The Colonel

My father was a product of Cottageville, West Virginia. Raised there during the great depression, he was the youngest of four children, two boys and two girls. Dad’s father, Wallace, was a horse trader, his neighbors all raised tobacco. Dad felt all of his life like he had to support the tobacco farmers so he chewed Mail Pouch, smoked El Producto cigars, would role his own cigarettes, smoke a pipe now and again, and even put in a pinch of snuff. Dad’s first job was driving sanitized jars from the creamery to the guys that made their own whiskey in the hills around Cottageville, he called it paradise. I have attached John Prines song "Paradise" with this post. He also swept out the round house in Huntington allowing the tramps to sneak in after everyone left at night for a warm place to sleep, and seeing they were out before anyone arrived in the morning the next day.

My father loved horses and this lead him to a short career in the rodeo. He enjoyed riding the bulls and would have lasted longer had he not been bucked off and broke both of his arms ending that career. He told the story of when he was growing up and a horse bit him in the right bicep. The doctor was nine miles away and the vet was three miles away. The vet gave him twenty-one stitches. He had the scar to prove it.

Dad also drove semi for thirty years going over three million miles and entering 48 states, Canada, and Mexico. I will never forget a trip he had to make for a company he had to work for. A company out of Chicago had bought up a bunch of old, handicapped, and insane horses near Dubuque and dad had to run them into Chicago to the “glue factory”. Even though I was about ten years old I could see the stress on dad’s face as he watched them load the horses to the trailer. Dad knew what was going to happen to these horses and it bothered him. He also realized that these horses were going to rock his truck all the way to Chicago. I saw that stress on his face only about three other times in my life.

Dad never wandered far from his roots, he always wore cowboy boots, loved pork chops and my mom’s biscuits, loved a Sunday afternoon nap when he was home, and loved to tinker with steam engines in the garage. I can still picture him sitting in his recliner with a check full of tobacco watching Sanford and Sons or the Rockford Files on a summer Friday night.

Expensive possessions mean very little to me, so I do not have a lot, what I do have are memories and I have some things that allow me to rekindle them. One possession I have are my dad’s spurs. They hang in my home.