00:00:05 Speaker 1: Welcome to this country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves from coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living. 00:00:12 Speaker 2: I want you to stay a. 00:00:13 Speaker 1: While as I share my experiences in life lessons. This Country Life is presented by Case Knives on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast. 00:00:25 Speaker 2: The airwaves have to offer. 00:00:27 Speaker 1: All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stories to share. Porridge, eggs and papaws. Grandfather's really only one requirement to be one, and that's to have a young and you like that, likes you, willing to call you that now, whether it's a blood relative or not, it's a moniker. I have myself, and I'm pretty proud to be one. Unfortunately I only knew one of mine, but to me, he was the best. 00:01:04 Speaker 2: He said. 00:01:05 Speaker 1: The bar is a grandparent for the rest of us in my family who called him that, And I've got a story about him, the father of my mother, a grandparent in the traditional sense who loved the duty but received it by default. But first I'm going to tell. 00:01:20 Speaker 2: You this story. 00:01:28 Speaker 1: This opening story is about a non traditional grandfather, the one who got the title through other circumstances. Just like the traditional grandfather doesn't matter how he got it, it's what he did with it once he received it. Brentley Smith, a native of the Sooner State and living in what she calls the heart of the Homeland. She's sent in a story about Tim, her grandfather. And since we're slipping up towards Father's Day in a few weeks, I thought i'd talk about Grandpa's today. So, in Brentley's word to my voice, here we go. Fresh pellets radded to the stove before the fireplace inserted door was closed. He calmly took a seat in the worn leather chair. With the light low and the flames dancing that old oak tree casting shadows on the wall, he knew the conditions were just right. 00:02:21 Speaker 2: He put an. 00:02:22 Speaker 1: Oversized orange cowboy hat on top of his head and begin to tell a story tonight. 00:02:27 Speaker 2: It's Goldilocks three Bears. 00:02:30 Speaker 1: Now, conveniently, he doesn't have to seek out volunteers to act out this tale, because there are already several little people in the room who are more than willing and eager for him to get started. We squeal and laugh as we run from porridge bowl to porridge bowl, and from Papa's. 00:02:46 Speaker 2: Bed to Baby Bear's bed. 00:02:49 Speaker 1: When the Bear family returns to their cabin, we all jump up and run to the woods outside. And that's when our storyteller calls after us. 00:02:58 Speaker 2: Remember there's bears. There's in them woods now. 00:03:04 Speaker 1: Still to this day, when I wake up in the early morning hours to climb a tree stand, my heart pounds in my chest as I'm still waiting for those bears to pop out of the woods that my grandparents land in northeast Oklahoma. 00:03:17 Speaker 2: Where there are, in fact no bears. 00:03:21 Speaker 1: My grandpa Tim is still acting out those stories with that oversized orange hat on his head, but this time it's with my own three little boys, and I'm no longer the little one running from porridge. 00:03:34 Speaker 2: Bowl to porridge bowl. 00:03:37 Speaker 1: And what a better place to start In the beginning, Tim married my grandma Kathy a month before I was born. Biologically he's not my grandpa, but by love he is. He chose to love the family he stepped into, and that is a most precious thing to me. It also speaks to the man I'm writing about today. When you take the time to get to know people, you will find that every now and then you come across someone that seems refreshingly, rare, genuine to who God made them to be, and you're attracted to their company like bees to honey. Tim is one of those people. Husband, father, business owner, gardener, paper boy, fisherman, auctioneer, cook, reader, teacher, veteran, grandpa and great grandpa are just some of the titles that fit this man. But there is one that he wears, the best storyteller. The mind of this man is extraordinary, and the best way I have found to describe it is as his own personal filing cabinet, packed full of details and pages from every person and interactions he's probably ever had. I still have not figured out his secret to keep it his memory so sharp, but I am prone to believe it's founded in his love of learning creativity. In the twenty nine years I've known to him, he's on the more shop, created beautiful gardens, cooked many good meals, rigged up his own fishing jugs, flies and lures, and has devoured one book after another. Once he masters one skill, he tackles another just to add to his list. And that alone has been one of my biggest inspirations lately. We've all benefited from his latest skill of leatherwork, dog collars, belts, guitars, traps, bracelets, and knife sheaths, all made by his willing hands. He grows tomato plants taller than anyone who walks by him, and smokes the best Thanksgiving ham you'll ever want to eat. He's a master of talents, and the creativity he weaves in his stories just adds to his list. Bloody Bones and corn Bread may sound like the title of an old Western nobby or maybe even a cordy horror movie. However, this is still one of Tim's most famous campfire stories from my childhood. Autumn nights in Oklahoma are perfect for sitting around the campfire late past our bedtimes, watching the flames the fire, the large brush piles ears attuned to the owl hooting nearby. We would sit on the edge of our seats stair wide eyed as we heard about the little boy who was sent to the store by his mother after school. He dawdled too long and had to make his way home in the dark, resulting in an ending that left us just scared enough to want to hear it again. It left an impression mark on all of us kids at that time, especially on my little brother, whose elementary teacher had a lot of questions from our mom after he copied it down for a writing assignment. 00:06:52 Speaker 2: Bringing that up still makes us bust into laughter. 00:06:55 Speaker 1: He may have mastered telling stories around the campfire, even acting out classics like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but I realize there is more to storytelling than just fiction. Every single conversation I have with him is weaved with thought provoking questions, a funny punchline, a lesson learned, wisdom shared, and all said in love. For the last few years, I've taken the liberty to record some of the everyday conversations I have with him, or even some he is having with others. 00:07:29 Speaker 2: I love randomly pulling. 00:07:31 Speaker 1: Them out on my phone and listening to some of my favorite voices and stories from those speakers. 00:07:38 Speaker 2: Stories told from his. 00:07:39 Speaker 1: Time in Vietnam, a phone conversation he had with his brother, laughter as he jokes about my uncle's fear of snakes. Each recording is filled with stories of specific people in exact locations and times throughout his life. He turns simple everyday conversations into stories worth remembering. There is something special and rare about him, and it's to regard people as worth knowing and remember. It can skim through those files in his memory until he lands on the exact one he was searching for. Doesn't matter if it took place just months ago or even decades back. He knows the details of the people he grew up around and worked with, he served with, where he did business with. He's a master of storytelling because he understands that people and their. 00:08:29 Speaker 2: Stories are the story. 00:08:32 Speaker 1: This has helped shape how I tell my own stories in life and how I get the privilege of telling them as the granddaughter of the true storyteller, one who chose to love a gaggle of little kids who just begged to hear Goldilocks in the Three Bears one more time, and who always remember that there's bears in them woods. And according to Brentley, it's just how that happened. Now, do yourself a favor and follow Brentley on Instagram. She's blogging away over at the Heart of the Homeland blog and my favorite island Reva the Diva. Hanson is going to post a LinkedIn where you can keep up with Tim's granddaughter. In the show description, it is well worth the look and the listen. Thank you Brentley, Thank you Tim. My grandfather, fine Us Weaverslye was born in Malvern, a city on the edge of the Washington Mountains in west central Arkansas, on August eighteenth, nineteen thirteen. When he hit the ground, he rounded the population number up to somewhere around two thousand, six hundred and ninety. At the time of his birth, Malvern had been the county seat of government for thirty years. A new business concern was started there that would later become Arkansas Power in Light, bringing electricity to much of the state. The brickmaking industry would also be a major influence in the area, with the city claiming to be the brick capital of the world. He grew up working hard and playing hard. He told me stories about being bullied by bigger boys and getting in fights for standing his ground and standing up for others. 00:10:25 Speaker 2: He said, if you needed to chunk. 00:10:26 Speaker 1: A rocket anyone that needed it, you didn't have to take your eyes off the boy that was going to get it to look for one. All you had to do was reach down around your feet. There was always one there. His family moved to southeast Tarkansas later on, and there he worked in the local lumber. 00:10:44 Speaker 2: Mill at night and farm during the day. 00:10:47 Speaker 1: These were hard times leading up to and during the Great Depression. A ten year period from nineteen twenty nine to nineteen thirty nine were over two hundred banks failed in the state, wiping out the savings of men. He married my grandmother, Beulah Player in nineteen thirty and by nineteen thirty three my uncle Charles was born. A few years later my mama, Betty lu would see the light of day, and then at my aunt Patricia in nineteen forty eight, who surprised everyone, most notably my grandmother. He worked two jobs to support his family. A lot of time he didn't have a car, so he walked to the saw mill and warned from our farm seven miles to town. After working all day in the fields, then after eight hours at the meal he made that same seven mile trek back home. That averages out to about five and a half hours a day of just walking, eight long hours at the saw mill, getting back home for breakfast around ten am, just to go. 00:11:50 Speaker 2: To work in the fields until time to eat supper. 00:11:53 Speaker 1: Take a nap, and start the long walk back to town at eight that night. The Following World War Two, times got better. He bought a store in town and built a house across from it on North Martin Street. He kept a farm, increased the cattle production, and built two modern for the time chicken houses to accommodate seventy thousand laying hens. He sold that store and built a second one on South Martin Street. I remember this one being built in the mid seventies. This store was supported by the egg farm and set across from the saw mill he walked to and from all those years ago, an every day reminder of how far he'd come by the literal sweat of his brow. And in the back of that new store was a process and planned for the eggs brought to town from the chicken houses. The collected eggs were washed, grated, separated, and boxed in big cardboard cases for wholesale distribution on a refrigerated bob truck driven by my Papa, another man who worked the route, and even my high school aged brother Tim when he wasn't driving the school bus. Of course, the egg machine was a big conveyor belt that threw an assembly line type operation, washed and sanitized first, then ran the eggs through a dark room with lights that lit them up from the bottom, allowing cracks to be easily seen by the person grading them. Once pasted there, they were separated by size and eventually rolled into stations where ladies packaged them in styrofoam cartings and blazoned with Sly Egg Company across the top. It was at that first door where a stranger challenged Papa's patience with rude behavior and an inappropriate language in front of my teenage mother and grandmother. It didn't bowld well for the stranger, who, along with sporting knots on his head and a bloody nose, has the idea that an old man had done it to him, my grandfather's premature white hair and giving him the look of someone twenty years older than he was. I talked about this that in great detail on episode three or one of This Country Life entitled The Country Store. You or to listen to that one if you hadn't already. But my grandfather's temperament was that of a man of faith, whose family, above all else, came first. His patience with his grandkids was legendary. His quiet and lovable sense of humor endeared him to all who knew him privately, and his honesty and integrity and dedication to doing what was right, common sense, and putting his family above all else except the Good Lord was the standard by which we were all measured. His tolerance for anything outside of that was nonexistent. And I believe that the combination of working so hard, literally around the clock, to take care of his family was what prompted the story I'm fixing to. 00:14:48 Speaker 2: Tell you now. 00:14:50 Speaker 1: Papa would give anyone the shirt off his back. He forgave debts owed him by folks who were trying but unable to pay. He'd lived that life as a young man raising a family in hard times, and he recognized what true effort was of a man doing all he could. Those folks might wake to find groceries sitting on their front porch that had been delivered during the hours of darkness, no bill, no note, just necessities for those that needed them. My grandparents' home sat across from the old store on North Martin Street, and every day he made his way to the farm to do what had to be done. Cows, hey, chickens, eggs. There was always something to do. He never had time to do anything else. He didn't hunt and I only saw him fish half a dozen times. The majority of those times when he came across from me and my friends fishing behind the chicken house. Is he was going about his chores. He didn't take time away from providing for all of us. He was forced to go to the doctor once, and after some tests, the doctor concluded that he had had a heart attack sometime in the recent passed and wondered why he hadn't told anyone. I didn't have time, that was his response. He had a high tolerance for pain and zero tolerance for a thief. And a thief had found his way onto our farm. 00:16:15 Speaker 2: They were stealing. 00:16:15 Speaker 1: Chickens and eggs, the two main ingredients of an egg farm. We lived on that farm, but over half a mile away from the chicken houses by the road, and over a quarter of a mile straight through the woods. Someone was slipping on their property during the middle of the night and stealing the eggs. From what we learned later, chickens too. I'm sure you're thinking stealing eggs. Those folks were probably just hungry. Well, it wasn't just a few eggs. It was cases of eggs. In each case held thirty six dozen some of y'all, who was tempting fate by stealing eggs from a man who took overwhelmingly personal everything that involved his family. They weren't just stealing from him. He would have just likely ignored that now they were stealing from his family. It was how we all survived, being invested partners and heirs to this whole operation. A significant portion of our income came from that farm, the farm that had been in my maternal family for five generations by the time I witnessed birth. Now, the way my grandfather saw it, the thief, by taking the chief commodity from that farm, was snatching food out of his grandkid's mouths and closed off their backs. He never said a word about it to me. Even years later, when I was a policeman, my mama told me that he figured he knew who was doing it and sent word through the grapevine that it needed to stop. 00:17:52 Speaker 2: But it didn't. 00:17:54 Speaker 1: Now what happened next is still up for debate. But the person that was suspected of doing it was well known in our rural areas being a thief. He was also a regular customer at our farm. Some folks a lot actually would stop by the farming buy eggs unwashed fresh out of the chicken. My grandfather more or less just covered the costs of the feet it took to keep the chicken alive enough to lay the eggs, and more or less was settling them for nothing. But this guy hadn't been by in a long time. A local restaurant started cutting back on their weekly egg order. These folks were all acquainted. Didn't take charlote holmes to figure out where the majority of the eggs were going and how they were getting there. So in drew Papa overreaction, he grabbed a rifle and waited for several nights on the egg thief to return. My grandmother feared and he was going to wind up in prison over someone stealing a bunch of eggs and a few chickens. Now, before someone starts balling about why he didn't call the shriff, allow me to clear that up for you. These were different times, right or wrong, and the sheriff had two deputies for the whole county. There were no game cameras to hang, there was no burglar alarm to install, and outside of driving by the farm when they were in the area or dragging off. 00:19:21 Speaker 2: A bullet ridden egg thief. 00:19:23 Speaker 1: There really wasn't a whole lot that they could have done. Besides, grandfather didn't have time to wait on whatever they would or wouldn't do. 00:19:33 Speaker 2: Anyway, he decided to handle it himself. 00:19:38 Speaker 1: There are two persons my brother Tim and I believe could have warned the thief. One of them would have done so inadvertently since they worked on the farm and lived nearby. It could have been overheard on the party line phone system, a singular line that all the families shared that lived near there during that time, including the suspect. They may have been talking about what was on and knowing my grandfather made a general statement that got back to the suspect, mister Finance will shoot him if he catches him. 00:20:10 Speaker 2: That's a very plausible theory. 00:20:11 Speaker 1: Listening on other folks conversations was a big pastime for several nosy roses out in the country, but I think it was a valued family friend. Tim still on the fence between the two, but I think my grandfather mentioned the situation to him when he was sending word through the grapevind that he needed to stop. Later on, during a visit to the farm to get eggs, that man found out that it hadn't stopped, and seeing the level of disgust my grandfather had with the whole situation, he took it upon himself to point blank tell the fellow what fate awaited him. 00:20:46 Speaker 2: I doubt my grandfather told him what he was going to do. 00:20:48 Speaker 1: He wouldn't have wanted to put him in a position to have to testify against him in court, or why he didn't report it to the authorities. It's my belief that, knowing my grandfather and how folks handled their own business back then, I believe that man paid him a visit. Regardless, my grandfather spent several nights at that farm, lying in wait to catch whoever it was, and thankfully no one ever showed up. Had the thief suddenly repented and changed his ways doubtful. Had the offender been warned of what might befall him if he continued his recklessness, more than likely, and that warning saved two families a lot of potential grief. As a follow up, in the time they would have taken for the restaurant in town to run out of eggs, the amount coincidentally and eerily similar to what had been stolen, they up their orders back to normal, and the suspected egg thief he returned to the farm in broad daylight with most of his family and farm workers there as a witness buying eggs, this time from my grandfather. And that's just how that happened. It took a lot of gumption for him to return. It took a lot of self control from my grandfather not to say anything. But it only took one person getting involved with concerned and keeping the peace that made the difference. In a time now where we stare at our screens and block out the world around us with headphones and earbuds, take a break, look around and listen. 00:22:28 Speaker 2: You might be surprised what you can hear. 00:22:30 Speaker 1: And who you might say. Thank y'all so much for listening to this country life, bear grease and the render all up your ears for my brother from across the big Muddy Robert Lake Pickle, whose Backwoods University podcast will be dropping right here on the same feed next month. And as I promised, I've got something coming out just in time for Father's Day on June the first that's really sharp, like literally sharp, Come on, you know what it is? Until next week. This is Brent Reeves signing off. Y'all be careful.

Save this episode