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Home > Namits
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Don't Shoot the Birds by Hubert Crowell
The small house on Barbour street had a large yard for a city lot. Dad built a garage and we had a small garden. We had sidewalks and a paved street. The yard was about two feet above the sidewalk with a cinder block retaining wall on two sides. I had been given a BB gun for Christmas and was looking for anything to shoot at. Mom was always saying, don't shoot the birds, so I found other things to shoot at. For some curious reason, I wondered if I could shoot the tobacco out of a cigarette butt. I held the butt over the end of the BB gun and pulled the trigger. I missed the butt but got my thumb, what a mess.
Dad was working for the West Kentucky Coal company in 1950 and was in charge of the underground operations at the large mine south of Providence, Kentucky. He was making good money and Mom was always remodeling the house. One of the projects was to dig a basement under the existing house. During the last stages of construction there were quite a few cinder blocks in the unfinished basement. Several of my friends and I took the blocks and built two forts, one in each corner of the basement. We then got our BB guns and had a battle. I kept getting hit in the back until I discovered that the other side was shooting at the wall behind me and the BB's were ricocheting around that basement like crazy. No one was hurt, but that ended the BB gun duels in the basement.
Dad would take me out to the mines quite often and give me small jobs to keep me busy. Before he took the job with the West Kentucky Coal Company, dad own a small mine south of town on Hwy. 109. This was a shallow mine in the side of a hill and they used a small pony to pull the coal car out of the mine. I remember dad giving me a hacksaw and a pipe to saw into, I worked all day on that pipe and can't remember if I ever finished the job. The mine went under Hwy. 109 and during one of the many cave-ins in the mine the Hwy. Fell in creating a large bump in the road.
The larger mine was quite an operation, they would strip mine the coal until the over burden would become two thick and then dad would come in with the underground equipment. Then would just start the tunnels in the sides of the strip cuts, avoiding the need for digging slopes to get to the coal. Modern equipment was used in the new mine and I was interested in the front end loader. It had large arms in the front that scoop the coal up and onto a conveyor that reached out the back. Electric coal cars would back under the conveyor to be loaded. One day while barefoot, I jumped upon the front of the loader, felt the DC current and bounced right back off again. If I had stepped on it with one foot still on the ground, I am sure it would have killed me.
Dad let me splice the broken electrical cables that ran into the mine for the equipment. We would stagger the two cut wires and tie them into a square knot a few inches apart. Then take a roll of rubber electrical tape and wrap the splice with the sticky side of the tape facing outward. This was so you could quickly flip the roll of tape around the splice until the complete roll of tape was used up. This would stand the stress of pulling through the wet mine.
Mother had her eye on a larger home just a half of block up the hill on Barbour street. It was a three-story home and one of the better ones in town at the time. In 1951 it came available and we moved in. It was great, we all had our own rooms. The upstairs was once a three-room apartment, the kitchen was just to the right at the top of the stairs. The master bedroom was directly in front of the stairs over reaching the front porch. A second bed room was on the left at the top of the stairs. My sisters got the bedroom on the left, our parents the large bedroom and the kitchen was converted into a small bedroom for me.
The kitchen bedroom was great, my bed was just under a window that overlooked the sun porch on the side of the house. The roof on the sun porch was flat and I could step out of my window and onto the roof for a great view of the night sky. The kitchen sink remained, so I had running water in my bedroom also. Under the sink there was a loose board that I removed for my secret hiding place. The fire place chimney came up through the middle of my bedroom creating a walk-in closet next to the sink and a great hiding place.
The house was heated with coal. In the basement corner room was the furnace and coal room. A chute on the side of the house allowed unloading the coal. You could slide down the chute to get into the house. Dad installed a stoker feeder to feed the small stoker coal into the bottom of the furnace and once or twice we had to take out the clinkers that would build up from burning the coal. A boiler above the furnace supplied the steam to the radiators in each room of the house. Mom remodel the house, creating an arch between the dinning room and the modern kitchen on the middle floor. She also added on a large back porch and had it screened in. We had perm-a- stone installed over the siding of the house and it looked like a rock house.
There was a garage on the right side of the house. A drive way around the left side to the back led to the daylight side of the basement. A concrete floor under the back porch with only one step down into the full basement. The back yard was large with a drainage ditch in the middle. Space for a garden on the other side of the ditch. I built my nine by nine-foot square fort there with a flat roof that I sometimes had a second floor made of tobacco sticks.
The field behind the house had an old tobacco barn and shallow pond that was a great place to play. Tobacco sticks are about one 1/2 inch square and about 5 feet long. They used them to place across the many rafters in the tall barn and hang tobacco on. The barn was no longer used and was full of tobacco sticks. We would climb the rafters and stack the sticks on them for flooring. We also used them to make rafts for the pond and building forts. At one time my next door neighbor Tommy and I dug a long ditch and using the sticks, cardboard and scrap boards, placed a roof over the ditch and covered it with dirt. I made a great tunnel and hide out.
Dad knew about all the old coal mines that were under the town, and when our septic tank failed, he brought in a drill rig and drilled down into the old abandoned mine tunnel. When the drill hit the coal seam, dad knew that he was in the center of a pillar left to support the roof. He lowered a few sticks of dynamite down the hole and blasted out the side of the pillar into the mine. After that we never had trouble with the septic tank again.
About the Author
http://hubertcrowell.name/
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