Telecosm - Ike Elliott

Postscript - A Trip to Given, West Virginia (by Fred Faber)

Dad mentioned at the start of his story that he thought that I had attempted to find Given, West Virginia, but I had not – I didn’t even know that that was his birthplace or that the family had lived there until I read his little piece.

This past weekend, Saturday March 14, 2007, was rainy and not too promising for any excitement around here, so Sue and I decided to put some miles on the car and drive to Given.  The road signs (to “Given") were lacking and the roads worse, but we did find it after several wrong turns.  I usually use the sun to orient myself and zero in on destinations, but there was no sun on Saturday to assist me in my quest.  The rain had been light and spotty until we reached the suburbs of that crossroads and then it really cut loose.  The post office used to be in a country store when Dad lived there and then visited the place in his later years.  We found the new building quite by accident while looking for a place to turn around and head back to the center of the little village.

Given, West Virginia (by Brooks H. Faber)

Brooks Faber, sitting on the stone bridge that he built across the “Little Creek”, as a teenager, from rock left over from the rebuilding of the stone root cellar.

It seems that there are always a few things in our lives it is impossible to forget. Some of these may be events that have taken place, or they may be things we have heard someone say, or they may be merely visions of the landscape or other very simple things.  The place where I was born is a very obscure community in Jackson County, West Virginia.  We moved away from there before I was four years old and I never had the opportunity to go back again until about four years ago: my wife and I decided to go see what the spot looked like, if we could find it.

I could recall very clearly in my mind many things about the place.  There was a creek nearby where my father used to take me with him to catch little sunfish about the size of a man’s hand; they were very delicious eating, indeed.  There was a swinging footbridge across that creek.  Beyond the bridge, there was a one-room schoolhouse where the children would play at recess time. When school was out, in the evening, they would stream out of the schoolhouse and run for home. From our front porch, from which I could see all this, there was also in view two dwelling houses and two store buildings. Near our home were two more houses with picket fences and gardens in between. Behind these houses was a barn where my father kept the horses.  On down the road a ways, but out of sight, was a post office and another store.  Just how such a community could support three country stores, I will never understand, but they all seemed to be prosperous enough.  I remember the name of the postmaster.  His name was Parsons.  He had a son about two years older than me: his name was Penumbrey.  One of the other stores was owned and operated by Louie Wolfe.  I remember hearing my mother speak of other families by the names of Skidmore, Sayre, Rankin, Kessell, Harrison and Raser (?).

Entertainment was scarce in those days and so such things as Sunday afternoon gatherings were very common.  One Sunday afternoon my family, and several of their friends and families, went for a hike through the countryside.  Someone in the gang had a camera and took some pictures.  In one of them, I happened to be prominently perched upon a rock along with some more of the gang.  I still have the picture to this day.

I can remember very clearly of seeing horse-drawn wagons turn the corner near our house, cross the creek near the swinging bridge, pass the schoolhouse and go on in the direction of the two stores.

My wife and I were successful in finding the place.  The schoolhouse was still there, but a larger building had been built beside it.  The two old store buildings and the two dwelling houses nearby were still there.  The footbridge was gone.  So were the barn, the house where we lived and the two neighboring houses with the picket fences.  The roadway, where I had watched the wagons cross the creek, was no more.  There was no sign of life in that immediate vicinity except a mobile home on the site where our house had stood.  In back, at a plain grassy meadow, where I could so vividly recall seeing these things years ago, makes one wonder.  Has my childhood memory been playing tricks on me?  Were they really there, or did I just imagine they were there?

We went on down the road and, low and behold, the post office was still there, store and all.  The postmaster was there to fill us in on the history of the place.  Mr. Parsons was long since deceased, but the post office never ceased to be.  I looked up on the hill across the road from the post office and there was the rock where I had my picture taken so many years earlier.

Little Notes 3 (by Brooks Faber, provided by Fred Faber)

Difference Between Preaching and Meddling (The Front Row Hussy)

A lady once approached the minister of her church to tell him what a fine job he was doing by telling all his parishioners so many things that they needed to be told.  She stated that other preachers she had heard merely meddled around with a lot of things that didn’t mean much, but you, she said, get right down to brass tacks.  The minister thanked her for her very kind remarks and stated that he always tried to do his best by way of spiritual guidance.  Then he remarked, “While we are on the subject, it would be a little less distracting at times if you would wear clothes that were a little less revealing. You are a beautiful woman and I can understand your wanting to show your charms, but don’t you think you could do it well enough if you wore your skirts a little longer and your blouses a little higher in the front?”  The lady replied, “Reverend, you have already quit preaching and gone to meddling”.

Little Notes 2 (by Brooks Faber, provided by Fred Faber)

A Good Sermon Is Worth Repeating

By Brooks H. Faber

A minister was assigned to a church and preached his first sermon to the congregation.  The church was filled because everyone wanted to hear and meet the new preacher.  At the end of the service, many people told the minister that he had preached the finest sermon they had ever heard.

The next Sunday, there was a good crowd, but the church was not quite so full as it was the Sunday before.  The minister preached the same sermon again.  Several people told the minister that although they had heard it before, it was still the finest sermon they had ever heard.

The next Sunday, the church was really overflowing.  Everyone was talking about the new minister who had preached the same sermon twice.  The minister preached the same sermon again.

By that time, the vestrymen began to get together and they decided that one of them should act as a spokesman and question the minister about preaching the same sermon three times.   When approached about the matter, the minister asked, “Have you folks started to live and profit by all the fine things that you say I told you in this sermon?”  The spokesman replied that he could not be sure that they had.  The minister said, “Be sure to come back to church next Sunday, you are going to hear that sermon again.”

Little Notes (by Brooks Faber, provided by Fred Faber)

My Dad left a fair sized roll of hand-written notes in his dresser.  Many were from his musings and preparation for his Sunday school lessons.  My wife found them after his death and planned to set about transcribing a few.  My Dad really appreciated to-the-point, plain talking – don’t mess around.

The Preacher Who Had but Little Book Learning, but He Was Filled With the Holy Spirit

By Brooks H. Faber

He knew nothing about Roman numerals, so he might start off his sermons with such things as: “We take our text from One-eyed John, two-eyed Chapter, three-eyed verse.”  One day one of his politician friends approached him and asked, ”What sort of position do you think that I might be elected to in Heaven?”  The preacher replied, ”I saw you run for councilman and you got elected, I saw you run for mayor and you got elected, I saw you run for congress and you got elected, I saw you run for governor and you got elected.  To be elected to a place in heaven, how do you expect to be elected to something that you aren’t even running for?”

(We'll be publishing additional notes from Brooks Faber, who was Ike Elliott's grandfather, later this week).

Slaughtering and Tomatoes (by Fred Faber)

This set of memories from my childhood was my first attempt at such things. Trying to remember significant, related events did not come easy, at first.  While not a world shaking item, I have always loved tomatoes eaten warm from the summer sun and just picked from the vine – that was easy.  The smoke house with its unique smell, the livestock around the place, a huge sycamore tree and slaughtering our own meat seemed important, so I had a go of it.  My interest in telling the story was that no one I know of still does it any more.  Even the few people I hear of that have gone hunting and killed a dear don’t do anything more then field dress the animal.  Their next stop is at a commercial butcher to have a pro finish the hard work and prepare the various cuts and ground meat ready for the freezer.  They don’t even can sausage in Mason jars.

Slaughtering and Tomatoes

Several of you have expressed some interest in my recollections of Elk Two Mile Creek. In trying a Google search of the name, I discovered it is spelled, “Elk Twomile Creek; three words, not four.

I could not have been older then five or six when I first remember Dad and some helpers from up the holler, Mr. Belcher and his two strapping sons, butchering a cow and then a pig from our livestock on the farm.  Today it would probably be called a hobby farm by the IRS, but to Dad it was a way of life and a way to feed the family.  Dad worked for Union Carbide, DuPont and several mining companies over the years while we lived there, but I do not remember the sequence.  His evenings after work and weekends were consumed by taking care of that farm.  The day of the slaughtering was cold and the carcasses steamed when opened as they hung from the block and tackle attached to a huge limb on the sweet gum tree beside the old garage.  The cows tongue and pig’s feet were gross, but valued by someone and set aside during the day’s process; I have never eaten any of that stuff.

Yankee, Vermin, and Bees (by Fred Faber)

Yankee was a worker and a pet – he protected all of us and he was a friend. The bees were just workers and never tired of their chore. I do not remember ever having a bee sting even though they were everywhere, all the time. That cannot be said about the Yellow Jackets and hornets. My younger brother, Pat, stepped on a ground nest of Yellow Jackets when he was probably 4 or 5-years of age and got a major bunch of stings.

YANKEE, VERMIN AND BEES

Yankee was our farm dog and an integral member of the family, and he knew it.  Whenever we kids left the vicinity of the house to go out into the woods or down to the little country store, Hunter’s Grocery, Yankee was right there with us.  I don’t remember our calling to him, he was just there.  Yankee was an Eskimo Spitz, a sled type dog, and powerfully built.  I don’t really know, but I would now guess that he weighed 35 or 40 pounds, but his fluffy, long white coat, even in summer, made him look much bigger.  We would often encounter pedestrian strangers along the road and they would always cross to the side opposite our path.  Their eyes were always on Yankee, as we passed, and they always seemed ready to jump off of a cliff, if necessary, to get away from that big white dog with those imposing teeth.  He probably sensed ill intent or fear and would snarl at some and ignore others.  We would restrain him by holding the fur around his neck when he seemed to not trust the stranger.  Our holding the dog back seemed to more vividly convey the danger that the pilgrim was facing and you could see their wide-eyed fear.

Nicknames, Picnics, and the Cemetery (by Fred Faber)

Some things are just fun to remember, fun for me, at least, this was my childhood.

Our nicknames were Fidgy, Skeeter, Scooky, Pinky, Punky and Bugaboo and I haven’t the slightest idea where they originated. The six of us were really named, in the same order from oldest to youngest, Phyllis, Fred, Barbara, Pat, Dianna and Sandra. When we moved to Jackson, Ohio, when I was 14, I wanted to be called Skeet, but everyone there just called me Fred and the use of my nickname died away.

Aunt Valerie (Moms’ sister) and Uncle Bernard Ruffner had six children, Uncle Martin (Moms’ brother) and Aunt Lily Coffey had six children, but the last boy died shortly after birth and Uncle Ben (Mom’s youngest brother) and Aunt Ruth had four children, but they lived in Texas and we did not know detail of their curiosities. All of those cousins had nicknames, but none as original or curious as ours. I was the same age as Billy Ruffner and a year younger then Marty Coffey. Phyllis was the same age as Patty Coffey; Barb was the same age as Emma Jo Coffey and Pat the same age as Bobby Ruffner. I went to Cub Scout meetings in town after school and Phyllis went to Brownie Scout meetings. On those days, never the same day, each of us would take a city bus to Grandma Coffey’s house, spend the night and ride the city bus to Sacred Heart School the next morning with our cousins who all lived very near by. All of us school age cousins could just about pack a bus already crowded with rush hour passengers.

Often, during the summer, one of us would be staying over with a cousin in town, or a cousin would be out at the farm. Billy Ruffner was staying with us when someone came down with the mumps: our mothers agreed that he could not return to Charleston until he had caught them and would not be a carrier to the rest of his family at home. Aunt Valerie was deathly afraid of germs and always overdressed her kids to ward off chills: they were always sick, it seemed. It took a month, as I recall, for all of us to eventually come down with our case, and recover, and Billy never did catch them in spite of his sleeping in our sick beds in an effort to hasten the process: boy was he ever homesick. There were a lot of June Bugs out on the farm and we would catch them and tie a light thread to their legs. Those were pretty, iridescent green-brown beetles that would hang on your tee-shirt and then fly a while at the end of the string, then relight on you somewhere. Billy would catch those bugs and bring them in the house to Mom and Dad’s bed on the ground floor where we spent the days while sick. There were bugs on strings flying everywhere

HOME BREW, GUNS, WRESTLIN’ & THE MOTORCYCLE (by Fred Faber)

Dad would ask, “Did I ever tell you about the time I road a motorcycle?”, and we would reply, as usual, “yes.”  He would then proceed to tell the story.  This was in his later years, and dementia was certainly setting in, but he obviously loved the story from his younger days. His retelling would emphasize the importance of dust, mud, bugs and the corduroy road.

Dad attended Marshall College (now University) in Huntington, WV, during the Depression; times were tough and money hard to come by.  He had accumulated enough for another semester and told his cousin, Bill Vickers, that he was going to hitchhike to Huntington.   He didn’t want to spend the money on a train ticket down there to enroll for the fall semester and secure a space in a rooming house.  Bill had been trying to collect a debt from someone and finally resorted to taking title to a motorcycle, in-lieu-of cash.  Bill really needed the cash, but had the cycle, and offered it to Dad for the purpose of making the trip.  That was not the age of Interstate Highways.  Most municipalities had some granite cobblestones, or brick on the main streets and there were a few sections of newfangled concrete roads, but for the most part, the road from Charleston to Huntington was dirt and gravel.  Macadam was not yet in wide use.  I have never seen such a thing, but lowland bogs, in those days, were crossed by what was called a corduroy road.  Since course stone, gravel or pavement would settle into the ooze and not survive, tree trunks were laid side by side on the gunk and the ride over these timbers was enough to jar the teeth out of you or ruin your vehicle.  The Civil Engineers of the time knew how to dewater such places, place stone bedding and such, but highway taxes were not in place and funds for major all-season roads was a distant dream.

Buying Your Way Out Of The Army In 1907

I hear that my great-grandfather, Shelly Oshell Faber, was a mountain of a man, about 6 and a half feet tall.  He served in the US Army about a century ago, until his discharge in May of 1907.  Back then, you could buy your way out of the army, and that's exactly what Shelly Faber did.  My Uncle Fred Faber, who guest-posts on this blog most weekends, found Shelly Faber's discharge papers back in the late 1960's, at around the time that Fred and his wife Sue made an unplanned visit to Goldtown, West Virginia.

Shelly Faber paid a year's wages, or $29.73, in 1907, to leave the army and return home.  Here are the discharge papers:

Dynamite Wire and Snapping Turtles (by Fred Faber)

The rebuilding of the high road above the big creek was a major event in this kid’s life. The things all of us did during that year and the rest of our lives seemed to spin off of that one great summer. I missed the opportunity, as a kid in the country, to enjoy turtle soup, but I have lived long enough to mature in my eating habits and learn of finer things.

DYNAMITE WIRE AND SNAPPING TURTLES

Yards speak volumes about the owner of that yard. Our yard was always mowed and prominently featured two weeping willow trees. The one to the side of the house toward the large garden was huge and a favorite resting/playing place for everyone within its shade and innate, nice environment.  The willow in the front yard, outside Mom and Dad’s bedroom window was smaller, but much fuller, weepier and graceful.  Between the back portion of the porch that wrapped around the house, and the playground, was an apple tree.  I would willingly climb onto the lowest limb, but Phyllis, the double-jointed “tomboy” of the family, would climb up to the highest twigs of that tree.  Mom would have heart palpitations when P. would get up high and spend some considerable effort coaxing her back down to a barely sane level of altitude.  Just off to the south of that tree and adjacent to the storage building was a large walnut tree.  There was another walnut tree beside the rear of the coal house at the playground and another near the fence of the chicken coop.  Our front yard, as it neared the Elk Twomile Creek, was lower then the major portion of the main yard and was defined by an abrupt drop-off in the lawn of several feet.  When I was young, Dad transplanted a row of small hemlock evergreens from the woods to along that divide; hemlocks like moisture and these transplants thrived to a high height even before we moved away from the place.

Goldtown (by Fred Faber)

Several years ago, some friends toured West Virginia by train and car.  Their later mention of encountering some obviously inbred hillbillies brought back images of my youth and many trips back to that state during my adult years.  The result of my recollections, at that time, turned into the little story about Ebro Elmo. My mind continued to dig about such things and I went to a deeper level, the movie Deliverance, from about the mid-seventies and deeper yet to a recollection of having read the book by James Dickey.  At last, I got back to one of my misadventures in the backcountry of West Virginia – mental images that helped me relate to the “Deliverance” saga.  There, some months later, was the story about finding my way to Goldtown, a tiny crossroads community that was only on the map because it ended up with an interchange on the Interstate highway system.

GOLDTOWN

Sue and I visited Grandma Ercell Lea Faber out on Elk Twomile Creek sometime shortly after we were married.  That creek got its name by virtue of having its mouth two miles up from where the Elk River joined the Kanawha River in the center of Charleston West Virginia.  We went through some old trunks and shelves of this and that in the loft over the stone root cellar.  The story is that my Dad locked himself in that loft the winter that the barn collapsed in a horrible snowstorm and killed Granddad Shelly Ochel.  My middle name comes from Shell, as he was called.  Dad came out for the funeral.

The trunks held many wondrous things, mostly junk, but of great interest to me.  One was the discharge papers for Shell when he got out of the army during the 1st World War.  He paid to have someone take his place so that he could go home; you could really do that back then.  He was one of the few people in his company that could read and write so they made him an instructor in the gunnery corps.  His papers read, in a very neat sepia ink script; "Honorably discharged by reason of purchase”.  Grandma gave me those papers and I still have them.

Some of the things we gathered and took with us were Granddad's hand held brass school bell; he was a country school principal/teacher at a one-room school just up the holler, a tin box of white chalk packed in sawdust and the buttons from his army uniform.  We examined several bank deposit books with entries of mostly pennies and sometimes a dollar.  Grandma was very bitter about his not being able to amass any fortune, just more land, but what was a school teacher/country farmer to do?  We did not take the bankbooks.

EBRO ELMO AND THE TRAILER HOME

Some good friends of mine from Pomroy, Ohio - the Ohio side of the Ohio River - took a sightseeing train ride over the river and up through the mountains.  Somewhere over by Beckley, they left the train, rented a car and drove back through some of the ridges and hollers of the APP.  They sent me an e-mail disparaging the hill people and made some reference to Deliverance and the inbred yokels they saw sitting on the remains of an old coal tipple.

I took exception to their characterizations; after all, they were from a back woodsy part of Ohio.  The following is a compendium of my 3-message response of fun fiction built loosely around my relatives from “West – By God – Virginia”.

Subject: EBRO ELMO AND THE TRAILER HOME

Watch it, I think that I have some blood relatives, all 2nd cousins, from Hinton, but I can't remember for certain.

I know that cousin Ebro Elmo, "Double E" as we called him, or was that his shoe size - he rarely wore shoes - went to a reunion over there looking for a date.  He got “deliveranced,” so Aunt Hulda (German for “loveable”) said, and never was the same - a tenor, instead of a baritone, as I recall.  EE played banjo, the juice harp and dabbled on the jug with Lester Flatts' touring company before he was 14, but lost his virtuosity sometime about that time.  The Faber/Morrison nasal tone just wasn't there on the vocals any more; a real shame since he still had all his teeth and no really noticeable scars. My hearing of him ended with the news of his full retirement as an oiler on "Big Bertha" at age 47 when he went to Virginia Beach with the family home on wheels. Funny what comes back to you when there is a mention of "Almost Heaven."

This and That

Several years ago, I started writing my childhood memories of my young life on "The Place", our family farm out on Elk Twomile Creek in Kanawha County, northwest of Charleston, West Virginia.  These stories are always the memories of a child, not history.  The following is one such memory and I shall add others from time to time.  Eventually I will add my retrospect pieces which will fill in a few real blanks of the saga.

Elk Twomile Road was a 1 1/2 lanes, sometimes two lanes wide, dirt track with many ruts and mud holes when I first remember being on it on foot or in the car.  Passing cars had to slow to a stop with one side of the vehicle hanging barely on the edge of the creek bank or against the hillside cut while the other cautiously eased by.  Granddad Shell was a big Faber man, as the entire family was reputed to be.  Grandma Ercel was a tiny wisp of a woman and she claimed that she could stand erect under Shell’s outstretched arm.  A car did not make it past another down the road above the Adams place one day when Granddad approached in his own car.  The road was blocked.  Old Model A Fords were probably not much heavier then a Honda 4-Runner, but they still had some weight.  The story is that Granddad got out, put one leg down over the hillside, grabbed the bumper and single-handedly heaved the car back up on to the road.

Twice a year, spring and fall, the county would send a big yellow road grader up the holler to knock off the high spots and fill in the low.  The newly smoothed road would hold until the next rain.  Sometimes a county truck would pass the farm and add gravel here and there, but the road was still mostly mud or dust depending on the weather.  When I was about 8 (1948), the county undertook a major road rebuilding project in the holler.  The huge Euclid dump trucks with wheels about a mile high, earth moving pans and graders and dozers with blades higher then a car were glorious and the greatest spectator sport in memory for the older folks and just plain eye-popping to us kids.  We would go climb on the equipment when the workers left for the day.  The old road was cut into the hillside about 40 or 50 feet above the creek that bounded our bottom land.  The road crew drilled for days and then would blast rock out of the hillside and all over the place.  A young worker from the construction company would come down to the house and accompany Mom and us kids up or down the fields into a far reach of the farm when they did their blasting in case a rock might fall in the yard or on the house; it never did, but the noise and dust cloud was dramatic.

Fishin' On The Elk (by Fred Faber)

Our Elk Twomile Creek flowed from somewhere upstream from the farm down into the Elk River and the Elk flowed into the Kanawha River two miles down stream from there.  Upstream from where the creek joined the river, the Elk was a mountain stream that had many tributaries and rapids.  In the old days, the Elk served to transport log flows down to the Kanawha and gristmills flourished at the locations of the rapids.

According to the research of my mother’s first cousin, Ben Swint Jr., son of Great Uncle Dr. Benjamin Swint who attended my birth at St. Francis Hospital in Charleston, my Great-Granddad Martin Van Buren Smith and his partner contracted for the cutting of logs during the 1870’s up in Webster County, West Virginia, somewhere near Snake Den Mountain, at the headwaters of the Elk.  The logs would be accumulated, over the course of a year, and then floated downstream with the coming of the spring rains.  The logs were trapped in a series of booms (a chain or line of connecting floating timbers extended across a river so as to obstruct passage or catch floating objects) on the Elk. Eventually the huge collection of resources would be stopped on the Elk at Charleston in a specially constructed boom so that the logs could be hauled out of the river and processed in Great Granddad’s mill for lumber and the manufacture of window sashes and the like.  One year, an unusually heavy flood caught the entire stockpile of five million feet of logs and swept them all down the river and on into the Kanawha and Ohio Rivers.  They lost the entire store and were almost bankrupt.  However, they were slowly recovering from this disaster when, in 1877 a fire destroyed the lumberyard.  This put them out of business and broke up the partnership.

Rules to Live By

Editor's Note:  My Uncle Fred sends me occasional emails of his writing, usually stories about growing up in West Virginia and Ohio, or tales of wisdom learned over the years.  Fred's stories have nothing to do with telecom or technology, per se, but they are entertaining life lessons, so I have his permission to begin posting some of them on my blog. The following is the first of what I hope will be many postings from Fred Faber.

My favorite old easy chair, not as ragged as Archie Bunker's, had just about had it, but it was so welcoming and comfortable.  My wife, Sue, could not tolerate it any longer and bought a new leather recliner with an ottoman, today.  I arrived home to find a big box in the house with a lot of parts included - some assembly required.

Sue was not home, so I poured a "small" glass of wine, got a knife to open the box, and sat about unpacking and assembling the chair and ottoman.  It all went well until I got to the final step of attaching the arms.  Only two of the three screws for each arm would go through the predrilled holes - I was p----ed.  After rechecking the instructions and all the parts and part bags provided, I sat in an adjacent chair, staring at the almost assembled chair, and contemplated a set of digital photos and nastygram to the manufacturer.  The last piece of literature in the stack was a pamphlet of the manufacturers' products.  The picture illustrated the arms opposite of what I was trying to install.  Shit!!!!

My Dad worked construction and owned his own contracting business for a number of years.  He often repeated a set of rules for the trade:

If at first it will not go, get a bigger hammer.

If it still will not go, read the instructions.

I would add a third rule:

If it still will not go, resolve not to drink wine until the job is complete. 

I am 67 and still learning hard lessons.

Uncle Fred says the new chair is working out fine, and that he is looking forward to watching OSU put LSU into a purple and yellow funk from that chair.