The first time I saw him was at the City Cafe, and it was easy to take a liking to him almost immediately. To begin with, he dressed real neat--not flashy--like some of the newly rich around town, but his pants had a crease and his shirt was ironed. His shoes had a shine on them which was difficult to maintain in the dusty streets around Winnsboro in 1947.
Thanks to the oil boom in northeast Texas, highways became important in the early 40's, and thanks to Governor W. Lee O'Daniel, we had good blacktop roads that ran from Winnsboro north to Mt. Vernon, south to Quitman, east to Pittsburgh, and west to Sulphur Springs--the full extent of the universe known to me at the time. Once you got off the "main drag", the streets were natural red clay that had been worn to a fine dust. Horse-drawn wagons still came to town on Friday and Saturday to sell home-grown tomatoes and other produce from nearby truck farms.
I was born in 1933 and was widely traveled up to 30 miles from home. Of course I had heard about some far away place called Dallas, but most people talked as if it was on the other side of the moon and the residence of people with no morals who partied all day and night and would just as soon rob you as look at you. When young men graduated from high school, many of them left for Dallas/Ft. Worth. Their mamas and daddies would try to talk them out of it, but once they reached 17 or 18, with very little work available around northeast Texas, they left looking for that pot of gold in the big city. Very few ever returned home after that, but the few who did only whetted the appetite of those left behind with stories about jobs that paid 2-3 dollars an hour and the beautiful girls that were just waiting for a good-looking country boy to sweep them off their feet.
It sounded like the Promised Land to me, but all the family would grunt and spit and say "Huh! That boy is going to get hisself in trouble....he's playing with fire....don't worry--he'll come back broke and draggin' his tail behind him." But most never did, and those who did come back for a weekend visit looked more prosperous and "alive" than the rest of us.
We eagerly listened to the tall tales they told and quietly made plans for our own escape.
The City Cafe was where my mother worked as cook and manager, sometimes two ten-hour shifts, and she knew everyone in town. Anyone passing through always stopped for chicken-fried steak or a steaming bowl of chili that was hot enough to "burn the hair off your tongue". Once a week they cooked barbecue and bacon and eggs and toast were always available. My mother loved to talk, and she never met a stranger, so it was natural for her to know all about everyone in town. Anyone new to town didn't have anonymity long before she knew their life history.
With very little to do in a small town, the City Cafe was the place most people would go to just about every time they were in town. Me and my friends spent hours listening to the latest records on the jukebox, faithfully copying down every word of a new song and then attempting to find the chords on our guitars. Mother always had a few quarters marked with red fingernail polish for the jukebox.
When the guy who serviced the machines came to replace some of the old records, he knew these quarters were used to "prime the pump" which would stimulate others to play their favorite song and would return them to Mother. She would then share some with me with the warning not to spend them anywhere else--they were for the jukebox. So, between the regular customers and me as a "shill", the music hardly ever stopped.
Well, my buddy, Cecil Jackson and I were listening and copying down the words to "I'll Sail My Ship Alone" by Moon Mullins when Ole' Ed walked in the front door of the City Cafe.
We were used to seeing strangers come and go--mostly roughnecks who came at the end of their shifts in greasy clothes, hungry for a hot meal and lots of it. Mother was great about cooking their favorite, ham and eggs, usually "over easy" and cooked exactly according to their instructions, which were anything from "fried edges and runny yolk" to "well-done until nothing moves" and everything in between including "poached" or "scrambled". Once ordered, she remembered how every customer wanted their eggs the next time and, with some pride, could recite their instructions from the last visit. Needless to say, this was a popular place, and there was lots of laughter and rough talk as they waited for their food. And they also tipped well when Mother served up exactly what they wanted and lots of it.
But Ole ED was different, not just his clean clothes and shined shoes, but he was polite and talked in a quiet way that you just naturally wanted to hear what he had to say.
Cecil was busy copying down a particular phrase of the new song "and when it starts to sink, then I'll blame you", while I sipped on a Coke that Mother had treated me to. Ole Ed walked in and quietly slipped onto a barstool at the counter and ordered a cuppa' Java. While he doctored it up with cream and sugar, Mother found out he was a roughneck who had an injury--his left arm was in a white cloth sling--and had to stay in town for a while until his insurance check arrived. Said he had rented a box down at the Post Office and had a room at the only hotel in town. I could hear Mother cluck-clucking at this man's bad luck and how sorry the oil companies were about taking care of hard-working men who got hurt on the job. He said he had saved a little money and would just wait in town until the insurance company paid off.
A couple others wandered in and heard the same story and were also sympathetic about Ole Ed's dilemma. After a while, I heard him ask one of the men at the counter if they knew where he might get a drink of whiskey, and one told him Wood County is "dry", and the nearest place was Gladewater near Big Sandy and how you go through Quitman, Mineola and Hawkins to get there.
The other man told him, "No, you can go to Pine Mills and then to Highway 80 and then to Gladewater". Ole Ed told them he didn't have a car, he'd come in on a bus and had no way to get there.
"Well, hell!", one of the men said. "You don't have to go that far--all you have to do is call for a taxi!"
"You mean....?", Ole Ed started to say, as the other man, eager to be of help to this wounded, new comrade blurted out "Hell, yes!! Joe sells a little hooch on the side."
Ole Ed smiled and said, "I guess I need to call me a taxi! Thanks for your help and I owe you one!", and the other two smiled and glowed about the fact that they were able to help and felt their importance for sharing this valuable bit of information with this nice stranger who seemed to hang on every word. One of them pointed out the pay phone and offered to dial the taxi for him, but Ole Ed said he wasn't all that helpless yet, but appreciated their help and left the two of them to bask in the afterglow of doing their good deed for the day.
Ole Ed showed up at the City Cafe three times a day for his meals after that and began to greet people by name, and they smiled and asked how the arm was doing and when the cast was coming off....any day now....Ole Ed would say, and they would feel good about caring for this stranger who, through no fault of his own, wound up in their little town recovering from an accident and waiting for a big, impersonal insurance company to payoff for his doctor bills and lost work.
After the first day, Mother would see him coming in the door and would ask, "The usual for breakfast--lunch--supper?" and she knew exactly how he wanted his eggs or whatever. He was an island at a table where people would circle by just to ask him how he felt today and how's the arm and ain't it a beautiful day? and other pleasantries as they made their way to their special tables where they always sat.
In 1947, life in the quiet town of Winnsboro, Texas was changing, from an agricultural-based life-style where sweet potatoes, strawberries and peanuts and cotton were the cash crops, to cattle--mostly milk cows, which provided the raw materials for the two major industries in town. Kraft corporation had built a plant just outside of town that provided jobs for people who were tired of scrabbling on a few acres to make a living. Many of their workers still lived on small farms and raised most of their food, but depended on their job at Kraft for "spending money" that bought new shoes for their kids once a year, usually just before school started. It also allowed them to "go to town" once a week and buy staples and a few luxuries they couldn't ordinarily afford.
The old "Oil Mill" just off the Sulphur Springs highway, bought cottonseed and peanuts. Peanuts were shelled and then resold in 100 pound bags. The rejects and the hulls were then stored in huge piles in cavernous, sheet metal warehouses. After the cotton had been ginned and separated from the seeds and other debris, the cottonseeds and hulls were trucked to the Oil mill where the workers made mountains of them in other warehouses, using screw-like chutes that sucked the hulls out of the trailers with chicken-wire sides, took them up a metal trough about fifty feet and then deposited them in huge piles in the warehouse.
Some of my earliest memories are of climbing up the side of the timbers supporting the sheet metal walls and jumping into a Mt. Everest-sized pile of cottonseed hulls which, being fluffy with air, cushioned my fall and kept me from dashing my young, dumb brains all over the floor. My friends and I, growing up next door to this wondrous place, quite naturally used it as our own personal playground.
These otherwise useless items, peanut hulls and cottonseed hulls, were then carried by the same screws turning in a metal trough to the adjacent building, where they were crushed between large steel rollers. The oil was extracted and shipped in tank trucks to other plants where it was refined and then wound up as shortening.
The remaining, crushed debris also had a use, as a supplemental feed for cattle. But first it was poured into large, shallow steel pans. Hundreds of these pans would be placed in racks inside a roaring oven that was fired by gas. You could feel the heat from these furnaces even on a hot summer night from quite a distance, and they worked three shifts day and night, except on Sunday. This was back-breaking work and the men, mostly black, worked with their shirts off. Under the glare of the lights at night, their skin glistened and glowed with a yellow hue as they sweated in the heat of this Dante's Inferno. When the "cakes" were done, they were dumped out of the pans, one on top of the other and stored in neat bundles about five feet high.
The only other source of income was from cutting and hauling wood, mostly pulpwood, used for paper products. Hardwoods were prized and hauled to sawmills where they were turned into lumber for houses and sometimes the most expensive, like hickory was sold to furniture makers.
These jobs provided a little "spendin' money" for the men, and many of them had a taste for what they called "snake-bite medicine", although nobody could remember the last time anyone was bit, they still administered the remedy with some regularity.
The oil boom in the early 'forties provided another kind of job, which required special skills that attracted men who followed wherever the next hole was to be drilled. Moving from place to place, these men had seen lots of small towns and had become a tough breed who worked long, hard hours, day or night, rain or shine. The locals bestowed the name "roughneck" to denote this searcher for oil and riches as opposed to "redneck", which applied to the men who worked in the fields and raised crops or cattle.
They came to town hungry and thirsty for more than ice tea at the City Cafe or Mother's famous chicken-fried steak. They developed a taste for "hard liquor", and the fact that Wood County was "dry" only served to increase their thirst for this "forbidden fruit".
As usual, demand fosters supply, so it didn't take the local entrepreneurs long to establish a supply route from Gladewater to Winnsboro, supplemented with a native brew called "white light'nin". This potent, 90 proof elixir was made from corn, poured in glass jugs and topped with a cork to allow for expansion. Small, black flecks of charcoal, which escaped the strainer, could be seen in the bottom of the jug, and when a drink was poured or sipped straight from the jug, they rose and circulated like the fake snowflakes in a Christmas globe.
Most favorite drink was Jack Daniels' prized whiskey and Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, both as illegal in Wood County as moonshine was universally. This did not deter the wily bootlegger who could always find a way to transport and get it to his customers. There was always a markup to compensate for the risk and danger of getting caught; however, competition was stiff, so the price was generally established so everyone knew how much to charge and how much to pay. The only constraint to trade was who had a supply at the time of your need.
The "Feds" were aware of this illicit contraband and were known to stop cars coming out of Gladewater and search them for illegal booze. Woe to anyone who had more than one pint, the legal amount allowed for personal consumption. There were few Federal Marshals and a multitude of bootleggers, so the odds were always in favor of the bootleggers, especially with only a few bottles at a time.
Most of these "midnight riders" would only bring back eight or ten bottles for two very good reasons; their resources were low and the fine was $40 dollars for each pint in excess of the one legal one. The Revenue Service was just active enough to make every trip a risk, so there were frequent trips, small purchases and lots of tension.
Understandably, the supply was somewhat undependable, but there was a gentleman's agreement among these low-level lawbreakers, which included a referral service. If any one ran short, they always knew of another possible supplier who could handle the transaction. So, they all shared in satisfying the need of their clientele, and developed a little camaraderie amongst themselves. It was because of this that there was a joke circulating about town that "all the bootleggers should wear badges to keep from selling to each other".
Ole Ed had been in town about three weeks when his picture appeared on the front page of the Winnsboro Weekly News.....along with eight other local citizens who were rounded up and convicted of selling bootleg whiskey. Two of those sheepishly smiling faces belonged to my uncles, David and Dick. It was immediately evident that Ole Ed was a "revenooer" who had pulled off the biggest sting operation in Wood county, and we never saw Ole Ed again.
With his arm in a fake cast and sling, and a pleasing personality, he had infiltrated the ranks of most of the bootleggers in Winnsboro. By systematically going from one to the other, on referral, starting with the taxi driver, he bought from and identified eight of the good citizens of this small, northeast Texas town who had varying amounts of inventory on hand. The only ones he missed were those who happened to be out of stock on the day he attempted to make a purchase.
One of my uncles paid a $160 dollar fine and the other $700 dollars(so he said), but both, surprisingly, did not have any ill-will toward the man that caught them. They would laugh and tell the story about how they were caught and say "Boy, that was a good one on me!" It seems they appreciated the fact that a real good actor had fooled them, and they thought it gave them a certain amount of notoriety which they seemed to enjoy and radiated real enjoyment when they related all these events.
Well, it was a fun occurrence in a small town, and it got better in the telling as time went on, but, as one of my uncles said, "I can make that back in about three weeks...."
........and life returned to normal pretty soon after that.
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