Two Boys from Hitchins: A Memoir of Adversity, Adventure, and Achievement

By Edward W. Isaacs and Chilton E. Isaacs

Two Boys from Hitchins: A Historical Fiction captures the life and times of rural Carter County.

Edward and Paul Isaacs, born at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in the bustling depot village known as Hitchins, Kentucky, at the close of the Depression period. Times were hard. The hills and hollers were the young boys' playground. Edward and his brother, Paul, were dreamers, both failing in school. Seeking adventure and success, they left home at an early age, Paul at thirteen, then Edward followed later at the age of fifteen. They set out on adventures reminiscent of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Luck is when opportunity meets preparation and determination. With the right timing seizing an opportunity, they found success in an unlikely city when they became associated with a giant corporation and incredibly influential people--a far cry from their birthplace, achieving success beyond their wildest dreams, only to be torn apart by a scheming, malevolent outsider.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662431845

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Two Boys from Hitchins

A Memoir of Adversity, Adventure, and Achievement

Edward W. Isaacs and Chilton E. Isaacs

Copyright © 2020 Edward W. Isaacs

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2020

ISBN 978-1-6624-3181-4 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-3180-7 (hc)

ISBN 978-1-6624-3184-5 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

Chapter One: The Hills of Home

The House at Fairview Hill

Killing the Hog and Other Tales

Chapter Two

Chapter Two: Family Ties

Julia

The Home

Chilt

Chapter Three

Chapter Three: Tough Times and Good Times

Hitchins Entrepreneurs

Hard Living

Big Brother Earl

Chapter Four

Chapter Four: School Daze

Holiday Tragedy

World War II

Chapter Five

Chapter Five: Games, Goats, and Graveyards

Risky Train Ride

Ghostly Encounters

Love Triangles in the Hills

Chapter Six

Chapter Six: Loving and Leaving

Taking Our Leave

Trails Out of Town

Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven: Learning a Trade

Pulling the Hose

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight: Branching Out

On the Road Again

To Catch a Thief

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine: Marking Time

Helping Mom and Dad

Temporary Setback

Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten: Lessons Learned

Getting an Education

A Dangerous New Occupation

Weissman Beer Distribution Center

Gilliam's Market

The Night of the Score

The Cracking of the Box

The Windup of Gilliam's

Ballinger's Supermarket

Chillicothe, Ohio

Pataskala, Ohio

KEYOVA METAL COMPANY

Hard at Studying

Betrayed

All Work and No Play…

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven: Bridges

A Capital Experience

The Mormons

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve: Endings and Beginnings

Edward Meets Alice

President John F. Kennedy Shot in Dallas

Fire!

Finding Naomi

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen: Back in the Groove

Love in the Air

Smokestacks and Wedding Bells

Statuary Hall

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen: Painter to Restaurateur

Chance of a Lifetime

It's Official

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen: The New Entrepreneurs

Dollars and Sense: Finding Investors / Learning the Business

From Dreams to Bricks and Mortar

Progress in a Pawnshop?

Roy Wheaton

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Sixteen: Next Steps

Rodeo Star Founders

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen: Building the Team

Dallas Franchisee Seminar: Austin

Founders' Banquet

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen: Open for Business

Dallas Seminar: Mazatlan

Sailfish Adventure: A Close Brush with Death!

Merritt Boulevard

Crain HWY

A Small Diversion

Unfounded Accusation

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen: Growing Pains

The Luckiest Dinner in Town

Going Public

Paul's Disruption of Our Stock Offering: A Firm Believer Strikes Again!

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty: North Carolina—an Unexpected Opportunity

To Catch a Thief

Good Management Makes All the Difference

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-One: Branching Out

Baltimore Street in Downtown Baltimore

Queen City Drive in Cumberland

Perring Parkway in Parkville, Reisterstown Road in Baltimore

Baltimore National Pike in Ellicott City

Sunburst Highway in Cambridge

Annapolis Road in Odenton (Fort Meade)

South Salisbury Boulevard in Salisbury

US Route 301 in Crofton

Halfway Boulevard in Hagerstown

US Route 301 in Waldorf

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Two: In-House Turmoil

Money Gone Astray

Impulses Unleashed

What Business Are We in, Anyway?

General Who?

Upheaval and Reorganization

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Three: Outside Distractions

Butting Heads

Playing Chicken?

A Spectacular Parade: Dallas Food Distribution and Dallas Family Restaurants

A Surprise Visitor

Enough Is Enough

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Four: It's All about People

Hostesses

Getting the Word Out

Buckaroos, Pioneers, and the Value of Free Stuff

The Streakers

John Dalton Dallas Comes to Town

Everybody Loves a Parade

Cumberland and the Freedom Train

Cooking without Gas

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Five: Bold Expansion Plan

An Unexpected Move

Keeping a Hand In

Taking Different Paths

A Final Reckoning

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Six: Life Outside of Dallas Restaurants

Moving On

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Back to the Hills of Home

Edward Purchases School of His Youth

A Piece of Hitchins History

Changing Course

Things that Aren't There Anymore

Epilogue: Growing Up in Hitchins

Coal Mining

Building a New Town Center

Saving the Gymnasium

Summary

A Tribute To A Man

And That Is What He Believed!!!!

Acknowledgments

To My dear wife Alice, my partner in life, secretary on the many business ventures we did successfully together. I have always loved Alice and grateful we met on a beautiful October Sunday 1963.

To my son Chilton, whose help and encouragement I am ever grateful for without his help this book may have never been completed.

To Mr. Day and Mr. Moore those great gentlemen educators I am grateful for their encouragement and influence on leading me to better myself. Additionally, I am grateful for the encouragement they gave me to attend the Dale Carnegie Course. To Mr. Day I am especially grateful he offered me the opportunity to study his book by Napoleon Hill composed of 16 Lessons on the Law of Success.

Regretfully after I left the school I lost contact with Mr. Day and Mr. Moore and regret that I never learned their first names.

I am ever indebted to those two men who rescued me by encouraging me to obtain an education. In 2015, I returned to Cincinatti in hopes that I could at least locate the boarding house where the school was conducted and perhaps find a lead on Mr. Day and Mr. Moore but times have passed and even the boarding house was gone.

Chapter One

Chapter One: The Hills of Home

The house on Friley Branch is quiet these days. Nestled in the foothills of Appalachia, just outside the town of Hitchins in Carter County, Kentucky, its sole occupant is a widow whose kids are grown and gone from home. Electricity, indoor plumbing, and central heat were installed decades ago, and the widow closed in the porch where the old pump used to belch cold, clear water from the well. Otherwise, the two-bedroom bungalow looks much as it did in the days of my childhood, when the antics of four little boys filled every room and there was rarely a quiet moment. One of my earliest memories is standing at the window, watching my dad wield a huge scythe in the fields below. Another is of playing on a sled in the barn when the sled turned over and cut a deep gash in the top of my head. No one thought to take me to the doctor or hospital, and my dad, Chilt Isaacs, treated the wound with salve and bandages. I recovered quickly, but I still have the scar.

We moved from that house when I was about three years old. I can see myself even now, standing on the porch, watching my parents and brothers load furniture into the old horse-drawn wagon, then being lifted into the wagon bed as we started down the dirt road for our new home on Fairview Hill. Today's road up the branch is paved, and its name has been changed to Fraley, an error introduced some years ago when road signs were erected to identify Kentucky hollers. But on that day, back in 1940, the horse kicked up dust and the wagon wheels jostled us over the ruts as we made our way into the town of Hitchins past the new school, built two years earlier by the WPA.

The WPA, or Works Progress Administration, part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, was designed to put people to work on public works projects across the country. One of these projects was Hitchins School, built from yellow stone quarried nearby and large enough to accommodate students from grades one through twelve. Before this, kids who lived in town went to a wooden schoolhouse expanded over the years to house grades one through ten and, eventually, one through twelve. (Until 1927, high schoolers from Hitchins commuted to Prichard for their final two years.)

Elementary students in outlying areas (through grade eight) usually went to one-room schools closer to their homes, as it was too long a walk each day to come into town. People I knew who attended these schools recalled having to arrive early to gather kindling for the potbellied stove, the only source of heat, and using that same stove to cook a lunchtime meal. The old Cedar House School at the end of Route 182, going into Route 60, is representative of this era.

After the WPA-built school opened, the building it replaced was used as the school bus garage, but quite a few of the one-room satellite schools continued to operate, sometimes for years, until the roads improved enough for buses to reach more remote areas.

The House at Fairview Hill

It was two and a half miles from Friley Branch to our house on Fairview Hill, a house my mother, born Julia Johnston, inherited from Roy Burton, her first husband. Roy died in 1929 at the age of thirty-two, leaving her with three children, Earl, Millard, and Irene. Two years later, she married Chilton Hobert Chilt Isaacs, and they had four boys: John (JC), Paul, Matt, and me, Edward Wayman Isaacs, born June 23, 1937. All four of us were born in the house at Friley Branch, brought into this world with the assistance of a midwife.

The house at Fairview Hill sat on about thirteen acres and bordered on Route 1. At one time, this road went right up over the hill, even with the edge of our property, but years before—back when Ray Burton was still alive—the highway people had evened out the terrain by taking some of Roy's land to cut a deep gash in the hill. Now our property ended at the cutbank, a steep incline overhanging the road below. On the other side was the cemetery.

It was an old-fashioned house, frame-board construction with high ceilings. The high front porch looked down over the town below, but there were no steps from the porch to the ground, so we entered from the back through the kitchen. Roy Burton had left the house to Mom and their children free and clear—which might have been why my folks decided to move there—but the place was sorely lacking in amenities. Like many country houses of the era, including the one on Friley Branch, it had an outdoor toilet and no central heat (though most rooms had a fireplace). Unlike our previous home, this property had no well. Rain barrels captured some water, but mostly we kids had to draw our drinking water in buckets from a neighbor's well.

When larger quantities were needed for washing, cooking, and so on, Dad hitched the team to a wagon filled with empty fifty-five-gallon barrels and drove to the edge of Little Fork Creek off Robin Run Road. We couldn't bring the barrels into the water—filled; they'd have been way too heavy to lift onto the wagon, so my brothers and I brought buckets of water to the barrels, two gallons at a time. One day we'd just finished filling the barrels when a storm blew in. Not wanting to be caught by the rising waters, we scrambled into the wagon, JC at the reins and Dad at the bridle. As they hurried the horses up the creek bank, water splashed over the sides of the open barrels, soaking us to the skin. We probably couldn't have gotten any wetter had we stayed where we were!

By the time we finally had a well dug on the property, I was a grown man.

* * *

Dad had done some work on the Friley Branch house; in fact, there's still a small cement footprint of my brother, Matt, in the basement, no doubt made one day when he was helping with some repair or another. Dad did much more at Fairview Hill, adding a lean-to on the back to give us a dining room, a larger kitchen, and a third bedroom. He also dug a cellar with its own outside entrance underneath the kitchen. And in the dining room, he installed a big potbellied stove, which we kept fired up once the weather turned cold. Along with the woodburning cookstove in the kitchen, it generated enough heat to keep us warm during the day. Mom and Dad also used the living room as their bedroom, and at night they'd light a fire in the fireplace there. We boys slept in the back bedroom. It had its own fireplace, but we never lit it—too much trouble, I guess. Each night we'd stand in front of the living room fire 'til we were good and warm, then jump into bed, and pile on homemade quilts. With no heat at all in our room, I don't know how we survived.

Dad also built a barn and a smokehouse. We used the smokehouse to preserve meat and hang beans to dry. The barn had an upstairs hayloft and stalls below, which is where we kept the horses and Old Sally, the cow. Mom milked Sally with ease, but it took me forever to learn to coax a gallon from her. When she was dry, I had to walk three quarters of a mile every evening down the dirt road to Charlie Burton's farm to buy a gallon of milk. (Charlie was Roy Burton's older brother. His wife was Bessie Mae Isaacs Burton, daughter of my uncle Joe Isaacs, Dad's oldest brother.)¹ Dad sold the cow when I was about nine, after which my trips to Charlie and Bessie's became a permanent fixture of the day.

Mom always kept a fire burning outside with a big kettle hanging over it. Here she boiled water for canning, cooking, and washing clothes. On washday, she would pull out the metal washtubs, which sat on a frame separated by the wringer, plunge the dirty clothes into one tub, and when they were clean, hand them to me to put through the wringer and into the rinse tub on the other side. After rinsing, I'd put them through the wringer again. The whole affair kept both of us busy and well exercised. Weather permitting, she'd set up the tubs outdoors, but summer or winter, she hung the clean clothes outside to dry. On a sunny day with a bit of breeze, clothes would dry in the coldest of weather, though they were sometimes a bit icy when she brought them in.

We also bathed outdoors in warm weather, mostly in Little Fork Creek where we had several choice swimming holes. The water was deepest on an elbow curve in the creek, right below a rock cliff overhanging a nearby hillside. This spot, a short distance from the school gymnasium, became one of our favorites.

Electricity wasn't available to most rural areas in the county until after World War II, so we burned coal oil lamps and kept food chilled in an old icebox, including a jug of boiled water especially for Dad. Ever mindful of an early bout with tuberculosis (though he'd been pronounced cured decades before), he drank only water Mom had boiled. And he told us kids never to touch it—protection for us, no doubt, as well as for him. Once every week or two, Mom put a card in the window to let the iceman know how much ice we needed—five, ten, twenty pounds—and the fellow brought the required amount to the door.

Killing the Hog and Other Tales

We kept chickens, so we always had plenty of eggs, and each year, we raised one or two pigs. At hog-killing time, usually in the fall, neighbors often got together and helped each other with the butchering. One fall, we weren't in a position to help others, since Dad and JC were traveling out West, and I suppose Mom didn't feel right asking for help if we couldn't return the favor. Still, we needed the meat for the coming winter, so one morning, Mom announced that she, Paul, and I were going to butcher the hog. Paul was about thirteen, and I was only eight or nine, but when Mom set her mind to something, she got it done no matter what.

Paul got out the .22 rifle, went to the pigpen, and shot the five-hundred-pound hog between the eyes. The shot was not enough to do the job, but it made the hog mad as all get out. The animal burst out of the pen, ran down past the cutbank, through a fence, and into a deep ravine. Paul and I took off in hot pursuit; Mom came screaming after us. Finally, the hog collapsed and died, but not before conveniently trampling down the weeds around it in a last burst of energy.

Well, boys, said Mom, I guess we'll have to butcher him right here. Paul and I trudged back to the house for the necessary equipment. He brought a tripod, a pulley, and some rope, all of which we'd need when it was time to gut and dismember the carcass. I brought the big iron kettle from the front yard, butcher knives, and a supply of clean, empty coffee sacks. We built a fire next to the fallen hog, filled the kettle from an old well at the end of the ravine, and waited for the water to boil. We then soaked the coffee sacks in the scalding kettle and draped them over the pig. Like hot towels on the beards of patrons in an old-fashioned barbershop, those steaming coffee sacks softened the hair on that stubborn old pig, making it easier to scrape it off with a butcher knife. Paul mounted the tripod and hooked up the pulley. Mom and I shaved the hide, and Paul put a rope around the animal's rear legs and hoisted it up. After he split open and gutted the carcass, we washed out the cavity with more water from the abandoned well. It wasn't the purest water—we certainly couldn't drink it—but for washing out the hog, it did fine.

It was now four or five in the afternoon. We were at least one thousand feet from the house—once we climbed the fifty feet or so out of the ravine—and we still had to get that shaved and gutted hog to the smokehouse. It would be a great ending to this story if Dad and JC had suddenly appeared on the horizon, ready to carve up the meat and cart it to safety. No such miracle occurred. Instead, Paul, Mom, and I hacked the carcass into manageable pieces and carried them up the hill. I don't know how many trips it took, but we were at it most of the night. This was my last experience at hog killing, but the next day, Mom cooked fresh sausage, a great reward for a job well done.

Once I was old enough, in addition to fetching milk, I was charged with riding our horse, Old Nell, to Little Fork Creek after school for watering. She knew where we were going as soon as I mounted her, so I spent the time there and back reading comic books. This was one of my easiest chores. I was also responsible for bringing in the firewood and coal we used for cooking and keeping warm, and sometimes I'd go with Dad into the woods and help him wield the big crosscut saw—no gasoline-powered chainsaws in those days—after which he'd use a wedge and mallet to split the logs into sections that fit the cookstove. We kept the split wood stacked in a pile near the house.

We burned coal in the fireplace grates and in the potbellied stove, coal we got from Mom's uncle, Talbert Toggie Johnston, who lived on the farm above us. I've heard it said that coal in those days went for as little as two dollars a ton, and Toggie bought it by the truckful. Down the hill from his house, just outside the cutbank at the entrance to the cemetery, was an expanded space off Route 1 where he kept his giant coal pile. Even today some folks still refer to this spot as Toggie's coal pile.

To fill orders, he loaded his wagon from the pile, one shovelful at a time, and made the rounds to his customers. There was no such thing as a telephone order back then; if you needed a delivery, you watched for Toggie and let him know in person. Some people had coal cellars. We kept our supply in a much-smaller pile in the yard, covered with a tarp to keep it dry.

Toggie was crippled, his right foot twisted and turned sideways, but he was a hard worker in spite of his disability, and he lived to be ninety-one. In addition to his coal business, he mowed hay along the sides of the roads to feed his livestock in the summertime, and he had little patience for anyone he felt was taking life too easy. When Paul and I were kids, Toggie must have thought we fell into that category, as he was once heard to remark, That ol' Paul and Ebert [my nickname growing up], they'll never 'mount to anything.

In spite of a lack of modern conveniences, we ate well. Dad raised field corn on the hillside to feed the animals and a large vegetable garden to feed us. I can still hear him saying, I hope the lettuce comes in soon. We also had apple and cherry trees, a rhubarb patch, and gooseberry bushes.

Blackberries grew wild in the area, so every summer, kids from Fairview Hill haunted the blackberry patches overlooking Hitchins behind Virgie Davis's restaurant. Many a Saturday morning, we'd fill buckets with plump, juicy berries. Some of the take we gave to our mothers, who turned out delicious blackberry cakes, pies, and jam. The rest we scooped into canning jars and sold door-to-door for twenty-five cents a quart. Once the hills near us were thinned out, whole families might load up a stake-bed truck and drive to nearby patches for a day of picking. These were festive occasions, with breaks from blackberry picking, accompanied by singing and guitar picking.

Our biggest meal of the day was breakfast, usually oatmeal, eggs, and bacon. The noon meal was called dinner. The evening meal was called supper and was of lighter fare. We ate a lot of corn bread and beans, and Mom canned all summer as things came into season. By late fall, the shelves in our cellar under the kitchen were bulging with glass jars of multicolored fruits and vegetables. Obesity wasn't a problem in those days; people ate what they raised and did enough work to burn up the calories they consumed.

Chapter Two

Chapter Two: Family Ties

Ancestors of both the Johnston and Isaacs clans were among this country's early settlers, and both families had deep roots in Eastern Kentucky.

Julia

My mom, Julia Johnston Burton Isaacs, was born in 1906 to John Jack and Mary Elizabeth Lizzy Brainard Johnston, small tobacco farmers in Carter County. Julia was the eldest of ten children, the others (in order of appearance) being Roy, Millard, Lucy, Grace, Opal, Ethel, twins Ed and Fred, and baby Everett, who was born when Grandma Lizzy was forty-nine years old and lived only one day.

Julia was only seventeen when she married Lee Roy (Roy) Burton, the third of seven children of George and Elizabeth Lizzie Clark Burton. Roy made his living as a clay miner and sometime coal miner. Julia and Roy had three children. Earl was born in 1924, followed by Millard in 1925 and Irene two years later. Roy started having medical problems even before his children were born. The longer he worked in the mines, the sicker he got. Finally, on January 6, 1929, after sitting up for several days and nights trying to get his breath, he died of chronic valvular heart disease.

The Great Depression did not officially begin until the Wall Street crash that October, but many people across the country, particularly in rural areas, had been scraping by for years. Roy and Julia, young and with three small children, were no exception. Roy owned their house on Fairview Hill, but he had no life insurance—like most young men, then and now, he hardly thought he'd need it anytime soon. He did, however, leave Julia a priceless gift through his membership in the Odd Fellows lodge at Grayson, Kentucky. The Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF), a fraternal organization established in England in the seventeenth century, opened its first chapter in the US in 1819 and still exists today in countries around the world.

The Odd Fellows promised that if a member died and his widow was not financially able to raise their children, the organization would feed, clothe, and educate them until the age of sixteen (for boys) and eighteen (for girls).² To fulfill this promise, the IOOF opened a series of residential facilities known as orphans' homes in cities around the country, and on May 19, 1929, four months after Roy passed away, Julia took Earl and Millard to the Odd Fellows' Home in Lexington, about one hundred miles west of Hitchins. Afterward, her sister Opal remembered, Julia cried herself to sleep every night, missing her boys.

Irene was too young to be admitted in 1929, but according to the US census, by April of 1930 (she'd turned three on March 26), she also was living at the Home. Julia moved to Grayson to work as a servant in the home of Mary and Andy James. Within the space of a single year, she had lost her husband, left her home to live with strangers, and been forced to commit the rearing of her children to others. She was twenty-four years old.

The Home

The official name of the IOOF facility in Lexington was the Odd Fellows Widows and Orphans' Home, though most people called it the Home. Moreover, by the 1930s, few of the children were actually orphans, and the only adults in residence, widows or otherwise, were members of the staff.³ Located at the end of West Sixth Street, the Home opened in September 1898 in what previously had been a large private residence. Eventually, more than three hundred children (called inmates) lived on the site in two three-story brick buildings. The boys' building housed dormitories, a library, a gymnasium, and a classroom in which the children were educated through the third grade. After that, they attended Lexington public schools.

The girls' building, in addition to dormitories, contained the kitchen and dining room. Outbuildings included a laundry, a barn that housed a herd of dairy cows, and a powerhouse with boilers that supplied heat for the complex. The Home aimed to be self-sufficient as much as possible. All the children had chores—even the littlest were expected to make their own beds. The boys worked in the powerhouse and fed and milked the cows. The girls helped prepare food (including straining the raw milk and making butter), worked in the vegetable gardens, and assisted with cleaning. Schedules were regimented and rules sometimes bizarre—for example, each child had a pillow on his or her bed but was not permitted to sleep on it. Nevertheless, at a time when hundreds of thousands of children were ill-fed, ill-housed, and ill-clothed, the Odd Fellows offered a safe, clean environment to those in their care and tried their best, according to the customs of the day, to provide their charges with the training, skills, and moral values to function effectively in the adult world.

In a memoir he wrote several years before his death in 2009, Earl Burton noted that he and his siblings came to appreciate the Home and the advantages they had there. Nevertheless, his description of the day he and Millard were left there (at the ages of five and four) is heart-wrenching.

The Isaac-Burton family ties are blessed with the same loving mother's love! Brother Millard Burton served US Navy, World War II, aboard USNS Gen. Geo. Randall, transporting troops to the front in the Pacific. He returned home and married his sweetheart, Bernice Burchett. They raised five children. Millard had a forty-five-year career at a US Ordnance Plant in Louisville, Kentucky.

[Millard and I] were taken upstairs to a dormitory on the third floor of the boys' building. We were given some small game to play, but I remember suddenly missing my mother. I got up from the floor and ran to a window, and upon looking out I could see my mother getting into a car. She was holding a handkerchief over her eyes as if she was crying. I started screaming and crying out loud, and Millard also joined in on the screaming and crying. Then the lady attendant started whipping us with a belt to make us quit screaming, and she put us in a dark closet and told us we would stay in the closet until we stopped crying. We soon learned to obey and do what we were told, because if we didn't we knew we would receive a whipping.

Despite the fact they were unable to have their children live with them full-time, many Odd Fellows families remained close, and it was a common occurrence for mothers and other relatives to visit the Home once or twice a summer, often traveling long distances and making a day of it. When the Johnston and Isaacs clans came to Lexington, they usually did so in an old farm truck with board-stake sides that belonged to a man named Bowling. For about three dollars a piece for transportation, friends and family could have a day on the town. Many came to visit Joyland, the local amusement park, but they also brought covered dishes and enjoyed a lunchtime picnic with the Burton children on the Odd Fellows grounds. Many summers, Earl, Millard, and Irene returned with the crowd to Hitchins for a couple of weeks' vacation.

These visits happened either before I was born or when I was very small. I have a vague recollection of going on some kind of adventure in an old flatbed truck, but I can't be sure it involved the Odd Fellows, so details of Home visits have come from others. My first memories of Earl are from shortly after he was released from the Home in March of 1940. I wasn't quite three; he was barely sixteen. We were up above my Grandpa Johnston's farm at Beech Grove, walking along what is now called Canoe Run Road. It was an old dirt logging road back then, and I remember riding on Earl's shoulders and bouncing along as he stepped in and over the ruts.

Millard left the Home in 1941 when he turned sixteen. Irene left the same year. She was only fourteen, but perhaps with both her brothers gone, she wanted to come back to her family. She enrolled at the Hitchins School that fall and completed seventh and eighth grades before dropping out to help Mom at home.

Sister Irene, after leaving the Odd Fellows Home, attended HHS. After living at home with Mom and Dad for several years, she married a local young man from Hitchins, Jimmy Bond, who accepted a job as a police officer in Erlanger, Kentucky. Irene had a thirty-five-year career in the garment industry with a local clothing manufacturer. She is raising two children.

Irene lived with us from the time she returned from Lexington until she married. One time, my brother Matt and I were clowning around, and to get us to stop, she put a large washtub over one of us. For years afterward, we called her Tub. She used to comb my hair and prep me for school and Sunday school. In her later teens, she worked at a little restaurant in town. I'd often go there after school, and she'd make me a hot dog, and we'd sit out front and talk. She was a terrific big sister.

From a twenty-first-century viewpoint, it might seem hard to understand why my mother would give her children over to the Odd Fellows, but in reality, she had no options. The programs that make up today's social safety net—Social Security survivors' benefits, Medicaid, food stamps, etc.—were as yet unheard of, and even the breadlines shown in Depression-era newsreels were almost exclusively for city dwellers. There was simply no government help available for rural folk, and my maternal grandparents, with a half-dozen youngsters of their own still at home, were in no position to take in three more. In his memoir, Earl described Julia's life as a young widow before she took the boys to the Home.

Although she owned her house, [Mom] had no job and no income. The only job she could get was that of washing clothes for others who worked in the mines and at the brickyard.⁴ All she was paid for her work was 10 cents each day. It was very hard work. She had to cut firewood with an axe and build a fire outside…[S]he would put the clothes in a large iron pot that hung over the fire and she would add lye soap to the boiling water and use a wooden paddle to stir the clothes. She had to go next door to her grandma's well to pump the water she used and carry it by the pail full to her yard.…She had to hang all of the clothes on a line for drying…[and] iron [some] with an old metal iron that was heated on the wood-burning stove in the house. In addition to all of this [and taking care of three small children], she tried to raise a garden.

Still, once my mom and dad married, why didn't they reclaim her children from the Odd Fellows? A large part of the reason, I imagine, was economic. The house on Friley Branch was very small, and they soon had children of their own. Plus, the Burton children were living with modern conveniences like indoor plumbing, central heat, and electric lights—a far more comfortable existence than anything my folks could provide. Perhaps the boys, at least, were content to stay where they were.

Chilt

My father's family has been in