Patrick W. Crabtree
12 Aug 1953 – 10 Jul 2018
BIO by : RFB Jenkins
Pat documented much of my family history from southern Ohio and Kentucky .... with honor and respect.
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Patrick W. Crabtree, 64, of McDermott, died Tuesday, July 10, 2018 at Southern Ohio Medical Center.
He was born August 12, 1953 in Portsmouth to Raymond and Mary Crabtree and grew up on Crowe Hollow.
Pat was a retired manager of Shawnee State Park.
In addition to his parents, he was predeceased by his brother, Michael B. Crabtree.
Pat is survived by his wife, Linda (Nelson) Crabtree; one daughter, Ashley (Michael) Collins of Jacksonville, Florida; three grandchildren, Aiden, Autumn and Nolan Collins; and a favorite niece, Heidi Crabtree of Clovis, California.
Pat admits that he too attended college, eventually being granted two separate degrees including an Associate's Degree in Parks and Recreation Administration and, much later, a B.A. in Social Science with a minor in history. Not very good degrees, to be sure, but degrees nonetheless. Then he would smile.
At Pat's request, his body was cremated.
Per Pat's request ... There was no service or visitation.
Arrangements were under the direction of F.C. Daehler Mortuary Company in Portsmouth.
Below are Exerts from Pat's love of and writings of the Appalachian hills, particularly around Portsmouth, Lucasville, and McDermott Ohio.
Patrick Crabtree's Blog: The Ospidillo News
Exert 1 Ode Dyin' to Kill Somebody
Ah well, such is life.
I will not be able to afford embalming and a casket and a cemetery plot and a gravestone. I have not saved any money for that -- I have spent my money on rescuing cats and dogs so the veterinarian will have to take pity on me and embalm me if I am to get a decent grave. But the truth is, I told Linda to go ahead and just have me cremated and dump my ashes up by those of my favorite cat ever, good old Rudy, up in the front yard.
I haven't been very pious either but that's good enough for me.
Exert 2
School had always represented an interference in what my pals and I really wanted to do which essentially amounted to this: riding our bicycles, driving cars, chasing girls along back roads, beer drinking, coon hunting, fishing, squirrel hunting, and listening to wild stories of old winos at the local bootlegger's joint.
For my part, I additionally particularly enjoyed reading but not the material which was offered at school by the teachers. The only person who ever understood this was Mrs. Madge Ervin. Most students didn't care for Mrs. Ervin because she was to the point and abrupt, but I liked her a great deal. She had been my third-grade teacher and eventually she became the school librarian. I thought she was perfect in that role, very organized and a good listener. She knew I leaned toward adventure fiction and so, through her great knowledge and willful assistance, I got to savor some really outstanding titles.
By the time I reached high school, I had become a genuine terror. I was forced to convey a pretense of civilized behavior at specific times because my own father was a very strict school principal in Portsmouth and there were additionally many teachers within my extended family. They often shared information about the activities of my many cousins and me. So I spent a good amount of time plotting and scheming as to how to semi-legitimately escape from class. I was lucky to have a confederate of a sort in this juvenile conspiracy -- it was our school principal at Valley High, Mr. James Young. Mr. Young was sympathetic with at least a few of my passions. Rather than come down on me like a boulder, (which he could have done since he and my dad were old college pals), he simply diverted and channeled my agenda as best he could. He had gotten no small amount of practice while dealing with my older brother of seven years, Mike.
One passion which Mr. Young and I wholly shared was squirrel hunting. On more than one occasion, Mr. Young would step into the first period study hall on a nice September day and motion for Roy Marshall and me to come along. Oh, Joy!!! That meant we were going squirrel hunting because Mr. Young wasn't above playing hooky himself now and then. Frankly, it was to Mr. Young's great advantage to do this because Roy and I were frequently scouting new ground all around the county and we had secured landowner permission to hunt these virgin territories. Most of these properties were bulging with either gray or fox squirrels or both.
People would hardly believe it nowadays but we always carried our shotguns, (and often hand guns for coon hunting), right in the back seat of our cars in the school parking lot. This was a common practice for those of us who hunted and it saved us from returning home to retrieve our weapons. And so we could thus get into the woods as quickly as possible after school had let out. So Roy and I would jump into Jim's car, (Mr. Young became "Jim" on these squirrel-hunting expeditions, a privilege we never abused), fire up a smoke, and he would pull around to our cars in the student parking area. Once there, we'd surreptitiously slip our shotguns and hunting gear from our vehicles into his. We'd usually make it back to school just as the busses were lining up to close out the day. Those were splendid times indeed. There's something about playing hooky which infuses a kid with a rush and when you're hooking along with the school principal, it's even lovelier.
But I had to devise other additional means of escape from the doldrums of grueling classes such as French II, Geometry, and Government (Civics.) I somehow managed to join certain organizations which came with the perquisites of occasionally being excused from class. One year I was the photographer for the Annual Staff and I shot tons of film which was never published anywhere. I think for two years I managed to latch on to the job of construction crew member for the class plays. We built little and smoked a great deal. And our football field and track were pretty new back then and a new concrete block concession stand was being built as well. Coach Morris Gullion was always quite happy to find volunteers willing to sod his beloved football field, a thankless task at which I excelled. We were typically left to our own devices so we just posted a guard at the top of the hill, commenced our work and smoked all we wanted to.
But our Senior year was the time when things actually got out of control. Hell, it even began to worry me! Here's what happened: Claude Sammons had been the Mechanical Drawing and Wood Shop teacher for many years. He ran a very tight ship and everything was maintained in perfect order. He taught even the most heinous and rowdy boys a great deal to get them through day-to-day life. For me, the shop class was elective as I was enrolled in the College Preparatory Program. I carried a heavy load of classes from my freshman year forward so that by the time I became a Senior, my days would be my own. I had actually devised this plan from the start of high school, probably on the sage counsel of my brother, Mike, who was infinitely superior at scheming than I was myself. So by my Senior year, the only class to which I was obligated was in the first period, Mrs. Fannin's Government class, the dreaded hour of all Seniors. The remainder of my days' time was spent in the wood shop.
Mr. Sammons had opted to work in the higher-paying position of the school Guidance Counselor, a job for which I felt he was ill-suited since, from my view, his outstanding talents were clearly going to be wasted. The guidance counselor of past years had done nothing that I ever heard of. I had never met with her (Mrs. Bertha Phillips) a single time and it's not for the fringe student to reach up to the Administration for guidance -- the guidance counselor must be aggressive in contacting all the students to set them on a positive track in life, or at least try to do so. It's ironic that her husband, Mr. Phillips the janitor, gave me invaluable advice while I was cutting class to help him, (yet another of my numerous dodges), on what I might do following graduation. Mr. Phillips was a great old fellow.
The grim story for Mr. Young was that he was short of a stellar shop teacher, a position which is incredibly difficult to fill. First we inherited poor old Julius Chandler, an elderly minister who was a superb home craftsman and who had never taught school in his lifetime. He really liked the boys but had not the least notion as to how to control them. Certain boys, (I won't name them outright), T.M., G.B., R.B., R.A., and T.G., aggregately became the bane of his formerly peaceful existence. And while I did nothing to impede the old man, neither did I demonstrate the slightest trace of leadership in an attempt to aid him, I am ashamed to confess. Before many days had passed, the lunatics were running the asylum and Mr. Chandler had become a ball of nerves. In fact, he is now buried just a mile or so east of my present home at the summit of the McDermott Cemetery Hill and I often wonder if we might have shaved ten years or so off his otherwise fruitful life.
Mr. Young came into the shop one Monday morning with a rumpled looking character attending him by the name of Mr. Larry Flannery. Mr. Flannery, he said, would be replacing Mr. Chandler and we were to help him all we possibly could. Of course we would. Then Mr. Young pulled me off to the side and cut me the deal of a lifetime. The truth was, Larry Flannery had a B.A. in Social Science, (good for nothing whatever, I have one myself), and he didn't know a band saw from a jackhammer. And he certainly possessed no knowledge of mechanical drawing which was to be taught to Freshmen and Sophomores. Would I teach the boys the mechanical drawing? You bet your sweet fucking ass I would! What a coup! This deal included a frequent excused absence from Mrs. Fannin's Government class -- I would just read the material and take the tests, a move which in fact moved me from a C- up to a B. My dad was much pleased.
Larry, as we came to know him, was posited strictly as a disciplinarian. What an outrageous notion -- he was more evil than all of us boys put together! In his private life, Larry was a bachelor-gambler of dubious repute. Years later, my brother Mike, (who became the Chief Probation Officer for the local Common Pleas Court), carried Larry on felony probation on the crime of carrying a concealed weapon, this charge no doubt stemming from some incident from within a Portsmouth speakeasy, most likely The Subway. So Larry taught the boys how to gamble, or rather he taught us how to cheat. He collected our lunch money most days with the nefarious match game, a numbers device which one cannot possibly lose when one knows the mathematical hoax involved in playing the game. We were too stupid to catch on because Larry was shrewd enough to lose a game now and again on purpose.
I kept my covenant with Mr. Young -- I taught the boys to draw, although clearly not as effectively as Mr. Sammons might have done. When a couple of the troublemakers would attempt to challenge me I would just retrieve one or two Senior thugs from the shop and the matter would be immediately and permanently quashed with no aftermath. It wasn't a perfect method for running a class but it got us through the year. I doubt, though, that my methods would have merited the School Board's endorsement.
Still, for Mr. Young, no news from the shop was good news. To keep the younger boys' mouths shut, we allowed them to periodically take a break and come into the shop for a smoke back by the welder, or to play the match game with Larry any time they wished. And one Freshman or Sophomore was appointed daily to stand guard duty at the door to maintain a watch for Mr. Young because we had smoking going on by the constantly fired-up welder and two or three card games were always in progress at various places throughout the large room. I would quickly complete the drawings for the appointed watchmen because Mr. Young would periodically scan these drawings and check off the names against the list of students. When it comes to drafting, I am truly a master, a skill which I ultimately carried forward to college engineering classes.
One day, I don't know why, G.B. said we were going to load up everything and take it all home. Larry was late for work that morning and so G. backed his big Oldsmobile into the shop and, with some help, loaded the table saw into his trunk. Obviously, the trunk lid wouldn't shut but G. didn't give a shit and navigated his car, trunk lid high in the air and saw protruding, back to the parking lot. Well this singular act breached the flood gates. Everybody drove their cars around and started loading up -- by the time they were finished, there wasn't a hammer or screwdriver remaining anywhere. Larry finally arrived, saw what had happened, and practically went into convulsions. He was a very high-strung person. When no one would immediately confess to the obvious larceny he headed down the hall in a huff to retrieve Mr. Young.
I thank the late James Young to this day and with all my heart for not pulling me aside to get the low down. He took on the task of remedying the matter through his own initiative. I forget what the threat was if we didn't comply but he said that he and Larry were leaving for fifteen minutes and when he got back, everything right down to the last 8d box nail better be back where it belonged. As soon as they walked out a scramble ensued. Everything was put right in five minutes and we utilized the next ten to grab a smoke or two before the authorities returned. Fortunately, all this happened within a few weeks of graduation and Mr. Young desired no problems which would cause eight or ten Seniors to not graduate. No one I ever knew had a cooler head than Mr. Young -- he knew precisely how to handle boys in difficult situations.
Once in a while, Roger McClay, who was the chemistry and physics teacher, would hear too much cacophony in the shop and he would peer out his door glass across the hall at our door to see what was up. At such times, either T.M. or G.B. would usually be summoned and they would simply point ominously at Mr. McClay, an act which caused him to become instantaneously blind, deaf, and mute. T. and G. were outlandishly large and domineering fellows and they could each convey an air of noir-authority, much in the spirit of a swarthy Mafioso guy. A number of the Senior boys that year had really been wearing on Mr. McClay, a fact which was not lost on the under-classmen. I think it was the following year when I heard that D.T. had physically roughed him up a bit. Such an act would have been unheard of at Valley in previous years but I guess my Class of '71 gave rise to something rather notorious which sort of clung on for a time, not a positive legacy for me or my peers.
The advent of Driver Education came about when I was a senior and Mr. Douglas Booth became the instructor. This was likely a thoughtful choice since he could handle the rougher boys with no problem and, the fact was, most of us had been driving since we were thirteen anyway. I think T.G. commenced driving when he was seven or eight because his dad ran a big junkyard down by the Drive-in Theater and T. loved to race the drivable cars around in the junkyard lot.
One day we were out driving around, a dubious contingent including G.B., R.B., T.C., and me, with Mr. Booth riding shotgun and reading his daily newspaper. T. was our pilot out near Minford and we soon spotted an elderly lady crossing the road ahead to retreive her mail from the box. I think it was R. who blurted out, "Run over that old bitch!" Well that was a very unfortunate remark because when Mr. Booth dropped his paper a bit to grab a looksee, let us say that it turned out to be a person near and dear to his heart. I don't recall precisely how it all played out but you can bet that it wasn't good in the end for R.
But the Driver Education car was yet another device which enabled me to occasionally skip class. A couple of us would go to Mr. Booth and volunteer to wash the car down at Shumway's gas station in Lucasville. He'd toss us the keys and we'd usually head straight for Hardrock's place, (the local bootlegger, Charlie Lockhart), for a quick cold beer. Then we'd run around the Lucasville Bottoms for a while and eventually we'd race back to Shumway's, wash the big Ford in record time, and then return the keys just before school was dismissed for the day.
During my Senior year, most mornings commenced with a get-together at Hardrock's place in the Lucasville Bottoms. Hardrock lived in a tiny green tarpaper shack and his operation was pretty simple. He went to town and bought lots of beer, wine, and whiskey and when he re-sold it at his house, which of course was in a dry township, he charged double what he paid for it. So a beer was about seventy-five cents. We didn't have the money to drink many of those before class each day so we often opted for Old Pheasant Brand Muscatel Wine instead -- wino wine. It was $1.25 per pint and two of us could get a pretty good buzz rolling with that amount. It certainly made the days pass more pleasantly. Old Hardrock was a prince of a guy. He inevitably had a good story to impart and, as he supped his breakfast tomato soup each morning, he'd fill us in on all the Bottoms gossip from the previous evening which might include cockfighting winners, shootings and other assaults, hired insurance arsons, card game winners and losers, and so on. Hardrock was better by far than the radio because he always embellished a bit to make each story more interesting but he'd never tell a lie outright.
We rode to school pretty much every morning with Gary Lee Risner in a decrepit sixty-something Pontiac Tempest. We'd start out in Crowe Hollow, Gary driving with his now late brother Larry Eugene riding shotgun and me occupying the rear seat. Then we'd swing in on West Avenue in Lucasville behind the Elementary School and pick up the now late Darryl Neeley, a cousin to the Risners. From there it was on to Hardrock's unless we had to stop to re-supply our blessed cigarettes. Darryl was the very best of us and I will not now go into how he was accidentally killed just a short period following our graduation -- it's a long and tragic story. But he eternally had a smile for everyone and was much loved by all his classmates, boys and girls alike. I miss him a great deal and I think about him all the time. Anyway, about eight minutes before the final bell rang to commence classes we would race up the hill to school in that old Tempest, sharing a good snort of Muscatel as we did so.
Once in awhile, Gary's car would become crippled and we'd be forced to ride the bus up the hill, (now Robert Lucas Road), from the Intermediate School on U.S. Route 23. We always chose Mr. Keller's bus for two noteworthy reasons: it was the final bus to ascend the hill to the High School and, Mr. Keller always allowed us to smoke all we wanted. He smoked too. The only people on this bus were the smokers because most students wanted to arrive at school a bit earlier to complete any last-minute homework. Homework be damned! That was the Crowe Hollow credo. I'd scratch out something in the final few seconds, garnering answers from the weak-willed whenever possible, and flail it toward the teacher at the last possible moment. Along Robert Lucas Road, there exists to this very day a small newt-and-toad pond on the right after you have topped the hill. We'd pull all the windows down to clear the smoke on Mr. Keller's bus and he'd shout, just before reaching the pond, "Throw those fuckin' cigarettes out!" He wasn't bull-shitting either and so we did. I'll bet the nicotine level of that pond would have killed any living thing back in those days.
As for girls, the Valley girls weren't much interested in most of us for obvious reasons. A couple of younger ones did take us on and we loved them very much for their kind attentions. I latched on to R.M. from the Bottoms, a free-spirit who sported a joyous, beautiful smile and who was four years my junior, but she knew far more about life than I ever did. We went to the Scioto Breeze Drive-in on Friday and Saturday nights, usually avoiding the entrance fee via the very large trunk of Pat Henry's '58 Chevy convertible. We also ran the back roads as a pack over in the northwest corner of the county where most of my numerous cousins lived and attended high school. I loved R. very much and, to this day, I feel a special fondness toward her even though I haven't seen her for forty-odd years. She eventually ran off with S.C., one of my Elvis-ish hero-icons from the Lucasville Bottoms and a man ten years my senior. I was quite proud that R. chose to run off with S. -- this lessened the pain of a love suddenly lost.
Lots of girls from other schools vied for our attentions. Darryl was our secret weapon -- they all wanted Darryl. But we seemed to always have enough girls on board to match up out on Freejack Hill for lengthy necking and beer-drinking sessions. Nothing beyond that ever happened -- there were simply too many of us. The car was as a can of sardines. We'd stay out pretty late and on weekends the girls were forgotten and we'd go coon hunting with Brother Bill Scaff of Otway. One night we caught and killed a skunk and, before dying, it revenged itself by spraying all of us, dogs included. The next day at school we were catching a lot of evil stares from our classmates. Mr. Young came to the rescue and sent us home for a day or so.
Once a year, Mr. Young felt an official obligation to catch all the smokers in the act. This was more an Annual Event than it was something to be feared or dreaded. We all knew it was coming and only fate would save certain individuals from the odious penalties of smoking at school. There was a janitor's room behind the stalls in the boy's restroom. Mr. Young would spend most of a day in that room, peering through a small vent above the stalls. We smoked in the restroom quite a lot between classes just to grab a couple of puffs. This routine practice led to doom in my Sophomore year. Near the end of the day, Mr. Young called off a laundry list of names over the speaker system, all smokers, and instructed us to report to his office. On the day I got caught, he also called Bill "Dinky" Dalton's name which was a big surprise since Dinky didn't smoke and we all knew that. We arrived in the office en masse, each of us bearing the feeble hope that this wasn't about smoking [Ha!]. As it turned out, Dinky had made some depraved and disparaging remark about Mr. Young personally and Mr. Young just wanted to scare the living shit out of him, which he proceeded to do -- then he let him go, addressing the rest of us with that ever-so-grim countenance which he could command at will. It was a choice between three licks and forty laps around the gym, or, a three-day suspension. I was elated since I was running between twelve and fifteen miles per day in practice for the track team -- I was the two-miler. Everybody took the three licks and forty laps except for Jerry O'Banion, a counter-culture upper-classman. There were about twenty-five of us and we got that mess behind us the very next day, except for Jerry that is.
Oh, I could go on and on as to the foolish and rotten things which transpired over those years. I guess that school did provide enough structure that we arose from our beds at a decent hour, (not so during the summers!), and enough discipline was enforced upon us to prevent our becoming serial killers or ax murderers. I eventually struck out a career in law enforcement and that where I remained following college. The best poachers make the most effective wardens.
And by the way, here's how to win at the infamous match game:
Exert 3
I'm no expert on early 20th Century Appalachian architecture... I don't think there are any such people. Maybe Kevin Bradbury comes close, my former assistant manager at Shawnee State Park who stepped up as park manager when I retired. Kevin was my resident genius -- I'd like to own the stack of oaken shake-shingles that he has produced in his lifetime. But the houses I'm talking about were wooden frame homes, often with a tin roof [or tar-paper and slate shingles] and vertical siding with furring strips which stood to defeat the winter winds.
My dad and I built a really nice storage shed and when I suggested that it would be easier to run the boards horizontally instead of vertically he quickly rebuffed any such notion, remarking with a measure of scorn, "That's how hog-pens are built." He was right about that, although I had never taken notice of it prior to his edifying comment, and there was clearly something in his mind, a cultural shibboleth, by which he was driven, one which drove him to veer away from representations of Appalachian poverty. My dad had come from humble roots, although it was a household of cleanliness and dignity, that there was going to be no hog-pen style shed erected on his property! I saw these same sort of "statements" repeated many times by Appalachian natives who grew up in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. People were raising the bar for themselves and for their families. I think this outlook of improvement was initiated largely as a result of World War II adventures as these young Appalachian men were exposed to the world during their travels. Their observations during their travels provided them with a new perspective on what could be achieved in their own lives.
Certainly the culture shifted throughout Appalachia as a result of World War II. Prior to that, entire families routinely continued to reside with their parents and grand-parents, often within the same residence and sometimes in a smaller, newly-constructed home on the same property. The Big House was always the central home on the property, usually where the evening meals were prepared and consumed by everyone who lived thereabouts. But subsequent to the war, the children were much more inclined to move out and raise their family elsewhere, often far away if a good job pulled them in that direction.
Where the household economics were good four-inch horizontal clapboards were used. A log cabin was to be avoided as it was stereotypical to Appalachia and again, emblematic of poverty... so my dad built a log cabin. That aspect of the matter seemed not to bother him and I think he viewed this as an aspect pioneer craftsmanship rather than as an icon of poverty. And, of course, he saved a lot of money by having his raw materials ready at hand, growing on the hillside. Country and suburban log cabins are nowadays all the rage although most people have no notion of their numerous limitations.
I certainly took note of the various wonders of carpentry as I was growing up, the late 1950s and '6os, a period in which most of these homes were entering their decline. The houses of post-World War Two embraced modernity and most folks wanted a single-story residence. Sadly, the rural Appalachian edifices of the pre-war period are practically all gone these days.
I feel very nostalgic about these homes -- that's what they were... homes. In most of the places that I'll be speaking of numerous children were raised, including my own paternal Grandfather's house where he and Grandma raised thirteen wonderful children. Such homes were the scenes of births, celebrations, [such as family reunions], hard times [the loss of employment], agriculture, innovation [such as unique ways of storing food supplies], deaths, and even wakes.
I really cotton to the notion of wakes, preferring the Irish variety over the Appalachian ones [which were largely Irish in their roots but if there was any alcohol around it was hidden, abiding by religious social mores, most likely nipped out behind the smokehouse along with two or three other male imbibers.] Some homesteads even featured back-yard cemeteries and you can sometimes track an Appalachian family's ancestry by visiting one if the monuments are marked. However, due to the poverty of the era, sometimes only a chunk of squared sandstone from the local quarry or even a much-deteriorated wooden cross marks these graves I like the idea of a family cemetery too. Would I prefer to have a wake when I drop dead and be buried near the home of my youth? Yep. Unfortunately, I have to remain practical for my Linda so we've decided that I will be cremated and my ashes will most likely be scattered in the front yard where Rudy, and some of my other cats are buried. A good many of them have also been cremated, (although I buried Rudy's carcass myself), such as old Mick, Sluggo, Big Boy, White Spot, and my beloved L.T.
Exert 4 from Pat's odes about the Sugar Shack
There had been a Sugar Shack I in 1966, operated by Arnold "Broken-Wing" Phipps and Junior "Doc" Blevins but it had been largely a gambling enterprise which didn't interest us boys much as we only rarely had more than a dollar or two in our pockets. Apparently neither did anyone else have any money after Arnold and Doc wiped them out and the place shut down after a month or so, having never once been raided by the county sheriff. It was just a slab-wood shed on Ghost Hollow, the outbuilding of a ramshackle hovel owned by one "Miss Tutwaller", an absentee church-going landlady who resided somewhere in North Carolina. I had never laid eyes on Miss Tutwaller but Larry's Grammaw, Sadie Friend, apparently knew her well. Miss Tutwaller owned three residences plus the Crowe Hollow Church-house which was actually in Ghost Hollow. She raked-in $25 per month for the tar-paper shack on Crowe Hollow, which burned around 1965 or so, [Orise Rowe lived there in sin with a really mean and sour old church lady, I forget her name but I always felt sorry for Orise], and $35 for Maggie Chandler's rickety bungalow at the forks and the same for The Sugar Shack property. I think she allowed the church to be used for free by any self-ordained hell-fire preacher who needed a launch-pad.
I can't remember who last paid rent for the house where The Sugar Shack ended up. Clifford and Steve Hicks moved in around the fall of '66, just after the first Sugar Shack had dissolved operations. Old Cliff was a foreboding, grimly statuesque figure with a big nasty mole protruding from his forehead but he was a very nice guy, easy to get along with -- groovy, one might have said at the time. He was not a well man but only occasionally did he complain, his tuberculosis and lumbago issues notwithstanding. Cliff's son, Steve, clearly housed some hungry evil worm within his over-sized head and it gnawed away at his brain, a very small brain. He got picked on a lot, most of it brought on by himself, yet a pathetic creature overall.
We'd be trundling up Ghost Hollow, Larry Eugene and me, and poor Steve would rush out on the ratty porch and holler, "Hey, Codwell...! Cod-LICKER...! Fuck you!" ...and then he'd scramble back into the house before Larry Eugene could nail him with a road-stone. One hot afternoon after giving Larry Eugene a hardy blaspheming, Steve ran inside, opened one of the tiny side windows, and then continued to rant the most intolerable obscenities while I stood by laughing my ass off. Larry Eugene perfectly timed a face-full of gravels for him when he peeped his bulbous head up a second time and Steve erupted in howls of pain and frustration. Clearly, Cliff wasn't home at that moment. Steve then snatched up a broom and used the handle to start busting out what few window panes there were, all the time ranting and screaming like a complete idiot, "Uh-oh! you broke that fuckin' window! Oh-oh! You broke that one too!" He shattered every window in the house. Larry Eugene thought this nonsense was as hilarious as I did.
We strolled on up the road to Larry Eugene's home, a sturdy old tin-roofed furring-strip bungalow just a hundred feet distant, and when we saw Cliff come dusting up the road we caught him before he got to his house and told him what happened. Since all the glass was on the outside, any moron could determine that the windows had been broken from within. Cliff allowed Steve to elaborate upon the lie about Larry Eugene demolishing the windows and then he boomed, "Okay there, little boy! Now it'll be yer ass in boxcar letters!" [He always said that to Steve before giving him a strapping.] A better first-class belt-beating I never saw. Even Larry Eugene said so and he had endured some dandy floggings from his Grampaw, who had since passed on.
The Hicks [pronounced HICK-zez] lived off the land, more-or-less hand-to-mouth. Cliff had never worked in his life, not at a regular job anyway, and Steve was incapable of achieving anything beyond stripping copper wire from electric motors and old car generators to sell for junk. People nowadays want to trash guys like Cliff, calling them lazy welfare moochers. Cliff wasn't lazy -- he was simply too fucking stupid to be able to do anything. People don't get this. The pair owned a red child's wagon and pulled it to Lucasville with great frequency to haul the rummaged waste food from Jake Kinstler's store dumpster, rotting produce and tainted meat mostly. At the first of the month when Cliff received his crazy check [that's what we called all welfare and social security disability checks, an entitlement for being crazy, we had been told by our thuggish hero-icons. The idea was to go down to the county courthouse and roll around on the steps and act crazy. Shortly thereafter you would start receiving your check. Oogie Delay and Joe Edgar Rowe said that's how they got their crazy checks.] they returned with multiple cans of Bugler tobacco which meant that us boys, four in our gang, would be well-supplied with smokes for at least ten days. No one on welfare ever bought enough cigarettes to last until their next crazy check so smoking for the final twenty days of the month depended upon shrewd junking, pop and beer bottle cash-ins, or selling something at a small profit, a dollar here and a dollar there. It wasn't so bad -- a green-paper pack [not a can] of Bugler or Kite provided about twenty-five hand-rolled cigarettes and cost only ten cents. Regular cigarettes were about thirty-three cents a pack so those were out of the question.
The Hicks hung on until late spring and that's when Cliff's health nose-dived even further, necessitating a move to some shack in the Lucasville bottoms down on It'ly Street, [West Street] where at least there would be some solid citizen around to verify to Steve that he was dead should tragedy strike. I think Doc Blevins must have had his eye on that house ever since he had shut down the original Sugar Shack. The Hicks dust was still in the air and their spore lay strewn about the grounds when he hired us boys to give the place a good going over. One treasure of Hicks' detritus was a working refrigerator. Leaving large heavy items behind was a common practice amongst local poverty-stricken residents as they could acquire no truck to move large appliances. The hope, of course, was that whomever they were displacing faced the same dilemma. Doc had already hooked a second refrigerator, an absolute necessity to maintain an adequate supply of multiple brands of ice cold beer and wine. There was one worriment that required a swift resolution... the Hicks had also left behind an old cow's tongue in their refrigerator and the electric had been off for a week or so. Doc declared to us that the man [boy] who removed it and cleaned the inside with bleach would be awarded an extra twelve cold beers. We decided that this was a four-boy job, or rather I did.
Doc and Junior "Junebug" Friend, his half-brother-in-law and partner in this venture, departed in Doc's lemon-yellow boat-ish 1956 Rambler 4-door hardtop station wagon, (a car that brought to my mind a corpulent Chinaman who was unsuccessfully trying to masticate a huge mouthful of cheese), to stock up on the first load of alcoholic beverages in Portsmouth while we carried out the assignment. I had it figured like this: Darryl Neeley [Larry Eugene's cousin] would open the refrigerator door, Larry Eugene would insert a shovel near the offending putrefying organ while his brother, Gary Lee "Spud" Risner would scrape it on to the shovel with a stick. Then Larry Eugene would dart out the front door, (which was my job to hold open because the floor was slanted a bit causing it to swing shut on its own), and run to the road where he would sling the unfortunate bovine's disjecta membra into the creek.
We assumed our respective positions and I shouted, "Go!" when Larry Eugene had the shovel in hand, ready to assault the contents of the reeking appliance. Darryl whipped open the door and as the odoriferous reeking blast swiftly enveloped him he emitted a disturbing utterance and then abruptly vomited all over his two cousins who were stooped below, prepared to carry out this dubious undertaking for which we were being grossly over-compensated. I burst into a roar of laughter since I was easily five paces distant from the offending aroma. Spud screamed like a woman being raped while Larry Eugene mumbled an artful string of profanities and he finally yelled at Spud to cease his bellowing and get on with it. My plan was thereafter effected as originally imagined except that someone now had to clean up Darryl's puke as well. Logic would dictate that this task should fall to Darryl but I pooh-poohed any such notion at once -- he had no stomach for such a job which was why he threw up in the first place. After a brief period of dispute and negotiation on the final beer split, Larry Eugene assumed the responsibility with a very little assistance from Spud who also pleaded a gastric frailty.
When Doc and Junior returned with the beloved inventory, the old refrigerator looked great and smelled good enough to use. The grounds had also been cleared of hillbilly detritus which I piled and burned. We celebrated by drinking the ice cold Hudepohl long-necks as we stocked the refrigerators. The brands were as follows, in order of popularity: Pabst Blue Ribbon, Blatz, Hudepohl 14-K, Carling Black Label, and Stroh's. There were no "lite" beers in those great days. Doc had decided to carry three wine brands, Gibson's Pheasant-brand Muscatel, Thunderbird, and Wild Irish Rose, all in pints. At the state liquor store they had also acquired 24 pints of Kessler's and Corby's American blended whiskey [cheap whiskey]. Everything would sell both on-premises or carry-out for double its original retail price. Thus, a beer cost seventy-five cents, wine was a dollar fifty, and whiskey would sell for four fifty a pint, the latter being vended warm. It was stored in the far back room where Junebug and Doc could control access to it... until Larry Eugene had a lovely idea of knocking loose a panel in the back door so we could remove it easily and reach in at night to occasionally filch a pint.
Spud was handed the keys to Doc's superb car and the four of us spent the remainder of the day rounding up several old couches and stuffed chairs for the patrons who would soon arrive as soon as the word spread. We just strapped them atop the old station wagon with rope and off we went -- Spud was nearly old enough to acquire a learner's permit so he did all the driving. If the reader wonders why anyone would be inclined to patronize to a place where such dear prices prevailed, the answers are multiple: 1) The nearest legal establishment that sold alcoholic beverages was twelve miles distant, in Portsmouth -- Lucasville and McDermott were completely dry and not far from our threshold. 2) Not many of the drunks around our area possessed a driver's license even though several owned uninsured cars. To get to Portsmouth the only reasonable course was down U.S. Route 23, taking one within yards of big trouble, the Ohio Highway Patrol post. 3) Doc and Junebug sold all types of alcohol every day and all night, every night -- the place was very customer-friendly that way and it was the only location to purchase 6% beer, wine, or whiskey on Sunday although some carry-outs in Portsmouth would extend this unlawful perq to their regular customers. 4) Booze was freely sold to under-aged patrons, (under age 21 at the time 3.2% beer excepted), as long as either Larry Eugene or I vouched for them and both Doc and Junebug soon became familiar with their faces. 5) Most of all, our big draw was the opportunity for the guys to lounge around and talk as they drank, often expressing themselves in language that would not have been tolerated at a licensed premises in mixed company. Once in awhile, someone would bring along some skanky old whore and that always added spice to the ambiance. I remember old man Simmons bringing in his scraggly wife fairly often and he'd give you a few beers if you'd do her as long as he could watch. Larry Eugene and I had a great thirst for beer but our desire for alcohol was never that compelling. A thirteen year-old would always opt for an hour of heavy petting with a young pretty girl, wholly rejecting a single moment of in flagrante delicto with some ragged old hag. Doc kept an old army cot in the back room where he often sneaked catnaps and that's where any sexual activity took place. Card-playing was also encouraged as long as the participants paid out ten percent of each pot. So in the end, it was an edifice of iniquitous joy and gratification, was the Sugar Shack II. Many years later I was appointed manager of a modern multi-million dollar state park recreational resort, sited in the center of a beautiful 60,000 forest. Ask me at which of these two places I'd rather spend an evening.
Business was soon quite robust and the proprietors took in a considerable amount of money that summer. I have no idea how they divided it -- I doubt that the split was even because Junebug seemed perpetually shy of cash, thus I suspect that his contribution was largely of the working-it-out sort with Doc supplying the bulk of the capital. For my part, I have never had so much fun either before or since. The deal, as far as my parents knew, was that Larry Eugene and I were supposed to be camping at the old foxhunters' camp up on our hill in a forest clearing, a convenient spot which lay halfway between the head of Crowe Hollow where I lived, Ghost Hollow being just a short walk along a woodland path. Indeed, Larry and I maintained a really superb campsite there in the woods with a nice home-fashioned shepherd's tent contrived from a canvas tarp, an aluminum cooler with ice when we could get it, and a fire ring of sandstones which was always mounded high with hot white oak coals.
Every night at about ten p.m. we'd jink on down to The Sugar Shack, head-smacking, cutting shines, and laughing as a pair of teen pals do and, upon a round of greetings by our adult friends, we'd swill a couple of beers to conform to the social atmosphere and to get the buzz rolling. Sometimes, when we were fairly sober, we'd ride Larry's old motor scooter through the woods, a Silver Pigeon, which required dismounting and run-push assistance as it putted up the gravel surfaced road of Ghost Hollow hill. Around midnight, Doc would retire for a nap in the back room and Larry and I handled all the alcohol sales, doing our best to maintain a sanguine atmosphere until around 4 a.m. when Doc arose from the dead. I hasten to remark that it was a very workable arrangement. Doc gave us a pony case of Hudepohl [the only brand to offer twelve long-neck beers in a small cardboard case] and a pint of muscatel for our trouble, at which time we would return to the campsite and drink until our supply was depleted, usually retiring a little after daylight. Of course we purloined a few extra beers and sometimes a pint of wine while Doc was sleeping, setting it out the back window where we could retrieve it after knocking off. I wish to point out that we never stole so much as a dime of Doc's cash -- all that was handed over to him as soon as he awoke and if he was still half-drunk he'd kiss one of us on the cheek and pat our shoulders. He did that to people as a joke, knowing that it would embarrass them but we laughed and took it in stride.
I later discovered that old Doc knew all along that we were filching that extra booze. In any case, that was quite a bit of nightly drinking for a pair of teenagers and pretty soon we could hold our liquor better than most. Still I feel compelled to confess that we were often drunk as lords by the time we sat by the campfire for awhile and before sliding into our sleeping bags. Years later, I was driving Doc over to Hardrock's place, a beloved bootlegging friend in the Lucasville bottoms. We were both half-drunk when I revealed to Doc that Larry and I had sneaked beer and wine out the window and, in place of an oral reply, he leaned over and sandpapered my face with a lathery kiss on the cheek, patted me gently on the back, and burst into laughter. That's when I knew that he knew and he could not have cared less.
One afternoon Larry Eugene and I were helping Doc stock the refrigerator. As Junebug was ill he had come down earlier than usual to relieve him. Just the three of us were present until a big car pulled in rather uncertainly. Doc walked out on the porch to greet some man and woman that he knew. They came inside and the man, in a friendly sort of way, was already negotiating with Doc for a bottle of paregoric [camphorated tincture of opium from the drugstore]. Doc was no dope dealer but he always kept some paregoric around to control diarrhea which plagued him off and on. This discussion continued until Doc finally relented and handed over a new bottle of the stuff. The man offered to pay for it but Doc declined the offer. He would rather have kept his medicine. The man said he needed a cooking pan and I went out and retrieved one of the Hicks' old aluminum pans from a scrap-heap on the hillside. There was no good way to clean it since the well was infested with all manner of garbage and critters. Finally I went across the road and washed it in the creek which might have been even worse since there were a couple of outhouses just upstream. Doc had a small gas stove in the kitchen and he fired up a burner while the man wiped out the pan with his shirt and poured in the paregoric.
Neither Larry Eugene nor I had the slightest idea what this was all about but we were about to find out. The paregoric was boiled down and then the man stuck the pan in the refrigerator while he went back out to his car. All this time the woman was sitting on the couch, batting flies and nursing a beer. When he returned he opened a velvet covered box which contained a glass syringe. I wanted to see it and he let me hold it and look it over -- I have always been a curious sort. Of course now things were becoming obvious but we were still in for a surprise. He told his old lady to come into the kitchen and she did. The pair remained oblivious to the three of us. She put her hands on the stove and bent over as he threw up her dress and there was her shining ass with no panties on. He filled the syringe and gave her an injection and then he dropped his drawers and she did the same for him. Soon they were both as happy as blowflies on a dead cow's eyeball. Then they bought a pint of whiskey and left. Doc said it was just some guy he had known in Columbus. The man had asked over at Lucasville where to find Doc and he had been given perfect directions. I never heard of injections of dope being administered like that before but I suppose it worked for them. Doc seemed to take the whole matter in stride as if he had seen it a thousand times. Just one more edifying life experience at The Sugar Shack.
Doc did have one special medical treatment which is how he got his nickname. I call it The Doc Blevins Hot Toddy and it was very effective for hangover, colds, the grippe, lumbago, or even the delerium tremens. We saw people with the DTs with some frequency around Crowe Hollow and in the Lucasville bottoms and the suffering of these poor devils was impossible to ignore. The panicky wives of these sufferers would sometimes resort to hollering for us boys as we were walking down the road, asking us if we knew what could be done. The first guy I saw with DTs scared the crap out of me but Larry Eugene had seen it before. After a time I knew a little bit, tips I had picked up here and there. DT sufferers almost always developed a high temperature so an ice pack wrapped in a towel and placed on the forehead or on the back of their neck was very helpful. Also, they'd get the shivers really bad so even though they were using an ice pack, extra blankets around their body were called for but you didn't want to restrain them in any way because this caused panic. The moving air produced by a fan blowing nearby seemed to ease muzziness, mild battiness, and night horrors. As for medicine, I always told these women to go get some Benadryl at the drug store. This seemed to help more than anything else because it made the poor fellow sleepy if he took multiple pills in a dose and I was told after the fact that it diminished hallucinations of rats and snakes. [A great irony, years later, I met and became good friends with the actual inventor of Benadryl, Dr. George Rieveschl. He laughed when I told him about using it as a treatment for the DTs and he said he had never heard of such a thing. The world is a small place indeed.] The proper thing to have done would have been to take the poor bastard to the emergency room to be treated by a physician because the DTs can kill you. But they simply would not go to a doctor so I offered the best advice I knew... as a thirteen year-old. Anyway, Doc's cure was first-class and the ingredients were: 1 ounce boiling water, 1 ounce cheap whiskey, about a tablespoon of paregoric, a squirt of lemon juice, and two teaspoons of sugar, all stirred together and drunk straight down. If you drank one of Doc's Hot Toddys you'd soon be on your feet and, if not cured, still feeling good enough to be sociable. People came in all the time for one of his hot toddys and he finally brought all the ingredients to The Sugar Shack and also a teakettle to boil the water. Everyone drank from the same glass tumbler, the only one on the premises and no one ever washed it. I think some of these shyte-pokes weren't all that sick and just wanted the free shot of whiskey, because Doc never charged for his cure but, on the other hand, pretty much everyone who loafed at The Sugar Shack had some sort of illness.
Not that I was breezing through tests at school, but I had acquired a pretty good formal education, albeit a curious one, by age thirteen. Reading was a great hobby of mine and, largely by means of osmosis I had retained a great deal, even though I was oblivious to this actuality at the time. I read all of Dr. Mickelethwaite's waiting-room magazines [my mom was his nurse so I was there a lot] as well as most of the books in the library he maintained at his office, an old two-story large frame home at the southwest corner of Ninth and Gay streets. (Those were the days when gay meant "happy-go-lucky" and nothing more... at least not in Portsmouth, Ohio.) The magazines at the office included "National Geographic", (with extra time devoted to perusing those African tribal photo-essays), "Life", "The Saturday Evening Post", dozens of Reader's Digest condensed books, and numerous novels of high adventure. At home, my devoted math and science teacher father had amassed a similarly diverse library which was where I absorbed plenty of non-fiction from texts concerning various crafts and trades, everything from magic to carpentry. Dad was especially proud of our brand new set of "World Book Encyclopedias". I spent many hours reading and re-reading issues of comic books as well, every character from Archie to Casper the Friendly Ghost to Spider-Man. (Why did I not retain that issue No. 1? I do not know.) I only bother to mention my studies because it eventually bore upon my role at The Sugar Shack II.
All of our customers lived from day-to-day and I cannot recall any of the locals who was employed. It was a little different on weekends because all my boyhood heroes would return home from their respective jobs in Columbus, ninety miles to the north. Most of these Elvis wannabes were in their twenties and each earned a viable living by painting houses, sheet-rocking, sealing asphalt, or cleaning brick. They all drove fast cars that were stressed daily to beyond the vehicles' limits and they also possessed seemingly endless quantities of cash, this being in total contrast to the locals who existed on their meager crazy checks, occasional pay-offs on cockfights and card betting, and a good many of these men traded cars with considerable frequency, picking up a few dollars by that means. Some resorted to a little junking when they were particularly hard-up. They mostly wore old work trousers, second-hand white shirts that were always too large, sagging gray sweaters, and old work boots. In contrast, what a fine assemblage of fellows the Columbus gang was with their tailored striped shirts, tight jeans, and black pointy-toed shoes with heel taps! All these guys, both the young and the old, could rattle off any number of superb personal adventures, embellished yes, but founded in actuality, all of which kept Larry and me wide-eyed and fascinated. Certain central themes prevailed: bar-fights, poker games, car races and crashes, and of course detailed yarns about women from which both Larry and I fashioned our courting techniques. Alas for that!
Some of these men were married, the older locals to very tired and gaunt-looking women who had endured difficult lives, usually having borne and raised a passel of snot-nosed brats. Those men who were not married were invariably winos, amiable personalities who, if they had bothered to journey during their sunset years they would have been characterized as hobos, given the era. One rarely encountered a mean-spirited wino because when such a character emerged, he was soon dead -- I think they were rolled and killed but no money would be wasted by the sheriff beyond a cursory investigation on such societal debris. "Uncle Jack Friend", Larry's Uncle, half-brother to Junebug, and half-brother-in-law to Doc, was a very cheerful wino and everyone loved him. It was a tragic episode, around 1970 when Jack stumbled on to the wrong porch during the wee hours one dark night in the Lucasville bottoms. He had gotten drunk at Hardrock's where he had been playing cards and had won a few dollars so he was in a good mood. He was looking for Coon Blevins' house where he planned to spend the night but had gotten on the wrong street and the houses in the bottoms looked much alike. When he pounded on the door of an old woman's home, yelling at the top of his lungs for Coon to get up and let him in, the terrified old woman shot him multiple times through the door with a revolver. Jack fell dead in a pool of blood. It was purely one of those incidents that never should have happened but it did. The unfortunate old lady was well into her 80s and was never charged with a crime, nor should she have been. Jack would have been the first to say so.
If the relationships seem extraordinarily close and complex in Crowe Hollow and Ghost Hollow, it is because there were frequent inter-marriages between the large clans that resided there. Widowers Sadie Risner and Louis Friend, through previous marriages, had brought a number of children into the household when they wed, one of whom was Uncle Jack as we all called him. Add to that, Louis and Sadie were the parents of Louis Jr... Junebug, who was later dubbed Mad Dog but I never liked that appellation although he seemed to not mind it at all. Doc had married one of Sadie's daughters, Chloe, and Doc's mother had been a Rowe, a large family, several of whom lived in Crowe Hollow including Allie Delay along with two of her numerous children, Carl "Orsie" Delay and Vernon "Oogie" Delay. The Henry and Salyers families boasted many members who had wed someone in either Ghost or Crowe hollows. Doc's mother, Lily, and Allie Delay were sisters. Allie's and Lily's brother, Sanford Rowe, was the father of Oogie's, Orsie's, and Doc's first cousin, Joseph Edgar "Ro-Ho" Rowe.
There was a funny story that Joe Edgar enjoyed telling with some frequency at The Sugar Shack: He and 'Tater-Hole Phipps had recently gotten themselves arrested at The Palace [honky-tonk] in Portsmouth for drunk and disorderly conduct as a result of a bar fight. They were brought before the desk sergeant who would decide if they could bond out if they paid a $25 fine. Pen in hand, the sergeant looked at 'Tater-Hole and said, "Name?"
'Tater-Hole shot back, "John Doe!"
The sergeant, shook his head, looked at Joe Edgar and said, "Well then, I suppose you're Joe Rowe!"
"I damn sure am!" Joe Edgar retorted.
The desk sergeant looked at the cop who brought them in and said, "Lock their fuckin' asses up!"
I mention these few folks in particular as most of them have some role in herein -- but you can see how it would have been advisable to refrain from telling a calumnious story about this person or that one without first knowing whether you were talking to a half-brother, uncle, or first cousin to the protagonist of your yarn. I kept close track of all these kinships and one day a curious thought struck me. I pointed out to Larry that he had two sons... both named Larry, (by two different women of course and far apart in their ages.) He gave that several moments of consideration, sniggered, and then declared, "I never thought about that before!" Larry wasn't stupid, in fact he was very intelligent, but the women had named his children and the elder of the two lads was never around. The fact was, no one else had thought about it either.
If all these relationships seem unreasonably murky to the reader then it will suffice to simply adopt the notion that most of the people mentioned herein were related by blood... except for me. My dad, mom, and helpful uncles raised our cabin during the summer of 1955 at the head of Crowe Hollow using logs felled from a nearby hillside. Our previous domicile had been more suburban, situated at the fringe of Portsmouth in Shearer's Hollow about fifteen miles from Crowe Hollow. At age two I obviously could not have cared less where we lived... not so with my nine year-old brother, Mike. He had accumulated numerous neighborhood friends in Shearer's Hollow. In town one could get about very handily on a bicycle or on foot to all manner of casual entertainments including restaurants, department stores, and theaters, all places that Mike loved to go. Until the day he died, just this year, Mike lamented about the dreadful move to Crowe Hollow although he later moved back there on his own.
While my family was sweating away that summer, my aunt Frieda baby-sat me on the more adulatory end of Big Run Road near Crabtree Corners, about five miles from Crowe Hollow or much closer by walking if you knew where to cut through the woods. The idea of the move was that dad could return to fairly near his homeplace, the enigmatic hamlet of McDermott, (and a place which bulged with my relatives), but he liked the isolation of this secluded twenty-two acre patch. Had he known what I was up to every night I would have been grounded until the necessity of my middle-aged cataract surgery would have forced his hand. He wasn't entirely oblivious to the fact that Larry and I were probably up to some manner of juvenile shenanigans; however, on the positive side, dad was a romantic and he also believed that boys should take a few knocks. He would have been okay with our more reasonable lunar meanderings, purloining a few ears of some nearby farmer's roas'n-ears, slipping over the ridge to meet up with some capricious girls, attending a cockfight in Pat Henry's barn, all through the social filter of an Appalachian rite of passage. That's actually what The Sugar Shack II was all about as well, at least so far as I view it in retrospect, but the magnitude of our nefarious activities was exponentially amplified from what dad would have found acceptable. It was simply way too much fun. The more entertaining and merry of one's social experiences, the more expensive, perilous, and unlawful they turn out to be. I have lived by a certain credo for most of my life: "Take what you want and pay for it." Sometimes the paying aspect is extremely burdensome.
Lots of men came to the Sugar Shack II, Gene and John Long, Rufford Wen, Don Sheets [who harbored a psychological fear of chickens], Butch Adkins [aka Boyd Hackbush], Jack Lee Burton, Orsie Delay, Robby Williams, Arnold "Broken-wing" Phipps, Jack and Garrett "Gaddy" Friend [Junebug's half-brothers], and numerous others. One or two of us four boys, the courageous quartet who had performed the nasty cleaning detail, were nearly always underfoot, standing alert to anyone who needed a flat tire changed, a pack of cigarettes from Bill Duffer's store [only a half-mile distant], or any other menial task for which we hoped to be rewarded in beer.
At The Sugar Shack II, other than Doc or Junebug, the only individuals permitted to open those refrigerator doors was Larry Eugene or me, albeit Junebug never trusted us like Doc did and he had it in his mind to impede our access, more-or-less to instill us with the fact that he was the man in charge. Neither of us had ever questioned that notion but Junebug was the lesser partner and I think he might have felt a little intimidated on that point. Opening those doors was the same as walking behind the bar at a licensed premises -- it simply wasn't done if you had no right to do so. Junebug was really bad to routinely augur The Evil Eye on us which we instantly warded off with a simple but effective gesticulation taught to us by Arnold Phipps, a man who knew everything which could not be learned from books or scholars. When Larry and I were serving, someone was always shouting at us, "I ain't no fuckin' camel, son -- reach me a cold one outta that icebox!" One or the other of us would have the cap popped off and in his hand faster than you can pick your nose. A drunk will always light a cigarette with a new beer so this was also an opportunity to bum a smoke. No one ever refused us. Then we'd collect their money and hand it straight over to either Junebug or Doc, whomever was in charge at the moment. It was quite common to have a dozen or so patrons laughing, lounging about on the old couches and chairs, sharing tales of life experiences. I found all these yarns fascinating, the veracity of these tall tales becoming less prevalent as the night advanced. Doc worked from about 9 p.m. 'till 9 the next morning and Junebug picked up the day shift. We never had to be told a patron's brand name of beer -- we knew who drank what. In fact, Larry Eugene and I knew more about them than their wives and kids did. No one ever asked for a glass of water or even for a an empty glass for their beer. There were no glasses on the premises, except for Doc's singular Hot Doddy tumbler, nor any means to clean one. There was a dug-well, maybe twenty feet deep, just outside the back door but it was polluted with newts, toads, frogs, and sometimes there was a dead possum floating in it. Plus, the Hicks had thrown plenty of trash down that well, purportedly to keep rats from accumulating as they would in an open garbage dump. But there were usually big rats in the well, both dead and live ones.
There was a lot of psychology to be observed at times when The Sugar Shack's business was booming. Only in later years did I reflect upon a peculiar phenomenon that was transpiring every day I was there which involved how the patrons of The Sugar Shack viewed me. I loved talking to these old guys. They told the most outrageous and hilarious stories and I learned a great deal from each of them. Even a stupid man can teach you how to not do something.
12 Aug 1953 – 10 Jul 2018
BIO by : RFB Jenkins
Pat documented much of my family history from southern Ohio and Kentucky .... with honor and respect.
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Patrick W. Crabtree, 64, of McDermott, died Tuesday, July 10, 2018 at Southern Ohio Medical Center.
He was born August 12, 1953 in Portsmouth to Raymond and Mary Crabtree and grew up on Crowe Hollow.
Pat was a retired manager of Shawnee State Park.
In addition to his parents, he was predeceased by his brother, Michael B. Crabtree.
Pat is survived by his wife, Linda (Nelson) Crabtree; one daughter, Ashley (Michael) Collins of Jacksonville, Florida; three grandchildren, Aiden, Autumn and Nolan Collins; and a favorite niece, Heidi Crabtree of Clovis, California.
Pat admits that he too attended college, eventually being granted two separate degrees including an Associate's Degree in Parks and Recreation Administration and, much later, a B.A. in Social Science with a minor in history. Not very good degrees, to be sure, but degrees nonetheless. Then he would smile.
At Pat's request, his body was cremated.
Per Pat's request ... There was no service or visitation.
Arrangements were under the direction of F.C. Daehler Mortuary Company in Portsmouth.
Below are Exerts from Pat's love of and writings of the Appalachian hills, particularly around Portsmouth, Lucasville, and McDermott Ohio.
Patrick Crabtree's Blog: The Ospidillo News
Exert 1 Ode Dyin' to Kill Somebody
Ah well, such is life.
I will not be able to afford embalming and a casket and a cemetery plot and a gravestone. I have not saved any money for that -- I have spent my money on rescuing cats and dogs so the veterinarian will have to take pity on me and embalm me if I am to get a decent grave. But the truth is, I told Linda to go ahead and just have me cremated and dump my ashes up by those of my favorite cat ever, good old Rudy, up in the front yard.
I haven't been very pious either but that's good enough for me.
Exert 2
School had always represented an interference in what my pals and I really wanted to do which essentially amounted to this: riding our bicycles, driving cars, chasing girls along back roads, beer drinking, coon hunting, fishing, squirrel hunting, and listening to wild stories of old winos at the local bootlegger's joint.
For my part, I additionally particularly enjoyed reading but not the material which was offered at school by the teachers. The only person who ever understood this was Mrs. Madge Ervin. Most students didn't care for Mrs. Ervin because she was to the point and abrupt, but I liked her a great deal. She had been my third-grade teacher and eventually she became the school librarian. I thought she was perfect in that role, very organized and a good listener. She knew I leaned toward adventure fiction and so, through her great knowledge and willful assistance, I got to savor some really outstanding titles.
By the time I reached high school, I had become a genuine terror. I was forced to convey a pretense of civilized behavior at specific times because my own father was a very strict school principal in Portsmouth and there were additionally many teachers within my extended family. They often shared information about the activities of my many cousins and me. So I spent a good amount of time plotting and scheming as to how to semi-legitimately escape from class. I was lucky to have a confederate of a sort in this juvenile conspiracy -- it was our school principal at Valley High, Mr. James Young. Mr. Young was sympathetic with at least a few of my passions. Rather than come down on me like a boulder, (which he could have done since he and my dad were old college pals), he simply diverted and channeled my agenda as best he could. He had gotten no small amount of practice while dealing with my older brother of seven years, Mike.
One passion which Mr. Young and I wholly shared was squirrel hunting. On more than one occasion, Mr. Young would step into the first period study hall on a nice September day and motion for Roy Marshall and me to come along. Oh, Joy!!! That meant we were going squirrel hunting because Mr. Young wasn't above playing hooky himself now and then. Frankly, it was to Mr. Young's great advantage to do this because Roy and I were frequently scouting new ground all around the county and we had secured landowner permission to hunt these virgin territories. Most of these properties were bulging with either gray or fox squirrels or both.
People would hardly believe it nowadays but we always carried our shotguns, (and often hand guns for coon hunting), right in the back seat of our cars in the school parking lot. This was a common practice for those of us who hunted and it saved us from returning home to retrieve our weapons. And so we could thus get into the woods as quickly as possible after school had let out. So Roy and I would jump into Jim's car, (Mr. Young became "Jim" on these squirrel-hunting expeditions, a privilege we never abused), fire up a smoke, and he would pull around to our cars in the student parking area. Once there, we'd surreptitiously slip our shotguns and hunting gear from our vehicles into his. We'd usually make it back to school just as the busses were lining up to close out the day. Those were splendid times indeed. There's something about playing hooky which infuses a kid with a rush and when you're hooking along with the school principal, it's even lovelier.
But I had to devise other additional means of escape from the doldrums of grueling classes such as French II, Geometry, and Government (Civics.) I somehow managed to join certain organizations which came with the perquisites of occasionally being excused from class. One year I was the photographer for the Annual Staff and I shot tons of film which was never published anywhere. I think for two years I managed to latch on to the job of construction crew member for the class plays. We built little and smoked a great deal. And our football field and track were pretty new back then and a new concrete block concession stand was being built as well. Coach Morris Gullion was always quite happy to find volunteers willing to sod his beloved football field, a thankless task at which I excelled. We were typically left to our own devices so we just posted a guard at the top of the hill, commenced our work and smoked all we wanted to.
But our Senior year was the time when things actually got out of control. Hell, it even began to worry me! Here's what happened: Claude Sammons had been the Mechanical Drawing and Wood Shop teacher for many years. He ran a very tight ship and everything was maintained in perfect order. He taught even the most heinous and rowdy boys a great deal to get them through day-to-day life. For me, the shop class was elective as I was enrolled in the College Preparatory Program. I carried a heavy load of classes from my freshman year forward so that by the time I became a Senior, my days would be my own. I had actually devised this plan from the start of high school, probably on the sage counsel of my brother, Mike, who was infinitely superior at scheming than I was myself. So by my Senior year, the only class to which I was obligated was in the first period, Mrs. Fannin's Government class, the dreaded hour of all Seniors. The remainder of my days' time was spent in the wood shop.
Mr. Sammons had opted to work in the higher-paying position of the school Guidance Counselor, a job for which I felt he was ill-suited since, from my view, his outstanding talents were clearly going to be wasted. The guidance counselor of past years had done nothing that I ever heard of. I had never met with her (Mrs. Bertha Phillips) a single time and it's not for the fringe student to reach up to the Administration for guidance -- the guidance counselor must be aggressive in contacting all the students to set them on a positive track in life, or at least try to do so. It's ironic that her husband, Mr. Phillips the janitor, gave me invaluable advice while I was cutting class to help him, (yet another of my numerous dodges), on what I might do following graduation. Mr. Phillips was a great old fellow.
The grim story for Mr. Young was that he was short of a stellar shop teacher, a position which is incredibly difficult to fill. First we inherited poor old Julius Chandler, an elderly minister who was a superb home craftsman and who had never taught school in his lifetime. He really liked the boys but had not the least notion as to how to control them. Certain boys, (I won't name them outright), T.M., G.B., R.B., R.A., and T.G., aggregately became the bane of his formerly peaceful existence. And while I did nothing to impede the old man, neither did I demonstrate the slightest trace of leadership in an attempt to aid him, I am ashamed to confess. Before many days had passed, the lunatics were running the asylum and Mr. Chandler had become a ball of nerves. In fact, he is now buried just a mile or so east of my present home at the summit of the McDermott Cemetery Hill and I often wonder if we might have shaved ten years or so off his otherwise fruitful life.
Mr. Young came into the shop one Monday morning with a rumpled looking character attending him by the name of Mr. Larry Flannery. Mr. Flannery, he said, would be replacing Mr. Chandler and we were to help him all we possibly could. Of course we would. Then Mr. Young pulled me off to the side and cut me the deal of a lifetime. The truth was, Larry Flannery had a B.A. in Social Science, (good for nothing whatever, I have one myself), and he didn't know a band saw from a jackhammer. And he certainly possessed no knowledge of mechanical drawing which was to be taught to Freshmen and Sophomores. Would I teach the boys the mechanical drawing? You bet your sweet fucking ass I would! What a coup! This deal included a frequent excused absence from Mrs. Fannin's Government class -- I would just read the material and take the tests, a move which in fact moved me from a C- up to a B. My dad was much pleased.
Larry, as we came to know him, was posited strictly as a disciplinarian. What an outrageous notion -- he was more evil than all of us boys put together! In his private life, Larry was a bachelor-gambler of dubious repute. Years later, my brother Mike, (who became the Chief Probation Officer for the local Common Pleas Court), carried Larry on felony probation on the crime of carrying a concealed weapon, this charge no doubt stemming from some incident from within a Portsmouth speakeasy, most likely The Subway. So Larry taught the boys how to gamble, or rather he taught us how to cheat. He collected our lunch money most days with the nefarious match game, a numbers device which one cannot possibly lose when one knows the mathematical hoax involved in playing the game. We were too stupid to catch on because Larry was shrewd enough to lose a game now and again on purpose.
I kept my covenant with Mr. Young -- I taught the boys to draw, although clearly not as effectively as Mr. Sammons might have done. When a couple of the troublemakers would attempt to challenge me I would just retrieve one or two Senior thugs from the shop and the matter would be immediately and permanently quashed with no aftermath. It wasn't a perfect method for running a class but it got us through the year. I doubt, though, that my methods would have merited the School Board's endorsement.
Still, for Mr. Young, no news from the shop was good news. To keep the younger boys' mouths shut, we allowed them to periodically take a break and come into the shop for a smoke back by the welder, or to play the match game with Larry any time they wished. And one Freshman or Sophomore was appointed daily to stand guard duty at the door to maintain a watch for Mr. Young because we had smoking going on by the constantly fired-up welder and two or three card games were always in progress at various places throughout the large room. I would quickly complete the drawings for the appointed watchmen because Mr. Young would periodically scan these drawings and check off the names against the list of students. When it comes to drafting, I am truly a master, a skill which I ultimately carried forward to college engineering classes.
One day, I don't know why, G.B. said we were going to load up everything and take it all home. Larry was late for work that morning and so G. backed his big Oldsmobile into the shop and, with some help, loaded the table saw into his trunk. Obviously, the trunk lid wouldn't shut but G. didn't give a shit and navigated his car, trunk lid high in the air and saw protruding, back to the parking lot. Well this singular act breached the flood gates. Everybody drove their cars around and started loading up -- by the time they were finished, there wasn't a hammer or screwdriver remaining anywhere. Larry finally arrived, saw what had happened, and practically went into convulsions. He was a very high-strung person. When no one would immediately confess to the obvious larceny he headed down the hall in a huff to retrieve Mr. Young.
I thank the late James Young to this day and with all my heart for not pulling me aside to get the low down. He took on the task of remedying the matter through his own initiative. I forget what the threat was if we didn't comply but he said that he and Larry were leaving for fifteen minutes and when he got back, everything right down to the last 8d box nail better be back where it belonged. As soon as they walked out a scramble ensued. Everything was put right in five minutes and we utilized the next ten to grab a smoke or two before the authorities returned. Fortunately, all this happened within a few weeks of graduation and Mr. Young desired no problems which would cause eight or ten Seniors to not graduate. No one I ever knew had a cooler head than Mr. Young -- he knew precisely how to handle boys in difficult situations.
Once in a while, Roger McClay, who was the chemistry and physics teacher, would hear too much cacophony in the shop and he would peer out his door glass across the hall at our door to see what was up. At such times, either T.M. or G.B. would usually be summoned and they would simply point ominously at Mr. McClay, an act which caused him to become instantaneously blind, deaf, and mute. T. and G. were outlandishly large and domineering fellows and they could each convey an air of noir-authority, much in the spirit of a swarthy Mafioso guy. A number of the Senior boys that year had really been wearing on Mr. McClay, a fact which was not lost on the under-classmen. I think it was the following year when I heard that D.T. had physically roughed him up a bit. Such an act would have been unheard of at Valley in previous years but I guess my Class of '71 gave rise to something rather notorious which sort of clung on for a time, not a positive legacy for me or my peers.
The advent of Driver Education came about when I was a senior and Mr. Douglas Booth became the instructor. This was likely a thoughtful choice since he could handle the rougher boys with no problem and, the fact was, most of us had been driving since we were thirteen anyway. I think T.G. commenced driving when he was seven or eight because his dad ran a big junkyard down by the Drive-in Theater and T. loved to race the drivable cars around in the junkyard lot.
One day we were out driving around, a dubious contingent including G.B., R.B., T.C., and me, with Mr. Booth riding shotgun and reading his daily newspaper. T. was our pilot out near Minford and we soon spotted an elderly lady crossing the road ahead to retreive her mail from the box. I think it was R. who blurted out, "Run over that old bitch!" Well that was a very unfortunate remark because when Mr. Booth dropped his paper a bit to grab a looksee, let us say that it turned out to be a person near and dear to his heart. I don't recall precisely how it all played out but you can bet that it wasn't good in the end for R.
But the Driver Education car was yet another device which enabled me to occasionally skip class. A couple of us would go to Mr. Booth and volunteer to wash the car down at Shumway's gas station in Lucasville. He'd toss us the keys and we'd usually head straight for Hardrock's place, (the local bootlegger, Charlie Lockhart), for a quick cold beer. Then we'd run around the Lucasville Bottoms for a while and eventually we'd race back to Shumway's, wash the big Ford in record time, and then return the keys just before school was dismissed for the day.
During my Senior year, most mornings commenced with a get-together at Hardrock's place in the Lucasville Bottoms. Hardrock lived in a tiny green tarpaper shack and his operation was pretty simple. He went to town and bought lots of beer, wine, and whiskey and when he re-sold it at his house, which of course was in a dry township, he charged double what he paid for it. So a beer was about seventy-five cents. We didn't have the money to drink many of those before class each day so we often opted for Old Pheasant Brand Muscatel Wine instead -- wino wine. It was $1.25 per pint and two of us could get a pretty good buzz rolling with that amount. It certainly made the days pass more pleasantly. Old Hardrock was a prince of a guy. He inevitably had a good story to impart and, as he supped his breakfast tomato soup each morning, he'd fill us in on all the Bottoms gossip from the previous evening which might include cockfighting winners, shootings and other assaults, hired insurance arsons, card game winners and losers, and so on. Hardrock was better by far than the radio because he always embellished a bit to make each story more interesting but he'd never tell a lie outright.
We rode to school pretty much every morning with Gary Lee Risner in a decrepit sixty-something Pontiac Tempest. We'd start out in Crowe Hollow, Gary driving with his now late brother Larry Eugene riding shotgun and me occupying the rear seat. Then we'd swing in on West Avenue in Lucasville behind the Elementary School and pick up the now late Darryl Neeley, a cousin to the Risners. From there it was on to Hardrock's unless we had to stop to re-supply our blessed cigarettes. Darryl was the very best of us and I will not now go into how he was accidentally killed just a short period following our graduation -- it's a long and tragic story. But he eternally had a smile for everyone and was much loved by all his classmates, boys and girls alike. I miss him a great deal and I think about him all the time. Anyway, about eight minutes before the final bell rang to commence classes we would race up the hill to school in that old Tempest, sharing a good snort of Muscatel as we did so.
Once in awhile, Gary's car would become crippled and we'd be forced to ride the bus up the hill, (now Robert Lucas Road), from the Intermediate School on U.S. Route 23. We always chose Mr. Keller's bus for two noteworthy reasons: it was the final bus to ascend the hill to the High School and, Mr. Keller always allowed us to smoke all we wanted. He smoked too. The only people on this bus were the smokers because most students wanted to arrive at school a bit earlier to complete any last-minute homework. Homework be damned! That was the Crowe Hollow credo. I'd scratch out something in the final few seconds, garnering answers from the weak-willed whenever possible, and flail it toward the teacher at the last possible moment. Along Robert Lucas Road, there exists to this very day a small newt-and-toad pond on the right after you have topped the hill. We'd pull all the windows down to clear the smoke on Mr. Keller's bus and he'd shout, just before reaching the pond, "Throw those fuckin' cigarettes out!" He wasn't bull-shitting either and so we did. I'll bet the nicotine level of that pond would have killed any living thing back in those days.
As for girls, the Valley girls weren't much interested in most of us for obvious reasons. A couple of younger ones did take us on and we loved them very much for their kind attentions. I latched on to R.M. from the Bottoms, a free-spirit who sported a joyous, beautiful smile and who was four years my junior, but she knew far more about life than I ever did. We went to the Scioto Breeze Drive-in on Friday and Saturday nights, usually avoiding the entrance fee via the very large trunk of Pat Henry's '58 Chevy convertible. We also ran the back roads as a pack over in the northwest corner of the county where most of my numerous cousins lived and attended high school. I loved R. very much and, to this day, I feel a special fondness toward her even though I haven't seen her for forty-odd years. She eventually ran off with S.C., one of my Elvis-ish hero-icons from the Lucasville Bottoms and a man ten years my senior. I was quite proud that R. chose to run off with S. -- this lessened the pain of a love suddenly lost.
Lots of girls from other schools vied for our attentions. Darryl was our secret weapon -- they all wanted Darryl. But we seemed to always have enough girls on board to match up out on Freejack Hill for lengthy necking and beer-drinking sessions. Nothing beyond that ever happened -- there were simply too many of us. The car was as a can of sardines. We'd stay out pretty late and on weekends the girls were forgotten and we'd go coon hunting with Brother Bill Scaff of Otway. One night we caught and killed a skunk and, before dying, it revenged itself by spraying all of us, dogs included. The next day at school we were catching a lot of evil stares from our classmates. Mr. Young came to the rescue and sent us home for a day or so.
Once a year, Mr. Young felt an official obligation to catch all the smokers in the act. This was more an Annual Event than it was something to be feared or dreaded. We all knew it was coming and only fate would save certain individuals from the odious penalties of smoking at school. There was a janitor's room behind the stalls in the boy's restroom. Mr. Young would spend most of a day in that room, peering through a small vent above the stalls. We smoked in the restroom quite a lot between classes just to grab a couple of puffs. This routine practice led to doom in my Sophomore year. Near the end of the day, Mr. Young called off a laundry list of names over the speaker system, all smokers, and instructed us to report to his office. On the day I got caught, he also called Bill "Dinky" Dalton's name which was a big surprise since Dinky didn't smoke and we all knew that. We arrived in the office en masse, each of us bearing the feeble hope that this wasn't about smoking [Ha!]. As it turned out, Dinky had made some depraved and disparaging remark about Mr. Young personally and Mr. Young just wanted to scare the living shit out of him, which he proceeded to do -- then he let him go, addressing the rest of us with that ever-so-grim countenance which he could command at will. It was a choice between three licks and forty laps around the gym, or, a three-day suspension. I was elated since I was running between twelve and fifteen miles per day in practice for the track team -- I was the two-miler. Everybody took the three licks and forty laps except for Jerry O'Banion, a counter-culture upper-classman. There were about twenty-five of us and we got that mess behind us the very next day, except for Jerry that is.
Oh, I could go on and on as to the foolish and rotten things which transpired over those years. I guess that school did provide enough structure that we arose from our beds at a decent hour, (not so during the summers!), and enough discipline was enforced upon us to prevent our becoming serial killers or ax murderers. I eventually struck out a career in law enforcement and that where I remained following college. The best poachers make the most effective wardens.
And by the way, here's how to win at the infamous match game:
Exert 3
I'm no expert on early 20th Century Appalachian architecture... I don't think there are any such people. Maybe Kevin Bradbury comes close, my former assistant manager at Shawnee State Park who stepped up as park manager when I retired. Kevin was my resident genius -- I'd like to own the stack of oaken shake-shingles that he has produced in his lifetime. But the houses I'm talking about were wooden frame homes, often with a tin roof [or tar-paper and slate shingles] and vertical siding with furring strips which stood to defeat the winter winds.
My dad and I built a really nice storage shed and when I suggested that it would be easier to run the boards horizontally instead of vertically he quickly rebuffed any such notion, remarking with a measure of scorn, "That's how hog-pens are built." He was right about that, although I had never taken notice of it prior to his edifying comment, and there was clearly something in his mind, a cultural shibboleth, by which he was driven, one which drove him to veer away from representations of Appalachian poverty. My dad had come from humble roots, although it was a household of cleanliness and dignity, that there was going to be no hog-pen style shed erected on his property! I saw these same sort of "statements" repeated many times by Appalachian natives who grew up in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. People were raising the bar for themselves and for their families. I think this outlook of improvement was initiated largely as a result of World War II adventures as these young Appalachian men were exposed to the world during their travels. Their observations during their travels provided them with a new perspective on what could be achieved in their own lives.
Certainly the culture shifted throughout Appalachia as a result of World War II. Prior to that, entire families routinely continued to reside with their parents and grand-parents, often within the same residence and sometimes in a smaller, newly-constructed home on the same property. The Big House was always the central home on the property, usually where the evening meals were prepared and consumed by everyone who lived thereabouts. But subsequent to the war, the children were much more inclined to move out and raise their family elsewhere, often far away if a good job pulled them in that direction.
Where the household economics were good four-inch horizontal clapboards were used. A log cabin was to be avoided as it was stereotypical to Appalachia and again, emblematic of poverty... so my dad built a log cabin. That aspect of the matter seemed not to bother him and I think he viewed this as an aspect pioneer craftsmanship rather than as an icon of poverty. And, of course, he saved a lot of money by having his raw materials ready at hand, growing on the hillside. Country and suburban log cabins are nowadays all the rage although most people have no notion of their numerous limitations.
I certainly took note of the various wonders of carpentry as I was growing up, the late 1950s and '6os, a period in which most of these homes were entering their decline. The houses of post-World War Two embraced modernity and most folks wanted a single-story residence. Sadly, the rural Appalachian edifices of the pre-war period are practically all gone these days.
I feel very nostalgic about these homes -- that's what they were... homes. In most of the places that I'll be speaking of numerous children were raised, including my own paternal Grandfather's house where he and Grandma raised thirteen wonderful children. Such homes were the scenes of births, celebrations, [such as family reunions], hard times [the loss of employment], agriculture, innovation [such as unique ways of storing food supplies], deaths, and even wakes.
I really cotton to the notion of wakes, preferring the Irish variety over the Appalachian ones [which were largely Irish in their roots but if there was any alcohol around it was hidden, abiding by religious social mores, most likely nipped out behind the smokehouse along with two or three other male imbibers.] Some homesteads even featured back-yard cemeteries and you can sometimes track an Appalachian family's ancestry by visiting one if the monuments are marked. However, due to the poverty of the era, sometimes only a chunk of squared sandstone from the local quarry or even a much-deteriorated wooden cross marks these graves I like the idea of a family cemetery too. Would I prefer to have a wake when I drop dead and be buried near the home of my youth? Yep. Unfortunately, I have to remain practical for my Linda so we've decided that I will be cremated and my ashes will most likely be scattered in the front yard where Rudy, and some of my other cats are buried. A good many of them have also been cremated, (although I buried Rudy's carcass myself), such as old Mick, Sluggo, Big Boy, White Spot, and my beloved L.T.
Exert 4 from Pat's odes about the Sugar Shack
There had been a Sugar Shack I in 1966, operated by Arnold "Broken-Wing" Phipps and Junior "Doc" Blevins but it had been largely a gambling enterprise which didn't interest us boys much as we only rarely had more than a dollar or two in our pockets. Apparently neither did anyone else have any money after Arnold and Doc wiped them out and the place shut down after a month or so, having never once been raided by the county sheriff. It was just a slab-wood shed on Ghost Hollow, the outbuilding of a ramshackle hovel owned by one "Miss Tutwaller", an absentee church-going landlady who resided somewhere in North Carolina. I had never laid eyes on Miss Tutwaller but Larry's Grammaw, Sadie Friend, apparently knew her well. Miss Tutwaller owned three residences plus the Crowe Hollow Church-house which was actually in Ghost Hollow. She raked-in $25 per month for the tar-paper shack on Crowe Hollow, which burned around 1965 or so, [Orise Rowe lived there in sin with a really mean and sour old church lady, I forget her name but I always felt sorry for Orise], and $35 for Maggie Chandler's rickety bungalow at the forks and the same for The Sugar Shack property. I think she allowed the church to be used for free by any self-ordained hell-fire preacher who needed a launch-pad.
I can't remember who last paid rent for the house where The Sugar Shack ended up. Clifford and Steve Hicks moved in around the fall of '66, just after the first Sugar Shack had dissolved operations. Old Cliff was a foreboding, grimly statuesque figure with a big nasty mole protruding from his forehead but he was a very nice guy, easy to get along with -- groovy, one might have said at the time. He was not a well man but only occasionally did he complain, his tuberculosis and lumbago issues notwithstanding. Cliff's son, Steve, clearly housed some hungry evil worm within his over-sized head and it gnawed away at his brain, a very small brain. He got picked on a lot, most of it brought on by himself, yet a pathetic creature overall.
We'd be trundling up Ghost Hollow, Larry Eugene and me, and poor Steve would rush out on the ratty porch and holler, "Hey, Codwell...! Cod-LICKER...! Fuck you!" ...and then he'd scramble back into the house before Larry Eugene could nail him with a road-stone. One hot afternoon after giving Larry Eugene a hardy blaspheming, Steve ran inside, opened one of the tiny side windows, and then continued to rant the most intolerable obscenities while I stood by laughing my ass off. Larry Eugene perfectly timed a face-full of gravels for him when he peeped his bulbous head up a second time and Steve erupted in howls of pain and frustration. Clearly, Cliff wasn't home at that moment. Steve then snatched up a broom and used the handle to start busting out what few window panes there were, all the time ranting and screaming like a complete idiot, "Uh-oh! you broke that fuckin' window! Oh-oh! You broke that one too!" He shattered every window in the house. Larry Eugene thought this nonsense was as hilarious as I did.
We strolled on up the road to Larry Eugene's home, a sturdy old tin-roofed furring-strip bungalow just a hundred feet distant, and when we saw Cliff come dusting up the road we caught him before he got to his house and told him what happened. Since all the glass was on the outside, any moron could determine that the windows had been broken from within. Cliff allowed Steve to elaborate upon the lie about Larry Eugene demolishing the windows and then he boomed, "Okay there, little boy! Now it'll be yer ass in boxcar letters!" [He always said that to Steve before giving him a strapping.] A better first-class belt-beating I never saw. Even Larry Eugene said so and he had endured some dandy floggings from his Grampaw, who had since passed on.
The Hicks [pronounced HICK-zez] lived off the land, more-or-less hand-to-mouth. Cliff had never worked in his life, not at a regular job anyway, and Steve was incapable of achieving anything beyond stripping copper wire from electric motors and old car generators to sell for junk. People nowadays want to trash guys like Cliff, calling them lazy welfare moochers. Cliff wasn't lazy -- he was simply too fucking stupid to be able to do anything. People don't get this. The pair owned a red child's wagon and pulled it to Lucasville with great frequency to haul the rummaged waste food from Jake Kinstler's store dumpster, rotting produce and tainted meat mostly. At the first of the month when Cliff received his crazy check [that's what we called all welfare and social security disability checks, an entitlement for being crazy, we had been told by our thuggish hero-icons. The idea was to go down to the county courthouse and roll around on the steps and act crazy. Shortly thereafter you would start receiving your check. Oogie Delay and Joe Edgar Rowe said that's how they got their crazy checks.] they returned with multiple cans of Bugler tobacco which meant that us boys, four in our gang, would be well-supplied with smokes for at least ten days. No one on welfare ever bought enough cigarettes to last until their next crazy check so smoking for the final twenty days of the month depended upon shrewd junking, pop and beer bottle cash-ins, or selling something at a small profit, a dollar here and a dollar there. It wasn't so bad -- a green-paper pack [not a can] of Bugler or Kite provided about twenty-five hand-rolled cigarettes and cost only ten cents. Regular cigarettes were about thirty-three cents a pack so those were out of the question.
The Hicks hung on until late spring and that's when Cliff's health nose-dived even further, necessitating a move to some shack in the Lucasville bottoms down on It'ly Street, [West Street] where at least there would be some solid citizen around to verify to Steve that he was dead should tragedy strike. I think Doc Blevins must have had his eye on that house ever since he had shut down the original Sugar Shack. The Hicks dust was still in the air and their spore lay strewn about the grounds when he hired us boys to give the place a good going over. One treasure of Hicks' detritus was a working refrigerator. Leaving large heavy items behind was a common practice amongst local poverty-stricken residents as they could acquire no truck to move large appliances. The hope, of course, was that whomever they were displacing faced the same dilemma. Doc had already hooked a second refrigerator, an absolute necessity to maintain an adequate supply of multiple brands of ice cold beer and wine. There was one worriment that required a swift resolution... the Hicks had also left behind an old cow's tongue in their refrigerator and the electric had been off for a week or so. Doc declared to us that the man [boy] who removed it and cleaned the inside with bleach would be awarded an extra twelve cold beers. We decided that this was a four-boy job, or rather I did.
Doc and Junior "Junebug" Friend, his half-brother-in-law and partner in this venture, departed in Doc's lemon-yellow boat-ish 1956 Rambler 4-door hardtop station wagon, (a car that brought to my mind a corpulent Chinaman who was unsuccessfully trying to masticate a huge mouthful of cheese), to stock up on the first load of alcoholic beverages in Portsmouth while we carried out the assignment. I had it figured like this: Darryl Neeley [Larry Eugene's cousin] would open the refrigerator door, Larry Eugene would insert a shovel near the offending putrefying organ while his brother, Gary Lee "Spud" Risner would scrape it on to the shovel with a stick. Then Larry Eugene would dart out the front door, (which was my job to hold open because the floor was slanted a bit causing it to swing shut on its own), and run to the road where he would sling the unfortunate bovine's disjecta membra into the creek.
We assumed our respective positions and I shouted, "Go!" when Larry Eugene had the shovel in hand, ready to assault the contents of the reeking appliance. Darryl whipped open the door and as the odoriferous reeking blast swiftly enveloped him he emitted a disturbing utterance and then abruptly vomited all over his two cousins who were stooped below, prepared to carry out this dubious undertaking for which we were being grossly over-compensated. I burst into a roar of laughter since I was easily five paces distant from the offending aroma. Spud screamed like a woman being raped while Larry Eugene mumbled an artful string of profanities and he finally yelled at Spud to cease his bellowing and get on with it. My plan was thereafter effected as originally imagined except that someone now had to clean up Darryl's puke as well. Logic would dictate that this task should fall to Darryl but I pooh-poohed any such notion at once -- he had no stomach for such a job which was why he threw up in the first place. After a brief period of dispute and negotiation on the final beer split, Larry Eugene assumed the responsibility with a very little assistance from Spud who also pleaded a gastric frailty.
When Doc and Junior returned with the beloved inventory, the old refrigerator looked great and smelled good enough to use. The grounds had also been cleared of hillbilly detritus which I piled and burned. We celebrated by drinking the ice cold Hudepohl long-necks as we stocked the refrigerators. The brands were as follows, in order of popularity: Pabst Blue Ribbon, Blatz, Hudepohl 14-K, Carling Black Label, and Stroh's. There were no "lite" beers in those great days. Doc had decided to carry three wine brands, Gibson's Pheasant-brand Muscatel, Thunderbird, and Wild Irish Rose, all in pints. At the state liquor store they had also acquired 24 pints of Kessler's and Corby's American blended whiskey [cheap whiskey]. Everything would sell both on-premises or carry-out for double its original retail price. Thus, a beer cost seventy-five cents, wine was a dollar fifty, and whiskey would sell for four fifty a pint, the latter being vended warm. It was stored in the far back room where Junebug and Doc could control access to it... until Larry Eugene had a lovely idea of knocking loose a panel in the back door so we could remove it easily and reach in at night to occasionally filch a pint.
Spud was handed the keys to Doc's superb car and the four of us spent the remainder of the day rounding up several old couches and stuffed chairs for the patrons who would soon arrive as soon as the word spread. We just strapped them atop the old station wagon with rope and off we went -- Spud was nearly old enough to acquire a learner's permit so he did all the driving. If the reader wonders why anyone would be inclined to patronize to a place where such dear prices prevailed, the answers are multiple: 1) The nearest legal establishment that sold alcoholic beverages was twelve miles distant, in Portsmouth -- Lucasville and McDermott were completely dry and not far from our threshold. 2) Not many of the drunks around our area possessed a driver's license even though several owned uninsured cars. To get to Portsmouth the only reasonable course was down U.S. Route 23, taking one within yards of big trouble, the Ohio Highway Patrol post. 3) Doc and Junebug sold all types of alcohol every day and all night, every night -- the place was very customer-friendly that way and it was the only location to purchase 6% beer, wine, or whiskey on Sunday although some carry-outs in Portsmouth would extend this unlawful perq to their regular customers. 4) Booze was freely sold to under-aged patrons, (under age 21 at the time 3.2% beer excepted), as long as either Larry Eugene or I vouched for them and both Doc and Junebug soon became familiar with their faces. 5) Most of all, our big draw was the opportunity for the guys to lounge around and talk as they drank, often expressing themselves in language that would not have been tolerated at a licensed premises in mixed company. Once in awhile, someone would bring along some skanky old whore and that always added spice to the ambiance. I remember old man Simmons bringing in his scraggly wife fairly often and he'd give you a few beers if you'd do her as long as he could watch. Larry Eugene and I had a great thirst for beer but our desire for alcohol was never that compelling. A thirteen year-old would always opt for an hour of heavy petting with a young pretty girl, wholly rejecting a single moment of in flagrante delicto with some ragged old hag. Doc kept an old army cot in the back room where he often sneaked catnaps and that's where any sexual activity took place. Card-playing was also encouraged as long as the participants paid out ten percent of each pot. So in the end, it was an edifice of iniquitous joy and gratification, was the Sugar Shack II. Many years later I was appointed manager of a modern multi-million dollar state park recreational resort, sited in the center of a beautiful 60,000 forest. Ask me at which of these two places I'd rather spend an evening.
Business was soon quite robust and the proprietors took in a considerable amount of money that summer. I have no idea how they divided it -- I doubt that the split was even because Junebug seemed perpetually shy of cash, thus I suspect that his contribution was largely of the working-it-out sort with Doc supplying the bulk of the capital. For my part, I have never had so much fun either before or since. The deal, as far as my parents knew, was that Larry Eugene and I were supposed to be camping at the old foxhunters' camp up on our hill in a forest clearing, a convenient spot which lay halfway between the head of Crowe Hollow where I lived, Ghost Hollow being just a short walk along a woodland path. Indeed, Larry and I maintained a really superb campsite there in the woods with a nice home-fashioned shepherd's tent contrived from a canvas tarp, an aluminum cooler with ice when we could get it, and a fire ring of sandstones which was always mounded high with hot white oak coals.
Every night at about ten p.m. we'd jink on down to The Sugar Shack, head-smacking, cutting shines, and laughing as a pair of teen pals do and, upon a round of greetings by our adult friends, we'd swill a couple of beers to conform to the social atmosphere and to get the buzz rolling. Sometimes, when we were fairly sober, we'd ride Larry's old motor scooter through the woods, a Silver Pigeon, which required dismounting and run-push assistance as it putted up the gravel surfaced road of Ghost Hollow hill. Around midnight, Doc would retire for a nap in the back room and Larry and I handled all the alcohol sales, doing our best to maintain a sanguine atmosphere until around 4 a.m. when Doc arose from the dead. I hasten to remark that it was a very workable arrangement. Doc gave us a pony case of Hudepohl [the only brand to offer twelve long-neck beers in a small cardboard case] and a pint of muscatel for our trouble, at which time we would return to the campsite and drink until our supply was depleted, usually retiring a little after daylight. Of course we purloined a few extra beers and sometimes a pint of wine while Doc was sleeping, setting it out the back window where we could retrieve it after knocking off. I wish to point out that we never stole so much as a dime of Doc's cash -- all that was handed over to him as soon as he awoke and if he was still half-drunk he'd kiss one of us on the cheek and pat our shoulders. He did that to people as a joke, knowing that it would embarrass them but we laughed and took it in stride.
I later discovered that old Doc knew all along that we were filching that extra booze. In any case, that was quite a bit of nightly drinking for a pair of teenagers and pretty soon we could hold our liquor better than most. Still I feel compelled to confess that we were often drunk as lords by the time we sat by the campfire for awhile and before sliding into our sleeping bags. Years later, I was driving Doc over to Hardrock's place, a beloved bootlegging friend in the Lucasville bottoms. We were both half-drunk when I revealed to Doc that Larry and I had sneaked beer and wine out the window and, in place of an oral reply, he leaned over and sandpapered my face with a lathery kiss on the cheek, patted me gently on the back, and burst into laughter. That's when I knew that he knew and he could not have cared less.
One afternoon Larry Eugene and I were helping Doc stock the refrigerator. As Junebug was ill he had come down earlier than usual to relieve him. Just the three of us were present until a big car pulled in rather uncertainly. Doc walked out on the porch to greet some man and woman that he knew. They came inside and the man, in a friendly sort of way, was already negotiating with Doc for a bottle of paregoric [camphorated tincture of opium from the drugstore]. Doc was no dope dealer but he always kept some paregoric around to control diarrhea which plagued him off and on. This discussion continued until Doc finally relented and handed over a new bottle of the stuff. The man offered to pay for it but Doc declined the offer. He would rather have kept his medicine. The man said he needed a cooking pan and I went out and retrieved one of the Hicks' old aluminum pans from a scrap-heap on the hillside. There was no good way to clean it since the well was infested with all manner of garbage and critters. Finally I went across the road and washed it in the creek which might have been even worse since there were a couple of outhouses just upstream. Doc had a small gas stove in the kitchen and he fired up a burner while the man wiped out the pan with his shirt and poured in the paregoric.
Neither Larry Eugene nor I had the slightest idea what this was all about but we were about to find out. The paregoric was boiled down and then the man stuck the pan in the refrigerator while he went back out to his car. All this time the woman was sitting on the couch, batting flies and nursing a beer. When he returned he opened a velvet covered box which contained a glass syringe. I wanted to see it and he let me hold it and look it over -- I have always been a curious sort. Of course now things were becoming obvious but we were still in for a surprise. He told his old lady to come into the kitchen and she did. The pair remained oblivious to the three of us. She put her hands on the stove and bent over as he threw up her dress and there was her shining ass with no panties on. He filled the syringe and gave her an injection and then he dropped his drawers and she did the same for him. Soon they were both as happy as blowflies on a dead cow's eyeball. Then they bought a pint of whiskey and left. Doc said it was just some guy he had known in Columbus. The man had asked over at Lucasville where to find Doc and he had been given perfect directions. I never heard of injections of dope being administered like that before but I suppose it worked for them. Doc seemed to take the whole matter in stride as if he had seen it a thousand times. Just one more edifying life experience at The Sugar Shack.
Doc did have one special medical treatment which is how he got his nickname. I call it The Doc Blevins Hot Toddy and it was very effective for hangover, colds, the grippe, lumbago, or even the delerium tremens. We saw people with the DTs with some frequency around Crowe Hollow and in the Lucasville bottoms and the suffering of these poor devils was impossible to ignore. The panicky wives of these sufferers would sometimes resort to hollering for us boys as we were walking down the road, asking us if we knew what could be done. The first guy I saw with DTs scared the crap out of me but Larry Eugene had seen it before. After a time I knew a little bit, tips I had picked up here and there. DT sufferers almost always developed a high temperature so an ice pack wrapped in a towel and placed on the forehead or on the back of their neck was very helpful. Also, they'd get the shivers really bad so even though they were using an ice pack, extra blankets around their body were called for but you didn't want to restrain them in any way because this caused panic. The moving air produced by a fan blowing nearby seemed to ease muzziness, mild battiness, and night horrors. As for medicine, I always told these women to go get some Benadryl at the drug store. This seemed to help more than anything else because it made the poor fellow sleepy if he took multiple pills in a dose and I was told after the fact that it diminished hallucinations of rats and snakes. [A great irony, years later, I met and became good friends with the actual inventor of Benadryl, Dr. George Rieveschl. He laughed when I told him about using it as a treatment for the DTs and he said he had never heard of such a thing. The world is a small place indeed.] The proper thing to have done would have been to take the poor bastard to the emergency room to be treated by a physician because the DTs can kill you. But they simply would not go to a doctor so I offered the best advice I knew... as a thirteen year-old. Anyway, Doc's cure was first-class and the ingredients were: 1 ounce boiling water, 1 ounce cheap whiskey, about a tablespoon of paregoric, a squirt of lemon juice, and two teaspoons of sugar, all stirred together and drunk straight down. If you drank one of Doc's Hot Toddys you'd soon be on your feet and, if not cured, still feeling good enough to be sociable. People came in all the time for one of his hot toddys and he finally brought all the ingredients to The Sugar Shack and also a teakettle to boil the water. Everyone drank from the same glass tumbler, the only one on the premises and no one ever washed it. I think some of these shyte-pokes weren't all that sick and just wanted the free shot of whiskey, because Doc never charged for his cure but, on the other hand, pretty much everyone who loafed at The Sugar Shack had some sort of illness.
Not that I was breezing through tests at school, but I had acquired a pretty good formal education, albeit a curious one, by age thirteen. Reading was a great hobby of mine and, largely by means of osmosis I had retained a great deal, even though I was oblivious to this actuality at the time. I read all of Dr. Mickelethwaite's waiting-room magazines [my mom was his nurse so I was there a lot] as well as most of the books in the library he maintained at his office, an old two-story large frame home at the southwest corner of Ninth and Gay streets. (Those were the days when gay meant "happy-go-lucky" and nothing more... at least not in Portsmouth, Ohio.) The magazines at the office included "National Geographic", (with extra time devoted to perusing those African tribal photo-essays), "Life", "The Saturday Evening Post", dozens of Reader's Digest condensed books, and numerous novels of high adventure. At home, my devoted math and science teacher father had amassed a similarly diverse library which was where I absorbed plenty of non-fiction from texts concerning various crafts and trades, everything from magic to carpentry. Dad was especially proud of our brand new set of "World Book Encyclopedias". I spent many hours reading and re-reading issues of comic books as well, every character from Archie to Casper the Friendly Ghost to Spider-Man. (Why did I not retain that issue No. 1? I do not know.) I only bother to mention my studies because it eventually bore upon my role at The Sugar Shack II.
All of our customers lived from day-to-day and I cannot recall any of the locals who was employed. It was a little different on weekends because all my boyhood heroes would return home from their respective jobs in Columbus, ninety miles to the north. Most of these Elvis wannabes were in their twenties and each earned a viable living by painting houses, sheet-rocking, sealing asphalt, or cleaning brick. They all drove fast cars that were stressed daily to beyond the vehicles' limits and they also possessed seemingly endless quantities of cash, this being in total contrast to the locals who existed on their meager crazy checks, occasional pay-offs on cockfights and card betting, and a good many of these men traded cars with considerable frequency, picking up a few dollars by that means. Some resorted to a little junking when they were particularly hard-up. They mostly wore old work trousers, second-hand white shirts that were always too large, sagging gray sweaters, and old work boots. In contrast, what a fine assemblage of fellows the Columbus gang was with their tailored striped shirts, tight jeans, and black pointy-toed shoes with heel taps! All these guys, both the young and the old, could rattle off any number of superb personal adventures, embellished yes, but founded in actuality, all of which kept Larry and me wide-eyed and fascinated. Certain central themes prevailed: bar-fights, poker games, car races and crashes, and of course detailed yarns about women from which both Larry and I fashioned our courting techniques. Alas for that!
Some of these men were married, the older locals to very tired and gaunt-looking women who had endured difficult lives, usually having borne and raised a passel of snot-nosed brats. Those men who were not married were invariably winos, amiable personalities who, if they had bothered to journey during their sunset years they would have been characterized as hobos, given the era. One rarely encountered a mean-spirited wino because when such a character emerged, he was soon dead -- I think they were rolled and killed but no money would be wasted by the sheriff beyond a cursory investigation on such societal debris. "Uncle Jack Friend", Larry's Uncle, half-brother to Junebug, and half-brother-in-law to Doc, was a very cheerful wino and everyone loved him. It was a tragic episode, around 1970 when Jack stumbled on to the wrong porch during the wee hours one dark night in the Lucasville bottoms. He had gotten drunk at Hardrock's where he had been playing cards and had won a few dollars so he was in a good mood. He was looking for Coon Blevins' house where he planned to spend the night but had gotten on the wrong street and the houses in the bottoms looked much alike. When he pounded on the door of an old woman's home, yelling at the top of his lungs for Coon to get up and let him in, the terrified old woman shot him multiple times through the door with a revolver. Jack fell dead in a pool of blood. It was purely one of those incidents that never should have happened but it did. The unfortunate old lady was well into her 80s and was never charged with a crime, nor should she have been. Jack would have been the first to say so.
If the relationships seem extraordinarily close and complex in Crowe Hollow and Ghost Hollow, it is because there were frequent inter-marriages between the large clans that resided there. Widowers Sadie Risner and Louis Friend, through previous marriages, had brought a number of children into the household when they wed, one of whom was Uncle Jack as we all called him. Add to that, Louis and Sadie were the parents of Louis Jr... Junebug, who was later dubbed Mad Dog but I never liked that appellation although he seemed to not mind it at all. Doc had married one of Sadie's daughters, Chloe, and Doc's mother had been a Rowe, a large family, several of whom lived in Crowe Hollow including Allie Delay along with two of her numerous children, Carl "Orsie" Delay and Vernon "Oogie" Delay. The Henry and Salyers families boasted many members who had wed someone in either Ghost or Crowe hollows. Doc's mother, Lily, and Allie Delay were sisters. Allie's and Lily's brother, Sanford Rowe, was the father of Oogie's, Orsie's, and Doc's first cousin, Joseph Edgar "Ro-Ho" Rowe.
There was a funny story that Joe Edgar enjoyed telling with some frequency at The Sugar Shack: He and 'Tater-Hole Phipps had recently gotten themselves arrested at The Palace [honky-tonk] in Portsmouth for drunk and disorderly conduct as a result of a bar fight. They were brought before the desk sergeant who would decide if they could bond out if they paid a $25 fine. Pen in hand, the sergeant looked at 'Tater-Hole and said, "Name?"
'Tater-Hole shot back, "John Doe!"
The sergeant, shook his head, looked at Joe Edgar and said, "Well then, I suppose you're Joe Rowe!"
"I damn sure am!" Joe Edgar retorted.
The desk sergeant looked at the cop who brought them in and said, "Lock their fuckin' asses up!"
I mention these few folks in particular as most of them have some role in herein -- but you can see how it would have been advisable to refrain from telling a calumnious story about this person or that one without first knowing whether you were talking to a half-brother, uncle, or first cousin to the protagonist of your yarn. I kept close track of all these kinships and one day a curious thought struck me. I pointed out to Larry that he had two sons... both named Larry, (by two different women of course and far apart in their ages.) He gave that several moments of consideration, sniggered, and then declared, "I never thought about that before!" Larry wasn't stupid, in fact he was very intelligent, but the women had named his children and the elder of the two lads was never around. The fact was, no one else had thought about it either.
If all these relationships seem unreasonably murky to the reader then it will suffice to simply adopt the notion that most of the people mentioned herein were related by blood... except for me. My dad, mom, and helpful uncles raised our cabin during the summer of 1955 at the head of Crowe Hollow using logs felled from a nearby hillside. Our previous domicile had been more suburban, situated at the fringe of Portsmouth in Shearer's Hollow about fifteen miles from Crowe Hollow. At age two I obviously could not have cared less where we lived... not so with my nine year-old brother, Mike. He had accumulated numerous neighborhood friends in Shearer's Hollow. In town one could get about very handily on a bicycle or on foot to all manner of casual entertainments including restaurants, department stores, and theaters, all places that Mike loved to go. Until the day he died, just this year, Mike lamented about the dreadful move to Crowe Hollow although he later moved back there on his own.
While my family was sweating away that summer, my aunt Frieda baby-sat me on the more adulatory end of Big Run Road near Crabtree Corners, about five miles from Crowe Hollow or much closer by walking if you knew where to cut through the woods. The idea of the move was that dad could return to fairly near his homeplace, the enigmatic hamlet of McDermott, (and a place which bulged with my relatives), but he liked the isolation of this secluded twenty-two acre patch. Had he known what I was up to every night I would have been grounded until the necessity of my middle-aged cataract surgery would have forced his hand. He wasn't entirely oblivious to the fact that Larry and I were probably up to some manner of juvenile shenanigans; however, on the positive side, dad was a romantic and he also believed that boys should take a few knocks. He would have been okay with our more reasonable lunar meanderings, purloining a few ears of some nearby farmer's roas'n-ears, slipping over the ridge to meet up with some capricious girls, attending a cockfight in Pat Henry's barn, all through the social filter of an Appalachian rite of passage. That's actually what The Sugar Shack II was all about as well, at least so far as I view it in retrospect, but the magnitude of our nefarious activities was exponentially amplified from what dad would have found acceptable. It was simply way too much fun. The more entertaining and merry of one's social experiences, the more expensive, perilous, and unlawful they turn out to be. I have lived by a certain credo for most of my life: "Take what you want and pay for it." Sometimes the paying aspect is extremely burdensome.
Lots of men came to the Sugar Shack II, Gene and John Long, Rufford Wen, Don Sheets [who harbored a psychological fear of chickens], Butch Adkins [aka Boyd Hackbush], Jack Lee Burton, Orsie Delay, Robby Williams, Arnold "Broken-wing" Phipps, Jack and Garrett "Gaddy" Friend [Junebug's half-brothers], and numerous others. One or two of us four boys, the courageous quartet who had performed the nasty cleaning detail, were nearly always underfoot, standing alert to anyone who needed a flat tire changed, a pack of cigarettes from Bill Duffer's store [only a half-mile distant], or any other menial task for which we hoped to be rewarded in beer.
At The Sugar Shack II, other than Doc or Junebug, the only individuals permitted to open those refrigerator doors was Larry Eugene or me, albeit Junebug never trusted us like Doc did and he had it in his mind to impede our access, more-or-less to instill us with the fact that he was the man in charge. Neither of us had ever questioned that notion but Junebug was the lesser partner and I think he might have felt a little intimidated on that point. Opening those doors was the same as walking behind the bar at a licensed premises -- it simply wasn't done if you had no right to do so. Junebug was really bad to routinely augur The Evil Eye on us which we instantly warded off with a simple but effective gesticulation taught to us by Arnold Phipps, a man who knew everything which could not be learned from books or scholars. When Larry and I were serving, someone was always shouting at us, "I ain't no fuckin' camel, son -- reach me a cold one outta that icebox!" One or the other of us would have the cap popped off and in his hand faster than you can pick your nose. A drunk will always light a cigarette with a new beer so this was also an opportunity to bum a smoke. No one ever refused us. Then we'd collect their money and hand it straight over to either Junebug or Doc, whomever was in charge at the moment. It was quite common to have a dozen or so patrons laughing, lounging about on the old couches and chairs, sharing tales of life experiences. I found all these yarns fascinating, the veracity of these tall tales becoming less prevalent as the night advanced. Doc worked from about 9 p.m. 'till 9 the next morning and Junebug picked up the day shift. We never had to be told a patron's brand name of beer -- we knew who drank what. In fact, Larry Eugene and I knew more about them than their wives and kids did. No one ever asked for a glass of water or even for a an empty glass for their beer. There were no glasses on the premises, except for Doc's singular Hot Doddy tumbler, nor any means to clean one. There was a dug-well, maybe twenty feet deep, just outside the back door but it was polluted with newts, toads, frogs, and sometimes there was a dead possum floating in it. Plus, the Hicks had thrown plenty of trash down that well, purportedly to keep rats from accumulating as they would in an open garbage dump. But there were usually big rats in the well, both dead and live ones.
There was a lot of psychology to be observed at times when The Sugar Shack's business was booming. Only in later years did I reflect upon a peculiar phenomenon that was transpiring every day I was there which involved how the patrons of The Sugar Shack viewed me. I loved talking to these old guys. They told the most outrageous and hilarious stories and I learned a great deal from each of them. Even a stupid man can teach you how to not do something.
Patrick W. Crabtree
12 Aug 1953 – 10 Jul 2018
BIO by : RFB Jenkins
Pat documented much of my family history from southern Ohio and Kentucky .... with honor and respect.
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Patrick W. Crabtree, 64, of McDermott, died Tuesday, July 10, 2018 at Southern Ohio Medical Center.
He was born August 12, 1953 in Portsmouth to Raymond and Mary Crabtree and grew up on Crowe Hollow.
Pat was a retired manager of Shawnee State Park.
In addition to his parents, he was predeceased by his brother, Michael B. Crabtree.
Pat is survived by his wife, Linda (Nelson) Crabtree; one daughter, Ashley (Michael) Collins of Jacksonville, Florida; three grandchildren, Aiden, Autumn and Nolan Collins; and a favorite niece, Heidi Crabtree of Clovis, California.
Pat admits that he too attended college, eventually being granted two separate degrees including an Associate's Degree in Parks and Recreation Administration and, much later, a B.A. in Social Science with a minor in history. Not very good degrees, to be sure, but degrees nonetheless. Then he would smile.
At Pat's request, his body was cremated.
Per Pat's request ... There was no service or visitation.
Arrangements were under the direction of F.C. Daehler Mortuary Company in Portsmouth.
Below are Exerts from Pat's love of and writings of the Appalachian hills, particularly around Portsmouth, Lucasville, and McDermott Ohio.
Patrick Crabtree's Blog: The Ospidillo News
Exert 1 Ode Dyin' to Kill Somebody
Ah well, such is life.
I will not be able to afford embalming and a casket and a cemetery plot and a gravestone. I have not saved any money for that -- I have spent my money on rescuing cats and dogs so the veterinarian will have to take pity on me and embalm me if I am to get a decent grave. But the truth is, I told Linda to go ahead and just have me cremated and dump my ashes up by those of my favorite cat ever, good old Rudy, up in the front yard.
I haven't been very pious either but that's good enough for me.
Exert 2
School had always represented an interference in what my pals and I really wanted to do which essentially amounted to this: riding our bicycles, driving cars, chasing girls along back roads, beer drinking, coon hunting, fishing, squirrel hunting, and listening to wild stories of old winos at the local bootlegger's joint.
For my part, I additionally particularly enjoyed reading but not the material which was offered at school by the teachers. The only person who ever understood this was Mrs. Madge Ervin. Most students didn't care for Mrs. Ervin because she was to the point and abrupt, but I liked her a great deal. She had been my third-grade teacher and eventually she became the school librarian. I thought she was perfect in that role, very organized and a good listener. She knew I leaned toward adventure fiction and so, through her great knowledge and willful assistance, I got to savor some really outstanding titles.
By the time I reached high school, I had become a genuine terror. I was forced to convey a pretense of civilized behavior at specific times because my own father was a very strict school principal in Portsmouth and there were additionally many teachers within my extended family. They often shared information about the activities of my many cousins and me. So I spent a good amount of time plotting and scheming as to how to semi-legitimately escape from class. I was lucky to have a confederate of a sort in this juvenile conspiracy -- it was our school principal at Valley High, Mr. James Young. Mr. Young was sympathetic with at least a few of my passions. Rather than come down on me like a boulder, (which he could have done since he and my dad were old college pals), he simply diverted and channeled my agenda as best he could. He had gotten no small amount of practice while dealing with my older brother of seven years, Mike.
One passion which Mr. Young and I wholly shared was squirrel hunting. On more than one occasion, Mr. Young would step into the first period study hall on a nice September day and motion for Roy Marshall and me to come along. Oh, Joy!!! That meant we were going squirrel hunting because Mr. Young wasn't above playing hooky himself now and then. Frankly, it was to Mr. Young's great advantage to do this because Roy and I were frequently scouting new ground all around the county and we had secured landowner permission to hunt these virgin territories. Most of these properties were bulging with either gray or fox squirrels or both.
People would hardly believe it nowadays but we always carried our shotguns, (and often hand guns for coon hunting), right in the back seat of our cars in the school parking lot. This was a common practice for those of us who hunted and it saved us from returning home to retrieve our weapons. And so we could thus get into the woods as quickly as possible after school had let out. So Roy and I would jump into Jim's car, (Mr. Young became "Jim" on these squirrel-hunting expeditions, a privilege we never abused), fire up a smoke, and he would pull around to our cars in the student parking area. Once there, we'd surreptitiously slip our shotguns and hunting gear from our vehicles into his. We'd usually make it back to school just as the busses were lining up to close out the day. Those were splendid times indeed. There's something about playing hooky which infuses a kid with a rush and when you're hooking along with the school principal, it's even lovelier.
But I had to devise other additional means of escape from the doldrums of grueling classes such as French II, Geometry, and Government (Civics.) I somehow managed to join certain organizations which came with the perquisites of occasionally being excused from class. One year I was the photographer for the Annual Staff and I shot tons of film which was never published anywhere. I think for two years I managed to latch on to the job of construction crew member for the class plays. We built little and smoked a great deal. And our football field and track were pretty new back then and a new concrete block concession stand was being built as well. Coach Morris Gullion was always quite happy to find volunteers willing to sod his beloved football field, a thankless task at which I excelled. We were typically left to our own devices so we just posted a guard at the top of the hill, commenced our work and smoked all we wanted to.
But our Senior year was the time when things actually got out of control. Hell, it even began to worry me! Here's what happened: Claude Sammons had been the Mechanical Drawing and Wood Shop teacher for many years. He ran a very tight ship and everything was maintained in perfect order. He taught even the most heinous and rowdy boys a great deal to get them through day-to-day life. For me, the shop class was elective as I was enrolled in the College Preparatory Program. I carried a heavy load of classes from my freshman year forward so that by the time I became a Senior, my days would be my own. I had actually devised this plan from the start of high school, probably on the sage counsel of my brother, Mike, who was infinitely superior at scheming than I was myself. So by my Senior year, the only class to which I was obligated was in the first period, Mrs. Fannin's Government class, the dreaded hour of all Seniors. The remainder of my days' time was spent in the wood shop.
Mr. Sammons had opted to work in the higher-paying position of the school Guidance Counselor, a job for which I felt he was ill-suited since, from my view, his outstanding talents were clearly going to be wasted. The guidance counselor of past years had done nothing that I ever heard of. I had never met with her (Mrs. Bertha Phillips) a single time and it's not for the fringe student to reach up to the Administration for guidance -- the guidance counselor must be aggressive in contacting all the students to set them on a positive track in life, or at least try to do so. It's ironic that her husband, Mr. Phillips the janitor, gave me invaluable advice while I was cutting class to help him, (yet another of my numerous dodges), on what I might do following graduation. Mr. Phillips was a great old fellow.
The grim story for Mr. Young was that he was short of a stellar shop teacher, a position which is incredibly difficult to fill. First we inherited poor old Julius Chandler, an elderly minister who was a superb home craftsman and who had never taught school in his lifetime. He really liked the boys but had not the least notion as to how to control them. Certain boys, (I won't name them outright), T.M., G.B., R.B., R.A., and T.G., aggregately became the bane of his formerly peaceful existence. And while I did nothing to impede the old man, neither did I demonstrate the slightest trace of leadership in an attempt to aid him, I am ashamed to confess. Before many days had passed, the lunatics were running the asylum and Mr. Chandler had become a ball of nerves. In fact, he is now buried just a mile or so east of my present home at the summit of the McDermott Cemetery Hill and I often wonder if we might have shaved ten years or so off his otherwise fruitful life.
Mr. Young came into the shop one Monday morning with a rumpled looking character attending him by the name of Mr. Larry Flannery. Mr. Flannery, he said, would be replacing Mr. Chandler and we were to help him all we possibly could. Of course we would. Then Mr. Young pulled me off to the side and cut me the deal of a lifetime. The truth was, Larry Flannery had a B.A. in Social Science, (good for nothing whatever, I have one myself), and he didn't know a band saw from a jackhammer. And he certainly possessed no knowledge of mechanical drawing which was to be taught to Freshmen and Sophomores. Would I teach the boys the mechanical drawing? You bet your sweet fucking ass I would! What a coup! This deal included a frequent excused absence from Mrs. Fannin's Government class -- I would just read the material and take the tests, a move which in fact moved me from a C- up to a B. My dad was much pleased.
Larry, as we came to know him, was posited strictly as a disciplinarian. What an outrageous notion -- he was more evil than all of us boys put together! In his private life, Larry was a bachelor-gambler of dubious repute. Years later, my brother Mike, (who became the Chief Probation Officer for the local Common Pleas Court), carried Larry on felony probation on the crime of carrying a concealed weapon, this charge no doubt stemming from some incident from within a Portsmouth speakeasy, most likely The Subway. So Larry taught the boys how to gamble, or rather he taught us how to cheat. He collected our lunch money most days with the nefarious match game, a numbers device which one cannot possibly lose when one knows the mathematical hoax involved in playing the game. We were too stupid to catch on because Larry was shrewd enough to lose a game now and again on purpose.
I kept my covenant with Mr. Young -- I taught the boys to draw, although clearly not as effectively as Mr. Sammons might have done. When a couple of the troublemakers would attempt to challenge me I would just retrieve one or two Senior thugs from the shop and the matter would be immediately and permanently quashed with no aftermath. It wasn't a perfect method for running a class but it got us through the year. I doubt, though, that my methods would have merited the School Board's endorsement.
Still, for Mr. Young, no news from the shop was good news. To keep the younger boys' mouths shut, we allowed them to periodically take a break and come into the shop for a smoke back by the welder, or to play the match game with Larry any time they wished. And one Freshman or Sophomore was appointed daily to stand guard duty at the door to maintain a watch for Mr. Young because we had smoking going on by the constantly fired-up welder and two or three card games were always in progress at various places throughout the large room. I would quickly complete the drawings for the appointed watchmen because Mr. Young would periodically scan these drawings and check off the names against the list of students. When it comes to drafting, I am truly a master, a skill which I ultimately carried forward to college engineering classes.
One day, I don't know why, G.B. said we were going to load up everything and take it all home. Larry was late for work that morning and so G. backed his big Oldsmobile into the shop and, with some help, loaded the table saw into his trunk. Obviously, the trunk lid wouldn't shut but G. didn't give a shit and navigated his car, trunk lid high in the air and saw protruding, back to the parking lot. Well this singular act breached the flood gates. Everybody drove their cars around and started loading up -- by the time they were finished, there wasn't a hammer or screwdriver remaining anywhere. Larry finally arrived, saw what had happened, and practically went into convulsions. He was a very high-strung person. When no one would immediately confess to the obvious larceny he headed down the hall in a huff to retrieve Mr. Young.
I thank the late James Young to this day and with all my heart for not pulling me aside to get the low down. He took on the task of remedying the matter through his own initiative. I forget what the threat was if we didn't comply but he said that he and Larry were leaving for fifteen minutes and when he got back, everything right down to the last 8d box nail better be back where it belonged. As soon as they walked out a scramble ensued. Everything was put right in five minutes and we utilized the next ten to grab a smoke or two before the authorities returned. Fortunately, all this happened within a few weeks of graduation and Mr. Young desired no problems which would cause eight or ten Seniors to not graduate. No one I ever knew had a cooler head than Mr. Young -- he knew precisely how to handle boys in difficult situations.
Once in a while, Roger McClay, who was the chemistry and physics teacher, would hear too much cacophony in the shop and he would peer out his door glass across the hall at our door to see what was up. At such times, either T.M. or G.B. would usually be summoned and they would simply point ominously at Mr. McClay, an act which caused him to become instantaneously blind, deaf, and mute. T. and G. were outlandishly large and domineering fellows and they could each convey an air of noir-authority, much in the spirit of a swarthy Mafioso guy. A number of the Senior boys that year had really been wearing on Mr. McClay, a fact which was not lost on the under-classmen. I think it was the following year when I heard that D.T. had physically roughed him up a bit. Such an act would have been unheard of at Valley in previous years but I guess my Class of '71 gave rise to something rather notorious which sort of clung on for a time, not a positive legacy for me or my peers.
The advent of Driver Education came about when I was a senior and Mr. Douglas Booth became the instructor. This was likely a thoughtful choice since he could handle the rougher boys with no problem and, the fact was, most of us had been driving since we were thirteen anyway. I think T.G. commenced driving when he was seven or eight because his dad ran a big junkyard down by the Drive-in Theater and T. loved to race the drivable cars around in the junkyard lot.
One day we were out driving around, a dubious contingent including G.B., R.B., T.C., and me, with Mr. Booth riding shotgun and reading his daily newspaper. T. was our pilot out near Minford and we soon spotted an elderly lady crossing the road ahead to retreive her mail from the box. I think it was R. who blurted out, "Run over that old bitch!" Well that was a very unfortunate remark because when Mr. Booth dropped his paper a bit to grab a looksee, let us say that it turned out to be a person near and dear to his heart. I don't recall precisely how it all played out but you can bet that it wasn't good in the end for R.
But the Driver Education car was yet another device which enabled me to occasionally skip class. A couple of us would go to Mr. Booth and volunteer to wash the car down at Shumway's gas station in Lucasville. He'd toss us the keys and we'd usually head straight for Hardrock's place, (the local bootlegger, Charlie Lockhart), for a quick cold beer. Then we'd run around the Lucasville Bottoms for a while and eventually we'd race back to Shumway's, wash the big Ford in record time, and then return the keys just before school was dismissed for the day.
During my Senior year, most mornings commenced with a get-together at Hardrock's place in the Lucasville Bottoms. Hardrock lived in a tiny green tarpaper shack and his operation was pretty simple. He went to town and bought lots of beer, wine, and whiskey and when he re-sold it at his house, which of course was in a dry township, he charged double what he paid for it. So a beer was about seventy-five cents. We didn't have the money to drink many of those before class each day so we often opted for Old Pheasant Brand Muscatel Wine instead -- wino wine. It was $1.25 per pint and two of us could get a pretty good buzz rolling with that amount. It certainly made the days pass more pleasantly. Old Hardrock was a prince of a guy. He inevitably had a good story to impart and, as he supped his breakfast tomato soup each morning, he'd fill us in on all the Bottoms gossip from the previous evening which might include cockfighting winners, shootings and other assaults, hired insurance arsons, card game winners and losers, and so on. Hardrock was better by far than the radio because he always embellished a bit to make each story more interesting but he'd never tell a lie outright.
We rode to school pretty much every morning with Gary Lee Risner in a decrepit sixty-something Pontiac Tempest. We'd start out in Crowe Hollow, Gary driving with his now late brother Larry Eugene riding shotgun and me occupying the rear seat. Then we'd swing in on West Avenue in Lucasville behind the Elementary School and pick up the now late Darryl Neeley, a cousin to the Risners. From there it was on to Hardrock's unless we had to stop to re-supply our blessed cigarettes. Darryl was the very best of us and I will not now go into how he was accidentally killed just a short period following our graduation -- it's a long and tragic story. But he eternally had a smile for everyone and was much loved by all his classmates, boys and girls alike. I miss him a great deal and I think about him all the time. Anyway, about eight minutes before the final bell rang to commence classes we would race up the hill to school in that old Tempest, sharing a good snort of Muscatel as we did so.
Once in awhile, Gary's car would become crippled and we'd be forced to ride the bus up the hill, (now Robert Lucas Road), from the Intermediate School on U.S. Route 23. We always chose Mr. Keller's bus for two noteworthy reasons: it was the final bus to ascend the hill to the High School and, Mr. Keller always allowed us to smoke all we wanted. He smoked too. The only people on this bus were the smokers because most students wanted to arrive at school a bit earlier to complete any last-minute homework. Homework be damned! That was the Crowe Hollow credo. I'd scratch out something in the final few seconds, garnering answers from the weak-willed whenever possible, and flail it toward the teacher at the last possible moment. Along Robert Lucas Road, there exists to this very day a small newt-and-toad pond on the right after you have topped the hill. We'd pull all the windows down to clear the smoke on Mr. Keller's bus and he'd shout, just before reaching the pond, "Throw those fuckin' cigarettes out!" He wasn't bull-shitting either and so we did. I'll bet the nicotine level of that pond would have killed any living thing back in those days.
As for girls, the Valley girls weren't much interested in most of us for obvious reasons. A couple of younger ones did take us on and we loved them very much for their kind attentions. I latched on to R.M. from the Bottoms, a free-spirit who sported a joyous, beautiful smile and who was four years my junior, but she knew far more about life than I ever did. We went to the Scioto Breeze Drive-in on Friday and Saturday nights, usually avoiding the entrance fee via the very large trunk of Pat Henry's '58 Chevy convertible. We also ran the back roads as a pack over in the northwest corner of the county where most of my numerous cousins lived and attended high school. I loved R. very much and, to this day, I feel a special fondness toward her even though I haven't seen her for forty-odd years. She eventually ran off with S.C., one of my Elvis-ish hero-icons from the Lucasville Bottoms and a man ten years my senior. I was quite proud that R. chose to run off with S. -- this lessened the pain of a love suddenly lost.
Lots of girls from other schools vied for our attentions. Darryl was our secret weapon -- they all wanted Darryl. But we seemed to always have enough girls on board to match up out on Freejack Hill for lengthy necking and beer-drinking sessions. Nothing beyond that ever happened -- there were simply too many of us. The car was as a can of sardines. We'd stay out pretty late and on weekends the girls were forgotten and we'd go coon hunting with Brother Bill Scaff of Otway. One night we caught and killed a skunk and, before dying, it revenged itself by spraying all of us, dogs included. The next day at school we were catching a lot of evil stares from our classmates. Mr. Young came to the rescue and sent us home for a day or so.
Once a year, Mr. Young felt an official obligation to catch all the smokers in the act. This was more an Annual Event than it was something to be feared or dreaded. We all knew it was coming and only fate would save certain individuals from the odious penalties of smoking at school. There was a janitor's room behind the stalls in the boy's restroom. Mr. Young would spend most of a day in that room, peering through a small vent above the stalls. We smoked in the restroom quite a lot between classes just to grab a couple of puffs. This routine practice led to doom in my Sophomore year. Near the end of the day, Mr. Young called off a laundry list of names over the speaker system, all smokers, and instructed us to report to his office. On the day I got caught, he also called Bill "Dinky" Dalton's name which was a big surprise since Dinky didn't smoke and we all knew that. We arrived in the office en masse, each of us bearing the feeble hope that this wasn't about smoking [Ha!]. As it turned out, Dinky had made some depraved and disparaging remark about Mr. Young personally and Mr. Young just wanted to scare the living shit out of him, which he proceeded to do -- then he let him go, addressing the rest of us with that ever-so-grim countenance which he could command at will. It was a choice between three licks and forty laps around the gym, or, a three-day suspension. I was elated since I was running between twelve and fifteen miles per day in practice for the track team -- I was the two-miler. Everybody took the three licks and forty laps except for Jerry O'Banion, a counter-culture upper-classman. There were about twenty-five of us and we got that mess behind us the very next day, except for Jerry that is.
Oh, I could go on and on as to the foolish and rotten things which transpired over those years. I guess that school did provide enough structure that we arose from our beds at a decent hour, (not so during the summers!), and enough discipline was enforced upon us to prevent our becoming serial killers or ax murderers. I eventually struck out a career in law enforcement and that where I remained following college. The best poachers make the most effective wardens.
And by the way, here's how to win at the infamous match game:
Exert 3
I'm no expert on early 20th Century Appalachian architecture... I don't think there are any such people. Maybe Kevin Bradbury comes close, my former assistant manager at Shawnee State Park who stepped up as park manager when I retired. Kevin was my resident genius -- I'd like to own the stack of oaken shake-shingles that he has produced in his lifetime. But the houses I'm talking about were wooden frame homes, often with a tin roof [or tar-paper and slate shingles] and vertical siding with furring strips which stood to defeat the winter winds.
My dad and I built a really nice storage shed and when I suggested that it would be easier to run the boards horizontally instead of vertically he quickly rebuffed any such notion, remarking with a measure of scorn, "That's how hog-pens are built." He was right about that, although I had never taken notice of it prior to his edifying comment, and there was clearly something in his mind, a cultural shibboleth, by which he was driven, one which drove him to veer away from representations of Appalachian poverty. My dad had come from humble roots, although it was a household of cleanliness and dignity, that there was going to be no hog-pen style shed erected on his property! I saw these same sort of "statements" repeated many times by Appalachian natives who grew up in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. People were raising the bar for themselves and for their families. I think this outlook of improvement was initiated largely as a result of World War II adventures as these young Appalachian men were exposed to the world during their travels. Their observations during their travels provided them with a new perspective on what could be achieved in their own lives.
Certainly the culture shifted throughout Appalachia as a result of World War II. Prior to that, entire families routinely continued to reside with their parents and grand-parents, often within the same residence and sometimes in a smaller, newly-constructed home on the same property. The Big House was always the central home on the property, usually where the evening meals were prepared and consumed by everyone who lived thereabouts. But subsequent to the war, the children were much more inclined to move out and raise their family elsewhere, often far away if a good job pulled them in that direction.
Where the household economics were good four-inch horizontal clapboards were used. A log cabin was to be avoided as it was stereotypical to Appalachia and again, emblematic of poverty... so my dad built a log cabin. That aspect of the matter seemed not to bother him and I think he viewed this as an aspect pioneer craftsmanship rather than as an icon of poverty. And, of course, he saved a lot of money by having his raw materials ready at hand, growing on the hillside. Country and suburban log cabins are nowadays all the rage although most people have no notion of their numerous limitations.
I certainly took note of the various wonders of carpentry as I was growing up, the late 1950s and '6os, a period in which most of these homes were entering their decline. The houses of post-World War Two embraced modernity and most folks wanted a single-story residence. Sadly, the rural Appalachian edifices of the pre-war period are practically all gone these days.
I feel very nostalgic about these homes -- that's what they were... homes. In most of the places that I'll be speaking of numerous children were raised, including my own paternal Grandfather's house where he and Grandma raised thirteen wonderful children. Such homes were the scenes of births, celebrations, [such as family reunions], hard times [the loss of employment], agriculture, innovation [such as unique ways of storing food supplies], deaths, and even wakes.
I really cotton to the notion of wakes, preferring the Irish variety over the Appalachian ones [which were largely Irish in their roots but if there was any alcohol around it was hidden, abiding by religious social mores, most likely nipped out behind the smokehouse along with two or three other male imbibers.] Some homesteads even featured back-yard cemeteries and you can sometimes track an Appalachian family's ancestry by visiting one if the monuments are marked. However, due to the poverty of the era, sometimes only a chunk of squared sandstone from the local quarry or even a much-deteriorated wooden cross marks these graves I like the idea of a family cemetery too. Would I prefer to have a wake when I drop dead and be buried near the home of my youth? Yep. Unfortunately, I have to remain practical for my Linda so we've decided that I will be cremated and my ashes will most likely be scattered in the front yard where Rudy, and some of my other cats are buried. A good many of them have also been cremated, (although I buried Rudy's carcass myself), such as old Mick, Sluggo, Big Boy, White Spot, and my beloved L.T.
Exert 4 from Pat's odes about the Sugar Shack
There had been a Sugar Shack I in 1966, operated by Arnold "Broken-Wing" Phipps and Junior "Doc" Blevins but it had been largely a gambling enterprise which didn't interest us boys much as we only rarely had more than a dollar or two in our pockets. Apparently neither did anyone else have any money after Arnold and Doc wiped them out and the place shut down after a month or so, having never once been raided by the county sheriff. It was just a slab-wood shed on Ghost Hollow, the outbuilding of a ramshackle hovel owned by one "Miss Tutwaller", an absentee church-going landlady who resided somewhere in North Carolina. I had never laid eyes on Miss Tutwaller but Larry's Grammaw, Sadie Friend, apparently knew her well. Miss Tutwaller owned three residences plus the Crowe Hollow Church-house which was actually in Ghost Hollow. She raked-in $25 per month for the tar-paper shack on Crowe Hollow, which burned around 1965 or so, [Orise Rowe lived there in sin with a really mean and sour old church lady, I forget her name but I always felt sorry for Orise], and $35 for Maggie Chandler's rickety bungalow at the forks and the same for The Sugar Shack property. I think she allowed the church to be used for free by any self-ordained hell-fire preacher who needed a launch-pad.
I can't remember who last paid rent for the house where The Sugar Shack ended up. Clifford and Steve Hicks moved in around the fall of '66, just after the first Sugar Shack had dissolved operations. Old Cliff was a foreboding, grimly statuesque figure with a big nasty mole protruding from his forehead but he was a very nice guy, easy to get along with -- groovy, one might have said at the time. He was not a well man but only occasionally did he complain, his tuberculosis and lumbago issues notwithstanding. Cliff's son, Steve, clearly housed some hungry evil worm within his over-sized head and it gnawed away at his brain, a very small brain. He got picked on a lot, most of it brought on by himself, yet a pathetic creature overall.
We'd be trundling up Ghost Hollow, Larry Eugene and me, and poor Steve would rush out on the ratty porch and holler, "Hey, Codwell...! Cod-LICKER...! Fuck you!" ...and then he'd scramble back into the house before Larry Eugene could nail him with a road-stone. One hot afternoon after giving Larry Eugene a hardy blaspheming, Steve ran inside, opened one of the tiny side windows, and then continued to rant the most intolerable obscenities while I stood by laughing my ass off. Larry Eugene perfectly timed a face-full of gravels for him when he peeped his bulbous head up a second time and Steve erupted in howls of pain and frustration. Clearly, Cliff wasn't home at that moment. Steve then snatched up a broom and used the handle to start busting out what few window panes there were, all the time ranting and screaming like a complete idiot, "Uh-oh! you broke that fuckin' window! Oh-oh! You broke that one too!" He shattered every window in the house. Larry Eugene thought this nonsense was as hilarious as I did.
We strolled on up the road to Larry Eugene's home, a sturdy old tin-roofed furring-strip bungalow just a hundred feet distant, and when we saw Cliff come dusting up the road we caught him before he got to his house and told him what happened. Since all the glass was on the outside, any moron could determine that the windows had been broken from within. Cliff allowed Steve to elaborate upon the lie about Larry Eugene demolishing the windows and then he boomed, "Okay there, little boy! Now it'll be yer ass in boxcar letters!" [He always said that to Steve before giving him a strapping.] A better first-class belt-beating I never saw. Even Larry Eugene said so and he had endured some dandy floggings from his Grampaw, who had since passed on.
The Hicks [pronounced HICK-zez] lived off the land, more-or-less hand-to-mouth. Cliff had never worked in his life, not at a regular job anyway, and Steve was incapable of achieving anything beyond stripping copper wire from electric motors and old car generators to sell for junk. People nowadays want to trash guys like Cliff, calling them lazy welfare moochers. Cliff wasn't lazy -- he was simply too fucking stupid to be able to do anything. People don't get this. The pair owned a red child's wagon and pulled it to Lucasville with great frequency to haul the rummaged waste food from Jake Kinstler's store dumpster, rotting produce and tainted meat mostly. At the first of the month when Cliff received his crazy check [that's what we called all welfare and social security disability checks, an entitlement for being crazy, we had been told by our thuggish hero-icons. The idea was to go down to the county courthouse and roll around on the steps and act crazy. Shortly thereafter you would start receiving your check. Oogie Delay and Joe Edgar Rowe said that's how they got their crazy checks.] they returned with multiple cans of Bugler tobacco which meant that us boys, four in our gang, would be well-supplied with smokes for at least ten days. No one on welfare ever bought enough cigarettes to last until their next crazy check so smoking for the final twenty days of the month depended upon shrewd junking, pop and beer bottle cash-ins, or selling something at a small profit, a dollar here and a dollar there. It wasn't so bad -- a green-paper pack [not a can] of Bugler or Kite provided about twenty-five hand-rolled cigarettes and cost only ten cents. Regular cigarettes were about thirty-three cents a pack so those were out of the question.
The Hicks hung on until late spring and that's when Cliff's health nose-dived even further, necessitating a move to some shack in the Lucasville bottoms down on It'ly Street, [West Street] where at least there would be some solid citizen around to verify to Steve that he was dead should tragedy strike. I think Doc Blevins must have had his eye on that house ever since he had shut down the original Sugar Shack. The Hicks dust was still in the air and their spore lay strewn about the grounds when he hired us boys to give the place a good going over. One treasure of Hicks' detritus was a working refrigerator. Leaving large heavy items behind was a common practice amongst local poverty-stricken residents as they could acquire no truck to move large appliances. The hope, of course, was that whomever they were displacing faced the same dilemma. Doc had already hooked a second refrigerator, an absolute necessity to maintain an adequate supply of multiple brands of ice cold beer and wine. There was one worriment that required a swift resolution... the Hicks had also left behind an old cow's tongue in their refrigerator and the electric had been off for a week or so. Doc declared to us that the man [boy] who removed it and cleaned the inside with bleach would be awarded an extra twelve cold beers. We decided that this was a four-boy job, or rather I did.
Doc and Junior "Junebug" Friend, his half-brother-in-law and partner in this venture, departed in Doc's lemon-yellow boat-ish 1956 Rambler 4-door hardtop station wagon, (a car that brought to my mind a corpulent Chinaman who was unsuccessfully trying to masticate a huge mouthful of cheese), to stock up on the first load of alcoholic beverages in Portsmouth while we carried out the assignment. I had it figured like this: Darryl Neeley [Larry Eugene's cousin] would open the refrigerator door, Larry Eugene would insert a shovel near the offending putrefying organ while his brother, Gary Lee "Spud" Risner would scrape it on to the shovel with a stick. Then Larry Eugene would dart out the front door, (which was my job to hold open because the floor was slanted a bit causing it to swing shut on its own), and run to the road where he would sling the unfortunate bovine's disjecta membra into the creek.
We assumed our respective positions and I shouted, "Go!" when Larry Eugene had the shovel in hand, ready to assault the contents of the reeking appliance. Darryl whipped open the door and as the odoriferous reeking blast swiftly enveloped him he emitted a disturbing utterance and then abruptly vomited all over his two cousins who were stooped below, prepared to carry out this dubious undertaking for which we were being grossly over-compensated. I burst into a roar of laughter since I was easily five paces distant from the offending aroma. Spud screamed like a woman being raped while Larry Eugene mumbled an artful string of profanities and he finally yelled at Spud to cease his bellowing and get on with it. My plan was thereafter effected as originally imagined except that someone now had to clean up Darryl's puke as well. Logic would dictate that this task should fall to Darryl but I pooh-poohed any such notion at once -- he had no stomach for such a job which was why he threw up in the first place. After a brief period of dispute and negotiation on the final beer split, Larry Eugene assumed the responsibility with a very little assistance from Spud who also pleaded a gastric frailty.
When Doc and Junior returned with the beloved inventory, the old refrigerator looked great and smelled good enough to use. The grounds had also been cleared of hillbilly detritus which I piled and burned. We celebrated by drinking the ice cold Hudepohl long-necks as we stocked the refrigerators. The brands were as follows, in order of popularity: Pabst Blue Ribbon, Blatz, Hudepohl 14-K, Carling Black Label, and Stroh's. There were no "lite" beers in those great days. Doc had decided to carry three wine brands, Gibson's Pheasant-brand Muscatel, Thunderbird, and Wild Irish Rose, all in pints. At the state liquor store they had also acquired 24 pints of Kessler's and Corby's American blended whiskey [cheap whiskey]. Everything would sell both on-premises or carry-out for double its original retail price. Thus, a beer cost seventy-five cents, wine was a dollar fifty, and whiskey would sell for four fifty a pint, the latter being vended warm. It was stored in the far back room where Junebug and Doc could control access to it... until Larry Eugene had a lovely idea of knocking loose a panel in the back door so we could remove it easily and reach in at night to occasionally filch a pint.
Spud was handed the keys to Doc's superb car and the four of us spent the remainder of the day rounding up several old couches and stuffed chairs for the patrons who would soon arrive as soon as the word spread. We just strapped them atop the old station wagon with rope and off we went -- Spud was nearly old enough to acquire a learner's permit so he did all the driving. If the reader wonders why anyone would be inclined to patronize to a place where such dear prices prevailed, the answers are multiple: 1) The nearest legal establishment that sold alcoholic beverages was twelve miles distant, in Portsmouth -- Lucasville and McDermott were completely dry and not far from our threshold. 2) Not many of the drunks around our area possessed a driver's license even though several owned uninsured cars. To get to Portsmouth the only reasonable course was down U.S. Route 23, taking one within yards of big trouble, the Ohio Highway Patrol post. 3) Doc and Junebug sold all types of alcohol every day and all night, every night -- the place was very customer-friendly that way and it was the only location to purchase 6% beer, wine, or whiskey on Sunday although some carry-outs in Portsmouth would extend this unlawful perq to their regular customers. 4) Booze was freely sold to under-aged patrons, (under age 21 at the time 3.2% beer excepted), as long as either Larry Eugene or I vouched for them and both Doc and Junebug soon became familiar with their faces. 5) Most of all, our big draw was the opportunity for the guys to lounge around and talk as they drank, often expressing themselves in language that would not have been tolerated at a licensed premises in mixed company. Once in awhile, someone would bring along some skanky old whore and that always added spice to the ambiance. I remember old man Simmons bringing in his scraggly wife fairly often and he'd give you a few beers if you'd do her as long as he could watch. Larry Eugene and I had a great thirst for beer but our desire for alcohol was never that compelling. A thirteen year-old would always opt for an hour of heavy petting with a young pretty girl, wholly rejecting a single moment of in flagrante delicto with some ragged old hag. Doc kept an old army cot in the back room where he often sneaked catnaps and that's where any sexual activity took place. Card-playing was also encouraged as long as the participants paid out ten percent of each pot. So in the end, it was an edifice of iniquitous joy and gratification, was the Sugar Shack II. Many years later I was appointed manager of a modern multi-million dollar state park recreational resort, sited in the center of a beautiful 60,000 forest. Ask me at which of these two places I'd rather spend an evening.
Business was soon quite robust and the proprietors took in a considerable amount of money that summer. I have no idea how they divided it -- I doubt that the split was even because Junebug seemed perpetually shy of cash, thus I suspect that his contribution was largely of the working-it-out sort with Doc supplying the bulk of the capital. For my part, I have never had so much fun either before or since. The deal, as far as my parents knew, was that Larry Eugene and I were supposed to be camping at the old foxhunters' camp up on our hill in a forest clearing, a convenient spot which lay halfway between the head of Crowe Hollow where I lived, Ghost Hollow being just a short walk along a woodland path. Indeed, Larry and I maintained a really superb campsite there in the woods with a nice home-fashioned shepherd's tent contrived from a canvas tarp, an aluminum cooler with ice when we could get it, and a fire ring of sandstones which was always mounded high with hot white oak coals.
Every night at about ten p.m. we'd jink on down to The Sugar Shack, head-smacking, cutting shines, and laughing as a pair of teen pals do and, upon a round of greetings by our adult friends, we'd swill a couple of beers to conform to the social atmosphere and to get the buzz rolling. Sometimes, when we were fairly sober, we'd ride Larry's old motor scooter through the woods, a Silver Pigeon, which required dismounting and run-push assistance as it putted up the gravel surfaced road of Ghost Hollow hill. Around midnight, Doc would retire for a nap in the back room and Larry and I handled all the alcohol sales, doing our best to maintain a sanguine atmosphere until around 4 a.m. when Doc arose from the dead. I hasten to remark that it was a very workable arrangement. Doc gave us a pony case of Hudepohl [the only brand to offer twelve long-neck beers in a small cardboard case] and a pint of muscatel for our trouble, at which time we would return to the campsite and drink until our supply was depleted, usually retiring a little after daylight. Of course we purloined a few extra beers and sometimes a pint of wine while Doc was sleeping, setting it out the back window where we could retrieve it after knocking off. I wish to point out that we never stole so much as a dime of Doc's cash -- all that was handed over to him as soon as he awoke and if he was still half-drunk he'd kiss one of us on the cheek and pat our shoulders. He did that to people as a joke, knowing that it would embarrass them but we laughed and took it in stride.
I later discovered that old Doc knew all along that we were filching that extra booze. In any case, that was quite a bit of nightly drinking for a pair of teenagers and pretty soon we could hold our liquor better than most. Still I feel compelled to confess that we were often drunk as lords by the time we sat by the campfire for awhile and before sliding into our sleeping bags. Years later, I was driving Doc over to Hardrock's place, a beloved bootlegging friend in the Lucasville bottoms. We were both half-drunk when I revealed to Doc that Larry and I had sneaked beer and wine out the window and, in place of an oral reply, he leaned over and sandpapered my face with a lathery kiss on the cheek, patted me gently on the back, and burst into laughter. That's when I knew that he knew and he could not have cared less.
One afternoon Larry Eugene and I were helping Doc stock the refrigerator. As Junebug was ill he had come down earlier than usual to relieve him. Just the three of us were present until a big car pulled in rather uncertainly. Doc walked out on the porch to greet some man and woman that he knew. They came inside and the man, in a friendly sort of way, was already negotiating with Doc for a bottle of paregoric [camphorated tincture of opium from the drugstore]. Doc was no dope dealer but he always kept some paregoric around to control diarrhea which plagued him off and on. This discussion continued until Doc finally relented and handed over a new bottle of the stuff. The man offered to pay for it but Doc declined the offer. He would rather have kept his medicine. The man said he needed a cooking pan and I went out and retrieved one of the Hicks' old aluminum pans from a scrap-heap on the hillside. There was no good way to clean it since the well was infested with all manner of garbage and critters. Finally I went across the road and washed it in the creek which might have been even worse since there were a couple of outhouses just upstream. Doc had a small gas stove in the kitchen and he fired up a burner while the man wiped out the pan with his shirt and poured in the paregoric.
Neither Larry Eugene nor I had the slightest idea what this was all about but we were about to find out. The paregoric was boiled down and then the man stuck the pan in the refrigerator while he went back out to his car. All this time the woman was sitting on the couch, batting flies and nursing a beer. When he returned he opened a velvet covered box which contained a glass syringe. I wanted to see it and he let me hold it and look it over -- I have always been a curious sort. Of course now things were becoming obvious but we were still in for a surprise. He told his old lady to come into the kitchen and she did. The pair remained oblivious to the three of us. She put her hands on the stove and bent over as he threw up her dress and there was her shining ass with no panties on. He filled the syringe and gave her an injection and then he dropped his drawers and she did the same for him. Soon they were both as happy as blowflies on a dead cow's eyeball. Then they bought a pint of whiskey and left. Doc said it was just some guy he had known in Columbus. The man had asked over at Lucasville where to find Doc and he had been given perfect directions. I never heard of injections of dope being administered like that before but I suppose it worked for them. Doc seemed to take the whole matter in stride as if he had seen it a thousand times. Just one more edifying life experience at The Sugar Shack.
Doc did have one special medical treatment which is how he got his nickname. I call it The Doc Blevins Hot Toddy and it was very effective for hangover, colds, the grippe, lumbago, or even the delerium tremens. We saw people with the DTs with some frequency around Crowe Hollow and in the Lucasville bottoms and the suffering of these poor devils was impossible to ignore. The panicky wives of these sufferers would sometimes resort to hollering for us boys as we were walking down the road, asking us if we knew what could be done. The first guy I saw with DTs scared the crap out of me but Larry Eugene had seen it before. After a time I knew a little bit, tips I had picked up here and there. DT sufferers almost always developed a high temperature so an ice pack wrapped in a towel and placed on the forehead or on the back of their neck was very helpful. Also, they'd get the shivers really bad so even though they were using an ice pack, extra blankets around their body were called for but you didn't want to restrain them in any way because this caused panic. The moving air produced by a fan blowing nearby seemed to ease muzziness, mild battiness, and night horrors. As for medicine, I always told these women to go get some Benadryl at the drug store. This seemed to help more than anything else because it made the poor fellow sleepy if he took multiple pills in a dose and I was told after the fact that it diminished hallucinations of rats and snakes. [A great irony, years later, I met and became good friends with the actual inventor of Benadryl, Dr. George Rieveschl. He laughed when I told him about using it as a treatment for the DTs and he said he had never heard of such a thing. The world is a small place indeed.] The proper thing to have done would have been to take the poor bastard to the emergency room to be treated by a physician because the DTs can kill you. But they simply would not go to a doctor so I offered the best advice I knew... as a thirteen year-old. Anyway, Doc's cure was first-class and the ingredients were: 1 ounce boiling water, 1 ounce cheap whiskey, about a tablespoon of paregoric, a squirt of lemon juice, and two teaspoons of sugar, all stirred together and drunk straight down. If you drank one of Doc's Hot Toddys you'd soon be on your feet and, if not cured, still feeling good enough to be sociable. People came in all the time for one of his hot toddys and he finally brought all the ingredients to The Sugar Shack and also a teakettle to boil the water. Everyone drank from the same glass tumbler, the only one on the premises and no one ever washed it. I think some of these shyte-pokes weren't all that sick and just wanted the free shot of whiskey, because Doc never charged for his cure but, on the other hand, pretty much everyone who loafed at The Sugar Shack had some sort of illness.
Not that I was breezing through tests at school, but I had acquired a pretty good formal education, albeit a curious one, by age thirteen. Reading was a great hobby of mine and, largely by means of osmosis I had retained a great deal, even though I was oblivious to this actuality at the time. I read all of Dr. Mickelethwaite's waiting-room magazines [my mom was his nurse so I was there a lot] as well as most of the books in the library he maintained at his office, an old two-story large frame home at the southwest corner of Ninth and Gay streets. (Those were the days when gay meant "happy-go-lucky" and nothing more... at least not in Portsmouth, Ohio.) The magazines at the office included "National Geographic", (with extra time devoted to perusing those African tribal photo-essays), "Life", "The Saturday Evening Post", dozens of Reader's Digest condensed books, and numerous novels of high adventure. At home, my devoted math and science teacher father had amassed a similarly diverse library which was where I absorbed plenty of non-fiction from texts concerning various crafts and trades, everything from magic to carpentry. Dad was especially proud of our brand new set of "World Book Encyclopedias". I spent many hours reading and re-reading issues of comic books as well, every character from Archie to Casper the Friendly Ghost to Spider-Man. (Why did I not retain that issue No. 1? I do not know.) I only bother to mention my studies because it eventually bore upon my role at The Sugar Shack II.
All of our customers lived from day-to-day and I cannot recall any of the locals who was employed. It was a little different on weekends because all my boyhood heroes would return home from their respective jobs in Columbus, ninety miles to the north. Most of these Elvis wannabes were in their twenties and each earned a viable living by painting houses, sheet-rocking, sealing asphalt, or cleaning brick. They all drove fast cars that were stressed daily to beyond the vehicles' limits and they also possessed seemingly endless quantities of cash, this being in total contrast to the locals who existed on their meager crazy checks, occasional pay-offs on cockfights and card betting, and a good many of these men traded cars with considerable frequency, picking up a few dollars by that means. Some resorted to a little junking when they were particularly hard-up. They mostly wore old work trousers, second-hand white shirts that were always too large, sagging gray sweaters, and old work boots. In contrast, what a fine assemblage of fellows the Columbus gang was with their tailored striped shirts, tight jeans, and black pointy-toed shoes with heel taps! All these guys, both the young and the old, could rattle off any number of superb personal adventures, embellished yes, but founded in actuality, all of which kept Larry and me wide-eyed and fascinated. Certain central themes prevailed: bar-fights, poker games, car races and crashes, and of course detailed yarns about women from which both Larry and I fashioned our courting techniques. Alas for that!
Some of these men were married, the older locals to very tired and gaunt-looking women who had endured difficult lives, usually having borne and raised a passel of snot-nosed brats. Those men who were not married were invariably winos, amiable personalities who, if they had bothered to journey during their sunset years they would have been characterized as hobos, given the era. One rarely encountered a mean-spirited wino because when such a character emerged, he was soon dead -- I think they were rolled and killed but no money would be wasted by the sheriff beyond a cursory investigation on such societal debris. "Uncle Jack Friend", Larry's Uncle, half-brother to Junebug, and half-brother-in-law to Doc, was a very cheerful wino and everyone loved him. It was a tragic episode, around 1970 when Jack stumbled on to the wrong porch during the wee hours one dark night in the Lucasville bottoms. He had gotten drunk at Hardrock's where he had been playing cards and had won a few dollars so he was in a good mood. He was looking for Coon Blevins' house where he planned to spend the night but had gotten on the wrong street and the houses in the bottoms looked much alike. When he pounded on the door of an old woman's home, yelling at the top of his lungs for Coon to get up and let him in, the terrified old woman shot him multiple times through the door with a revolver. Jack fell dead in a pool of blood. It was purely one of those incidents that never should have happened but it did. The unfortunate old lady was well into her 80s and was never charged with a crime, nor should she have been. Jack would have been the first to say so.
If the relationships seem extraordinarily close and complex in Crowe Hollow and Ghost Hollow, it is because there were frequent inter-marriages between the large clans that resided there. Widowers Sadie Risner and Louis Friend, through previous marriages, had brought a number of children into the household when they wed, one of whom was Uncle Jack as we all called him. Add to that, Louis and Sadie were the parents of Louis Jr... Junebug, who was later dubbed Mad Dog but I never liked that appellation although he seemed to not mind it at all. Doc had married one of Sadie's daughters, Chloe, and Doc's mother had been a Rowe, a large family, several of whom lived in Crowe Hollow including Allie Delay along with two of her numerous children, Carl "Orsie" Delay and Vernon "Oogie" Delay. The Henry and Salyers families boasted many members who had wed someone in either Ghost or Crowe hollows. Doc's mother, Lily, and Allie Delay were sisters. Allie's and Lily's brother, Sanford Rowe, was the father of Oogie's, Orsie's, and Doc's first cousin, Joseph Edgar "Ro-Ho" Rowe.
There was a funny story that Joe Edgar enjoyed telling with some frequency at The Sugar Shack: He and 'Tater-Hole Phipps had recently gotten themselves arrested at The Palace [honky-tonk] in Portsmouth for drunk and disorderly conduct as a result of a bar fight. They were brought before the desk sergeant who would decide if they could bond out if they paid a $25 fine. Pen in hand, the sergeant looked at 'Tater-Hole and said, "Name?"
'Tater-Hole shot back, "John Doe!"
The sergeant, shook his head, looked at Joe Edgar and said, "Well then, I suppose you're Joe Rowe!"
"I damn sure am!" Joe Edgar retorted.
The desk sergeant looked at the cop who brought them in and said, "Lock their fuckin' asses up!"
I mention these few folks in particular as most of them have some role in herein -- but you can see how it would have been advisable to refrain from telling a calumnious story about this person or that one without first knowing whether you were talking to a half-brother, uncle, or first cousin to the protagonist of your yarn. I kept close track of all these kinships and one day a curious thought struck me. I pointed out to Larry that he had two sons... both named Larry, (by two different women of course and far apart in their ages.) He gave that several moments of consideration, sniggered, and then declared, "I never thought about that before!" Larry wasn't stupid, in fact he was very intelligent, but the women had named his children and the elder of the two lads was never around. The fact was, no one else had thought about it either.
If all these relationships seem unreasonably murky to the reader then it will suffice to simply adopt the notion that most of the people mentioned herein were related by blood... except for me. My dad, mom, and helpful uncles raised our cabin during the summer of 1955 at the head of Crowe Hollow using logs felled from a nearby hillside. Our previous domicile had been more suburban, situated at the fringe of Portsmouth in Shearer's Hollow about fifteen miles from Crowe Hollow. At age two I obviously could not have cared less where we lived... not so with my nine year-old brother, Mike. He had accumulated numerous neighborhood friends in Shearer's Hollow. In town one could get about very handily on a bicycle or on foot to all manner of casual entertainments including restaurants, department stores, and theaters, all places that Mike loved to go. Until the day he died, just this year, Mike lamented about the dreadful move to Crowe Hollow although he later moved back there on his own.
While my family was sweating away that summer, my aunt Frieda baby-sat me on the more adulatory end of Big Run Road near Crabtree Corners, about five miles from Crowe Hollow or much closer by walking if you knew where to cut through the woods. The idea of the move was that dad could return to fairly near his homeplace, the enigmatic hamlet of McDermott, (and a place which bulged with my relatives), but he liked the isolation of this secluded twenty-two acre patch. Had he known what I was up to every night I would have been grounded until the necessity of my middle-aged cataract surgery would have forced his hand. He wasn't entirely oblivious to the fact that Larry and I were probably up to some manner of juvenile shenanigans; however, on the positive side, dad was a romantic and he also believed that boys should take a few knocks. He would have been okay with our more reasonable lunar meanderings, purloining a few ears of some nearby farmer's roas'n-ears, slipping over the ridge to meet up with some capricious girls, attending a cockfight in Pat Henry's barn, all through the social filter of an Appalachian rite of passage. That's actually what The Sugar Shack II was all about as well, at least so far as I view it in retrospect, but the magnitude of our nefarious activities was exponentially amplified from what dad would have found acceptable. It was simply way too much fun. The more entertaining and merry of one's social experiences, the more expensive, perilous, and unlawful they turn out to be. I have lived by a certain credo for most of my life: "Take what you want and pay for it." Sometimes the paying aspect is extremely burdensome.
Lots of men came to the Sugar Shack II, Gene and John Long, Rufford Wen, Don Sheets [who harbored a psychological fear of chickens], Butch Adkins [aka Boyd Hackbush], Jack Lee Burton, Orsie Delay, Robby Williams, Arnold "Broken-wing" Phipps, Jack and Garrett "Gaddy" Friend [Junebug's half-brothers], and numerous others. One or two of us four boys, the courageous quartet who had performed the nasty cleaning detail, were nearly always underfoot, standing alert to anyone who needed a flat tire changed, a pack of cigarettes from Bill Duffer's store [only a half-mile distant], or any other menial task for which we hoped to be rewarded in beer.
At The Sugar Shack II, other than Doc or Junebug, the only individuals permitted to open those refrigerator doors was Larry Eugene or me, albeit Junebug never trusted us like Doc did and he had it in his mind to impede our access, more-or-less to instill us with the fact that he was the man in charge. Neither of us had ever questioned that notion but Junebug was the lesser partner and I think he might have felt a little intimidated on that point. Opening those doors was the same as walking behind the bar at a licensed premises -- it simply wasn't done if you had no right to do so. Junebug was really bad to routinely augur The Evil Eye on us which we instantly warded off with a simple but effective gesticulation taught to us by Arnold Phipps, a man who knew everything which could not be learned from books or scholars. When Larry and I were serving, someone was always shouting at us, "I ain't no fuckin' camel, son -- reach me a cold one outta that icebox!" One or the other of us would have the cap popped off and in his hand faster than you can pick your nose. A drunk will always light a cigarette with a new beer so this was also an opportunity to bum a smoke. No one ever refused us. Then we'd collect their money and hand it straight over to either Junebug or Doc, whomever was in charge at the moment. It was quite common to have a dozen or so patrons laughing, lounging about on the old couches and chairs, sharing tales of life experiences. I found all these yarns fascinating, the veracity of these tall tales becoming less prevalent as the night advanced. Doc worked from about 9 p.m. 'till 9 the next morning and Junebug picked up the day shift. We never had to be told a patron's brand name of beer -- we knew who drank what. In fact, Larry Eugene and I knew more about them than their wives and kids did. No one ever asked for a glass of water or even for a an empty glass for their beer. There were no glasses on the premises, except for Doc's singular Hot Doddy tumbler, nor any means to clean one. There was a dug-well, maybe twenty feet deep, just outside the back door but it was polluted with newts, toads, frogs, and sometimes there was a dead possum floating in it. Plus, the Hicks had thrown plenty of trash down that well, purportedly to keep rats from accumulating as they would in an open garbage dump. But there were usually big rats in the well, both dead and live ones.
There was a lot of psychology to be observed at times when The Sugar Shack's business was booming. Only in later years did I reflect upon a peculiar phenomenon that was transpiring every day I was there which involved how the patrons of The Sugar Shack viewed me. I loved talking to these old guys. They told the most outrageous and hilarious stories and I learned a great deal from each of them. Even a stupid man can teach you how to not do something.
12 Aug 1953 – 10 Jul 2018
BIO by : RFB Jenkins
Pat documented much of my family history from southern Ohio and Kentucky .... with honor and respect.
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Patrick W. Crabtree, 64, of McDermott, died Tuesday, July 10, 2018 at Southern Ohio Medical Center.
He was born August 12, 1953 in Portsmouth to Raymond and Mary Crabtree and grew up on Crowe Hollow.
Pat was a retired manager of Shawnee State Park.
In addition to his parents, he was predeceased by his brother, Michael B. Crabtree.
Pat is survived by his wife, Linda (Nelson) Crabtree; one daughter, Ashley (Michael) Collins of Jacksonville, Florida; three grandchildren, Aiden, Autumn and Nolan Collins; and a favorite niece, Heidi Crabtree of Clovis, California.
Pat admits that he too attended college, eventually being granted two separate degrees including an Associate's Degree in Parks and Recreation Administration and, much later, a B.A. in Social Science with a minor in history. Not very good degrees, to be sure, but degrees nonetheless. Then he would smile.
At Pat's request, his body was cremated.
Per Pat's request ... There was no service or visitation.
Arrangements were under the direction of F.C. Daehler Mortuary Company in Portsmouth.
Below are Exerts from Pat's love of and writings of the Appalachian hills, particularly around Portsmouth, Lucasville, and McDermott Ohio.
Patrick Crabtree's Blog: The Ospidillo News
Exert 1 Ode Dyin' to Kill Somebody
Ah well, such is life.
I will not be able to afford embalming and a casket and a cemetery plot and a gravestone. I have not saved any money for that -- I have spent my money on rescuing cats and dogs so the veterinarian will have to take pity on me and embalm me if I am to get a decent grave. But the truth is, I told Linda to go ahead and just have me cremated and dump my ashes up by those of my favorite cat ever, good old Rudy, up in the front yard.
I haven't been very pious either but that's good enough for me.
Exert 2
School had always represented an interference in what my pals and I really wanted to do which essentially amounted to this: riding our bicycles, driving cars, chasing girls along back roads, beer drinking, coon hunting, fishing, squirrel hunting, and listening to wild stories of old winos at the local bootlegger's joint.
For my part, I additionally particularly enjoyed reading but not the material which was offered at school by the teachers. The only person who ever understood this was Mrs. Madge Ervin. Most students didn't care for Mrs. Ervin because she was to the point and abrupt, but I liked her a great deal. She had been my third-grade teacher and eventually she became the school librarian. I thought she was perfect in that role, very organized and a good listener. She knew I leaned toward adventure fiction and so, through her great knowledge and willful assistance, I got to savor some really outstanding titles.
By the time I reached high school, I had become a genuine terror. I was forced to convey a pretense of civilized behavior at specific times because my own father was a very strict school principal in Portsmouth and there were additionally many teachers within my extended family. They often shared information about the activities of my many cousins and me. So I spent a good amount of time plotting and scheming as to how to semi-legitimately escape from class. I was lucky to have a confederate of a sort in this juvenile conspiracy -- it was our school principal at Valley High, Mr. James Young. Mr. Young was sympathetic with at least a few of my passions. Rather than come down on me like a boulder, (which he could have done since he and my dad were old college pals), he simply diverted and channeled my agenda as best he could. He had gotten no small amount of practice while dealing with my older brother of seven years, Mike.
One passion which Mr. Young and I wholly shared was squirrel hunting. On more than one occasion, Mr. Young would step into the first period study hall on a nice September day and motion for Roy Marshall and me to come along. Oh, Joy!!! That meant we were going squirrel hunting because Mr. Young wasn't above playing hooky himself now and then. Frankly, it was to Mr. Young's great advantage to do this because Roy and I were frequently scouting new ground all around the county and we had secured landowner permission to hunt these virgin territories. Most of these properties were bulging with either gray or fox squirrels or both.
People would hardly believe it nowadays but we always carried our shotguns, (and often hand guns for coon hunting), right in the back seat of our cars in the school parking lot. This was a common practice for those of us who hunted and it saved us from returning home to retrieve our weapons. And so we could thus get into the woods as quickly as possible after school had let out. So Roy and I would jump into Jim's car, (Mr. Young became "Jim" on these squirrel-hunting expeditions, a privilege we never abused), fire up a smoke, and he would pull around to our cars in the student parking area. Once there, we'd surreptitiously slip our shotguns and hunting gear from our vehicles into his. We'd usually make it back to school just as the busses were lining up to close out the day. Those were splendid times indeed. There's something about playing hooky which infuses a kid with a rush and when you're hooking along with the school principal, it's even lovelier.
But I had to devise other additional means of escape from the doldrums of grueling classes such as French II, Geometry, and Government (Civics.) I somehow managed to join certain organizations which came with the perquisites of occasionally being excused from class. One year I was the photographer for the Annual Staff and I shot tons of film which was never published anywhere. I think for two years I managed to latch on to the job of construction crew member for the class plays. We built little and smoked a great deal. And our football field and track were pretty new back then and a new concrete block concession stand was being built as well. Coach Morris Gullion was always quite happy to find volunteers willing to sod his beloved football field, a thankless task at which I excelled. We were typically left to our own devices so we just posted a guard at the top of the hill, commenced our work and smoked all we wanted to.
But our Senior year was the time when things actually got out of control. Hell, it even began to worry me! Here's what happened: Claude Sammons had been the Mechanical Drawing and Wood Shop teacher for many years. He ran a very tight ship and everything was maintained in perfect order. He taught even the most heinous and rowdy boys a great deal to get them through day-to-day life. For me, the shop class was elective as I was enrolled in the College Preparatory Program. I carried a heavy load of classes from my freshman year forward so that by the time I became a Senior, my days would be my own. I had actually devised this plan from the start of high school, probably on the sage counsel of my brother, Mike, who was infinitely superior at scheming than I was myself. So by my Senior year, the only class to which I was obligated was in the first period, Mrs. Fannin's Government class, the dreaded hour of all Seniors. The remainder of my days' time was spent in the wood shop.
Mr. Sammons had opted to work in the higher-paying position of the school Guidance Counselor, a job for which I felt he was ill-suited since, from my view, his outstanding talents were clearly going to be wasted. The guidance counselor of past years had done nothing that I ever heard of. I had never met with her (Mrs. Bertha Phillips) a single time and it's not for the fringe student to reach up to the Administration for guidance -- the guidance counselor must be aggressive in contacting all the students to set them on a positive track in life, or at least try to do so. It's ironic that her husband, Mr. Phillips the janitor, gave me invaluable advice while I was cutting class to help him, (yet another of my numerous dodges), on what I might do following graduation. Mr. Phillips was a great old fellow.
The grim story for Mr. Young was that he was short of a stellar shop teacher, a position which is incredibly difficult to fill. First we inherited poor old Julius Chandler, an elderly minister who was a superb home craftsman and who had never taught school in his lifetime. He really liked the boys but had not the least notion as to how to control them. Certain boys, (I won't name them outright), T.M., G.B., R.B., R.A., and T.G., aggregately became the bane of his formerly peaceful existence. And while I did nothing to impede the old man, neither did I demonstrate the slightest trace of leadership in an attempt to aid him, I am ashamed to confess. Before many days had passed, the lunatics were running the asylum and Mr. Chandler had become a ball of nerves. In fact, he is now buried just a mile or so east of my present home at the summit of the McDermott Cemetery Hill and I often wonder if we might have shaved ten years or so off his otherwise fruitful life.
Mr. Young came into the shop one Monday morning with a rumpled looking character attending him by the name of Mr. Larry Flannery. Mr. Flannery, he said, would be replacing Mr. Chandler and we were to help him all we possibly could. Of course we would. Then Mr. Young pulled me off to the side and cut me the deal of a lifetime. The truth was, Larry Flannery had a B.A. in Social Science, (good for nothing whatever, I have one myself), and he didn't know a band saw from a jackhammer. And he certainly possessed no knowledge of mechanical drawing which was to be taught to Freshmen and Sophomores. Would I teach the boys the mechanical drawing? You bet your sweet fucking ass I would! What a coup! This deal included a frequent excused absence from Mrs. Fannin's Government class -- I would just read the material and take the tests, a move which in fact moved me from a C- up to a B. My dad was much pleased.
Larry, as we came to know him, was posited strictly as a disciplinarian. What an outrageous notion -- he was more evil than all of us boys put together! In his private life, Larry was a bachelor-gambler of dubious repute. Years later, my brother Mike, (who became the Chief Probation Officer for the local Common Pleas Court), carried Larry on felony probation on the crime of carrying a concealed weapon, this charge no doubt stemming from some incident from within a Portsmouth speakeasy, most likely The Subway. So Larry taught the boys how to gamble, or rather he taught us how to cheat. He collected our lunch money most days with the nefarious match game, a numbers device which one cannot possibly lose when one knows the mathematical hoax involved in playing the game. We were too stupid to catch on because Larry was shrewd enough to lose a game now and again on purpose.
I kept my covenant with Mr. Young -- I taught the boys to draw, although clearly not as effectively as Mr. Sammons might have done. When a couple of the troublemakers would attempt to challenge me I would just retrieve one or two Senior thugs from the shop and the matter would be immediately and permanently quashed with no aftermath. It wasn't a perfect method for running a class but it got us through the year. I doubt, though, that my methods would have merited the School Board's endorsement.
Still, for Mr. Young, no news from the shop was good news. To keep the younger boys' mouths shut, we allowed them to periodically take a break and come into the shop for a smoke back by the welder, or to play the match game with Larry any time they wished. And one Freshman or Sophomore was appointed daily to stand guard duty at the door to maintain a watch for Mr. Young because we had smoking going on by the constantly fired-up welder and two or three card games were always in progress at various places throughout the large room. I would quickly complete the drawings for the appointed watchmen because Mr. Young would periodically scan these drawings and check off the names against the list of students. When it comes to drafting, I am truly a master, a skill which I ultimately carried forward to college engineering classes.
One day, I don't know why, G.B. said we were going to load up everything and take it all home. Larry was late for work that morning and so G. backed his big Oldsmobile into the shop and, with some help, loaded the table saw into his trunk. Obviously, the trunk lid wouldn't shut but G. didn't give a shit and navigated his car, trunk lid high in the air and saw protruding, back to the parking lot. Well this singular act breached the flood gates. Everybody drove their cars around and started loading up -- by the time they were finished, there wasn't a hammer or screwdriver remaining anywhere. Larry finally arrived, saw what had happened, and practically went into convulsions. He was a very high-strung person. When no one would immediately confess to the obvious larceny he headed down the hall in a huff to retrieve Mr. Young.
I thank the late James Young to this day and with all my heart for not pulling me aside to get the low down. He took on the task of remedying the matter through his own initiative. I forget what the threat was if we didn't comply but he said that he and Larry were leaving for fifteen minutes and when he got back, everything right down to the last 8d box nail better be back where it belonged. As soon as they walked out a scramble ensued. Everything was put right in five minutes and we utilized the next ten to grab a smoke or two before the authorities returned. Fortunately, all this happened within a few weeks of graduation and Mr. Young desired no problems which would cause eight or ten Seniors to not graduate. No one I ever knew had a cooler head than Mr. Young -- he knew precisely how to handle boys in difficult situations.
Once in a while, Roger McClay, who was the chemistry and physics teacher, would hear too much cacophony in the shop and he would peer out his door glass across the hall at our door to see what was up. At such times, either T.M. or G.B. would usually be summoned and they would simply point ominously at Mr. McClay, an act which caused him to become instantaneously blind, deaf, and mute. T. and G. were outlandishly large and domineering fellows and they could each convey an air of noir-authority, much in the spirit of a swarthy Mafioso guy. A number of the Senior boys that year had really been wearing on Mr. McClay, a fact which was not lost on the under-classmen. I think it was the following year when I heard that D.T. had physically roughed him up a bit. Such an act would have been unheard of at Valley in previous years but I guess my Class of '71 gave rise to something rather notorious which sort of clung on for a time, not a positive legacy for me or my peers.
The advent of Driver Education came about when I was a senior and Mr. Douglas Booth became the instructor. This was likely a thoughtful choice since he could handle the rougher boys with no problem and, the fact was, most of us had been driving since we were thirteen anyway. I think T.G. commenced driving when he was seven or eight because his dad ran a big junkyard down by the Drive-in Theater and T. loved to race the drivable cars around in the junkyard lot.
One day we were out driving around, a dubious contingent including G.B., R.B., T.C., and me, with Mr. Booth riding shotgun and reading his daily newspaper. T. was our pilot out near Minford and we soon spotted an elderly lady crossing the road ahead to retreive her mail from the box. I think it was R. who blurted out, "Run over that old bitch!" Well that was a very unfortunate remark because when Mr. Booth dropped his paper a bit to grab a looksee, let us say that it turned out to be a person near and dear to his heart. I don't recall precisely how it all played out but you can bet that it wasn't good in the end for R.
But the Driver Education car was yet another device which enabled me to occasionally skip class. A couple of us would go to Mr. Booth and volunteer to wash the car down at Shumway's gas station in Lucasville. He'd toss us the keys and we'd usually head straight for Hardrock's place, (the local bootlegger, Charlie Lockhart), for a quick cold beer. Then we'd run around the Lucasville Bottoms for a while and eventually we'd race back to Shumway's, wash the big Ford in record time, and then return the keys just before school was dismissed for the day.
During my Senior year, most mornings commenced with a get-together at Hardrock's place in the Lucasville Bottoms. Hardrock lived in a tiny green tarpaper shack and his operation was pretty simple. He went to town and bought lots of beer, wine, and whiskey and when he re-sold it at his house, which of course was in a dry township, he charged double what he paid for it. So a beer was about seventy-five cents. We didn't have the money to drink many of those before class each day so we often opted for Old Pheasant Brand Muscatel Wine instead -- wino wine. It was $1.25 per pint and two of us could get a pretty good buzz rolling with that amount. It certainly made the days pass more pleasantly. Old Hardrock was a prince of a guy. He inevitably had a good story to impart and, as he supped his breakfast tomato soup each morning, he'd fill us in on all the Bottoms gossip from the previous evening which might include cockfighting winners, shootings and other assaults, hired insurance arsons, card game winners and losers, and so on. Hardrock was better by far than the radio because he always embellished a bit to make each story more interesting but he'd never tell a lie outright.
We rode to school pretty much every morning with Gary Lee Risner in a decrepit sixty-something Pontiac Tempest. We'd start out in Crowe Hollow, Gary driving with his now late brother Larry Eugene riding shotgun and me occupying the rear seat. Then we'd swing in on West Avenue in Lucasville behind the Elementary School and pick up the now late Darryl Neeley, a cousin to the Risners. From there it was on to Hardrock's unless we had to stop to re-supply our blessed cigarettes. Darryl was the very best of us and I will not now go into how he was accidentally killed just a short period following our graduation -- it's a long and tragic story. But he eternally had a smile for everyone and was much loved by all his classmates, boys and girls alike. I miss him a great deal and I think about him all the time. Anyway, about eight minutes before the final bell rang to commence classes we would race up the hill to school in that old Tempest, sharing a good snort of Muscatel as we did so.
Once in awhile, Gary's car would become crippled and we'd be forced to ride the bus up the hill, (now Robert Lucas Road), from the Intermediate School on U.S. Route 23. We always chose Mr. Keller's bus for two noteworthy reasons: it was the final bus to ascend the hill to the High School and, Mr. Keller always allowed us to smoke all we wanted. He smoked too. The only people on this bus were the smokers because most students wanted to arrive at school a bit earlier to complete any last-minute homework. Homework be damned! That was the Crowe Hollow credo. I'd scratch out something in the final few seconds, garnering answers from the weak-willed whenever possible, and flail it toward the teacher at the last possible moment. Along Robert Lucas Road, there exists to this very day a small newt-and-toad pond on the right after you have topped the hill. We'd pull all the windows down to clear the smoke on Mr. Keller's bus and he'd shout, just before reaching the pond, "Throw those fuckin' cigarettes out!" He wasn't bull-shitting either and so we did. I'll bet the nicotine level of that pond would have killed any living thing back in those days.
As for girls, the Valley girls weren't much interested in most of us for obvious reasons. A couple of younger ones did take us on and we loved them very much for their kind attentions. I latched on to R.M. from the Bottoms, a free-spirit who sported a joyous, beautiful smile and who was four years my junior, but she knew far more about life than I ever did. We went to the Scioto Breeze Drive-in on Friday and Saturday nights, usually avoiding the entrance fee via the very large trunk of Pat Henry's '58 Chevy convertible. We also ran the back roads as a pack over in the northwest corner of the county where most of my numerous cousins lived and attended high school. I loved R. very much and, to this day, I feel a special fondness toward her even though I haven't seen her for forty-odd years. She eventually ran off with S.C., one of my Elvis-ish hero-icons from the Lucasville Bottoms and a man ten years my senior. I was quite proud that R. chose to run off with S. -- this lessened the pain of a love suddenly lost.
Lots of girls from other schools vied for our attentions. Darryl was our secret weapon -- they all wanted Darryl. But we seemed to always have enough girls on board to match up out on Freejack Hill for lengthy necking and beer-drinking sessions. Nothing beyond that ever happened -- there were simply too many of us. The car was as a can of sardines. We'd stay out pretty late and on weekends the girls were forgotten and we'd go coon hunting with Brother Bill Scaff of Otway. One night we caught and killed a skunk and, before dying, it revenged itself by spraying all of us, dogs included. The next day at school we were catching a lot of evil stares from our classmates. Mr. Young came to the rescue and sent us home for a day or so.
Once a year, Mr. Young felt an official obligation to catch all the smokers in the act. This was more an Annual Event than it was something to be feared or dreaded. We all knew it was coming and only fate would save certain individuals from the odious penalties of smoking at school. There was a janitor's room behind the stalls in the boy's restroom. Mr. Young would spend most of a day in that room, peering through a small vent above the stalls. We smoked in the restroom quite a lot between classes just to grab a couple of puffs. This routine practice led to doom in my Sophomore year. Near the end of the day, Mr. Young called off a laundry list of names over the speaker system, all smokers, and instructed us to report to his office. On the day I got caught, he also called Bill "Dinky" Dalton's name which was a big surprise since Dinky didn't smoke and we all knew that. We arrived in the office en masse, each of us bearing the feeble hope that this wasn't about smoking [Ha!]. As it turned out, Dinky had made some depraved and disparaging remark about Mr. Young personally and Mr. Young just wanted to scare the living shit out of him, which he proceeded to do -- then he let him go, addressing the rest of us with that ever-so-grim countenance which he could command at will. It was a choice between three licks and forty laps around the gym, or, a three-day suspension. I was elated since I was running between twelve and fifteen miles per day in practice for the track team -- I was the two-miler. Everybody took the three licks and forty laps except for Jerry O'Banion, a counter-culture upper-classman. There were about twenty-five of us and we got that mess behind us the very next day, except for Jerry that is.
Oh, I could go on and on as to the foolish and rotten things which transpired over those years. I guess that school did provide enough structure that we arose from our beds at a decent hour, (not so during the summers!), and enough discipline was enforced upon us to prevent our becoming serial killers or ax murderers. I eventually struck out a career in law enforcement and that where I remained following college. The best poachers make the most effective wardens.
And by the way, here's how to win at the infamous match game:
Exert 3
I'm no expert on early 20th Century Appalachian architecture... I don't think there are any such people. Maybe Kevin Bradbury comes close, my former assistant manager at Shawnee State Park who stepped up as park manager when I retired. Kevin was my resident genius -- I'd like to own the stack of oaken shake-shingles that he has produced in his lifetime. But the houses I'm talking about were wooden frame homes, often with a tin roof [or tar-paper and slate shingles] and vertical siding with furring strips which stood to defeat the winter winds.
My dad and I built a really nice storage shed and when I suggested that it would be easier to run the boards horizontally instead of vertically he quickly rebuffed any such notion, remarking with a measure of scorn, "That's how hog-pens are built." He was right about that, although I had never taken notice of it prior to his edifying comment, and there was clearly something in his mind, a cultural shibboleth, by which he was driven, one which drove him to veer away from representations of Appalachian poverty. My dad had come from humble roots, although it was a household of cleanliness and dignity, that there was going to be no hog-pen style shed erected on his property! I saw these same sort of "statements" repeated many times by Appalachian natives who grew up in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. People were raising the bar for themselves and for their families. I think this outlook of improvement was initiated largely as a result of World War II adventures as these young Appalachian men were exposed to the world during their travels. Their observations during their travels provided them with a new perspective on what could be achieved in their own lives.
Certainly the culture shifted throughout Appalachia as a result of World War II. Prior to that, entire families routinely continued to reside with their parents and grand-parents, often within the same residence and sometimes in a smaller, newly-constructed home on the same property. The Big House was always the central home on the property, usually where the evening meals were prepared and consumed by everyone who lived thereabouts. But subsequent to the war, the children were much more inclined to move out and raise their family elsewhere, often far away if a good job pulled them in that direction.
Where the household economics were good four-inch horizontal clapboards were used. A log cabin was to be avoided as it was stereotypical to Appalachia and again, emblematic of poverty... so my dad built a log cabin. That aspect of the matter seemed not to bother him and I think he viewed this as an aspect pioneer craftsmanship rather than as an icon of poverty. And, of course, he saved a lot of money by having his raw materials ready at hand, growing on the hillside. Country and suburban log cabins are nowadays all the rage although most people have no notion of their numerous limitations.
I certainly took note of the various wonders of carpentry as I was growing up, the late 1950s and '6os, a period in which most of these homes were entering their decline. The houses of post-World War Two embraced modernity and most folks wanted a single-story residence. Sadly, the rural Appalachian edifices of the pre-war period are practically all gone these days.
I feel very nostalgic about these homes -- that's what they were... homes. In most of the places that I'll be speaking of numerous children were raised, including my own paternal Grandfather's house where he and Grandma raised thirteen wonderful children. Such homes were the scenes of births, celebrations, [such as family reunions], hard times [the loss of employment], agriculture, innovation [such as unique ways of storing food supplies], deaths, and even wakes.
I really cotton to the notion of wakes, preferring the Irish variety over the Appalachian ones [which were largely Irish in their roots but if there was any alcohol around it was hidden, abiding by religious social mores, most likely nipped out behind the smokehouse along with two or three other male imbibers.] Some homesteads even featured back-yard cemeteries and you can sometimes track an Appalachian family's ancestry by visiting one if the monuments are marked. However, due to the poverty of the era, sometimes only a chunk of squared sandstone from the local quarry or even a much-deteriorated wooden cross marks these graves I like the idea of a family cemetery too. Would I prefer to have a wake when I drop dead and be buried near the home of my youth? Yep. Unfortunately, I have to remain practical for my Linda so we've decided that I will be cremated and my ashes will most likely be scattered in the front yard where Rudy, and some of my other cats are buried. A good many of them have also been cremated, (although I buried Rudy's carcass myself), such as old Mick, Sluggo, Big Boy, White Spot, and my beloved L.T.
Exert 4 from Pat's odes about the Sugar Shack
There had been a Sugar Shack I in 1966, operated by Arnold "Broken-Wing" Phipps and Junior "Doc" Blevins but it had been largely a gambling enterprise which didn't interest us boys much as we only rarely had more than a dollar or two in our pockets. Apparently neither did anyone else have any money after Arnold and Doc wiped them out and the place shut down after a month or so, having never once been raided by the county sheriff. It was just a slab-wood shed on Ghost Hollow, the outbuilding of a ramshackle hovel owned by one "Miss Tutwaller", an absentee church-going landlady who resided somewhere in North Carolina. I had never laid eyes on Miss Tutwaller but Larry's Grammaw, Sadie Friend, apparently knew her well. Miss Tutwaller owned three residences plus the Crowe Hollow Church-house which was actually in Ghost Hollow. She raked-in $25 per month for the tar-paper shack on Crowe Hollow, which burned around 1965 or so, [Orise Rowe lived there in sin with a really mean and sour old church lady, I forget her name but I always felt sorry for Orise], and $35 for Maggie Chandler's rickety bungalow at the forks and the same for The Sugar Shack property. I think she allowed the church to be used for free by any self-ordained hell-fire preacher who needed a launch-pad.
I can't remember who last paid rent for the house where The Sugar Shack ended up. Clifford and Steve Hicks moved in around the fall of '66, just after the first Sugar Shack had dissolved operations. Old Cliff was a foreboding, grimly statuesque figure with a big nasty mole protruding from his forehead but he was a very nice guy, easy to get along with -- groovy, one might have said at the time. He was not a well man but only occasionally did he complain, his tuberculosis and lumbago issues notwithstanding. Cliff's son, Steve, clearly housed some hungry evil worm within his over-sized head and it gnawed away at his brain, a very small brain. He got picked on a lot, most of it brought on by himself, yet a pathetic creature overall.
We'd be trundling up Ghost Hollow, Larry Eugene and me, and poor Steve would rush out on the ratty porch and holler, "Hey, Codwell...! Cod-LICKER...! Fuck you!" ...and then he'd scramble back into the house before Larry Eugene could nail him with a road-stone. One hot afternoon after giving Larry Eugene a hardy blaspheming, Steve ran inside, opened one of the tiny side windows, and then continued to rant the most intolerable obscenities while I stood by laughing my ass off. Larry Eugene perfectly timed a face-full of gravels for him when he peeped his bulbous head up a second time and Steve erupted in howls of pain and frustration. Clearly, Cliff wasn't home at that moment. Steve then snatched up a broom and used the handle to start busting out what few window panes there were, all the time ranting and screaming like a complete idiot, "Uh-oh! you broke that fuckin' window! Oh-oh! You broke that one too!" He shattered every window in the house. Larry Eugene thought this nonsense was as hilarious as I did.
We strolled on up the road to Larry Eugene's home, a sturdy old tin-roofed furring-strip bungalow just a hundred feet distant, and when we saw Cliff come dusting up the road we caught him before he got to his house and told him what happened. Since all the glass was on the outside, any moron could determine that the windows had been broken from within. Cliff allowed Steve to elaborate upon the lie about Larry Eugene demolishing the windows and then he boomed, "Okay there, little boy! Now it'll be yer ass in boxcar letters!" [He always said that to Steve before giving him a strapping.] A better first-class belt-beating I never saw. Even Larry Eugene said so and he had endured some dandy floggings from his Grampaw, who had since passed on.
The Hicks [pronounced HICK-zez] lived off the land, more-or-less hand-to-mouth. Cliff had never worked in his life, not at a regular job anyway, and Steve was incapable of achieving anything beyond stripping copper wire from electric motors and old car generators to sell for junk. People nowadays want to trash guys like Cliff, calling them lazy welfare moochers. Cliff wasn't lazy -- he was simply too fucking stupid to be able to do anything. People don't get this. The pair owned a red child's wagon and pulled it to Lucasville with great frequency to haul the rummaged waste food from Jake Kinstler's store dumpster, rotting produce and tainted meat mostly. At the first of the month when Cliff received his crazy check [that's what we called all welfare and social security disability checks, an entitlement for being crazy, we had been told by our thuggish hero-icons. The idea was to go down to the county courthouse and roll around on the steps and act crazy. Shortly thereafter you would start receiving your check. Oogie Delay and Joe Edgar Rowe said that's how they got their crazy checks.] they returned with multiple cans of Bugler tobacco which meant that us boys, four in our gang, would be well-supplied with smokes for at least ten days. No one on welfare ever bought enough cigarettes to last until their next crazy check so smoking for the final twenty days of the month depended upon shrewd junking, pop and beer bottle cash-ins, or selling something at a small profit, a dollar here and a dollar there. It wasn't so bad -- a green-paper pack [not a can] of Bugler or Kite provided about twenty-five hand-rolled cigarettes and cost only ten cents. Regular cigarettes were about thirty-three cents a pack so those were out of the question.
The Hicks hung on until late spring and that's when Cliff's health nose-dived even further, necessitating a move to some shack in the Lucasville bottoms down on It'ly Street, [West Street] where at least there would be some solid citizen around to verify to Steve that he was dead should tragedy strike. I think Doc Blevins must have had his eye on that house ever since he had shut down the original Sugar Shack. The Hicks dust was still in the air and their spore lay strewn about the grounds when he hired us boys to give the place a good going over. One treasure of Hicks' detritus was a working refrigerator. Leaving large heavy items behind was a common practice amongst local poverty-stricken residents as they could acquire no truck to move large appliances. The hope, of course, was that whomever they were displacing faced the same dilemma. Doc had already hooked a second refrigerator, an absolute necessity to maintain an adequate supply of multiple brands of ice cold beer and wine. There was one worriment that required a swift resolution... the Hicks had also left behind an old cow's tongue in their refrigerator and the electric had been off for a week or so. Doc declared to us that the man [boy] who removed it and cleaned the inside with bleach would be awarded an extra twelve cold beers. We decided that this was a four-boy job, or rather I did.
Doc and Junior "Junebug" Friend, his half-brother-in-law and partner in this venture, departed in Doc's lemon-yellow boat-ish 1956 Rambler 4-door hardtop station wagon, (a car that brought to my mind a corpulent Chinaman who was unsuccessfully trying to masticate a huge mouthful of cheese), to stock up on the first load of alcoholic beverages in Portsmouth while we carried out the assignment. I had it figured like this: Darryl Neeley [Larry Eugene's cousin] would open the refrigerator door, Larry Eugene would insert a shovel near the offending putrefying organ while his brother, Gary Lee "Spud" Risner would scrape it on to the shovel with a stick. Then Larry Eugene would dart out the front door, (which was my job to hold open because the floor was slanted a bit causing it to swing shut on its own), and run to the road where he would sling the unfortunate bovine's disjecta membra into the creek.
We assumed our respective positions and I shouted, "Go!" when Larry Eugene had the shovel in hand, ready to assault the contents of the reeking appliance. Darryl whipped open the door and as the odoriferous reeking blast swiftly enveloped him he emitted a disturbing utterance and then abruptly vomited all over his two cousins who were stooped below, prepared to carry out this dubious undertaking for which we were being grossly over-compensated. I burst into a roar of laughter since I was easily five paces distant from the offending aroma. Spud screamed like a woman being raped while Larry Eugene mumbled an artful string of profanities and he finally yelled at Spud to cease his bellowing and get on with it. My plan was thereafter effected as originally imagined except that someone now had to clean up Darryl's puke as well. Logic would dictate that this task should fall to Darryl but I pooh-poohed any such notion at once -- he had no stomach for such a job which was why he threw up in the first place. After a brief period of dispute and negotiation on the final beer split, Larry Eugene assumed the responsibility with a very little assistance from Spud who also pleaded a gastric frailty.
When Doc and Junior returned with the beloved inventory, the old refrigerator looked great and smelled good enough to use. The grounds had also been cleared of hillbilly detritus which I piled and burned. We celebrated by drinking the ice cold Hudepohl long-necks as we stocked the refrigerators. The brands were as follows, in order of popularity: Pabst Blue Ribbon, Blatz, Hudepohl 14-K, Carling Black Label, and Stroh's. There were no "lite" beers in those great days. Doc had decided to carry three wine brands, Gibson's Pheasant-brand Muscatel, Thunderbird, and Wild Irish Rose, all in pints. At the state liquor store they had also acquired 24 pints of Kessler's and Corby's American blended whiskey [cheap whiskey]. Everything would sell both on-premises or carry-out for double its original retail price. Thus, a beer cost seventy-five cents, wine was a dollar fifty, and whiskey would sell for four fifty a pint, the latter being vended warm. It was stored in the far back room where Junebug and Doc could control access to it... until Larry Eugene had a lovely idea of knocking loose a panel in the back door so we could remove it easily and reach in at night to occasionally filch a pint.
Spud was handed the keys to Doc's superb car and the four of us spent the remainder of the day rounding up several old couches and stuffed chairs for the patrons who would soon arrive as soon as the word spread. We just strapped them atop the old station wagon with rope and off we went -- Spud was nearly old enough to acquire a learner's permit so he did all the driving. If the reader wonders why anyone would be inclined to patronize to a place where such dear prices prevailed, the answers are multiple: 1) The nearest legal establishment that sold alcoholic beverages was twelve miles distant, in Portsmouth -- Lucasville and McDermott were completely dry and not far from our threshold. 2) Not many of the drunks around our area possessed a driver's license even though several owned uninsured cars. To get to Portsmouth the only reasonable course was down U.S. Route 23, taking one within yards of big trouble, the Ohio Highway Patrol post. 3) Doc and Junebug sold all types of alcohol every day and all night, every night -- the place was very customer-friendly that way and it was the only location to purchase 6% beer, wine, or whiskey on Sunday although some carry-outs in Portsmouth would extend this unlawful perq to their regular customers. 4) Booze was freely sold to under-aged patrons, (under age 21 at the time 3.2% beer excepted), as long as either Larry Eugene or I vouched for them and both Doc and Junebug soon became familiar with their faces. 5) Most of all, our big draw was the opportunity for the guys to lounge around and talk as they drank, often expressing themselves in language that would not have been tolerated at a licensed premises in mixed company. Once in awhile, someone would bring along some skanky old whore and that always added spice to the ambiance. I remember old man Simmons bringing in his scraggly wife fairly often and he'd give you a few beers if you'd do her as long as he could watch. Larry Eugene and I had a great thirst for beer but our desire for alcohol was never that compelling. A thirteen year-old would always opt for an hour of heavy petting with a young pretty girl, wholly rejecting a single moment of in flagrante delicto with some ragged old hag. Doc kept an old army cot in the back room where he often sneaked catnaps and that's where any sexual activity took place. Card-playing was also encouraged as long as the participants paid out ten percent of each pot. So in the end, it was an edifice of iniquitous joy and gratification, was the Sugar Shack II. Many years later I was appointed manager of a modern multi-million dollar state park recreational resort, sited in the center of a beautiful 60,000 forest. Ask me at which of these two places I'd rather spend an evening.
Business was soon quite robust and the proprietors took in a considerable amount of money that summer. I have no idea how they divided it -- I doubt that the split was even because Junebug seemed perpetually shy of cash, thus I suspect that his contribution was largely of the working-it-out sort with Doc supplying the bulk of the capital. For my part, I have never had so much fun either before or since. The deal, as far as my parents knew, was that Larry Eugene and I were supposed to be camping at the old foxhunters' camp up on our hill in a forest clearing, a convenient spot which lay halfway between the head of Crowe Hollow where I lived, Ghost Hollow being just a short walk along a woodland path. Indeed, Larry and I maintained a really superb campsite there in the woods with a nice home-fashioned shepherd's tent contrived from a canvas tarp, an aluminum cooler with ice when we could get it, and a fire ring of sandstones which was always mounded high with hot white oak coals.
Every night at about ten p.m. we'd jink on down to The Sugar Shack, head-smacking, cutting shines, and laughing as a pair of teen pals do and, upon a round of greetings by our adult friends, we'd swill a couple of beers to conform to the social atmosphere and to get the buzz rolling. Sometimes, when we were fairly sober, we'd ride Larry's old motor scooter through the woods, a Silver Pigeon, which required dismounting and run-push assistance as it putted up the gravel surfaced road of Ghost Hollow hill. Around midnight, Doc would retire for a nap in the back room and Larry and I handled all the alcohol sales, doing our best to maintain a sanguine atmosphere until around 4 a.m. when Doc arose from the dead. I hasten to remark that it was a very workable arrangement. Doc gave us a pony case of Hudepohl [the only brand to offer twelve long-neck beers in a small cardboard case] and a pint of muscatel for our trouble, at which time we would return to the campsite and drink until our supply was depleted, usually retiring a little after daylight. Of course we purloined a few extra beers and sometimes a pint of wine while Doc was sleeping, setting it out the back window where we could retrieve it after knocking off. I wish to point out that we never stole so much as a dime of Doc's cash -- all that was handed over to him as soon as he awoke and if he was still half-drunk he'd kiss one of us on the cheek and pat our shoulders. He did that to people as a joke, knowing that it would embarrass them but we laughed and took it in stride.
I later discovered that old Doc knew all along that we were filching that extra booze. In any case, that was quite a bit of nightly drinking for a pair of teenagers and pretty soon we could hold our liquor better than most. Still I feel compelled to confess that we were often drunk as lords by the time we sat by the campfire for awhile and before sliding into our sleeping bags. Years later, I was driving Doc over to Hardrock's place, a beloved bootlegging friend in the Lucasville bottoms. We were both half-drunk when I revealed to Doc that Larry and I had sneaked beer and wine out the window and, in place of an oral reply, he leaned over and sandpapered my face with a lathery kiss on the cheek, patted me gently on the back, and burst into laughter. That's when I knew that he knew and he could not have cared less.
One afternoon Larry Eugene and I were helping Doc stock the refrigerator. As Junebug was ill he had come down earlier than usual to relieve him. Just the three of us were present until a big car pulled in rather uncertainly. Doc walked out on the porch to greet some man and woman that he knew. They came inside and the man, in a friendly sort of way, was already negotiating with Doc for a bottle of paregoric [camphorated tincture of opium from the drugstore]. Doc was no dope dealer but he always kept some paregoric around to control diarrhea which plagued him off and on. This discussion continued until Doc finally relented and handed over a new bottle of the stuff. The man offered to pay for it but Doc declined the offer. He would rather have kept his medicine. The man said he needed a cooking pan and I went out and retrieved one of the Hicks' old aluminum pans from a scrap-heap on the hillside. There was no good way to clean it since the well was infested with all manner of garbage and critters. Finally I went across the road and washed it in the creek which might have been even worse since there were a couple of outhouses just upstream. Doc had a small gas stove in the kitchen and he fired up a burner while the man wiped out the pan with his shirt and poured in the paregoric.
Neither Larry Eugene nor I had the slightest idea what this was all about but we were about to find out. The paregoric was boiled down and then the man stuck the pan in the refrigerator while he went back out to his car. All this time the woman was sitting on the couch, batting flies and nursing a beer. When he returned he opened a velvet covered box which contained a glass syringe. I wanted to see it and he let me hold it and look it over -- I have always been a curious sort. Of course now things were becoming obvious but we were still in for a surprise. He told his old lady to come into the kitchen and she did. The pair remained oblivious to the three of us. She put her hands on the stove and bent over as he threw up her dress and there was her shining ass with no panties on. He filled the syringe and gave her an injection and then he dropped his drawers and she did the same for him. Soon they were both as happy as blowflies on a dead cow's eyeball. Then they bought a pint of whiskey and left. Doc said it was just some guy he had known in Columbus. The man had asked over at Lucasville where to find Doc and he had been given perfect directions. I never heard of injections of dope being administered like that before but I suppose it worked for them. Doc seemed to take the whole matter in stride as if he had seen it a thousand times. Just one more edifying life experience at The Sugar Shack.
Doc did have one special medical treatment which is how he got his nickname. I call it The Doc Blevins Hot Toddy and it was very effective for hangover, colds, the grippe, lumbago, or even the delerium tremens. We saw people with the DTs with some frequency around Crowe Hollow and in the Lucasville bottoms and the suffering of these poor devils was impossible to ignore. The panicky wives of these sufferers would sometimes resort to hollering for us boys as we were walking down the road, asking us if we knew what could be done. The first guy I saw with DTs scared the crap out of me but Larry Eugene had seen it before. After a time I knew a little bit, tips I had picked up here and there. DT sufferers almost always developed a high temperature so an ice pack wrapped in a towel and placed on the forehead or on the back of their neck was very helpful. Also, they'd get the shivers really bad so even though they were using an ice pack, extra blankets around their body were called for but you didn't want to restrain them in any way because this caused panic. The moving air produced by a fan blowing nearby seemed to ease muzziness, mild battiness, and night horrors. As for medicine, I always told these women to go get some Benadryl at the drug store. This seemed to help more than anything else because it made the poor fellow sleepy if he took multiple pills in a dose and I was told after the fact that it diminished hallucinations of rats and snakes. [A great irony, years later, I met and became good friends with the actual inventor of Benadryl, Dr. George Rieveschl. He laughed when I told him about using it as a treatment for the DTs and he said he had never heard of such a thing. The world is a small place indeed.] The proper thing to have done would have been to take the poor bastard to the emergency room to be treated by a physician because the DTs can kill you. But they simply would not go to a doctor so I offered the best advice I knew... as a thirteen year-old. Anyway, Doc's cure was first-class and the ingredients were: 1 ounce boiling water, 1 ounce cheap whiskey, about a tablespoon of paregoric, a squirt of lemon juice, and two teaspoons of sugar, all stirred together and drunk straight down. If you drank one of Doc's Hot Toddys you'd soon be on your feet and, if not cured, still feeling good enough to be sociable. People came in all the time for one of his hot toddys and he finally brought all the ingredients to The Sugar Shack and also a teakettle to boil the water. Everyone drank from the same glass tumbler, the only one on the premises and no one ever washed it. I think some of these shyte-pokes weren't all that sick and just wanted the free shot of whiskey, because Doc never charged for his cure but, on the other hand, pretty much everyone who loafed at The Sugar Shack had some sort of illness.
Not that I was breezing through tests at school, but I had acquired a pretty good formal education, albeit a curious one, by age thirteen. Reading was a great hobby of mine and, largely by means of osmosis I had retained a great deal, even though I was oblivious to this actuality at the time. I read all of Dr. Mickelethwaite's waiting-room magazines [my mom was his nurse so I was there a lot] as well as most of the books in the library he maintained at his office, an old two-story large frame home at the southwest corner of Ninth and Gay streets. (Those were the days when gay meant "happy-go-lucky" and nothing more... at least not in Portsmouth, Ohio.) The magazines at the office included "National Geographic", (with extra time devoted to perusing those African tribal photo-essays), "Life", "The Saturday Evening Post", dozens of Reader's Digest condensed books, and numerous novels of high adventure. At home, my devoted math and science teacher father had amassed a similarly diverse library which was where I absorbed plenty of non-fiction from texts concerning various crafts and trades, everything from magic to carpentry. Dad was especially proud of our brand new set of "World Book Encyclopedias". I spent many hours reading and re-reading issues of comic books as well, every character from Archie to Casper the Friendly Ghost to Spider-Man. (Why did I not retain that issue No. 1? I do not know.) I only bother to mention my studies because it eventually bore upon my role at The Sugar Shack II.
All of our customers lived from day-to-day and I cannot recall any of the locals who was employed. It was a little different on weekends because all my boyhood heroes would return home from their respective jobs in Columbus, ninety miles to the north. Most of these Elvis wannabes were in their twenties and each earned a viable living by painting houses, sheet-rocking, sealing asphalt, or cleaning brick. They all drove fast cars that were stressed daily to beyond the vehicles' limits and they also possessed seemingly endless quantities of cash, this being in total contrast to the locals who existed on their meager crazy checks, occasional pay-offs on cockfights and card betting, and a good many of these men traded cars with considerable frequency, picking up a few dollars by that means. Some resorted to a little junking when they were particularly hard-up. They mostly wore old work trousers, second-hand white shirts that were always too large, sagging gray sweaters, and old work boots. In contrast, what a fine assemblage of fellows the Columbus gang was with their tailored striped shirts, tight jeans, and black pointy-toed shoes with heel taps! All these guys, both the young and the old, could rattle off any number of superb personal adventures, embellished yes, but founded in actuality, all of which kept Larry and me wide-eyed and fascinated. Certain central themes prevailed: bar-fights, poker games, car races and crashes, and of course detailed yarns about women from which both Larry and I fashioned our courting techniques. Alas for that!
Some of these men were married, the older locals to very tired and gaunt-looking women who had endured difficult lives, usually having borne and raised a passel of snot-nosed brats. Those men who were not married were invariably winos, amiable personalities who, if they had bothered to journey during their sunset years they would have been characterized as hobos, given the era. One rarely encountered a mean-spirited wino because when such a character emerged, he was soon dead -- I think they were rolled and killed but no money would be wasted by the sheriff beyond a cursory investigation on such societal debris. "Uncle Jack Friend", Larry's Uncle, half-brother to Junebug, and half-brother-in-law to Doc, was a very cheerful wino and everyone loved him. It was a tragic episode, around 1970 when Jack stumbled on to the wrong porch during the wee hours one dark night in the Lucasville bottoms. He had gotten drunk at Hardrock's where he had been playing cards and had won a few dollars so he was in a good mood. He was looking for Coon Blevins' house where he planned to spend the night but had gotten on the wrong street and the houses in the bottoms looked much alike. When he pounded on the door of an old woman's home, yelling at the top of his lungs for Coon to get up and let him in, the terrified old woman shot him multiple times through the door with a revolver. Jack fell dead in a pool of blood. It was purely one of those incidents that never should have happened but it did. The unfortunate old lady was well into her 80s and was never charged with a crime, nor should she have been. Jack would have been the first to say so.
If the relationships seem extraordinarily close and complex in Crowe Hollow and Ghost Hollow, it is because there were frequent inter-marriages between the large clans that resided there. Widowers Sadie Risner and Louis Friend, through previous marriages, had brought a number of children into the household when they wed, one of whom was Uncle Jack as we all called him. Add to that, Louis and Sadie were the parents of Louis Jr... Junebug, who was later dubbed Mad Dog but I never liked that appellation although he seemed to not mind it at all. Doc had married one of Sadie's daughters, Chloe, and Doc's mother had been a Rowe, a large family, several of whom lived in Crowe Hollow including Allie Delay along with two of her numerous children, Carl "Orsie" Delay and Vernon "Oogie" Delay. The Henry and Salyers families boasted many members who had wed someone in either Ghost or Crowe hollows. Doc's mother, Lily, and Allie Delay were sisters. Allie's and Lily's brother, Sanford Rowe, was the father of Oogie's, Orsie's, and Doc's first cousin, Joseph Edgar "Ro-Ho" Rowe.
There was a funny story that Joe Edgar enjoyed telling with some frequency at The Sugar Shack: He and 'Tater-Hole Phipps had recently gotten themselves arrested at The Palace [honky-tonk] in Portsmouth for drunk and disorderly conduct as a result of a bar fight. They were brought before the desk sergeant who would decide if they could bond out if they paid a $25 fine. Pen in hand, the sergeant looked at 'Tater-Hole and said, "Name?"
'Tater-Hole shot back, "John Doe!"
The sergeant, shook his head, looked at Joe Edgar and said, "Well then, I suppose you're Joe Rowe!"
"I damn sure am!" Joe Edgar retorted.
The desk sergeant looked at the cop who brought them in and said, "Lock their fuckin' asses up!"
I mention these few folks in particular as most of them have some role in herein -- but you can see how it would have been advisable to refrain from telling a calumnious story about this person or that one without first knowing whether you were talking to a half-brother, uncle, or first cousin to the protagonist of your yarn. I kept close track of all these kinships and one day a curious thought struck me. I pointed out to Larry that he had two sons... both named Larry, (by two different women of course and far apart in their ages.) He gave that several moments of consideration, sniggered, and then declared, "I never thought about that before!" Larry wasn't stupid, in fact he was very intelligent, but the women had named his children and the elder of the two lads was never around. The fact was, no one else had thought about it either.
If all these relationships seem unreasonably murky to the reader then it will suffice to simply adopt the notion that most of the people mentioned herein were related by blood... except for me. My dad, mom, and helpful uncles raised our cabin during the summer of 1955 at the head of Crowe Hollow using logs felled from a nearby hillside. Our previous domicile had been more suburban, situated at the fringe of Portsmouth in Shearer's Hollow about fifteen miles from Crowe Hollow. At age two I obviously could not have cared less where we lived... not so with my nine year-old brother, Mike. He had accumulated numerous neighborhood friends in Shearer's Hollow. In town one could get about very handily on a bicycle or on foot to all manner of casual entertainments including restaurants, department stores, and theaters, all places that Mike loved to go. Until the day he died, just this year, Mike lamented about the dreadful move to Crowe Hollow although he later moved back there on his own.
While my family was sweating away that summer, my aunt Frieda baby-sat me on the more adulatory end of Big Run Road near Crabtree Corners, about five miles from Crowe Hollow or much closer by walking if you knew where to cut through the woods. The idea of the move was that dad could return to fairly near his homeplace, the enigmatic hamlet of McDermott, (and a place which bulged with my relatives), but he liked the isolation of this secluded twenty-two acre patch. Had he known what I was up to every night I would have been grounded until the necessity of my middle-aged cataract surgery would have forced his hand. He wasn't entirely oblivious to the fact that Larry and I were probably up to some manner of juvenile shenanigans; however, on the positive side, dad was a romantic and he also believed that boys should take a few knocks. He would have been okay with our more reasonable lunar meanderings, purloining a few ears of some nearby farmer's roas'n-ears, slipping over the ridge to meet up with some capricious girls, attending a cockfight in Pat Henry's barn, all through the social filter of an Appalachian rite of passage. That's actually what The Sugar Shack II was all about as well, at least so far as I view it in retrospect, but the magnitude of our nefarious activities was exponentially amplified from what dad would have found acceptable. It was simply way too much fun. The more entertaining and merry of one's social experiences, the more expensive, perilous, and unlawful they turn out to be. I have lived by a certain credo for most of my life: "Take what you want and pay for it." Sometimes the paying aspect is extremely burdensome.
Lots of men came to the Sugar Shack II, Gene and John Long, Rufford Wen, Don Sheets [who harbored a psychological fear of chickens], Butch Adkins [aka Boyd Hackbush], Jack Lee Burton, Orsie Delay, Robby Williams, Arnold "Broken-wing" Phipps, Jack and Garrett "Gaddy" Friend [Junebug's half-brothers], and numerous others. One or two of us four boys, the courageous quartet who had performed the nasty cleaning detail, were nearly always underfoot, standing alert to anyone who needed a flat tire changed, a pack of cigarettes from Bill Duffer's store [only a half-mile distant], or any other menial task for which we hoped to be rewarded in beer.
At The Sugar Shack II, other than Doc or Junebug, the only individuals permitted to open those refrigerator doors was Larry Eugene or me, albeit Junebug never trusted us like Doc did and he had it in his mind to impede our access, more-or-less to instill us with the fact that he was the man in charge. Neither of us had ever questioned that notion but Junebug was the lesser partner and I think he might have felt a little intimidated on that point. Opening those doors was the same as walking behind the bar at a licensed premises -- it simply wasn't done if you had no right to do so. Junebug was really bad to routinely augur The Evil Eye on us which we instantly warded off with a simple but effective gesticulation taught to us by Arnold Phipps, a man who knew everything which could not be learned from books or scholars. When Larry and I were serving, someone was always shouting at us, "I ain't no fuckin' camel, son -- reach me a cold one outta that icebox!" One or the other of us would have the cap popped off and in his hand faster than you can pick your nose. A drunk will always light a cigarette with a new beer so this was also an opportunity to bum a smoke. No one ever refused us. Then we'd collect their money and hand it straight over to either Junebug or Doc, whomever was in charge at the moment. It was quite common to have a dozen or so patrons laughing, lounging about on the old couches and chairs, sharing tales of life experiences. I found all these yarns fascinating, the veracity of these tall tales becoming less prevalent as the night advanced. Doc worked from about 9 p.m. 'till 9 the next morning and Junebug picked up the day shift. We never had to be told a patron's brand name of beer -- we knew who drank what. In fact, Larry Eugene and I knew more about them than their wives and kids did. No one ever asked for a glass of water or even for a an empty glass for their beer. There were no glasses on the premises, except for Doc's singular Hot Doddy tumbler, nor any means to clean one. There was a dug-well, maybe twenty feet deep, just outside the back door but it was polluted with newts, toads, frogs, and sometimes there was a dead possum floating in it. Plus, the Hicks had thrown plenty of trash down that well, purportedly to keep rats from accumulating as they would in an open garbage dump. But there were usually big rats in the well, both dead and live ones.
There was a lot of psychology to be observed at times when The Sugar Shack's business was booming. Only in later years did I reflect upon a peculiar phenomenon that was transpiring every day I was there which involved how the patrons of The Sugar Shack viewed me. I loved talking to these old guys. They told the most outrageous and hilarious stories and I learned a great deal from each of them. Even a stupid man can teach you how to not do something.
