Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Monday, August 24, 2009
Portland and Beyond Vol 3
http://picasaweb.google.com/nesthimer/MountSaintHelens#
Mount Saint Helens--beautiful, desolate and fascinating.
Mount Saint Helens--beautiful, desolate and fascinating.
Portland and Beyond 2
http://picasaweb.google.com/nesthimer/PortlandAndBeyond2#
We had a great day in the city, especially touring the Chinese Garden. Then the evening involved good food, good wine, good friends and playing Apples to Apples.
We had a great day in the city, especially touring the Chinese Garden. Then the evening involved good food, good wine, good friends and playing Apples to Apples.
Portland and Beyond
http://picasaweb.google.com/nesthimer/PortlandAndBeyond
First album, Cape Falcon, Oswald State Park, OR
First album, Cape Falcon, Oswald State Park, OR
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Scene: Caribou Coffee
Today, 9:30 a.m., in the quiet section to the right of the counter: four newspaper readers, three laptop users, two paperback readers and one pair of earbuds.
Kind of nice that the paper/book readers outnumbered the techies for a few minutes.
Kind of nice that the paper/book readers outnumbered the techies for a few minutes.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Cafe Scene
Young man with shaved head looks up when someone says "bald man" to her companion...mom trying to rustle two small children and her large to-go cup, computer users and cell phones now common as lattes, a loud group inside makes me glad for a mild morning when I can sit outside...I'm not the only one; most of us on the patio are singletons happy with our own company...is the shaved head guy flirting with the girl now?...I'd love another mocha...
Street Scene, PIttsboro
Middle schoolers with and without jackets, books and backpacks...jackets, books and backpacks with and without middle schoolers...a line at the ice cream counter at S & T's...dogwoods in the yard of the Hall London House...the mural on the side of the old hotel...a fella on a motorcycle, one of them with bad indigestion...a little dog worried because his human just disappeared into a shop...the menagerie on the lawn at French Connection...the warmth of old brick...the mystery and intrigue of those tools in Roy's shop...the comfort of knowing where to get equestrian wear, a banjo, photos developed, a facial, good coffee..the bridal gowns in the thrift shop window...a visit to Pittsboro Toys and a chat about the BBS (me: "some of those people are crazy")...dark clouds in the west. Time to go home.
Friday, January 30, 2009
I wrote the Brief Biography of my grandfather, Samuel Johnston, to preserve family stories, sorry that I hadn't begun to record them earlier. I hoped to capture the voices of old Sam's daughters. They--including my mother--loved to talk about him and their immediate family's growing up.
I hope you'll enjoy reading about people who are gone, reared in a time that's gone and in a place that's so changed it could be said to be gone.
I hope you'll enjoy reading about people who are gone, reared in a time that's gone and in a place that's so changed it could be said to be gone.
A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF SAM JOHNSTON
by Nora Jane Gaskin Esthimer
January 2001
To my cousins, brother and sister: I started this project when Penny asked me to write down stories I recall about our grandfather, Sam Johnston. Since most of what I know came from my mother, and the rest from Bon, Tib, and Polly, the information is slanted by the female perspective. I hope those of you who heard the men’s stories will make additions, corrections, and provide your own versions.
My thanks to Beverly for sending me her family history. It helped me fill in some blanks and correct some errors.
Years ago, Bon gave me what information she had about the Johnston family. The earliest one she could name was Joseph Johnston. He was Scotch-Irish and moved to Georgia from South Carolina. He was born February 22, 1780. He married Anna Alexander, who was born May 2, 1797.
Joseph and Anna’s oldest child was Samuel, born December 19, 1813. If those dates are right, then Joseph was 33 when his oldest son was born, and Anna was 16. They had nine children in all. The youngest, Andrew was born March 17, 1833 when Joseph was 53 and Anna was 36.
Jehu, Joseph and Anna’s fourth child, was born October 2, 1821. He was to become our great-grandfather. On October 1, 1846, Jehu he married Susan Shirley. He was a day short of his 25th birthday. Susan was born on January 20, 1830, so she was 16 years old. They had eleven children. The oldest, George, was born July 9, 1847 and the youngest, James Hugh Johnston, was born July 20, 1873. Jehu was 51 and Susan was 43.
Jehu and Susan’s eighth child was our grandfather, Samuel, born January 19, 1862.
We know that Jehu fought in the Civil War, when he was in his forties. There is a sad story about the death of Jehu’s and Susan’s oldest son, George. Jehu was away in the war and Susan was trying out a gun she was thinking of buying. No doubt, she needed a gun to protect and feed the family. She fired the gun and accidentally killed George.
I do not know how old George was at the time, but he may well have been old enough to be in the war himself. Yet, he was killed at home in a terrible accident, and his father had to receive that news while he was in the army. Jehu survived the war and lived to be 81 years old, dying on January 7, 1903.
Susan died August 8, 1919, age 89. (I do not remember ever hearing my mother or Tib or Bon or the others talk about their grandmother, but surely they knew her. Does anyone remember talk about her?)
The other thing we know about Jehu is that he made furniture. The desk that stood in Polly’s back bedroom, which I now have, was his work. He made a desk because he needed a desk. It is crude, functional, sturdy, and beautiful to my eye. Jehu taught his son, Sam, to make furniture, too. Laura has a bed and a chair Sam made.
I suspect that a lot of the traits Sam possessed, and passed down to his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, came from Jehu.
Sam was 22 years old when Laura Johnson was born, May 11, 1884. Laura, her three sisters and one brother were orphans and lived with their Uncle Newt and his family in the Wax community. Sam knew the family and when Laura was a little girl, he would bring her candy and hold her on his knee. I think he may have boarded with the family because I remember either Tib or Bon telling me that one of Laura’s chores when she was an older child was to heat water for him to shave. I can recall being told about a trick Laura played on Sam, but I don’t remember the details.
Sam and Laura married on June 7, 1906 when he was 44 and she was 22. Then came the children, Bonnie, June 21, 1907, Hallie (Tib), August 26, 1909, Nora, August 26, 1912, Samuel (Bud), May 22, 1914, Ned, May 5, 1917, Scott, September 30, 1920, and Virginia (Polly), October 22, 1924. My mother said that in those days, they didn’t tell the children much about certain things. Every so often, the children would be rounded up, given a box of oatmeal and told to go stay with Miz So-and-So for a few days. When they got back, there would be another baby. Mom also said she could remember her mother being sick once, and thinking back as an adult, Mom thought that there could have been a miscarriage.
In one of my last visits with Bon, she was recalling their childhood, and she said that Samuel (Bud) was her baby. She was almost seven when he was born, and I guess that was old enough to help out with the new one.
How Polly came to be called Polly is an example of those character traits I mentioned earlier. The new baby had been born, the seventh, and Miz Who’s-It came to the house to see the new little girl. She asked the baby’s name and was told they hadn’t named her yet. “Whatever you do, don’t name her Polly,” said Miz Who’s-It, “I can’t stand the name Polly.” Well, they didn’t name her Polly, but that’s what’s on her tombstone.
My mother’s name is another story. Her middle name was Jane, according to Laura and it was Mae, according to Sam. Apparently, Mae was an old girlfriend of Sam’s and Laura didn’t care for that. I have a copy of the legal document settling the Estate of Sam Johnston, and it’s Nora Mae in that document. But other family members called her Nora Jane, and my father’s nickname for her was Miss Jane.
Laura died of influenza on April 15, 1927. She was 43, had been married 21 years and left seven children. The oldest was 20 and the youngest was two and a half. And there was Sam, age 65, with all those young’uns.
Bonnie was through school and working when Laura died. Tib was away at school in Alabama. Margaret Moon and her husband, who was a cousin, went to Alabama to bring Tib home. At the age of 17, Tib took over the household, cooking, cleaning, acting as mama to the younger children. Polly surely viewed her as a surrogate mother. Nora, only three years to the day younger than Tib, didn’t take so well to being bossed around. Nora was the dishwasher, and Tib thought she should get up from the table and wash dishes right away. It didn’t matter that there was a new movie showing, or that there were things to do outside. Those dishes needed washing. For the rest of Nora’s life, she’d let the dishes sit until she got good and ready.
The boys could give Tib a hard time, too. At least once, somebody put chickens in her flour bin.
Two of Sam’s old maid sisters, Aunt Ann and Aunt Mary (pronounced Aint Ann and Aint Mary) lived with the family in Lindale at some time after Laura died. I don’t know their ages when they lived there, but I would think they were in their seventies or even eighties. It’s possible that they helped with the household, but Mom always made it sound as if they were there to be taken care of. My sister, Laura, recalled Polly telling her that it was her job as a little girl to wash Aunt Ann’s back every night.
The Johnstons, the mill, and Lindale are inseparable. Sam, with his mules and wagons, must have been there from close to the time that construction on the mill started. Although his fortunes and his family’s welfare depended upon the mill, as I understand it, he was never employed by the mill. He was an independent businessman who contracted with the mill. That seems to suit his character. And of course, he had a business to pass on to his son, Scott.
Sam got his two cents worth in when the mill village houses were being built. The Massachusetts-based company was putting high pitched roofs on the houses and Sam explained to them that they needn’t bother. Snow wasn’t much of a problem in Georgia.
By the time Sam and Laura were married, the mill was a going concern. The family lived in a house my mother always called “down on the corner.” You pass it on the street that goes out to Silver Creek Presbyterian Church. Mom felt affection for that house and lived there long enough—until she was about 12, I think—that it was important in her memories of growing up. I’m sure that would have been true for the Bon, Tib, Bud and Ned, too. Scott might have been too young to remember it well and Polly was not born when they moved to the house on the hill.
The house down on the corner was close to the mill, the school, the store, the depot, and everything else in town. The Johnstons would have had close neighbors there, too. They owned a cow and a pony said to be so mean only Nora could ride it.
My mother was a tomboy and apt to get into fights with boys. Sometimes the fights were in defense of Scott. He was her favorite and bigger boys (including Ned) picked on him, so naturally she waded in. When she got home dirty and ragged from a fight, her mama would whip her, but her dad defended her. He said she had to take up for herself. I think he was proud of his roughneck daughter. Bon and Tib were much more ladylike, probably like their mother.
Even Bon could get salty, though. This would have been in the nineteen thirties. Bon and Nora shared a bedroom. They heated by burning coal in the fireplace or a stove. One night, Nora wanted to stay up and read and Bon wanted to go to sleep. The light Nora had on bothered Bon, and she kept asking Nora to turn it out. Instead, Nora put another chunk of coal on the fire so she could stay up longer. Bon got up, took the tongs and pulled the coal off. Nora put it back on and it caught. Bon said, “If I was a man and had a peter, I’d put that fire out.”
My mother was born prematurely, at home, and weighed less than five pounds. She could not nurse, and they did not have much hope for her. Sam declared that no child of his would starve to death. He fed the infant sweet potato mashed with buttermilk and she lived to be 79 ½.
She also lived to defy her father. He would not let his daughters get their hair cut, and his word was law, even when they were grown. You are familiar with the hair—thick, curly, unruly. Nora finally went and got the damn mess cut off. Everybody held their breath to see what Sam would do. He didn’t speak to her for a few days, then everything was back to normal. He never said a word about it. So Bon and Tib got new hairdos, too.
Sam did not believe in educating his daughters beyond high school. Bon finished high school, but Tib did not because of her mother’s death. Nora wanted to get more education and she worked her way through junior college and business school and became a bookkeeper. She had to fight her father to do it. Years later, Polly went to college. I’m not sure if her father was still living then or not.
My father knew Scott and Bud in high school, at Gordon Lee in Chickamauga. He remembered them as being smart boys, and said that Bud was a good athlete. Funny that he would meet and marry their sister quite a few years later. Daddy never knew old Sam, but I think he felt as if he did, from knowing his children.
Bon married before her father died--Laura remembers hearing a story about some blow up the day of the wedding and Sam saying, I came here to see a wedding and I plan to see one--but none of the other children did. Tib was 32 when her father died. Nora was 29. The boys were all in their 20s. Of course, economic times were tough during the 1930s, but I think the biggest reason for them marrying late is that their father just did not want any of them leaving home.
That seems a little odd, when you think that he started a new business venture, sharing the fate of a mill rising up out of the earth, and married when he was middle aged. I guess he felt that he had exercised enough adventurousness for two generations.
Several years ago, I was at Silver Creek Presbyterian Church for a service and afterwards a very old man came up to me. He asked me if I was Nora’s girl and I said yes. “I sure do miss your granddaddy at a funeral,” he said. “Why is that?” I asked. “Because he always brought the liquor.”
Since Sam had been dead for forty-five years, I guess the old fellow was feeling pretty dry.
I asked Mom about Sam and the liquor and funerals and she said that when they were kids, they would all go out to Wax for funerals or homecoming and the preaching at the Primitive Baptist Church would go on all day long. Gradually, the men would disappear out of the church and congregate down in the woods and have a party.
Daddy visited Lindale in 1947 or 1948, before he and Mom married. He got to the house, was welcomed, and someone produced a jar of clear liquid from under the kitchen sink. Libations were poured all around. Daddy had been in the Navy in the Pacific during the War and he felt that he had had an experience or two, but that clear liquid was like nothing he’d ever tasted, and it just about took the top of his head off. One of Sam’s legacies was acquaintance with the local moonshiners.
Another liquor story: Ned and Bud left home to go to a family funeral in Alabama. They were to be gone several days, but they were home by nightfall on the day they’d left. They’d drunk their coming home liquor on the way and had to sleep it off—and replenish the supply, I’m sure.
I think any of us who remember The House on the hill would say that it was as much a part of the Johnston family as the curls are. Most summers, Mom would take Dop, Jeep and me to Lindale for a visit and she always referred to it as “going home.” For us, The House was the destination. Tib still cooked a big midday dinner. Ned and Jennie came home to eat and Bud stopped by. During the course of the day, it seems as if everyone passed through. Tib’s beau, Guy, brought fresh honeybuns every day. There was always divinity candy and a pound cake. Tib was in her element, lots of people in the house to feed and fuss at. She was like her father. She did not want anyone to leave or anything to change.
Sam had installed the first indoor bathroom in town in that house. Well, it was sort of indoors. He enclosed a section of the wraparound porch and you had to go out onto the porch to go into the bathroom.
Sometime, it must have been in the nineteen thirties, somebody started building a house down below The House and Sam went out of his way to let them know, he had seven children, an old maid sister, and one bathroom. If they thought he was going to quit pissing off his front porch, they were mistaken. But they could build there if they wanted to.
You might think that a man who installed an indoor toilet would embrace the idea of the telephone. He did not. He refused to have one. Finally, when he was out of town, his offspring had one installed. Sam refused to acknowledge its existence. Somebody got a neighbor to call. “Dad, So-and-So wants to talk to you.” Sam took the receiver and talked to So-and-So for a minute and hung up. “Well, Dad what do you think? Couldn’t you hear him just as plain?” “Aw hell, he only lives over yonder.” After that, Sam used the telephone.
The mill stayed open during the Depression, and that kept Sam in business, too. Mom was in school at Young Harris and found one of her friends, Ellen, crying over a letter. Ellen’s folks had written to tell her not to come home, they could not feed her. Sam told his daughter to bring her friend home to Lindale. Later, Ellen married Jack Logan and stayed.
Sam was generous to those in need. There were lots of trains passing through Lindale and that meant hobos. If Sam came across a man in need of a meal, he would take him to the house down on the corner. There was always food on the stove or in the oven and Sam gave what he had. Laura was afraid of the tramps and if she saw them coming, she would grab as many children as she could and hide. Sam’s attitude must have been catching, though. After they had moved to The House and Laura had died, Tib once made a hobo a butterbean sandwich, because it was what she had.
There were also nights when a mill hand would knock on the back door and ask for Mr. Sam. Maybe the man had drunk or gambled away a paycheck, or maybe there were just more children than he could keep doctored and clothed. If he was a little short until payday, Sam would help out.
The stubbornness in Sam no doubt came from Jehu and Susan, Joseph and Anna, and no doubt it was passed on to his children. Ned and Scott going decades without speaking has to be the ultimate example. I can remember when they first had the falling out, they were warned that they would regret it one day. Their sisters and wives worried over it and tried to get them to patch things up. Finally, I think everyone just gave up and let them have it their way. What else was there to do? When The House was destroyed in the tornado, Ned and Jennie moved into another house the mill owned. It had been empty for a while and the grass was overgrown. It was Scott who went and mowed, but so far as I know no words passed between them.
Sam had his own standards for behavior and honesty was the highest virtue. Mom said he would curse someone up and down, but calling a man a son of a bitch really did not mean much. If he said the man was a rascal, that was serious, that meant he was dishonest. The child of his I knew best, my mother, shared that opinion. There was nothing worse to her than dishonesty, and hypocrisy and pretentiousness were forms of dishonesty. I am sure she got that from Sam and I am sure his other children were the same.
Dop remembers Mom quoting her father as saying So-and-So may be cross-eyed, but he’s still honest.
Sam had angina and took nitroglycerin. He had periods of illness when he was in bed. Tib told me that she would sit with him and quilt. She recalled, word-for-word, conversations they had, joking, picking, teasing. And she smiled when she recalled.
In May 1941, a German U-boat sank an American merchant ship and in September 1941, a German submarine fired torpedoes at a US destroyer. Bud and Ned enlisted in the Navy. On October 6, 1941, Sam drove them to the train station and on his way home, he had a heart attack and died.
The document that settles his estate is dated April 4, 1946. Although Sam rented the houses he and his family lived in, he owned a lot of real property. He left each of his children real estate. The document was signed by A.A. Chapman, Archie Mills, and Jack Knight.
Sam Johnston was born as the Civil War was beginning and died as World War II was heating up. His children belonged to the generation that has been called “The Greatest Generation.” I would not argue with that, but it seems to me that the people of Sam’s generation were called upon to accept a tremendous amount of change in the world. It seems to me that Sam did his best to stand strong in the midst of that change. There is a good side to that, and there is a bad side to that. You could never accuse him of being weak-minded or weak-willed, though. And as I mentioned earlier, I see a lot of those traits still alive and well in my niece and nephews and my youngest cousins.
At Scott’s funeral, Jan Rhodes referred to the Johnstons as being people who did not get watered down. Amen.
by Nora Jane Gaskin Esthimer
January 2001
To my cousins, brother and sister: I started this project when Penny asked me to write down stories I recall about our grandfather, Sam Johnston. Since most of what I know came from my mother, and the rest from Bon, Tib, and Polly, the information is slanted by the female perspective. I hope those of you who heard the men’s stories will make additions, corrections, and provide your own versions.
My thanks to Beverly for sending me her family history. It helped me fill in some blanks and correct some errors.
Years ago, Bon gave me what information she had about the Johnston family. The earliest one she could name was Joseph Johnston. He was Scotch-Irish and moved to Georgia from South Carolina. He was born February 22, 1780. He married Anna Alexander, who was born May 2, 1797.
Joseph and Anna’s oldest child was Samuel, born December 19, 1813. If those dates are right, then Joseph was 33 when his oldest son was born, and Anna was 16. They had nine children in all. The youngest, Andrew was born March 17, 1833 when Joseph was 53 and Anna was 36.
Jehu, Joseph and Anna’s fourth child, was born October 2, 1821. He was to become our great-grandfather. On October 1, 1846, Jehu he married Susan Shirley. He was a day short of his 25th birthday. Susan was born on January 20, 1830, so she was 16 years old. They had eleven children. The oldest, George, was born July 9, 1847 and the youngest, James Hugh Johnston, was born July 20, 1873. Jehu was 51 and Susan was 43.
Jehu and Susan’s eighth child was our grandfather, Samuel, born January 19, 1862.
We know that Jehu fought in the Civil War, when he was in his forties. There is a sad story about the death of Jehu’s and Susan’s oldest son, George. Jehu was away in the war and Susan was trying out a gun she was thinking of buying. No doubt, she needed a gun to protect and feed the family. She fired the gun and accidentally killed George.
I do not know how old George was at the time, but he may well have been old enough to be in the war himself. Yet, he was killed at home in a terrible accident, and his father had to receive that news while he was in the army. Jehu survived the war and lived to be 81 years old, dying on January 7, 1903.
Susan died August 8, 1919, age 89. (I do not remember ever hearing my mother or Tib or Bon or the others talk about their grandmother, but surely they knew her. Does anyone remember talk about her?)
The other thing we know about Jehu is that he made furniture. The desk that stood in Polly’s back bedroom, which I now have, was his work. He made a desk because he needed a desk. It is crude, functional, sturdy, and beautiful to my eye. Jehu taught his son, Sam, to make furniture, too. Laura has a bed and a chair Sam made.
I suspect that a lot of the traits Sam possessed, and passed down to his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, came from Jehu.
Sam was 22 years old when Laura Johnson was born, May 11, 1884. Laura, her three sisters and one brother were orphans and lived with their Uncle Newt and his family in the Wax community. Sam knew the family and when Laura was a little girl, he would bring her candy and hold her on his knee. I think he may have boarded with the family because I remember either Tib or Bon telling me that one of Laura’s chores when she was an older child was to heat water for him to shave. I can recall being told about a trick Laura played on Sam, but I don’t remember the details.
Sam and Laura married on June 7, 1906 when he was 44 and she was 22. Then came the children, Bonnie, June 21, 1907, Hallie (Tib), August 26, 1909, Nora, August 26, 1912, Samuel (Bud), May 22, 1914, Ned, May 5, 1917, Scott, September 30, 1920, and Virginia (Polly), October 22, 1924. My mother said that in those days, they didn’t tell the children much about certain things. Every so often, the children would be rounded up, given a box of oatmeal and told to go stay with Miz So-and-So for a few days. When they got back, there would be another baby. Mom also said she could remember her mother being sick once, and thinking back as an adult, Mom thought that there could have been a miscarriage.
In one of my last visits with Bon, she was recalling their childhood, and she said that Samuel (Bud) was her baby. She was almost seven when he was born, and I guess that was old enough to help out with the new one.
How Polly came to be called Polly is an example of those character traits I mentioned earlier. The new baby had been born, the seventh, and Miz Who’s-It came to the house to see the new little girl. She asked the baby’s name and was told they hadn’t named her yet. “Whatever you do, don’t name her Polly,” said Miz Who’s-It, “I can’t stand the name Polly.” Well, they didn’t name her Polly, but that’s what’s on her tombstone.
My mother’s name is another story. Her middle name was Jane, according to Laura and it was Mae, according to Sam. Apparently, Mae was an old girlfriend of Sam’s and Laura didn’t care for that. I have a copy of the legal document settling the Estate of Sam Johnston, and it’s Nora Mae in that document. But other family members called her Nora Jane, and my father’s nickname for her was Miss Jane.
Laura died of influenza on April 15, 1927. She was 43, had been married 21 years and left seven children. The oldest was 20 and the youngest was two and a half. And there was Sam, age 65, with all those young’uns.
Bonnie was through school and working when Laura died. Tib was away at school in Alabama. Margaret Moon and her husband, who was a cousin, went to Alabama to bring Tib home. At the age of 17, Tib took over the household, cooking, cleaning, acting as mama to the younger children. Polly surely viewed her as a surrogate mother. Nora, only three years to the day younger than Tib, didn’t take so well to being bossed around. Nora was the dishwasher, and Tib thought she should get up from the table and wash dishes right away. It didn’t matter that there was a new movie showing, or that there were things to do outside. Those dishes needed washing. For the rest of Nora’s life, she’d let the dishes sit until she got good and ready.
The boys could give Tib a hard time, too. At least once, somebody put chickens in her flour bin.
Two of Sam’s old maid sisters, Aunt Ann and Aunt Mary (pronounced Aint Ann and Aint Mary) lived with the family in Lindale at some time after Laura died. I don’t know their ages when they lived there, but I would think they were in their seventies or even eighties. It’s possible that they helped with the household, but Mom always made it sound as if they were there to be taken care of. My sister, Laura, recalled Polly telling her that it was her job as a little girl to wash Aunt Ann’s back every night.
The Johnstons, the mill, and Lindale are inseparable. Sam, with his mules and wagons, must have been there from close to the time that construction on the mill started. Although his fortunes and his family’s welfare depended upon the mill, as I understand it, he was never employed by the mill. He was an independent businessman who contracted with the mill. That seems to suit his character. And of course, he had a business to pass on to his son, Scott.
Sam got his two cents worth in when the mill village houses were being built. The Massachusetts-based company was putting high pitched roofs on the houses and Sam explained to them that they needn’t bother. Snow wasn’t much of a problem in Georgia.
By the time Sam and Laura were married, the mill was a going concern. The family lived in a house my mother always called “down on the corner.” You pass it on the street that goes out to Silver Creek Presbyterian Church. Mom felt affection for that house and lived there long enough—until she was about 12, I think—that it was important in her memories of growing up. I’m sure that would have been true for the Bon, Tib, Bud and Ned, too. Scott might have been too young to remember it well and Polly was not born when they moved to the house on the hill.
The house down on the corner was close to the mill, the school, the store, the depot, and everything else in town. The Johnstons would have had close neighbors there, too. They owned a cow and a pony said to be so mean only Nora could ride it.
My mother was a tomboy and apt to get into fights with boys. Sometimes the fights were in defense of Scott. He was her favorite and bigger boys (including Ned) picked on him, so naturally she waded in. When she got home dirty and ragged from a fight, her mama would whip her, but her dad defended her. He said she had to take up for herself. I think he was proud of his roughneck daughter. Bon and Tib were much more ladylike, probably like their mother.
Even Bon could get salty, though. This would have been in the nineteen thirties. Bon and Nora shared a bedroom. They heated by burning coal in the fireplace or a stove. One night, Nora wanted to stay up and read and Bon wanted to go to sleep. The light Nora had on bothered Bon, and she kept asking Nora to turn it out. Instead, Nora put another chunk of coal on the fire so she could stay up longer. Bon got up, took the tongs and pulled the coal off. Nora put it back on and it caught. Bon said, “If I was a man and had a peter, I’d put that fire out.”
My mother was born prematurely, at home, and weighed less than five pounds. She could not nurse, and they did not have much hope for her. Sam declared that no child of his would starve to death. He fed the infant sweet potato mashed with buttermilk and she lived to be 79 ½.
She also lived to defy her father. He would not let his daughters get their hair cut, and his word was law, even when they were grown. You are familiar with the hair—thick, curly, unruly. Nora finally went and got the damn mess cut off. Everybody held their breath to see what Sam would do. He didn’t speak to her for a few days, then everything was back to normal. He never said a word about it. So Bon and Tib got new hairdos, too.
Sam did not believe in educating his daughters beyond high school. Bon finished high school, but Tib did not because of her mother’s death. Nora wanted to get more education and she worked her way through junior college and business school and became a bookkeeper. She had to fight her father to do it. Years later, Polly went to college. I’m not sure if her father was still living then or not.
My father knew Scott and Bud in high school, at Gordon Lee in Chickamauga. He remembered them as being smart boys, and said that Bud was a good athlete. Funny that he would meet and marry their sister quite a few years later. Daddy never knew old Sam, but I think he felt as if he did, from knowing his children.
Bon married before her father died--Laura remembers hearing a story about some blow up the day of the wedding and Sam saying, I came here to see a wedding and I plan to see one--but none of the other children did. Tib was 32 when her father died. Nora was 29. The boys were all in their 20s. Of course, economic times were tough during the 1930s, but I think the biggest reason for them marrying late is that their father just did not want any of them leaving home.
That seems a little odd, when you think that he started a new business venture, sharing the fate of a mill rising up out of the earth, and married when he was middle aged. I guess he felt that he had exercised enough adventurousness for two generations.
Several years ago, I was at Silver Creek Presbyterian Church for a service and afterwards a very old man came up to me. He asked me if I was Nora’s girl and I said yes. “I sure do miss your granddaddy at a funeral,” he said. “Why is that?” I asked. “Because he always brought the liquor.”
Since Sam had been dead for forty-five years, I guess the old fellow was feeling pretty dry.
I asked Mom about Sam and the liquor and funerals and she said that when they were kids, they would all go out to Wax for funerals or homecoming and the preaching at the Primitive Baptist Church would go on all day long. Gradually, the men would disappear out of the church and congregate down in the woods and have a party.
Daddy visited Lindale in 1947 or 1948, before he and Mom married. He got to the house, was welcomed, and someone produced a jar of clear liquid from under the kitchen sink. Libations were poured all around. Daddy had been in the Navy in the Pacific during the War and he felt that he had had an experience or two, but that clear liquid was like nothing he’d ever tasted, and it just about took the top of his head off. One of Sam’s legacies was acquaintance with the local moonshiners.
Another liquor story: Ned and Bud left home to go to a family funeral in Alabama. They were to be gone several days, but they were home by nightfall on the day they’d left. They’d drunk their coming home liquor on the way and had to sleep it off—and replenish the supply, I’m sure.
I think any of us who remember The House on the hill would say that it was as much a part of the Johnston family as the curls are. Most summers, Mom would take Dop, Jeep and me to Lindale for a visit and she always referred to it as “going home.” For us, The House was the destination. Tib still cooked a big midday dinner. Ned and Jennie came home to eat and Bud stopped by. During the course of the day, it seems as if everyone passed through. Tib’s beau, Guy, brought fresh honeybuns every day. There was always divinity candy and a pound cake. Tib was in her element, lots of people in the house to feed and fuss at. She was like her father. She did not want anyone to leave or anything to change.
Sam had installed the first indoor bathroom in town in that house. Well, it was sort of indoors. He enclosed a section of the wraparound porch and you had to go out onto the porch to go into the bathroom.
Sometime, it must have been in the nineteen thirties, somebody started building a house down below The House and Sam went out of his way to let them know, he had seven children, an old maid sister, and one bathroom. If they thought he was going to quit pissing off his front porch, they were mistaken. But they could build there if they wanted to.
You might think that a man who installed an indoor toilet would embrace the idea of the telephone. He did not. He refused to have one. Finally, when he was out of town, his offspring had one installed. Sam refused to acknowledge its existence. Somebody got a neighbor to call. “Dad, So-and-So wants to talk to you.” Sam took the receiver and talked to So-and-So for a minute and hung up. “Well, Dad what do you think? Couldn’t you hear him just as plain?” “Aw hell, he only lives over yonder.” After that, Sam used the telephone.
The mill stayed open during the Depression, and that kept Sam in business, too. Mom was in school at Young Harris and found one of her friends, Ellen, crying over a letter. Ellen’s folks had written to tell her not to come home, they could not feed her. Sam told his daughter to bring her friend home to Lindale. Later, Ellen married Jack Logan and stayed.
Sam was generous to those in need. There were lots of trains passing through Lindale and that meant hobos. If Sam came across a man in need of a meal, he would take him to the house down on the corner. There was always food on the stove or in the oven and Sam gave what he had. Laura was afraid of the tramps and if she saw them coming, she would grab as many children as she could and hide. Sam’s attitude must have been catching, though. After they had moved to The House and Laura had died, Tib once made a hobo a butterbean sandwich, because it was what she had.
There were also nights when a mill hand would knock on the back door and ask for Mr. Sam. Maybe the man had drunk or gambled away a paycheck, or maybe there were just more children than he could keep doctored and clothed. If he was a little short until payday, Sam would help out.
The stubbornness in Sam no doubt came from Jehu and Susan, Joseph and Anna, and no doubt it was passed on to his children. Ned and Scott going decades without speaking has to be the ultimate example. I can remember when they first had the falling out, they were warned that they would regret it one day. Their sisters and wives worried over it and tried to get them to patch things up. Finally, I think everyone just gave up and let them have it their way. What else was there to do? When The House was destroyed in the tornado, Ned and Jennie moved into another house the mill owned. It had been empty for a while and the grass was overgrown. It was Scott who went and mowed, but so far as I know no words passed between them.
Sam had his own standards for behavior and honesty was the highest virtue. Mom said he would curse someone up and down, but calling a man a son of a bitch really did not mean much. If he said the man was a rascal, that was serious, that meant he was dishonest. The child of his I knew best, my mother, shared that opinion. There was nothing worse to her than dishonesty, and hypocrisy and pretentiousness were forms of dishonesty. I am sure she got that from Sam and I am sure his other children were the same.
Dop remembers Mom quoting her father as saying So-and-So may be cross-eyed, but he’s still honest.
Sam had angina and took nitroglycerin. He had periods of illness when he was in bed. Tib told me that she would sit with him and quilt. She recalled, word-for-word, conversations they had, joking, picking, teasing. And she smiled when she recalled.
In May 1941, a German U-boat sank an American merchant ship and in September 1941, a German submarine fired torpedoes at a US destroyer. Bud and Ned enlisted in the Navy. On October 6, 1941, Sam drove them to the train station and on his way home, he had a heart attack and died.
The document that settles his estate is dated April 4, 1946. Although Sam rented the houses he and his family lived in, he owned a lot of real property. He left each of his children real estate. The document was signed by A.A. Chapman, Archie Mills, and Jack Knight.
Sam Johnston was born as the Civil War was beginning and died as World War II was heating up. His children belonged to the generation that has been called “The Greatest Generation.” I would not argue with that, but it seems to me that the people of Sam’s generation were called upon to accept a tremendous amount of change in the world. It seems to me that Sam did his best to stand strong in the midst of that change. There is a good side to that, and there is a bad side to that. You could never accuse him of being weak-minded or weak-willed, though. And as I mentioned earlier, I see a lot of those traits still alive and well in my niece and nephews and my youngest cousins.
At Scott’s funeral, Jan Rhodes referred to the Johnstons as being people who did not get watered down. Amen.
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