Ethyl Remembers: Characters

One thing was true about Tishomingo County: It was full of characters.  There was the neighbor who lived just down the road and came every morning for coffee.  He had never married and he shared a house with his two sisters.  One of them was a maiden lady and the other one was divorced with a son, so neither of them were up to the morning task of seeing to if he had coffee.   Instead of making a pot for himself, he always showed up at our house at breakfast time for coffee.  For fifty years until a massive stroke disabled her, my mother made biscuits every morning of her life.  There were always eggs and some type of breakfast meat, either ham, sausage or bacon.  My dad had a smoke house and every winter he killed a couple of hogs and cured the meat.  I thought all people had an ample supply of country ham and bacon and sausage.  Funny the things you take for granted when you're a kid.
Dick, our neighbor,  was always invited to sit down and eat with us, but he always declined.  He just came for coffee.  If he didn't show up we knew he was sick or something bad had happened to him.  The front door was never locked and he never knocked.  In summer we would hear the screen door on the front open and close and we knew it was him.  In winter he opened the wooden door and came straight through the house to the kitchen, pulled up a chair and my mother would always jump up and get him a cup of coffee.
Another thing I remember about Dick was his dog.  That dog went with him everywhere he went.  It would ride beside him in his pickup when he went to town.  In the summertime the windows would be down and the dog would sit up front with his head poked out and his tongue wagging.  When someone made a comment to him about how he pampered that animal he replied, "Be quiet, I don't want to hurt his feelings.  I haven't told him he's a dog yet".
Then there was my daddy's friend who made moonshine and sold it to buy food for his family when his crops failed.   Once when he was apprehended by the law and dragged up before the judge, his honor said to him that if he would just promise that he would never make illegal whiskey again, he would just fine him and let him go.  What he said to the judge has always amazed me.  "Your honor, I appreciate what you say, but I can't lie to you.  If my family gets hungry and I have no money I will make some shine and sell it".  He would do what he had to do to see that his kids didn't go hungry, but he wasn't going to lie about it even if it meant going to jail.  Such honesty is in short supply in today's world.
When telephones first came into the country homes, my mother and her siblings thought it was imperative that my grandmother who lived alone had one.  In those days there were few phone lines so the neighbors shared what was called a party line.  More than one household was on a phone line, and it was possible to pick up the phone and listen to what was happening to your neighbors.  One little old lady in our country was notorious for listening.  When the phone would ring and you would answer it, in a moment you could hear a little click and you knew Louella was on the phone.  Some of the very best rumors in the country got started from that party line.  She had a very high pitched shrill voice and I used to love to call her and lay the phone aside and listen to her screech and scream and demand who was on the other end of the phone.  Thankfully I never got caught.  Also it was great fun to call the little county store and ask the owner if he had Dr. Pepper in a bottle or Prince Albert (chewing tobacco) in a can.  When he would proudly announce that he did, we would laugh and tell him to let him out before he smothered.  Another screamer was to call an unsuspecting neighbor and tell them we were the power company and then ask if their refrigerators were running.  They would always assure us they were, and then we would laugh and tell them to catch it before it got out the door.
Then there was the grumpy old man who lived by himself in Iuka.  He hated all small animals and children, so some of the neighborhood boys decided it was time to retaliate.  They gathered up a large fresh cow pile and put it in a  paper grocery bag, which they deposited at the bottom of his front porch steps, then lit a match and set the bag on fire.  On boy knocked hard on the front door after which they all made a run for it and hid in the shrubbery.  When he saw the burning paper bag and ran down the steps to stomp out the fire with his feet, the rest is history.
Our world for the most part was simple and the pranks we played were harmless and funny.  What would not have been funny were the consequences if our parents had caught us.   They might actually have cared that we were harassing the neighbors.   How different so many parents are today whose kids "do no wrong" and the mischief is not only aggravating but downright harmful in many instances.  Tishomingo County was a good place to raise kids in the fifties and sixties.