LIFETIME MEMORIES OF MY DADDY
My earliest memories of Daddy is of him reading Sunday comics to my brother, Billy Joe, and me every Sunday afternoon. We would go to church at First Baptist Church in Hamilton, Alabama. After lunch, while Mother cleaned the kitchen, Daddy would read the comics with Billy standing beside him and me in his lap. I was two years old.
Daddy and Mother went to church every time the church was open. That is the way I was raised (Thank God for this). Daddy was a deacon and he and Mother were active in all phases of church work. Daddy probably helped Mother and the other members get Sunbeams started. Mother helped in VBS when I was young. Daddy made sure we were at revival meetings.
One Sunday afternoon in July there would be a sacred harp singing at the courthouse in Hamilton. Daddy always went. He really liked this. His parents had always sung “old book” singing which is singing fa so la or the notes. It is beautiful.
My daddy was a Mason. Many people do not know that the Masons is a Christian organization. There are some folks who are members of the Masonic Order because they can benefit economically or socially by joining. They may or may not attend but flash their rings around for all to see and gain promotions by other members who do not work in the Masons. What my daddy did was always for God.
Daddy was also a volunteer fireman as a young man. He worked at the store in town and if there was a fire, he would leave the store in the hands of his work staff and go fight the fire. One time, he fell through a 2nd story floor in a burning house. We were watching the fire from across the street and it looked like he had fallen to his death. Mother fainted and had to be tended to so she did not see him get pulled back up to safety. His ring had hooked onto the hose and saved his life. I don’t remember anything else about his fighting fires.
When he was in high school, he worked as the janitor at the school and had a place to sleep there. I don’t know how long he did this. He was Valedictorian when he graduated and was awarded a $100.00 scholarship to Auburn University. Pa Davis was a sharecropper with nothing to give the bank as security so he could not borrow the 2nd $100.00 for Daddy to go to Auburn. Daddy studied all his life either by correspondence courses or attending conferences. He told us that we should never be satisfied with what we knew but strive to learn something new as long as we lived.
In previous stories, I have given information about his various jobs. After he sold Bill’s Rolling Store, he worked for Hodo Groceries unloading trains. Remember, we lived in Amory, Mississippi. With his history of back surgery, he did not do this long. That is when he and Mother sold cookware. He was a coffeeman delivering coffee to retail customers, a life insurance salesman, breadman delivery two times, worked at Bryce Hospital when they needed a manager for Partlow State School for the mentally retarded so he was transferred to the laundry and retired from that at 61 for health reasons. His heart could not take the physical strain any longer.
Daddy had so many heart attacks there was no way to count them. He was in his 40s when I worked at DCH as an EKG technician. He had a heart attack while I was on lunch break at their house and I rode to the hospital in the ambulance with him. Linda Parham,my coworker, did the EKG while Mother and I anxiously waited. He lived to be 66, had many heart attacks. He was in the hospital and had two heart attacks, a stroke and kidney failure. Dr. Hill said he would not live. He did live after that and remained active, teaching mother to write checks, balance a checkbook and anything else he thought would help her after his death. When he died, he was in DCH in a semi-private room. He had walked in carrying his suitcase and was just “to have a medication adjustment”. He went in on Thursday. He had never been in a semi-private room nor had he ever walked into the hospital! He had gone via either car or (more frequently) ambulance and spent all the time either in CCU or step-down unit. Mother drove them to the hospital that day. Sunday morning, he told Mother to go on to church and called me. I had bronchitis and we were going to church. He said for us to go on. We were planning to go that afternoon to check on him and he told us not to come. “I’m fine”. He did not want us to come. We had spent much of our married life seeing about them when either he or mother was in the hospital. So after church, we were going to take the children to the zoo. At 1:00 the phone rang and it was Mother. Daddy had died during Sunday School. Someone had called her out of SS and taken her to the hospital. We all felt that Daddy knew he was going home that afternoon to be in the presence of his Savior. He wanted us in church and he took that journey without the presence of family. That’s what he wanted.
Our great-grandson, Scott, was about 18 months old. Mother had made him a white shirt and tie and I made him a blue three piece suit. The vest was plaid. He went around and shook hands with the folks at Daddy’s funeral. He was adorable. He is the only great grandson we had at the time and was the only one Daddy saw before he died. He thought the world of Scott and apparently, it was mutual.
So Daddy was buried. When his garden was in need of weeding or things Mother could not do that year (it was the best garden Daddy had planted in a very long time) Thomas took care of it. Mother had many vegetables to freeze that year; the year was 1981.
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