“the show is coming!”

They used to have tent shows – did anybody tell you about them, the shows that would come to the Eastern Shore?  … They’d come with movies and actors on the stage and that sort of thing and set up the tents, and they would come at strawberry-picking time, because that was the first time in the year that people in the neighborhood had a little cash. The pickers had made some money, and it cost ten cents to get in.

One of them was O.L. Sykes – the name on the truck.  The other one was Al Moore.  I don’t know where they came from or how far they went, but you’d hear they were down the county.  The show is coming!  So you knew pretty soon they’d be up in Birdsnest.

Some of the movies … were silent still, and they’d put the words on the screen.  Both black and white came.  The black folks sat on the right-hand side and the white folks on the left-hand side.  But all under the tent together, and while they were under the tent, both sides  - when the words came onto the screen, you didn’t have to know how to read when you were real little, because those who could read would whisper to their neighbor what the words were saying, and you could hear in unison maybe 40 voices whispering what the words were up on the screen.

And almost all of them were old western shows that they had.  I don’t remember any of the actors but it was a marvelous thing to go to those tent shows.  They’d take them down on Sunday and move up the road a ways farther and set it up again.

They’d sell Cracker Jacks after the movie was over, turn on the lights, and then some would get up on the stage and act and dance and tell the corniest jokes and encourage people in the audience to come up and do tap dancing or any old fool thing, but it was a wonderful show.  Those places were packed every night.

From an interview with Ridgway Dunton, summer 2010.

“That’s why I never wanted to live on the water”

Bill: Anybody on the Eastern Shore is not very far from the water, no question about that.   … We farmed land on the seaside.  … It wasn’t much difference in the farming part of it, except sometimes, in the spring of the year … when it’s time to drag off white potatoes … and we’d be working over here [near New Church] and it would be nice, warm, and we’d get through here and go over there [to the seaside] and sometimes, it would freeze you to death -

Lee: [The wind] coming off the water?

Bill: Coming off the water, yeah.  Makes all the difference in the world.

And then, when we used to grow potatoes years ago, we’d plant sorghum after we dug the potatoes, just for a soil conditioner … it would help the soil – and by September that was up probably six foot tall.  And we’d go in there with tractor and disk, and disk it down and sow it in rye for a cover crop for the winter.

And years before we had tractors with cabs on them, back years ago, it was so bad –  the mosquitos and biting flies were so bad, the only way you could stay on there would be wrap up everything you had except your face – overcoat, whatever – you know, just save your face.  And then they’d fly in your mouth and nose.  You couldn’t stay out there, the mosquitos were so bad.

Lee: This was all over the Shore?

Bill: Well, this was on the seaside.

Lee: The marshes?

Bill: On the seaside, yes.  Next to … the creeks and all this.  They were bad here [near New Church], but not like that.  And tomatoes … you were picking something, the help – they’d have to wear long-sleeved shirts, wrap up or the mosqitos would eat you alive.

That’s why I never wanted to live near the water.  Never had any desire to.  It’s pretty and all that.   Of course, it’s different now.  You can spray and whatnot, take care of that sort of thing.  Wasn’t any spray then.  Wasn’t even mosquito spray [to spray on your arms].

From an interview with Bill and Audrey Davis, summer 2010.

on wartime shortages and ration books

There was a shortage of hunting ammunition down here on the farm. I hunted. Daddy hunted. We had quail, rabbit, squirrel, duck – all of it, but you had to be very careful, you had just a very little bit of ammunition. I mean, you prized a handful of ammunition. It was to be watched and taken care of.

WWII ration book (courtesy of Taylor family)

During the war, we had … stamp books.  We were allotted so many stamps for certain things during the war. The books that I can remember, they [were for] … coffee, sugar, cigarettes, beef, tires, gas …

There were no cars available whatsoever during the war.  Most of them had been froze on the first day of the war … by Roosevelt, the President, and daddy was lucky enough to find one new car in the middle of a war, and he had to go through an Act of Congress in Accomack to get a permit to get that car. He hunted from Cape Charles to Philadelphia up in a storage house on the fourth or fifth floor to get one old Chevrolet – it wasn’t old, it was a brand new one – but to get a Chevrolet automobile. I think that must have been the last one on the East Coast. But he got it anyway, and we were fortunate in that respect, because our automobile was getting worn down.

From an interview with Pierce B. Taylor, Jr., summer 2010.

“It’s part of growing up on a farm.”

grading potatoes circa 1940 (courtesy Dixon family)

Thom:  Nothing was on pallets back then, like it is now.  Everything was – I mean, we’d take hand trucks and truck ‘em off the truck or truck ‘em on the truck or truck ‘em out of the freight car – and nothing palletized, and they’d put down this, for lack of a better word, tar paper on the floor of the trucks, and then you’d have a big conveyor belt going in, and about two heads standing up there, taking whatever size it was, whether it was 50s or 20s or 10s or 5s and stack ‘em, and you always want to stack your ears to the inside so it wouldn’t get caught.

Hume:  You call it air stacking, ‘cause you always wanted the air to be able to move through your load, you know from front to back.  If you stacked it real solid, from side to side, possibility you could go through a heat.  So, you kept where they had the vents in the front of the truck, you would have like little tunnels in between certain bags all the way down that whole row to the back end so air could just pass through.

Thom: That’s the way we had the seed potatoes.  We had ‘em stacked – I remember one time – I wasn’t very old.  And we had unloaded a load of seed potatoes.  We had everything down at the south end of the packing shed down at Capeville and they were over my head, stacked, each 100-pound bag and about that much width between ‘em.  And I was making my way down through to go around and do something, and all of a sudden, I looked down and there was a rat about that long and big as a cat, walking right there, and that just terrified me.

Hume:  Part of growing up on the farm.

Thom: But that made you strong, too, I’ll tell you what.  When Billy Bynum had football practice, and we’d been working on the farm all summer, we were all ready.  Those other guys who hadn’t done anything, hadn’t participated in any activity or exercise …  but David Jones and I – all the farm boys, we were ready to go.

Lee:  Weren’t you telling me … about competitions for lifting?

Thom: Oh yeah, lifting the barrels.  Who could …

Hume: [Or] the front end of the tractors …

Thom:   Uncle Bill could lift the front end of the tractor … .  I could never do that.  And I never had an opportunity – the barrels were before my time.  But it was kind of a competition between all the [men].

Hume: Good natured competition.

Thom:  And if you were the boss-man’s son, you didn’t want to have the reputation of being – you know, “That’s daddy’s boy.  He’s not gonna do anything.”  It’s kind of up to you – whatever they could do, you could do one step better or one step quicker or one step stronger.  So … and that’s generational, ‘cause I’ve heard my daddy and uncle and –

Hume: I was the youngest one, see – I’m like this tall and these guys – they were able to do it, but  I couldn’t pick up anything, until my turn came a few years later.  My daddy – greatest man that walked the earth as far as I’m concerned, next to God, but when he said do something, we just … we had to overdo whatever he said.  I mean you wanted to do it.  As I got older, I was in the Marines in boot camp, and the summer I spent in the boot camp wasn’t as bad as being on the farm during the summer here.  They weren’t bad – I thought, I said, “Lord, I’m on a picnic.”  [laughing]  ‘Cause a lot of the boys I was in the service with, well, they’ve never been away from home before and all that, you know, but it was old stuff – I said, “Lord, I ought to carry these boys home with me.”

From an interview with Hume and Thom Dixon, summer 2010.

on soldiers on the farm during WWII and fresh fish cakes

During the heaviest part when there were U-boats and other boats down the coastline here, the fort down to Kiptopeake, right down to the Cape, had a batch of troops in it down there. In the afternoons before dark, winter and summer, they would bring two soldiers up, drop them off on the hill over to the house over there, to mother and daddy’s, and they spent the night there – one of them on duty at all times.  They shifted around.  They brought their knapsacks.  They had a paper bag lunch that was packed down there for them to bring for their midnight snacks.  And one little thermos bottle of hot coffee, and this was some nights when it was snowing, raining, sleeting, not fit for an animal to be out, much less a human being.

They would be dropped off out of a plain Jeep with no top on the thing, most of the time, that brought them up from clean down to the Cape up here.  Now on that same Jeep, they would have started with [soldiers] for other creeks; they did the same thing that they did to this creek here – two at the front end of the creek, the farthest out the creek – … two soldiers, same way, some of the other creeks were placed that way, too.  I don’t know all of them and where they were placed at, but I know they were … there.

We had a cornstack over there that wasn’t in use.  I went in there, and daddy had a lot of bags throwed up under there – we replaced all of them bags in there and made plain old flat bunks out of them, and that was a place for them to go into and at least – wasn’t supposed to be but one in there at a time – to lay down on.  And it was out of the weather.  They didn’t get wet in there, but I wouldn’t say about cold air drawing through there, because it did.

Mother would, most of the time in the evening … we got to the point where we learned the boys.  They weren’t always the same two, but a lot of times it would be a series … it would be the same two boys that would be stopping in there, coming in there overnight to watch on the hill.  And she would fix them hot sandwiches and have hot coffee for them and – if it was too bad, the kitchen was open to ‘em with the woodstove going all night in there, and they were invited into the house. As I said, it wouldn’t be fit for man nor beast to stand on that hill down there, in the winter months down there all night long in a snowstorm or whatever, ice, sleet.

But I remember one thing that some of them enjoyed, which I always enjoyed myself, … [was] salted fish. …  Daddy would soak it out and get it fresh, and it had a little bit of relish from the salt into it, but it wasn’t  that much salt into it after he’d freshen it out like he had, and she would make fresh fish cakes out of that, and she’d give them boys fresh fish cakes, and they thought it was nothing else like that.  And I was just like those boys were, the soldiers – there was nothing like those fish cakes.

From an interview with Pierce B. Taylor, Jr., summer 2010.

on making do and loving bananas

I remember hearing my grandfather say how much money he lost that he had in the bank, you know, during the Depression.  I don’t remember how much it was, but it seemed like a big amount to me at that time.

They had a bank on Deal’s Island.  And that bank just closed during the Depression.

It was very depressing, very depressing times, but people in that day and time … most everybody had their own vegetables and they had … well, my grandfather raised hogs.  He’d always kill a hog every fall, have his own hams and sausages and all that.  They had a lot of their own meats.  They managed to make do with what they had.

We had a corner grocery store, but it wasn’t a whole lot.  I can remember, very seldom we ever had bananas.  Every once in a while, my grandfather would go to Princess Anne on the bus and get these things that we couldn’t get at the corner grocery.  Once in a while, he’d bring bananas home.  Well, I love bananas, but I didn’t have that many of them, and then, when I’d go to Baltimore during the summer to visit, my father and aunts up there, they had bananas.  Well, I thought that was the greatest thing there ever was.

That was so wonderful to have bananas when you wanted it.  And, in the city at that time, they had what they called hucksters going up and down the alley and calling out what they had on their wagons.  They had a horse and wagon, pulling all the fruit and vegetables and whatever.  And you could just hear them going up and down the alley, hooting and hollering out what they had on their wagon.

And I remember one aunt especially, she would always get bananas if I was there.  She always had plenty of bananas.  And they tasted so good to me.  It was a treat for me to have bananas.  I thoroughly enjoyed them.

From an interview with Una Holland, summer 2010.

on foods that cramp the tongue

They had two black heart cherry trees and then they had another cherry tree – I don’t know what the name of it was.  It was a white cherry.  And my grandmother made the best desserts out of those cherries.

She used to make something called cherry roly-poly. And then she’d fix some kind of sauce to put on top of it.  Oh my gosh, that would cramp your tongue.  That was so good.

And, of course, everything then – there were no instant mixes. Everything … I’ve seen her many a time get up and make biscuits in the morning for breakfast.  Bake them in the woodstove oven.

And then, on Saturdays, she would always make up yeast rolls.  [She] didn’t have a yeast cake.  There was some way they would … well, they did have a yeast cake, but they’d boil a white potato or something … white potato has something to do with it.  And she would make all these rolls up there for Sunday dinner.

Most of the time, you would have chicken – either baked chicken or fried chicken. Young biddies come off or young chickens come off in the spring, and you’d have fried chicken.  But in the winter, you’d have baked chicken.  And the baked chickens then – it was your laying hens, and they always had a whole cluster of little eggs inside and everybody wanted those eggs.  You know, when you bake a chicken, all those little eggs inside.  She was a good cook.

She used to make butter, make her own butter.  And then, she’d have the milk – she’d leave it setting here, would turn the clabber and honey. Those clabber biscuits would melt in your mouth.  She’d use clabber to make her biscuits. They were some kind of good.

I used to love clabber. Did you ever eat clabber? Probably not. … It reminds me of yogurt.  You know, the yogurts you have now, except this was – this was the real thing. The milk set out until it soured and then it turned to clabber.  And then you’d eat it, put a little sugar on it. [It was] nice and solid, pretty good.

From an interview with Una Holland, summer 2010.

“And the track just stayed busy.”

The trains ran down the Shore here, and they hauled a lot of freight.  They pulled a lot of freight during World War II, government freight or wartime stuff, all types of vehicles that they used in the fields and tanks.  I’ve seen trains go down with tanks on them.

It would take the train a half-hour to get by the [school], out of sight of the window of the school over to Bloxom. I was on the west side of the building, where I could see the railroad track during the wartime, and … all I had to do was turn my head like that and look right at all of that wartime stuff that was traveling.  And the track just stayed busy.  I don’t know where all the trains went. I don’t know how they got all of it across that Bay at the other end and on and off with those floats that they had to float in there.  … You can’t hardly perceive it in your mind, if you could have seen the amount of stuff that went down on [the train].

I had my aunt and uncle in Birdsnest that were the postmaster and the assistant postmaster down there.  And I used to go down to visit them, and one of my trips going down, daddy put me on the train.  I had never been on a train before.  I knew the train; I saw the train regularly.  … I was down in the grammar grades.

Bloxom is where he put me on.  And I got on there, and he watched me, and the train took off and went on south, and I was sitting there, and I was sitting there with my back to the south.  The train was going south, and I was sitting with my back that direction, actually looking backwards.  And I was enjoying myself, looking out the window.  Didn’t know what it was all about, but I was going becuase I was on a train for the first time in my life.

Somewhere between here and Birdsnest, about half-way down I think, another train was on the other track, so the sidewire was sitting right up next to the other train coming this way.  And when we’re going down and this other train coming up, and right of of nowhere in between my window and that other window, in between them two tracks, wasn’t very much room, maybe this much room is all it was between them cars, going like this, that train come up beside me, right beside my window and blanked that off dark, with that movement like that and that roar. I thought I’d been eat right down.  I figured it was all over with.  I never will forget that.

From an interview with Pierce B. Taylor, Jr., spring 2010.

“We growed pretty well every crop you could grow.”

Farmers … didn’t have big acreage, but they always had something coming off.  … Strawberries was the first crop – they come off in the spring.  Then, we have string beans.  We grew two crops of them a year, string beans.  Then, white potatoes.  Then, sweet potatoes.  Then string beans … so we had about five or six different crops, vegetable crops.

We only grew corn enough for to feed the mules.  It was all ear corn.  You had to pick all your corn by hand.  In other words, we break the ear off and shuck it and throw it in the heat and then we pick it up and put it in the horse cart and … then we carry it to the stack, dump it up and then throw it by hand in the stack.  We always picked, went through it, and anything –  little, teeny ears we call nubbins – we fed that to the pigs.   Of course, they were meat for the table in the wintertime.  We’d kill about four or five hogs every year – for family, you know.

So we grew about five, six crops. Strawberries – [my daddy] generally had about three or four acres, and that’s about all he could get picked.  He had to pick them every day.

And then … string beans – they’d grow probably ten acres, maybe more. And then Irish potatoes – he’d have 15, 20 acres of that – depends on what size farm they were growing, but my daddy – he would probably have more than that.

And the sweet potatoes – they usually have 25 acres of them, because all of it’s hand work.  You know, you had to plow them out and scratch them out and throw them in the heat.  Irish potatoes – we actually graded them in the field and put them in barrels and then we shipped them by freight car and carried them through the station about seven barrels, eight barrels at a time.  A barrel of Irish potatoes weighs about 165 pounds.  A lot of the men could handle them by themselves.  But usually two of them would pick it up and put it on the wagon.

… Tomatoes – I forgot about that.  We grew a lot of tomatoes and picked green tomatoes, and then we picked the red tomatoes and carried them to the canning factory.  … There was a canning factory in every town … one in Hallwood, one in New Church, three in Pocomoke, one on Chincoteague, one in Greenbackville, one in New Church.  I think there was one in Stockton.

I heard my daddy say – this was in the 30s – he sold ‘em for five cent a basket, a five-eight basket.  So I mean, you know, people don’t know what hard times are.

From an interview with Bev Fletcher, spring 2010.

“everything we did was outdoors …”

I played every sport in high school. I didn’t have to work out, because I was in shape.  Like they do now?  We didn’t work out.  I was hard as nails, ’cause … we worked all the time.

I played baseball.  I played football.  I played basketball.  I did a little boxing.  … I played all the sports, but we worked that in.  I’d play baseball and then walk home from school.  There ain’t no way to get home; we walked home.  Ain’t no bus to take us nowhere.

When we played football, we didn’t have no money to buy uniforms.  The school didn’t buy no uniforms. We had, I think it was five helmets and we didn’t have no shoulderpads.  We used sweatshirts.  We put on about three or four sweatshirts.  They knew – ’cause the backfield had helmets and one or two on the line – they knew what plays we were going to make because we’d have to switch our helmets around. And the football field at the end of the game – it looked like a rag field, because they’d grab you  and you’d lose your sweatshirts.

We did have baseball suits though.  I don’t think we bought our uniforms.  …  But basketball we played – we didn’t have no gyms … we played on the dirt.  We played outside.  That’s why we played in the spring of the year.  I mean, it was dirt courts.  We played tennis too.  Tennis … [the school] didn’t have no sport of tennis; [but] you could play tennis.  I used to like to play tennis.

I don’t know why they didn’t build any gyms, but we played outdoors and everything we did was outdoors, so I guess they thought that’s where we were supposed to [play].

From an interview with Bev Fletcher, spring 2010.