Our Employee's

One particular lady was Emogene she was a very skinny lady. Her face was thin and she wore glassses that covered her whole face. She smoked alot and you could tell it in her face. She looked older than she was. It could have been Dick her husband that made you look so old. She was picking cotton for us and he was just  drinking. They had so many boy children that I can't remember them all. They were just called the Howard boys. Some of them were slow, meaning they could not learn things as fast as most boys. May have been that they were not taught much from their dad and Emogene was always working for some farmer in the community. I still recall how bad the house smelled they lived in. It smelled like boys and motor oil. These were males that messed with cars so much that they were black from it and it wouldn't wash off. All you could see that wasn't black from car grease were the whites of their eyes. The oil may have washed off but I dought they tried really hard. There was one named Eddy even with the black all over him you could tell he was Eddy Howard, because he had a huge head. He was the one for many years after he was an adult that had the nerve or the stupidity to flag for illegal drag racing on Highway 99 north of Anderson. He did it more for the acceptance of his peers than any other reason, I would think.
They always messed with old Dodge cars. There were Roadrunners, Chargers, Darts, and even a Corenet 440. My daddy got the Corenet he had from them. I am still partial to them old Chryslers today. My daddy always had more of the Dodge cars than any other make. He prefered them, but if he was in a bind for a car,a cheap one the kind really did not matter. This being the case when he bought the Catilina with the money he made his one cotton growing venture he made on his own. The Pontiac was green and long. He gave six-hundred dollars for it. The crop that Mama, Grandmother, my brother and I harvested made six-hundred dollars for him a way to go get whiskey. That's another story within it's self.
The house they lived in was where 99 ended, north of Anderson. The house was next to The Howard Glass Cafe. This location holds many certain memories. Howard Glass used the cafe for basically anything in the food area he thought would help his business. There was a meat counter where you could buy bologna and have it sliced. He also ground sauage. This was the place we went to have our sausage ground. The location was north of Anderson. North of the cafe' slash meat store was Tennessee. Alabama-Tennessee Stateline was the location of the beer joints. My daddy did not drink beer often. At the stateline only beer was supposed to be sold. The thing was the owner of the beer joint was a bootlegger. It was really not a secret who the bootleggers were. They all had the same last name or were related to someone with that last name. In the Whitehead Community there were the Estep's, Patrick's, Wiggington's and Parker. I left Parker plural, because I only knew of the one Parker bootlegger. The bootleggers of yester year had children that went on to be drug dealers. Those were near my age and are either dead or in jail now. A trip to the bootleggers was just like any visit to a good buddies house. They really tried to appear to be normal abiding citizens. There were many times I actually had fun while daddy was talking to them. There was an older Estep man that lived almost to the end of the Nugent Hollow road. There were two by the same name that lived on that road. One day when we were there he went to the barn and got the cutest little pony for me to see. When he got it in the yard, I wanted to ride it of course. I rode the little pony for as long as Daddy was willing to stay. Seems like everyone of those days would sell anything if they could. Daddy got me to get off the pony by telling me he might buy it for me. He had had to get money from Grandmother for the whiskey so buying a pony would not be easy for him. I still believed he might. I did have faith in what he said. He had not opened the bottle yet, so he was his sweet humble self. The talk of the pony later went to Grandmother saying that Jeff my cousin had gotten Keither-Ray to get him one; that ponies are mean and dangerous. That is something I learned that to this day I can act an expert on the temperment of ponies.
The bootleggers grandson worked for us a couple of times he was a red headed boy that was friends with my boy cousin that was my same age. He helped plow some after we were older.

The cotton patches we had brought a host of characters out for a day of making some whiskey money too. The White's were an famous bunch of drinkers also. Danny White was married to the daughter of one of Daddy's bootleggers. The Whites were very good looking men. There mother was my third grade teacher. Her son's had followed in there father's footsteps as far as drinking went. Well, there was one of the three that I never knew of drinking. They even came to our house up- north bringing nothing but their drinking selves. Danny was one that pulled the big weeds after the cottton was too big to hoe. This was July and hot. He pulled with a sweat from the drunk from the night before. To help the sweat and sick he drank and worked. He drank wildcat whiskey in July in a freaking cotton field, go figure.