Uncle Grover had grown up hard and poor and had gone to work in a cotton mill in Carroll County, Georgia, when he was ten, and he never really escaped.
He married my Aunt Jessie in the thirties and moved to the next county and tiny Moreland, Georgia, in the early fifties. They had four children by this time, and both worked in the Moreland Knitting Mill, which produced women’s hosiery. Aunt Jessie sat at a sewing machine ten hours a day for a pittance and Uncle Grover was in charge of keeping whatever machinery there is in a knitting mill in running order. Uncle Grover may not have been able to read or write, but he could take apart most any machine and put it back together again with all of the parts in the same position as they were when he started. This is a gift.
People came to my Uncle Grover from all over the county to have him work on their tractors, trucks, automobiles, and power lawn mowers, which is another story. I’m not sure when power lawn mowers were invented, but one didn’t appear in Moreland until the late 1950s. Boyce Kilgore ordered one from Sears and Roebuck. It had a rope crank to it and an adjustable blade (it went up and down). You still had to push it, like the mowers of old, but the engine made a nice sound and it cut more evenly than the powerless mowers and Boyce said it made cutting the grass a real pleasure.
He shouldn’t have said that, because everybody took him literally and began offering him the opportunity to cut lawns all over town.
He also inherited the grass-cutting job at both the Methodist and Baptist churches, not to mention both parsonages.
Boyce finally admitted to Loot Starkins he was, and I quote him, “goddamn tired of cutting every goddamn blade of goddamn grass in this goddamn town,” and Loot said, “Hell, Boyce, that’s what you get for thinking you’re better than everybody else and going out and buying yourself a power lawn mower.”
What all that has to do with my Uncle Grover is beyond me, except that Boyce’s power lawn mower did quit running one day, and Uncle Grover offered to fix it for him, but Boyce said, “Goddamnit, Grover, you put one hand on that goddamn power lawn mower and your ass is mine.”
Boyce never did have his power mower repaired until three or four others had popped up around town, and he could pass on his heavy grass-cutting duties to somebody else.
Uncle Grover’s mechanical sense actually came close to making him rich. I know very little about machines, so I can’t be specific here, but Uncle Grover tinkered around with one of the machines at the hosiery mill and altered it so it would do approximately twice the work it was doing before in half the time.
Before you knew it, all sorts of big businessmen and slick-talking lawyers descended upon Uncle Grover. And this confused him greatly. He’d had so little in his life, and now he was getting offers of thousands of dollars for the rights to his invention.
It was unfortunate that Uncle Grover was illiterate, because what eventually happened was he sold the rights to his invention to a big cotton man from Memphis for a check for twenty-five thousand dollars. Memphis went on to make millions from Uncle Grover’s genius.
But Uncle Grover did take some of his money and spent it on two things he wanted all his adult life—a new Pontiac and a trip to the Kentucky Derby. Nobody, not even Aunt Jessie, knew Uncle Grover cared anything for thoroughbred racing, but it turned out that he did, and he and Aunt Jessie drove the new Pontiac to Louisville for the Derby.
Uncle Grover never would say if he won any money betting at the Derby, but did tell everybody about the motel he and Aunt Jessie stayed in outside Chattanooga that had a bed that would vibrate if you put a quarter in the slot on the night table and about how smoothly the Pontiac ran.
After he returned from the Derby, Uncle Grover went back to the knitting mill and resumed his duties, making sure the machines he invented that made the guy in Memphis filthy rich operated properly. Uncle Grover and Aunt Jessie never moved out of the house they were living in before the twenty-five big ones, and Uncle Grover was still driving the ’54 Pontiac when he died in the late sixties.
Now, how Uncle Grover had a part in starting me toward journalism:
My parents separated when I was six, and my mother and I moved in with her parents in Moreland. My grandparents lived next door to Uncle Grover and Aunt Jessie.
My grandfather was still able to farm twelve acres back then, and certain agricultural chores were placed upon me even at my tender age.
I was in charge of gathering the eggs from the henhouse in the morning, rain or shine. That wouldn’t have been such a difficult task had it not been for the fact my grandfather’s rooster, Garland, didn’t like me. The minute I would set foot in the henhouse, Garland would charge at me. Six-year-old boys aren’t that much bigger than a rooster. I had to gather the eggs while defending myself from a crazed rooster with my legs, my hands being occupied with the eggs, of course.
“Get back, you goddamn rooster!” I screamed out one morning, unaware that my grandmother, a foot-washing Baptist, was in earshot. After a fifteen-minute sermon, based on the Commandment that says, “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain,” my grandmother cut a switch off a small tree and thrashed me severely.
“When you say your prayers tonight,” she scolded me, “you must ask God to forgive you for what I heard you say in the henhouse.”
That night I prayed, “I’m sorry I said what I did in the henhouse, and would you please kill that goddamn rooster for me?”
Garland, however, was the Methuselah of roosters. I forget the exact year he died, but he outlived all the hens and two of my dogs.
The henhouse experience was enough to sour me against agriculture, but there were other things that made me even more certain I wanted no part of any career that had to do with dirt and attack roosters.
I had to pull corn one Saturday morning. There I was, relaxing with a bowl of Rice Krispies, when my grandfather said, “I need you to help me pull corn this morning.”
Corn doesn’t want to be pulled. It’s more stubborn than a rooster protecting his harem. Ears of corn grow on the cornstalks, and the idea is to separate the ears from the stalks. Mr. T. probably wouldn’t have any trouble pulling corn, because he can lift a Roto-Rooter van. But not me. I was a small, thin boy and my hands developed blisters and my grandfather said things like, “You’ll never make a good farmer if you don’t learn how to pull corn.”
“If he thinks I’m going to be a farmer,” I said to myself, “he is sadly mistaken, e-i-e-i-o.”
I won’t go into all the stuff about shelling butter beans and digging up potatoes and planting tomatoes and going out, as they said in those days, to pick a mess of turnip greens. Simply know that as I hurried toward an age that included double figures, I was certain agriculture wasn’t in my future.
Some might tell a youngster that he doesn’t have to pick a career until he’s older, but that’s wrong. The earlier you decide what you are going to do in life, the bigger head start you get in pursuit of same.
My father had been a soldier, but I didn’t want to be a soldier. All that marching. My mother was a schoolteacher, but I didn’t want any part of that, either. Imagine having to go to school every day for your entire life.
I toyed with the idea of driving a train for a while. The Crescent Limited ran through Moreland between Atlanta and New Orleans on the Atlanta and West Point Railroad, and it seemed all the guy who drove the train had to do was sit there and blow the horn. I mean, you didn’t have to learn a lot about steering.
After that, I considered opening a truck stop. The only businesses Moreland had was the knitting mill, Cureton and Cole’s store, Bohannon’s Service Station, Johnson’s Service Station and Grocery Store, the Our House beer joint, and Steve Smith’s truck stop.
A boy could learn a lot in a place like Steve Smith’s truck stop. Steve was sweet on my mother, I think, and before she remarried (another guy), she would take me down to Steve’s for a cheeseburger. We’d sit in one of the booths,