The Wonderful Stories told by Mr. James P. Fondren 1904-1999 |
And so it went - just an open invitation for Jimmie Fondren to talk about anything that interested him. Many of the conversations were at breakfast in our bathrobes. Some were in the afternoon, or at dinnertime. And many were at "cocktail hour" - Daddy with his large, watered-down whisky, and me with my large glass of wine. He never had more than the one drink - but had a remarkable ability to make it last for a long time. And it never seemed to dull his remarkable memory.
I learned early on that I had no luck in trying to steer his reminiscences in one direction or another. He would politely answer my question, and then go back to what he had originally intended to say. So I learned to just shut up and listen. And what a gold mine of information poured forth. I continue to be astonished at the details he recalled. Names, places, dates - feelings. It was a history as seen and remembered by a 94-year- old man - a man who would often describe himself as just a "country boy". Yet he had a special view of a country that went from horse-drawn travel to space flights, a life that spanned most of a century.
Below are just a few of his "stories."
- Jean Fondren Yates
There were four Clements brothers, all in the saw mill, lumber and timber business together in Ray City. Of course the business declined and they sold out. Uncle Bill kept his little bit of whatever they owned at the time. He bought some more land here and there and he became quite an owner of timberland. Up until the day he died.
Uncle Bill had worked in a bank in Madison, as a bank clerk. He was so proud of having graduated from a community college of some sort. He talked about that several times. There was an article written by someone connected with that bank in Madison. He was quite a well known man around town.
And Lucius and Eugenia came to Florida, looking for work because the business closed. That happened to a lot of mill towns. They came because of the phosphate business which was attractive at that time.
I don't know much about Eugenia's life in Ray City. Well, I guess she was busy raising children. Lucius, he would go around the timberland and decide which tree to buy and which tree to cut and bring into the mill and so forth. That was his main job.
Ray City was a nice looking little town. Some of Pearle's aunts still lived in Ray City and she wanted to visit them. We didn't know exactly where one aunt lived, but we knocked on the door of a house that Pearle thought might be hers. Her aunt came to the door dressed in a house dress and do you know what they were doing? They were shelling peanuts and pecans. (Laughter) She was so shocked that Pearle was calling on her dressed so poorly. It wasn't much of a house, but it was a frame house. Livable, you know. Fireplace and mantle. Of course, she had pictures of her children there. One of her sons lived over in Jacksonville. He was doing fairly well. He was at one of the reunions one time. Nice looking young man, he and his wife. I remember Pearle's aunt saying, "Now next time you come, honey, you want to let me know in advance. So I'll be dressed for you!" It tickled me.
I always complained to Pearle every time we came to Florida since she was always talking about her relatives in Ray City -- I kept prodding, you know, "Pearle, I want to stop by there and see some of your relatives."
Oh, she had some aunts in the Atlanta area. One lived in southwest Atlanta. She had two sons. Very nice woman - very prim-like. She was a smart woman too.
And the other aunt lived in Decatur. I think you went to see her one time.
We knew Pearle's Uncle Bill lived in the town of Sirmans, Florida. But we can't find Sirmans, even though we followed Ralph's directions. So we pulled off the road and stopped at a small store. We went in and asked the man behind the counter for directions.
The man said, "Lady, I've been here all my life, and I don't know anything about this town of Sirmans you're talking about. Who'd you say you're looking for?"
Pearle said, "William Clements. William Grove Clements." She pulled the full name on him, you see.
"Sorry. I don't think I ever met the gentleman." With a straight face.
And I'm looking at this guy, and I knew what Ralph had told us had to be right. And I knew my maps. So I'm starting to think maybe this guy was lying some way or another. Something's gotta give here...
I looked at the man and said, "I know I looked this town up on the map and I know Sirmans has to be right about here where we're standing. And I think you know something about this place."
And again he denied knowing anything. Pearle butted in and said, "Mister, you must be lying. Where is my Uncle Bill?"
"Oh, why didn't you say he was your uncle? He lives just behind the store here." Bill used to own the store and his house was right in back of the store! (Laughter)
Pearle was mad as she could be. She wanted to jump over that counter and let him have it. You remember how your mother used to do with her pocketbook? She drew that pocketbook back at that man...she wanted to hit him!
I don't know why that man played possum...
My effort didn't amount to much, but I was so proud of the fact that I had worked in the Quartermaster General's office during the war for a period of time. That was when I was with the Bureau of Reclamation and deciding whether I was going to Denver or not. Well, we were doing a lot for the war effort before we declared war. And they were having difficulty at the time keeping me in Washington, at the Washington office. About every few weeks I'd get called into the senior engineer's office.
"Well, Fondren, would you mind going to Denver? We've got a lot of things out there we hope you can start up. The question is getting you out there." They kept prodding me.
Finally, I said, "I'm not going. I'll resign." I didn't want to leave Silver Spring and my new home and my new wife.
Well, they were having difficulty keeping me in the Interior office, you see, which was strictly administrative. All the engineers were out west in Denver. So I was assigned to the Army and put in the Quartermaster General's Division of the Army. It was a four story building between the Capitol and the Agriculture Building. Anyhow, I was thrown into the thicket - with these renowned civil engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, architects, you name it. The building was just loaded with them. Man, it was getting busy. This was a prime assignment, to be in that new office building. They took it over completely. It was mainly all types of engineering, and I was in the civil engineering department of it. And some were the professors I had read about in books, some were from Cal Tech and some from MIT - they were the best in the country, you know. Some were getting up in years. They were mainly there just to ride herd over the young ones, I suppose. And my job was to check over temporary and final plans. They would send it to different people who know something about the country, or maybe how far it was to civic centers, or know something about topography, know something about surveying, about the shape of the land, could they build here, could they build there. That was the way I was brought into it. So I stayed busy for, I guess it was about three or four months there. Well, I gained a lot of knowledge down there. It was quite an effort. And that was not wasted effort either. Most of it was building new bases in this country to house the military and train them before they ship them overseas. And of course, there was quite a bit about building landing strips in the Pacific. Quite a bit about that. It was quite an effort.
When Pearl Harbor happened, I was at Griffith stadium with Doc Henson. We didn't know what was going on. During the game they were calling high ranking military people. We knew something was going on but we didn't know what. A lot of people were leaving. We left the stadium and went down to the parking lot to Doc's car because he had a radio in his car and that's where we heard about it. All I can remember was Doc and I standing there listening to all these events that are going on about Pearl Harbor being struck. And they were starting to describe it by that time, not too much, because it had just happened. But we just couldn't believe it.
My father and mother came to Washington for a visit several times. Daddy had a big time. He had lunch down at Congress. I guess Mother was wondering where he was. He was supposed to be back for dinner at the house you see. He didn't show, but he called. He never did say what he was doing. He often didn't say what he was going to do next, because he never knew what he was going to do next. Well, not too extreme, you know. Mother took care of the family business and he took care of the other business. That was his.
I listened to a few arguments between my mother and father. "Well now, Jim, I guess you just have to have your way." But when she used the word "Jim" out loud, you see, or "Well now, Jim" you knew she had more or less lost the decision. Discussions usually took place in the kitchen. In the big house, we had a big kitchen. Big dining room too, as far as that goes. But most of the action, most of the decisions were made in the kitchen. That is, the family decisions. They had separate bedrooms. There were two bedrooms for the children downstairs. There were three furnaces upstairs, two were in rooms and the other was kind of open where the stairway came up into sort of an alcove or whatever you might want to call it. There was a bed in there you see. That's where I slept most of the time. Until it would get hot upstairs. In hot weather, I'd sleep downstairs on the back porch or in the spring house.
We had what you call a spring house, where we'd do the washing and ironing. It was square, quite large. Had a roof over, you know. It was frame, wood and brick. The walls were siding and from about midway up, it was screen. Screen about six feet up. And it was cool out there. And we had one or two trees close by. It was really cool out there. We had a trough about eight to ten feet long, about two feet wide and it was sealed so it could hold water. You would put milk in there or anything that needed to be cool that you didn't have to put in the ice box, because the ice box wasn't very big. You needed a big block of ice for the ice box. It was on the back porch, outside the kitchen door. Anything that you wanted to keep cool, like something cool for us kids to drink, Mother would put it in a jar, half gallon fruit jar, with a lid on it and then put it the spring house in the water trough.
And we had two cows. We had plenty of milk. And most of the time we didn't put milk in the refrigerator because we'd use it up quite rapidly. We used a lot of crock ware, ceramic type jars. You'd use them for slop jars too. The bedrooms had slop jars. Usually you had a little stand for a wash bowl in every bedroom and a pitcher of water, you see, where you wash your face and wash your hands. My job sometimes was to empty the slop jars. I hated that. The girls did their rooms, I did mine and sometimes I would do Mother and Daddy's rooms. The slop jars were used during the night. We had an outdoor toilet. We had a two-seater. (Laughter) That was better than primitive living, I'll tell you.
Mother and Daddy lived in a lot of houses. After my grandfather Thomas died - my grandmother Fondren died before he did - Daddy's two sisters wanted to get out of town and seek their careers in the big city, you see. One went to St. Louis and the other went to Kansas City. My daddy's brother died as a relatively young man. All the people in town used to tell me, "You look just like your Uncle Harry." And I was so proud of that, you know. Anyhow as he was growing up, he did a lot of different things. He and Walter, they worked on the railroad, building the railroads, and drilling water wells. My grandfather Thomas owned the water rigs, and the boys and he would drill water wells. When Daddy was about twenty and Mother was about sixteen or seventeen, they got off the farm, which was between Searcy and Kensett. And he went over to Judsonia, four miles away from Kensett and about five miles from Searcy, to the north. He bought a small store and also worked for a lineman, installing telephone lines, climbing poles and installing lines. Hell, he could climb those telephone poles just like that. You know, with leg spurs? Later on, I would go with him. Anyhow, they had bought a little home next to a railroad station. And Lorene and Merle were born there. He became quite prosperous in the telephone business. He put in an exchange and then he put in the rural lines. And he was right next to the railroad station, and all the trains stopped in Judsonia - well, not all, no - main passenger trains and local freight trains. And he made good money there. Granddaddy Fondren had a small grocery store in Kensett and after he died, Daddy's sisters had moved away, so he and Mother came back to the farm. And so they were all living on the farm, in the small farmhouse there. Daddy then became owner of a small business in Kensett, you see. He built a small, frame house that was across from the Methodist Church. I think I was born there, although I always said I was born out on the farm (laughter). Sybil was born out on the farm; she was two years older than I was. I was just a boy, a baby, in this house, across the street from the church. It was a frame house. It was adequate for the family, growing up. I used to like to run off with the other boys and go down to the creek and go swimming. The nigrahs used to tell Mother - Mother and Daddy always used to have a lot of help, especially Mother, house help, you know, laundry, cooking and so forth - "That baby of yours, he down at the creek there swimming." Daddy would come get me - sometimes Mother.
Anyhow, I matured there, more or less, as a boy. Well, that house burned. There was a lot of talk about that. Of course I was a boy and all this was talk later on. It was an oil stove, a kerosene stove. Kerosene was used quite a bit in those days for cooking as well as heating. And one of the burners malfunctioned and exploded and set the house on fire. And it didn't take long for it to burn. Well, what I'm leading up to is: Daddy in the meantime, had bought a few lots. So he negotiated - well, I know he had to borrow money - to purchase this other property. And there was one old mansion-type house that was really deteriorating on the front part of the property. And the back part was stables where they had hogs, pigs. Half a block means about three hundred feet this-away and about hundred to two hundred feet that-away. So I remember when Daddy moved that old house, which he bought with this property. He and some men moved that house - they jacked it up, you see - round wooden rollers to roll it from the sight where it was, to the back part of the property. They tore down all the old barns and stuff back there in the back. Then he restored the house inside and out and rented it.
But after our house burned, we moved into what we called the "coffin house." There's quite a story about the coffin house.
Sybil swallowed a piece off of a ketchup bottle - somehow it had broken off. And they were quite concerned about her. They fed her dough and so forth and she passed it. I remember that because that was in that house. It was quite crowded in that place.
That's where we were living while Daddy was building the wonderful home we all grew up in. You've heard us talking about it so much - the "big house." Two-story home, with many fireplaces. The chimney was in the center part, a double chimney. There were two fireplaces upstairs, and three fireplaces downstairs, one in Mother and Daddy's room, one in the parlor, one in the dining room. There was a big porch with columns in front. The floor was built above flood level, because we had floods sometimes, maybe one or two feet during the spring.
All during the construction of that home, I was a little boy, you see, and I was always in the way of the carpenters building the house. Daddy would watch out for me, but I was there most of the time, watching them. I guess that's where I got started in engineering, perhaps.
So much for the big house. But as the years went on, Daddy acquired other property, and did this and did that. Bought the movie business. The first one was "open air." They put 2x4's up and put tin around it. That was the theater. Daddy bought the rights to that - two guys had had it before. That was when he started building some brick buildings, on the piece of property where the old livery stable was.
He rebuilt the house that burned, a frame house, across the street from the church, and rented it. Then he built about two more houses in that direction and about six houses in the other direction. He owned about 3/4's of a block. And the Dickey's owned the other quarter of the block. Daddy built rent houses there on that block, you see, and he made a lot of money out of them.
When the big house burned, I had finished the University of Arkansas. And I had all my trophies and books and stuff stored there, and all that burned up too. Plus some things that Merle and Lorene had - all the treasures that we children had. I don't remember how old Blevins was.
Blevins was the baby. I remember a few accidents that happened to him. Lorene had dropped him in the rain barrel - almost drowned him. A pet mule kicked him in the face. Different incidents that happened as we grew up - crises and so forth. Lorene's hair caught on fire. Merle got an infected foot one time, playing basketball. She stuck a needle in the big part of her foot, when she was at school at Galloway. It was a school for women only. All three of the sisters went to Galloway. Merle stayed there and got a degree. Sybil was in the academy part of Galloway - you could go there for 10th through 12th grade. Those that could afford the tuition. The rest of us went to Searcy for the 10th to 12th grade.
You remember me mentioning Fern Cowan, and two of the Williams girls - the Williams had a ranch and they were pretty wealthy. They had a two-story home too, back towards the river. He was in the cattle business - he shipped cattle and so forth. In other words, the girls' family could afford it. We would ride the train together between Kensett and Searcy. The trains ran about every hour or two, and we could take the train - a twenty-five cent fare - from Kensett to Searcy. There was a station at Galloway College, where the girls would get off, and we would go into Searcy, about another mile and a half, two miles further, and get off and go to the high school. You know the two-story house that you girls came to? The athletic field was right across from there. There were two school buildings back on the back part - the high part - of that property. Of course they are all gone now. They later on built some modern school buildings down at the lower end of it, which was there when you all were there.
Anyway, I was at Vicksburg when the big house burned. I had graduated in 1930 from the University of Arkansas. So it must have been about 1932 or 1933 when it burned. There was a frame house, a rent house, next door to our home. I had helped Daddy build it - I guess I was about 12 or 14. Well, anyway, the guy, the renter, set fire to the house. His wife left him and he set fire to the house to collect insurance on the furniture. If it hadn't been for the marshal, Daddy would have killed him. At that time, Blevins was at Hendricks College at Conway - out from Little Rock.
Well, Daddy was sleeping in the back bedroom, adjacent to the little rental house. And he had heard this car drive up - he was light sleeper. Then he heard it drive away. And he went on back to sleep. Then when he was awakened, the house was ablaze. The marshal lived across the street from us - they had a small hotel there. The custom was, when they had fires, people would shoot guns up in the air. That was the alarm. And that's when Daddy awakened. Of course he knew what it was. The marshal was shooting his pistol. So Daddy was up quite soon. We had water works in the house and I had even put in a fire hose, a big 2 inch line. But some way the hose had been disconnected.
So the house burned. And our home burned. That was a tragedy.
Well, the family moved back to the house that they had rolled. Of course, when it happened I took leave and came home right away. Daddy had lost a lot of money in the bank during the Depression years, and he had sold some of the businesses they had originally owned.
The original store of ours - it was frame. It had burned, and then we rebuilt it with brick. I helped build that one. That was the one that you saw. But the original property burned. Daddy lost a lot of money.
I was in Leavenworth, going to the CMTC. I hadn't heard about the store, and I was coming home on the train. Here's a young boy returning from military duty - one month, August. And I was so homesick. I just couldn't wait to get home. The train went from Kansas City to St. Louis. I was so anxious, I was peeping out the window as we approached Kensett. The train slowed down, and I could see smoldering smoke coming up. It was about the middle of the day. As the train pulled into the station, I could see my mother, my daddy, and Merle and Sybil. They were out there rummaging around in the debris where the store was. It was a big mess.
So what did Daddy do? He went down to Little Rock and got some loans, and he rebuilt the store. Piggly Wiggly was coming along at that time, out of Memphis. They had a store in Little Rock, self-service, you know. Piggly Wiggly had already got started as self-service stores. Daddy was seeking a Piggly Wiggly franchise, but was unable to get one. Daddy found out the name of a firm, an independent one, headquartered in St. Louis, and it was there that he got a franchise from them. He had to match their capital.
So we rebuilt the store, improved it. I remember digging the foundation on that store. Course I was always nosy when it came to building anything. There was a big lumber mill in Doniphan - they couldn't keep me away from that place. They cut the logs and planed the lumber and finished it and shipped it out on boxcars. That was a big industry.
In front of the store, there were the railroad tracks, and there was branch of a creek between the main street of the town where all the businesses were and down in here was a big drainage area. And the drainage drained to the south. So to get rid of the seepage underground, Daddy put a drain out to the creek.
I was worried that the foundation wouldn't hold. We had stored some of the iron bed railings out in the old coffin house. And I got some steel rods and these bed railings, and I arranged them across the foundation to reinforce it. As we poured the concrete, about halfway up, I put in another layer of reinforcing. And all over town, Daddy would say, "That boy of mine came up with idea." I was the first one in town to put in a foundation with reinforcing in it! All the old men in town talked about. Every time you did anything, the old men would come around and see what's going on.
We built the store. Everything was white. Bought a new big walk-in freezer for the meats. All kind of meats - mainly beef and pork. Not too much chicken, everybody killed their own chickens. For many years we had that store. It didn't burn. That's the building that still exists. Well, the company in St. Louis went broke. And Daddy took his lawyer and went to St. Louis. And this lawyer somehow pulled a rabbit out of the hat and Daddy got his capital back, whereas a lot of other didn't. And they operated that store for some time. It served as the first modern, self-service store in the county. People would come up from Searcy and buy things there.
One thing about that building, it didn't want to give up (laughter). We tried to sell the building several times, but the buyers wouldn't meet the price. It was Merle that got the lead about a guy down in Houston that had bought the cotton mill from the Mills and he was interested in shipping rice. They didn't have a wharf on the Little Red River at the time, but they were loading rice barges on the White River not too far from Searcy and Kensett at Augusta, Arkansas, just below Bald Knob. The Little Red River came into the White River about ten miles south of Kensett. So the people there were visualizing being more prosperous and developing because they were going to build a port on the Little Red River. It never happened. When they built the dam on the Little Red River in Heber that killed that idea. Shortly after the dam was built, Pearle and I went across the dam together. We went to Heber Springs just the two of us. The Little Red River was always flooding, so they built the dam. Well that ruined the idea of barges coming in by steamboat and coming in near Kensett.
So Blevins, through Merle's acquaintance, got in touch with this guy in Houston who was buying up property and he had visions of Kensett growing. Well, he bought the store and the adjacent lot. We had already sold the lot where the coffin house was. Well, okay, we took a mortgage on it - $40,000 at 10%. And then the guy defaulted on his loan. So we got back the property and all the money we had collected on the mortgage. Then it was sold to another guy, who paid off the mortgage.
That left the big house, the two-story house in Searcy, and the property across the street where the apartments were and the movie theater was. Daddy had already sold the garage building and he had already sold the adjoining two-story commercial buildings. Then there some vacant property in there too that we owned. It took quite a while to sell that property - but finally we did. And we got enough money to satisfy Blevins and satisfy all the others.
Well, we finally sold all the other property. Daddy had already sold the coffin house before he died, so that left us with the one property over in Searcy - the two-story house - my grandfather Blevins' home - which Mother had outright. It was deeded over to her outright. Mother had two step-sisters. You remember Helen. The other one - you didn't hear too much about her. Her son was at Blevins' funeral. I can't remember her name right now. The sisters had many a disagreement about my grandfather Blevins' property on Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena.
My mother's mother died early in life - there was my mother and her brother - and then there was a baby sister that had died. I'm not sure how old she was - two, three - when she died. Buried in Searcy Cemetery. Granddaddy's second wife was a Doneghy. He was quite prosperous - they lived in a big home and he had a big livery business. My mother always resented all the chores as a young girl that her step-mother made her do. But later on, she had a lot of love for him.
Blevins lived with Granddaddy Blevins and my step-grandmother a couple of times when he first went out to California. And Lorene, lived with them when she went to high school out there one year.
So that house that Grandfather Blevins built in Searcy was finally disposed of. Mother needed some furniture to help furnish her two-story house in Searcy, so she got some of Sybil's furniture out of storage.
It was stored in one the old warehouses there on the property. Daddy would use it as a storage house for cotton. It was completely enclosed, where he could store bales of cotton until the market got high. He wasn't about to sell cotton at 25 cents a pound - he'd wait until it was 35 to 38 cents a pound and then he'd take so many bales out of the storage house and take it over to Searcy where they had a big compress. The original bales were quite big, you see, and bulky. And when the cotton was ready to be sold and shipped to places where they would make it into fiber and cloth, they would compress into smaller bales. Buyers would buy the cotton from the farmers in big bales, and they would bring it into the compress place and they would pay rent on the cotton. The buyers would store it in the compress place until the market got to a certain place that they wanted to sell. And then when they sold it, the compress people would take the bulky bales and compress into bales about one-fourth the size of the other bales. It was ready then to be shipped overseas or to New York or Chicago or New England - to people in the textile industry.
Also in Searcy there was a cotton seed industry. When I was growing up, they had big places in North Little Rock built along the river - and they had one in Searcy - where you press the oil out of the cotton seed. It made a tremendous smell, smelled just like country ham cooking. There were times when I would miss the DK&S, the train coming back to Kensett, sometimes after football practice. I'd have to run back to the high school to change clothes after practice, and then run to catch the DK&S. Many times I'd be running and I'd just barely catch it as it was pulling out. Sometimes I'd miss it, then I'd have to walk home. I'd run or trot half of the way. It was four miles. I was in good shape back then! Many times I'd miss that train.
This was the house [Grandfather's house] with the window that both Merle and I wanted. We had great memories of it from when we were kids. There was a large landing where the stairs came up and turned to the right and this is where we kids would look out the window, through the colored glass.
Well, we had sold the house, and of course we had rights to remove the furniture and contents of the house, but we didn't have rights to take any part of the building. Well, Merle, using her persuasive powers, talked me into going back over there at night to get the window. I got a hammer and pry bar out of the store. A screwdriver too. It was mainly on hinges, so you could remove the window and frame by the hinges. I put it in the back of my car, wrapped up in a blanket.
Mother saw it and said, "What have you got there, Price?"
I said, "I've got this goddamned window."
You've heard the story about the window. It's been talked to death. Merle's already got the desk, now she talked me into getting the window out of my grandfather's house.
Then I said, "Where can I hide it?" because the owner's might come over here and put a search warrant out for this damned window. So we put it somewhere in the store, left the blanket on it. We put it back of something that was heavy to move. I felt safe about that. Okay, the next day, Merle gets a call and the buyers were complaining about the window being taken out.
I was going to put the window in the trunk of my car, but Merle talked me into putting it in the trunk of her car, her Buick. So the next day as we were coming back to the motel, one of the buyers intercepted us on the street. He hailed us down. He got out of his car, and we were seated in our car.
He said, "What do you mean by stealing our window?" (I had nailed plywood over the window, because we had been having some rain and some storms at that time).
We pleaded innocent. Merle was driving, and we took off and left him talking. I figured next maybe he would get the law after us.
Well, the next morning, I took off about four in the morning, and Merle took off about six or seven. We were out of town before they could get the law on us about the window. So Merle got the window and the desk. Suzanne has the desk now and Elizabeth has the window