I barely remember my grandfather, but I remember him being bedridden for a long time before his death. My grandmother was an Indian woman who outlived my grandfather by more than 20 years. She continued living alone on her farm, but she had children in separate houses about a mile away. She had a large fenced-in garden that she maintained until she was found dead there in her early nineties. She had weekly Sunday dinners for all the nearby family until she died.
My father's name was Isaac Spurgeon Wood. His father was Isaac Henry. Isaac is biblical and Spurgeon was a famous Baptist preacher. One of my uncles was named Pershing after a World War I general. I had a lovely Aunt Esther and I remember a troubled Aunt Ethel. I know little about that side of the family because we moved away when I was about seven years old.
My mother's family was also from that area, but were not a farming family. This grandfather, who was known as Big Daddy, worked for the railroad and traveled most of the time. He died fairly young, before I was born, and my grandmother lived alone for many years in Darlington, a tiny community with the area school. My grandmother was a very gregarious person and was known by all her family and neighbors as Mammie. Her given name was Exxer Bowers. She had three children -- my mother Beatrice, Uncle Lamar, and Aunt Jesse Merle.
My parents were very poorly educated. My father went to the fourth grade and could read or write little. He was needed to work on the farm. My mother went through the sixth grade, all that was available where she lived. In fact, she said she went to the sixth grade three times to learn as much as she could. She highly valued education. She wanted to be a teacher.
After they married, my father continued farming, and we lived in an old farmhouse built out of roughcut planks. I was born in that house, birthed by a Dr. Brown. My earliest memories include looking through cracks in the wall to the outside world and picking cotton with a child-sized bag. Soon, my father built a more modern house across the dirt road and the original house was left to decay.
I am by far the youngest of my siblings. My sister, Barbara, was sixteen years older than me. Norman was twelve years older, and Isaac, Jr. was eight years older. They were raised on the farm and life was very limited and difficult. Plowing was done with a mule. The main crops were cotton for cash and corn for the animals. The land was very sandy and infertile.
I remember my father telling me that in one year before they left the farm he had an income of $300. Food seemed plentiful. They were expert gardeners. They grew watermelons, sugar cane, and pecans. They kept a milk cow and made butter in a hand churn. They pressed sugar cane and made syrup. They raised hogs and had a large smokehouse.
I am sure that my mother was unhappy with farm life. In some way the decision was made to leave. They sold out the farm and opened a restaurant and bar in the closest large town, DeFuniak Springs. Mammie was probably the source of that idea. After she was widowed, she ran a restaurant and bar in a bigger city, Crestview. My parents' place was primarily a juke joint that served food. There was a juke box and a shuffleboard table, and most of the profit was in beer.
The restaurant was a great success for a while. A nearby Air Force base was booming, and DeFuniak was near enough to benefit on rowdy weekends. My father and older brother kept cut off pool cues behind the counter to deal with aggressive customers. My father told me he would not call the military police in case of fights. They would have placed the bar on the off-limits list. For a while, many of the other places in DeFuniak were shut down and my parents' place was jumping.
While they were getting settled in to the restaurant, I lived some of the time with Mammie and with some family friends. They moved into the back of the building housing the restaurant. It was an old frame building with a small sleeping area in the back. Some time later, they rented a house a few blocks away. While we lived behind the bar, I could drop in when I wanted, sometimes late at night to mingle with large and raucus crowds. The smell of stale beer still brings back memories.
I was five years old at the time. I can calculate that because of a specific event that I remember. Hank Williams died in the back of a Cadillac convertible at age 29 on January 1, 1953. He was locally beloved because he was born about 50 miles away. My father told me that he had been hospitalized in DeFuniak for treatment of back pain, and drug and alcohol problems. One night was especially crowded and the next morning the jukebox still had a backlog of music queued up to play, and it was one Hank Williams song after another. My father told me then that Hank Williams had died.
I first started school in the rural community of Darlington. I lived with Mammie for a while, I suppose to get me out of the bar environmment. However, the business boom from the Air Force base soon fizzled and my parents came up with a new plan. We had relatives who had moved to central Florida to find work, and they encouraged my family to move there. Their first job was picking oranges seasonally and later they found other permanent jobs. I was in the first grade and was left to live with my sister Barbara and her family for about six months. My parents bought a small house in a rural area near Oldsmar in a neighborhood called Herda's Corner at the intersection of U.S. 19 and the Oldsmar road.
We lived there for a few months until my father bought a lot in Largo on a sand street subdivision just east of Largo High School. The Herdas Corner house was sold to Barbara's family who also decided to move down, and we moved into a small house trailer in Largo. My father bought salvaged material from houses that were being dismantled, and over many years added onto the trailer and finally moved it to the back yard. After some years, the rambling house had six bedrooms. The trailer in the back yard, and sometimes spare rooms, were let to renters and boarders.
When I was twelve years old, the house burned to the ground. I learned the reason when my father took me with him into the still-hot ashes to find the fusebox. He took out a penny from behind a fuse -- he did not want the insurance company to find out that he had bypassed a circuit that had surely overheated and caused the fire. He had recently bought a large, new refrigerator of which my mother was very proud. He had bought the refrigerator on credit. I went with him to talk to the finance company where he told them he would try to pay them sometime. The night the house burned was the only time I saw my stoic and taciturn father cry. I know that he felt the loss deeply, but was especially ashamed he had made such a mistake.
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