All that was gone too. Jim Ed was a senior that year, and he got a job at the feed store in town that spring. Gladys and I had always had a special feeling for Jim Ed because we’d been there when he came into the world and we’d had him at our house for his first eight months. Now we were watching him suffer along with his father. Jimmie didn’t get well; he never had any use of his right hand, but he could walk with a brace and then eventually without his brace. He learned to do lots of things because he still had the determination and intelligence he’d always had. I think Jimmie had the physical damage, but Jim Ed had the psychological damage. He was too young to have to go through all that.

During the sixties I was a member of the Board of Directors of Saluda County’s Farmers Home Association. We called it the FHA, and it was mighty important in Saluda County. James Corley was the head of it in the county, but he couldn’t lend money by


himself. The Board had to approve every loan. I did know exactly how much money we loaned while I was on the Board. It made a big difference to the farmers of the county to have a government agency that was set up on purpose to lend them money. When you ride around the county now and see the little brick houses that are everywhere, you can thank the FHA. Of course, they had a limit on how big the house could be and also rules about how it had to be built, but all in all, it was a big help to poor people who couldn’t get money from the banks to build or buy. I’m proud I had a chance to serve Saluda’s people that way. It wasn’t like we didn’t know the people asking for loans. Saluda’s a small county, and we knew everybody and whether a borrower was a good risk or not. And, of course, we had all kind of government regulations we had to go by. Remember I told you that Jimmie refinanced his house in 1958 with FHA and they made him finish the first floor before they’d consider it. He finished it, and he got his loan!

I was also appointed to the Saluda County Voter Registration Board in 1962. In fact, I broke the promise I’d made to myself back in Hawkinsville, Georgia, when I swore I’d never ask another man for a job, that if I couldn’t make it myself, I’d just perish to death. I asked F.G. Scurry for the job, and I’m still serving. I enjoy going to town for one or more days each month and staying in the court house where lots of people come. I get to talk with the folks who have business there. The board has a secretary that does the actual work, but we have to be there to make the decisions, and we’re responsible for seeing about the voting too—not just the registration. The Senator appoints the members and I’m proud that he appointed me. I believe that voting is a mighty important part of being a good citizen. It’s part of having a free country—a place where people get voted in and out of office—at the pleasure of the voters. “We the people”—that’s an important phrase to me. I’ve had to go with the other board members to the schools in the county to register the eighteen-year-olds that are enrolled in school, and I’ve had to go to every little store and polling place in the county to try to get people to register to vote. One place I went


to was Holston’s Crossroads where the Red Shirts had scared the Negroes away from the voting place in 1876 when South Carolina was trying to throw off the Reconstruction government. (I’ve told you about that already.) My father was one of those Red Shirts. I love to say that he helped take voting away from Negroes then and I helped give it back to them ninety years later. And that’s the truth. I was glad I was a part of giving it back; everybody has the right to vote in a free country.

Chapter 32

1970–1973

Seeing Loved Ones Suffer

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Jim Ed graduated from high school the spring of 1970. He

worked at the FCX in Saluda that spring and summer and went to the University in Columbia that fall. He had already lost too much—the farm he loved, the pond house he’d built, the dairy he’d kept going by himself. Now he had no plans for the future. I worried about him, and I soon found out I had a right to worry. He got in with the wrong crowd down there at Carolina and failed mighty near everything first semester. It nearly broke Bela’s heart to see him fail when she knew how smart he was. That was just the beginning though. He got involved in drugs and dropped out of school and came home that spring. Jimmie couldn’t understand how his son could destroy his young, healthy body, and neither could we. That winter and spring Jimmie suffered something awful from pain in his face and neck—where the injury in his brain manifested itself. What a hard time they had! We watched and suffered with them. Each of them was struggling in a different way. Life had changed that day in May, and now they all—except for little Alice maybe—knew it would never be the same again. Gladys and I did what we could for Bela and Jimmie and their four children, but that wasn’t much.


Full integration of the schools came to Saluda in the fall of 1970. A few Negro students had attended the schools in the sixties according to the “Freedom of Choice” ruling. James Gibson that lives right by Emory Church—his daughter was one of those students. They’re good people, and I reckon they just wanted a better education for her. She’s been working in the bank for years now. Everybody, including the school board, knew it was just a matter of time, but they waited until the courts made them do what some people thought would never work.

It did finally happen. In the spring of 1970 the ruling came down that Saluda’s schools would be fully integrated by court order when they opened in the fall. There was only one Negro school in the district—Riverside, and only two white schools—Saluda and Hollywood. All three had first through twelfth grades. It was just a matter of putting the students together, but that was no simple matter. The court also ordered that selected Negro and white teachers would exchange classrooms for three weeks in the spring. Bela was one of the selected teachers. She had to exchange places with a Riverside English teacher. She took the Riverside teacher’s classes, and the Riverside teacher took hers. It turned out that Jim Gant’s daughter was in Bela’s class, and his family has been living right down the road from us all these years—Ed and Mary Gant and their houseful of children. In fact, Bela said she knew many of the students in her classes.

When school opened in the fall, Madaline was a junior at Saluda High School, and William was in the sixth grade at Riverside Middle. The school board had put all the high school students in two buildings—the one that had been Saluda High School since it was built in 1951 and also the old building that had been closed for years. The high school grew from a little over 400 students to 800 students that fall. The integration went smooth then and has ever since. I always said it was because the students and teachers all knew each other. Saluda County is a little county, and the Negroes and the whites have been living here together for over 200 years. Maybe it never would have happened if the courts

Seeing Loved Ones Suffer 333

hadn’t ordered it, but once it was a fact, the people of the county accepted it. Of course, a few built a private school right down the Batesburg highway from where we live and sent their children there—ones that had been going to the public schools all their lives. It was a big change, but it’s for the best. Education is the foundation of our country. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the only Republican president I ever voted for (and I’ve regretted it ever since) said, “In a democracy, everyone is a leader.” And that’s the truth because everybody can vote, so everyone needs to have a good education—Negroes and whites and all the other colors that are a part of the United States.

Negroes didn’t have any schools until after the Civil War. Back in the 1860s my grandpa Mahlon gave them the land to build Mt. Moses Methodist Church on right across the branch from where I’m sitting right now, and, by the way, that branch has always been called Andy Branch named after Free Andy Valentine, who lived in the little two-room house that’s over on the hill—the Jack House we always called it. We lived there with Pa for a while one time when somebody was renting our house. The freed slaves had a little one-room building they used for a school at first. It was about to fall down, and back in the thirties I gave them a couple of acres across the road from their church for them to build a school house on. They had school there until the fifties when all the country schools were closed and the students were bused to school—the whites on one set of buses to Hollywood and Saluda, and the Negroes on other buses to Rosenwald, as it was called then. After integration, the students all rode the buses together. We always had a big Negro population to work the crops here in this county. Of course, beginning in the early 1900s a lot of them moved to the big cities up north to get better jobs and have more opportunities. Now the fields are all in pastures, and very few row crops are planted. Farmers have beef cows and dairies, and a lot of them have chickens. Nearly everybody in the country and in town has a big garden every summer and cans and freezes food to eat in the winter time.


Mary Alice was still in the nursing home, and she got worse every day. She could still walk real slow to the dining room to eat her meals, but her mind was going fast. Gladys and I went to see her a couple times a week, but most of the time she didn’t know us. They took good care of her, and she was probably happy to have people around her. She was always scared to be by herself. I think she lived in hell those years after Cantey died before she went to live at Mrs. Hyler’s boarding house. I paid her bills and rented her house to a family of Forrests, and they took pretty good care of it.

Gladys and I went to church every time the church door opened; we played canasta with our friends, and we had a lot of company. The Wightman reunion was held in our yard the first Sunday in August every year. In the fifties we’d had it in Greenwood, but then Gladys wanted to ask them all to come to our house, and they did come—starting sometime in the sixties and on into the seventies. We had a big yard and plenty of shade trees, and we put up tables and got chairs to put outside. Everybody had to go inside to use the bathroom, but we didn’t mind that. The reunion was at our house until the Sunday when the bottom dropped out of the sky just as we had all served our plates. Everybody made a dash for the house, and the rest of the food was ruined by the rain. After that the Wightmans met at Emory Community Center, which had been Emory School until it closed. The reunion was the last place Gladys went—on Sunday, August 6, 1979, the day before we took her to the hospital. She was so weak and so feeble she could hardly walk, and she was so mixed up about everything that she didn’t even recognize her own family. I don’t enjoy remembering those days. But like I said, you have to take the bad with the good—and we sure had a lot of good.

Something else happened in 1970—something that affected everybody in the whole state of South Carolina. The state celebrated its 300th birthday, its Tricentennial, because South Carolina was first settled in 1670. Everybody got in the act. I had


been appointed to the Saluda County Historical Research Committee to compile the history of Saluda County. We had met a lot before that summer and decided that we would publish a book that told about the history of the county. That’s exactly what we did; we published a book called Saluda County in Scene and Story, and I was a contributor. I reckon they put me on the committee because I was seventy-six years old and remembered a lot of history myself. Mr. Mott Yarbrough was on it too, and he knew as much or more history than I did. The difference between him and me was that he could write. He’d been a lawyer in Saluda for years. All kinds of events were held to celebrate the Tricentennial. The Boy Scouts had a huge camporee out in the country. William was a part of that.

Madaline had a girl from France visiting her that summer, and they went to a lot of the activities—parades and parties and dances and historical programs and other things. Bela was teaching summer school at Piedmont Technical College, so Jimmie took William and Madaline and Alice and met the French girl in the airport in Columbia. The plane was late, and they had to wait for hours, but Madaline took care of Alice, who was just three years old. Jimmie had learned to drive a car and a tractor with his left hand, and he could saw a board and drive a nail too. In fact, he could do most anything he had done before—except cut his meat at the table and trim his toenails and fingernails. Bela had to do that. That summer he took Madaline and William and Anne (the girl from France) to Charleston to spend a few days and see Charleston with Bela’s college roommate and her husband—Ann and William Blalock. He was one determined man—determined to get back so he could farm. He’d already bought another tractor and overhauled it in the basement with William as his hands. I admired his spunk.

In the spring of 1971 Jim Ed came home from Carolina; he’d got mixed up with drugs and dropped out. That was the beginning of his long, long struggle. He had hepatitis from dirty needles and had to go to the hospital for awhile. It tore me up to see him lying


there in that hospital bed—sick with something he didn’t have to have. I ‘d loved that boy since he was just a baby, and I didn’t want to see him destroy himself. I talked to him, and tried to help him, but he was too troubled for me to reach him. When he came home from the hospital, he lay around the house the rest of the summer. When he got able, Jimmie bought him a car, and he went to work at Toni Smith’s plant over near Prosperity where he worked until May when he went out the window and disappeared for several months. They didn’t know where he was until he came back in the summer ready, he said, to go back to college. Bela got him admitted to Spartanburg Junior College in spite of his record at Carolina, and they allowed them to pay his tuition by the month. He and Madaline were both in college that fall of 1972.

In 1971 Gladys and I went to Savannah for Bettina’s graduation from college. We were proud that she’d stuck to her classes and finally got her degree. Madaline and Boney were proud of her too. She’d had to go to school and take care of her family at the same time—Doug was twelve and Scott was ten. Then we had to go back to Savannah again in August. This time it wasn’t a happy occasion. Boney had been sick for so long that everybody just took for granted that he was going to keep on doing about the same. He and Madaline had been for his check-up at the heart clinic at Emory on Friday and come home on Saturday. The doctors had said he was doing fine and told him not to come back for six more months. Boney and Madaline were happy about that.

On Sunday they got little two-year-old Bryan, Harold and Tinker’s little boy. He’d been born in 1969, my third great-grandson. That afternoon that little boy was playing around near Boney when all of a sudden Boney collapsed and died. His heart had failed just like that. Madaline called us as soon as she knew that he was gone, and we went straight to Savannah to be with her. The Savannah paper published his picture and a write-up about his career in the F.B.I. and as an attorney. They had a nice service at the funeral home and buried him in an old, old


cemetery there in Savannah. He was the first in our little family to go. As I told you, he was a good man, but he was hard to live with. Madaline was lost for awhile without him in the house, but she was still teaching. She didn’t retire until she was sixty-five. Bettina was suffering too. She and her daddy hadn’t got along too well, and she felt guilty when he died and she didn’t even get to say good-bye.

Little Madaline wasn’t so little anymore. She was a senior in high school and involved in everything. So far as I ever knew, she didn’t have a steady boy friend in high school. She was waiting until she got to college for that, I guess. The spring of 1971 Bela got a scholarship to work on her doctor’s degree in English. She went all summer, and Lizzie Mae and Madaline took care of little Alice. Bela was trying to get that degree so she could get a pay raise. That was the only way she could increase her salary in Saluda District One. She’d already passed the number of years that counted toward a pay raise, and she had her master’s degree too. That summer she took two courses each session and two each semester that winter of 71-72. Jimmie went with Bela to classes and waited for her. He’d get on a city bus and ride the routes just to pass the time she was in class and lots of times he’d go to a movie. He could drive the car with one hand better than most people can with two—and his mind was as good as it ever was.

Madaline took care of Alice on the two afternoons that Bela went to Carolina for classes and on Saturday when she went to the library. She loved Alice and never minded taking care of her, and, Lord, how Alice loved her Mimi, as she called Madaline. Madaline had decided to go to William and Mary up in Williamsburg, Virginia. I’d never even heard of the place, but Madaline got brochures from lots of colleges since she’d made so high on some exam she took. She’d never seen Williamsburg, much less the college there. She did apply, and she did get accepted, but she wanted to see it before she decided. Bela couldn’t take her to see it, but Ann Herlong, Jimmie’s brother’s wife, made a week-end trip there with her mother, her daughters, and Madaline just so


Madaline could see the college and talk to someone there. When she got home, her mind was made up. She decided she’d go.

That May of 1972, I had surgery in Greenwood. I’d been having a hard time for a while, and Dr. Bates told me I had to have surgery for an enlarged prostate gland. Bela didn’t work the day of the surgery. She brought Gladys early that morning before they took me up to surgery, and they stayed all day. Gladys was worried sick about me, but I came through the surgery fine and was soon home from the hospital all well and like new. I was sure glad I had that surgery. I never had any trouble that time with bleeding like I’d had with the hemorrhoid surgery back in the fifties. Madaline came that weekend to see about me. She was teaching at Armstrong College by that time. Madaline was always faithful about coming home as often as she could.

As I talked about before, Jim Ed had knotted sheets and gone out his window one night in May, and nobody knew where he was. Later we found out he’d bummed a ride to Myrtle Beach where he lived while he was gone. When he came home six weeks later, he wanted to go back to college, and that fall of 1972 he started over again—this time in Spartanburg. He was messed up at Christmas and didn’t stay at home much, but he did go back to school after the holidays. One day the first week in February, he called Jimmie and asked him to come get him—he needed help. Jimmie called Bela at school, and they brought Jim Ed home and took him straight to Dr. Wise, who sent him to a psychiatrist in Augusta. That doctor put him in the hospital and gave him shock treatments for his drug addiction.

It tore me up to see him so pale and listless and burned out. I talked with him, but he didn’t hear me. Oh, I know he loved me, but love didn’t help his problem. That spring I got sick with pneumonia and couldn’t take care of my cows. Jimmie and Bela were down here one Sunday afternoon, and the cows got out. I was scared somebody would hit one on the road in front of the house. Bela called Jim Ed, and he came and tried to round up the cows and get them in the pasture. He was a pathetic sight. Eddie


Hurt, Edison and Cindy’s boy from up on the hill, drove by and stopped. He was in just as bad a shape as Jim Ed was; both of them moved like old men. They did finally get the cows back in the pasture and nailed the wire back on the posts, but it’d been a sorry sight—a sight I never thought I’d live to see.

Madaline did well at William and Mary, but she loved Jim Ed so much she was interested in his lifestyle. She brought her roommate home with her the spring of 1973 for spring break, and I made it my business to get Madaline by herself and talk to her. She assured me that she was all right. I told her I was counting on her. And I was. She’d always been sensible and smart and loving, and I believed in her. It was a bad time for young people. Colleges were filled with drugs and all kinds of crazy ideas that took hold and caused trouble. The next year she met Don, the man who was to become her husband, and I don’t believe she’s ever looked at another man. He came to see her that Christmas, and I was impressed with him.

That Christmas of 1972 we went with Jimmie and Bela to spend a week-end with Doug and Barbara. Madaline, William, and Alice went too, but Jim Ed was somewhere else. Jimmie drove, and I sat on the front seat. He told me about something he had read in the paper on Christmas morning—an article about a doctor in New York who did brain surgery on accident and stroke victims. Jimmie’s right hand was totally paralyzed, and it was balled in a fist so tight that his fingernails cut into the palm of his hand. The surgery was supposed to free whatever nerves were still functioning so that they could move the muscles in the affected area. I didn’t know then that Jimmie intended to have that surgery. He thought it might help him to play golf again. I didn’t pay much attention at the time. It seemed too far away to be real to me. Little did I know then what consequences that article was going to have on our family.

Curtis and Edith and Deedee came over to visit while we were at Doug’s. Deedee was still in college and a pretty girl. We had a good time talking and visiting. It’s not far to Atlanta, and Doug


and Barbara always seemed glad to have us. Madaline had changed since she’d gone away to college. She was thinking more like me. I’ve been a Democrat all my life, and she was leaning that way too. We talked about what was happening in the country. Doug and Curtis both kept up with politics, and I did too. My sons were both Republicans, but as young as Madaline was, she could hold up her end of an argument. I’ve told you how the Padgetts have always liked to argue. Steve was in the ninth grade and William was a year behind him although he was just six months younger. Alice was five and in kindergarten. Yes, we had a good visit—short but good. We were glad to get back home—as always.

Things were going as usual for Gladys and me. We had a warm house in the winter time and plenty of fresh air in the summer time. We never wanted air conditioning; it felt too cold to us. We liked to have all the windows and doors wide open night and day in the summer time. I looked after my cows and saw that they had plenty of grass and plenty of hay. We planted a big garden and froze and canned all we needed. We played canasta and visited a lot and just enjoyed being together. Gladys would go in the living room and play the piano. I was never much on music—‘course, I did love to dance—but I enjoyed hearing Gladys play the hymns I’d heard at Emory and Sardis all my life.

That reminds me of the early seventies when John Griffith first came to the Butler Circuit to preach. Emory’s on that circuit, so he was our preacher. He was a good preacher and a dedicated man. He believed what he preached, and he lived it too. But he had one bad fault; he preached too long and he prayed too long. He’d get carried away and go on and on. The second Sunday he preached at Emory, after the service he was standing at the door shaking hands. When I got to him, I said, “John, I thought you’d be a Bishop one day, but you’ll never make it.” John’s told me since then that he’d dressed up in his robe and prepared what he thought was a good sermon and he wondered what he’d done wrong.


What he said to me was, “What’s wrong, Mr. Davenport?” I had to tell him the truth—and it was the truth then and it still

is. I said, “You preach too long, John.” It didn’t do a bit of good to tell him. He still preaches too long.

I’ve known a lot of Emory ministers since I can remember them back to 1900. All of them were good men, but not all of them were good preachers. Some of them were long-winded, but John Griffith beats all the rest. He’s got a lot to say, and he wants to be sure everybody gets a chance to hear the word.

That spring Jimmie told us that he was going to see a neurosurgeon in Savannah who’d be able to get him an appointment with the New York doctor that did the cryosurgery he’d read about. Madaline Boney, whose friend in Savannah had had the surgery, made an appointment for Jimmie to see the doctor who’d sent her friend to New York. Jimmie was so intent on going that he drove to Savannah by himself; he didn’t even ask Bela to take a day off from school. When he came back, he had an appointment with the doctor in New York for a day in June. He was excited about the possibility of getting better. It was the only ray of hope he’d ever had. I had my doubts, but I sure didn’t tell him about them. Bela was excited too. She never seemed to have any doubts. Whatever he wanted, she wanted too—and he wanted to find out about this new surgery. He was under Bela’s state health insurance, so the cost would mostly be covered. That wasn’t an issue. They’d sold the farm on a lease purchase basis, and he was getting a check every month, but he put that money on what he still owed on the farm. The man that had bought it was running the dairy and living in the old house on the farm.

To make a long story short, Jimmie and Bela flew to New York in June to see that doctor. William and Alice stayed with Gladys and me. Jim Ed was at home, and supposed to be going to Lander. (We learned later that he’d only attended a few classes.) He and William were finishing planting the hundred acres of soy beans that Jimmie had wanted planted on the farm that had belonged to his mother. After the initial examination, the doctors told Jimmie


that he seemed to be the perfect candidate for the surgery since he was in good physical condition except for the paralysis. They told him he’d have to have a lot of tests for them to figure out whether they should operate. He stayed, and Bela came home to take care of the children. He called her at the end of the week to tell her that he was scheduled to have the surgery on Tuesday and for her to come up on Monday.

She flew from Columbia to New York on Monday morning and met Gus’ daughter Grace, who’d flown from Chicago to be with her for the surgery. She stayed ‘til Thursday, and then Bela was by herself. When they got to the hospital, Jimmie had already had the surgery. The sad thing is that when he came to, he didn’t recognize Bela or anyone else. The doctors didn’t know what had happened. The surgery had made his hand just hang at his side. It was no longer spastic and immovable on his chest, but neither did he have any more use of it than he’d had before. And we were to learn when he came home that he had lost that sharp, quick intelligence he’d always had. He was like a lost soul. The doctors had told Bela that it was “insult to an injured brain” and sent him home.

What a hard time they had! Alice was just five, and she’d say, “I wish Daddy hadn’t gone to New York.” She didn’t understand, but then neither did we. Bela did all she could to help Jimmie get his memory back, and he did recover a lot. But we could never know what he knew and what he didn’t. Jimmie had wanted that hundred acres of soybeans planted, but when he returned, he didn’t know what a soybean looked like. He’d told Bela what to do if he died—there would be his insurance then—but he didn’t tell her what to do if he lived and didn’t know what to do himself. Ben helped her see about the harvest, and gradually Jimmie got better, but he never returned to the person he had been. The initial accident had not changed him except to paralyze his arm and hand completely; the surgery took away so much of what he knew and what he’d been.


When their stepmother died in the fall of 1973, the five Herlong heirs settled their parents’ estates. Neither their mother’s nor their father’s had been settled even though she’d died in 1956 and he, in 1969. Ben and Jimmie were supposed to work together, but it turned out that Ben had to go ahead since Jimmie wasn’t able to help anymore. Ben bought the land on one side of the road, and Jimmie bought the land on the other side of the road. Their sister and two brothers sold their parts to them since they weren’t interested in farming. Once again Jimmie owned a farm—something that was very important to him. Once again he tried to farm it; this time there was no dairy. He tried soybeans and corn and then wheat. Finally in 1984 he began to plant pine trees.

Bela and Jimmie and William and Alice came to our house nearly every Sunday for dinner. Gladys was still a good cook then. One Sunday William rode his bicycle from town—seven miles. They didn’t believe I could still ride a bicycle at my age, but I showed them. I got on that bicycle and rode around the yard. I told them the story about the first and only bicycle I ever owned—the one I bought for myself on credit from Mr. Van Edwards. Today nearly every child gets several bicycles before they’re grown. Life has sure changed. We bought Bela and Doug a bicycle together, and they thought they were lucky to have that.

Bela had finished all the work on her Ph.D. except her dissertation, and she’d been working on that when Jimmie had the surgery. In fact, she’d taken books with her to New York to study while she sat with him. It turned out that she couldn’t study then, and she didn’t get back to her work for a year. She did finish it the summer of 1975, and we all went to see our daughter become a doctor. Years later when she spoke at Emory when the Wightmans gave a baptismal font in memory of their ancestor Sherard Wightman, the preacher introduced Dr. Herlong to speak for the family. I kept looking around to see who Dr. Herlong was. Then, lo and behold, Bela stood up, and I realized that she was Dr. Herlong.


Gladys had an attack with a kidney stone that fall. She’d had trouble for years with her side. She just called it side ache. She’d have a terrible sharp pain in her side, and if she’d lie down, the pain’d gradually ease off. She’d be all right then for weeks or maybe months, and then she’d have it again. The doctors told her she had a stone in her kidney and that if it ever moved, she’d have to have surgery immediately. Well, it moved, and Dr. Wise sent her straight to the hospital where the doctors operated on her kidney to remove the stone. She was pretty sick, and they gave her some strong medicine that made her crazy. The second night after the surgery, the woman in the room with her heard a noise and waked up. She saw Gladys in the corner of the room where she’d taken the bandage off her incision and was trying to pick out the stitches. The lady called the nurses, who came and put Gladys back in the bed and took care of her. She didn’t remember any of that the next day. She got straightened out and came home in a few days. She never had another side ache in her life. It was a shame she hadn’t had that operation a long time before she did; she’d been putting up with that pain since Bela and Doug were little.

Chapter 33

1974–1979

Gladys’ Illness and Death

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I told you that Gladys was getting forgetful. She made lists for

everything—something she’d never done before; but she was still able to do most everything she’d always done, and she still had the sparkle in her eyes. I turned eighty years old on June 20, 1974, and Gladys was seventy-six on June 14—Flag Day. Bela had a big birthday celebration for both of us in her back yard and invited lots of cousins and, of course, all our family. Madaline and her family, Curtis and Edith and Deedee and Dave (her fiancé), Bela and Jimmie and their family, and Doug and Barbara and their family were all present. Somebody took pictures and sent them to us. In them everybody looks like they’re having a good time. They gave me a new suit and Gladys two new dresses that Bela had made. I remember saying I could be buried in my new suit. I thought eighty was awful old. Pa died at fifty-eight, and Ma at forty-two. I sure didn’t feel old though. I hadn’t sold my cows then, so I was still working on the farm.

That summer Deedee got married in Atlanta to the fellow she’d brought to our birthday party. Of course, we were supposed to go, and Gladys got all upset about what she was going to wear. She was beginning to be unsure of herself—not bad, just a little


different from the way she’d always been. Madaline made a nice dress for her, and Bela helped her get her things together. We all stayed with Doug and Barbara. Deedee was as pretty as a speckled pig in her long, white wedding dress, and she sure looked happy. She was our fifth grandchild to be married—Bettina, Harold, Bobby, Barry, and now Deedee.

I knew Gladys was changing, and it nearly broke my heart. When I was a boy, old people had what was called “hardening of the arteries” where they got so they couldn’t remember and their personality was different. I’d never dreamed that such a thing could happen to Gladys, as smart as she was. Her mother was clear as a bell when she died at eighty-nine. She could remember everything back to the 1860s—she was born in 1862. But that was not to be the case with Gladys. She was seventy-six that summer, and, thank God, we were able to do all the things we’d always done and go visiting as we always had.

Mary Alice was still at the nursing home, and we went up there several times a week to see about her. She didn’t know us or anybody else. She was two years older than Gladys, so this thing had started with her earlier than it had with Gladys. Doctors were just beginning to talk about a disease called Alzheimer’s—something new to me. We went to church, and we visited our kin people and our friends. We went to a lot of funerals too. Every person that died was someone we’d known all our lives, so we felt obliged to go to their funeral. A lot of them were years younger than Gladys and me. Gladys kept the house clean and worked in the garden with me. We picked vegetables together and then froze them. We’d bought a freezer to put in the little utility room with our washing machine. We never did buy a dryer though. Gladys liked to hang the clothes on the line. She liked the way they smelled when she brought them in. I left her every first Monday to go work at the courthouse in Saluda with the Election Committee. She was still able to stay by herself then. I know it was a long day for her, but she still liked to read, and she liked to sit out on the front porch and watch the cars go by too—just resting. Other than

Gladys’ Illness and Death 347

first Mondays, I was with her most all the time. Where I went, she went.

Gus still came down every Sunday night, and Gladys was able to fix a little supper for us. Her disease came on her slow, but it was sure. Gladys and I started going to Bela’s for Sunday dinner every week; I just told Gladys that Bela wanted us to come up there, that she thought it was time for her to cook dinner for us. I still took Gladys to Bela’s on Saturday mornings for her to fix Gladys’ hair, and we’d go any other time during the week when we were in town. I knew Gladys felt comfortable there, and Bela was always glad to see us.

That fall I got in bad shape. Dr. Wise had been treating me for gall bladder trouble. He thought maybe he wasn’t diagnosing it right and sent me to Dr. Baker in Greenwood. Dr. Baker examined me good, and then he left on vacation on Saturday. On Sunday Dr. Christian and Dr. Allred had me in x-ray. I knew they were heart doctors. Finally, Dr. Christian said, “It’s not your heart; it’s your gall bladder, and you need an operation.” He told me that my heart had a skip every eight beats.

I said, “If my heart is all that bad, I better put off the gall bladder operation.” Dr. Christian told me then I could stand it. He operated, and I did stand it. I’ve been better ever since.

Gladys stayed with me in the hospital then. She thought she was taking care of me, but I was really taking care of her. She was beginning to need help in doing little things. Oh, she could work and think, but she wasn’t like she’d always been. So even in 1974, we knew that something was happening to her. I knew that I had to take care of her. And I did take care of her right up until the day she died in the fall of 1979.

One of the things I’d learned early in life—being left alone like I was then—is that you have to learn to give and take and prepare yourself to make a go of life. I learned through the experiences of my little brother Gus. He was thrown from pillar to post when he was little after Ma died. First he lived with Grandma Sue and Grandpa, and Aunt Pearl was there to help take care of him. Then


he stayed with Cousin Frank Long a while and, off and on, with Pa and us, and then with Aunt Ada and Uncle Jake in Johnston. I heard him say once he wished they’d put him in an orphanage. But he turned out to be a good man, and I loved him. Like I told you, Gus died in January of 1975 with a heart attack. He’d been feeling bad for a few weeks, and Dr. Wise sent him to the hospital. We had no idea he was that sick. He’d lived alone since Essie died in 1968—seven years. Gus was my baby brother, and I remembered when he was born. I’ve sure missed having him to talk to.

Jim Ed had gone back to the University in Columbia and was taking engineering. He was doing pretty well—better than when he went before. But he was still mixed up. We thought he’d sure make it this time though. Madaline was at William and Mary, so she was gone too. Then in the spring of 1975, William decided he’d apply to a school in Atlanta and ask for a full scholarship—a school that Bobby and Deedee had gone to. It took boarding students too. The school wrote to William and told him he’d have to take a bunch of tests to be accepted. He drove over there and took the tests, and they accepted him on the spot. Later that summer he got his scholarship, so he left Saluda the fall of 1975. He spent his junior and senior years there and graduated the summer of 1977. During William’s senior year, he was in a singing group at his school, and we went with Bela and Jimmie and Alice to Doug’s house in Atlanta, and Doug and Barbara took us to the theater where they were performing. I was proud to see William singing. He didn’t know he could sing ‘til he got over there. Saluda schools didn’t have any choir.

Then he got a scholarship to the University of Virginia, and we never saw much of him after that. It was a good thing he went away to high school when he did because Bela had been depending on him too much after Jimmie had the surgery. She knew it, and I knew it too. He made good friends at that school and brought them home with him several times. He’s stayed good friends with them too. If he hadn’t gone to Atlanta, he probably


wouldn’t have gone to the University of Virginia, and then he wouldn’t have met Joan. Then his whole life would have been different. I think back to Gladys’ professor and what he believed—that each person has an affinity somewhere in the world. It seems to me that William had a round-about route to find his affinity since she was from Chicago and went to Virginia too. But they seem to be perfect for each other.

In October of 1980 after Gladys died in 1979, I went with Bela and Jimmie to Charlottesville to see Madaline and Don and William. Seeing William meant seeing Joan too. They were seniors and had been going together the whole time they were there. Bela had borrowed Ben’s van and carried a load of furniture to Madaline and Don. They’d just moved there in August. Don was going to law school, and Madaline was getting a master’s degree in English and teaching some courses too. Bela drove, and Jimmie sat in the front seat and studied the map. Ben used the van for his electrical business so there was only one other seat in it. Alice had that one, and I sat in a big old chair they were taking to Madaline and Don for their apartment up on a mountain. We got there late Friday night since Bela couldn’t leave ‘til school was out on Friday. Saturday morning William took us all up on the Blue Ridge Parkway, and if that wasn’t some sight! Everywhere you looked the leaves seemed like they were on fire in the bright sunshine—every shade of red, gold, yellow, orange, brown. Oh, it was a sight to behold! Joan had got us all tickets for a play the college was putting on that night, but we couldn’t all sit together because we got the last tickets. I sat by a nice-looking woman and enjoyed talking to her. The play was bright and funny. I think it was called “Anything Goes.” I never did look at the program. We left after breakfast on Sunday morning. This time I got the seat, and Alice read on a quilt on the floor nearly the whole way home. She slept a little too.

On April 15, 1977, Jim Ed married Kathy Thames from down below Columbia. It was a rush-up affair since they had a baby on the way. Jim Ed was still at Carolina, and she was working at a


hospital. Gladys and I went to the wedding in a little Methodist Church on Highway 378 close to where her family lived. The service was short and sweet, and afterwards the bride’s family had a little reception at their house. I knew the bride and groom didn’t have the faintest idea what being married meant. I just prayed that things would turn out all right. I liked the looks of the family and thought the bride was awful pretty. William was Jim Ed’s best man, but he looked like he might faint any minute. He was so sick he had to go lie down in the car during the reception. He got well, though, and went back to Atlanta and finished the rest of his senior year. After graduation he went with his choir to perform in Poland and Russia—quite a trip for a country boy!

On June 17 Madaline married Don Haycraft, the man she loved. They’d both finished William and Mary, and Madaline had taught a year. He had a job in Florida as captain of his uncle’s sailing boat, and so that was where they were going to live. Gladys was normal enough to do all right at both weddings. Madaline’s was in Bela and Jimmie’s backyard, and the birds were singing during the whole wedding. The reception was right there too, and there was a lot of laughing and talking. The bride and groom didn’t leave until it was black dark. Madaline didn’t want a big wedding—just people she really knew and loved, but two of the most important people didn’t get to come. Madaline Boney was studying in Brazil that summer, and William was singing in Russia.

Yep, 1977 was a big year for our family. Two weddings and one great-grandchild born! Jim Ed was in his third year at Carolina taking engineering, and their baby boy, James Kirk Herlong, was born on November 29. William was nineteen that same day. Sad to say, Kirk was just six weeks old when Jim Ed and Kathy separated and then divorced. I knew they didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making a go of it. Barry is another one like that—Madaline’s youngest boy. I haven’t told you about his weddings—he’s had too many for me to keep up with. He was just out of high school when he married Sandra, and she left him about a year


later while he was in the Navy. Then he married Mary—and we went to the wedding and the reception. She seemed to be a fine girl with a lot of ambition, and she loved Barry. They all loved Barry; he’s a lovable boy. Then there’ve been Phyllis and Sherry and Carol. He’s still married to Carol. It may not last though. He’s got a son, David, by Phyllis, and a daughter, Brooke, by Sherry—both fine children.

Bettina got divorced too. She and Chuck were married a lot of years; the children were grown when they separated. She said she just didn’t love Chuck anymore—like that was a reason to quit your husband. Later on she married Orson Beecher, and they’ve been mighty happy together; so maybe she was right to catch a little happiness while she could. Her son Doug has had all kind of trouble and given Bettina and Madaline a lot of heartache, but her son Scott never did a thing wrong in his life. What makes the difference? Nobody knows. Gladys and I never believed in divorce. Young people today see life differently. They seem to get a divorce at the drop of a hat. Yep, Bettina married again in 1979, the summer that Gladys was dying—Orson Beecher, a history professor at Armstrong College and twenty-five years older than she was. It seems like they are mighty happy together though. I just can’t understand all this switching around.

Harold and his wife divorced too. I guess people these days just don’t get married for a lifetime. They’d had two children, a boy and a girl—as fine a looking children as you ever saw—Bryan and Lisa. Harold made such good grades at Furman (all A’s, I think) that he got a full scholarship to go to school at a fine college in Pennsylvania, where he was at the top of his class. He was up there when we had our fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration. When he finished, he came to work in Greenville. Then he moved to Columbia, went to law school, and worked full time for Colonial Life. I’ll never know how he did all that. I think he was at the top of his class in law school too. Anyhow, he got a job with a Beaufort law firm—a fine law firm. He’s been in Beaufort ever since—‘course, he went out on his own after a while. He’s done all


right with his work. He does love to hunt just like his Daddy did. Yes, sir, Boney would rather come to Saluda and hunt and do most anything else in the world.

Every time the children came home after Gladys started going down, she’d ask Bela to help her decide what to cook and to help her fix it. That was before she got so bad. In her last years, she didn’t want help. She thought we were looking down on her and saying she couldn’t do things, and she resented us. Mary Alice finally died in July 1976, and Gladys had the family down at our house. Of course, Cantey was dead, but many of Gladys’ half brothers and sisters and their families came for the funeral. Mary Alice’s Presbyterian Church ladies prepared and served the dinner, so Gladys didn’t have any responsibility, and it was a good thing because she could not have done it even then, and she lived until November 1979.

She had got so she wouldn’t go to the doctor, but she tried to do all the things she’d ever done. We continued to play canasta for a while, but we had to give it up. She had forgot how to play. She went everywhere with me, and people were understanding. I know she could sense that they were treating her differently though. She kept on trying to cook until she got so bad that I was afraid for her to mess with the stove. I cooked breakfast myself and worked with her on the other meals. I’d learned to cook when I was a boy cooking for Pa and Gus. We went to Bela’s a lot and for dinner every Sunday after church. That’s when Bela got me to tell her my life. I’ve been at it a long time, but then I’ve lived a long life. Bela would come down here and cook supper a lot too. It was just her and Alice and Jimmie. It was funny about Jimmie. He treated Gladys so sweet—just like he understood what she was going through. Maybe he did since what had happened to him was a lot like her situation.

Yes, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Gladys went through hell those last five years of her life. She couldn’t trust her own mind, and if you can’t trust your mind, what can you trust? She’d always loved for her daughters to help her in the kitchen.


She had taught them how to do everything, and she’d enjoyed having them beside her. In fact, she thought they were better cooks than she was. She was wrong there, of course. Nobody was a better cook than Gladys—or a faster cook. She could get in the kitchen, build a fire in the stove, and have a meal ready in no time. Then after we got that electric stove in 1952, she was even faster. I loved to see her make biscuits.

Before we got the electric stove, I’d sit in a straight chair between the old wood stove and the table we had in the kitchen. We didn’t have any cabinets then—just the table and a safe to keep the dishes and the pots and pans in. Mr. John Matthews made the table for us, and it had two big bins in it—one for flour and one for meal. You see, I planted corn and wheat, and I’d take a bushel or so of each to the mill at one time and have it ground into flour and meal. Then I’d bring it home and dump it into the bins. Anyway, I’d watch Gladys as she put the flour in the old wood dough tray and made a little hole in that flour. Then she’d take a little dip of lard out of the bucket and put it in the hole and pour a little milk over it. She always used self-rising flour. Then she’d work the stuff with her fingers and pretty soon she’d start pinching off pieces and shaping them into little biscuits that would end up light as a feather. Yes, I loved to see her hands as she kneaded the dough and shaped it. And I loved to eat those biscuits! I never did like big old heavy biscuits like a lot of women made. Of course, nobody had what we called “light bread” back then. It’s common now, and we can buy it in every grocery store. It’s just plain old white bread now. It’s not good like Gladys’ biscuits though. Gladys also made a big pan of what we called “dogbread” every morning out of corn meal. I took that “dogbread” and mixed it with the milk that had soured overnight and fed it to the dogs I was training. You couldn’t buy dog food back then, and I couldn’t raise good bird dogs if I didn’t feed them good.

Back to Gladys’ problem though. After she got so she wasn’t thinking right, she didn’t want her daughters to help her in the


kitchen. I was still planting a garden the summer of 1979, and when the corn got ready to freeze, I called Bela to come help me. That made Gladys so mad that I was afraid for her to have a knife to help cut the corn off the cob. She thought we were treating her wrong; she wanted to be the one to cut the corn and get it ready. She was miserable. She didn’t know what was happening to her, and I didn’t either. Dr. Wise kept a check on her diabetes, but we never talked about how she was losing her memory. She still liked to go places, and sometime the old Gladys would come out. She’d say something that would show that keen mind she’d always had. I remember one time we were sitting out on the patio at Bela’s after she got home from school. Like I said, I took Gladys up there often. She loved to be with Bela, and so we’d just drop in after Bela got home from school. This must have been after 1977 because we were out on the patio that they’d added before Madaline got married in June of ‘77. We were talking, and Gladys said something that didn’t make a bit of sense. I said to her, “Gladys, you’re just plum crazy.”

She looked at me with sharp eyes and said, “Well, at least my whole family’s not crazy.” That sure took me by surprise. She’d always thought my family had problems, and her answer showed she still had some of her reasoning ability left and some of her old spunk. Grandma’s Sue’s father had killed himself because he was melancholy; my father had spells of deep depression—he’d stayed in a room at his sister’s home for three years; and my brother Jouette had been afflicted with the same problem all his life. All that was somewhere still in Gladys’ brain. Yes, at times I could see the old Gladys.

In the summer of 1978 our kitchen needed painting, and it’s so small that Bela decided she could do the job. She took everything out of all the cabinets and put the stuff in the dining room. Gladys was beside herself since she didn’t understand what was going on. Bela works fast anyway, but when she realized what Gladys was going through, she painted that kitchen in one long day. Of course, she just had to put on one coat, and that dried quick, so


she put everything back in place the next morning. It looked a whole lot better, but the sad thing was that Gladys thought Bela was “Gus’ wife” the whole time. She hadn’t really known Bela for over a year, but I could see tears in Bela’s eyes when Gladys asked her if she was Gus’ wife.

In October of 1978 our good friend Farah Mae Pou died, and Gladys and I went to Ramey’s in Saluda for the funeral. It was in the morning, and Bela took an hour off from school and came. We were already seated, and she came to sit with us. I said to Gladys, “Here’s your daughter,” and she asked, “Which one?” You could see how that hurt Bela, and it hurt me too. But I’ve always believed that you have to face up to whatever comes. I just never thought I’d lose Gladys that way.

As the months passed, she got more and more confused. We still went everywhere together—to church and to visit our old friends, and even to things we were invited to. In July before she died in November, we went to Ben Herlong’s daughter’s wedding at St. Paul. Gladys was all right except she wanted to leave in the middle of the ceremony, but I managed to keep her there. We’d been at Bela’s the day before while they were getting ready for the rehearsal party that night. We were probably in the way, but we ate dinner with all the folks, and I enjoyed it and I guess Gladys did too. She wanted to help, and Bela gave her some little something to occupy her. By that time she’d got so she didn’t know her clothes were dirty. She had said to Bela when Mary Alice first got so bad, “Don’t let me go around dirty if I get like Mary Alice.” Bela and I both tried, but sometimes she didn’t want to bathe or change clothes. Bela took her the summer before she died to a store in Saluda and bought her a new dress—the one she wore to the Wightman reunion on August 6, 1979, the last place she went before we took her to the doctor and then to the hospital and finally to the nursing home.

I took care of her for those five years, and I’ll always regret that I didn’t bring her home from the hospital rather than take her to the Saluda Nursing Home. I was just tired out and didn’t think I


could give her the care she needed in the years ahead. What I didn’t realize was it wasn’t going to be years—just months. If I’d known, I believe I could have lasted those last two months. We left the hospital the last of August, and she died November 3, 1979. She had lost so much weight that she looked like skin and bones, but the doctors didn’t tell me how near death she was. We were hopeful when we took her to the hospital that something might be done to help her. Carrie Herlong’s grandson, Ray Hesse, was her doctor, and he did all he could, I reckon, but nothing could help Gladys then. Bela was with her in the hospital every day until her school started, and Madaline had come from Savannah and stayed until she had to start her year at the college where she taught.

Both of our daughters helped me with Gladys. When Madaline finished teaching her summer school, she came home and went to Aiken with me every day. She rode in the ambulance when we brought Gladys back to the nursing home in Saluda. Gladys had a nice room near the fountain, and I went every day about dinner time and stayed through her supper. Madaline was there in the daytime until she had to start her college teaching. Bela came every afternoon after school and fed her her supper. One weekend when two-year-old Kirk was with Bela and Jimmie, Bela brought him over to the nursing home to see Gladys. You could see her face light up when Kirk was playing around her feet. She reached out and touched his little face, and love was shining in her eyes. Even as mixed up as she was, she still loved children—and she seemed to know that little boy was special to her.

Madaline had bought a little book to put in the room for visitors to sign so we’d know who had visited when we couldn’t be there. We looked at it every day. One day I saw that Gladys had written in a real shaky hand “Mr. Padgette is a fine and worthy man. He is a grand man and I love him.” I tell you when I saw those words and knew they’d come from Gladys even in the shape she was in, I just broke down and cried. When I looked over at her sitting in the chair with little tiny straps holding her in, I knew she didn’t recognize that I was Mr. Padgette, but she knew somewhere


in that mixed-up mind that she loved him. Yes, she still knew in her heart that she loved me. That was a comfort to me.

Toward the end I stayed with Gladys all day and into the night, and Bela came in the afternoons and stayed until bedtime. Then she was there most of the last week day and night. The last night the two nurses that were taking care of Gladys were Kathy Lake and Sheryl Matthews. Bela had taught both of them, and Gladys had taught their fathers—Ralph Lake and Lorenzo Matthews—at Sardis and Fairview. That was almost as good as being at home—but not quite. Gladys died early in the morning—very quietly. She just slipped away. Bela and I had been there all night, but Bela had just left to go back home to get Alice ready for school. Bela had taken off from work most of that last week.

We had the visitation that night at Ramey’s and buried Gladys the next day in our plot out at Emory. Of course, all the children and most of the grandchildren came. They had all loved Gladys. She just had a way with children. The pallbearers were her grandsons and great-grandsons The church was full of friends and family. Lots of her students were there too, and they told us what Mrs. Padgette had meant in their lives and what a good teacher she was, and how much they loved her. We told them how much she had loved her students. She never had any discipline problems. She was so intent on teaching them what she thought they needed to know that none of them ever misbehaved. Even the big boys who were in their teens never gave her a minute’s trouble.

The day we buried her was a bright, warm November day, and the light coming through the stained glass windows touched us all and colored the church too. I figured that Gladys had got back to herself. She’d been somebody else for five years. She was eighty-one and I was eighty-five when she died. I’d loved her since I was eleven and she was seven—the day I decided I was going to marry that little black-eyed Wightman girl who made such a good speech at Children’s Day.


After the funeral was over, we all went back to our house. Pretty soon the family started leaving. They had to get back to their lives. Bela and Jimmie and Alice stayed and we ate supper. I’d been alone in the house while Gladys was in the nursing home after Madaline had to go back to Savannah, but after Bela and her family left, the house seemed emptier than it had ever been. Everywhere I looked I could see Gladys. She had made that little tiny house a home when she was just a girl, and she was the one that insisted on working on it until we got it pretty nice. We had three bedrooms, two baths, porch, entrance hall, living room, dining room, den, kitchen, and utility room. We even had a carport right by the house. Gladys had kept all of it clean and neat. She had a place for everything—very different from Gus’ wife Essie, who never put things in the same place twice.

I was eighty-five years old, and I’d have to live by myself. When somebody asked me if I was going to marry again, I told them, “Hell, no!” I was determined not to let happen to me what had happened to Pa. He’d stayed single from the spring of 1903 when Ma died until December of 1914 when he married Miss Carrie—nearly twelve years. Then, when Pa died, she got everything he had. His children were left out in the cold. No sir, I was going to keep it ‘til I died—my land and what little money I’d accumulated—and then it’ll belong to my four children—share and share alike. They can keep it or sell it, whatever suits them. Of course, I’ve worked so hard for what I’ve got that I’d like for them to hold on to it. A lot of it first belonged to William Padgett and then to his son Mahlon—my great-grandfather and my grandfather—all the way back to the early 1800s. I told the fellow that asked me if I was going to marry again that I’d batched before I got married, and I reckoned I could do it again.

Chapter 34

1985–1987

Looking Back

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I’ve been batching again ever since Gladys died—the last six

years. Yes, Gladys has been dead six years. It doesn’t seem that long though. Time passes fast when you get old. I wash my own clothes and iron them too—‘course, I don’t have to iron many. Most of them are what they call “permanent press,” which sure is nice. When I think about the old days when women had to heat irons on the stove or at the fireplace and pick them up with a heavy cloth and use them fast to get as much done as they could before the iron got cold, I don’t see how they did it. They starched a lot of clothes too. Then they’d have to sprinkle them and let them sit and then iron them. It was quite a job.

I’d had the experience of bachelor life after my mother died and before I married Gladys. But in the sixty-four years we were married, I’d forgotten just how bad it is. It’s a devil of a life. I reckon you know I don’t put flowers on Gladys’ grave—leastways, not often. I put them on her when she was alive. I loved her, and I was good to her, but I’ve been by myself six years now. What Gladys couldn’t do a little bit better than anybody else wasn’t worth doing. She was smart mentally and physically. She never went to school without her lessons prepared. She didn’t get to go


to college when she graduated from high school, but she did finally get her degree Cum Laude from Newberry College in 1956—but I’ve already told you about that.

I kept the chaps too. I bathed them and dressed them and read them stories and played with them. Of course, that wasn’t any trouble to me because I’d always loved children. But I always believed in making them mind too. I said one time at Ruby Riser’s that I hoped Gladys would have one baby that wouldn’t be so damn smart and that he could take over the land I’d worked so hard to get. Then after that, Doug came along. When he was about a year old, Ruby asked me about him, and I said, “Hell, he’ll never plow. Anybody can look at him and tell he’s the smartest one of the four.” Doug never did like farm work, and he got away from it as quick as he could. ‘Til this day, he won’t grow a tomato plant if he can help it. He loves living in Atlanta. I couldn’t stand it. I like the wide open spaces where I’ve spent my whole life.

I don’t do too much cooking now. I go up to Bela’s every Sunday, and she and Jimmie take me to the Fish Hut down on the lake every Friday night. When they get little Kirk for the week-end each month, he goes with us too. I order two little catfish. That’s all I want to eat, but I sure do like to talk to all the people down there. I get lonely sitting here, so I go visiting. I can still drive the 1979 Chevrolet Doug helped me buy while Gladys was in the hospital in 1979. I guess it’ll last me the rest of my life. I hope so anyway.

I made a big trip to Atlanta the summer of 1981 when Doug’s son Steve got married. Of course, I went with Bela and Jimmie and Alice. They stayed at a motel, but I stayed at Doug’s house. The rehearsal party was at a big restaurant, and everybody got to make a little speech. They asked me to say a word or two, and I didn’t have a bit of trouble giving them some good advice. I told them not to plant any trees in their yard so they wouldn’t have to rake leaves. I’ve had to rake up leaves from the oak trees in my front yard all these years. ‘Course our house faces west, and that oak tree has come in handy to shade the front porch in the

Looking Back 361

afternoons. Steve married a pretty girl who’d already graduated from college. Steve finished his doctor’s degree from Georgia Tech and went to work for Monsanto in Saint Louis.

William finished the University of Virginia and then worked in Atlanta for a year because Joan was working there too. They got married in 1982 way up in Chicago, Illinois, but I didn’t try to go. I would like to have been there, but I was too old to take that kind of trip. (William has always been special to me since he has my name.) They’d been going together ever since the first week-end they were at the college. After they married, they lived in Chicago where William went to law school and Joan worked to support them. Another little Davenport was born in 1984—little Jackson Davenport Herlong—to William and Joan. William said he was determined to name him Davenport since he wanted to carry the name on down to the next generation. William graduated in 1985 and came to Charlotte to work with a judge up there. Mary Darcy Herlong was born while they were there. I went with Bela and Jimmie to Charlotte to Jack’s second birthday in April, and Darcy was just an infant. Then they moved to Virginia, and William is working for a big law firm in Washington. I always heard that somebody was as smart as “a Philadelphia lawyer.” My grandson is as smart as a “Washington lawyer” now.

People come to see me too, but my children and grandchildren don’t come often enough to suit me. They’re all educated and married and involved in their own lives. Even Bela, as close as she is, I don’t see every day. As the little girl said to Curtis when he went to Annapolis, “You will be gone,” so are our children gone—two in Atlanta, one in Savannah, and the other in Saluda. They’ve filled the desires their mother drilled in them from the time they were big enough to think and even before that, and they’ve instilled the same ideas into their children, I believe. I guess they have done pretty well in the world. You can count on them to do what they say they will do. None of them are rich, but they’re all what I call comfortable. They are a lot better off than Gladys and I ever were.


Madaline comes pretty often since she’s by herself. Boney’s been dead a long time now. She’s always been my “Presh” I reckon because she was always such a loving little girl. She retired in 1982 when she was 65. They made her a Professor Emeritus, whatever that is. All I know is that it’s a big honor. She was just like her mama. She did love to teach, and from what I can tell, her students loved her just like Gladys’ did. As long as Gladys was able to go uptown or to funerals or anywhere around here, some one of her students—old by then—would come up to her and tell her how much they enjoyed her teaching, that she made it interesting. It was like they lit a fire inside of her; she’d just laugh, and her eyes would be sparkling.

Curtis and Doug come when they can, and I always enjoy talking to both of them. We sit up late at night discussing politics and religion and everything else. They’ve got their ideas, and I’ve got mine. We argue a lot because we like to argue. All my four children have children and grandchildren. There may be a lot more that I won’t live to see since Alice is still in college. I’m ninety-three now, and I’ve got Patsy working for me every day. She feeds me good and keeps the house clean. I’ve told her she’s going to sweep a hole in the floor, she sweeps so much!

All four of my children came with most of the grandchildren for the big birthday party Bela gave me when I turned ninety in 1984 on June 20. It was out in Bela and Jimmie’s back yard with tables full of good things to eat. I talked with all my children and grandchildren and even my great-grandchildren and my nieces and nephews and cousins galore. When I was young, I thought I’d die of tuberculosis like Ma and Pa and Curtis, but I never had much trouble with my lungs. I’m still around and enjoying life, and I’m still picking up my feet too. I don’t want to be like Mr. Bill Eargle. You ought to see him shuffle along, and he’s not ninety yet. I’m proud because I haven’t gotten old. I’ve seen old young folks. Cantey Wightman was born old. Hell, I ain’t old now, and I’m ninety-one. Old is how you act, or that’s what I think. But I reckon I might get there. I told Jessie Padgett, my nephew Wallace’s

Looking Back 363

widow, not too long ago, “You may be old in years, but you’ll never be old in action.” But be durn, if she’s not old in action since she had the stroke. It just breaks my heart to look at her now.

My great-grandson, Scott Pearce, Bettina’s second boy, got married in Savannah. When I went to the wedding with Bela and Jimmie, I looked around me, and I remembered what it was like to be twenty-two years old and just getting married. I decided that I’ve had a wonderful life producing all those folks that surrounded me. And I thought as I looked at my family that they’re most all connected a little with the church. I reckon Jim Ed, Bela’s first son, is the least churchy of any of them, and he’s all right. He was a little wild at one time, but he was always special to me.

All four of our children grew up going to church. Though none of them are at Emory now, they always go to church when they come home. They were all baptized there, and my two daughters were married there. I grew up at Emory, and it means the world to me. I saw Emory survive the problems in 1939 when the Southern Methodist Church united with the Northern Methodist Church. Other churches were torn apart but not Emory. And I’ve seen the black Methodist churches go together with the white Methodist churches, and we’ve come through that too.

Our children also helped us work on the farm from the time they were big enough until they left home. Without their help we’d never have made it. And we didn’t give them allowances when they were little or any salary when they were bigger. We just shared what little we had with them. They always knew that we’d give them anything we had—which wasn’t much. But God had given us all health and good sense, and that’s a big start in this world where so many people are sick and so many children are born feeble-minded.

To drop back sixty-five years. I lost a job about a cigarette three-hundred miles from home. When I started across that big forty-acre field to the place I was boarding, I realized I’d played hell. I had two measly dollars in my pocket and nobody to turn to.


My father did own a home, but he was sick and couldn’t look out for me. When I realized what I’d done, I vowed I’d never ask another man for a job. If I couldn’t make it on my own, I’d perish.

It looks like God took me in hand and led me like he tried to lead the children of Israel to the Promised Land. I got a job within ten minutes of losing the other job. I had seventeen dollars at the end of the week—I thought I was rich! I went to the payroll office to get my back pay from the man who had fired me. He paid me and asked me why I didn’t tell him I didn’t make the cigarette I had. I told him that he was too fiery and I didn’t like to be bossed. He asked me to come back, and I stayed and worked with him until I finished the job in August.

The work I did for anybody was gratis until one day I made this statement to three fellows, my friends, sitting on the steps of the Saluda Court House. One of them died less than a month from that day. I had told him I didn’t want to ask for a job. But I thought so much of Alvin Padgett, my first cousin—one of the men on the steps that day, that when he died, I decided to ask for his job like he’d told me to. I went and asked F.G. Scurry, who was Saluda’s state senator then, for Alvin’s job on the Election Board of Saluda County. I didn’t want to ask, but I did, and I got the job. That was a long time ago, and I’m still on the board. I thought Larry Gentry, who is Saluda County’s representative now since we don’t have a senator any more, was going to fire me when he called me to come see him a couple of weeks ago, but all he wanted was to tell me that he was going to put two more people on the board.

About that same first cousin, Alvin Padgett—about two months before Alvin died, I was talking to him one day and he looked at my sleeves and noticed that I had on beautiful gold cuff buttons. He said, “Dick” (he always called me Dick), “do you know I’ve never had a pair of cuff buttons in my life?”

I said to him, “Why, you could have had these.” And he said, “I don’t know whether I could or not. I had eight

children, and we couldn’t spare anything.” He told the truth; Alvin and Eunice had a hard time bringing up their family, but all

Looking Back 365

those children have made a success in life. When Alvin died, I carried a pair of cuff buttons to the funeral home. I meant to put them in his shirt in the coffin, but his hands were covered up and I couldn’t get to them. And it did just as well. I don’t suppose he would have known it anyway. I lost the buttons that day before I could get them back home.

I’ve had several bouts in the hospital in my life. Supposedly I had a cancer in my lip. In 1925 I had it cut out. Then it was dormant for twenty-five years. In 1950 I had it removed again. I remember telling the doctor, “Well, if it waits twenty-five more years, it won’t bother me.” The funny part about the thing is that it got bad again twenty years later. My good friend Jeff Griffith, who was a lawyer and the solicitor for this district, said to me, “Davenport, if you haven’t got the money, you go on and have that lip operated on. I’ll pay for it.” But believe it or not, it healed up of its own accord. And that’s been years ago.

The Lord has blessed us all. We’ve never had much sickness. I’ve been operated on twelve times, but I got well every time. In 1955 when I had a hemorrhoid operation, I wanted to go home on Friday, and Dr. Pendergast wouldn’t let me go. I vowed I was going uptown in Greenwood to see Miriam Stevenson, who was to appear in a parade there that day. She was the South Carolina girl who had become Miss Universe. On that Friday morning I went to the bathroom and hemorrhaged and fainted. The nurses found me and picked me up and carried me into a ward. An orderly came in, and they got me back to my room. A little red-headed girl from Florence said, “Mr. Padgett, that artery is bleeding. I’ll sew it up.”

She did, and Dr. Pendergast came in and raised sand at me. He said, “I told you that you weren’t ready to go home. Suppose you had gone home—you’d have died from such a hemorrhage as this. You couldn’t have got to the doctor before you bled to death.”

I just laughed and said, “It’d just have been a good man gone.” Yes, I had the lip operation first. Then in 1941, I had locked

bowels and a kidney stone and they cystoscoped me. Then I had


five skin cancers cut off my face in 1962, another lip operation in 1950, a hemorrhoid operation in 1954, enlarged prostate gland surgery, two cataract operations, a gall bladder operation, a broken hip, and locked bowels in 1983.

In 1963 I had a prostate gland operation. I’d had a lot of trouble with emptying my bladder, so I was glad to have that surgery. I got over that, and I’ve already told you about the hemorrhoid operation I had the summer of 1955 and how I nearly died when I hemorrhaged in the hospital. But the doctors fixed me up, and I worked a long time after that, and it did cure another problem—the hemorrhoids I’d had all my life.

Then all of a sudden cataracts came on my eyes. I had to have both of them operated on at different times. I could see fine after the operations. The doctors wanted to put contact lenses on me, but I knew that I’d never be able to manage them with my big hands and big fingers. So I stuck with glasses. I remember that when we went to Savannah to see my grandson Barry after he’d accidentally shot himself, he took one look at my glasses and said, “Grandpa, you look like you’re looking through the bottoms of two Coca Cola bottles.” But I didn’t care what they looked like to other people just as long as I could see through them. Having the operations on my eyes put me in a sad position in one way though. I couldn’t kill birds any more. Somehow I couldn’t aim the way I always had.

This is a wonderful world we live in, and this is a wonderful place where I live. We have the lowest taxes of any county in the state, and we have the least crime of any county in the state. And that’s too much. To tell you the dying truth, I’m one of the gentlemen who believe that the young people are no worse than the old were. We talk about our young people and what a wayward disposition they seem to have, but I can remember three generations, and it seems like to me that the young people are getting better instead of worse. I know that my boys and my neighbors’ boys were better than we were. The only thing that makes the young generation seem so bad is that they are not

Looking Back 367

sneaky with what they do. And honestly, I believe if the women in my day had dressed like they do now, there would have been more rape cases than there are now.

One of the things that I hate to know is that I wasn’t as good as my wife’s sister Anna and her children thought I was. And I certainly hate that I wasn’t as smart as my own dear Aunt Ella and her children thought I was. I was neither. I thought when I was thirty and my father died at 57 that he was old and that it was all right for him to die. Now I look around me and think how long, how long will it be. I had an idea when I grew up that people, as they grew older, grew better every day in every way. Now I know that’s not true.

When I first started out in life, I was pretty wild and didn’t think too much about anything, but I remember when my mother was dying, she called us three boys to the foot of her bed and talked to us. She was worried about Curtis and me. She wasn’t worried about Jouette. Her worry stayed with me. I never did in all my wildness forget that one thought she had about me, and so help me God, if I’ve ever done to any man or woman anything I wouldn’t have them do to me, I don’t know it. And I decided the first week after I married that if I was going to raise a family, I was going to walk circumspectly before them, my neighbors, and God Almighty.

One time when my son Curtis was home and we were looking over the land that I’ve accumulated, I said, “Curtis, if I had had the education that my children have had, what do you reckon I would have been?” He answered me right straight, “You might not have been worth a damn.” He was probably right, but it seems that a lot of people have taken advantage of me because I didn’t have an education.

Another thing I know is that it’s no good to pile up money in this world. I never have seen money hanging from a hearse as it was taking the dead to the graveyard. I told my cousin Will that one time. He was offering too little for Ella Padgett’s timber. (Remember she was Wash Padgett’s daughter and grew up right


behind this house.) She was a good woman, and she never married. Once when she was sick, I went after Dr. Wise for her. When he came in, Ella was smoking the pipe she always smoked. Dr. Wise told her, “If God Almighty had intended you to smoke, he’d a put a smoke stack behind your head.” Ella just looked at him and went on smoking.

Well, she had some timber to sell on the land Uncle Wash had given her, and Will Padget offered her $1200 for it. I said to him, “I’m damned if you’re gonna do Ella like that. Ella has kept my babies for me and let me go bird hunting while Gladys was teaching.” Then I asked him if he’d consider buying that timber by the thousand. He pretty quick agreed. After he got his sawmill in the woods, he saw there was a lot more timber there than he’d thought. Ella ended up getting $4100 for it instead of the $1200 he’d offered her at first. She let me have the slabs that had been left in the woods, and I sold them. Yes sir, Ella was a fine woman. I went to her funeral at Mt. Moses just like I went to Dora’s and Eliot’s and Bennie’s and Ida’s and even Uncle Wash’s back in 1913. All Uncle Wash’s children are buried on the hill over at Mt. Moses. They’ve got tomb rocks too. Aunt Emmaline is buried there too, but she died when I was little. She’s got a tomb rock too.

I thought the world of Ella’s brother Eliot. When I went to the hospital one year when my fodder was ready to pull, while I was gone Eliot pulled 966 bundles of fodder. He’d also hitched up the mules and hauled it to my new barn and stacked it up. He didn’t want to take pay, but I made him. He was bad to drink, and I’d taken him to the doctor so many times that I told him that day if he got drunk with the money I paid him, I wouldn’t take him to the doctor. He promised me he wouldn’t, but that was the way he always spent his money. That night Ella came and got me to go over to the house where they lived—the two unmarried children of Uncle Wash. Of course, Eliot was drunk and in pretty bad shape. I went ahead and took him to Saluda to see the doctor. When Dr. Wise looked at him and saw how drunk he was, he

Looking Back 369

reminded me, “Davenport, I told you not to bring that man back up here.”

I said, “You know you’ll treat him, Dr. Wise.” And he did. Eliot had money to pay; he worked hard. Yes, he’d work—the only fellow who went to the field with me who could beat me in everything, and he was four or five years older than I was. Ella was younger than he was, but she died before he did.

Gladys and I both believed in helping others. We carried Carrie Elizabeth and Miriam Wightman, Glady’s brother Wesley’s daughters, to Ware Shoals and paid a week’s board there for them to work in the cotton mill. Wesley didn’t have a dime, and the girls couldn’t get a job in Saluda. Gladys and I helped them all we could. I was going to carry Jouette’s daughter Kathleen to Spartanburg and help her go in nurse’s training, but she got a notice that Greenwood Hospital would train her free and give her a place to live and pay her a little salary. Of course, she went to Greenwood. Gladys made her uniforms for her, and we took her to Greenwood to get her started.

I’ve had a good time all my life. I was walking up the street in Saluda one day, and Sam Perry, the sheriff, said to me, “Davenport did you ever have a pain or feel bad?”

I said to him, “Mr. Perry, I’m gonna tell you a little thing I read in a magazine one time: “Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone. If you got troubles, keep’em to yourself. Other people got troubles of their own.”

He smiled and said, “That’s a dang good motto.” I’ve tried to live up to that old saying. I’ve had some hard

times, and I’ve been to the mill and didn’t get ground. I don’t have an enemy, I don’t think, in the world. I told my boy—I told Curtis one time—I said, “Curtis, do you know what the biggest desire in my life has been?”

He said to me, “No, I don’t, Daddy.” I said, “To live by the side of the road and be a friend to man.” He looked at me and said just as plain—I’ll never forget the

look on his face—“Well, Daddy, I think you got your wish.” All I


know is that I’ve tried. I’ve always tried to do what the Bible says, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

One time a man by the name of J.Y. Jackson moved to this section. He was a bird hunter like me. His wife got down sick, and he took her to see Dr. Wise in town. Dr. Wise took one look in her mouth and sent her over to the dentist with directions for him to pull all her teeth. I happened to be in the office that day and heard the dentist tell her to open her mouth. She did what he said, and he told her she had the worst set of teeth he had ever seen. He asked her, “Who’s gonna stand for this work if I pull out your teeth?”

She said, “I don’t know. We don’t have the money. Dr. Wise is the one told me to come over here to see you.”

The dentist said to her, “I can’t pull your teeth if you haven’t got money to pay.”

I piped up and said, “Doctor, I’ll stand for her work.” He looked at me and asked kinda funny like, “Davenport, do

you know what you’re getting into?” I told him—I said, “I don’t give a damn; I heard Jake Grigsby in

my Sunday School class say one day that all you can hold in your cold dead hands is what you did for somebody else, and I don’t know a damn thing you ever did for anybody without the money.” Yes, I told him that, and I said again that I’d stand for Mrs. Jackson. So he pulled every one of her teeth. Be danged if J.Y. Jackson didn’t pay every cent of that damn bill. It took him a while, but he did it, but I know the dentist wouldn’t have pulled those teeth if I hadn’t told him I’d stand good for it.

I’ve always liked to farm, and I have always loved the land. I did have four hundred acres one time, but I sold that piece down on the creek, and now I just have 340. It’s a good thing I did like to farm because I didn’t have much education, so farming was the only thing I could do. My pa was the best farmer I ever saw, and I imitated him, and I did some of the things he had done, and the people around here thought I’d gone crazy. In 1919 it started to raining on the 16th day of May, and I had seven acres—a little over

Looking Back 371

seven acres—of the prettiest corn you ever saw, and it rained and rained. It rained so much the corn began to fire up. My father had told me that if corn fired up, it wouldn’t make a thing. He also told me what to do in such a case. I took a wide buster and ran around it every other row as close as I could get to the corn stalks. Cousin Mill Stone came along while I was running around that corn. At that time I lived over at my wife’s mother’s place. Cousin Mill stopped and said to me, “Davenport, what are you doing?”

I said, “I’m trying to save this corn.” He frowned and said, “You’re ruining it; that’s what you’re

doing; it’s wet.” “Well, that’s what Pa would have done,” I said. That’s exactly

what I told him, and it was the truth. I got through running around it, and I borrowed a wagon and hitched up the mule and went over to Saluda to buy 800 pounds of soda to put around the corn. The only trouble was that there wasn’t any soda in the whole town of Saluda. I asked Mr. Will Crawford, the warehouse superintendent, did he have any cotton seed meal.

He said, “Yeah, I got plenty of it.” I told him I wanted ten sacks. He said, “What in the world do

you want with ten sacks of cotton seed meal in June?” I said, “I’m gonna put it around my corn.” He said kinda surprised, “I never heard of that.” And I said to him, “That’s where Pa put it down.” I loaded the meal on the wagon and went home and put a big

handful of meal around every three stalks. When I got through putting out the meal, I took a little one-horse cutaway harrow that my pa had bought and put one of my mules to it and flattened out the middles where I had run around the corn. The end of that story is that I made more corn that year of 1919 than any other ten farmers did—cause they didn’t make no damn corn.

The weather’s always been pretty good in Saluda. We don’t have much bad weather anyway. We have a few little snows, but they melt in a day or two, and we’ve had some ice storms that break up the pine trees. I read in Tuesday’s paper that they had


one heck of a storm in Alabama, and when I met our mail carrier, Frank Herlong (my son-in-law’s father) at the mailbox, I told him about the storm down in Alabama. I said, “Frank, we don’t have no such weather as that in Saluda County.” He agreed with me, but I found out the next day that we were both wrong. Lo and behold, the next morning we had a damn cyclone. I had a big pine tree that snapped off about four feet above the ground. It fell in the road. The wind just cut it off like a pair of scissors. I had to hire somebody to help me clean it up. I had to change my tune about we didn’t have any tornados like they have out in Alabama. That was the first one I ever remember hitting right here around Mt. Willing.

About fifteen years ago we had a bad winter. My brother Jouette called me up on the telephone one day, and I said to him, “This winter reminds me of the winter of 1899.”

Right over the telephone, Jouette said, “You don’t know a damn thing about the winter of 1899. You weren’t old enough to remember it. “

“I do remember it.” I said. He asked me what I remembered. I told him, “Well, we had a snow, and you all—you and Curtis—were going rabbit tracking, and I wanted to go with you. I was seven years old—No. that’s wrong. I wouldn’t have been but five years old. I wanted to go with you, and you didn’t want me to go. My mother made you wait, and she put my red stockings over my shoes and two extra little blouses under my coat—there wasn’t a sweater made back at that time—and something else. Oh, yes, she put a skull cap on me. I went on out in the yard to catch up with you. There wasn’t but one rock out there in the yard. I wasn’t paying much attention. I knew the rock was covered up with snow so I couldn’t see it, but I went tearing out there anyway, and I stumped my toe and fell on that rock. I’ve got a scar right now up on my head, by golly—where I cut it. Some of the grown-ups ran out and picked me up and carried me into the house, and the snow was all over the door steps. I remember my blood hitting on the snow and how it looked. I went in the house, and Ma cleaned

Looking Back 373

out the cut and put something on it. It didn’t hurt too much. Ma died when I was eight, but I remember how she hugged me that day and said she was sorry I was hurt—even if I was just five years old. I’ve always been able to remember what happened to me. It just sticks in my mind.

I’ve told you about bird hunting. You know I’ve loved to bird hunt all my life. Course, I just hunted partridges or quail, as they call them today. One day I was in town and there was a fellow back of Des Caughman’s produce wagon telling about hunting and killing birds. Someone called me over and said, “Mr. Davenport, come over here and tell this man about hunting dogs and killing birds.”

I said, “There’s no need; he wouldn’t believe it nohow.” But I walked on over there anyway, and I told him that I’d killed ten thousand birds and hunted seventy-six dogs. It sounded so much like a lie that I thought it was a lie myself. That night when I got ready to say my prayers, I thought about what I’d told that fellow, and I went to wiggling.

Gladys said, “What are you wiggling for?” And I told her about what I had said to that man. I got up and got the memorandum book where I’d kept account of the birds I’d killed. I had 7,382 birds set down, and I hadn’t set down a bird then in three years, and I didn’t set them down at first. I didn’t start until after I’d been married awhile. I didn’t have much time to hunt before I married. Oh, we’d rabbit hunt late on Saturday evening; we had rabbit dogs—old Rabbit and Old Red. But Pa didn’t want us to stop work to talk to people that came to the field much less take time off to go hunting. Pa wouldn’t stop. If you wanted to talk to Pa in the field, you had to talk to him walking with him as he worked. After I found out how many birds I’d kept account of killing, I figured I wasn’t far wrong with what I’d told that fellow, so I went back to bed and went right to sleep.

I smoked cigarettes from the time I was ten years old until I was seventy-seven. And I quit. I didn’t say a word to anybody. I just quit. Of course, I’d quit in 1947 when I had the punctured


lungs. I quit then for three years, and there was never a moment in those three years that I didn’t want a cigarette. So I went back to smoking. When Dr. Wise and the ear specialists told me that I was damaging my hearing by smoking and that it might get better if I quit, I didn’t quit. Then when Mary Alice, Gladys’ sister, got in such bad shape and we had to put her in the nursing home and then later when Gladys started getting in bad shape too, I knew I had to keep on living to take care of both of them. Mary Alice had never wanted me to take care of her, but I had to do it. She gave me the power of attorney, and I took care of her place and her business for over five years.

And poor Gladys—she didn’t want me to take care of her either. She was an independent soul if there ever was one, but she got so in the end that she would get lost in our house—the house we’d been living in since 1919. And many a time she got lost outside. She couldn’t remember when she’d eaten her meals or how to cook, and she saw little children in the yard—little children that weren’t there. I had to take care of her in spite of her wishes. So I quit smoking so that I could live and do what Grandpa Mahlon made me promise in that wedding ceremony in 1916. It must have worked because I’m ninety-three now and in pretty good health. I can still mow my yard, and I do all my cooking—if you want to call it cooking. I mostly just open cans. I don’t take time to cook. There’s food in the freezer—corn and peaches—that’s been there since before Gladys died. I haven’t cooked it. I just don’t want to be bothered. Somebody asked me if I felt better after I quit smoking. I told him no, that I’d always felt good.

Chapter 35

1988–1989

Nearing the End

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ It seems like I’ve been telling this story for years now. My life

has been a long one and a full one too. I hate to admit it, but I’m getting a little feeble now. I don’t drive anymore. My children think it’s a danger to others for me to be on the road. I got a letter from the highway department telling me that if I wanted to continue driving, I’d have to take a written test and a road test. I got the book and studied it, and I went and took both tests. I failed them both—surprised myself. I thought I was as good a driver as I’d ever been. I never had but one wreck (I told you about it), and it was when I was bringing Madaline and her friends home from Winthrop. Nobody was hurt, but it affected my driving for years. I finally got over it and got back to normal though.

Since I can’t drive anymore, Patsy drives me around in the daytime, and we go all sorts of places visiting everybody I know. She’s a good driver, and I like to ride, so that’s a good combination. If we get hungry, we just stop and eat wherever we happen to be. I read in the State one Sunday about the Abbeville Opera House, and Monday morning I told Patsy to get ready—we were going to visit the Opera House. We did visit, and I went in and talked to the man who runs it. I told him I’d read about it in


the paper and wanted to see it. He took me on a little tour and told me all about it. It was built nearly a hundred years ago, and they’ve restored it and are putting on plays in it. I’d sure like to go see one of those. I wonder if it’d be as good as the one I saw in Virginia when we went to see Madaline and William at Charlottesville.

We go to see the Ellises—two old maid ladies who live way on the other side of Saluda, and we go to see Henry Conrad Herlong and his wife Ludie down at the end of our road. Oh, and Eugenia Shealy and lots of people in the nursing home, where there’s always plenty of people I know, and some of them still recognize me. I hope I never end up there. It’s a good place, but it’s a sad place. When you go in, you know the only way you’re going to come out is feet first.

Will Crouch, my good Negro neighbor and friend who lives on the other side of Mt. Moses Church, stays with me at night. I think I’d be all right by myself, but my four children hate to think of me here by myself all those hours. He comes about eight at night and leaves when Patsy gets here at seven-thirty the next morning. He sleeps, but he’s here if I need him, and I love to talk to him. We spend the evenings before we go to bed just talking. I’ve known him all his life. He’s in his sixties, I guess—thirty years younger than I am. He’s been a hard worker all his life—doing public work and farming. He mows yards now and digs graves for Ramey Funeral Home. He’ll probably dig mine. I asked him if he’d mind that, and he said, “Not a bit, Mr. Davenport.” I don’t mind who digs it. I just want to put it off as long as possible.

I’ve treated everybody like I’d want to be treated myself. Uncle Wash’s grandson, Boy Jackson, came to see me Saturday morning. He lives about a mile in front of this house. You know, I appre-ciated him coming. I’ll never forget it. I helped his mother, Ida Padgett Jackson, who’d taught school at Cambridge, a little rural school for Negroes, for years and years and quit before the state started giving teachers retirement benefits. I decided I’d try to help her since she had to depend on her son to take care of her. I

Nearing the End 377

got what papers I needed to prove she’d taught the years she had taught, and I got all the trustees that were still living to sign them. I got records from the courthouse too. I took all that proof to Columbia and applied for retirement for Ida. It took a while, but she did get a pension, and she thanked me over and over for getting it for her. I think Boy was proud of it too. She already had her house, so that pension made Ida independent, and she was proud not to have to look to anybody for support—even her son. Posey Padgett, another Negro friend who lives about a mile behind this house, happened to come while Boy was here. He married Uncle Wash’s granddaughter, my nurse Dora’s daughter, Cora—the one who went to Atlanta to keep Bettina and then came home and kept her at our house. You remember I told you about that. All the colored folks that I’ve known I’ve treated right, and they know it. I couldn’t live with myself if I’d treated anybody wrong.

I’ve always gone to church. I was christened at Emory, and I’ve been there my whole life. In fact, Ralph Shealy got Bela to interview me for our Homecoming in August of 1985. I told her about all my years at Emory, and she wrote it down and typed it up. Ralph printed it, and everybody that came got a copy. Gladys was at Emory all her life too—and her parents and my parents before us. Also our grandparents and her great-grandparents. In fact, her great-grandfather Henry Conrad Herlong founded the church. So we both had ties that bind us to Emory. When I was just twenty-three years old, I was elected the assistant Bible Class teacher. At twenty-four, I was elected the real teacher. I taught that class for forty-some years. One time for six months I taught it without my teeth. That was when I had all my teeth pulled, and I had to let my gums heal of the pyrea before I could get my new teeth. Years later I resigned, and in less than a month they had me teaching one Sunday a month until my whole teaching amounted to fifty-eight years. Then I resigned for good. And I want to tell the world that I learned a lot and loved teaching that class. I’m not too positive about it, but I just hope my teaching did somebody some


good along the way. The only thing I can say for sure is that I know my teaching was good for me.

Did you know that I know the Bible and I knew my Grandpa Mahlon, who was a hardshell Baptist minister. He was supposed to be such a good fellow, and I looked at his children, what they believed. What you believe will affect what you do. I didn’t always agree with Grandpa, but one thing was for sure, he never seemed to have any doubt about what he believed. Two of Grandpa’s children committed suicide—Aunt Pearl and Uncle Luther. They were almost non-believers.

Pa and Uncle Oscar were almost non-believers too. Yet I’ve never seen a man who was any more perfect than my pa was about the morals of this world. I was worried about my father’s soul in the next world when Pa was dying. He was good to everybody, but we children thought he was mean to us. He had an idea he was going to get well and make up for what he’d done. But it didn’t happen. He was dying of consumption. I asked him what he thought about the next world, and he held up his arm and there was nothing on it but skin and bone, and when I asked him what he thought about eternity and what would happen in the next world, he looked at me and said, “Davenport, nobody has ever returned, but if what I’ve done and what I haven’t done is weighed, I can truthfully say that I’ve treated every man as my brother and every woman as my sister, and if it’s over there, I believe I’ll inherit it, and if it’s not, I’ll have rest in the grave, a rest which I’ve never had on this earth.”

That answer didn’t satisfy me then. For several years I worried about it, but as the years passed, our great, good family doctor, O.P. Wise (old Doctor Wise), told me his good friend Dr. Watson was dying in Columbia and he was worried about Dr. Watson’s soul. He made a trip down to Columbia to talk to him. I didn’t ask him then what Dr. Watson said, but the whole story stayed in my mind, and later I did ask Dr. Wise what Dr. Watson said. Dr. Wise told me, “I went and talked to him, and I’ll never forget the expression on his face, and he was practically dying then. He said,

Nearing the End 379

‘Oscar, if God Almighty won’t save me for what I’ve done for his humanity without pay and without grumbling—which I believe he will—then I’ll be lost.’“ Little did you know, I became reconciled to my father’s fate then.

What do I believe? Well, I believe that most people are good—that if, if you will let them be. We’ve never had any very bad people in this county anyway. Of course, they’ve always done the same things they’re doing now. But then they’re just being human, and you can’t blame them for that when God made them human. I believe that love is the most important thing in this world. I loved my mother and my father and my brothers and all my cousins and all my friends. And everybody knows I loved my brother Jouette. God knows, he was all I had after Ma died and Pa got sick. He was a mother and a brother to me. When he was seventeen, just a baby really, he married Mrs. Emmie, and she was thirty-four and had five children. David, the oldest, was already fifteen. Boy, how Jouette worked—for Johnny Herlong’s children and for his own four. And talking about love, I’ve loved Gladys like most people just imagine. I lived with her for sixty-four years. And all those years were like a three-ring circus. I couldn’t ever tell what was coming up tomorrow.

I believe I’m going to heaven. But I don’t think it will be like Grandma Sue and Grandpa Mahlon thought it would be. I think you’ll be so happy when you get to heaven that you won’t think about who you know. They thought they’d lock arms and walk together down those golden streets. I said to them, “That woman in the Bible who had seven husbands would be in a hell of a mess. They’d get to fighting before they got around the corner.” I’m like Greg Forrest was. He said he wouldn’t be choosy about where he was in heaven; if he could just get a little corner, he’d be satisfied. Greg and I always hit it off.

I sho’ do dread dying. I’m not afraid to die, and it wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t stay dead so long. I’ve never settled in my mind about what happens when you die. I’ve studied about it a lot. Just exactly when does your soul go to heaven? I hope it goes


right when you die. The Bible says not to fear man, who can destroy your body, but to fear the one that can damn your soul.

If I had my life to live over, I’d not do one dowl thing different. I’ve got everything out of it I could. I read once, and I believed it, that you’re not coming this way but once and you’d better have a good time while you’re passing through. And that is what I’ve done. J.D. Griffith and I were partners one Thursday night in our regular setback game over at Ben Lindler’s store. I’ve been playing with the boys since Gladys died. I never would leave her at night while she was with me because she was scared to stay by herself at night. Well, anyway, J.D. said, “Mr. Davenport, I’ve just got an idea that you’ve had the best time in the world and that you did mighty little work.”

Ben Lindler stopped cutting hair and said, “Mr. J.D., you got it wrong. Mr. Davenport and his whole family worked. Even the little children worked. And they didn’t get any money for it either.”

And he was right. We did all work. And I worked the hardest. No, I can’t say that. I’ll have to say that Gladys worked harder, ‘cause she worked all the time. Me, I could go hunting and get away from work. It was hard to make a living forty years ago, a lot harder than it is today. And we didn’t have a decent house and no conveniences. The first year I got married, I thought I’d get rich in a hurry. I worked hard, and I never even paid for a damn cow that year.

Do I believe that God controls the weather like the preachers say? Well, I believe that God could make it rain, but I also believe that God fixed all that in the beginning just like he fixed the other laws that govern the world—like the law of gravity. He doesn’t mess with that either. I’ll never forget the first Sunday in August, 1914, at Saint Mark’s Lutheran Church. I was sitting between Miss Emma Werts and Miss Tranny Caughman. We were giggling like young people will. The whole congregation prayed and prayed for rain, and it didn’t rain until Christmas. We had twenty-five acres of corn, and it all burned up. They prayed and prayed, and it

Nearing the End 381

didn’t rain in 1925. It rained on the twelfth of May and then on the fourteenth of December. The cotton grew up and fell down. Rivers went dry. People played a game of baseball in the Savannah River down below Augusta. All the wells went dry. Then in 1977 people prayed, and it didn’t stop the drought. My son-in-law Jimmie Herlong planted one hundred acres of corn down at the McCarty Place, and he didn’t make a single ear—not even one to cook. In 1931, 1925, 1954, we had terrible droughts, and no amount of praying could change that. No sir, I don’t believe God interferes with the rain. And in my neck of the woods—farming, that is—rain has been all important. You can’t grow crops without rain.

I also believe in the land. Yes, sir; I feel strongly about land. God placed it here, and he placed us here to manage it. My father said it was more in the man than in the land. What worries me about my land is what kind of shape I’m going to leave it in for somebody else. My fences are down, thistles are all over the pastures, but at this point maybe I’m like Lester Able. At the end he said his 700 acres of land were the least of his worries. I haven’t got to that stage yet.

I’m old now, and all the people I knew a long time ago are dead. I miss all those who die. As Farah Mae Pugh said, “There are so many friends who have died that I have more friends over there than I have here, so I don’t mind going on.” But I mind myself. I’m not ready to go yet. I look out the back window at the Rocky Ridge and think how many birds I’ve killed on that hill and how many times I’ve plowed it and how many times I’ve cussed the rocks on it, and I feel sad that I won’t plow anymore or hunt birds anymore or even cuss the rocks anymore. But I still enjoy looking at the land I’ve lived on all my life. In fact, it’s looking prettier and prettier. I guess that’s because I know it won’t be long now before I’ll be leaving it.

On Sunday mornings when I sit in my regular seat at Emory, I think about all the years I’ve been going to church there and all the preachers I’ve listened to. The preachers and the good people who make up the church have helped me live my life like my


father taught me—to treat every man like my brother and every woman like my sister. And I look out in the cemetery and I can see the tombstones of my grandparents and my parents in the old part and over by the road I can see the double tombstone for Gladys and me. We buried Gladys there in 1979 after we’d been married sixty-four years. I know that one of these days I’ll take my place by her side. But even then I’ll be a part of Emory Church and Saluda County.

Epilogue

He Died as He Lived With Courage, Love, and Joy

by Bela Padgette Herlong

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sitting in his chair by the window and surrounded by his son Doug and his grandson Steve, Davenport

Padgett enjoyed his last Sunday in the home he’d lived in for seventy years, a place where his family gathered to celebrate his 95th birthday.


“What do I believe? Well, I believe that most people are good—that is, if you will let them be. We’ve never had any very bad people in this county anyway. Of course, they’ve always done the same things they’re doing now. But then they’re just being human, and you can’t blame them for that when God made them human. . . . ”

“I believe I’m going to heaven. . . . I sho’ do dread dying, but I’m not afraid to die, and it wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t stay dead so long. I’ve never settled in my mind about what happens when you die. I’ve studied about it a lot. Just exactly when does your soul go to heaven? I hope it goes right when you die.”

From Padgett’s My Name, p. 379 On Palm Sunday, 1989, Robert and Sarah Mae Black had picked

Daddy up as usual and taken him to church at Emory, where he’d been going all his life. Then Mrs. Thelma DeLoache brought him to our house for dinner as she had been doing since he’d stopped driving. She had sold her house in the country when her husband died and built a house in Saluda. She and her husband had been Mama and Daddy’s good friends for years.

After we’d eaten and while I cleaned the kitchen, Daddy sat on the sofa and read the paper as he usually did. Jimmie was sleeping in his chair. Alice went on to St. Paul to practice for the Palm Sunday concert that afternoon. She and Mr. Humphries, principal of Saluda Elementary School, were presenting the program. After a while, Jimmie, Daddy, and I went to the church also. St. Paul has a ramp at the front, but Daddy headed for the steps. I noticed then that he was much slower than I’d realized and seemed feeble too. We found seats near the front, and Alice gave her part of the program—special Easter selections, and then Mr. Humphries gave his part. Daddy beamed with joy and pride as he sat and listened to Alice sing. He loved her voice, and he always reminded her that she sounded just like her grandmother Roseva—a high compliment in his opinion. He said she’d had the most beautiful voice he’d ever heard. Of course, Alice had never heard her

Epilogue: He Died as He Lived 385

grandmother sing since she’d died eleven years before Alice was born, but she’d certainly heard people talk about her pure, high soprano voice.

I had seen how hard it was for Daddy to get up the steps on the outside, and I knew that to go to the reception afterward we’d have to go down a flight of steps also. So I suggested that we not go to speak to the performers and others and just go home. Daddy didn’t like that idea one bit. He said firmly, “No, I want to go where the people are.”

And we did go where the people were. It took Daddy a long time to get down the steps, but he had great fun speaking to everyone there. He always loved to talk with people. When he talked to our minister that day, he told him he didn’t look like a preacher, that he looked like a policeman. Our minister seemed to enjoy Daddy’s viewpoint and his candor. Daddy was in no hurry to go, and when Alice came up to greet him, he hugged her and told her that she had a beautiful voice and that he loved to hear her sing, that she sounded like her grandmother Roseva. He always reminded her of that.

When we left, I got the car and parked it right by the side door so that Daddy didn’t have to go up any stairs. I took Jimmie home and then took Daddy to his house so that he could rest in his chair and sleep a little before Will Crouch came to spend the night with him. I knew he’d want to talk with him a while.

I didn’t call the next morning because I knew Patsy would be there by seven thirty to relieve Will and that she would let me know if anything was wrong. I was a little worried since Daddy had seemed so frail and weak on Sunday.

I had taught my first period class when Patsy called me to say that Daddy was hemorrhaging from his mouth. I told her to bring him immediately to Dr. Riley’s office, which was directly across from the school. That gave me time to write down directions for a substitute that the office sent to my room. I went directly over to Dr. Riley’s office and met Daddy and Patsy, and we helped him get inside. After Dr. Riley examined him, he called the ambulance


to take him to the hospital. Dr. Holman examined him in the emergency room and put him in the hospital for tests. The first time the doctors put a tube down into his lungs, they did not find the cancer. The next day they tried again, and this time after they brought Daddy back to his room, Dr. Holman came in and put his finger on the upper part of Daddy’s chest—just over the top part of his right lung and said to Daddy, “Mr. Padgett, you have a cancer right there.”

Daddy looked up at him and said in a joking manner as he shook his head, “Well, I guess that’s ‘Hello, Pete.’“ What he meant was that he would soon be seeing the Pearly Gates and Saint Peter.

The doctor then began to talk about Daddy’s having radiation every day for weeks, and I wondered how I could get him to Greenwood as weak as he was. I didn’t know how I could leave my job every day either. Daddy wasn’t saying anything. He was just lying there on the bed listening to the doctor explaining all the details of the treatments.

Suddenly he stated emphatically, “I’m not going to have any radiation. It won’t do any good anyway. I’ve lived ninety-five years, and I’m not going to suffer through radiation. I’ve seen what it does to other people.”

The doctor answered, “That’s your choice to make, Mr. Padgett. Radiation won’t cure you, but it might help you to live a little longer. You can go home tomorrow if you have someone to help you out.”

“My daughter will take care of me, and I’ve got a housekeeper that comes every day and a fellow that’s lived by me for years that comes and spends every night with me. I’m sure they’ll keep on doing what they’ve been doing,” Daddy answered. I was glad he’d made the decision. I could not have made that choice. I would have made every effort to get him the radiation as the doctor suggested. Daddy had always believed that cancer was the worst disease—nearly always fatal. And so it had been for most of his life. Only recently have doctors been successful in curing cancer. I’d often heard him say that he knew too many people


who’d had cancer and then had surgery to remove the tumor. He said it looked like to him that cutting them open made the cancer grow and they were dead in no time.

“Mr. Padgett, it looks like you’ve got things pretty well taken care of,” Dr. Holman told Daddy. He motioned for me to follow him out in the hall. I went with him, and he told me that Daddy had what was called Oatcell cancer and that it was fast acting and aggressive and that Daddy would probably be gone in a month. He added that he would order home health nurses to come to the house to check on him regularly.

I assured him that we would take care of Daddy, and we did. Patsy and I took him home from the hospital that first week in April, and she came at seven-thirty every morning and fixed Daddy’s breakfast just as she had been doing for nearly four years, and Will Crouch came at 7:30 every night and stayed until Patsy got there the next morning. Patsy stayed until I came from school each day, and I stayed until Will arrived. Patsy cooked dinner and had enough left for supper. Usually Jimmie came and ate with us. Daddy didn’t have any pain and was able to walk from his bed to sit up in his recliner and then walk to the bathroom and back to his bed or his recliner. He continued to eat a little at every meal. One night I had fresh strawberries for dessert, and he said, “Damn, these strawberries are good.” He still read the paper through May.

Right after he came home from the hospital, I took him outside. We were sitting in the spring sunshine out of the wind in front of the storage house when he said to me, “I saw my Ma on the golden stairs. I saw Curtis Temples too and others—some I didn’t think would make it. I don’t know what heaven is like, but I know my mother’s there.” Then he almost whispered something I had never heard him say in all his conversation and in all the hours he had spent dictating his life to me. It was a song or a poem: “Hello, Central. Give me heaven, for I know my Mother’s there. You will find her with the angels on the golden stair. Tap the bells softy for I know she’s there.” Even though his mother had died when he


was eight years old, he’d remembered her all his ninety-five years. Now she was the one he was thinking about and dreaming about.

About the middle of April, Alice was trying to get ready to compete in the Miss South Carolina pageant in Greenville that summer. Dibbie Shealy was taking photographs of her to include in the pages that people had contributed to buy for her in the pageant program book. One person Alice wanted in her pictures was her grandfather. She wanted to have her picture made with him in the sanctuary at Emory. I told Daddy that she wanted me to take him to Emory and she and Dibbie would meet us there and take some photographs. Daddy was excited about going, and his only question was, “Can I wear my new suit?” I laughed and agreed. I helped him to put on his white shirt and tie. (He had to tie it because I had never learned how.) Then I helped him put on the suit we all had given him for Christmas—the one he’d never worn. It was the suit he would be buried in.

Madaline Boney had come that week to be with Daddy, so she and Daddy and I met Alice and Dibbie at the church. Dibbie got wonderful photographs of Alice and Daddy together—the last pictures we have of him. One of them was published in the program book on one of Alice’s twenty pages. She wrote a poem about each of the twenty photographs as a kind of window into her life. The one she wrote for the picture of her with Daddy is about her view of him: “You are something else. Your strength baffles me. Your memory amazes me. Your humor tickles me. Your friendship guides me. Your love warms me.”

On Mother’s Day week-end in May, our daughter Madaline came from New Orleans with her almost two-year-old Daniel to see her grandfather for the last time. She also wanted Daddy to see Daniel as a kind of blessing. I stayed with Daddy while Jimmie drove to the airport to meet her. While he was gone, a terrible storm with high winds hit the area. I was afraid, but Daddy was not. He’d never been afraid of anything that I knew of. In fact, when I was growing up, if Daddy was home, everything was all right. We were afraid at night if he wasn’t there. That storm also


hit the airport and almost blew Daniel out of Madaline’s arms as they were rushing to the car. Will Crouch was still staying with Daddy at night, so after Madaline visited with Daddy for a while, we were able to go home to sleep. The next night Daddy was able to go with us to the Farm House restaurant, which was several miles from his house. He didn’t eat much, but he enjoyed being with Madaline and Daniel.

The last part of May Patsy had to quit to take care of her companion, who had also been diagnosed with cancer. Dorothy Crouch, Will’s wife, came and stayed days while I was still in school and mornings after I got out of school.

On June 13 William called and told me that Joan had given birth to their third child, a daughter—Martha Grace Herlong. Soon after that Caroline called and said that their daughter Rene had given birth to her first child—David Joseph Miller—named for his father David Miller, who is Daddy’s brother Jouette’s great-grandson. I said to Daddy, “Daddy, you have a new great-granddaughter—Martha Grace Herlong—and Uncle Jouette has a new great-great-grandson. William and Joan have a baby girl, and Rene and David have a baby boy.”

He looked at me with a smile and said, “Isn’t that nice. They can play together.” He was still looking ahead as had always been his way.

One night Carrie Elizabeth Wightman and her husband came from Batesburg (she was Mama’s niece and loved Mama and Daddy) and brought their outdoor cooker and fixed a cherry pie. We took Daddy out by the back door, and he sat there and watched Odell cook the pie. He even ate a little of it.

Other people came by to see him every day, and he got hundreds of cards and letters. I have the letter that Dibbie Shealy wrote to him about how much he’d meant to her all her life. She’s Madaline’s age—so in 1989 she was 35—and she thought so much of Daddy that she took time to write. Daddy enjoyed the visits even though he didn’t talk as much as he usually did.


One Sunday morning Posey Padgett and James Jackson, two black men who’d been his friends all their lives and who both lived within a mile of him, came to visit. I had gone there at eight to relieve Will Crouch so I listened to them talk. Both of them remembered times when Daddy had done things for them, and they told stories about the old days. It was a joy to hear their stories and see the way those two men felt about my father, who’d been born in 1894 and who had never treated anyone—black or white—any way but good. He’d tell them what he thought, but he’d do as much as he could to help anybody.

One night the second week in June about nine o’clock after I’d come home and Will was with Daddy, my telephone rang. It was Will’s son saying that Will was having problems with his heart and they were taking him to the emergency room. We knew he had problems, but I had not thought he would have an attack. Jimmie and I rushed down to Daddy’s house in two cars. The ambulance was there, and they were putting Will into it. Daddy was all right. I stayed that night and the rest of the time until Daddy went to the nursing home. Jimmie would come down for meals. I slept near Daddy so I could get up when he needed me at night. We had put diapers on him several weeks before that, and he had some medicine for pain, but he didn’t have any pain. I had asked Dr. Holman how he would die. He’d told me that the fluid would fill his chest and he would drown and it would be hard. Daddy was still very much himself and remembered everything and knew everything that was happening. He knew that he was dying, but we never really talked about it. He told me he was glad that I had taken down his life—that he had told his story. He said he’d had a good life and been married to a good woman that he’d loved since he was eleven and she was seven—and that she loved him too. He also said he was proud of his four children and that he knew they’d “stand hitched.”

On Sunday, June 18—Father’s Day, Curtis and Edith and Madaline and Bettina and Doug and Barbara and their son Steve had come for Daddy’s birthday on June 20. Steve had flown all the


way from St. Louis, where he was working, to Atlanta and come over with his parents to see Daddy before he died. Daddy was so happy to have all his children together. Curtis had just had his first carotid artery surgery three weeks before and looked weak. He had been determined to come as soon as he was able. Daddy’s Sunday School class had brought a homemade chocolate cake for his birthday, and other friends had brought enough food for the rest of our dinner. We managed to get him to the dining room table where he sat in his regular place at the head. He bowed his head and led us in the Lord’s Prayer as he always did. He was so weak, but he was determined to keep going to the very last. He knew he didn’t have long, but he enjoyed every day. Once when I was alone with him and he was sitting in his recliner looking out the back window over the field he called the Rocky Ridge, he said to me, “It looks awful good when you know you have to leave it.” I think he was savoring every moment he had left.

The nurse and doctor agreed that he needed skilled care, care that I could no longer give him. They told me that he needed to be cared for in the nursing center. I had called the nursing center, and they’d said they would let me know when a room was available. They called me on Monday, June 19, and said the room would be available on the 20th. That was Daddy’s ninety-fifth birthday, and I wanted him to spend it in his own home, where he had lived since he and Mama bought the place in 1919—seventy years. His father had built the house for hands in 1894, and Daddy and his father and two brothers had lived in it in 1908 and 1909. In fact, Daddy’s brother Curtis had died in that house in 1909 with tuberculosis. Daddy, at fifteen, had been his main caregiver. Curtis’ wife, Hattie, had left him because she didn’t want their two little girls to catch the disease, and Daddy’s father had brought him to live with them in their little house. Remembering what the house meant to him, I told the nursing home that we’d pay for the twentieth but we’d bring him on Wednesday after his birthday was over. I wanted him to spend his last birthday at home.


We spent Tuesday quietly. By then Daddy was in bed and could not get up without help. I grieved that he could not die in his own house. But I knew that I could not care for him as he needed to be cared for. I did not know then what the future held. I did not know that he would not have another bowel movement normally and that he’d get so an enema would not work and the nurses would have to use a relief tube to go into the bowels to relieve the pain and swelling.

When the ambulance came the next morning and I saw them put Daddy on the stretcher, he looked at me as if I were failing him, and I cried. He didn’t want to leave. I followed the ambulance to the nursing center and saw that they were putting him not in a regular room but in the intensive care room where the patients go to spend their last weeks. This was June 21 and he did not die until August 7—over six weeks. They sent him to the hospital on July 3 and, of course, I went with him. He stayed in the emergency room until late that night, and then they admitted him to a regular room. He was there almost two weeks. Will Crouch had come home and was getting around some. He was soon able to sit with Daddy each morning after he returned to the nursing home, and Daddy enjoyed having him for company. I went every afternoon and stayed until about eight thirty at night. He was never in any pain after they began to use the relief tube. His stomach had swelled before he went to the hospital, but after he returned it was as flat as it had always been. He was still alert and enjoyed the many people who came to see him.

Jimmie went to Savannah and brought Madaline back so that she could be with Daddy some. She was here while he was in the hospital. She was in such bad shape even then that she had a hard time walking, and I would have to stop in front of the hospital and get her out and get her seated to wait for me, then go park the car and return and get her and go to Daddy’s room. He always knew us and was happy to see both of us. He always called Madaline ”Presh” for Precious. She had a special little spot in his heart. He grieved over her condition before and after he got sick.


He remembered her as we all did—beautiful, full of life and laughter, vibrant, talking, working, helping others. It broke my heart too to see her so handicapped. In 1988 Bettina had taken her to Duke for evaluation at the Alzheimer’s Clinic. They said they did not think she had Alzheimer’s. Her symptoms did not fit that disease. After she died in 1993, they examined her brain and said she had Supra Nuclear Palsy—a devastating disease.

On the way home from the hospital one afternoon, I looked over at Madaline and said, “Madaline, it must be terrible not to be able to say what you want to say.”

She turned to me and struggled to get out, “And I always had so much to say.” I wanted to cry, but I didn’t.

William also came to the hospital to see Daddy. He had decided to leave Covington and Burling, the law firm where he worked in Washington, D.C., and come to South Carolina to practice law. He had made appointments for interviews in Columbia and Greenville. As he was driving from Columbia to Greenville, he came to the hospital in Greenwood and talked with Daddy. Of course, he was dressed in a fine dark suit for his interviews.

When he came in and stood by the bed, Daddy looked up at him and said jokingly, “Well, William, you look like a Philadelphia lawyer.”

William had heard the old joke about the Philadelphia lawyer, and he said, “Granddaddy, I am a Washington lawyer, but I won’t be one long. I’m coming back home to South Carolina to live and practice law. I’m on my way to an interview in Greenville now.”

Daddy told him he was glad to see him come home, that he was proud of him. He said he’d always admired lawyers and that he believed William would make a good one but to always be honest and true. He added that if he’d had a chance to get an education, he would have liked to be a lawyer.

Rene and David had been living in a trailer at the McCarty place before their baby, David Joseph or D.J., as they were to call him, was born. They stayed with Caroline and Ben for a week or so after she and the baby came home from the hospital. She


decided she didn’t want to take the baby back to the trailer they’d been living in, and she and David asked me whether they could move into Daddy’s house while he was in the nursing home. I told them I’d ask Daddy about it since all the furniture and personal belongings were still in the house. This was about the first of July—before the doctors sent him back to the hospital on July 3.

The next day when I went to the nursing home, they had Daddy sitting up in a chair. I sat down beside him and said, “Do you remember that I told you about Rene and David having a little boy—Uncle Jouette’s great-great-grandson?”

He looked me straight in the eye and laughed a little and said, “‘Course, I remember. I haven’t lost my memory yet.”

He was right. His mind was just as alert as it ever was. It was just his body that was giving away. Ninety-five years of living was taking its toll. I was ashamed of what I had said. I told him that Rene and David had asked if they could live in his house while he was in the nursing home—that they didn’t want to go back to the trailer they’d been living in.

He didn’t even question it. He smiled and held his head at an angle like he’d always done and said, “That’d be right nice. Let them stay there.” He didn’t say it, and I didn’t say it, but he knew he wouldn’t be going back. He’d known that the day they took him out on the stretcher, the day I’d cried because I couldn’t keep him in his own home until the end. There was no Hospice then to help me as there was when my husband died.

Anyway, Daddy returned to the nursing home from the hospital, and he got weaker and weaker. One night I had stayed later than usual, and I said to him with my eyes full of tears, “Daddy, I have to go and fix Jimmie’s supper.”

He looked at me and said, “What are you crying about?” I answered, “I don’t want you to leave me.” He said matter-of-factly, “Well, you can’t do a thing about it.

You might as well go on home.” I did go home, and I thought about what a philosophy those words to me had expressed.


Daddy was determined to make the best of each day until the last one came.

The last week in July it occurred to me that I could read what Daddy had dictated to me. By that time I had typed eighty pages that he’d dictated to me in chronological order. Somehow I had never thought of reading it aloud to him before. I am so glad I didn’t wait too late. By this time, the nurses weren’t trying to get him up anymore. He had a catheter and, when necessary, the relief tube to make him comfortable.

One day I told him that I’d been working on the book and that I’d finished typing what he had told me in chronological order. I added that I was working on typing all the stories he had continued to tell me about people and events that had been part of his life. I also told him that I had thought I’d call the book “Davenport” but now I was leaning toward “Padgett’s My Name,” since that was what he always said when he wanted to meet somebody. He’d just go up to them and stick out his hand and say, “Padgett’s my name,” and expect the other person to shake hands and introduce himself.

He just listened to me and didn’t speak. Then I asked him, “Daddy, would you like for me to read your book to you?”

He smiled a little and nodded his head. So I began to read aloud what he had dictated to me. I stood by

his bed so that he could see my face and my lips, and I read extra loud. He was very deaf, and he could never wear a hearing aide. Once we talked him into buying an expensive one, but he could never get any satisfaction from it. He said his fingers were too big to adjust it, and it didn’t do any good anyway. He would often tell someone, “I can hear everything; I just can’t separate the words.” I always talked extra loud to him and tried to let him see my face. He could hear everything if you were talking directly to him.

Yes, I wanted him to hear every word he had dictated to me, so I watched him closely to be sure he heard. I often saw tears come into his eyes as he listened. He was reliving the old days again as he heard his own words telling about his grandparents and his


mother, who’d died at forty-two when Daddy was eight, and his father, who’d died at fifty-six when Daddy was twenty-four. He also cried when he heard me read about the two little girls, one white and one black, that he’d seen catch on fire. He’d put both of them out, but they’d died anyway. In both cases, he was just a boy and the only one who took action. I know that he enjoyed remembering again the events of his life, so I am grateful that I was able to bring him that joy during his last days.

The weekend before he died on Monday, Doug and Barbara came to the nursing center as soon as they got to Saluda. I was standing by Daddy’s bed, and I said to him, “Daddy, Doug and Barbara have come from Atlanta.”

He looked up and said, “The pretty girl.” He’d always thought Barbara was beautiful. That was Friday, and he was still alert at noon on Sunday. But Sunday afternoon he was uncomfortable—not in pain but not resting. Then he began to sleep and didn’t open his eyes when I talked with him. I stayed with him all night. The nurses came in regularly and checked him. One of them told me that his feet and legs were getting cold and that was the beginning of the end. I continued to stay with him, and Doug and Barbara came and Alice too. We were all in the room when he died about noon on Monday. I was holding his hand and looking at him when I saw him stop breathing. If I had not been looking at him, I would not have known he was gone. He just slipped away so quietly, so gently. I cried, but I knew that if anyone went to heaven, it would be Davenport Padgett. He had lived and died a good man—one who loved God and people. He never saw a stranger and was the same to everyone. Yes, he did what he said he wanted to do: he lived by the side of the road and was a friend to man.

So many of his family and friends came to the visitation we had at the funeral home the night before the funeral. Of course, many of the ones he’d known and loved had already died. But the old and the young had loved him, and they came to say their last good-byes and to tell us how he had always brightened their lives.


As I listened to them, I could hear Daddy saying, “Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone. If you’ve got troubles, keep them to yourself. Other people’ve got troubles of their own.” He had lived by those words. Everyone had a story to tell about what he’d said to them or what he’d done for them. All Daddy’s black friends and neighbors came too. Everyone of them wanted to tell us about what Daddy had done for them and how much they loved him. Posey Padgett, in tears, said, “I don’t know how I can go on without Mr. Davenport.” Even Charlie Daniel, a black man who lived in town and who’d always been a strong Civil Rights leader, came to pay his respects. He and Daddy had had lots of discussions when Daddy was on the Election Board and spent days in the courthouse. It was a humbling experience to hear the words and see the love and respect in the eyes of those who came to pay tribute to a man who had lived and died among them—an ordinary man who had lived an extra-ordinary life.

When we were planning the funeral, I thought about what had happened a year or two earlier. I had gone to Mrs. Amelia Ann Adams’ funeral at Saluda Baptist Church and heard her two grandchildren sing their grandmother’s favorite hymn. That experience made me realize that our Alice could sing at Daddy’s funeral when the time came. She has a beautiful voice, and the last place that Daddy had gone before he had the hemorrhage was to St. Paul, where Alice and another vocalist presented a musical program on Palm Sunday. Daddy was proud of her and said often, “She’s got her Grandmother Roseva’s voice.”

So I’d asked him, “How would you like Alice to sing at your funeral?”

He seemed to think for a moment and then said, “That would be nice, but I’ve already asked Ralph Shealy.” He’d told me earlier that he wanted John Griffith to preach his funeral. So two things were already decided.

We buried him the next day at Emory Methodist Church, the church where he’d been christened as a baby, where he’d worked all his life. He’d taught a Sunday School class for fifty-eight years,


and he’d helped with the Epworth League and cleaning off the graveyard and a thousand other things. The church was an integral part of his life. He believed that the church was the house of God and its people were the people of God. The casket and the flowers and even the people that afternoon seemed to glow in the sunlight shining through the stained glass windows. John Griffith, who’d been Daddy’s preacher and his friend, did manage to come. He was serving a church in the upstate and had a funeral that day there, but he got to Emory on time and said the right words—words that came from his heart. Ralph Shealy did sing—a song I’d never heard before but one that has become one of my favorites and is used constantly today—“Hymn of Promise.” We don’t have any pictures, but the scene and the sounds are imprinted in my mind. Alice sang “The Lord’s Prayer” at the end with such beauty and meaning that I’m sure that Daddy would have been pleased that she sang for him.

After the service the pall bearers—five grandsons and one great-grandson, carried the casket outside to the gravesite—right beside my mother’s grave. Daddy and I had had the double tombstone put up after she died, and it had all his information on it except his death date and the short inscription we’d left a place for. She had added the e to her name, but he never had, so he had the name for both of them spelled PADGETT on the tombstone. That day the congregation walked out to the grave, and the family sat under the tent and watched as the Emory minister committed the body of my father to the earth and his soul to God. My heart was grieving that he had left me but rejoicing in the life he had lived, a life filled with love and joy. I thanked God that I had been born his daughter and had lived close to him all my life.

Later I agonized over choosing the few words that would be carved into the stone that marked his grave. What words could accurately depict the man he was, the impact he made on all those who knew him? I talked with my brothers and my sister, and we chose “Stalwart, strong, and loving, a friend to all.” Each word carries with it memories of his warmth, his strength, his courage,


his compassion—inadequate but the best we could do. Who can describe a man’s life in a sentence? Especially a man such as my father, a man who lived his entire life in one place but was filled with wisdom and truth and love for his fellow man.

His own words as he came to the end of his story of ninety-five years of living reveal his philosophy of life and death far better than my words ever could:

On Sunday mornings when I sit in my regular seat, I think about all the years I’ve been going to Emory and all the preachers I’ve listened to. The preachers and the good people who make up the church have helped me live my life like my father taught me—to treat every man like my brother and every woman like my sister. And I look out in the cemetery and I can see the tombstones of my grandparents and my parents in the old part, and over by the road I can see the double tombstone for Gladys and me. We buried Gladys there in 1979 after we’d been married sixty-four years. I know that one of these days I'll take my place by her side. But even then I'll be a part of Emory Church and Saluda County. Yes, he is still a part of Emory Church and Saluda County and

also a part of the fabric of the lives of all those who remember him. I hope that his words will live on in Padgett’s My Name, the memoir which he dictated to me over a period of ten years. Maybe those words will carry his life and my mother’s life to generations to come—a story of two people who loved greatly and made a difference for good with their everyday, ordinary lives.

(Note: Davenport and Gladys’ children have placed two stained glass windows behind the pulpit at Emory Church and also portraits of their parents in the foyer—all in memory of these two people who gave so much to their family, their church, and their community. They also placed the 200-year-old hand-carved, heart pine arch from the Mt. Willing house in the Saluda County Museum in their parents’ memory.)


Obituary for Douglas Davenport Padgett, published in The State, The Greenville News, The Index-Journal, The Atlanta Constitution, and the Augusta Chronicle on August 8, 1989, and later in the Saluda Standard/Sentinel

Historian D.D. Padgette Dies at 95

SALUDA—Douglas Davenport Padgette, formerly of Route 4,

a historian and long-time civic leader in Saluda County, died Aug. 7, 1989, at Saluda Nursing Center. He was 95.

He was born June 20, 1894, in Mt. Willing, then Edgefield County, which became Saluda County in 1895.

He was a farmer and philosopher. He was a member of the Saluda County Historical Research Committee and contributor to Saluda County in Scene and Story, a history of the county, done for the Tricentennial of South Carolina. He was a member of the Saluda County Beautification Committee, chairman of the Saluda County Voter Registration Board for 25 years, and a member of the Board of Directors of Saluda County Farmers Home Administration.

He was a member of Emory United Methodist Church for 95 years and a teacher of the Adult Bible Class for 65 years.

In 1986, the chimes at Emory United Methodist Church were given in honor of his dedicated service to the church and community.

Surviving are two sons—Curtis Davenport Padgette and Douglas Donald Padgette, both of Atlanta, Ga.; and two daughters, Madaline Padgette Boney of Savannah, GA., and Ruby “Bela” Padgette Herlong of Saluda.

Service: 2 p.m. Wednesday at Emory United Methodist Church with burial in the church cemetery.

Visitation: 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday at the Ramey Funeral Home, Saluda.

Memorials may be made to Emory United Methodist Church. The family is at the residence.

Appendix

Family Connections

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Note To Reader: When my father began telling his story, he told first of his ancestors who had lived in the Mt. Willing area since before the Revolutionary War. He was proud of his heritage and felt that whoever read his words needed to know about those who had come before him to understand who he was. This information has been moved here so the book begins with stories from his own life.

I have lived my whole life on Padgett land. It belonged to my

father, Walter Padgett, and before him to my grandfather Mahlon Demarcus Padgett and before that to my great-grandfather William Padgett, who bought it in the early 1800’s. Also, it’s pretty close to the land William’s father, Job Padgett, owned in the 1700’s. Now the land didn’t come to me directly. William gave it to my Grandpa Mahlon, and he lost it. Then Pa bought it back, and then he sold it. I finally bought it back again in 1919 when I was 25 years old. Course, it took me twenty years to pay for it. I feel close to this land, and I feel close to the Padgetts that came before me. They must have had a dream. I’m going to tell you about them before I tell you about myself. I guess they have affected what I’ve done and what I’ve been.

I go back to Job Padgett and Mary Bodie Padgett who came to Edgefield District before the Revolutionary War. Job settled on Moore’s Creek, and his brother Josiah settled on Clouds Creek. I know Job fought in the Revolutionary War because he is listed in Captain Michael Watson’s Company of Volunteers. I know he’s


buried in a little graveyard right near Moore’s Creek with just a big pile of rocks to mark his and his wife’s grave. My Grandpa Mahlon told me that much. I also read Job’s grandson’s account of his life. He was Mahlon Padgett too; only he was Mahlon Mouzon Padgett. His mother died, and his father, Job Padgett, Jr., went west and left this Mahlon with his grandmother and grandfather—Job and Mary. He tells that he worked harder than his grandfather’s slaves but that his grandmother was kind to him. He wanted to go to school and ended up an educated man living in Edgefield.

I did know my grandparents well—Mahlon Demarcus and Susannah Euphrates Long Padgett. I was born less than a mile from where they lived, and I lived close to them all my growing-up days, so I can tell you a lot about them. We all called them Grandma Sue and Grandpa. They had twelve living children and about sixty grandchildren. Grandpa was born in 1838, and he fought in the war in 1863 and 1864. Their oldest child, Aunt Ada, was born in 1859, and my pa, Walter Joseph, was born in 1860. The next child died. She didn’t live long. Then another died. Both of these are buried at the Sardis Cemetery. Annie came next—then Mamie, Ella, Mattie, Luther, Oscar, Mahlon, Eva, Ernest, and finally Pearl Omega. Grandma was determined Aunt Pearl was going to be the last one. Grandma brought up twelve children, and if she ever had any help I didn’t know it.

Grandpa was not a good businessman. But his father, William Padgett, son of Job Padgett, must have been the best businessman in this part of South Carolina. I didn’t know him; he was born in 1803 and died in 1884, ten years before I was born. In 1822 when he was nineteen years old, he asked his father to give him what he was going to inherit. His father did give him his share, and William took the money and went down toward Augusta to a little place called Hamburg. He bought ten acres of land there and enlarged a little store that was already on the property. He ran that store for three years and made a lot of money. He was intelligent enough to look across the Savannah River and see that Augusta

Appendix: Family Connections 405

would crowd Hamburg out. He got a big offer for the land and the store, and he sold out, came back to the Clouds Creek section where his father Job lived, and started buying land with what he had from the sale of his store and land in Hamburg.

Grandpa Mahlon said his father, William, was the biggest landowner in Edgefield District at one time. Eventually he owned fifteen thousand acres of land from Nazareth Church to Richland Springs Church along Clouds Creek. He married Margaret (Peggy) Denny, who was from one of the best families in the state. Her brother was Captain David Denny, who fought in the Seminole War and was chosen captain of the company of 101 men who volunteered at Mt. Willing just after the Ordinance of Secession was passed. Peggy was a good woman and smart, but she had the highest temper of anybody. She and William and the rest of the family were members at Sardis Baptist Church. William is mentioned in the minutes on nearly every page. As their children came along, every one of them joined the church. One of his daughters—Matilda Johnson—was the first person buried in the Sardis cemetery. William and Peggy had a bunch of children—Uncle Dave, Uncle Tillman, Dr. John Elbert, Matilda, Mary Ann, Eleanor, Sarah, Abigail, Margaret—and, of course, my grandfather Mahlon Demarcus. James D. was killed in Franklin, Tennessee, in the war. We’ve still got some letters he wrote home not long before he was killed. We’ve also got some that Mary Ann wrote home warning her parents about what Sherman had done close to where she was living in Georgia.

When Mahlon married Grandma Sue, his father, William Padgett (I’d better repeat these names so you can be sure to keep them straight), gave him three hundred acres of land, which he soon lost. I told you he wasn’t any businessman. Then something happened to my great-grandfather that most of us would like to forget.

It was like this. His overseer, who was named Padgett too—Samuel Padgett—got sick and died. Before he died, he asked William to take care of his family. Well, part of his family was a


young girl named Samantha—“Mancy,” they called her. William evidently fell in love with Samantha because he quit Peggy and built a house for him and Samantha down near where Nazareth Church is today. The house is still standing on the left side of Highway 378 as you go toward Columbia—right after you pass Beaverdam Creek. That house was still on his land even though it was five miles from where he and Peggy had lived together. William died on February 29, 1884, when he was eighty-one years old. When William left Margaret, she was fifty-five. She was born on December 8, 1804. They’d lived right between Sardis School and Walter Kennerly’s place. All that land belonged to William. The 300 acres he’d given to Mahlon was part of it, and Mahlon had lost it. All of William’s children by Peggy were grown when he left her, and he gave Grandpa Mahlon and Grandma Sue another eleven hundred acres of land for them to take care of Grandma Peggy. That land was the Jarott Edwards place—right behind where Ben Lindler lives today—about a mile from my house. Grandma Sue and Grandpa did take care of Peggy as long as she lived.

William would go to see Peggy every two or three months on Sunday afternoons and sit on the porch and visit, and Samantha would sit in the buggy hitched in a grove away out from the house. Grandpa said William came for a long time to see Peggy, but in the end Samantha would come with him and they’d stop in the woods on a knoll in front of the house. Samantha would outtalk him, and he wouldn’t come in. As the years passed, William would just drive by and speak to Grandma Peggy, who’d be sitting on the porch. I know all this is the truth because Grandpa told me. I was thirty-one years old when he died in 1925 as an old man, and he remembered well when all this happened.

When Peggy died, she was buried out at Sardis Cemetery where Mahlon had preached. Yes, he became an ordained Baptist preacher. Great-Grandpa William came to the funeral, and when they were lowering Peggy’s casket into the grave, he had them stop the coffin, which was held by cotton straps. He came up right


by her casket and held out his hand and said to the whole crowd, “I want you all to know that what happened was my fault. Peggy was a good woman and did right by me and her children. I ask her to forgive me, and I ask God to forgive me too.” Peggy was buried there at Sardis, and later they buried William beside her. You can go look at their graves today. They’ve slept side by side for over a hundred years.

After Peggy died in 1882, William married Samantha, but then he died in 1884—so they weren’t married but two years. On her tombstone down at Nazareth Church are the words, “Mancy Padgett, Wife of William Padgett.” I guess she was proud that she finally got to be his wife. She was young, but she never married again after he died. William and Samantha had a bunch of children too, and some of them had the same names as William’s first children had.

When this whole thing first happened, after William and Samantha moved into the house down near Nazareth (I told you that it’s still standing, but if you want to see it, you’d better hurry because it is just about to fall in. It belongs to Pat Kirkland, whose wife was descended from William’s second crowd of children), the Vigilantes or Night Riders came to take William out and beat him up. The moon was shining. William opened the door and looked at them as they came up on the piazza—six men. Mrs. Frank Cannon (she was Laura Padgett, a sister of Samantha, and she was right there) told me what happened. This was right after the Civil War when the Night Riders were sort of the law of the land, and they would “tend” to men that were not doing right in their opinion. They were after William because of the way he was living; it wasn’t right for the richest man in Edgefield District and a pillar in the church to leave his wife and “take up” with another woman. Well, William went out on the porch and faced them. According to Mrs. Cannon, he said, “You can take me because I am old and you can beat me up, but I know who you are and if you do, you’ll have Mahlon and Dave and Tillman and Elbert to answer to.” And they all tucked their tails and left, and they never


bothered him again. William was strong enough to face down that mob that night. He must have been strong in some ways and weak in others—maybe Samantha was just too much for him.

Grandpa always said that seven Padget(t) brothers came from Padgett Station in England, landed on Chesapeake Bay in Maryland or Virginia, and then migrated to central South Carolina, Edgefield District, and especially to Clouds Creek and the upper waters of Moore’s Creek. Two of them became dissatisfied and went back to England, he thought. Five remained. I know that three of them were Josiah, Joel, and Job. We think the other two were Elijah and Milledge. Joel moved to Orangeburg District. There are Padgetts galore down there and even one little town is Padgett, South Carolina. We think that Elijah moved in that direction too, and we think he was the same generation. His descendants are in the Hampton-Allendale-Fairfax area. The three that remained here in old Edgefield District have many descendants here now.

At one time Job, William’s father, lived on one side of what is now Highway 178, and his brother, the first Josiah Padget (his descendants are one-t Padgets) owned the other side. My daughter married Jimmie Herlong, a descendant of Josiah Padget. His grandmother was Ida Padget, a great-granddaughter of the first Josiah. There were four Josiahs in a row that lived in this county. Mrs. Ida’s father was Josiah, and her brother was Josiah too, but everybody called him Bub. He married my mother’s sister, Carrie Davenport, so he was my Uncle Bub Padget, but actually we were a little kin on the Padget side, but it’s a long way.

Back to Grandma Sue and Grandpa Mahlon. Grandpa was born in 1838 right over behind the house I’m living in about a mile from here at the old William Padgett homestead. It was right behind the Jack Turner house—right where you turn to go to Woodrow Padgett’s. It was a two-story house. Renny Turner’s father tore down William’s overseer’s house, but William’s house burned.


Old William was hard on his children. Grandpa at twelve was hoeing cotton on Bell Hill (where Boy Jackson lives now) on the day Matilda Padgett Johnson and her daughter were buried at Sardis graveyard. Matilda was Grandpa’s sister, and she had died in Atlanta. She was the first person buried in the Sardis graveyard—on June 20, 1850. You can see her grave over at Sardis today. Grandpa’s sister was dead, but he still had to hoe cotton all morning. Grandpa never got over that till the day he died. They shipped Matilda’s body from Atlanta. The hearse never got to Sardis ‘til just before night, and they buried her just before dark. I reckon William figured that there wasn’t any use in losing a day’s work just sitting around the house waiting for the body to come.

William was worried because they had no stock law then. He was afraid that hogs would root up the casket or cows would trample over his daughter’s grave since there wasn’t any fence around the graveyard. The first Garrett Matthews told him that he’d put a rail fence around the grave before he went to sleep that night. Garrett went to the house, ate supper, and then built the fence around Matilda’s grave. He went back in his house, went to bed, and died in the night. He was the first person put in the Corley Cemetery right by a little cedar tree in front of Sardis Church. He was the father of all the Matthews that live around Sardis now.

Mahlon grew up working hard. He always went to Sardis, and he said he had a desire to preach even when he was a little boy. He built a pulpit between three trees in the woods, and he practiced preaching there. When he was about seventeen, he knew that preaching would be his occupation all his life, but he had to be a preacher and a farmer. He married Susannah Euphrates Long, and, as I told you earlier, they had fourteen children. Two died in infancy. All the rest lived to be grown and old except one.

Aunt Eva died at childbirth in 1908 when she was just 28. She married on Christmas Day and died the last day of August during the flood of 1908. Her body lay in Columbia until the water went down so they could bring her home. She married Reverend Dr.


Will Allen. He had a sweetheart and was already engaged, but when Aunt Eva went to Latta in September to teach school, she and Uncle Will fell in love. He broke his engagement, and he and Aunt Eva married at Christmas. She died when the baby came early on August 30, 1908. Eighteen months later he married the childhood sweetheart he’d left for Aunt Eva. When Grandma Sue died in 1909, Uncle Will, her son-in-law, and her five sons were her pallbearers. My daddy wore a red pocket-handkerchief.

As I told you earlier, Mahlon inherited 300 acres and his father’s old homestead and lost it. It had to be sold. Then he moved to the Vansant place next to Ward and Ridge Spring. Uncle Dave had moved to the Watson place in Ridge Spring so that his children could go to the good schools they had there. Then Grandpa left the Vansant Place and moved back to the Eldred Herlong place near Emory Church. He stayed there one year and then moved to the Joseph Long house, the old house that is falling down now on Julian Mitchell’s land just off Highway 378. Susannah had been born there, and she grew up and was married there. Her father was Reverend Joseph Long, and her mother was Catherine Fulmer Long.

At one time this Reverend Joe Long, who was a Baptist preacher licensed and ordained at Sardis, had three sons and two sons-in-law in the Confederate Army, and they were all stationed in Charleston. He heard that they were perishing to death because there was no food down there. He hitched up a four-horse wagon where he lived in the eastern part of old Edgefield District known as Merchant School District, and he carried all the way to Charleston a load of flour, meal, lard, and meat for his sons and sons-in-law. When he got there, he found that they’d been shipped up the coast to a camp in North Carolina close to the Virginia line.

He actually brought those provisions back home. He was so worried about his sons and sons-in-law that on the very day he got back home he went to the lot to feed his mules, and he carried his shotgun with him. He killed himself by the well. He’s buried in front of that old house. His granddaughter, Nora Long Wideman,


Aunt Betty and Uncle Joe’s daughter, collected money from the Long family and put a tombstone there ninety years later. You can go look at it now, if you know where to look. A story Grandpa Mahlon loved to tell happened while he was stationed in Charleston. A lot of Edgefield boys were there. One of them was James David Herlong, a young man and a friend of Mahlon’s. Mahlon said that he asked Jimmy, “Jimmy, what in the world is the matter with you? Have you got the mullygrubs?”

And Jimmy answered, “No, Mahlon, I just got a letter from home saying I’ve got a new son, and I’ve been trying to see him with my mind’s eye.” That James David Herlong is the great-grandfather of my son-in-law Jimmie Herlong. We’ve been here in this area so long that our families are all mixed up. Of course, only one of my four children—Bela—married a local boy. The rest of them went way off to find the person they married—Curtis and Doug to North Carolina, and Madaline to Chester.

Mahlon and Susannah lived in that house with his father-in-law until William bought the Isaac or the Jarrott Edwards place and gave Mahlon a house and 1100 acres of land to take care of Peggy. Then Mahlon and Susannah moved there. It was a two-story house with four rooms downstairs, two rooms upstairs, and an open hallway through the downstairs. Pa was twelve or thirteen years old, so it was 1872 or 1873 since he was born in 1860. Pa was going to Shady Grove School, and he was the head of the class. The teacher told him he didn’t need to come any more because he already knew too much. Shady Grove was right across the Little Saluda River on old Mitchell Land going toward Denny’s Cross Road. Pa still went to school every afternoon to spelling class so that he could continue to stand at the head of the class.

Mahlon preached at a lot of churches, but he also owned slaves. When the war was over, he lost his slaves, and he owed money for some of them. That’s what broke him up; he couldn’t pay what he owed. William had given him two of his slaves—Alec Valentine and Wash Padgett. When Mahlon freed them in April, 1865, Alec said, “Massa, we pore now, but we won’t be pore long.”


Grandpa told me that Wash, who was plenty smart, said kinda quiet to Alec, “Alec, we know what it’s like on the inside, but we don’t know what it’s like on the outside.”

Grandpa had over 1000 acres of land when he freed them. Alec raised four children and sent three to Payne College in Augusta and bought and paid for 39 acres of Grandpa’s land. Wash was married to Alec Valentine’s sister, and they raised twelve children and sent seven to Payne College. When Wash died in 1913, he had over seven hundred acres of the land Grandpa had owned. Grandpa had lost all but 117 acres, and that had a mortgage on it. Wash had bought it a little bit at a time, and he paid cash for every acre. He never mortgaged a foot of his land in his life, and when he died he gave every child he had a home and a tract of land. When his wife died seven years later in 1920, each heir got $338 apiece—a lot of money then. That set of Padgetts have lived and farmed their land right around me all my life, and they’ve always been my friends—Uncle Wash and Aunt Emmaline’s children, Mattie and Ella and Eliot and Annie and Dora and Ben.

In 1869 Grandpa Mahlon started a prayer meeting at Sardis Church. In 1889 when three men in the community cut up out on the church grounds during the prayer meeting, Grandpa asked them either to come in church or to go home. They got mad and threatened to kill him if he came back to conduct the prayer meeting the next time. Furman Matthews begged Grandpa not to hold the meeting, and he sorta promised that he wouldn’t, but after Furman left, he told his sons Oscar and Luther to run balls to put in the cap and ball pistol.

Grandpa went to Sardis on Wednesday night as was his custom, and he pulled out his pistol and laid it on the lectern that he was standing behind. He told the congregation that he’d been threatened but he was going to conduct the meeting anyway. He said if he was killed, he wanted to be buried in the Sardis Cemetery and he wanted put on his tombstone, “Died at my post. Killed by a coward.” The funny part is that the men who had threatened him were at the prayer meeting. They heard him and


left. Later Mahlon got his brother-in-law Joe Long to go with him to Bob Prater’s house. Bob was the main one in the group that had threatened him. Bob met him at the door and grabbed him around the neck and said, “I’m sorry.” As long as Bob Prater lived, when he got on a big drunk, his folks would send for Grandpa. He was the only person who could do anything with him.

One time in the Mt. Willing store, Ring-eyed Lije Watson went to shoot Grandpa with a thumb-cocking pistol. Some fellow threw his finger between the hammer and the cap, and the pistol didn’t go off. Ring-eyed Lije had quite a reputation for having a hot temper and shooting off his mouth. I think Grandpa called him down, and he didn’t like it.

Another thing about Grandpa—I guess he buried more people than any other preacher in Saluda County. Once he promised a man that he’d bury him. After the man died, his family came from Bethel Baptist Church down below Batesburg to get Grandpa to come. Grandma Sue told him he shouldn’t go because his crop was in bad shape. Now Grandma Sue was a businesswoman. He told the man’s family he couldn’t go, that he’d lose his crop if he went. But he did go, and he did lose his crop. One reason Grandpa lost his land twice is that he always put preaching above farming. He preached in North Augusta at Sweetwater Baptist Church—forty miles away—for $40 a year.

Grandpa was six feet tall and very slender; he weighed about 160 pounds. He had a long beard and a bald head when I knew him—the last 25 years of his life. Grandma Sue was short, pretty, and plump. She loved to dress up, and she was known for wearing a lot of rustling petticoats. The men out at Sardis said when Mrs. Susannah came down the aisle, all the lady folk were always looking at her clothes. She could sing too, and all the children except my father could sing. Every one of Pa’s brothers and sisters could play a musical instrument too. When Ma died in 1903, my baby brother Gus was a little fellow. Grandma Sue took him and kept him until she died in 1909. After she died, nobody wanted to keep Gus. Grandpa Mahlon died in 1925, and my wife


Gladys missed the only day she ever missed from school when she wasn’t sick to go to Grandpa’s burial.

After Grandma died, Aunt Ella and Uncle Joe Etheredge moved in the house with Grandpa and took care of him. Uncle Ernest had come back from the army the Christmas of 1908. He and Aunt Pearl were going to farm there at Grandpa’s, but they both got jobs in Edgefield, Pearl at the bank and Ernest at Edgefield Mercantile Co. Gus came to our house in August of 1909 when Aunt Pearl and Uncle Ernest went to Edgefield. He was nine years old, and he didn’t remember our mother. Grandpa lived with Aunt Ella and Uncle Joe.

As soon as they finished the crop, they bargained for the home place, but they had to give it up in 1913 because they couldn’t make a living there. They moved to Saluda and Grandpa moved with them. Aunt Ella ran a boarding house in the Milledge Pitts’ house at the corner of Main and Highland Streets.

Grandpa was supposed to be a hard-shell Baptist preacher, but he had a slave that preached in a brush arbor where Mt. Moses Church is today. In 1866 he deeded Henry Dick Moses two acres of land, and Dick Moses built a Methodist church. That was the same Henry Dick Moses that William had dreamed about. After William had given most of his land to his first children, one night he dreamed that the richest man in Edgefield District had died. He waked up and told Samantha, and then he went back to sleep and dreamed the same dream again. This time he didn’t go back to sleep. When sunup came and the hands came to work, they told him that Uncle Dick Moses had died in the night. William said his dream was right: Henry Dick Moses was the richest man in spirit in the county. Mahlon thought so much of him that he buried him in the Edwards graveyard, but he didn’t put a tomb rock, and you can’t find the grave today.

There’s a story about Wash I ought to put in here because he was really my Cousin Wash. He was the son of Grandpa Mahlon’s brother—Dr. John Ethelbert Padgett—and a slave named Dinah. Dr. Elbert’s white son William or “Bill,” as everybody called him,


lived in Edgefield. He went to the Spanish American War, returned, and married Aunt Ann Harris Buzardt. They had a good farm in Edgefield County. A sewing machine agent kept coming in and trying to cheat the Negro hands that were living on his place. He told the sewing machine agent if he ever caught him on his place again, he’d kill him.

Sure enough the man came back and sold a Negro a no-count machine. Bill cut him up pretty bad, then picked him up and took him to Augusta to the hospital. The man lived, and they tried Bill for cutting him. The trial was in the Saluda courthouse. The judge fined him $400. Bill didn’t have that kind of cash, and he was going to have to serve time. Negro Wash Padgett, Bill’s half-brother, came up to the front and got out his little tobacco sack (he always carried his money in a tobacco sack) and pulled out four hundred dollars. The money was crumpled and smelled of tobacco, but it was good, and it paid the fine.

I’ve told you about my father’s side of the family—the Padgetts. Now I need to tell you about the Davenports, my mother’s side. Ma was a strong woman, a woman before her time; she was tall and good-looking and she was making her own living as a milliner in Batesburg before she married Pa. Her father was Mose Davenport, son of William and Anna Davenport Gibson Davenport. She was a Davenport, married the first time a Gibson and the second time a Davenport. Ma’s mother was Hester Boyd Davenport. Their families all the way back had been from the Dead Falls area of Newberry County.

People said that Mose Davenport could take a quart of liquor and lead more people up to the pasture by Emory Church than the preacher could keep in the church. He was a lovable man everyone said. After the death of his second wife, he married my grandmother, Hester Ann Boyd, whose father was Joshua Boyd and whose mother was Elizabeth Henry Boyd. I’ve got her sideboard today, and I’m going to give it to my daughter Bela—the one who married Jimmie Herlong.


Mose and Hester moved from Dead Falls in Newberry County to Emory Community in what was then Edgefield District. The house they lived in was where John Porter’s house is today. It was right up the road from Emory Church. I can remember when it burned. If Emory had won the election in 1896 to become the town of Saluda, the county seat of the new Saluda County, their land would have been the downtown area. Instead Red Bank won by 88 votes, and Emory got passed by.

Yes, Mose sold his farm in Dead Falls. (His house there burned, but you can see where it was on Highway 121 just beyond the Dead Falls Road which turns to the right as you head toward Newberry.) The reason they came to Emory Community was that Hester’s brother, my great-uncle Frank Boyd, had come to the Mt. Willing store to clerk there for Jacob B. Smith, the grandson of the first settler there—Jacob Smith, who built the Mt. Willing house before the Revolutionary War. Anyway Frank Boyd was clerking in the store when Aunt Carrie Herlong, my wife’s great-aunt, came to the store with her mother, Mrs. Magdaline (Polly) Minick Herlong. When Frank Boyd saw her, he fell in love, and they were married. (They are the couple that lived in the Bonham House from 1856 when her father bought it until her death.) I don’t know exactly the dates of this, but I have an account book from the Mt. Willing store that shows that Frank Boyd was clerking there by 1851.

After 1861 when my mother Euela was born, Mose and Hester and their three girls moved to Emory. They bought land from William Bouknight right by Emory Church. That land came down to Jacob B. Smith’s line. (He owned from Emory Church to Mt. Moses Church.) Moses was born in 1818, and Hester was born in 1826. They had Carrie, Betty, and Euela—or Ela, as she was called. Moses farmed the big place they bought—where the John Chapman, Toll Herlong, John Porter, Watson Padgett, and a part of the Ben Harmon place are today. It was about six or seven hundred acres. The children went to Emory to school. Carrie married Josiah (Bub) Padget. (I’ve already told you about him.) In


1866 Betty married Joseph Long, Grandma Sue’s brother, and Euela (Ela) married Walter Padgett in 1884. Grandpa Mose Davenport was dead a long time before I was born. He died in 1878 and was buried at Emory Church. I’ve got his will, and he left the Henry sideboard to my mother and the Davenport bed to Grandma Hess.

All three of the Davenport girls died early—in their forties—and they all left young families. Carrie died about 1896 and left a houseful of children. Grandma Hester moved from her big two-story house where she was living by herself to Uncle Bub’s house and took care of his nine motherless children. I remember Grandma Hess very well because she got sick and moved from Uncle Bub’s to our house so Ma could take of her. I waited on her even though I wasn’t but seven years old. I carried out her slop jars. That is why I got the six silver Davenport spoons with the D engraved on them. (I gave my grandson William one because he’s William Davenport Herlong; I gave my nephew Horace one because he’s Horace Davenport Padgett, and I gave my granddaughter Bettina the rest because she’s Bettina Davenport Boney.)

When Grandma Hess died on June 5, 1902, Betty’s daughter, my cousin Nora Long, got the Davenport bed. She was single and Grandma Hess gave it to her. My mama got the sideboard and the three-lion-paw table, which got gone somehow. Hester moved the sideboard and the table to our house after she left Uncle Bub’s. I remember the day they moved them there. They had to put the table up against the wall because two of the toes were broken. Lord knows what happened to that table. After Pa died, Mrs. Carrie, Pa’s second wife, gave me the Hester Davenport sideboard. It had belonged to Hester’s mother and then to my mother. It came from the Henry side of the family.

My mother and father were married at the Davenport place in the big two-story house that burned down a long time ago. They had a wedding at home. Ela was a Methodist and a member of Emory, but most folks got married at home back in those days;


that was 1884. Lord, don’t you know they had great dreams for themselves when they said those wedding vows! Pa was already doing all right, and Ma had been on her own running a store by herself in Batesburg. She’d already been in love and engaged and lost the man she loved. When they lost everything in Ridge Spring and came back to the home place and Pa built a house and the barns, he also built a store for her so she could keep on running her hat shop.

I’ve never forgotten my mother though I was only eight years old when she died. She was a beautiful, proud woman, and she could do anything. She could make fashionable hats and beautiful clothes. She could just cut something out—make up the pattern even—and make it look great. Pa must have loved her a lot. She named my brother Jouette after the man she had almost married, and my father never seemed to mind. He was Jouette Davenport, her third cousin. He died with typhoid fever in the town of Batesburg where he was a pharmacist and she was running a millinery shop. After Jouette died, a rich man in Batesburg wanted to marry her, but she told him, “There’s many a slip between the cup and the lip. Walter will be coming back directly.” She had known Walter Padgett from the time she moved to the Emory section of Edgefield County.

Sure enough, Walter Padgett did come back into the picture. He was six feet three inches tall and a very handsome man. Ma had really loved Jouette Davenport, but after he died, she married Walter and went to Ridge Spring where he was clerking at Merritt and Dubose, a great wholesale and retail store. He was manager as well as clerk. When Mr. Dubose’s son died, Mr. Dubose got melancholy and killed himself. The store closed, and Walter became the postmaster there in Ridge Spring. He also put up a store in conjunction with the post office. He went to farming too, and the panic of 1893 wiped him out. Then Pa went to Texas to seek his fortune, and Ma and Curtis and Jouette moved back up here and lived in the house with Grandpa and Grandma Sue. Ma waited for him to settle out in Texas and wire her to come to him.


Instead of his wiring her though, one day she looked up the road and there he was coming home. She ran out to meet him, and he told her that he couldn’t live out in that land when he was used to South Carolina.

Mrs. Martha Suddath Padget, Josiah’s widow, had moved to Greenville when Josiah died in order to make a living for herself and her children. She made a fortune with her boarding house. She let Walter borrow $3500 to build three houses and a store on the land he’d bought in 1879 when he was 19 and which he had put in my mother’s name. It was 315 acres, which he’d bought for $630 at two dollars an acre. He’d paid for it in a little over a year clerking at Denny’s store.

Pa was the oldest boy Grandpa had. He was smart, but he never thought about going to college. He gave his father one hundred dollars a year for his freedom from the time he was sixteen until he was twenty-one and of age. At sixteen he left home and went to Denny’s store and clerked for Captain David Denny, his Grandmother Peggy’s brother.

Someone had been stealing from the store, and Captain Denny wanted his young clerk to catch that thief. So Pa slept in the rooms above the store. (You can go out the Denny Highway to what we call Five Points and see that store right now—it’s getting old though.) It wasn’t long before Pa heard someone come in the store downstairs. He sneaked down the stairs, holding the pistol that Captain David had let him use. He didn’t make a light, and he grabbed the man in the dark and then lighted a match to see who it was. It was one of the most prominent men in the community. That man told Pa that he’d never steal again if Pa would let him go and never tell who it was he caught. Pa did let him go, and he was as good as his word. Nobody ever stole anything from the store again. And Pa never told anybody who it was he caught. On Pa’s deathbed, I asked him who the man was, and he answered, “I never told your ma, and I’m not going to tell you. I’ll go to my grave carrying that secret.” And he did.


A drummer that came to Captain Denny’s store was so impressed with Pa that when someone at the big store in Ridge Spring said he needed a clerk who could keep books, that drummer (or salesman as you call them today) said that he knew the smartest young man he’d ever seen up at Denny’s store. Mr. Dubose in Ridge Spring got in touch with Pa and offered him a job at Merritt and Dubose. Pa went and worked there and saved money. That money was part of what he used to buy the 315 acres of land he had to come back to. And all this time, he was paying his father Mahlon one hundred dollars a year just so he wouldn’t have to stay home and work on his father’s farm.

Pa had never joined the church at Sardis where his father Mahlon was the preacher, but he did join the Methodist church at Ridge Spring. After Pa and Ma married, Ma transferred her membership to Ridge Spring Methodist Church, and Pa joined that church with her. That church was right by the house that Pa built for Ma in Ridge Spring when they got married. The church is still there, but the house burned a few years ago.

After they came back to Saluda, they both joined Emory. When each of the children was born, Pa and Ma had us christened at Emory, and in due time each one of us joined the church. I guess I had enough Baptist in me that I wasn’t quite for that christening business. But then after I got older, I realized that it was just for the parents to promise that they’d bring up the child in the right way.

I told you I was born in June of 1894. Fourteen months later in August of 1895, my mother had Luther Grady. They all said he was the prettiest one of us boys, but we never got a picture of him. He wasn’t in the family group picture I’ve got hanging on my wall because he was crying when the picture was taken. Dora, our nurse, had taken him outside, and the photographer just took the picture without him. He died of typhoid malaria when he was eleven months old in 1896. I had it at the same time, and I nearly died too. People were dying like flies. Three Negro children on our place died the same afternoon. When Pa came back to the


farm in 1894, he hired his brother Oscar to work for wages. Together they hauled lumber for ten cents a hundred to Batesburg. But Pa just wasn’t happy on the farm. He applied for the master’s job when Saluda County was created in 1896, and he was the first master of Saluda County. He stayed master until he got the Post Office at Saluda.

He was the second postmaster that Saluda ever had. Bob Ramey was the first one. Bob wanted the job, but he didn’t want to ask Eulie Simpkins, the Negro committeeman, for the job, and he had to because the Republicans were in power. He finally did ask him, and he got the job as postmaster. But he was the undertaker too, and all of a sudden, people started dying so regular that Mr. Bob didn’t have time to be Saluda’s undertaker and postmaster; he was too busy burying all the people who had died. So he gave it up. Pa stood the civil service examination and made the highest mark of anybody that took it, but he still had to ask Mack Jones, the Negro Republican committeeman under Joe Tolbert, for the job.

He got it, and he kept it for seven years—from 1898 to 1905. He gave it up because he got tired of it. He had two big places, and he felt like he had to manage his farms. We made 90 bales of cotton in 1906. That was the year that Dave Perry and Rose were milking our cows and Henry Dozier stole one and he had sense enough to let the chain drag in the road to make it look like the cow had just wandered off. Rose came and told Pa that Dave had stolen the cow, but Pa didn’t believe her. She tracked the cow and saw where he’d picked up the chain. She told Pa, and this time he believed her and went on horseback to look for Henry and the cow. He stopped by Wallace Wright’s and found out that Henry had tried to sell the cow to him. Pa and Mr. Wallace hitched Pa’s horse Old Prince to a buggy, and they went up the road and got ahead of the Negro and the cow. When Henry saw Pa, he ran and Pa shot him. Then Pa picked him up and took him to Edgefield to the doctor. Pa brought him back home and never prosecuted him for stealing. He filled his back full of buckshot.


Henry’s daddy, Romulus, told Pa that was the best day’s work he ever did because Henry stayed home after that instead of drinking and gambling. But Pa always hated he shot him. The reason Henry stole the cow was that he’d lost ninety dollars the night before in a skin game. He was working for Cousin Tolly Herlong, and he’d sold a bale of cotton, and he lost that money too. He was Hootsie-Nootsie Dozier’s daddy. Hootsie-Nootsie lives about a mile from here.

I’ve told you about the Padgetts and the Davenports, my father’s people and my mother’s people. My folks always believed that who you are is important—that blood matters. I’ve always been proud of what is in John Chapman’s History of Edgefield County, the one he published in 1897. When they reprinted it, I bought several copies for my children so they would know what someone else had thought of their family. I keep a copy of it folded up in my billfold. Let me read it to you: “William Padgett was . . . a worthy and prominent citizen of this section. He never sought nor held a public position. Indeed it may be said of the Padgetts that they are remarkable for their love of private life. William Padgett’s wife was Margaret Denny, sister of Colonel David Denny. . . . He [William] was quite wealthy before the war but at its close he was not rich. For honesty, industry, and general integrity of character he had few superiors. Rev. Mahlon D. Padgett of Mt. Willing and Mr. David Padgett of the Ridge are his sons.” Now isn’t that a fine thing he said about Grandpa Mahlon and my great-grandpa William!

I don’t have to go far to find my ancestors’ graves. I live about half way between Sardis and Emory graveyards. William and Peggy and Mahlon and Susannah and many other family members are buried at Sardis. Mose and Hester and Walter and Ela are buried at Emory along with all my wife’s people. Of course, I know nearly all the people buried in both places. In fact, they were my neighbors and friends. I’ve always helped clean off the graveyard at Emory and at Sardis. You know, every spring they let it be known that everybody is welcome to come help on


the day they’ve set for the big cleaning, and Gladys and I always go. We feel real close to those who’ve gone on before when we’re working in either place.

Douglas Davenport Padgett: Reflections on the Life of a

“Grand” Man

by

His Children, Grandchildren, Great-Grandchildren, Nieces, Nephews, Cousins, Friends, and Acquaintances

“Mr. Padgette is a fine and worthy man. He is a grand man and I love him.”

by Gladys Wightman Padgette, his wife of sixty-four years (Even in the dementia she suffered in the months before she died, she scribbled on a note pad in the nursing home these words about the man she loved.)

Appendix: Essays, Letters and Articles 425

A Card and a Letter from Madaline to Her Father by Madaline Padgette Boney, the older daughter (The following letter and card that Madaline wrote to her father are the only ones from her to him. When the book was being completed, it was too late to ask her to write about him. She was a gifted writer and teacher and would have been able to contribute depth and detail to this portrait of him—these “notes in the margin” of what he told about himself and his family. She was always special to him—his precious daughter or “Presh,” as he called her. She was suffering with a degenerative disease for the last nine years or her life and was unable to write as she always had. It is sad that she did not tell her story since she, as the oldest, had known him longer than the other three children had.)

Dear Mother and Dad, 7-17-77

We are over half way through our trip. The good outweighs the bad, which I will talk about later. Rio is a huge city, but very beautiful. I’ve seen little since we arrived only last night and have been busy at the P.O. and cashing travelers’ checks (a real long process) this a.m. Salvador was magnificent and a great experience. I hope you both are well and enjoying your summer. I wish you could see this place!

Love, Madaline

Dear Dad, February 8, 1983

I guess I’m better though I haven’t any physical stamina. Friday and Saturday I took down (finally) the Christmas decorations and put them in boxes. Barry came over Sunday afternoon and put my decorations in the attic. After all of January, I went to church on Sunday because I felt better and because I could get panty hose on. No one would have cared had I gone in pants, but I could not. You have no idea how difficult it is to fold clothes. It is simply


impossible to fold sheets. I have done several loads of clothes and changed my bed—so washed the sheets. They’re clean, but they are not folded at all. This morning I have sort of electrobroomed the house, and I’m exhausted. I bought an electrobroom because my vacuum is too heavy to push, and I couldn’t possibly carry it up the steps. The steps have banisters on both sides now. Orson and Scott put up one banister rail, and Scott put a security grip on my bath tub. My break must have been very bad as I’m still wearing the cast and will be for two more weeks. I’m very tired of it, but it would be worse to get out of it too soon.

Bela says you’re doing fine. I’m glad. And she insists that you’re no trouble at all, which is good. Did you find the farm okay? Where is the dog? You must have had lots of company and cards. Even I had cards from people in Saluda, Emory, and Sardis.

This letter has been mostly about me, but I think of you often, and people you don’t know at all ask me about you. So I’m not altogether selfish.

Love, Madaline

P.S. I do play bridge with the board Barry made for Jimmie many years ago. For no known reason I kept it and knew where it was.

(Note: Daddy broke his hip just before Christmas in 1983 and was in the hospital during the holidays. Madaline came to be with Daddy as soon as her classes were finished. She had been with him in the hospital on Saturday and was going to stay with him all day Sunday since we had the Herlong Christmas dinner at our house. I had to teach Sunday School, so Jimmie and I went on to church. Madaline got dressed and was walking down our front steps when she fell and broke her wrist. A man driving by stopped and helped her and called me at church. I came home and took her to Dr. Wise, who sent her to Greenwood Hospital. She and Daddy ended up being in the hospital at the same time. Daddy stayed with us about six weeks after he got out of the hospital. Bettina came and took Madaline back to Savannah. This letter, written February 8, is telling about her condition and asking how Daddy is progressing.)


My Father: A Friend to All by Curtis Davenport Padgette, the older son

Emory United Methodist Church, founded in 1843, is located

about four miles southeast of Saluda, South Carolina, off Highway 178 to the right; a sign is at the crossroad. My father, Davenport Padgett, grew up as a member of this frame (clapboard) rural church and as an adult became one of the true pillars as well as the teacher of the adult Sunday School class for 58 years. Obviously this is where he was laid to rest in the plot with his wife, my mother, who had preceded him in death by a decade.

A former preacher at Emory and a great friend of my father conducted the funeral. He kept his homily about Daddy in a light vein though always honoring his life as he had lived it. The minister told many of his personal experiences with Daddy as well as many stories about him, During the minister’s talk, many of my memories of our relationship I recalled and still revere.

Mother, it seemed to me, always taught school, and in my early years (before school age) Aunt Stella (a wonderful black woman) looked after me and cooked for us. I still remember her sweet potato pies. On many occasions during this early period of my life, Daddy would take me to ride with him on his big red horse. He couldn’t use a saddle when I rode with him, so he’d use a folded quilt, and I would ride behind him holding my arms around his body to stay on. There were times he took me hunting with him riding double. These were very high points in the life of a little boy.

I’m sure my love and respect for him began about this time in my early life. In those days before we had a car, Daddy drove the family wherever we went in a buggy. It was slow getting anywhere, so except for mother going to school and our going to church and to Saluda, Daddy didn’t take us many places


Then came the great day. Daddy, with Mother’s consent, decided we should have a car; so, a few days later he hitched up a mule to the buggy and set out for Batesburg about twelve miles away on dirt roads to buy a car. Late that afternoon he came home driving a 1924 Model T Ford and pulling the buggy behind the car. (He’d traded the mule in on the car) This was a sight for a little boy to see, but even then I wondered how he learned to drive so quickly, and I still do.

This really was the end of a phase of my life and the beginning of the era of automobile transportation—a dramatic but wonderful and exciting change. A move from the horse and buggy days to automobile transportation brought our family closer to friends and relatives. Daddy always loved and cared for people so that much of his idle time was spent driving the car around and visiting friends, always ready and able to expound on most any subject but particularly on politics. He was a good friend of Jimmy Byrnes, our governor and former Senator and a member of Roosevelt’s staff.

Back to another story about my growing up with him. When I was probably six or seven years old, he decided a boy my age should learn to swim, but at that time, 1926-27-28, we had no place to swim. He dammed up the branch behind our house and cleared it out for swimming, and he said I had to learn to swim, or he would cut the dam. I did learn to swim, but when it rained the dam would break, so he dug us a nice pool in the middle of the pasture—a pool fed by spring water. For years my friends came to swim with me, and Daddy was there and had as much fun as we did. His actions certainly had a favorable influence on a least five or six boys.

In about 1925, when I was five, we—Mother, Dad, Madaline, and I—went to Greenwood in our car to buy me a little suit. We went to Belks Department Store. Mother and Dad picked out a suit for me, and I didn’t like it, so as you might expect, I started fussing and crying. Daddy took me into a closet, took off his belt and gave me a good belting, or at least it seemed to me it was. The


only thing he said was, “Curtis, this is the suit we can afford for you, and we are going to buy it.” That was one of the two whippings he ever gave me. I cannot remember his ever punishing me in anger.

Daddy was always a farmer, and during the off-period, in quail-hunting season, he hunted a great deal, much to Mother’s chagrin. This resulted in some of their most harsh disagreements (plain fusses). Most of the time Daddy was the calmer of the two, but not always.

At age five I entered school, and my closeness with my father diminished some until I was old enough to work in the fields with him in spring, summer, and fall. We worked hard together planting cotton, corn, oats, and wheat. Harvesting of the grain occurred about the time the cotton and corn were planted, so we had double duty during that period. The cotton and corn were harvested during the fall. He usually had some help during the farming season, so we all worked together. As I look back, it was a very happy time in my life, but at the time I was not too happy having to work so hard.

It was during this period when I was probably about ten years old that we were in the house one day for lunch and Daddy asked me to go to the spring (our only source of good, fresh, cool water) and get a bucket of water. I said, “Daddy, I’m not going to do it.”

His response was, “Come with me.” We went outside to a peach tree where he cut a switch and used it on my legs. When he had finished, all he said was, “Curtis, I’m your father. Don’t ever tell me you are not going to do something I ask you to do—at least as long as you put your feet under my table.” That was all that was ever said. In retrospect, I know what he did was appropriate for my disobedience.

After I entered college, our closeness again was changed as I was away from him and really never returned to the farm work as I had summer jobs each summer. After college our association was close but never the same. I was married and he treated me as a man—an equal.


Through his life he maintained certain basic values, and these he emphasized to me by word and example. These simple basic values were “One does not lie, cheat, or steal.” and “You always treat your fellowman fairly.” You could say this was his “golden rule.”

No doubt some of this was instilled in him during his early years by his mother, who died when he was eight years old. As I was growing up, he spoke of her often and with obvious devotion and love. In fact, at least until I left home, he always wore a white rose in his lapel on Mother’s Day to church to honor her. (I might add that I never remember seeing him at church on Sunday without a coat and tie regardless of weather.)

We experienced some very difficult times during the depression years, but we survived, that is my sister and I, thanks to the efforts of our parents. It was during this period, 1931 to 1934, that our young sister and brother were born. They are Bela and Doug. Madaline and I were soon grown and gone, so the “second family” arrival gave Mother and Dad many great years raising them. So we wound up as an adult family of six and enjoyed many years as a family.

Mother and Daddy disagreed in one other area, but fortunately Daddy prevailed in this instance, which was the continued buying of land. Daddy sought security in land as that was the manner in which he was raised. He continued to add to his original forty acres until he retired. By that time—he was about 80 when he quit farming or raising cattle—he had accumulated several hundred acres. As it worked out, he sold timber from the land and some land itself and was financially comfortable during his last years and left some land and money to his children.

My parents were happily married for over sixty years, and selfishly, I feel they raised four responsible children who learned from their teaching and example. In Daddy’s latter years, I spent many evenings with him in his den and listened and enjoyed his reminiscing about his life, mother’s life, and the four children—much of which is covered in other parts of this book.


I think and believe that he was a man’s man, a caring and loving husband and a devoted father who lived by his golden rule. He was a man who lived a full life and who loved his family and respected his friends.

My Father: A Stalwart, Loving Gentleman by Ruby Euela (Bela) Padgette Herlong, the younger daughter (with two letters to her mother and father)

When I was a child in the 1930s, I loved my father so much, but I did not realize he was different from other fathers. I took him for granted—the way he took care of Doug and me when Mother was at school, the way he read to us and played with us, the way he was always telling us stories. He was easier to approach than Mother was. At first I believed he would let me do things Mother wouldn’t. I soon learned, though, that he had lines he wouldn’t cross. He believed in treating everybody right, and he never held grudges. I observed the way he treated Mother—like she was his equal and his love. I just thought every husband treated his wife that way. Both of them gave us unconditional love always. My older brother and sister were almost grown when I can remember, but Mother and Daddy thought they could do no wrong—and they never did! When they came home from college and later from wherever they were living, Mother and Daddy were so excited and happy, and Doug and I were too.

I never saw my parents kiss, but I saw them often touch each other and look at each other with love. Oh, I saw them fuss a lot too, and Mother was always wanting Daddy to get a “real” job in the winter when he wasn’t farming. He loved her enough and was strong enough to encourage her to teach—to do the work that she loved to do. Some men teased him about “Mrs. Gladys making the living.” He just laughed and did what he thought was right. Of course, in winter Daddy raised and trained bird dogs, each of which would sell for more money than Mother would make in


several months of teaching. However, they could count on her steady salary, and it was important in our household. Mother was like me, though (or I was like her): we both enjoyed teaching so much that we could hardly believe that people would pay us to do it! Mother taught me in fifth, sixth, and seventh grades at Fairview, the little country school where she was principal and teacher. I learned from her just as everyone else did because she loved her students and knew how to interest them. She was valedictorian of the Saluda High School Class of 1915, but she didn’t get to go to college. She recognized that Davenport, as she always called him, was far smarter than she was. She wanted him to know algebra and Latin and English grammar and, after they married, she offered to teach him. He never accepted her offer, but he read constantly and kept informed on what was going on in the world.

We didn’t have electricity or even a well in the yard (we got our water from a spring until I was ten years old) or a painted house, but we did subscribe to The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Readers’ Digest, The Country Gentleman, Woman’s Home Companion, Ladies Home Journal, and The Southern Christian Advocate, and we owned a set of encyclopedias they’d paid for by the month. We always knew when Daddy was reading because he moved his lips, and a tiny little sound came out. He read whenever he sat down—the encyclopedia, magazines, Sunday School books, the Bible; and he was a thinker: he drew conclusions, he analyzed, he synthesized. Yes, he had great intellect; therefore what he read and what he experienced became a part of him. Thus he gained wisdom as well as knowledge. People came to him for advice; he and Mother were both counselors. I remember as a child wondering why so many people wanted to talk to my parents. I learned later of one lady who came because her husband was abusing her, and she wanted to talk to Mother and Daddy about getting a divorce. That was when people didn’t get a divorce; they just endured whatever occurred in a marriage. She sought their counsel as did so many others.


Daddy had worked hard on the farm first for his father and then for himself and his own family. I never heard him complain even though he suffered daily with back pain and a terrible hernia he’d had since he was seventeen. He was always joyful—laughing and whistling the one tune he could whistle. He loved us all and didn’t hesitate to tell us. His words were “I love you more than you know.” He loved others too even if they were cranky and hard to get along with. He said he never held it against anybody for being what he was because God made us all human—and that meant we all have faults. He just accepted people the way they were—rich or poor, black or white, mean or good, educated or uneducated, kin or not. He said he’d tried to treat every man like his brother and every woman like his sister—and I think he accomplished that. He was a friend to all. He told you what he thought though, but he could do it in such a way that he didn’t anger people.

He was an extraordinary man; there have never been many like him. He was a caring father to me as a child and a teenager, and I knew he had wisdom and knowledge and great love for me then. But as I became an adult, I could appreciate the greatness in his unswerving assurance that he was a child of God and a brother to every person in God’s creation. He was happy and contented with the woman he loved and the children they had, with the land he worked, and the people he knew, and this contentment was grounded in his awareness of his own joy in being alive. (The first letter below was written by Bela Herlong to her parents in June, 1951, just before her college graduation, and the second, on August 6, 1973, after her husband, Jimmie, had had unsuccessful brain surgery in New York.)

Dear Mother and Daddy,

This is going to be a thank-you letter. First I want to thank you for the material things you’ve given me—for the record player that you and Madaline sent me. It is beautiful—just exactly what I


wanted. I only have one record so far. I bought it with the dollar Aunt Anna gave me. I’ve wished so long and so hard for a record player—ever since I can remember almost. And now I have one at last. I’m going to buy records that will last on and on—something we will like to listen to ten years from now. Popular tunes are gone so soon. They are beautiful while they last though, and I want some of them. Thank you for the record player.

And then I want to thank you for giving me a college education, for that is the greatest thing I have. It means so much to me—more than I ever realized it could. I know it doesn’t mean that to all people, but it means a beginning to me—a beginning of the opening of the doors of knowledge. I haven’t entered very far yet, but I intend to keep on going, to learn as much as I possibly can, for to know is to live, in a way. Thank you for letting me come, and thank you for the clothes and for the many privileges you have given me. Thank you again and again.

But most of all I want to thank you for the intangible things you’ve given me—your great love, security, and the good name that I have. I hope I never spoil it, for a great name is to be treasured more than great riches. Thank you also for the Christian principles you have given me, and thank you for bringing me up in the church, for teaching me that I can always turn to God, and that He is there to help and love us. I hope that I can be a true Christian.

Maybe someday I will be able to give you something in return for all you’ve done for me, for you are great parents—the greatest in the world! Thank you for being mine. I love you very much. I wish I could live up to all the hopes you’ve had in me, but I know that I’ve disappointed you so many times in so many ways.

I love you, Bela

Dear Mother and Daddy, August 6, 1973 This is a thank-you note to tell you both how very much I

appreciate all you have done for me through the years and especially in the last six weeks. The money you gave me before I


left and then the money Mother sent me has certainly helped out. My airline tickets to New York and back were $200.00 and Jimmie's were $100.00. There were just so many expenses. We did appreciate the money. I am also so grateful for your taking care of our children. Alice knew she had a place to come to when she got tired of the beach. She felt at home with you. Also the dinner you and Cousin Carrie fixed was so wonderful. We would not have had anything to eat in the house if you all had not provided all that good food. Then, too, I want to say thank you for remembering my birthday. You were the only ones. And I truly needed the slip and panties. I tried them on, and they are perfect. I know I'll enjoy them. There is no real way to say what you both have meant to me in all the years—and now! I've had some rough spots, and you have always been there to help me—with whatever I needed—money, love, food, clothes, or whatever.

I do love you both! Bela

A Letter to My Father: A Man I Love and Respect by Douglas Donald Padgette, the younger son Dear Daddy,

You have been gone for eighteen years, but there has not been one day since then that I have not thought of you, told someone about you, or envied the kind of man you were. It is impossible to describe the impact you have always had on my life, and it continues as I grow old.

As a son it has not been easy to live up to the standards that you set. Your morality, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, and spirituality were never questioned by anyone. Everybody respected you—black or white, rich or poor—and that is truly remarkable. I remember how Posey, your lifelong black friend,


stood beside your coffin until it was closed. When I asked why he still stood there, he replied, “I don’t know if I can go on with my life without Mr. Davenport.” Most people could never understand a relationship like that.

You were a person who took life as it came. The good, the bad, the hard, the easy, the pain and the sorrow were all met with an even determination that life itself is the greatest gift we receive and should be enjoyed to the fullest. I have often wondered how you became you. Maybe it was the pain, sorrow and hard times you had as a child and young man. I will always wonder but will never know, however, how it created a man unlike anyone else I have ever known.

Your faith in your children made us responsible adults even though none of us are as remarkable as you would have people believe. That faith also extended to other people. I recall you saying “People will do the right thing most of the time and when they don’t, it’s because they are only human.” This philosophy allowed you to look at life with a positive attitude, which was reflected in everything you did. In 1966 I had the honor and privilege to meet and hear a sermon by Lloyd Oglesby—later chaplain of the Senate. The topic of the sermon was “I Believe In Life after Birth.” He explained that as a child and young man, he was reared in an environment where faith and enjoying life seemed to be mutually exclusive. This caused him to leave the church. While at the University of Chicago, he roomed with two World War II ex-Marines and found that they were deeply religious but still enjoyed life. Knowing them changed his life and caused him to go into the ministry. Whenever I think of that sermon, I always think of you because you were the most Christian man I ever knew, but you also enjoyed life as much as anyone I have ever known.

Following in your footsteps is not easy, and I have failed many times. However, I still ask myself the same question when faced with a moral or ethical question: “What would Daddy do?” I always know the answer—“The right thing.” This is a legacy that I


hope my children will remember. It is absolutely unbelievable that everyone that knew you felt the same way, and as your lifelong friend Jake Grigsby said when asked why he chose the cemetery plot next to yours, “I had rather spend eternity close to Davenport Padgett than just about anybody I know.” What a compliment!

It has always been a privilege and honor to call you “Daddy,” and I know that you know that I felt that way. Many years ago someone asked me to describe my father in one sentence. “That is easy,” I replied. “He would do more for his enemy than most people will do for their best friend. This says it all.”

(The following note is from a birthday card Doug sent to his father—a note of love, concern, and gratitude.)

Dad, we are very sorry that we won’t make your birthday

party. However, that doesn’t lessen our love for you on your birthday or on Father’s Day. You are one of a kind, and the entire Doug Padgette family appreciate having you as the sire. I personally realize that you are the thread of stability that has always run through my life regardless of where I lived.

Love, Doug, Barbara, Steve, and Mark


Letter in a Time of Rejoicing by Harold Abner Boney, Sr., son-in-law (Madaline’s husband) Dear Mr. Padgette December 12, 1938

This is certainly a time of rejoicing for me. I have long awaited the day when Madaline and I would be reconciled and would agree that we desired to marry each other. There have been many romances and potential marriages busted up because of hostile parents. I truly thank you for having always been so kind and receptive to me. Now, I have come to the one great moment when, after having secured the heart of the daughter, I can ask for your permission and approval of the event that will open the door to our greater happiness.

I knew when I first started going with Madaline that she was the girl for me. I knew, even after we broke up, that she would come back to me and I to her. Our love had been built on only the highest ethical and moral principles. The teachings of our parents taught us the true value of real love.

Although we shall be separated for a few months, I know that we will be much happier married to each other. I have arranged to help and to secure help for my brother in school; and by summer, barring unforeseen difficulties, I believe that Madaline and I shall be prepared to start out in a modest and happy life.

I feel myself honored to be the recipient of affection from so fine and attractive and intelligent a person as Madaline. I feel sure that she has a maturer and finer love for me than before, and I know that I am more capable of being a good husband and provider.

I have gone ahead quite extensively with plans and I solicit your blessings, good will, love, and cooperation. I truly love Madaline and would consider it a great privilege to have her as my wife and to become a part of your family.

Love, Harold A. Boney (Sr.)


Thoughts about Grandpa by Bettina Davenport Boney Beecher, granddaughter (Madaline’s daughter)

I have tried and tried to write about Grandpa, and I can’t.

Maybe I feel so deeply about him that everything sounds trite. He was truly a second father to me. I remember following him

around while he cussed blue blazes and while he whistled “Coming Home on a Wing and a Prayer,” one of the few tunes he could whistle. I must have been really young since that was a World War II song, and I was born in 1940.

The greatest feeling was that I was special to him. I know it is blasphemous, but Grandpa was love to me, unconditional love. My parents were critical and demanding, but Grandpa was love—although he never let me get away with anything. His most remarkable characteristic was that he loved individuals in spite of what they did. When they did things he didn’t like or even when they hurt him, he’d tell them about it, but he’d go on loving them. I always thought that was so wonderful. I learned later that not everybody is like that.

Granddaddy: The Real Thing, the “Genuine Article” by Harold A. Boney, Jr., grandson (Madaline’s older son) Dear Bela and Others, June 30, 2008

Bela, you asked me a few years ago to write down for the book some of my recollections of Granddaddy. I’ve had a really hard time getting around to it for at least a few reasons.

1. Most of my time with Granddaddy was when I was very young (mostly pre-teen years). My recollection of those early years is not so clear and my perspective is a little different.

2. You, Bela, are a very special and TALENTED person, and all my cousins, who have already put down their recollections, are so brilliant in their ways with words that I have felt and still feel a


little inadequate for this endeavor. You know, we tend to avoid things we don’t feel quite equal to.

3. Most importantly, I think I have delayed—avoiding the tremendous feeling of loss that I still have, the sadness that I have, knowing that Granddaddy is gone and that I can’t talk to him, or hear his stories, or just be around him anymore. When Granddaddy died, I just couldn’t help crying—and crying—and crying, feeling and knowing that the world would never be as good a place without him. Then, when I started to read the early partial draft of the book, I couldn’t get past the first page, the poem. I cried again—thinking about Granddaddy looking out over the Rocky Ridge, part of the land he lived on and loved all his life, where I, as a little boy, had followed him so many hours, where we had ridden so many times on the slide, where I had walked with Granddaddy and my father bird hunting, and where he had planted a dove field for me when I was a young man. Even now, as I’m thinking about these things, tears are in my eyes.

Anyway, whatever the reasons for my delay, I apologize. If you didn’t know my Granddaddy, Davenport Padgett, you

missed a treat. He was a people person, mostly happy—hardly ever cross. It seems like he was always humming some hymn. (If I had the Methodist Hymnal, I could probably pick out one or two.) He liked people and genuinely cared about people, all people, black, white, rich and poor, regardless of whether they liked or cared about him. He just seemed to like and accept people for what they were and, even though his own standards were high, he did not judge others. He did not have much formal education, but he was educated in the ways of the world he lived in—and was especially “people smart.” He didn’t seem to have a big ego, but he was plenty self-assured. In fact, he may never have met a stranger. He was the real thing, as people say a “genuine article,” with no pretensions. About thirty seconds into any conversation with Granddaddy, you would know where you stood—and where he stood. There was something magic about Granddaddy—I just can’t exactly describe it—so that he could put you in your place


nicely and effectively—without making you angry. Without anything being said, you knew he expected your best out of you, and you didn’t want to disappoint him.

To really appreciate what a remarkable and special person Granddaddy was, you also have to know and consider the world he was born into and grew up in and how it changed during his lifetime. That could be a book in itself. Suffice it to say he was born in 1894 in rural and sparsely populated Saluda County where the roads were mainly one-lane dirt trails for horse and buggy or farm wagon travel. There was no electricity for decades. Before electricity there was no running water in the house. (Grandmother and Granddaddy cooked on a big wood stove in my memory.) There was no air conditioning, and the heat was a fireplace.

Granddaddy was a young father in WWI and, of course, was a young grandfather during WWII. During his lifetime the nuclear bomb was developed, air travel became commonplace, telephones came into use, television was invented and became a part of everyday life, computers were invented, the revolution in information and communication technology started, and I believe we put a man on the moon.

We (the Boney family) lived in Baltimore from my age one through my third grade in school, from around 1945 until about 1953. My first memories of Saluda are probably from about 1949 to 1953. Mother loved going home to Saluda and my father—everyone called him “Boney"—loved to bird hunt with Granddaddy, so we travelled from Baltimore to Saluda for Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays when we could. We also spent summer vacations in Saluda. There was a time when Boney was sick and almost died, and we spent months, including a whole summer, I believe, in Saluda then. I remember eating lots of watermelon that summer and plenty of home-made peach ice cream, which I proudly “turned.” Daddy always maintained that the watermelon cured him.


In 1953 we moved to Charleston, and in 1955 we moved to Savannah. After we moved to Charleston, and then Savannah, we spent even more time in Saluda, at least until I was in high school.

During those early times in Saluda, I think I watched Granddaddy like a hawk—to see if he was going somewhere. My favorite phrase was “Can I go, Granddaddy?” and I can’t remember him saying no. We went to Ben Lindler’s store, to town, to Mt. Willing, and to visit any and everybody. Everywhere we went we visited, and visited. We stopped at Homer Calk’s store—and visited. Then we’d stop and pickup Cousin Frank Long, and take him to town. Sometimes we went to see Uncle Jouette or Uncle Gus. Sometimes we went by to see “Little Grandmother” Wightman and Uncle Cantey and Aunt Mary Alice. Sometimes we went by Emory church and Emory schoolhouse—but always we visited. Sometimes we took presents to people, like corn, beans, or tomatoes from the garden—but always we visited. Granddaddy greeted and talked to everybody we saw. When folks were sitting around talking, like in a yard or at Ben Lindler’s store, Granddaddy had a unique way of squatting. He could squat down completely flat-footed and stay like that for long periods of time, with no effort or discomfort. Try it sometime.

With me being sort of a little “city boy,” Grandmother sometimes seemed concerned about what I was doing—sort of afraid that I was going to get hurt or in trouble. Granddaddy, on the other hand, never seemed to worry. He just told me what I could do, showed me how, and then didn’t seem to worry about it—and if Granddaddy said it was okay, it seemed to alleviate or override Grandmother’s concerns. I went pretty much where I pleased, and the only place I remember being forbidden to go was the pasture where Will was. Now, I didn’t fully understand that. Will, the bull, seemed peaceful and gentle to me, but Granddaddy said he might get mean and that we should stay away from him—so I did.

There were two mules, Laura and Pet. Laura was older, and, as mules go, was the smarter of the two. Pet could be very stubborn.


Sometimes Granddaddy hooked them both up, and it seemed to me that either Pet didn’t get the instructions or didn’t want to cooperate with Laura. Granddaddy had a heck of a time getting Pet to do right when the two mules were together, but Pet seemed okay when she was not with Laura.

I don’t know whether it was because of the school bus wreck or for some other reason, but it seems like for a few years Granddaddy used the slide as his main means of transportation— to get wherever he was going around the home place. The slide was just a heavy wooden platform, made with rough hewn (“undressed” they called it) lumber with runners on each side and a steel strip on the bottom of each runner. Pet pulled the slide like a sleigh. I loved to ride on the slide with Granddaddy. He would put me in the middle and then he would sit behind me on an upside-down bucket and hold the reins. He let me hold the reins sometimes. It made me feel like I was driving.

Sometimes we took the slide to fix fences, and Granddaddy let me help. He would let me use one claw hammer to stretch the barbed wire tight while he was nailing a staple in the post. When we didn’t take the slide, we would walk. I remember one time, when I was six or seven, he told me it (where he was going) was too far for me to walk. I begged to go, and he let me. He was right when he had said it was too far. I did my best to keep up and he never said a word.

It was probably when I was eight or nine and Tina was twelve or thirteen that we asked Granddaddy if we could ride Pet. He put on the bridle, threw a burlap sack on Pet’s back, got her up next to the board fence around the barnyard, and held her while I climbed up the fence and then went from the fence to Pet’s back. After that, I sort of made friends with Pet and would “catch her up,” as Granddaddy would say, by myself. I got her over to the fence, put on the bridle, threw on the sack, mounted from the fence, and we were off. There was no problem until we told Grandmother. She gave Granddaddy a pretty good ration of grief


about how dangerous it was, but he didn’t tell us we couldn’t ride Pet, so we kept on.

Granddaddy was a smoker, you know. That was before everybody knew how bad smoking was—or everybody except Grandmother, I should say. Grandmother knew, and she let Granddaddy know how bad it was all the time. He kept smoking anyway.

There was some kind of metal matchbox holder mounted on the wall in the kitchen, and there was always a big box of strike-anywhere kitchen matches in that matchbox holder. Granddaddy took a few and carried them in his pocket to light his cigarettes. He had a way of holding a kitchen match in his right hand between those broken and bent up middle fingers, with the phosphorous tip oriented toward his palm. Then he would swipe the match tip across some surface to light the match and, in the same motion, cup the lighted match in the palm of his hand. It almost seemed like he was a magician.

My memory is a little vague on it, but I believe that before the early 50’s Granddaddy had a black Chevrolet. Then in the early 50’s, I believe there was a tan Chevrolet. Then, I believe he bought a green 1957 Chevrolet and drove that for almost an eternity. The Chevrolet company should make a case study of that car and use it for an advertisement. It was a survivor.

The ’57 Chevy had a trunk that opened almost all the way down to the bumper. Granddaddy didn’t have a truck, so everything that had to be hauled went into the trunk of that Chevy. I remember loading bales of hay from the Mt. Willing house, which was then a hay barn, to take to the pasture. When Granddaddy drove (instead of walking) somewhere to go bird hunting, the dogs rode in the trunk. He always kept a piece of baling twine handy to tie the trunk down, leaving a three- or four-inch crack so that the dogs would get plenty of air.

In 1957, car companies were not as smart as they are now, so the ’57 Chevy didn’t have a padded dash. (It could be that the government didn’t require it.) Anyway, I believe the dash on that


Chevrolet was metal. There was a place on the dash that was just a naturally perfect place to swipe a match, and my memory of that Chevy is that there was a hole there in the dash where the phosphorous from the matches being struck had just eaten up the metal.

Now, you know that car had a standard transmission with three forward gears. Why three, I don’t know. Granddaddy always shifted from first to third, sometimes when the car was barely moving, causing it to jump and jerk. What a strain that caused on the engine and transmission I cannot even imagine, but the car seemed to last forever.

Although Granddaddy had an early model McCormick Farmall Cub tractor, I think he preferred using the mules. Barry and I found a primitive sort of disc harrow next to the tractor shed after Granddaddy died, but I don’t remember ever seeing him use it. I do remember his plowing with the mules long after he had the tractor. (He did stop with the corn and cotton he was growing and put the fields in pasture at some time, so that might have something to do with his not using the tractor as much as you might otherwise figure.)

Anyway, the tractor is a whole story by itself. I would ride on Granddaddy’s knee when he was driving the tractor, and I wasn’t very old when he showed me how to start and drive it. I was probably eight or nine. Being just the right kind of big brother, I wanted to share my knowledge and experience with Barry, four and half years my younger. With a little coaxing and help from me, Barry started the tractor and it somehow began rolling through the shed, which was on a slight downward slope. So there was my four- or five-year-old brother driving, or I should say “rolling,” off on the tractor. Did we ever get in trouble with Mother and Grandmother on that one—but Granddaddy didn’t fuss. I guess he didn’t have to—or maybe he didn’t have a chance.

It seems to me that the tractor always had a problem. Granddaddy didn’t get along with machines as well as he did with people. It seems that the Cub was always overheating and


Granddaddy was always carrying water to put in the radiator. If it wasn’t overheating, something else was wrong. The main thing I remember Granddaddy using the tractor for was mowing. He had a sickle mower, and as best I can recall something was almost always wrong with the mower too. No wonder he liked the mules.

Speaking of mules, somewhere along the line Laura died. Granddaddy later told me “When Laura died, Grandpa cried,” and I believe he probably did.

Beginning when I was very little, possibly just seven or eight, Granddaddy and Daddy would let me walk with them bird hunting. If you didn’t know it, Granddaddy was a bird hunter extraordinaire. I think he loved it, but I also think he trained and sold a few bird dogs, and Grandmother and Granddaddy ate birds regularly from Thanksgiving to March 1 every year. Bird hunting was a part of his life and his living. Excluding only Sundays, Granddaddy hunted at least part of the day almost every day in the season. From the time I first remember hunting to many years later, when my dad Boney gave him an automatic, Granddaddy used a 12 gauge Ithaca double, with rabbit ears and laminated steel barrels. If you don’t know, laminated steel barrels are not supposed to be used with modern powders, but he did it anyway. The last time I looked at the Ithaca before it was stolen, the muzzle of one of the barrels was worn paper thin and, I believe, worn through on one edge. The bead on the end had been filed off. My dad, Boney, was a good shot, but Granddaddy was better. I asked Granddaddy one time how he could shoot so good, and he said to me it was because “I shoot by motion”—his words, whatever they mean. Granddaddy once complained that he couldn’t find No. 10 shot anymore and it was hard to find 9’s. I asked him why he wanted 10’s. He said that 10’s didn’t tear up the birds.

Granddaddy gave my dad credit for being a good shot also, but Granddaddy said Boney was better with a pistol—that with a pistol he could make a tin can jump and roll down the road.


When I started following Granddaddy and Daddy bird hunting, Granddaddy had two dogs, Betty and Jim. Jim was a male lemon-spotted pointer, and Betty was a female liver-spotted pointer. They were good. Jim was a little bigger, farther-ranging (sometimes too far), and a little more hard-headed. (They say males are generally a little more hard headed and less eager to please.)

The closest I believe I saw Granddaddy to being angry was one day when Betty didn’t mind. Betty was on point and Granddaddy and Daddy were trying to get up to her to get in position to shoot, and then, to walk past her and flush the birds. At least one of the birds was apparently moving right in front of Betty, and she started creeping forward. Granddaddy said “Mind” in his stern command voice, just like I heard him say the same thing many other times. Instead of “minding,” Betty leaped forward to try to catch the bird that was apparently moving right in front of her (which we couldn’t see) and, when she did, flushed the covey—before Granddaddy and Daddy were in position to shoot.

Granddaddy fussed at Betty pretty good about that, and you know, I believe Betty knew exactly what she had done wrong and was ashamed to have disappointed Granddaddy. You could just tell. Granddaddy didn’t say another stern word to her, and she performed like a champion the rest of that day and really about all the other times I can remember. It was just like she wanted to do good for Granddaddy and to not disappoint him—just because he was Granddaddy. I always felt the same way.

Bela might remember better than I do, but it seems to me that when I was very young, I spent a lot of time in Saluda with Grandmother and Granddaddy when Tina and Barry weren’t there. Granddaddy showed me how to make a toy tractor out of a spool, a rubber band, and a piece of candle. (Back then spools were made of wood and you could notch out the ridges on each end with a pocket knife.) I did and played hours in the red-clay sand, or dust, under the tree in the front yard. Then I made wagons from match boxes, match sticks, and buttons and used


beetles tied to the wagons for horses. Granddaddy showed me how to catch a June bug and tie a string to its leg so that it would fly in a circle while I held the string.

Talking about that red-clay sand or dust, we never wore shoes in the summer. It just wasn’t necessary. When we walked the mile to Ben Lindler’s store (just because it was sort of an adventure and we didn’t have anything else to do) that clay dust was so fine and soft to walk on it felt just like silk. We took our time walking and looked for May pops along the road. It was a thrill throwing them down hard just to hear the pop. That clay dust was also a popular spot for doodle bug cones, and we always looked for the doodle bugs. Just about always Granddaddy gave us a nickel to buy a coke or a TruAde when we got to Ben Lindler’s. If we lost track of time and were gone too long, he’d come after us.

During one of my summer stays in Saluda, Granddaddy was recovering from the school bus wreck. I believe the fields on both sides of the house were in cotton and the field across the road was in corn. Granddaddy had to plow the fields with Laura or Pet, and I walked behind him. It seems like he was in such pain he had to stop, sit down, and rest at the end of almost every row. We would wait until he felt like he could do it, and then he would plow the next row. I guess he did it because he had to.

Granddaddy had little expressions and “ways,” I guess you would say. He sometimes rattled his teeth to entertain babies and toddlers, and they seemed to be fascinated. He had a rhyme, which I’m not sure I heard or remember correctly. It started something like “One zot, two zot, zit, zot-zan.” If you remember the rest, please let me know. He taught us a little poem, which I do remember:


Big Belly Ben ate enough for ten score men. He ate a cow and a calf, a bull and a half, an ox and a steer, a big barrel of beer, forty pounds of johnny cake, fifty pounds of cheese, a big pot of hominy, a little pot of peas. He went to the cupboard to get him some crust and thought by golly his belly would bust. Granddaddy always referred to children as “chaps.” (That may

have been a Saluda thing.) It never seemed very complimentary to me, but he would sometimes describe things as “pretty as a speckled pig in August.” I still haven’t figured that out.

After I was thirteen or so, which would have been ’57, we didn’t spend quite as much time in Saluda during the summers, but we still spent Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays and some weekends, and I still walked with Granddaddy and Daddy bird hunting. They first let me hold and shoot Daddy’s 12 gauge Sauer double on a covey rise when I was about ten or eleven. It kicked like a mule, but I didn’t admit it. After that, they let me shoot every once in awhile, but it was just occasional. It was a long time before I ever got a bird. Thinking back on it, I’m sure those times bird hunting with Granddaddy and Daddy are what made me love hunting as much as I do.

Now, I’m a not-so-young lawyer in Beaufort County, and I have a little piece of land of my own. In contrast to Granddaddy, I’m not really a “people person.” Some of my happiest times are my many hours working by myself on my little place. During those times, I think a lot about Granddaddy and how he loved his


place—his land—and how it was like a part of him. I feel the same way. It must be in my Padgett blood.

Granddaddy loved to go places and see things, but, as best I can remember, he didn’t make many overnight trips. He probably had to be around the homeplace just about every day to tend to the animals.

One time when I was pretty young, Jimmie came by with some Clemson football tickets. He and Granddaddy let me go with them to the game. I didn’t know or care much about football then, but I wanted to go to be with Granddaddy and Jimmie. (Jimmie was sort of an idol for me too, but Jimmie and Bela are a whole different, but related, wonderful story. Maybe one of my talented cousins will write that one, and I’ll be able to put in my two-cents worth.) The trip to Clemson was long, and about all I remember was going with Granddaddy and Jimmie, Clemson’s losing the game, and them talking some about whether a boy from Saluda, who was a quarterback, was going to get to play. I saw him warming up and was impressed with how he threw a tight spiral almost on a line, but I can’t remember if he played in the game. Seems like his name was Johnny Mack Goff, or something like that. Bela would know, because she knows everybody from Saluda.

I didn’t go out for high school football until I was a senior, and then I think it was to suit my daddy, who was proud of the fact that he had been the quarterback on Chester High School’s state championship team sometime around 1929 or 30 and had played at Furman in the early 30’s. I wasn’t very good but did make Savannah High’s ’60 team. (It might be because Mother, who everybody loved about like everybody loved Granddaddy, was a teacher at Savannah High. She was a friend of Coach Spears, and maybe he kept me on the team because of Mother, I don’t really know.) My positions were half-back on offense and safety on defense. I was about third string for both right and left halfback and didn’t get to play much at all.


In November, 1960, we were 7 and 1 when Richmond Academy came up on our schedule. Richmond Academy was the only public high school in Augusta and was a perennial football powerhouse. (I heard that Richmond had five backfield players that year who received full football scholarships to major colleges, which is pretty good since there are only four backfield positions.) I’m rambling again. The whole point of this is that Augusta is pretty close to Saluda, so Granddaddy and Jimmie came over to Augusta that Friday night in mid-November, 1960, to see us play Richmond Academy.

Now, like I said, I was third string, a little on the short side of spectacular as a football player, and I really didn’t even expect to get to play in that big game. We had a really tough kid named Billy who started two levels ahead of me at right half on offense and safety on defense. Billy got knocked out just about the first time he carried the ball. Why? I don’t have a clue, but Coach Spears called my number and put me in.

A few plays after I had sort of by chance caught and returned a quick-kick while I was playing safety on defense, Coach Spears sent me in on offense with a trick pass play we had put in just for that game. It was called “Georgia left” or “Georgia right” depending on which side you were going to run it toward. I ran my pass route, made my cut, and threw up my hands at the same time I looked back for the pass. Well, the ball was already there and hit me in the hands just as I threw’em up and looked back. It started squirting away, and I fell forward and caught it just before it hit the ground in the end zone. It was almost like a miracle—or maybe good reflexes coupled with plain, dumb, blind luck. That was my first, last, and only touchdown in my short athletic career. Overall, with the luck and everything, I played about four feet over my head that night—way beyond my skill and capability. In the end, Richmond beat us like a drum. The final score was 27 to 7, I believe. But the point of this is that I was so glad I got to play and “did good” when my Granddaddy was there to see it.


From ’62 through mid-’65, I was at Furman. One time during those years, I came to Saluda to visit Grandmother and Granddaddy and was hoping that I would be able to go bird hunting too. For some reason, Granddaddy couldn’t go, but he let me and Jim Ed hunt with his dogs. We had a good time and even shot a few birds the best I can remember.

Granddaddy came to my graduation from Furman in ’65. When he got there he didn’t know anyone—except our family, of course. By the time the day was over, I suspect that he had made friends with at least half the people there and knew where they were from, and who their “kin folk” were. That’s the way he was.

A few years later, I’d say in 1970 or 1971, when I was working at Liberty Life in Greenville, Granddaddy planted brown-top in a little four acre field behind the little pond, next to the Rocky Ridge. He didn’t say he planted it for me, but I know he did it because I told him I wanted to shoot doves. Granddaddy loved quail hunting, but he didn’t care a thing about shooting doves. To my knowledge, that time when I asked him was the only time he ever planted for doves—or had a dove shoot. He did that for me!

Around ’78 or ’79, I had some legal business in Johnston and thought I’d go to Saluda to visit Granddaddy before returning to Beaufort. When I was trying to find Granddaddy, I stopped for a coke at Homer Calk’s store on 178 between Granddaddy’s and town. Now the man in the store was not the Homer Calk we had visited with when I was little. Bela tells me now it was probably Homer, Jr., but I don’t remember ever having seen him before. Anyway, I just bought my coke without introducing myself, and when I was finished paying, he said, out of the clear blue, “Son, I don’t know who you are, but I know you’re a Padgett.” That made me feel good then, and now, as I look back, it makes me think. Granddaddy told me one time that he could look at “chaps” and tell who they were and how they were going to turn out before they knew it themselves—and I believe he did know. Anyway, I’m plenty happy that I’m a Boney, but I’m really proud to be a Padgett too. I’m especially happy and proud to be Davenport


Padgett’s grandson—and hope that he is proud of me too. I know I’m a pretty good person, but I also know that I’m not as good as Granddaddy. Then again, I’ve never known anyone who is. I just hope that I’m good enough that someday I’ll see him again in eternity and be able to hear his stories, and walk behind him bird hunting again, and ride on some slide with him over some Rocky Ridge in heaven.

I regret that this is so rambling and disjointed, but I’m out of time—at least for now. Hopefully, I’ll be able to smooth this out and maybe add more later. I guess I miss Saluda and the connection with my roots a lot. I especially miss Granddaddy. Even though this Earth is not the same without him, he did leave the Earth a better place. With the magic sort of way he had, he gave joy and caring. He left us some wonderful memories, and he left a heritage of really good and talented children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, who continue to use their talents to make the world a better place.

Sincerely, Harold A. Boney

Memories of Granddad by Robert Lewis (Bob) Padgette, grandson (Curtis’ son)

While I probably didn’t spend as much time in Saluda as some of the grandchildren, I have fond memories of the time I did spend there. For a person raised mostly in urban or suburban surroundings, going to Saluda was a big change from my everyday life.

I remember the family surroundings and particularly some of those big meals with lots of food and conversation. It was in Saluda that I had my first and only experience of having fresh cow milk at breakfast. Granddad kept trying to convince me that it was better for me than the milk at the store, but I’m still not sure about


that. I personally thought it tasted terrible. And then he knew that I needed to start drinking coffee. At that time it was half coffee and half milk, so I had two things to drink together, neither of which I was particularly fond of. But that was a minor inconvenience when compared to the large plates of food, family, and fun that seemed to surround the meals.

He also showed me how to call the pigs and the cows. I have always had a loud voice, probably inherited from Granddad, and I got to where I could do a reasonable imitation of those pig and cow calls. As an adult I even thought about entering the National Hollerin’ Contest in Spivey’s Corner, NC, at the suggestion of a few friends. I never did, but I’m sure Granddad would have been a formidable competitor or maybe the winner if he had ever gone there.

I also remember the stories that he told and was amazed about how much Granddad knew about so many things and people. As a youngster it seemed to me that he knew everybody, and I sometimes thought that would be easier in a small town where you lived all your life. But as I reflect back, he might have known everyone even if he had lived in Atlanta.

There were a lot of other things that I remember pleasantly that include fishing at Lake Murray (where I stuck a fishhook through my Dad’s hand), hunting frogs, trying to shoot rats in the corn crib with Harold, riding that old mule around the farm, and just the general amazement at how different and relaxed life seemed to be in Saluda. While Granddad may not have been involved in each activity, he was probably the glue holding all of it together. As a youngster, you don’t always realize what it takes to make life what it is.

And my memory of attending his funeral is also a good memory. A lot of people at funerals say they are a celebration of life, but his funeral really was. There was story after story and the church seemed to be filled with the joy of his life and what he meant to so many people. And there was definitely some laughter


that showed how many lives he had touched in a positive way. A great life with a great ending!

My Time in the Country with Granddaddy by Edith (Deedee) Padgette, granddaughter (Curtis’ daughter)

The crunch of the rocks under the tires up the long driveway to

the white house, the fig bush on the left, the side screen door opening and the big “Hello,” smiles, and hugh hugs from my granddaddy as this little city girl arrived to visit her granddaddy in the country. I can still hear, see, and feel the warmth of the greetings from my granddaddy that I love and who, I feel, is one of the best people that I’ve ever known. While I can’t say that I have lots of memories, those that I do have are wonderful, and the smile I feel when I say “Douglas Davenport Padgett” sure tells me of the love we shared.

So there is Granddaddy trying to teach me how to milk a cow—can’t say that I ever could get any milk out of them—and the fun of his lifting me onto ol’ Pet, the mule, and my riding up the hills in the nearby pastures. And then Granddaddy and I would walk through the pastures, watching for cow patties. (My mom always seemed worried when we headed up to the pond, scared of the bull, snakes, and whatever unknowns.) Granddaddy just told me not to wear “red” and we’d be just fine. And we were.

I remember sunshine, the smell of dirt, and just holding his hand walking between the barns and up the hill to the pond. Maybe he was checking on the cows—I don’t know—or maybe he was just showing me life outside. Whatever it was, it was good.

And then when I was out front one day looking at rocks and bugs, he brought me a magnifying glass. And I held this magnifying glass up to a daddy-long-leg spider and saw that brown little body was actually made up of reds, blues, and many colors. Oh, I was amazed and still until today, when I see daddy-long-legs, I know they are multi-colored and not just brown. Some


may say that it was the sun shining through that magnifying glass or maybe it was the magic of Saluda, but it sure was pretty, and my granddaddy showed it to me.

And sitting outside as we did so much under the pecan tree in the glider and swing was a time of talking truth. I don’t reckon much could get by my granddaddy, but he didn’t challenge much either. He seemed to accept people for themselves. Granddaddy also laughed, and it was a good laugh. And Grandmama cooked so much wonderful food and loaded the table. My home dinner was meat and two vegetables, but visiting in Saluda, we ate so many tastes—including birds Granddaddy had hunted.

And Granddaddy could sure say a blessing and talk right to God. And I suspect right now that is what he is doing—jawing away up in heaven with God and all the other good people. Lucky them!

Grandpa: Always the Same by James Edmund Herlong, Jr., grandson (Bela’s son)

“What do you remember about Grandpa?” Mama asked me. How can I dig up memories from those very early years when he was such an important part of my life? They tell me Grandpa and Grandmama were there when I was born and that they wrote to my Daddy in Korea and told him I had arrived safely. They say that I lived with them until spring when he came home. Of course, I don’t remember that, but some of my earliest memories are being down at Grandpa’s house and following him around.

I remember when he was castrating a hog once. I must have been a mighty little boy—I can see him now—the hog kicked him and he was rolling in manure. When he got up, it was all over him, but he didn’t pay it a bit of attention. He just continued working on that hog.

Then in my mind is the day I caught my first snapping turtle. I was down on the branch—Grandpa called it Andy Branch—


behind his and Grandmama’s house. When I’d go to their house, they’d just sort of turn me loose, so I had been all over the place. I knew that branch like the back of my hand. One time I had caught minnows in it and tried to fish with them. I remember the spring where Grandpa said they used to get their water. It still had a big terracotta around it and the water looked cool and clear and fresh. Anyway. along that branch was where I caught turtles. And this was my first one. I’d caught it on a hook. I knew he’d bite if he got a chance, so I used the line and pulled his head over a big flat rock and then took out my sharp little knife and cut that turtle’s head off.

When I started carrying that big turtle up the hill toward the house, I heard Grandpa hollering, and I looked up and saw him waving his hands and heard him yelling, “Put that turtle down, Jim Ed. That’s a snapping turtle, and he’ll bite you and won’t let go ‘til it thunders.”

I remember yelling back, “No, he won’t!” And Granpa hollered again—this time almost angry, “Why

not?” I’d been coming up the hill, and he’d been rushing down

toward me, so we weren’t too far apart when I answered, pretty proud, “‘Cause I cut his head off.”

About that time Grandpa saw the headless turtle I was carrying in my hand, and he said, “No, I guess he won’t. You fixed his wagon.” He kinda rubbed me on the top of my head, and we went on up the hill together. Grandpa had never messed with turtles, and he didn’t know how to clean one, so he just left me to make my own way. I made the mistake of cutting into that turtle’s gut, and the stink was so awful I had to throw the whole thing away.

The next one I caught down on the branch, I didn’t make that mistake. I tried a different method to clean it, and that one turned out fine. Mama boiled the big shell for me to have as a catch-all on my dresser, and she cooked the meat. We all ate it—even Mama, who wasn’t too happy about the whole thing.


I also remember digging worms in the septic tank drain, and they were the fattest, healthiest worms I ever saw. I loved using those worms to fish in Grandpa’s little pond with a cane pole.

Yes, I had a fishing pole, but I wanted a rod and reel. Grandpa took me over to Ben Lindler’s store when I was awful little, but I remember everything that happened. He bought me a Johnson Century closed face reel, my first store-bought fishing gear. I felt like a big man then.

The best part was that I was spending a week with Grandpa and Grandmama, and every day Grandpa would take me less than a mile down the road to Daddy Frank’s—he’s my other granddaddy—to his pond and let me fish with my new rod and reel. I’d wade in and look over on the bank and see Grandpa reading a book, and I knew the name of the book was To Kill a Mockingbird. Grandpa didn’t enjoy fishing. He was a hunter—and he loved to read. Every time I see that movie—and I’ve watched it again and again, I think of those days—a whole week of days—spent on that pond with Grandpa sitting on the bank reading about Atticus Finch. I love that story. I think Grandpa was the same kind of man that Atticus was. He was the same to everybody—black or white, rich or poor. He had lots of black friends, and when I’d ride around with him, he’d go to see them or talk with them wherever he ran into them. Yes, he appreciated people and accepted them for what they were.

Anyway, he’d sit there on the bank, and I’d wade out in the water casting as I went. I had to learn to do that by myself. Grandpa wasn’t interested in teaching me how to fish. He figured I could do that for myself. When I’d finally get out of the water, Grandpa would light matches and burn the leeches off my legs. Then I’d go back in for awhile. It was so quiet on that pond you could hear the crows overhead and the July flies around the pond.

Mama gave me an enlarged picture of me on the beach holding that little green rod and reel up, and you can see that I’ve hooked a shark—the very first one I ever caught, and it was in the surf at Hunting Island.


Everybody kept saying to me that Grandpa was one “hell of a shot”—the best shot in the country. I finally got to go hunting with him. He hunted quail, or partridges, as he called them. I remember the first time I went with him. It was on Thanksgiving Day, the first day of hunting season, so he was pretty glad to be out in the woods again. I had the gun Daddy had bought me for Christmas the year before. It was what I’d wanted, but it wasn’t what I needed to hunt quail; it was more for doves—for the dove shoots that we had on our dairy farm. Grandpa killed birds that day, but I didn’t. One thing I do remember is being behind him when he crawled over a barbed wire fence and seeing shells fall out of his pocket on to the ground. I called to him that he’d lost some shells.

He turned around and leaned down under the fence and picked up a handful of shells. I heard him mutter, “Damn, I must’ve been doing that all my life—losing shells and then wondering what happened to them.”

Grandpa would put his bird dog—always a pointer—in the trunk of his car when he wanted to hunt over at the Mt. Willing place, which he owned too. It had a big old house on it that Grandpa had hay in. I remember going with him and Mama when he agreed to give her the old boards from one of the rooms to make paneling for our living room wall. Usually he hunted a little every day during hunting season in the woods and fields around his house.

Grandpa always cleaned the birds himself. He said he wanted them to be really clean, that he didn’t want feathers left on them. Then for supper Grandmama would fry them and make milk gravy and cook biscuits and fix slaw. I can remember ‘til yet how good those meals were. The birds were juicy and tender, and that milk gravy was just right. And the biscuits—well, I think I like Kentucky Fried Chicken so much because their biscuits remind me of Grandmama’s.

In my mind I can see a mule named Pet that pulled a slide whenever Granddaddy needed to haul something to the field.


Then there were two cows that he milked twice a day. Grandmama never milked. I sat on the cub tractor that he finally bought. He had a bushog under it to keep the bitterweeds out of the pastures. He’d always plowed a mule when he planted cotton. He looked too tall and gangly for that little cub tractor.

I asked him about his crooked finger. He told me it got broken when he was playing catch with Doug out beside the house. He never had it set so it just healed crooked. He had the backache a lot too, he said, because he’d hurt his back when he was just a boy seventeen years old.

I was fourteen in 1966 when Grandpa and Grandmama had their fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration. What I remember was the china and crystal in the corner cabinet in the dining room. Grandpa said they were so poor they didn’t have any presents when they got married so he reckoned people were giving to them fifty years later.

Grandpa didn’t drink. He told me he’d “drunk a little liquor” before he got married but that Gladys was so set against it he never did drink anymore after they married. I can remember what a big deal it was at Christmas when one of his buddies would give him a quart of homemade scuppernong wine. He’d open it and the grownups would drink it out of little tiny glasses Grandmama had in the china cabinet. I also remember that Grandmama had some Falstaff beer in the refrigerator at times. Some doctor had told her it was good to get rid of kidney stones, and she’d suffered a lot from them. That’s the only time I ever saw any alcohol in their house.

I remember when I killed a robin with my air rifle (I must have been real little) and Grandmama cooked it and made a little stew for me. I ate it, I remember, and was so proud that I’d really killed a bird. I wasn’t particular back then.

I spent many nights in that cozy little house that Grandpa said he’d lived in when he was a boy. I remember listening to the rain on the tin roof—such a friendly sound on a stormy night—and seeing the lightning flash and hearing the thunder roar time and


time again. Knowing Grandpa was in the next room was a good feeling to a little boy.

Grandpa and Grandmama liked to play canasta, and they played a lot with Mrs. Nina and Mr. Woodrow Padget, who had a dairy farm just a couple of miles down the road. Sometime when I was spending the night, they’d let me play too. That was fun, I remember.

Grandpa always told me he learned to cook as a boy when his mother died. Well, some days when I was at his house at lunch time and Grandmama had gone somewhere, Grandpa would fix us dinner. I’d watch him put grease in a frying pan and carefully put four eggs in the grease—two for him and two for me. (If I couldn’t finish mine, he’d finish it for me.) He’d fry them so hard they’d be crusty around the edges. He said he’d always liked fried eggs, and I like them too the way he cooked them.

He had a lot of sayings he would fit into his conversation. Of course, he threw in a “hell” or a “damn” or a “dowl” (I never heard anybody but him use that one) pretty often, but he’d also say things were in a “mell of a hess” or somebody was “tickled spraddle-legged” and a girl was “pretty as a speckled pig. He also had a lot of others like “One zot, two zot, zit, zot zan; a bobtail honey come a til, tol, tan”—whatever that means. Sometime when he’d say the blessing before a meal, after he said “Amen,” he’d add, “Bless us and bind us, and put us in the corner where the devil can’t find us.” Children loved him because he was always entertaining them.

Grandpa was a happy person; he was just Grandpa—the same always. He was comfortable in his own skin. He never put on airs for anybody or tried to impress anyone. He’d let you know how he felt though. If you riled him, he’d tell you about it. Grandpa never stopped learning. He was interested in everything. He kept on getting knowledge, but with it he always had wisdom, wisdom he’d gained from all that living.


Memories of Granddaddy by Gladys Madaline Herlong granddaughter (Bela’s daughter)

“Write down your memories of Granddaddy,” Mama said. “I’m

putting together a book from what he dictated to me, and I want a section with other people’s views of him—to round it out.” The effort, at some level, I suppose is to recreate the man so others can share in him. But I wonder if our memories are not like a description of the exterior of a house, leaving untold all the inside except for the glimpse through an occasional window. Or are we like the blind men describing an elephant—the first swearing it is like a snake because he feels only the trunk; the second finding it is like a tree because he feels only the great legs. Or do we offer our memories like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which even when complete lacks the breath of life and the shine of laughing eyes.

So I shy away from my assigned task and wonder what this grandchild can offer? What can I say about what mattered in his life or what made his life matter. Still, I reach back into my memory to see and feel and hear him again so I can share whatever is there for whatever ends.

This is Granddaddy to me. First, there is a chair. A brown chair with prickly tweed upholstery. A dangerous chair. Push it back and the footrest flies up. Push the footrest down and little pink fingers are easily pinched. Beside the chair is a shiny glass ashtray on a metal stand. Across the room is the television. That is Granddaddy’s place. He never sits anywhere else.

He sits in his chair and I can see the deep crisscross of wrinkles on his neck. Sun on a farmer’s neck. And his hands. Callused palms and twisted fingers. One that took a crazy turn just at the last knuckle. A bumpy nose. Broken once, was it? I don’t recall.

The mule is Pet. The dog is Dan. The hill is rocky. The men hunt on Thanksgiving and Christmas. I grow older and paint a picture for him of spaniels flushing pheasants. The picture in autumn oranges and browns hangs over the television.


On Christmas Eve Granddaddy and Grandmama come for dinner. Oyster stew because Granddaddy likes it. The house glitters with Christmas and we sit to open gifts. Granddaddy brings out his knife. Some day, I am convinced, it will open his finger instead of the boxes. But it never does. Christmas after Christmas, the knife does its duty on boxes packed with warm plaid shirts, ties, maybe a Sunday coat or a set of farmer’s work clothes in olive green.

Granddaddy is the patriarch. Sitting at Grandmama’s Sunday table, he is the center of the conversation without being always the speaker. Yet when he speaks it is in stories. And there is an occasional earthy turn of phrase. I was grown before “tickled spraddled legged” made sense. Nonsense songs for the little ones. Something about “Bill, Bob, Dan?” And the way he snaps his fingers and cries out to make small eyes big. He bounces the little ones on his knee, but he is made more for adolescents. The boys growing up feel kin to him in a way we prim and ruffled little girls cannot.

We all grow older. My returns home from college bring with me the man I love. “Mr. Haywire,” Granddaddy calls him in jest and says nothing else. We go to law school. My husband takes on the role and when we visit again, Granddaddy notices. “You’re parting your hair like a lawyer now,” he says, and he is right.

Granddaddy grows older. Grandmama dies. His eyes disappear behind Coke-bottle glasses for post-cataract surgery. His hearing fades. He dresses in suits always as the farming chores grow fewer. He carries a cane and sits on the courthouse square telling stories.

And what is my unique memory of those times? Sitting with family, I am reading aloud a story I have written about Grandmama. I expect him to be pleased that I have written about her, that I have written about the beauty of her life and the sadness of her last days. I wonder whether he will cry as I read. But when I finish, he demands in a strong voice. “Why did you write that?” I am stunned and mutter a stupid reply feeling like an


emotional fraud, like one who has used Grandmama’s memory to manipulate an audience. I cannot talk to Granddaddy about his question, and I do not understand it. At the time, I think his reaction is the measure of the distance between us.

Looking back, though, I now know his reaction was the measure of his love for Grandmama and of the depth of the wound her absence made. It was a protective cry that came straight from his heart. It was my only glance inside the windows, my only moment to see the whole creature, the only time the puzzle pieces breathed.

And it was proof of the truth of Grandmama’s last words. When Grandmama died, in her last dementia in the nursing home, she tore out a piece of the endpaper of a book and wrote, “Mr. Padgette is a fine and worthy man. He is a grand man and I love him.”

When Granddaddy himself died in the same nursing home, he suffered no dementia and was surrounded by his children. He lies beside Grandmama in the Emory cemetery. His gravestone says that he was a farmer and a philosopher. But, for me, it is Grandmama’s words on that tiny scrap of paper that form his epitaph. For what is it that matters in a life or that makes a life matter except the love that we give and we receive.

To reflect the fullness of a life in words is impossible. Though each of us contributes a memory or an anecdote or a reflection, these can never be tallied to show the profound humanness and aliveness that was. And yet, like the spare notes of an early spring bird in the still bare trees, something moving and magnificent emerges from the relationship between the occasional notes and the long, full silences. There is, at last, the note so piercingly beautiful that explains the whole, that focuses and firms, that draws together and completes, that unveils the divine.

Granddaddy loved and was loved. What else mattered? What else is to be said?


Granddaddy: What You’ve Meant To Me by William Davenport Herlong, grandson (Bela’s son) (The following two letters were written by William in 1989 when his grandfather was dying and 1979 when his grandmother was in the last stages of dementia—just before she died in November. Both letters were in the little green metal box on the top shelf of Davenport’s closet, where he kept letters and clippings that had special meaning to him.)

Dear Granddaddy, Summer 1989 When I saw you a few months ago, I was moved by the force of what you mean to me. As I sat in your wonderful home and looked out the back windows, over the furnace, through the backyard, I remembered all the times I had spent in that yard running around—young, wild, and happy. I remembered all the times the grownups would sit on the patio and talk and I would be sent back in for this or that. I remembered the summer Daddy was operated on, when I spent so much time at your house, and you and Grandmother looked after me while I tried to finish planting the soybeans. I remembered helping you get your tractor out of a hole down by the branch. I remembered looking for Christmas trees with Mama, Madaline, and you, cutting the tree and hauling it back to the house on the tractor sled. I remembered so many wonderful discussions around the dinner table in your house. And I remembered the time Steve and Mark and I stayed with you for two weeks before they went to Orlando.

Granddaddy, you have always meant so much to me, more than I can say truly. I am sorry that I cannot be with you more now, but I offer you my love and my very pleasant memories. You are the guiding light for me—along with your magnificent daughter, my mother. And I pray for you each day.


I hope I can see you again very soon. I hope you will feel better and get better. But mother says your spirits are unflagging. That I would expect.

I love you, Granddaddy. Your grandson, William.

Dear Granddaddy, July 30, 1979

I talked with Mother on the phone today about a whole lot of things. One of the main things was Grandmother. I really don’t know what to say to you about her, but I feel that I owe it to you to let you know how I feel, that I care, that I’m not so far removed from you that I’m totally unaware.

First, Granddaddy, I’d like to apologize to you for not ever having done this before. I never really thought of it. Just now the idea to write you first came into my head. That is sad, isn’t it? I guess I take you for granted—and Grandmother too. It is easy to just forget or, even worse, ignore the unpleasant things at home. I want you to know that though I forget them sometimes, I don’t ignore them. They are part of me. That is obvious. How could I be what I am without Daddy’s accident. Oh sure, I’d be something, but not just what I am. Daddy’s fate is an integral part of me. So is Grandmother’s.

Granddaddy, I love you and revere you. Grandmother, I do not know anymore. She has lived a long, beautiful, and very fruitful life. She has done much and seen more. And I am one-fourth hers, but she is all mine. She is my grandmother. The only one I have ever had. She was a powerful woman, an awe-inspiring person to the little child in me who remembers her. And so good! Yes, good. She was very good. I have heard you “old” folks talk about how it is her insecurity that she has always had that makes her so ornery now. I don’t know if I believe anyone who says that. Mother has told me that Grandmother was never that sensitive. I’m beginning to believe that I don’t believe that either. You see, Grandpa, right


now I feel very deeply that whatever anyone does, he does because he believes it is right, that it is truly right.

All I’m really trying to say is that for all the moronical, senile things I have seen Grandmother do or heard her say, I still look back beyond that to what she really was. Yet she was hardly anything to me compared to what she has been to you. For you, she was a life. It hurts me, knowing as little about her as I do, to see her this way. How it must hurt you, Grandpa! I know there isn’t really anything I can do to ease the distress you must feel. To have to see Grandmother this way and also to have to put up with what she says and does—you’re a strong man! I hope that, by letting you know that I feel some tiny fraction of what you feel, you will be a little bit better. I hope that your knowing that someone else doesn’t ignore what your life is like now will make that life a bit easier.

Grandpa, this is an emotional subject, and I’m afraid I’ve tried to be over eloquent or something and have not actually said a thing. You are my grandfather, and it is from your stock that I come. I love you. I venerate you. And now I hurt for you. I pray to God that your strength lasts as long as it must.

Empathetically, William

Granddaddy’s Still Visitin’ by Alice Herlong Powe. granddaughter (Bela’s daughter)

The Fish Hut bustled with the activity of patrons gobbling fried

shrimp and waitresses filling iced tea glasses for the third time. As any new customers walked through the door, they were greeted with familiar hello’s from the waitstaff and waves from other diners too far across the room to be heard.

When D.D. Padgett entered, the words he heard were no different, but the young girls, with their water and iced tea pitchers, paused a bit longer and added a flashy coquettish grin to their hello’s. He was in his late 80’s, tall and lean, with a head full


of hair. His step shuffled a bit, but he worked at keeping it regular. “You can tell when a man gets old by the way he shuffles his step,” he had always said. D.D. Padgett was not going to get old gracefully; he would fight to the end.

Though Mama, Daddy, and I always brought Granddaddy to the Fish Hut to eat dinner, it was never a quick and easy affair. Granddaddy always took what seemed like forever to my child’s mind to finally get to the table. He wasn’t satisfied with waves from across the room but had to go and see his fellow diners and chat for a few minutes. Somehow, he always knew the people, or if he didn’t, he knew their mama or their granddaddy, a connection which inevitably led to stories about their kinfolk.

Soon Mama would have to go get him. “Daddy, you’ve got to let these folks eat now,” she would holler in his ear. (His hearing had been bad for years, but he wouldn’t wear the hearing aid.) He’d say his goodbyes and move on. There were other tables to interrupt, to visit, to tell stories to. Finally, he would make it to our table (I would be on at least my second glass of tea) only to order his “two little catfish,” which he would pick at between tales of how he had known Thelma’s mama back in 1928 when her baby got sick and almost died and he had to feed their cows while the whole family took the wagon to the hospital in Columbia—or something like that.

Granddaddy’s stories were legendary, just like him. Not only did he have countless numbers to tell, but he also had a special way of telling them. He monopolized the dinner table conversation wherever we were but not in an overbearing way. Everyone was always interested in what he had to say. Once, when asked to give my cousins a piece of sage advice on the eve of their wedding, he told them not to plant too many trees in their yard, or they’d be raking leaves for the rest of their lives. No one ever forgets advice like that.

As I watched Granddaddy grow older, and as I matured myself, I was often amazed and amused at the resistance he put up. I remember how he had wanted to go to “that tractor thing”


over there off Highway 178 to see what the big fuss was about. The Saluda Young Farmers’ Truck and Tractor Pull was no place for a ninety-year-old man alone in his car, but that thought never crossed Granddaddy’s mind. After he’d had his fill of all “that mess” (and I’m sure talked a thousand people’s ears off), he had trouble finding his car. There were probably 15,000 people there, so it really wasn’t a wonder that he might have trouble locating a lone automobile in that sea of cars. Finally a policeman who, of course, knew who D.D. Padgett was, helped him find his car and get home.

This incident started a chain reaction of events which caused him to lose his license. I remember being so sad for him because I felt like such a vital man should be able to go and visit and see the things he was still amazingly curious about. I shouldn’t have worried so. Much to Mama’s chagrin, Granddaddy’s neighbors soon began to call to tattletale that they had seen Mr. D.D. up at Mr. So-’n-So’s barber shop, or that he “‘bout ran them off the road down near Cloud’s Creek.” Granddaddy was still going.

He kept going too. Even after he gave up his automobile, he still loved to visit. He would get Patsy, his housekeeper, to cart him around the country visiting folks and keeping up with how people were doing. No one ever minded a visit from D.D. Padgett. He was an engaging man whom everyone respected, but I believe they loved him also.

Granddaddy’s memory was phenomenal. He could remember events and details from 1912 as if they happened yesterday. He always had his facts straight (of course, there was no one left to question him) or at least he sure was convincing.

One of the last places he went to was a vocal recital of mine. I know his hearing was not good, but I don’t think he could have been any more proud of me. I could see on his face that he was thinking how I sang “just like Miss Roseva” (my paternal grandmother), and he believed that to have that heritage was the most important factor in a person’s life.


He remained proud of me and resistant to age right ‘till the end. On the day before his death at ninety-five, I went to see him in the nursing home he had occupied for a few months. Mama asked if he knew who I was, and he said, “Of course, the pretty one.” He talked of going home, but didn’t mind that my cousins were living in his house while he stayed at the home. He always saw that situation as temporary.

The next day I stood by his bed. Only in the last hours had his mind left him. He was breathing easily and then didn’t breathe again. I can thank Granddaddy for many lessons, but I believe his death was the greatest. His zest for life was unceasing, but when his mind and his soul left, there was no longer any fight. I learned how peaceful death could be. As Bryant believed and wrote in “Thanatopsis”:

. . . go not, like the quarry slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him and lies down to pleasant dreams. Granddaddy wrapped those blankets around a life that had felt

true pain, tremendous joy, and enormous love, and he lay down to sleep. Throughout his life if you asked him how his day had gone, he would say, “Every day’s a good day if you’re not in the cemetery.” But I believe that he knew something more. Without a doubt he loved life and all the people and vitality it had to share, but he was wise and knew that there was more. He bravely “went visitin’,” somewhere else.

This paragraph of an essay Alice wrote in high school—one which was based on an interview of her grandfather about national events he remembered—gives her opinion of what he saw as most important.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt seemed to affect Davenport Padgett

the most out of the events I’ve named. He believes that Roosevelt did what he said he would do: “. . . get the economy into the state


that there would be ‘flour in the pan, a chicken in the pot, and two cars in the garage.’” Davenport says that anybody can see that Roosevelt did just that and that he saved the United States from a desperate fate. Davenport himself has affected many lives also. His daughter Madaline gave him a framed copy of the old saying: “Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.” This statement best explains Douglas Davenport Padgett and his ever-present joy and laughter.

Memories of Granddad by Stephen Rogers Padgette, grandson (Doug’s son)

I only saw my grandparents in Saluda a few times each year, as

we lived out of state. There was always a Christmas visit and a summer visit, and maybe a weekend or two tucked in here or there. Even so, my memories of Saluda and Granddad are more intense than the frequency of my visits would suggest. Why? I suppose because Granddad was larger than life—at least to me.

First of all, he was the oldest person I’ve ever really known. To me, he looked the same from my first memories of him to his last days. Granddad just oozed experience and authority, and I couldn’t really fathom questioning anything he said. First of all, he seemed like he remembered absolutely everything—days and dates and people’s names from fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty years ago. I have never been around anyone who seemed to have such instant recall of such distant events. Of course, as he got older and all of his generation passed on, there weren’t many people around to dispute his view of the facts! But down deep, probably due to the certainty with which he spoke, I guess I really believed that everything he remembered was accurate, and that led me to believe that he was probably the wisest person I could ever imagine.

The second reason that Granddad remains larger than life to me is the relationship that he had with my father. The bond


between those two and the respect and love of my father for Granddad set a standard—at least in my own mind—for the ideal father-child relationship. Watching those two when I was growing up and observing my own father’s treatment of me, set an idealized example in my mind of the relationship I would want to have with my kids and how I would want them to feel about me. Whether my kids end up feeling about me the way my dad feels about Granddad . . . Well, one can only hope. One common bond that my dad had with Granddad is that they both loved to talk . . . to each other . . . a lot. At night on our visits, two of the three chairs by the window in the den were always occupied by Grand-dad and Dad. I would call them professional conversationalists. Sometimes I thought that they must have had to practice talking to keep talking so long at night without going to bed. I never outlasted them. The conversations could be based on current events, politics (a lot), long-forgotten (by most) minutia of Saluda history, but especially popular was family history—speaking of relatives that I never met but who formed the fabric of my understanding of what it meant to be a Padgette.

The third reason that Granddad was larger than life was that everyone around town—and I mean everyone—seemed to know and respect him. We’d go to Homer Calk’s store, or we’d go to downtown Saluda, and it was the same: “Hi, Mr. Padgette.” “Afternoon, Mr. Padgette.” And then the conversation would start. I realized even when I was small that Granddad had many, many relationships and that others in town treasured their relationships with him. This showed me, subconsciously at least, the value of treating everyone—rich or poor, black or white, family or friend—fairly and with respect. Maybe that was why Granddad was loved by so many people—he respected people and they paid him back with respect.

When I was little, Granddad would always ask me if I wanted to go call the cows. We’d usually get in his car, drive over by the Mt. Willing house, get out and head to the fence around the pasture. I knew what was coming, but I would still be a little


nervous. He would call out “whoaee, whoaee, whoaee,” and the cows would start running to him. I would get behind him; the cows would stop just in time, and he would feed them hay or give them a salt lick. For a kid from the suburbs, this was quite an adventure. And, of course, Granddad had it all under control.

For meals at Granddad’s house, I always sat at the side seat under the old arch, farthest from the kitchen. Grandmother would sit next to me, with Granddad in the end seat nearest the kitchen. For breakfast, my brother and I would watch as Granddad got his food, and we would giggle as he filled up his plate with grits. Granddad could eat more grits than anyone I ever saw, and there was barely enough room for his eggs. For dinner, my recollection is that we ate a lot of birds—birds that Granddad shot when he went hunting. Although I never went hunting with him, I can remember him taking off in the afternoon—with anyone that wanted to go—and returning with birds to clean and stories to tell about the hunt.

Meals at Granddad’s house were always preceded by The Lord’s Prayer. I could always tell that faith held a central position in my grandparents’ lives, and my visits with them to Emory Church reinforced my sense of their total devotion to the church. But it wasn’t just the church that captivated my imagination; it was the place that that church held for our family that resonated with me. This was nowhere more evident than in the graveyard, where we would always go after services or sometimes just on an afternoon drive. Generations upon generations of Padgettes and other relatives are in the Emory cemetery, and the combination of the gravestones and the stories of the relatives being told by Granddad and my dad really made me feel that I was a part of a much bigger picture. Hours and hours of visits at Emory and other—sometimes remote—cemeteries while listening all the while to Granddad’s stories of our relatives made a large impression on me. These times with Granddad and my dad gave me a feeling of history and continuity and also a feeling of responsibility to live up to as a Padgette.


One summer, my parents went on a cruise and left my brother and me with Granddad and Grandmother. I was out playing in the barn with my cousin William, and we found an old tractor that looked like it hadn’t been started in years. This was probably the case, as the barn was so old it still had the old baby carriage wheel nailed to the outside wall where my dad learned how to shoot baskets when he was a kid. After we finished playing on the tractor, William and I started itching and itching, and it was concluded that we were the victims of a major chigger infestation. Now we had both heard that painting chigger bites with fingernail polish would kill them and stop the itching, but Granddad and Grandmother told us that we were not going to be testing that theory on that day. Undeterred, we secretly found some pink fingernail polish and locked ourselves in the back bathroom of the house, off the bedroom where my parents slept when we visited. As we were very quietly painting the itching chigger bites on our bodies, one of us knocked over the polish on the pink bathroom rug. As the dark pink polish oozed out on the light pink rug, we looked at each other with mortal fear. I can’t remember exactly who we were more afraid of facing, Granddad or Grandmother, but after a strong scolding, we were let off the hook. For years and years, every time we visited, the dark pink stain on the bathroom rug reminded me not only of our mischief but especially of how I was treated kindly while scared completely out of my wits for disobeying a direct command from Granddad . . . and Grandmother.

My Granddad and the old house in Saluda, with the family pictures over the sofa in the den, the piano in the living room, the guns in his closet and the swing on the patio made an indelible impression on me when I was growing up. Granddad seemed always positive, always energetic, always friendly, and always kind to me. One of my most prized pictures is one of him and me taken at my first wedding in Atlanta. I was so proud that he had made the trip in 1981 to be there, and I hope that he felt the respect that I had for him that I can see on my face in that picture.


Above all, Granddad set a standard for hard work, perseverance, respect, fairness and a love of family that all of his descendents could only hope to achieve in our own lives.

My Grandfather’s Gifts to Me by Mark Douglas Padgette, grandson (Doug’s son)

When I was a child, my parents used to take me to Saluda,

South Carolina, to see my grandparents on my father’s side. I have fond memories of those times. I remember my grandfather very well. He was one of those people that other people liked to be around. I was amazed at the way he could call his cows and they would sort of obey him. It seemed like he was talking to them. I never saw or heard him complain about anything ever. He was quite the opposite. He was always seemingly in a good mood. He could tell great entertaining stories about things that he did and things that happened to him. He would bring up dates, like April 14, 1923, like it was yesterday. Of course, no one could check him on these things, but I bet he was right on.

He seemingly had the knowledge of many lifetimes in one life. It seemed like he knew more about people than anyone else. I am not referring to specific people, as in gossiping, but rather human nature, or people in general. He always got up early, like he did not want to miss any of the day. Sometime when he would have company over, he’d go hunting even though they were there. It was not a rude thing, and he would always ask if anyone else wanted to go. I always admired that. It seemed like he did not let things cramp his style, and we could all use a little of that. It was like he knew that everything was going to be okay, and this knowledge just spread to the people around him.

He would always talk to me and really listen to what I said even though I was just a child. I remember being ten or eleven, and we walked around a cemetery together. He told me who everyone was, and they seemed to come alive again as he talked. I


remember riding in his Chevy Impala and visiting a few people with him. Everyone was always glad to see him.

I know God loves this earth dearly, and perhaps that is why he let Davenport Padgette live so long. I know that he was ninety-five when he died. My father once told me that my grandfather would do more for his enemies than most people would do for a friend, and I believe it.

When he passed away, I received his wedding band from my father because I was named Douglas for my grandfather; he was Douglas Davenport Padgett. I am Mark Douglas Padgette. I used it when I was married in 1992. It is a cherished possession of mine.

I am a systems analyst for banks, and there are times when things get pretty tough at work. I find myself gazing at that ring on my finger, thinking of all the tough situations that it’s been in. It gives me strength. Davenport Padgette was a very great man who left this earth a better place because of the way he was and because of how he imparted his wisdom to his children and grandchildren.

Great-Grandfather: His Gift of Stories by Charles Douglas Pearce, great-grandson (Bettina’s son; Madaline’s grandson) Dear Great-Grandfather, April 15, 1985

Hello. I hope you’re feeling better upon receiving my letter. I hope my letter finds you in good spirits. I love you very much, dear Great-Grandfather. I hope everyone in your family realizes, as I do, how wonderful you truly are. I really enjoy your company, sir! I also wish I was able to come to see you more often than I’m presently able to. I really enjoy sitting around listening to your stories out of your past. You bring me great joy. I’m proud to be a descendant of yours, and I look forward to visiting you again as soon as I’m able to. God loves you, Great-Grandfather; so do I. Take good care of yourself, and I’ll write to you again real soon!

I Love you, Great-Grandfather! Doug


My Memories of Great-Grandfather Padgett by Scott Pearce, great-grandson (Bettina’s son; Madaline’s grandson)

Writing about Great-Grandfather is a very thought-provoking

journey down memory lane. I hope I can convey something that will shed some light on my childhood memories of spending time in what I considered my second home in Saluda.

Silence is what I remember most about Great-Grandfather Padgett. Whenever he did speak, everyone stopped what they were doing and listened as if this man had something important to say. I was entranced by the stories he told of the memories he had of growing up and raising his children. This silence surely must have been a sign of true love and respect for such a wise leader of this wonderful family.

He was a large, towering figure of a man who moved quietly yet showed great dignity and strength. Tall, tough, and with a full head of hair blowing in the warm country wind, he reminded me of the lead men in the western movies that I would come to love.

I remember him strolling down the fields calling (with that booming voice) his cows to come in, and his talking to them as if they were his children. Maybe that’s where he practiced talking to his real children. It seemed to me to be a trait of a kind and caring person.

If ever there was a person to strive to emulate, you could not do better than D.D. Padgett. He epitomized what a great-grandfather was supposed to be like. That’s my opinion anyway! He had everything a man could want, but I never heard him boast about himself—only his family.

I will always be proud to be a member of this great and wonderful family that was so gracious and kind to me when I was growing up. You will never know all of the fond memories that I keep inside me to remind me of the proper way to treat others in this crazy world we live in.


As I said in the beginning, “Silence is golden.” May Great-Grandfather and Great-Grandmother Padgett shine in all of God’s Glory. God bless this wonderful family that branches out of Saluda, South Carolina.

Memories of Grandpa by James Kirk Herlong, great-grandson (Bela’s grandson)

I was just twelve years old when Great-Grandpa died, but I

remember him. I saw him about once a month from the time I was a baby. My Grandmother Bela and Granddaddy Jimmie came to Columbia on one Friday afternoon every month and picked me up to spend a week-end during school or a week in the summer every year until I came to live with Bela and Jimmie when I was fourteen. When Great-Grandpa died, I was in sixth grade at Hand Junior High School in Columbia, and somehow his death is associated in my mind with the hurricane Hugo, which devastated much of South Carolina in 1989 just a month after he died.

Every Saturday night when I was visiting my grandparents in Saluda, we would get ready, go pick up Great-Grandpa at his home, and then go to the Fish Hut down on Lake Murray to eat supper. Great-Grandpa always ordered “three little catfish” fried, and he didn’t eat any slaw or anything else. He seemed to know everybody there and to spend time speaking to them.

At Bela and Jimmie’s house and at his own home, he always sat at the head of the table, and he always asked the blessing before we ate. Sometime he would say—just for fun—at the end “Amen, Brother Ben, shot a goose and killed a hen.” And, of course, we little ones got a kick out of that. There is a picture of Great-Grandpa holding me—I’m just a baby really. I don’t remember when it was taken—but he looks perfectly at ease with me in his arms.


When we’d go down to his house, he was always sitting in the same chair; it was his chair, and nobody else sat in it. I remember being a little boy and finding the old Sears Roebuck catalog there. It looked ancient, and I liked to look through it. I know now that it was just a reproduction, but it looked real to me, and it had buggies and all kind of old things advertised in it.

The den at his house, the room he was always in, had a low ceiling, and as a little boy, I liked to see whether I could jump up and touch it, so I’d try over and over. He didn’t like that, and he’d say to me, “You better stop jumping and calm down, or I’ll bend you over my knee.” I believed him too. He was never mean, but you could tell he meant business.

I learned to drive Jimmie’s old Dodge pick-up in Great-Grandpa’s north pasture. Jimmie taught me how to manage the gears and to steer, and then he just turned me loose. I’d just go in circles over that big empty pasture. It didn’t seem that there were any cows in it then. I think he’d got rid of his cows years before.

I remember going with Bela and Jimmie in the truck to Great-Grandpa’s house and digging up centipede grass and bringing it back and setting it out in their yard. Grandpa’s whole yard was filled with good, healthy centipede that had grown out into the big field beside the yard.

Great-Grandpa was always good to me—never fussy and picky—just even-tempered and full of stories. He was stern, direct, and didn’t beat around the bush. I respected him and was on my best behavior around him. I can remember sitting in the swing on the patio with him. Great-Grandma died when I was two years old, so I don’t remember her, but Grandpa made a big impression on me.


When I was taking art at Holy Cross College in Indiana, I decided that I’d paint a portrait of Great-Grandpa for my Grand-mother Bela. I knew that would please her more than anything I could buy. I asked her to send me some photographs of him to look at. I worked harder on that painting than on anything I’d ever done. I can remember as I came to know his features so well, I thought about all the things he’d seen and all the things he’d done in his ninety-five years on this earth. When he was born in 1894, there were no cars or telephones or airplanes or television—no interstates or even paved roads around his part of the country. I thought about he was alive for the Spanish-American War, for World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and the Viet Nam War and that he knew the Depression years first hand too.

Great-Grandpa was born in the Mt. Willing area of what was Edgefield County in 1894 and became Saluda County in 1895. He’d tell you in a minute that it was the “garden spot” of the world. Now that I am living in the house he lived in when he was a boy fifteen years old and then, after he and Great-Grandma married in 1916, from 1919 until he died in 1989, I feel a kinship with him—more than the blood I share with him. I love the land I live on, and I enjoy getting up in the morning and seeing space and trees and not city streets and another apartment complex.

When I walk in the woods that surround the house now, I think about who he was as a man. I know that I am not half the man he was and I don’t have the knowledge and farming ability he had. I


don’t understand the land the way he did. When you walk in the woods above the house, you can see an old McCormick reaper that he used. It was pulled by mules and cut grain. Life was harder then, and I think that our generation has lost touch with that kind of life. I believe it helped people to be moral and gave people character. Life seems hard to me now—not knowing what people knew back then.

I do wonder how he made a living on the land. I know he worked hard, but he left a legacy of love and a family that will carry that legacy on into future generations. I am proud to be his great-grandson.

Granddaddy: He Lived with Faith, Love, Humor and Gusto by Joan Egan Herlong, granddaughter-in-law (William’s wife)

Dear Bela, August 22, 1989 I am so sorry for your loss, and I know you must feel a great loss despite Granddaddy’s infirmity and constant needs these past few years. He was a wonderful father, grandfather and great-grandfather, and he was certainly blessed to have a wonderful daughter like you. You were so tired so many times, but you were unfailingly loving and supportive of him to the end. I am so glad you were together when he died. I imagine that was a tremendous comfort to you both.

I cannot recall Granddaddy ever uttering a single complaint. He was always “up,” always cheerful, always a pleasant person to have around and to be around. He was a marvelous storyteller. He always treated me with kindness and made me feel welcome in the family right from the start. He really lived his whole life, and he lived it with faith, love, humor, and gusto. He will always be a great inspiration. I’m so glad William and I named our son Jackson Davenport. I hope he is strong enough to carry on some of Granddaddy’s strengths along with his name.


I’m really sorry William could not come to the funeral. It was hard on him not to go, and I know it was hard on you not to have him there. At least he saw Granddaddy a few times before the end.

You have been in my thoughts and prayers. I know Granddaddy is in heaven, having a wonderful “reunion” party. He certainly paved the way there for the rest of us wise enough to follow him.

Love, Joan

A Nephew’s View of Uncle D. by Horace Davenport Padgett, a nephew (Gus’ son)

I was born on a farm in the Ward school district of Saluda

County, to Augustus E. Padgett (Gus) and Essie Stone Padgett as one of three children—Grace, Gus Jr., and Horace (me). My father had three brothers—Curtis (deceased when I was born), Jouette, and Davenport (Uncle D.). My father’s parents were both deceased, but he had a step-mother—Carrie Bouknight Padgett Watson Smith, whom we called “Grandmother Carrie.” This is what I can remember as the “close-kin” family in my early childhood.

Of the six uncles in my family, I was most attached to, or my favorite, if you prefer, was Uncle D. Even from the beginning, his ability to meet people and start talking immediately was something that utterly fascinated me. When he and Daddy got together, even though a week or two had elapsed between visits, the conversation was as if only a few minutes had passed from the last visit. What really impressed me was his ability to debate any subject with anyone at any given time. (At that time Aunt Gladys, his wife, called it “arguing” and she detested it.) That didn’t bother me at all because I liked it then and even more later when I began participating in it.


In the early days, both Daddy and Uncle D. had Model T Ford automobiles, with curtains for windows and lap robes for heaters. I can only remember our T Model as to whether or not a starter was present—there was no starter on ours. Starting it by jacking up the back wheel and using the crank located at the front of the engine is a memory I’ll never forget. Well, in 1929 Uncle D. got a Model A Ford with a self-starter, roll-up glass windows, and a “slide” gear transmission, which ended what I thought of as equality of possessions between the families. No more common ground existed for the car discussions as the A model was simply a car of luxury.

In the Padgett families, visitations were very frequent, either on Saturday nights or on Sundays. The Saturday nights almost always resulted from meeting in downtown Saluda on Saturday afternoons (a must for most farm families around Saluda) and deciding on an oyster stew together or some other delicacy that was different from what we had at home from the farm. After supper, the womenfolk usually talked, and the men discussed farming or played setback until about nine p.m. The male children played setback out of necessity as it took more than the adults present to make it an interesting card game.

Uncle Davenport’s children were Madaline, a daughter, and Curtis, a son, both of whom were much older than I, or so it seemed. When I was about seven, Ruby Euela, another daughter, was born and a couple of years later, Douglas Donald, another son, came along. Since the latter two children stayed some with my mother while Aunt Gladys taught school, they became closer to our family than the other two, even though the age difference was greater.

Most of my memories concerning these relationships until after 1946 were of very frequent visits and little or no conflict. I don’t ever recall Uncle D. and Daddy having any serious disagreements. When just normal controversial discussions started, as a very young man, I participated enthusiastically while Daddy just participated. I took the opposite side from Uncle D. regardless of


the issue just to make the subject interesting. At the end of the “discussion,” almost everyone listening was a little upset or even a little angry, but not the two of us involved. That never changed, and we two never changed.

Uncle D. was more skilled than Daddy in such things as killing hogs and the beginning process of butchering the hog. Usually, when he was not present for the butchering of one of our hogs, the killing became a chase of the hog because the bullet was not well-placed and the poor creature would run only to be chased down and his throat cut. Scalding the hog would also present another dilemma. If not done exactly right, the hair would become “set” and would take a lot of manual effort to remove. Uncle D. could drop the hog with one shot, get him scalded, the hair removed, strung up and gutted about as fast and efficiently as any other person in Saluda County. Then he’d have to go either home or downtown. Inevitably, though, he’d come back about the time the rest of the process was completed. Everybody then had “fresh meat.”

In the winter time when the weather was so bad that outside it was impossible to do anything except take care of the farm animals and seek out a warm fire, Uncle D. could be found either uptown or at our house waiting for Aunt Gladys to finish her work day of teaching school. When we would get home from school, he and Daddy would be sitting in front of the fireplace talking, Daddy chewing tobacco and Uncle D., smoking. Since the school we attended was one mile and a half from home, walking that distance in the cold and rain was not very inducive to look with favor on that type of conversation in a warm house. In fact, they would be surprised that we could be a little upset. Such was life on the farm in the thirties.

The only time that I remember that Uncle D. got very upset with me was when I “fixed” his radio. Sometime during the thirties, both families owned a Sears Conducive battery radio, about the same size, look, and method of operation. There was a difference—the volume on our radio was much greater than their


volume. I knew the position of every tube in our radio as I had great interest in such things in those days. One Sunday when we were visiting, I asked Uncle D. if he would mind if I took a look at the tube arrangement in his radio because his low volume could be a result of a bad configuration or misplacement of the tubes. He okayed my taking a look since I was pretty good at repairing watches and clocks. This seemed a logical extension of my technical skills. Well, I found the trouble. Two tubes in his set were in exactly opposite positions from the same two in ours. I switched the tubes, and the volume increased two-fold, or as loud as ours. When we left to go home, that radio was playing as normal as any radio could play. Sometime the following week, the radio quit playing, and it had to be taken to Harry Riser, a real repairman, and it took two new tubes to get it playing. Needless to say, he thought my switching those tubes caused the difficulty, but I figured that he switched those tubes back without turning the radio off. He never changed his mind so I conceded that he could be right.

We had no swimming pools at our house, not even a swimming hole. Until Uncle D. dug one down in his pasture with a mule and a drag pan, I had seen very little water deep enough to swim in. In fact, I couldn’t swim. But that pond changed all that. We all learned to swim there. That pond stayed operational for most of my young life, and in the summer time it was always busy on Sunday afternoons.

During the war years when I was in service and overseas, I heard very little from Uncle D. except in letters from home—never from him. Upon my return from service, our relationship became as before, but I found that it was more on an adult level, rather than adult and junior level.

One day I met him between Quincy Adams’ filling station and Noel’s store, and he stopped and asked me if my name was Davenport. Naturally, I said “Yes,” as that is my middle name. Well, he said then that he’d decided to give all the Padgetts named after him a present, and he promptly gave me a silver dollar


provided that I keep it and remember that occasion. I still have that silver dollar in my safety deposit box. Much later in life I was telling that story to Alvin Padget, Jr., a cousin of mine, and he commented that he didn’t believe Uncle Davenport told me the truth because his middle name was Davenport too and he didn’t get a silver dollar, and in fact, had never heard anything about it. I replied that was probably because he spelled his last name with a single “t” instead of two “t”s, which disqualified him.

Visits during the 50’s and 60’s were not as frequent as I was working quite a bit more than normal and my job was demanding—sometimes seven days a week. Then in 1960 I moved to Pendleton, and it was strictly on special occasions that I saw Uncle D. for any length of time, and too often, those special occasions were for final rites for kin folks. Even then, the conversations were just as they had always been because we understood each other.

When my mother passed away in 1968 and my father in 1975, Uncle D. and Aunt Gladys were “there,” as I knew they would be. Along about that time, my job required that I spend more time visiting the various mills in the Milliken chain, so every time I went to Barnwell, I would turn on Highway 178 on the road to Columbia from Barnwell and come through Saluda and stop for a short visit. After Uncle D.’s 75th birthday, that day or shortly afterwards became special for me to go visit him. He never became old to me although he did become hard of hearing. The hearing factor only enabled him to ignore the other side of our discussions so that I think he thought he always came out the winner on whatever we were arguing about.

A staunch, loyal Democrat all his life, he never even considered voting for a Republican. That is, never until his son Doug and I convinced him that Nixon was the man. He said he voted for him, but I kind of doubted it. After the Nixon fiasco he said there was no use to discuss his voting Republican again.

I would say that he enjoyed life to the fullest with his zest for talking, keeping up with the “news,” and staying on the move.


Even when he lost his driving license at ninety because he “lost” his parked car at a tractor pull, he still stayed on the move with someone to drive for him. He thoroughly enjoyed telling me where he had been, what he saw, and whom he had seen. He told me the only time he felt that he was getting old was when he had his driving companion carry him to Johnston to see his cousin, Maurice Smith. Upon reaching his house and knocking on the door, he asked the lady who greeted him if Maurice was home. She replied that Mr. Smith had died two years before and that Uncle D. had attended the funeral. He said he couldn’t believe that he had forgotten it.

I would say now that during the last ten or fifteen years of his life he became as close to me as was my Daddy during his life—in some respects, even closer. He shared with me his thoughts on most everything—his dreams, his successes, his failures, his philosophy of life—but never his disappointments. I think that he was completely satisfied with the way that life had treated him and was extremely proud of the way things had turned out for him and his family—grateful, in fact.

During his final illness at age 95, never once did he mention to me that he had cancer, although he did say that “consumption was just like his daddy said it was—tough.” Maybe he believed that was really what he had.

I can’t say how much he influenced my life or changed anything about my life, but I can say that I certainly enjoyed the love and the relationship that I had with him in our stroll through that part of his life I was privileged to share.


Memories of Uncle Davenport by Sarah Minier Padgette, niece (Curtis’ daughter, who was nine months old when her father died)

After I retired in 1968, my mother, Mrs. Harriet Long Padgett,

used to say to me, “Does it suit you to visit Uncle Davenport and Aunt Gladys today?” Mother would call to see if they were at home. We would eat dinner at eleven a.m., leave Columbia about eleven thirty, and get to Uncle Davenport’s about an hour later. We would have a wonderful time hearing all the news. They both always seemed glad to see us and welcomed us into their comfortable home. We made these trips many times. We sat in the living room or in their yard in the summer time or maybe on the patio under the pecan tree. Aunt Gladys always served delicious refreshments. She was an excellent cook.

Uncle Davenport was my father’s brother. My father, Curtis Dubose Padgett, died shortly after I was born at the age of twenty-three; he had tuberculosis—what Uncle Davenport called consumption. He and my mother, Harriet Long, had been sweethearts since childhood and married when they were very young. He worked as a rural letter carrier out of Saluda as long as he was physically able. When he died, my mother was left with no home and no means of support. She went to Neeses and taught school for years and then became the postmaster of the town. Uncle Davenport has told me about my father’s death and about how much he loved my mother and my sister Euela and me. I wish I could have known him. My mother never married again.

My father is buried at Emory cemetery by his mother and father. There was no tomb stone for Curtis’ grave. Uncle Davenport asked my mother to buy one for him, and she did. Uncle Davenport had helped to give nursing care to my father—his brother—who was dying with tuberculosis, and he knew more about my father than I did. He always told me that Ela and I had inherited our father’s brains—that he was a scholar and finished high school when they taught Latin and physics and chemistry.


Uncle Davenport and Aunt Gladys came to my sister’s and my college graduation at Lander College in Greenwood in May, 1930. We were so proud they came, and we had such a good time visiting with them. Both of them were such good company and seemed to always be in a good mood. I think they had a good life together. They certainly seemed to love each other.

Uncle Davenport told me that the four boys in his family all loved their mother, Eva Euela Davenport Padgett, very much. Three of the boys named a girl for her. Curtis named a daughter Euela Davenport Padgett. Davenport named a daughter Ruby Euela (Bela) Padgette, and Augustus (Gus) named a daughter Grace Euela Padgett. However, it seems the name is not being carried on in the family.

Uncle Davenport was very smart. He knew many lines of his family and a great deal about other families. He knew Saluda County history and present events. He also knew many state, national and international facts. He was a remarkable character. I was glad to be his niece.

Davenport: “A Man to Match the Mountains and the Sea” by Margaret Lindler Austin a first cousin (Mattie Padgett Lindler’s daughter)

Bela, yes, we will go on “celebrating” Davenport’s wonderful

life, but that won’t keep us from missing him in a thousand ways and from being sad that he isn’t with us in that vibrant, stalwart body of his. I keep feeling a destabilized sensation about Saluda now; it’s as if the focal point of our Padgett “world” is gone. It is truly!

There are so many thoughts and lines that come to my mind when I think about the man Davenport. Two from Markham’s “Lincoln, The Man of the People” keep coming back to me. They could have been written of Davenport:


Here was a man to hold against the world, A man to match the mountains and the sea . . . . . . . And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs, Goes down with a great shout upon the hills, And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.”

Davenport has left a lonesome place against our sky. There are so many things I want to say—I’ll save all but two

until I see you. Davenport had the dearest, most thoughtful, caring, loving daughter in you that anyone has ever had in the whole wide world—and nothing in the way of song and spirit could have been more beautiful than Alice’s singing of “The Lord’s Prayer.”

With much love and understanding sympathy, Margaret

A Gift in Honor of Davenport and in Memory of Gladys by Kathleen Lindler Sansbury, a first cousin (Mattie Padgett Lindler’s daughter) My dear Bela,

Your family have given me a “lift” as long as I’ve known you all. You said you looked forward to my summer vacations and seeing my pretty cars and clothes and my happy smiles. I enjoyed being with Davenport and Gladys and you and your brothers and sister too. I have fond memories of sitting on Davenport and Gladys’ front porch and laughing and talking the afternoon or evening away. It seemed as if stories just fell from Davenport’s lips and entertained us. He knew something about everything, and he could make it funny too. Yes, he was a favorite cousin. And Gladys, she was a wonder! I loved her too.

I’m enclosing a check for Emory Methodist Church for $5,000.00 to be given to the church in honor of Davenport’s 92nd birthday and in memory of Gladys by their first cousin, Kathleen Lindler Sansbury. You can give it now or wait, but I’m a believer in


never putting off a good deed until tomorrow when you can do it today. I’m not in favor of big surprises either—a little one is OK, but not a big shock, so tell Davenport that I gave this because he, Gladys, and his family have meant much to me and I want him to know it. I wish Gladys could know it. They are both “Salt of the Earth” people.

Yours, Kathleen

Davenport: “A Man for All Seasons” by Isabel Etheredge Mayer, a first cousin (Ella Padgett Etheredge’s daughter)

Davenport Padgett and I go back a long, long way. In fact, our

relationship began on the day of my birth, October 16, 1912. My brother, Padgett Etheredge, and Davenport were not only first cousins but also best friends. They had an excursion planned—a trip to the fair in Batesburg—when my mother, Ella Padgett Etheredge, went into labor with me. Davenport and Padgett were quickly sent on a search mission to find Dr. Buster, the family physician. I was never quite forgiven for spoiling a much-anticipated Oktoberfest!

Nevertheless, I was always loved by my almost-brother. Davenport dearly loved my mother, as she had helped to care for him after his own mother died, and her welfare and that of her family were always priorities with him. He rode “Aunt Ella” all over the state when something came up that necessitated travels, and he visited more regularly than most children visit their parents!

There are so many memories I treasure of my dear cousin. I shall share only one or two. For some years, Davenport had boarding kennels for hunting dogs owned by men in the Columbia area. He trained and kept those dogs in a fine state of readiness. I was privileged to follow the dogs and watch them work. There is no more beautiful sight in nature than watching a fine hunting dog “point” a partridge! It is an almost spiritual


experience to see one of His creatures doing what he was destined to do. (Saint Francis knew that animals are “All Creatures of our God and King.”)

Davenport was slender and in splendid physical condition at that time. In his boots and hunting clothes, he was a swashbuckling man in his teenage cousin’s eyes! A grand memory!

I loved all the family and felt Gladys was as much kin as her husband. For many years, before Bela and Doug came along, there were Madaline and Curtis to enjoy. Madaline and I were “on the same wave length” all our lives. I spent time with the family and knew I was always welcome. Gladys, at one point in time, tried to hone my math skills. She was a splendid teacher, but my mind has never been excited over addition and subtraction.

All through the years there have been exciting times and happy and sad experiences that Davenport and I shared. My family was at Bela’s wedding, and Davenport and Gladys came to our Jody’s. They also came to support me when my dear Rob died. My mother and older brother, Joe Oscar, lived with me for some time in Georgetown. When it was time to take them “home” to Sardis churchyard, Davenport and his family cleaned house, ran errands, and fed “Aunt Ella’s” family. He assisted in the clearing of the house and in a small estate sale after Mother’s death.

The spring before Davenport died, he had a critical illness that indicated his end might be near. Bela called and I went to be with my almost-brother and his family. Davenport made a surprising recovery, and on Sunday came to the dinner table to lead us in “The Lord’s Prayer.” It was a blessing that Our Father also knew the words! We found it difficult to swallow tears and pray at the same time!

Davenport and I had a bit of quiet time before dinner and a bit of meaningful conversation. He said to me, “I expected to be resting in Emory churchyard today.”

“Not so fast,” I answered. “Look out your windows.” Davenport asked, “What am I looking for?”


“Your cows, your pasture, your trees, and God’s beautiful world,” I said. And I continued, “Do you think pearly gates and golden streets are any more appealing?”

And Dear Coz answered, “No, I don’t, and I’m staying here as long as I can.”

Now my dear almost-brother knows all about Our Father’s House! I’m sure he is being Davenport and is enlivening the heavenly hosts and enjoying harps and angels and the Tree of Life. I’ve an idea, though, he remembers hunting dogs, and cows, and pasture land, and his good life at Mt. Willing. And we, Davenport’s kin, will treasure our memories of a special man—“A Man for All Seasons.”

Davenport: A Generous, Gracious Cousin by Eva Sue Etheredge Butler, first cousin (Ella Padgett Etheredge’s daughter)

Davenport Padgett was my mother’s nephew, the son of Walter

Padgett, my mother’s older brother. Davenport was married to Gladys Wightman. A more hospitable couple you’ll never meet! I visited in their home often and loved it. They took me wherever I wanted to go.

When I graduated from Winthrop, my piano teacher helped me to get a summer job at Sound Beach, Conn. Davenport and Gladys drove me down to Charleston to get the boat to New York. Also after graduating, I taught in Mississippi (my brother, Padgett Etheredge, knew the superintendent of the school) where I roomed with Mable Woodham. She came home with me the first Christmas I was there. Davenport walked us through the woods near old Mt. Willing, and we had a great time walking and hearing his stories.

Later after I was married to George Butler, Jr., and living in Jonestown, my older daughter and her husband were stationed in Germany and invited us to visit them. I needed a passport, and


Davenport helped me get one. A more generous, gracious person you’ll never meet!!

Davenport and the Old Landmarks and Touchstones by Maylena Padgett Jordan, first cousin (Mahlon Padgett’s daughter) Dear Cousin Davenport and Gladys,

Sorry I couldn’t spend more time with you going over the old landmarks and touchstones. I want to come back so you can tell and show me more. You two have lovely children, and we all appreciate and love you both. All the Padgetts-Herlongs-Dennys may be a “little mean”—not much though—I think more stubborn in order to muster up courage to carry on. Anyway, “Robert, Peter, John and Paul: the Good Master made us all.” He’ll have to take care and manage things. It’s too big for me.

Love to you both, Maylena

On the Occasion of Your Golden Wedding Anniversary by Jack Long, second cousin (Frank Long’s son) Dear Cousin Davenport and Gladys, April 26, 1966

As I read the article in the Sentinel about your Golden Wedding Anniversary celebration and viewed the handsome picture of you both, I thought of how wonderful it must be for two people to have lived together for fifty years and to have reached this plateau with distinction and great accomplishments. For this and all you have meant to me, I wish to extend my wholehearted congratu-lations and best wishes to you on this special occasion.

It is on occasions like this that we have an opportunity to pause and reflect over our past and to take inventory of what we have accomplished. To me, your life represents a true picture of love, devotion, sacrifice and loyalty to your family, friends, community and church. I am reminded of a favorite expression I have heard my father say many times which goes like this: “Give me my


flowers while I live.” It is in this spirit that I say to you I can think of no one who has done more to make their community, state, and nation a better place in which to live than you, and the example you have set will live on forever.

Lib and the children join me in extending to you our love and best wishes for continued good health, happiness, and success for many years to come. Affectionately yours, Jack

Thoughts on My Visit with Davenport by Laurie Patricia Gamble Juliana, cousin (the granddaughter of Grace Etheredge Gamble)

I remember that it was during the summer of 1979 when my

husband and I, after having attended a science conference in South Carolina, traveled to Saluda making it possible for me to keep a promise made to my father so many years ago. “Go home, Pat; go home,” he would say.

We stopped at the family cemetery to visit Great-Grandmother Ella’s grave. There we met the grounds keeper, who said that I had a cousin “Up yonder, about a mile or so,” and he gave us directions. It turned out to be Davenport Padgett and his lovely wife, Gladys. We drove up to the house, and Davenport came out—an elderly, tall gentleman who seemed to have something wrong with one eye, but abounding with grace. He invited us into his home, introduced Gladys, and we all talked pleasantly for about ten minutes or so. Davenport suddenly pointed at me and said, “I know who you are. You are one of the twins from New York; you are Grace’s grandchild.” I acknowledged that this was true. We stayed there for a bit under two hours and fell under the spell of these two enchanting people as I heard of my family’s past history—a part of me. How wonderful it was to hear about Great-Grandmother Ella, my Grandmother Grace (How I shall always love her!), and some of the early life of my beloved father and of my uncles—Jim, Bill and little Joe!


Davenport then showed me a copy he had of the history of the Padgett brothers; it was his only copy. I said that if he would allow me to borrow it for a few days to Xerox, I would send him back his original plus several copies. I didn’t know why, but he entrusted his copy to me. The following week I had mailed back to Davenport his original and several copies.

I received a lovely letter from Davenport later on that month. He thanked me for the extra copies, and then wrote, “The reason I let you take my copy is because you always looked me straight in the eye when I spoke to you.” (Goodness, how difficult it would have been not to have given Davenport the utmost courtesy he deserved!)

Over the years I have had time for much reflection on that visit. His lovely wife, Gladys, so gracious and kind—she exuded an aura of profound beauty and deep spirituality. Davenport—there seemed to be a quiet in his soul, I thought—an inner timeless grace about him—as one having accepted with serenity all that God gave him (good times, hard times) with utmost dignity, not knowing that perhaps his very being must have surely been most pleasing to God. When someone “wears” such qualities as naturally as one breathes air, it cannot help but inspire others to strive always to attain the goodness that was Davenport. Now I know why my father said, “Go home, Pat; go home.”

Mr. Davenport: My Would-be Grandfather by Dibbie Shealy great-great-step-niece (great-great-step-granddaughter of Jouette) (She had taken photographs of him and Bela’s daughter Alice for Alice’s competition in the “Miss South Carolina” pageant.) Dear Mr. Davenport, April 10, 1989

I have been working in the darkroom this morning printing pictures of you and your beautiful Alice, and I just had to stop to say a few words to you.


I hope you know how valuable you and your family have been to Saluda County all of these years. Because of your family, many little children have fond memories of Christmas Sunday School parties at your house. I remember that Mrs. Gladys gave all of her students a box of candy for their very own one year, and being one of four little Shealys, a box of my own was a rarity and a luxury. I enjoyed every piece of that box of chocolates!

Because of your family, Emory was blessed for years with a pianist who was devoted and talented, and now, on occasion, gets to hear Alice sing with that wonderful voice of hers.

Because of your Bela, Saluda County’s history is being preserved in book form, on tape, in the Prism, and in those very valuable oral histories Bela’s students created. Bela, herself, is a treasure, and she is the best teacher I ever had. So often, I wish I could still be her student and capture her enthusiasm, dedication, and love of life. I’m sure you know that her dedication has always extended to her roles as wife, mother, and daughter.

Because of you, I have amusing memories of sitting behind you for years at Emory and hearing your comical and quite frank remarks to and/or about many ministers and their sermons! Your visits to Mother and Daddy’s house over the years always drew me into the room so I could hear your tales! You are a master storyteller and everyone who has heard you reminisce has been blessed! I remember saying one time that if I could adopt a grandfather, it would be you!

I am enjoying printing these pictures because in them I see your personality, your family, your home, and your church. I am so privileged because I got to take these photographs

I hope your days are peaceful and you are enjoying this springtime. I just had to let you know that you have impressed just one little ol’ Saluda girl with your life.

Take care of yourself. Love you, Dibbie


Musings upon the Passing of Davenport by Henry Fletcher Padget III, grandson of a first cousin, Fletcher Padget, Sr. Dear Bela, Aug. 15, 1989

I mourn with you your father’s passing, while at the same time celebrate with you his inspiring life. It seems the “old guard” is falling away all at once. Not only are we losing parents and grandparents—individuals whom we loved and who loved us, individuals who are largely responsible for who and what we are today, but we are also losing invaluable, priceless links to the past: guardians of family, of values, of community, of philosophy of life. And such wonderful mirrors they were and still are! Casting brilliant, focused images of such clarity that our reflections seem somehow dimmer, duller. Images difficult to live up to. Examples not easy to follow. But what a legacy they leave behind—the many lives they have touched. Certainly mine. We have so much to be thankful for—so very much.

Sincerely, Hank

A Pastor Remembers Mr. Davenport by Reverend John Griffith, Davenport’s pastor at Emory Church

Mr. Davenport Padgett was a very impressive person to me

when, as a young man coming back to my home county to serve people I’d known all my life, I came to know him well. I was serving Butler Charge, and Emory was one of my churches. Mr. Davenport had been a member there all his life, and I soon realized that Mr. Davenport Padgett was a standout. He had lived a rich, full life in the Emory Community, and he had lots of common sense that he used in whatever situation he found himself. He was an important member of the Board for a time, and at the Board meetings, there were all kinds of feelings that might clash over some proposal. Mr. Davenport would listen to all the members give their opinion, and then his contribution would come from his common, practical sense. Somehow he could


always see the right thing to do in all the situations the church encountered. When I think of Mr. Davenport, I think of what Jesus said in the fifth chapter of Matthew: “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.”

Jesus also said “Ye are the salt of the earth.” And there was certainly a salt about this man’s life. Wherever he was, he added a real seasoning to everything. He could make you laugh, and he could make you cry when he told his stories. And what a memory he had! He could tell you about everybody in the community and their grandparents too! He was impressive, and he’d never tarnish with time. He was indeed the kind of people Jesus preached to when he said, “You are the salt of the earth.”

Mr. Davenport also said what he thought. The first Sunday I preached at Emory, he said, “that young man won’t be here long. He’ll make a dowl bishop.” About the third Sunday I was there he told me he’d been wrong, that I’d never make a bishop, that I preached too long. He also said to me, “You’d be a powerful preacher if you’d cut a little bit of both ends of your sermons and put more fire in the middle.” He also teased me about putting a trapdoor in the pulpit so that when twelve o’clock came, he could pull the rope and if the preacher was still preaching he’d disappear.

He had an unusual way of teaching the adult Sunday School class. I’d have to say he taught like Jesus did—in parables. He used illustrations from what he knew—farming and hunting and just everyday life—and he could show the profound truth in what he was saying and the illustration would have meaning for the listeners. Yes, he always related the scriptures to real life—the life that people knew about. Another thing, he had a memory like an elephant—he could tell you how many birds he’d killed and the exact date it rained and how many bales of cotton he made in a certain year.

I knew that I had a calling to preach the gospel, and I believe Mr. Davenport had a ministry too. He moved through his long life touching all the people he encountered making their lives better.


He never struck a pose. What you saw was what you got with Mr. Davenport. He wasn’t wishy-washy; he didn’t change if he thought he was in the right. And that’s where he stood—for what was right. On the Board, when a vote was taken and he knew he had to stand alone, then he stood alone. He was a true man in Christ, and he stood for his convictions. There was a saying he had, “He’s like a good mule. He’ll stand without hitching and pull where he’s hooked.” Mr. Davenport was like that. He kept his convictions and his composure until the end of his life.

He thought a lot of me. We had a good relationship. He told me when I preached too long, but he’d touch me on the shoulder and tell me, “You did well today.” After Mrs. Gladys died and he was getting on toward ninety, he drove to Zoar to hear me preach at night. I offered to accompany him back home, but he said he reckoned if he’d made it to church, he could make it back home. And he did. He also thought a lot of Priscilla. Once he said, “Oh, she’s peachy.” Priscilla liked that, and she’s never forgotten it.

While I was serving Emory, Priscilla and I took Mr. Davenport and Mrs. Gladys to Cokesbury College up in Greenwood County. It had recently been restored and was open for tours. When I learned that Mrs. Gladys’ grandfather had been a Methodist minister in the 1800s and had taught at Cokesbury, I asked them to go with us to visit the old Methodist college. It isn’t far from Saluda, but that day I traveled far in what I learned about these two very special members of my church. You could see the great love they had for each other, and the interest they had in everything. I’ve taken a lot of trips in my life, but that is the most memorable one I’ve ever taken. Somewhere there is a picture that Priscilla took of them. I wish I could find it. That day stands out as an affirmation of all I already knew of Mr. Davenport and Mrs. Gladys. I think they were truly “pure in heart,” and I know that they will both “see God.”


Words from Friends upon the Death of an Aged Parent by Dora and Sidney Hare, friends Dear Bela,

Sidney and I have thought about you often. We know that, even though you really don’t want an aged parent to have to continue living, their death brings a real sorrow and a particular kind of loneliness.

You are fortunate in that your parents verbalized many of their experiences and much of their knowledge, and you had the skill to draw these out and record them. You will have this as you grow older, and it will become more meaningful, I am sure, through the years. We hope the heartache and loneliness will soon ease and the good things you shared can be what you remember.

Most sincerely, Dora and Sidney Celebration of a Good Life by Bettie Rose Horne, a friend of Bela’s

I wanted to tell you how many times your father’s funeral has crossed my mind. His minister is a wonderful fellow. Many of his ideas keep coming back to me. I hope you’ll understand my saying that the service was enjoyable because it was such a marvelous celebration of a good life, one which was truly well lived. Think of all the good Mr. Davenport Padgett did and all the many and diverse lives he touched. We got to laugh at recalling some of the good times—and there were many, I know.

You are a lot like him, and he will live on through the years in many ways.

Love, Bettie


Mr. Davenport Padgett by Harvey Driggers, reporter Midlands Outdoors, Vol. I, No.3. May 9, 1984, p. 11 (The reporter tells about going to Little River Landing on Lake Murray where the “Boys” have just come in from fishing and how they clean the fish, cook them, and then after considerable “knawing, smacking, grunting and grease-wiping, fair justice is done to a pretty good sized box full of fried fish.” At this point he introduces Mr. Davenport Padgett and writes the following story,)

Somebody turned to look at an approaching car and exclaimed. “That’s Mr. Davenport Padgett, ain’t it?” Somebody else acknowledged that it was, indeed, Mr. Padgett. Now, being mostly a “summer resident” of the Little River, there’s a few folk around there I just hadn’t gotten around to meeting as yet. Mr. Davenport Padgett was one of them.

As the grey car drew to a halt several feet from the corner of our makeshift supper table, an elderly gentleman opened the door and gracefully stepped out. I was immediately struck by his poise and apparent elegance, but most of all by his erect carriage and completely satisfied-looking face. He had the appearance of someone who had not a care in the world and wasn’t accepting any from other folk.

Mr. Davenport Padgett. They say first impressions are lasting, and I can pretty much say I don’t think I’ll ever have trouble recalling the gentleman or the experience that was to follow.

“Where they having the fish fry?” Mr. Davenport Padgett inquired of Gwinn.

“Right here.” Gwinn replied. “What time does it start?” “We done had it.” “The hell you say, “ Mr. Davenport Padgett exclaimed. “I’m

hungry.” Gwinn quickly informed Mr. Davenport Padgett that there

were fish and slaw left to be consumed, and Russell scrambled over to the grill to fetch a plate. As Mr. Davenport Padgett filled


his plate, he let on as how he hated to eat alone, and really looked forward to a good fish fry. I think one or two of the boys had a mind to head on home before that, but the man had begun weaving his charm around our little group. The stories that followed can only be told by someone who has lived them.

“I’m might near a hundred years old, 90 to be exact,” said Mr. Davenport Padgett. “I was up to the voter registration office in Columbia today, and there were these two pretty gals standing there in the line. I told them I’d tell ‘em how much money I had, but I didn’t want both of ‘em to propose to me at once.”

Mr. Davenport Padgett seemed to enjoy telling his stories as much as he obviously enjoyed living them. His high-pitched laugh and warm character had captivated his audience. I was spell-bound. There are few treats in life equal to listening to our elders tell of the days of their youth and their escapades, and I knew we were about to be entertained by a master storyteller.

“I’m 90 years old, and I’ve worked at the voter registration office for 21 years now.” related Mr. Davenport Padgett. “Up to two years ago, I thought I was in charge, but found out I wasn’t, and now I don’t care much about it anymore.”

His laugh was contagious, and all the “Boys” were having a good time right along with him. He laid line after line out before us, and we greedily snapped them into our consciousness and savored the character embedded so deeply in his humor. Laughter was, he told us, his secret to longevity. Then, he regaled us with the story of his attitude about fishing.

Seemed Mr. Davenport Padgett, then a chap of 14 or so, was supposed to be working the farm one day when he noticed fish zapping mayflies on the surface of the river bend near his father’s land. His mother was no longer with the family, and he and his older brother had to help keep the place running. They did this, he told us, at the end of the iron arm of a strong, discipline-minded father.

Having witnessed the spring ritual of “the bream and the fly,” nothing would do but a bit of fishing. Dad was supposed to be at


his job as a postmaster, and couldn’t possibly come home in time to catch Davenport Padgett, the chap of 14, away from his chores enjoying the excitement of a hot fishing spree. But fate was not to be on his side.

“I heard something rustling in the bushes, and I looked and there was my father. He had broke a hickory stick about six feet long and big around as your thumb, and when he walked up to me, all he said was, ‘Would you rather fish or take a licking?’

“I said, ‘Well, you might as well go ahead an whup me.’ He hit me about three licks that didn’t hurt at all, and I picked up the two poles I had cut and started back to my spot on the river bank.

“‘Come back here and pick up this plowshare,’ he hollered at me.

“‘I’ll be damned if I will,’ I said, and he caught me and beat the tar outa me. From that day on, I never cared nothing about fishing.”

He ends that part of the tale with a healthy laugh. We all laughed with him, and Donnie took it so well, I thought he was gonna choke on a little piece of fish he had snitched from the leftovers. But Mr. Davenport Padgett wasn’t through with the tale.

“A bit later that day, my brother said he’d dress the fish if I’d milk the cows, and we’d cook the fish for supper. My father came in just as we got the fish done and set them on the table, and we all sat down to eat. That man ate more fish than me and my brother put together.

“Now, my brother wasn’t afraid of the devil himself, and he turned to Pa and said, ‘Them fish oughta kill you before morning, anybody’d beat a motherless child.’”

That had us all roaring pretty good by then. And, so it went for another hour or so as the old gent finished his plate of fish, alternately pulling a white handkerchief from his coat pocket to dab his lips with and cranking up another story from his past.

I could have gone my whole life without meeting Mr. Davenport Padgett and sharing his memories. I would have been much worse off for the loss.


People Await Results on Courthouse Lawn by Cathy Collins, Staff writer for The State, 1980 SALUDA—Some traditions never go out of style.

Even in the 11 p.m. darkness, the Saluda County Courthouse lawn looked like it was ready for a picnic.

Older women sat in circles in their lawn chairs exchanging news. Children played Frisbee while babies rocked in their mother’s laps. Many men stood, hands on hips, making their guesses. And everyone was awaiting election returns.

One by one, box bearers would park their cars and deliver their results. “There comes another one!” they would yell.

Once tabulated, a man recorded the numbers with chalk on a blackboard in the courthouse hall. People crowded around with their pencils and charts, copying the votes to tally themselves.

Among the people braving the rising body heat were John L. Deloach and D.D. Padgett of the Saluda Registration Board.

They had arrived before 7 p.m. and had kept up with every development. Padgett, who is 86 years old, has been doing that for 70 years though, and DeLoach has been there about as long.

They said that elections have always been done this way but the results used to be announced out the window. “Up to four years ago,” said Padgett, “there would be a thousand people on that lawn.”

Padgett also recalled the days when he and a couple of other men would handle the tallies until “the law” required that a clerk fulfill the duties.

It is not strange that the 86-year-old survived the late hours. When his wife of 64 years died, he carried on with the housework. No one helps him because he doesn’t need it.

“I cook,” he laughs. “I cooked a chicken in the crockpot last Sunday evening, and darned if I didn’t eat it up Monday!”

Padgett is somewhat of a living legend because he represents 70 years of what reoccurred election night. The Saluda people


voted during the day and afterward they brought their families to see who the sheriff and the state senator would be.

It is hard to believe that kind of excitement still exists. Along with the spirit of friends gathering, perhaps Saluda has the key to the spirit of democracy.

Padgette Scholarship Established at Newberry College The Saluda Standard-Sentinel, Saluda, SC 29138 August 28, 1980, p. 1 (also in Dimensions, Newberry College magazine, October 1980, p. 22) NEWBERRY—The Gladys Wightman Padgett Memorial Scholar-ship has been established at Newberry College as a result of a gift from her husband, Davenport, of Saluda, and the family and friends of the late Mrs. Padgette.

The new endowed scholarship will be awarded annually to the College’s oldest rising senior, providing that person is at least 25-years-old at the beginning of his/her senior year.

A 1956 honor graduate of Newberry College, Mrs. Padgette did not receive her bachelor’s degree until she was 58. Because of financial problems, she was unable to enter college when she graduated from Saluda High School in 1915. However, she took and passed the state teacher’s examination and began teaching that fall.

The young teacher took advantage of college programs in the area and attended classes at Winthrop College and the University of South Carolina. She enrolled for the first time at Newberry during the summer of 1927 but did not take courses until the summer of 1941. Beginning in 1947 she commuted to Newberry every summer for classes until she received her bachelor of science degree in elementary education in 1956.

Her 45-year teaching career in Lexington and Saluda counties included 30 years as a teacher-principal. She retired in 1965 as a fourth grade teacher in the Batesburg Elementary School. In addition to her service to public schools and in education, she was


an active member in Saluda’s Emory United Methodist church, in many farm women’s organizations in Saluda County and in professional organizations.

When she retired in 1965, the Batesburg-Leesville Twin-City News commented:

“She still hears from many of her children and follows with interest those she has taught as they graduate from high school, attend college or follow their careers. She feels that her most valuable investment has been in the lives of her ‘children of the classroom,’ whom she has loved and trained. These students returned that love, assured that she was genuinely interested in them as individuals, their welfare, and in preparing them for the future.

“Her sweet smile, calmness in the classroom, kindness and thoughtfulness for the students and fellow teachers are only a few of her many fine traits. In her church, in the school, and in her community activities, she has been a leader and a good ambassador.”

“Because of her love for education,” Dr. Ruby Padgette Herlong, a Saluda High School teacher and one of the Padgette’s four children, said, “our mother’s family and friends believe that this scholarship for an older adult is the best way to continue her investment in education.”

Mrs. Padgette, who died in November, married Davenport Padgett, a Saluda County farmer, in 1916. The children in addition to Dr. Herlong are Madaline Padgette Boney, professor at Armstrong College in Savannah, Ga.; Curtis Davenport Padgette, vice president of Royal Globe Insurance Corporation, Atlanta; and Douglas D. Padgette, engineer and manager with Western Electric Company in Atlanta. Mr. and Mrs. Padgette have 11 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.


High Schoolers Register to Vote (with picture of Davenport Padgett registering a student) Saluda Standard-Sentinel, Saluda, SC, June 5, 1980, p. 12

One hundred ten Saluda High School students, mostly seniors, registered to vote in early May. The Saluda High School Social Studies Department secured the services of three volunteers from the Saluda County Registration Board to register eligible students. Here Davenport Padgett, left, instructs Willie Smith on the registration process. [This picture is among those in pictorial section of this book.]

Students Honor Citizens (with picture of Davenport Padgett, Ruby Riser, and Mrs. Jess Tolbert) Saluda Standard-Sentinel, Saluda, SC, December 10, 1987

Saluda High School students of Dr. Bela Herlong recently

honored longtime residents of Saluda with a tea in the school library. Those honored took part in an oral history project of the students, who taped interviews with the citizens, then transcribed the tapes

Pictured above, L to R, are Davenport Padgett, Mrs. Ruby Riser and Mrs. Jess Tolbert, who were three of the county residents interviewed by the students. [This picture is among those in pictorial section of this book.]


Padgette Gift Dedicated at Emory Saluda Standard Sentinel, Saluda, SC, April 9, 1983, page 6

The family of the late Gladys Wightman Padgette presented a lowboy table to Emory United Methodist church Sunday in her memory.

Mrs. Padgette was a lifelong member of Emory, having served the church as a Sunday School teacher, organist and choir member. She served for many years as a school teacher in Saluda-Batesburg area.

The table, which sits in the church vestibule, was presented Sunday by Mrs. Padgette’s daughter, Dr. Bela Herlong, dedicated by the pastor, Rev. John Bauknight, and accepted by Chairman of the Administrative Board, Ralph Shealy.

After the regular morning services a covered dish luncheon was enjoyed by members of the church and guest.

Present for the presentation were Mrs. Padgette’s husband, D.D. Padgette, daughters—Mrs. Herlong and Mrs. Madaline Boney, and sons—Curtis and Douglas, and some of the Padgette’s grandchildren.

Emory Chimes Dedication Saluda Standard-Sentinel, June 19, 1986, p. 3

Emory United Methodist church will dedicate its new chimes

Sunday, June 22. The dedication service will be held during the regular morning worship at 10:30 a.m. and will be followed by a covered dish luncheon in the church social hall.

The chimes, which play at set times daily, were given to the church by Mrs. Kathleen Lindler Sansbury of Florida in memory of Gladys W. Padgett and in honor of D.D. Padgett.

Mrs. Padgett was a longtime school teacher in Saluda County and a member, Sunday School teacher, choir member and pianist at Emory. Mr. Padgett, who celebrated his 92nd birthday June 20,


is the oldest active member at Emory, where he taught Sunday School for 58 years.

Members, former members, and friends are invited to attend and bring a covered dish for the meal that follows the service. Rev. Wash W. Belangia is pastor at Emory.

Tid Bits by Ralph Shealy Saluda Standard-Sentinel, Saluda, SC, June 5, 1986, p. 5 THE CHIMES

If you’ve passed our house recently and seen people standing out in the front yard apparently staring at trees, we are not crazy—we are trying to hear the new chimes at Emory United Methodist Church.

The chimes were installed Saturday, and they are beautiful. Atmospheric conditions have much to do with the distance the

chimes carry. Saturday, we could barely hear the chimes from our house. Sunday at 3 p.m. they came in a little louder, and Monday at 6 p.m., they sounded like they were being played in our neighbor Allen Harmon’s back yard.

The only problem is traffic. The Batesburg Highway is well traversed, to say the least. So, all you motorists traveling the Batesburg Highway around 12 noon or 6 p.m. need to stop about ten minutes, so I can hear the chimes.

Looking through the catalog of chime tapes, I found that you can order tapes of Rogers and Hammerstein’s greatest hits, a tape of songs about Texas, Irish songs, and popular songs. Can’t you just hear “Deep in the Heart of Texas” coming from a local church?

Nine Generations of Padgett(e)s: From Job, the First to Settle in the Mt. Willing Area, through

Douglas Davenport Padgett’s Great-Great-Grandchildren

Three generations of Davenports: Douglas Davenport Padgett holding the baby, Jackson Davenport Herlong, with William Davenport Herlong, the baby’s father

and Davenport’s grandson, looking on.

“I go back to Job Padgett and Mary Bodie Padgett, who came to Edgefield District before the Revolutionary War. Job settled on Moore’s Creek, and his brother Josiah settled on Clouds Creek. I know Job fought in the Revolutionary War because he is listed in Captain Michael Watson’s Company of Volunteers. I know he’s buried in a little graveyard right near Moore’s Creek with a big pile of rocks to mark his and his wife’s grave.”

Padgett’s My Name, Appendix “Family Connections,” 403


(Information from “Job Padgett” by Dallas Phelps, “Mary C. Bodie and Her Descendants” by Jack and Lula Stewart, A Documented History of the Long Family by Eytive Long Evans, and Descendants of Josiah Padget I by James Suddath Paget, Jr., as well as information from living family members. All sources are in the Saluda County Museum in Saluda, SC.) 1. Job Padgett, b. c 1750, d. 1837, m. Mary C. (also said to be

Nora) Bodie, b. 1750s, d. 1822, served 183 days in Capt. Michael Watson’s Volunteers on Horseback from 15 December 1781 to June 1782

2. Abigail Padgett, b. abt. 1780, d. aft. 1840, m. Abraham Hurt 2. Malinda Padgett, b. abt. 1782, d. aft. 1840, m. Thomas R.

Bond, Jr., b. abt. 1769 2. Sarah Padgett, b. abt. 1785, d. bef. 1843, M. William Jones 2. Job Padgett, Jr., probably eldest son, b. 1787 in Randolph

Co., Ala., m. Elizabeth Bodie, d. Mar. 1822 2. Margaret Padgett, b. 19 Apr. 1795., d. 1 Mar. 1864, m. (1)

James C. Whittle, (2) Henry Rucker 2. Mary Ann Padgett, b. abt. 1787, d. 21 Apr. 1853, m. 1)

Richard Yarbrough, b. abt 1800, (2) Joel F. Warren 2. Jane Padgett, b. abt. 1800, m. William McGehee, b. abt. 1797 2. Deborah Padgett, b. abt 1801, m. David Bowers, 17 Mar.

1837, b. ab. 1812 2. Chesley Padgett, b. 1802, d. 19 Sept. 1857, m. Elizabeth A.

Padgett, b. 20 May 1813 (Born in Edgefield County, died in Texas)

2. William Padgett, b. 19 Apr. 1803, d. 29 Feb 1884, m. (1) Margaret Denny b. 3 Dec. 1804, d. 24 Jan 1882, (2) Samantha (Mancy) Padgett, daughter of Samuel Padgett, b. 1837, d. 26 Nov. 1901

Children by first wife: 3. Dr. John Ethelbert Padgett, b. 26 Jan 1824, d. 2 Apr. 1875,

m. 20 Dec. 1849 Savannah Harris, b. 8 Aug. 1830, d. 20 June 1901.

Appendix: Genealogy 513

3. Mary Ann Padgett b. 1825, m. Joseph Huiet, lived in Newton Station, Ga., during Civil War

3. Tillman D. Padgett, b. 14 Aug. 1826, d. 4 June, 1881, m. Mary Ann Timmerman, b. 15 Oct. 1839, d. 9 Jan. 1911

3. Sarah Matilda Padgett, b. 1828, d. 20 June 1850, m. S.V. Johnson

3. James D. Padgett, b. abt. 1830, Lt. in 1864 in Confederate Army, killed in Franklin, Tenn. , d. 30 Nov. 1864

3. Eleanor Elizabeth Padgett, b. 1834, m. 13 Dec. 1855 J. William Herrin

3. David William Padgett, b. 13 Sept. 1836, d 31 Mar. 1914, m (1) 1855 Martha Ann Long, b. 31 Oct 1835, d. 1856, m. (2) 1857 Harriet Ursula Long, b. 10 Jan. 1834, d. 21 Sept. 1909

3. Mahlon Demarcus Padgett, b. 26 Jan. 1838, d. 3 Apr. 1925, m. Apr. 1858 Susannah Euphrates Long, b. 21 Mar. 1842, d. 15 Mar. 1909

Compiler’s note: For a full listing of the children of Mahlon Demarcus Padgett and Susannah Euphrates Long Padgett, see A Documented History of The Long Family, Switzerland to South Carolina, 1578-1956 Including Allied Families by Eytive Long Evans, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 56-11873. This book is available in the genealogical library of the Saluda County Historical Society at the Saluda County Museum on Law Range Street in Saluda, South Carolina. Mahlon and Susannah’s children have in parenthesis the name that their nephew Davenport Padgett called them in the text of this book. This genealogy follows Walter’s descendants down to the ninth generation from Job, the first Padgett in the Mt. Willing area. Davenport’s direct descendants as well as his direct ancestors are in bold type. 4. Ada Margaret Padgett, b. 14 Feb. 1859, d. 17 Nov. 1934

(Aunt Ada), m. 14 Nov. 1878, Jacob Littleton Smith, b.


11 Apr. 1847, d. 15 Jan. 1918, ten children: Mary Ethel Smith, Marvin L. Smith, Ervin Newton Smith, Katherine Estelle Smith, Myrtis Cleo Smith, Annie Sue Smith, Ella Blanche Smith, Earle Herbert Smith, Ola Kathleen Smith, Jacob Mahlon Smith

4. Walter Joseph Padgett, b. 12 Sept. 1860, d. 1 June 1918. m. (1) Eva Euela Davenport, b. 14 Oct. 1861, d. 12 May 1903, m. (2) Carrie Boyd Bouknight (no children by second wife)

Children by first wife: 5. Curtis Dubose Padgett, b. 31 May 1886, d. 13 Dec.

1909, m. 15 Apr. 1906, Harriett Pinkney Long, b. 29 Sept. 1887, d. 8 Sept. 1980

6. Euela Davenport Padgett, b. 31 Jan. 1907, d. 24 Apr. 1988, m. 25 Nov. 1942, Rembert Allen Hodge, no children

6. Sarah Minier Padgett, b. 19 Mar. 1909, d. 29 Nov. 2003, unmarried

5. Walter Jouette Padgett, b. 18 Apr. 1890, d. 21 Feb. 1969, m. 5 Apr. 1908, Emmie Nina Grigsby, b. 5 Mar. 1874, d. 12 Sept, 1949 (widow of John Herlong)

6. Wallace Jouette Padgett, b. 14 Jan. 1909, d. 27 Mar. 1980, m. Dec. 1934, Jessie Harmon Hawkins, b. 3 Oct. 1891, d. 2 Nov. 1987

6. Walter Joseph Padgett, II, b. 14 Jan. 1909, m. 29 Dec. 1933, Rebecca Brooks, b. 22 Nov. 1911, d. 27 Jan. 1988

7. Walter Joseph Padgett III, b. 16 Nov. 1934, d. 1978, m. Susie Jane Procter

8. Donna Lynn Padgett, b. August 1965 8. Dana Lydell Padgett, b. 28 Nov. 1969 7. Miriam Annelle Padgett, b. 20 June 1936, m. 5

Dec. 1953, Dwight Evaughn Miller, b. 30 Dec. 1931


8. Richard Evaughn Miller, b. 11 May 1955, m. (1) 20 June 1987 Stephanie Blalock

9. Collin Andrew Miller, b. 29 Nov. 1988 m. (2) Ashley Green 8. Melanie Miller, b. 23 Jan. 1955, m. 20 Jan.

1979 Joseph Lamar Lake, b. 7 May 1953 9. Miriam Ashley Lake, b. 6 Mar. 1982 9. Amy Elizabeth Lake, b. 14 May 1986 8. David Jeffrey Miller, b. 9 Sept. 1961, m. 7

Mar. 1987 Irene Herlong, b. 31 July 1961 9. David Joseph Miller, b. 15 June 1989 9. Katie Irene Miller, b. 10 Mar. 1992 9. Rebekah Caroline Miller, b. 28 Jan. 1995 9. Jeffrey Herlong Miller, b. 30 Apr. 1996 6. Nellie Ray Padgett, b. 24 Sept. 1910, d. 2 Apr.

2000 m. 1928, Willie Mosley Wright, b. July 1904, d. 17 Oct 1978

7. Willie Mosley Wright, Jr., b. May 1929, m. Aline Alexander

8. Willie Mosley Wright, III, b. 6 Feb 1961, d. 21 Sept 1986

7. Clyde Ray Wright, b. 5 Oct. 1942, d. 18 Mar 2005, m. Loretta Powell, b. 29 July 1938, d. 14 July 2007

8. Patrick Clyde Wright, b. 17 Mar 1959 8. Catherine Ranell Wright, b. 11 Dec. 1962

m. (1) Donald Hugh Morris, b. 4 Apr. 1981, m. (2) William Anthony Shealy, b. 24 Sept. 1959

9. Meagan Michelle Morris, b. 30 June 1985, m. 19 May 2007 Rodney Corley Herlong, Jr., b. 27 Feb 1982

9. Catherine Amanda Morris, 6 Oct 1986 9. William Brooks Shealy, b. 6 July 1988


8. Teresa Wright, b. 28 Aug. 1967, m. 22 June 1991 Francis Michael Gossett

6. Emmie Kathleen Padgett, b. 13 Mar. 1913, d. 13 Mar 2000, m. 1948, Jake Burley Hill (no children)

5. Douglas Davenport Padgett, b. 20 June 1894, d. 7 Aug. 1989, m. 16 Apr. 1916 Gladys Elizabeth Wightman, b. 14 June 1898, d. 5 Nov. 1979, daughter of Sherard and Lydia Herlong Wightman

6. Gladys Madaline Padgette, b. 23 Mar. 1917, d. 19 Dec. 1993, m. 25 Dec.1938 Harold Abner Boney

7. Bettina Davenport Boney, b. 20 Feb. 1940, m. (1)14 Sept. 1958 Charles W. Pearce, b. 21 May 1926, m. (2) August 1979 Orson Beecher, b. 16 July 1914, m. (3) 29 Oct. 2006 Denver Combs, b. 18 March 1943

Children by first marriage 8. Charles Douglas Pearce, b. 28 Sept. 1959 8. Scott Pearce, b. 9 June 1961, m. 30 Dec.

1983 Sharon Davis, b. 19 Apr. 1960 9. Jeffrey Pearce, b. 3 Mar. 1998 7. Harold Abner Boney, Jr., b. 11 Sept. 1944, m.

Anita Marie Folsom, b. 20 Jan. 1942 8. Bryan Boney, b. 17 May 1969 8. Anita Elizabeth (Lisa) Boney, b. 22 Oct.

1971, m. 7 Apr. 2001 David McNeely Bradham, b. 13 Dec. 1970

9. Anita Alexander Bradham, b. 26 Aug. 2002

9. Elizabeth McCauley Bradham, 30 July 2004

9. Tyler McNeely Bradham, 9 Mar. 2007 7. Barry David Boney, b. 19 Dec. 1948


m.1) Phyllis Coughlin, b. 8 Oct. 1953 (divorced)

8. David Davenport Boney, b. 9 Mar. 1982 m.2) Sherrie Harrison, b. 20 Dec. 1958 (divorced)

8. Brooke Renee Boney, b. 24 March 1983, m. 12 Mar. 2005 Travis Michael Smith, b. 14 Jan 1978

6. Curtis Davenport Padgette, b. 6 Aug. 1920, d. 4 Aug. 2008, m. 11 June 1943 Edith Williamson Wooten, b. 8 July 1921, d. 10 Nov. 2004

7. Robert Lewis Padgette, b 2 Oct. 1946 m.1) 19 Aug. 1967 Carolyn Ruth Norton, b. 7

Apr. 1946 (divorced) 8. Robert Lewis Padgette, Jr., b. 12 June 1970

m. 16 Dec. 1995 Heather Marie Clapp, b. 23 July 1970

9. Cameron Matthew Padgette, b. 4 Mar. 2004

9. Nathan Robert Padgette, b. 12 Oct. 2006

8. Elizabeth Ruth Padgette, b. 11 May 1974 m.2) 1 Apr. 1978, Martha Rebecca Eason, b.

26 Mar. 1948, stepson Christopher Mark Eason , b. 10 Oct. 1966 7. Edith Williamson Padgette, b. 19 Jan. 1950 6. Ruby Euela (Bela) Padgette, b. 29 July 1931, m.

18 Aug. 1951 James Edmund Herlong, b. 22 July 1923, d. 17 Jan. 2006

7. James Edmund Herlong, Jr. b. 20 Sept. 1952, and Vicki Bane, b. 14 July 1958

8. Charity Leigh Herlong, b. 8 Feb. 1974 m. (1) Apr. 1977, Kathy Gavin Thames, b.

Sept. 1954


8. James Kirk Herlong, b. 29 Nov. 1977 and Christine Tannone, b. 19 Jan. 1983

9. Zackery James Herlong, b. 11 Dec. 2006

9. Jonathan Alexander Herlong, b. 19 June 2008

m. (2) Oct. 2003 Wendie Smith, b. 15 July 1949

7. Gladys Madaline Herlong, b. 1 Oct. 1954, m. 18 June 1977 Don Keller Haycraft, b. 16 March 1955

8. James Keller Herlong Haycraft, b. 19 Dec. 1984

8. Daniel Padgett Herlong Haycraft, b. 13 Jun. 1987

8. Jesse Davenport Herlong Haycraft, b 13 Mar. 1992

8. Travis Major Herlong Haycraft, b. 11 Jan. 1996

7. William Davenport Herlong, b. 29 Nov. 1958, m. 30 July 1982 Joan Egan, b. 20 May 1959

8. Jackson Davenport Herlong, b. 19 Apr. 1984

8. Mary D’Arcy Herlong, b. 28 Mar. 1986 8. Martha Grace Herlong, b. 15 Jun. 1989 8. Blanche Helen Herlong, b. 10 Jun. 1992 7. Minier Alice Herlong, b. 25 July 1967, m. 17

June 1995 Heyward Singley Powe, b. 8 March 1967

8. Padgett Singley Powe, b. 3 Oct. 1997 8. Harrison Price Powe, b. 15 Sept. 2002 6. Douglas Donald Padgette, b. 29 June 1934, m.

30 July 1955 Barbara Ann Rogers, b. 26 July 1935


7. Stephen Rogers Padgette, b. 29 May 1958, m. 3 June 1981 1) Dianne Welsh (divorced)

8. Christopher John Padgette, b. 24 Dec. 1988

8. Lauren Padgette, b. 15 June 1991 m. 29 Sept. 1996, 2) Dominique Francx, b. 5 Jan. 1970

8. Eric Padgette, b. 12 Feb. 1998 8. Hannah Padgette, b. 27 Dec. 2000 7. Mark Douglas Padgette, b. 9 Jan. 1962, m. 25

Apr. 1992 Michelle Schendler, b. 27 Jan, 1964 8. Alec Schendler Padgette, b. 18 Apr. 1994 8. Erika Elizabeth Padgette, b. 2 Oct. 1999 5. Henry Grady Padgett, b. 28 Aug. 1895, d. Apr. 1896 5. Augustus Elliott Padgett, b. 28 July 1901, d. 25 Jan.

1975, m. Essie Stone, b. 11 Feb. 1902, d. 31 Mar. 1968.

6. Grace Euela Padgett, b. 18 Sept. 1921, m. 1 July 1943, Rolland Francis Boldon. b. 3 Apr. 1919

7. Rolland F. Boland, Jr., b. 21 May 1945, m. Debra Richards

8. Douglas Rolland Boldon, b. June 1981 8. Daniel Earl Boldon, b. June 1981 7. Richard Alan Boldon, b. 8 Oct. 1947, m.

Nancy Frick 8. Elliott Boldon, b. 15 May 1990 7. Linda Kay Boldon. 24 Oct. 1949, m. 9 Sept.

1972 Philip Leonard Maslowe, b. 1 Feb. 1947 8. Kathryn Elisabeth Maslowe, b. 8 Jan. 1980 8. Stone Padgett Maslowe, b. 26 Nov. 1982 8. Meghan Grace Maslowe, b. 1 Nov. 1984,

m. 6 April 2007 Ryan Stuart Smith, b. 28 Apr. 1984

9. Hannah Grace Smith, b. 18 July 2007


6. Horace Davenport Padgett, b. 14 Apr. 1924, m. 3 March 1947 Mildred Kirkland, b. 30 Jan. 1929

7. Horace Davenport Padgett, Jr., b. 7 Dec. 1947, m. 8 Aug. 1970 Patricia Milam, b. Apr. 1949

8. Amanda Milam Padgett, b. 27 June 1981 8. Emily Stone Padgett, b. 17 Mar. 1984 7. Sandra Lee Padgett, b. 19 July 1962 7. Barbara Lynn Padgett, b. 22 April 1965 6. Augustus Elliott Padget, Jr., b. 18 July 1926 m. 2

July 1949 Kathleen Caughman, b. 21 Apr. 1930 7. Susan Gail Padget, b. 29 July 1953, m. Joseph

William Yonce, III, b. 10 Apr. 1942 8. Kimberly Page Yonce, b. 4 Apr. 1974, m. 18

Oct. 2003 William Timmerman 9. Elizabeth Page Timmerman. b. 7 Feb.

2006 8. Joseph Elliott Yonce, b. 27 Jan. 1980 7. Timothy Oscar Padgett, b. 7 Dec. 1962 m.

May 1987 Karen Dianne Norris, b. May 1966 8. Tiffany Padget, b. 10 March 1991 8. Elliott Padget, b. 11 May 1994 4. William Jacobson Padgett, b. 10 May 1862, d. age 10

mo. 4. Martha Catherine Padgett, b. 8 Feb. 1864, d. age 6 mo. 4. Annie Leone Padgett, b. 4 Oct. 1865 (Aunt Annie), m.

18 Dec. 1888, Stonewall Jackson Matthews. Five children: Ashby Leo Matthews, Frances Everett Matthews, Stonewall Jackson Matthews, Eva Leona Matthews, Annie Dorothy Matthews

4. Mary Lark Padgett, b. 25 Apr. 1867 (Aunt Mame), b. 25 Apr. 1867, m. Marion Pope Trotter, b. 5 June 1857, d. 21 Nov. 1915. Seven children: Vera Trotter, Wellborn Pope Trotter, McCoy Padgett Trotter, Marion Denny Trotter, Mary Sue Trotter, John LeGrande Trotter


4. Susannah Matilda Padgett, b 12 Mar. 1869 (Aunt Matt), d. 31 Jan. 1948, m 18 Nov. 1892, James Pinckney Lindler, b. 9 Jan. 1868, d. 18 May 1927. Six children: Alma Cleora Lindler, Edith O’Keefe Lindler, James Bankston Lindler, Lillian Lorena Lindler, Kathleen Suzanne Lindler, Margaret Elizabeth Lindler.

4. Julia Ella Padgett, b. 7 Mar. 1871 (Aunt Ella), d. 13 June 1964, m. Joseph Wolfe Etheredge, b. 22 Sept. 1863, d. 28 Feb. 1937. Five children: Joseph Oscar Etheredge, Ella Grace Etheredge, Mahlon Padgett Etheredge, Eva Susannah Etheredge, Sophia Isabella Etheredge

4. Oscar Denny Padgett, b. 18 Oct. 1873 (Uncle Oscar), m. 5 Oct. 1905 Farrah Watson Smith. Five children: Edward Hipp Padgett, Frances Willard Padgett, Maye Watson Padgett, Erle Padgett, Ernest Oscar Padgett

4. Luther Gwaltney Padgett, b. 11 Nov. 1875, d. 17 Oct. 1961 (Uncle Luther), m. Sallie Padget, b. 6 Apr. 1885, d. 5 Aug. 1961. Five children: Luther Gwaltney Padgett, d. at two years old, Carrie Euphrates Padgett, Ernest Edwin Padgett, William Nathaniel Padgett, Elma Padgett

4. Mahlon Ethelbert Padgett, b. 6 Feb. 1878 (Uncle Mahlon), m. Motlena Herlong, 5 Apr. 1903, nine children: Mahlon Ethelbert Padgett, Jr., Oscar Denny Padgett, Ida Padgett, Sue Padgett, Eva Padgett, Michael Herlong Padgett, Mary Ann Padgett, Mahlena Padgett, Julia Padgett

4. Eva Euela Padgett, b. 15 June 1880, d. 30 Aug. 1908 (Aunt Eva), m. 25 Dec. 1907 Rev. William C. Allen, d. 30 Aug. 1908

4. Ernest Edwin Padgett, b. 3 Sept. 1883, d. 18 Dec. 1944 (Uncle Ernest), m.(1) Berta Hill, d. 14 May 1919, m.(2) 1931, Margaret Hill, sister of Berta. Two children: Margaret Sue Padgett, b. 1933, and Ernest Edwin Padgett, Jr., b. 1935


4. Pearl Omega Padgett, b. 14 Nov. 1886, d. 7 Oct. 1933 (Aunt Pearl), never married

William Padgett’s Children by second wife, Samantha (Mancy) Padgett (no information on these): 3. Eugenia Padgett, m. an Echberg 3. Laura Padgett, m. Ambrose Gibson 3. Eliza Padgett, m. a Bedenbaugh 3. Abe Padgett, m. Frances Aull 3. William Padgett, m. Mattie Miller 3. Davis Padgett, m. Katherine McLeod

padgett's my name - by d.d. padgett, as told to his daughter ruby p. herlong

Documents