Coming Up the

Hard Way

By
Delbert Gray
 BOOK TITLE

Collinwood, Tennessee, USA

© 2009 by New Sound Studio
All rights reserved.

www.jimarrington.com

Printed in the United States of America.

 Introduction

I am Delbert Gray, I was born in Lauderdale County, Alabama,

near Killen; a small country town on May 22, 1928. This is
about my experiences growing up when times were hard as I
remember from the time I was about 3 years old through those
times until the present time. I hope you enjoy reading about the
good and bad adventures as I recall them.

Delbert Gray

i
 1
EARLY YEARS

The first I was old enough to remember, I was about three

years old, we had moved to Athens Alabama. The thing that
stands out in my mind was y dad taking me to the Milky Way
Farm which was between Athens Alabama and Pulaski
Tennessee. This farm was a dairy farm. I remember there were
many Holstein cattle which there weren’t any in the area I had
been. We only lived there as I remember for less than a year.
We later moved to Elgin, Alabama. Some people call it
Crossroads because two highways cross one another at this little
town. Elgin was a small community of about three hundred
people. They were building the Joe Wheeler Dam on the
Tennessee river during the time we lived there. There was a lot
of traffic each day as people went back and forth to work.
Times were hard during those days. My Dad was a
farmer and since we didn’t own a home, he was a sharecropper.
This was working land that was owned by another person for
dividing a share of the earnings with that person. Usually a forth
went to the land owner.

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 Coming Up the Hard Way

During this time, many people were coming to the area

looking for a job at the dam that was being built. I remember
that they would stop at our house and ask if we had something
we could give them to eat.
Lots of them hadn’t eaten for one or two days. We
wouldn’t have had it to give them if we didn’t raise a large
garden. This was the only way we could get by since we had no
money to buy other than the little we received from our share of
the proceeds of our crop. It took most of this to buy flour and
other items, as well as clothing.
We had several neighbors that lived close to us. They
were good families and would help you anyway they could, but
all were poor back then but most were in the same condition.
One of the families was Vornia and Tom Belue. I
remember Dad had an old guitar. It only had three or four strings
on it. I would go out on the back porch and make up songs about
my cows, hog, mules, etc. Mr. Tom would come out on his
porch and listen to me sing about my animals at this time. I
didn’t know until later that Mr. Tom was listening to me.
Mr. Tom and Mrs. Vornia had a daughter and son. The
daughter was about the same age as me. She was the only one
then that there was to play with since there wasn’t any boys my
age to play with, but we got along well.
Dad was not able during this time to buy me a little
wagon, so he cut out of a log, bored holes in them to make
wheels and lumber to finish the wagon.
We had a dog that was obtained after we moved to Elgin.
He was mixed with Curr and Bulldog. He was very playful, but
very gritty. I would tie a rope to the tongue of the wagon. I
would shake it at the dog and he would take hold of it and run
backwards around the yard. Lots of time we would pull a limb
down from a tree that would hold him off the ground until we
made him turn loose.

2
 CHAPTER ONE

During this time I had an uncle living at Elgin. He was

my mother’s brother. Also, he was one of the people helping to
build Joe Wheeler Dam. He had several children, as I remember;
there were one boy and four girls. The boy and oldest have
passed away as of the day I am writing this story.
At the last of my fifth birthday, we moved from Elgin to
the area of the little town of Center Star, Alabama. We lived in
an area known as the “Swamp.” It was called this because from
Center Star you ad to go through a swamp to get to where we
had moved to Center Star.
Like Elgin, it was a small community, but where we had
to move to, we only had one neighbor. They were a colored
family but were very good neighbors. Any time we needed any
help; there were there to help us.
I remember one time we had a dog come to our house, it
started going round and round until it fell over with a fit. Dad
had me go to our neighbor’s house to get him to come see what
was wrong with it. He immediately said it had Rabies. He took
his shotgun and shot it. We were very glad he did this, for we
had never seen a mad dog before.
It was here that I started to school, since I was six years
old and required to go to school. The bad part then was we
didn’t have school buses and I had to walk three miles each way
to and from school with about a mile of it through the swamp.
This was very bad during the winter. Two occasions still stand
out in my mind. One winter we had a lot of rain and frozen
weather. My Dad came to get me. Bing that the swampy road
was about ankle deep, Dad took me straddle of his hops and
carried me through the swamp. On another time my Dad came to
get me in a wagon. The Swampy mud came up tot the bolters
brake. This was a rough time for a six year old boy!
By the way, I have come this far in the story and
although I spoke of my parents, I hadn’t told you their names.
My mother was Evie Jones Gray and Dad was Herbert B. Gray.
They were wonderful parents. Both were good Christians and
gone on to be with Jesus. Dad passed away in 1989 and Mother

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 Coming Up the Hard Way

in 1993. I have three wonderful sisters living and one passed on

when she was about five months old.
Getting back to the school days, I remember we had a
large pasture with part of it in swamp grass. My Dad went to get
the cows since they didn’t come to be fed and to be milked. The
sun was about to set. The pasture in the swamp had a narrow
path where cows had walked going through the swamp.
I had never as a child heard my Dad say a cuss word, but
Dad came to the house out of breath. Mother looked at him
bewildered and said, “What in the world is wrong with you?”
Dad breathing hard and white as cotton replied, “I stepped on a
G_D_ snake stretching out arms about three and a half feet.”
Mother with mouth wide open, “what did you say?” Dad, “Oh I
stepped on a big snake.” This was the only time I hard my Dad
say a cuss word.
One other incident that stands out in my mind while were
living in Swamp was as I came out to get the old cedar water
bucket that was hung out on the front porch (since this was a
routine back then). I saw two men pass by the end of the porch.
One of them grabbed the dipper from the bucked and carried it
with them. I ran in and told Momma that they had taken our
dipper. Momma called Dad down at the barn and told him what
had happened. He came to the house in a hurry. Since the men
were not too far away, Dad hollered and told them wait there,
that he wanted to talk to them. When he started toward them, he
saw on of them toss something in a plum thicket that was near
them. Dad told them that his son said that they had taken our
dipper out of our water bucket on the front porch. One of the
men had a shot gun on his shoulder. When confronted, the other
man started pulling his shirt off and said anyone said they took
our dipper was a damn liar. Dad told him that his son saw it and
he didn’t lie. Mom saw that things were not going well so she
rushed up there to back Dad. When she got there, the man that
had pulled his shirt off threw two quarters at Dad saying, “We
didn’t take your dipper, but take this and buy you another one.”

4
 CHAPTER ONE

Dad being mad threw them back at him saying, “I don’t want the
money, I want the dipper.” Then Dad and Mom went back to the
house. Dad looked back and saw one of the men go back and
pick up something out of the plum thicket. The next day, Dad
went back to see what they might have done with the dipper.
Following the path, he found aluminum shavings where they had
cut the dipper up. This really upset Dad, he sent word by another
person that knew the two to never to come by the path through
our yard again. And that he would shoot them if they did. We
never saw them again.
At the end of the crop year we moved from the Swamp to
a farm known as part of the Holden farm. This was about three
miles north of Center Star, which was the opposite direction of
the Swamp. Dad again was a sharecropping on this farm. This
was my second year in school and I still had to walk three miles
each way to school. The road that I had to walk on was a lot
better than the Swamp; however, we lived out a little lane about
an eighth of a mile that didn’t have any Chirt on it. Also, the
main road had a lot of red clay that made it muddy and slippery
when it rained.
I don’t remember a lot of unusual things happening
during the year we lived here except two things. There was a
branch or small creek near. There was a waterfall that had about
a seven feet drop. At the top, you cold walk out about one third
of the way to fish below in the waterfall; since the water was
about six or seven feet deep, I decided to see if I could catch any
fish. Boy was I surprised, as soon as my bait went in hole of the
water, my line tightened up with a tug and I brought out a large
green Perch. This continued until I had caught about a dozen
about the same size. It was more than enough for a good meal.
During that year, I had returned several times having good
results each time.

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 Coming Up the Hard Way

The other thing that happened was quite humorous. Dad

and Uncle Solon Gray worked together cultivating about fifty
acres of bottom land. My two first cousins that were Uncle
Solon’s sons would help hoe corn while Dad and Uncle Solon
plowed it. We took lunch with us since it was about one mile
from the house. One day as we had sit down to eat lunch, Dad
and Uncle Solon told us that there was some little black fellows
down below us that would give us a good whipping. We thought
they were talking about some little colored boys about our age
that lived below the bottom land we were working in. This had
got us stirred up and we didn’t believe they could do it and were
just about to take off to see about it. Then they started laughing
and said we had better not go because those black fellows were
hornets and in their nest. So as you probably guessed, we didn’t
go down there.
By the way, I thought of another thing I wasn’t going to
mention, but though it was embarrassing, it did happen. One
evening as I started home from school, a short distance from the
school I had severe pain (excuse the language) to wee-wee and
houses were real close, no place to go, no bushes, or weeds and I
didn’t want to do that in my pants. So the only place I could get
was in the water ditch. Though embarrassed and hoping no one
was looking, I got relieved.
Later on that year, since it was about two miles a day
closer to walk, as I had changed to go to school at Lexington
Alabama. I did this because Dad was moving to a little farm
about three quarters of a mile closer to the buss that carried me
on to Lexington School. There was one thing that happened one
morning as I was going on a path through some woods on my
way to catch the bus, I saw several squirrels. I was amazed to see
one that was solid white. I saw it quite often during the time I
was going this route. To this date, I don’t recall seeing another
white squirrel.

6
 CHAPTER ONE

We moved to this little farm spoken about above. This

place consists of only fifty acres of land. On it was a log house
we would live in. It had a board roof and logs that had gaps
between them, some as much as two inches. They had been
filled in between the gaps with split sticks of wood and plastered
around the wood to seal up the gaps, yet a lot of it had come out
leaving holes you could see out of.

This made it hard to keep warm during the winter, but we

managed to make it with putting on extra clothes in the daytime
and more quilts at night. I remember seeing the stars sometimes
as I lay in bed at night. The thing that amazed me was when it
rained it didn’t leak, but when it came a snow, sometimes snow
would blow through and be on the bed the next morning. By the
way, this house didn’t have a ceiling in it, but back then in this
part of the country, people had to do without until times were
better.
At this time as I recall, it was the year of 1937. This
place of fifty acres only had a five acre cotton allotment which
was the amount allowed for this small place. This was one of the
hardest years of this young person’s life. We cultivated this five
acres of cotton and raised corn for meal and to feed our livestock
and chickens. It rained practically every day: Most of the time it
rained about one or two o’clock in the evening. It was about two
football field’s length from the field to the house. We would
have to take off and run as fast as we could, trying to get to the
house before it started raining real hard. This was hard work;
there was water standing in the middle of rows every day. We
would hoe the grass out of the cotton rows; it would start
growing in the middle. When it got dry enough to plow and Dad
plowed the middles, it would rain and set it to growing again in
the rows. It seemed no way to win.
Finally the rain slowed and we had killed most of
the grass and the cotton survived. A lot of people will find it
hard to believe, but our gross cash crop of cotton for the year
was $250 dollars.

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 Coming Up the Hard Way

This was rough and if we hadn't had a good garden of

vegetables, hogs for meat and lard. Also, our cow for milk and
butter plus eggs from our chickens, we probably couldn't have
made it.
I remember later when I was going to catch the bus it had
been real cold; near twenty degrees that morning. I had to cross a
small creek that had a waterfall of about one and one half feet.
The water was only about 1 inch deep above the fall. The rocks
were two or three inches thick to walk across on. That morning
as I stepped on the first rock to cross the creek it was frozen with
ice on it, so I slipped and fell off in waterfall on my side. I was
wet on the side that I fell on. I got out of the creek I was very
cold when cold air hit me. I was only about one hundred yards
from where I would catch the bus. I wondered if I should go
back home but it was about one and a half miles back home, and
the bus would be on in about ten minutes. It probably would be
better to catch the bus where with the heat on the bus would dry
me out. What I didn't realize was that by the time the bus came,
my clothes on the side I got wet were frozen hard.
I thought it would make me sick, but with the
heat on the bus, I dried out alright. I didn't have this problem
anymore since the winter was over soon after this incident..
One funny but serious thing happened before we moved
again. There was a very steep hill on the road that went by our
house. A lot of the old cars had the fuel tanks in the font under
the windshield and since the hill was so steep that when the fuel
was low, they would turn around the care and back up the hill.
One day I was out in the yard and heard the sound of a
car trying to get up the hill. After few tries and not making it, I
heard a loud roar, sure enough they had backed up on a smaller
hill coming down to approach the large hill. He had held the gas
pedal to the floor, but what the driver didn’t know a hundred
yards after topping the hill was a very sharp curve and there was
steep woodland hill on the outside of the curve.
All of a sudden I heard a loud crash/ I knew immediately
they had wrecked. I ran down there to see if any of them were

8
 CHAPTER ONE

seriously hurt. When I got there, since the old car was a
convertible; it had turned over and thrown all of them out of the
vehicle down the hill. Some of them were thrown about fifty feet
down the steep hill; most of them were just bruised and
scratched up, but one of them had some broke ribs. The comical
fact came when one of them said to the driver as they were
pretty much intoxicated, “you said I bet we would make the
next hill in high gear” and we did. After looking at that old car
that had wrecked, I realized it was a model that I hadn’t saw
before. It was an Erskine that had wooden spokes. And a lot was
broken out.
Soon after this, we moved to a farm known as the
Thigpen place. This was about seven miles west from where we
were living. This cause me to change schools since the bus I was
riding didn’t come by where we had moved to. I would now be
going to school at Greenhill Alabama. The farm we moved to
had more crop land of about eighty acres, also we had a nicer
and larger house. We had closer neighbors and they were very
good neighbors.
I remember that after we moved, that I was twelve years
old and that Dad had bought me a bicycle. I didn’t know how to
ride it. There was a chirt road near the house, so I decided to go
there to learn how to ride it. It was slightly down hill so I was
going to get on it and coast down the hill. The problem was it
had some pretty deep water ditches. The first time I started off I
got over balanced and down in the ditch I went, with a few
scratches from the briars on the bank. After several trips I
managed to stay in the road, finally learning to ride as I should.

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 Coming Up the Hard Way

2
CHAPTER

I remember that year as school started I had to catch the

bus and ride it for about seven miles to Greenhill School. Later
on as winter was starting to begin, the gravel road we had to
travel, because of rain that we had for several days, begin to
freeze and then thaw out. This caused the road to be soft and
give way. In the evening as we were to return home, the bus
would stall in the mud and we would unload until they managed
to get it out. We dreaded this because it happened several times.
We were glad when the road finally dried out.
One day Dad sent me with some corn to a small grocery
store about one mile from where we lived. I had to walk and
carry the corn on my shoulders, it was a half of a bushel of corn.
They had a small grist mill that would grind the corn into meal,
the man would keep one fourth of it for grinding it.
The store manager also operated the mill. A funny thing
happened while I waited for the corn to grind. A small boy came
in the store and asked the store owner for five cents wroth of
bologna. The owner said I can’t slice it that small. The young
boy asked, “ can you slice it ten cents worth?” The merchant
said yes. The boy said, “then cut it into and you have five cents
worth.” The merchant grinned and said, “you’re right” and gave
him the bologna.

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 CHAPTER ONE

About the next year as I went to school and arrived

entering the school, a young boy at school came in with a bloody
nose. That morning a new boy student had started school at
Greenhill. He was from Detroit Michigan and already stared a
fight bloodying a boy’s nose. The teacher, since this was the
students first day, gave him a stern talking. The next day another
boy at recess came in with a black eye caused by the same boy
from Detroit. This time one teacher held him while another
teacher paddled him good. The reason he was so bold, was that
he had took boxing while in Detroit. The teacher called a few
boys in and told them not to start a fight, but if he started
something not to give him the chance to get the first lick and to
protect their self. This is one of the reasons he was successful
because he got the first lick. One morning soon after he stared
some trouble with one of the boys, the teacher had to. Before the
young man from Detroit knew what happened, the other boy had
worked him over good. From that day forward, there wasn’t
anymore trouble from the boy from Detroit.
They didn’t have football at Greenhill at the time I
attended. It was probably fifteen years later before they had
organized football. They had a good basketball program and I
attended as many as I could.
I remember that even with no football program, we boys during
recess would choose sides and play what was suppose to be
touch football, but occasionally we would tackle one that was
about to get around us. I was tackling a boy bigger than me with
large feet. When he went down his feet came up and hit me
under the chin. This stopped me from wanting to play anymore
tag football.
Greenhill School at this time only went through the ninth
grade. I continued to go to this school until I finished the ninth
grade. After this, we moved to what was known as the Forsythe
Place. By this time Dad found out this was for sale. Dad bought
this farm that consisted of eighty acres with a big house and
barn.

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 Coming Up the Hard Way

Mr. Edward Forsythe was still living in the house at the

time that Dad bought it. Mr. Forsythe was building a new house
to move in. He was going to need another month to finish the
house. He told Dad since the house was so large, that we could
move into have of the house and they would live in the other
side. This we had to do because we had moved so the man could
rent the farm that we were moving from. We moved in one side
of the house we were purchasing.
We lived there with the Forsythe’s until they moved to
their new home. They were good people with two children; the
same as in our family. Since I had a sister named Earline that
was born when I was six years old. I was the only child old
enough to help Dad plow and plant our first year’s crop.
I remember dad told me to get some new plow lines
when I got out of school at the store in Center Hill that was two
miles from where we lived. Since he was planting corn and
needed them for the mile, I would be using. I forgot to get them
and Dad was very angry.
The bus I was riding had to go to a dead end road about a
mile below where we lived. I t would return the same route back
by the store. Dad said, “you catch the bus, get the lines and you
had better be back in fifteen minutes.” Knowing how angry dad
was, I ran the two miles back to the field. We then planted a
small field of corn. We had about a fifteen acre cotton allotment,
the amount you could have on this farm. We also raised about
fifteen or twenty acres of corn plus about five acres of hay.
Cotton was the cash crop. Our farm had two forty tracts. One of
them had the blue water creek on the south border. The creek in
most area was thirty to forty feet wide. On days when we didn’t
have to work on the farm, I would go fishing on the creek. It had
plenty of brim, blue and yellow cat, also some good bass and
buffalo fish. I caught some good strings of fish nearly every time
I would go.

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 CHAPTER ONE

During these times I would occasionally ride my bicycle

to a night basketball game at Greenhill School. It was seven
miles from our house to the school. I had reflectors on the back
and used a flashlight for the front when going home at night.
I remember one night I decided to try and get a head of
the cars going the same road I was traveling. I was amazed that I
went about three miles before the first car passed me. It makes a
lot of difference being young and strong from working all day in
the fields.
Another time when riding the bus to Lexington, it was in
the winter time and that afternoon rain started freezing on the
highway. We stared home on the bus; there was a steep hill at
Center Hill. We started up the hill and got within a hundred
yards of the top when the bus stopped still just setting there not
moving. The bus driver was afraid it might start to slide back
down hill which was about ¼ of a mile to the bottom and about a
20 foot fill on the right side of the road that if the bus went off
would turn over. He had us get off. A few of the boys got to the
side and pushed on the bus. It gradually started to move forward
and made it over the hill although some of us was still shaken up
a little.
A little while ago I spoke about going fishing on the Blue
Water Creek. There was a large hole of water that was about six
or eight feet deep. Several people had fished there and caught
blue catfish weighing about four or five pounds. I was there to
fish one Saturday. There was a large rock that stood out about
four feet from the bank over the creek. I was sitting on this rock
fishing when I got a tremendous tug on the pole I was fishing
with. I raised my pole very quickly, but I didn’t have anything
on my line. I put my line back in the water. The same thing
happened three more times with the same results with no fish on
the line; making me wonder what I was doing wrong. I had been
fishing on this creek dozens of times and never had this to
happen before. I thought a few minutes what I might do
different. It came to me that maybe I should go side ways instead
of upwards.

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 Coming Up the Hard Way

When I did this to my surprise, I caught the fish. It was a

large white buffalo fish; I carried it home and put it in a wash
tub. Its tail would turn up in the tub because it was about three
feet long. I didn’t weigh it but people that saw it said it would
weigh fifteen or twenty pounds. That was the largest fish I had
caught at that time of my life.
In the summer across the creek from where I fished was a
cow pasture. Some of the men and boys in the community
wanted to play some baseball. Since we didn’t have a ball field,
we decided to play in the pasture. The problem we had was there
were rocks as big as your fists and the cows had left a few bases
we didn’t need. So if you went sliding into a base you had better
make sure you were going to the right one. By the way, after that
game, we decided we didn’t want to play in the cow’s pasture
anymore.
During the summer, I had ridden my bicycle to visit my
cousins that live in the community called Springfield. It was six
or seven miles to where they lived. That evening, my uncle
Solon told my cousins to take the horses to a creek to water
them, since the lot they were in didn’t have water. One of my
cousins told me to get on the horse he was riding behind him.
The lot had an opening in the fence with the post staggered at an
angle. You could ride a horse through it going in the lot with the
right angle.

The problem was you had to be careful not let your legs
get caught by the posts. My cousin knew this but he didn’t tell
me. The cousin pulled his legs up so as not to hit the post. The
horse was going in a gallop. So not knowing this I didn’t get my
legs up in time. The post almost dragged me off the horse but I
managed to stay on barely stopping on the hips of the horse. No
more would I climb on the horse with him.
One day I was retuning on my bicycle from visiting my
cousins. About one mile from home was a long hill going down
a steep incline. Near the end was a sharp curve. Starting down
the hill, my chain came off my bicycle. There was a web wire

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 CHAPTER ONE

fence on the outside of the curve going down the hill. This really
scared me because I was going to fast to jump off and I had no
brakes since a car could only turn this curve doing about thirty
miles per hour. I’m sure I was doing about this as I entered this
curve. Luckily I made it okay, but it took about three hundred
feet dragging my feet on the ground to get stopped. I put the
chain back on and rode home.
We had a neighbor that lived on a farm on the backside
of our farm. On e spring, his cattle had gotten out and had got
into young corn that dad had planted. At this time, the corn was
about knee high. They had eaten and damaged it a lot. Dad drove
the cattle back to the neighbor’s house. Do told our neighbors to
repair his pasture fence so they wouldn’t get out anymore into
his corn. The man had a little dog that acted like it might bite my
Dad. The man hollered at the dog. “Come back here, did he bite
you?”, Dad said, “no, if he had, I would have cut his head off.”
What Dad didn’t know was that this was what the man had
named the dog.
One school day I asked Dad if I could come stay over
after school was out to see a basketball game that night at
Lexington School. Several other boys and I played softball on
the field at school until close to the time for the game. I knew
that some parents of the children that had transferred from
Greenhill would go back by Center Hill and I could ride with
them to Center Hill and walk the two miles from there to my
house. What I didn’t know was it would be the darkest night that
I had ever seen. If when they let me out, I hadn’t seen the road
from their lights to get started on the road, I really would have
been in trouble. It was so dark you couldn’t see your hands out
in front of you. The only way you could stay in the road was to
hold your arms out in order to feel the bushes near the ditch lines
on either side of the road. The ditches were not very deep so you
didn’t have to worry about stepping in a large ditch. It was about
two miles to our house. The only way I would know when I was
getting close to home was there was a sharp curve before getting
to the house and I kept getting in the ditch on the right until the

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 Coming Up the Hard Way

curve straighten out. I was from there about 150 yards to our
house. There was no ditch in front of our house. I stayed in the
left ditch line until it ran out. I knew then I had come to where
our house sits. I turned left and walked not seeing the house until
my knees struck the front porch. Boy was I thrilled to know
through the dark I had finally gotten home. I made sure that after
this, I had some kind of light with me at night.
During the time I attended the Greenhill School, a group
of students wanted to start a bluegrass band. Three of the boy’s
last names were parker. Two were brothers, the other was their
cousin. Another’s last name was Clemons and then there was
me. One of the Parkers played a mandolin, the other two played
guitars. The Clemons played the fiddle and I played the bass. We
played at chapel programs at the Greenhill School. We
continued to practice for about one year. We then got a program
on the radio station at Florence, Alabama. The program was for
thirty minutes on Saturdays.
One Saturday, as we were on our way to the station, Mr.
Clemons was driving the car we were riding in. The car was an
A model. It had cross springs. At a street, we had to make a
sharp right turn. As we turned, the springs shifted catching the
front wheels so that he couldn’t straighten the wheel up causing
the car to jump the curb going in the edge of the field. Some of
us were hit by musical instruments in the back of our heads, but
although it shook us up, none of us were hurt.
We were very careful from then on when we went on our way to
the station. We played on this station until we were finishing
high school.

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3
CHAPTER

While we were playing on this station, it brought about

the means of me meeting and eventually marriage of the girl that
became my wife. One Saturday on our program, since I was
chosen to be the speaker for our group, I was reading the request
for different songs and the names of the one’s that made the
request. I noticed that when I had gotten home, I had skipped
one of the requests. This troubled me, so I sit down and wrote
this young lady a letter apologizing that I missed her request. A
week later, I got a letter from her.
We wrote to each other a few times. I then got a letter
from her telling me they were having a home coming at Piney
Grove Church where a lot of her people were buried. She said
that she would like to meet me and to go with her to the
decoration. She told me how to get to her grandmother’s house.
And her brother would meet me there and shower where they
lived. It was called the Cummins Hollow. This was about May
1949. After finishing school, we started going steady and I
would borrow Dad’s car about every two weeks to go to
Collinwood, Tennessee where she lived with her parents.
One Sunday, as I was on my way up there between Iron
City, Tennessee and Collinwood, it was about 8:30 in the
morning, when I came upon a man laying in the road. This
caused me to be scared. He had been run over by a car. I got out
of the car and cautiously walked to him. He was asleep. I shook
him until he woke. He seemed to be somewhat intoxicated. I

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talked him to get him over to the side of the road, so he wouldn’t
get run over. I couldn’t get him to let me carry him home, so I
left him there. When I came back that afternoon, he was gone. I
never saw or heard of him again. The girl that later became my
wife was Patsy Cummins. She had one sister named Marie and
brothers’s Hoyt, Roy, Johnny and Prince Jr. and Tommy.
Patsy and I continued to go together until the last of
August 1949. We had planned to get married several months
later: About a week before September. Her family were going to
MO to pick cotton. She said she had rather go ahead and marry
before they left. I don’t think she wanted to go to MO and pick
cotton. We then set the date of September 9th, 1949 to be
married. At that time if you didn’t want to wait several days for
blood test and marriage licenses, you could go to Mississippi and
get married on the same day. I had a close friend that him and
his girlfriend were going to Iuka to get married, so we went with
them and married at the same time.
The funny thing was that there were several magistrates,
with each on of them wanting to perform the ceremony. They
finally agreed on which one to do the honors. At this time, this
was a common thing because most couples were not able to have
a fancy wedding. We came home and lived with her parents Mr.
and Mrs. Prince Cummins. We lived with them for several
months until we found a house to rent. During this time, I helped
Mr. Cummins and his sons make billets from hickory timber
used to make handles to go in hammers. We would cut the
timber into logs and haul them to tan open shed. This shed had a
tin roof on it and tin on all sides but the front was open.
We would cut the logs into about sixteen inch
blocks and then with a mall and chisel split them into sticks
large enough to make ha handle for a hammer. We would on a
good week, make three or four thousand billets. It usually takes
about two days to cut and haul enough timber to work five days
making the billets. At this time (of 1949) a thousand billets
would bring forty dollars a thousand. I remember this was in the
fall and winter, part time. One morning we went to cut some

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 CHAPTER ONE

timber. The ground had snow and frozen rain on it. One of Mr.
Cummins sons laid the ax down and it was on a hill side and it
slid all the way to the bottom of the hill. This is the only time we
tired to cut timber in this kind of weather.
I guess by the time you’ve read this far about my life,
you have decided, I’m a very humorous person. I guess I get
some of this from my father. I remember one morning when I
was about ten years old. I came into the living room where dad
was listening to Lum and Abner. There was tears streaming
down his cheeks with laughter. I asked him what was so funny.
He said, “Abner had gotten up that morning. Abner came in the
living room where Lum was, all bent over. Lum said, “what’s
wrong with you?” Abner answered, “Lord I don’t know, I can’t
straighten up, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to see the sunrise
and set again”. Lum got up to check on him to see what was
wrong. He found that Abner had put his long handle underwear
on backwards. He had the arms on his legs and the legs on his
arms with the straddle on his neck. Lum helped him get it right.
So this I guess is the reason I like a little humor. I think
we should be happy and enjoy life although we go through a lot
of trouble in life, but there is also a lot of good times.

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 Coming Up the Hard Way

4
CHAPTER

Getting back where I left off about my life at this time.

We found a little house to rent. It had a bedroom, living room
and a small kitchen. But it didn’t have electricity. We had some
furniture that our families and other shad given us. This included
a wood heater, wood cook stove, bed, table & chairs and other
items that we needed to start house keeping. A few months
before we moved, my wife gave birth to our first daughter. She
weighed about eight pounds. We had gone down to Patsy’s dad
and mother’s house that day. It was about 1:00 a.m. that night
when she went into labor. Since we didn’t have a hospital in
Collinwood and most of us called a local town doctor to do the
delivery; most of us not having medical insurance couldn’t
afford to go to the hospital.
I was very nervous, since this was something I had never
experienced. At about 4:00 a.m. the baby still hadn’t been born.
My wife was having tremendous pain. Several months before
this, my wife and I attended a revival at a local Church. We
became Christians and accepted Christ into our lives knowing
we had a child soon to be born. I know needed guidance to raise
our child the right way.
Since the baby hadn’t arrived by 4:00 a.m., I decided to
go out behind a small smoke house behind the main house. This
was a time I felt the need of my Lord. So I knelt and beg my
Lord for help.

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I will never forget this experience. As I got up from my

prayer, it seemed the skies lit up. When I stepped on the back
porch, I heard the cry of that little daughter. My heart leaped
with joy for my prayer had been answered.
As I guess you can realize she became my pride and joy,
but I guess I spoiled her as a lot of the first born are. We took her
home being proud parents and loving her as a precious little doll.
I got a job with Lee Moser, working at the saw mill and cutting
timber. It was in the beginning of spring. That winter before it
came a bad ice storm, breaking and damaging a lot of timber.
We were cutting any timber that could be used for lumber, even
if it was only one 2x4.
Sometimes you got 1x2x4 when it sawed out you had
two slabs and two strips when it was run through the edger. It
was very hard to keep them out of the way. When we started,
Mr. Moser only had one man on it. One of the men carrying the
slabs bet Mr. Moser that he couldn’t carry them out one day, that
he would give Mr. Moser back his weeks pay check. Mr. Moser
took the bet and the next day started carrying the slabs and threw
them over the end of the stack. You’ve never seen such a mess,
he had them scattered off the side and everywhere he could put
them. At noon after we ate, he quit and put two men on carrying
them. I worked there until March. After this a good friend of
mine, Hobard Risner helped me get a job at Genesco Shoe Plant
in Waynesboro, Tennessee. During this time my little girl was
growing like a weed and we were so proud of her. One week as I
was working at the shoe plant and she was nearly six months
old. She had bronchitis and we were afraid she would get
strangled when coughing, so we left the lamp burning. We did
this for several nights.

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 Coming Up the Hard Way

At this time our little girl name Oleta Marie was six
months old. When she had gotten over the bronchial trouble, she
would play and not want to go to sleep. When we would turn the
lamp off she would cry and scream until we turned it back on.
Then she would start playing as if it was daylight. Sometimes
around twelve or one o’clock, she would get drowsy and go to
sleep.
The problem was I was having to get up at 4:30 to get
ready to go to work and wasn’t getting enough sleep. After two
or three nights of this, I had to do something to break her from
this habit. I was aggravated and I had never scolded her. She had
a thick cloth diaper on, so I spanked her lightly one time and
said to her in a harsh voice, “hush”. After sobbing a while, she
hushed and went to sleep. We never heard a peep out of her
when we turned the lights out after this. My mother-in-law said
she was too young to be corrected. I told her if she knew to cry
for the light, she also knew not to cry for it when she was
corrected. At this time, she for her age learned fast.
Her little legs grew strong and I would stand her in my
hands by her feet. She would stand with her arms spread for
balance. I would keep my left hand out behind her in case she
would lose her balance. I never once had to catch her. She
continued to grow and before she was a year old she was
walking and going all over the house.

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5
CHAPTER

I’ll tell you more about my little girl later, but first I
want to tell you about an adventure I had one morning as I was
going to work. I rode to work with Mr. Earl Butler and several
other riders. It was winter time and in 1951 was worse than
usual. We were about halfway to Waynesboro when the 1940
Ford of Mr. Butler’s started freezing up. Mr. Butler couldn’t
believe it. He said his radiator only held two gallons and he had
one gallon of antifreeze in it and it shouldn’t freeze. He put a
sack over it and let it run idle for a while. It thawed out and with
the sack left over it, we made it to work. What we didn’t realize
was that it was twenty degrees below zero and it was the coldest
place in the United States according to the U.S. weather report.
To my knowledge, it has never been this cold here again. Also, I
believe a couple of years later, we had the largest snow that I
have ever seen. I measured it and it was seventeen inches. I
couldn’t move my car, the snow would push up over the front of
my car when I tried to move it. I’m glad we haven’t had another
one like that again.
Back to my little girl, “Oleta”. After she begin walking,
my wife had items on end tables and shelves and there’s where
Oleta wanted to get her little hands on them. Some of the items
were made of glass and we were afraid she would break them
and cut her hands. After the first or second time she had gotten
in them I begin to spank her hands and tell her this was a no-no.
I did this two or three times and she would go the other way.
From then on all I had to say was no-no & she got the message.

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 Coming Up the Hard Way

At the church we attended I met

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 10
CHAPTER

Friends, I’ve about ran out of things to write about, so I will

close out with these thoughts. I hope you have enjoyed rading
about my adventures of coming up the hard way.
Through all the years along with bad times there’s a lot
of wonderful times. My children, grandchildren, sisters, their
family and friends have been a blessing to me. Also Marlene’s
children are just like mine. Only one thing be the greatest
blessings of all. That we would be together in Heaven when life
is over and that includes you that read these writings.

The greatest blessing to you all,

Thanks,

Delbert Gray

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