The Good Old Days Weren’t Always That Good

By Schaefer Kendrick

Getting up at the crack of dawn; feeding, then milking the cow whether you feel like it or not, stripping her good so she won’t go dry and getting tail whipped in the process; slopping the hog; feeding the chickens; cutting the stove wood and filling the wood box; feeding the coal burning Franklin stove; heating water to shave using the straight razor inherited from your grandpa, needing a good portion of a roll of toilet paper to stop the bleeding; eating breakfast in the kitchen to try to stay warm in the dead of winter; drinking milk that reeks of wild spring onions, it being blue john at that because the cream is needed for something else; an air-conditioning system that consists of a cardboard fan which has a picture of Jesus holding in his arms a lamb standing in the midst of a flock of sheep, the fan furnished  through the courtesy of the local funeral home; riding on dirt roads either eating dust or getting stuck in the mud on tires that are sadistic in picking the place and the time to go flat; automobiles that have to be hand cranked to start the motor whose windshield wiper is hand operated, and when a sudden squall brews up you have to stop the car, frantically get the curtains from under the back seat, get them installed – just in time for the sun to come out.

This is what we old folks call “the good old days.”

The truth is, we really prefer the homogenized milk that comes out of a carton instead of a cow; pork from a hog we don’t know on a personal basis; central heat that comes on automatically in the morning and cuts off at the appointed time at night; riding on interstate highways in cars that start with the push of a button, are warm in the winter and cool in the summer, having tires that seldom go flat.

All of which leads up to a story.

In the 1930’s there were no automobiles with factory air.  An air-conditioned car was a novelty experienced by very few.
The hottest place outside of hell is about 15 miles south of Wadley, Georgia, on U.S. Highway 1 in the middle of August.  It was at that very spot in 1936 where a worn out Georgia Cracker was “thumbing a ride.”

A Yankee was in an air-conditioned Cadillac on his way from New York to Miami, and needing somebody to talk to.  He stopped and picked up this Cracker who had never heard of a car being air-conditioned, much less having ridden in one.

Driving along the Yankee asked, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going down to the Johnson place.  You know hit’s just passed the old Shiloh Baptist Church, which if’n you are familiar with these here parts, is on this side of Williams General Store.  They call it Williams but hit’s owned and run by Chet Paysinger, old Williams’ son-in-law, you know the one what has ten girls and a boy.”

The Yankee knew it wouldn’t serve any useful purpose to say he didn’t know where the Johnson place was, never heard of Shiloh Baptist Church, wasn’t familiar with Chet Paysinger or his offspring, and that this was his first trip through Georgia; and apparently everything he had ever heard about Southerners was true.

Ten miles down the road the Yankee broke the silence, “What are you going to do when you get to the Johnson place?”

By this time, the Cracker was shivering from the cold.

“Well, I was going thar to chop cotton but with this here sudden change in the weather we’ll probably butcher a hog or two.”