Growing Up

About the Book

This story takes place in southern Indiana in the late nineteen twenties. The main character is Tom, my older brother. It was a time when everybody in our area had large families. To our family and our extended family, the children seemed to be the best thing that ever happened. The older children usually helped to raise the younger ones, but this was one of Tom’s problems as he grew up. He started watching his younger brothers when he was five. When Lester and Chris were nine and eleven, Tom was still supposed to watch them and he was sick of it.

This story opens in Memphis, Indiana. Tom was happy living there until he heard his father say the mill was closing and he would be out of work. This would mean moving back to Borden, Indiana, and that Pop would be working wherever he could find a job.

All the children, nine of them, sat quietly while Mom and Pop planned for the future. They had learned well that they had better not speak while the adults were having a serious conversation. They had heard so many times that children should be seen but not heard. Tom was eleven and his sister was a year and a half older. They glanced at each other and Tom rolled his eyes up into his head; they both knew that they felt the same way.  

Pop went to Borden and rented a house. When he came back he told Tom to take Lester and Chris and catch all the chickens. The hens were easy but they had trouble with the two roosters. During the rooster chase, one of them flew into the air; Chris was stabbed when the rooster landed on him. Mom looked at the wound and immediately blamed Tom because he hadn’t watched Chris.

Pop and another laid-off worker loaded the furniture on a new Ford flat-bed truck with a fence on the front and two sides. Pop told Tom, Lester, and Chris to sit on the chicken crates on the back of the truck. He told them they had to hold the three dogs on their laps.

Things were going smoothly until the rear wheels of the truck went through a deep chug hole. The boys, the chicken crates, and the dogs went up into the air several inches. The beagles were jumping, barking and trying to get off the truck. The coon-hound was howling. Chris started sneezing when a feather went up his nose. Tom was screaming at the top of his voice, “Stop! Stop! We’re falling off.”

   * * * *

At their new home the older children were immediately disappointed. The two-room house would have to hold nine children and their parents. In the spring and fall some of them could sleep in the attic. There wasn’t any electricity in the house, but that didn’t matter because kerosene lamps worked fine. When Mom took the group out to the woods to show them the outhouse, Mom couldn’t find it. Tom called from a little deeper in the woods, “Mom, I found it. It’s a board nailed between two trees.”

   * * * *  

A few days later, Pop announced that he was going to Bill’s house because Bill had something to show him. Tom and Lester went along; however, Chris wasn’t allowed to go because he had failed to fill the kitchen wood box the night before. On the way to Bill’s house they saw two boys flying kites and walked over to them for a better look. The boys allowed Tom and Lester to hold the string and fly the kites. Now Tom really wanted a kite, but he first had to have some string to build it.

At Bill’s house Pop was asked to look over a new horse in the barn. Pop first looked at the horse’s teeth and said that horse was about seven years old. When he finished his examination, including the horse’s feet, he declared the animal to be strong and healthy. The two men went outside to look at a tractor, leaving Tom and Lester alone in the barn. Tom saw a ball of strilng in the barn and decided he needed it to build and fly a kilte. He looked around and no one was lookinkg, so he reached for the string, hesitated and then picked

About the Author

I was born in Southern Indiana. By the time I was three there were nine of us children living with our parents in a two-room farm house in Borden, Indiana. We moved into this house shortly after the mill closed down in Memphis, Indiana. The family did some tobacco farming the first summer in Borden, but it brought in very little cash. In late spring Pop came in cold and wet from hunting all night. He died two weeks later from double pneumonia. We moved to Camp Taylor, Kentucky, and my older brothers supported the family by working on a truck garden farm. When I was ten I started working on the farm in the summer and going to school in the winter. We moved to Louisville, and at age fourteen I quit school and continued on the farm too. I went back to school at fifteen and a half.