A week or so ago, i posted a short story about Venerable T Houston. Part of this character was modeled after the legend of Hamper McBee., but with all of my fictional characters, Venerable, in no way is Hamper. i get my ideas from people, events, and things i remember, and then they become different from the source, greatly different.

Billy Parsons introduced me to Hamper in the early sixties while we were at Vanderbilt.. A Nashville dentist whose name i do not remember was a student of Tennessee folk music who went up to Monteagle Mountain, found Hamper and recorded him, mostly out in the woods. i have lost my copy of that record, which included a number of narratives of Hamper’s in addition to folk songs. i loved it and, after i lost the album, i looked for another copy for years. In the late 1980’s, i finally found a cassette tape of the album in a classic old record/music store in. of all places, San Diego. That version is holed way with a large box of my CD’s up in the garage attic. i’m too lazy to go dig it out.

Hamper McBee was a mountain man, a legend, and just a tad wild. He was rather incredible and well known by the locals and even some of my friends. When you crossed Monteagle Mountain headed southeast on old route US-41 back in the day after an uncountable number of switchbacks, you reached the crest. The highway took you through the town of Monteagle, To the southwest was Sewanee and between the two towns was Tubby’s. Tubby’s was a tavern.  If a white mule was tied up outside, Hamper was inside drinking beer, spinning his tales, and singing. i regret i was always in a hurry and never stopped to see if the mule was there. Mind you, this is a legend i cannot verify.

Then, Amy Beth Hill, another Heights alum and the Director of Member Services at the International Bluegrass Music Association, posted about my hometown’s Antique Mall and a store with about a  gazillion old records (at least it seemed that way). It brought back my longing to hear Hamper McBee.

So i searched on Google, and lo and behold, he popped up. i ordered a record from the MTSU Marketplace, something that they didn’t have when i (finally) obtained my BA in English. If you are looking for some great old time music, this is a great source.

The album, “Hamper McBee: Cumberland Moonshiner” arrived three days ago. It has not been continuously played, but it’s been played a lot, and when it’s not playing, i’m humming one of the songs.

While searching, i ran across the video of Hamper telling his stories while making moonshine whiskey. If you want to hear some good old hill music and learn a bit about making white lightning, This video is a must.

arhttp://www.folkstreams.net/film-detail.php?id=236

John Moriarty, i thought you might find this amusing.

i wrestled with posting this or not since early afternoon when i completed this draft. The first section, in italics and green like this, explains how it got started. It does not explain that after the first draft, i had some more ideas pop into my head and decided in some future form, it would be part of a group of stories i keep working on since around 1964. It eventually, maybe in thirty or forty years when i am 106 or 116, i will finish it and turn it into loosely connected chapters in a novel. No, i don’t think it will match Faulkner’s Go Down Moses. But it’s from my heart and all of those things popping up in my head in the middle of the night. i decided to go ahead and post it after the Padres clinched their playoff berth this afternoon. i point out again, this is a draft.

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Now this is a tall tale, or for mariners a Tennessee sea story, popping into my mind after laying back down after a pee break in the middle of the night, a habit i’ve acquired with age. i could not go back to sleep when i hit the rack again when a name popped into my mind.

The title character’s name is what popped into my head. In the middle of night. Wouldn’t leave. Don’t know why. Possibly because I had one date with a high school senior when i was a freshman at Vanderbilt in the spring of 1963. A friend set me up with Ann (if i remember correctly). She was a high school senior in McMinnville. Believe it or not (also the name of an old television show most of you won’t remember), her parents put Ann on a Trailways bus in the afternoon for the two-hour ride to Union Station in Nashville. i picked her up, and we went to the Kappa Sigma “pajama” party. She was beautiful in her red striped nightshirt in the photo of us on a bed. It was all in fun. Around 10:30 after she got back into her real clothes, i put her back on the bus to McMinnville. I never saw her again. Pity. Her father’s first name was Venerable.

That stuck in my head and found some recess for fifty-seven years from whence it popped out last night. Worse, my little brain kept adding things to it. Perhaps it came from reconnecting to Hamper McBee yesterday morning. Hamper McBee and Tubby’s which took me into bluegrass and mountain legends and songs like “Brown Mountain Light” and “Long Black Veil.” I think Mr. Warren, you know, Robert Penn, like in “The Ballad of Billie Potts,” and of course, Mr. Faulkner; some Jack London, no doubt; maybe even a touch of D.H. Lawrence had something to do with these thoughts. And from there, more stuff kept popping up, like my cousins over in North Carolina because their dads of the Lumbee tribe weren’t allowed to go to college at UNC and went to Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee where they met my two cousins, married them and took them away to the Carolinas. And i thought of injustice and Andrew Jackson, a hero of mine with a dark, dark side, and Sam Houston who lived with the Cherokee for three years as a youth, becoming a champion for Native Americans in later years (and he happened to have a law practice early on in Lebanon, Tennessee with the support of Jackson and my great, great, great, great uncle, John Knibb Wynne).

And then while i was lying there in the dark wee hours, these things popping around in my head started to form some substance, make some sense – at least as much sense as i can muster at three in the morning.

I think it fits with New Palestine, a place i’ve been writing about for years.

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Venerable T Houston came out of the mountains, or rather out of the glen a hill or two over, and up the mountain to the hamlet on the crest.The townsfolk of Aerieton didn’t know what to think of Venerable.

They wondered about his name.

Even though Venerable was his first name, he wasn’t very venerable. He claimed to have some blood of the Cherokee and had a distant relative named Sam, but they suspected he was of the Lumbee tribe, a prominent bunch much overlooked but still relegated to less than citizen status by other tribes and the beneficent (not) government of these here states united, of which Aerieton had been located in three without ever moving as the white folk claimed the narrow expanse of land some 150 miles north to south from the coast to the Mississippi River and named Carolina in honor of the king after which the province split into north and south states, and then east of the Smokies ridge it became part of the rebellious Free Republic of Franklin before becoming part of the State of Tennessee.

All of his name was strange. No, not the “Venerable” part but the “T.” It didn’t have no period and no one really knew what it meant or where it came from, not even Venerable.

And who knew who he was or where he came from other than from that one-room cabin with the clay floor with lots of hogs running around and an old fice dog (the educated folks spell it feist, but it just means it’s a hunting dog) in the glen over a hill or two? The Lumbee aren’t particularly loved by the Cherokee who found it convenient to have slaves when possible, but the Lumbee accepted whoever it was who joined them and the mix was white and black and red but those kind of words can get you into trouble depending who is sensitive to what.

And what is a word anyway? Good? Bad? What a disservice to language played out with determining the connotation of a word by someone actually getting upset about that word. Yet it exists and words keep disappearing because someone feels abused. By a word?

 But up in the mountains of East Tennessee, there ain’t much attention paid to color of skin. Everybody is pretty much accepted ‘cept the government men who came to shut down the stills or eventually roust folks out of their land to make way for a dam and electric power. Got too much work to do to bother with that kind of stuff. They didn’t worry about whether Venerable was Lumbee or Cherokee or any number of other things he could have been.

And it didn’t matter when ole Venerable T Houston set out to work hard. He worked in the railroad yard for the line that climbed over and down the mountain from Carolina to Tennessee and back, and he slopped hogs, and he slaughtered them and made sausage, and he got enough to buy a patch of land, and he planted taters and ‘maters and onions and made stew, and of course, cooked it all with sausage, and sold it out front where he had built a little stand, and under the counter of the stand, he had mason jars filled with the splendid liquid. You know, that stuff they  make in those woods in the glen, far, far back, a trek to take the fixings of a still and set it up, and light the fires and pour the mash into the crackling steaming vats and pipes and coils to come out with white lightning as they call it that can fetch a fair price for the toil and strife of cooking the batches in the hills deep in the woods to keep it out of the reach of the government men.

Venerable T Houston made enough to buy him a mule, and it was white. So he had something to help him plow his plot and carry the heavy loads of still making deep into the woods and carry him to the tavern and the bank where he was going more and more often.

There ain’t many white mules around those parts anymore. No need to mate a jack and a mare with automobiles, pickups, jeeps, all-terrain vehicles, tractors, and such around nowadays. And not as many cows either but more horses ‘cause the folks gone uppity and want to ride ‘em for fun, and the big grocers started getting their meat from the stockyards in the Midwest and out in the west, which pretty much ruint cow counting games on road trips and the fun of seeing a white mule that would add ten to your cow count while sitting in the back seat with the windows rolled down before they made air conditioning for cars, but that’s okay ‘cause them new-fangled interstates ain’t up close to the fences of the pastures passing by, and you can hardly see the cemeteries, which would wipe out the cow count of your sibling sitting on the other side of the back seat and the bumps in the road are gone, smooth, which ended the “thank you, ma’am” shouts, and the switchbacks are gone too, and the world has changed since Venerable T Houston ran around those hills.

Then, Venerable T Houston met the banker’s daughter, and she knew he was a strange fellow, dark and crazy sometimes, and like some women, she was drawn to a man with a dark side, and even though Venerable T Houston thought she was pretty in her gingham dress, he didn’t even consider she might be interested in him until she began to chase him, a long and intricate mating dance of a sort, and her father was against it all ‘cause he had seen Venerable T Houston operate and suspected that money Venerable T Houston kept putting in his bank wasn’t all, if any, on the up and up, and it made no difference ‘cause Beatrice had her mind made up, and once a woman of her sort had her mind made up (just like her mother), there weren’t going to be no changing it, and sure ‘nuff, the mating dance came to a final resolution, and Beatrice left the fine things of the banker’s manor and moved into Venerable T Houston’s shack, which she immediately began to spruce up, which was fine with Venerable as he didn’t have to cook all the time, and Venerable T took Beatrice Houston down to New Palestine on the train. Palestine was a real town down in the valley. There Venerable bought her the wood for the floor he would put in, a stove, an icebox, and a nice dress.

The stores were on the square of New Palestine. While Beatrice was trying on a dress in the women’s clothing store, Venerable T Houston walked over to the water fountain from the spring underneath the square about twenty yards in front of the courthouse. The Giddings family had just moved to New Palestine from Clarence Junction, a small town to the west past the foothills. The Giddings brothers, Ezekiel and Zebediah were horsing around with some new friends outside the courthouse. One of the new friends, Merritt Brown recognized Venerable T Houston from a trip he had made over the mountains about a year before. Merritt had stopped at Venerable’s stand and bought some stew and some of the magic elixir.

The two exchanged greetings. Then, Merritt asked Venerable if he had brought along any of his hooch. Venerable T Houston was always prepared and told Merritt he had about ten half-pints in his satchel. Merritt bought a half pint for a dollar. Zeke and Zeb watched this and decided they should get some of this stuff too. They introduced themselves to Venerable and each of them bought a half pint, a dollar each.

After Venerable and Beatrice had taken the train back up the mountain, the Giddings boys were talking while sipping their whiskey at the back yard of the mule barn. They realized there was a bunch of folks in New Palestine who would like to have some good whiskey without having to go to Nashville and pay a pretty penny. The boys figured they could sell Venerable’s stuff for a buck twenty-five and make some good side money while working their dad’s farm out on the pike.

The next day, Zeb took the train up to Aerieville and found Venerable. They worked out a deal where Zeb and Zeke would get a runner to bring Venerable’s whiskey down from the mountain on the train in half pints, fifth’s, and jugs. They would buy it from him for seventy-five cents a pint, a dollar and fifty cents for a fifth, and two-fifty for a jug of the stuff.

Pretty soon, they made enough money to buy a 1930 Buick 64C roadster for the runner. The business thrived until the early 50’s when the local police began to hit the bootleggers and the lesser stills around New Palestine and sell the confiscated hooch (evidence) out the back of the police station to those in the know.

The Giddings’ “side money” was their main source of income while they worked odd jobs around the city and worked the farm. They socked away enough for Zeke to buy a dairy business and rename it Heavenly Dairy Products and Zeb to buy a Chrysler dealership and a tire franchise, naming both with the family name. After the senior Giddings passed away, the boys sold the farm and moved to big houses across from each other on the main drag, Paradise Pike, in New Palestine. They got married and both had two daughters.

Zeb became a quiet member of the First Presbyterian Church and sat in a pew near the back of the sanctuary every Sunday. He believed in Calvin’s idea of original sin and paid a significant amount for his penance but requested that his pastor never reveal the money came from him.

Zeke’s wife was Baptist. So Zeke became a Baptist and gloried in it while tithing more than any other member of the Calvary First Baptist Church of New Palestine. He became a deacon and finally an elder of the church.

Venerable made a lot of money too, but other than fixing up the shack for Beatrice, adding on until folks quit calling it a shack and called it a nice house. Venerable turned the stand into a small diner and ended up with four diners and taverns on the mountain. He spent a lot of time in the taverns, telling tales and singing old mountain songs. You could tell he was at one of the establishments when his white mule was tied up outside. He eschewed automobiles but would take a ride if offered. But most of his travel around Aerieton was on the mule.

And all of the world of Aerieton and the hills and the mountain was good.

Now would be the time for interjecting some problems into this tall tale, but to be truthful, i ain’t up to it. And it took ‘em a long time to get television up in the mountains. Even radio didn’t have reception all that good, and the townsfolk only read the New Palestine Gazette. So they didn’t get all that information about how the world was going to hell and how sports team had heroes (?) and how countries and businessmen and politicians were vying for power and people were fleecing other people.

And except for every once in a while someone breaking into a house, stealing somebody’s whiskey , an occasional killing, or a big fight, things went along pretty much as usual up in the mountains, and Venerable T Houston and his wife Beatrice lived pretty long and pretty well and had four kids, a white mule, a fice dog, chickens, and a couple of hogs.

David Whitten, one of the better men in folks i’ve met in my life and someone i consider a great friend even though we haven’t seen each other in nearly sixty years, pointed out i erred in this post. Of course, it wasn’t “Mrs.” Fahey. It was “Miss” Fahey. It wasn’t spell checker’s fault. It was mine. Too quick. Not thorough editing. Old man.

And Miss Fahey was the matriarch of Castle Heights Military Academy for years. It seems like forever. She cared for all of us, but man, could she rip you a new one if you stepped out of line. Terrific woman.

Thanks, David.

Phil  Turner, that town boy with such a pure jump shot, along with George Haynes, who graduated from Heights in the spring before i walked up that hill in 1962, were the alums who pointed out i had omitted one term for Heights cadets in my first addendum. In addition to “goobers,” the high school cadets became “geebers,” a label that does not exist in any dictionary i have checked. How it originated, i have no clue.

Thanks, Phil and George.

For further clarification, “town boys” was used interchangeably to classify cadets who did not board and those boys who did not attend at all

And while i’m at it, the balcony and only seating area in our wonderful gym had two bench seats, solid wood, not one as i described in the post. i got to thinking about that one (in these times, someone my age has time to think about such things), and i looked up some old photos of Heights cadets in the stands.

This, of course, led to me thinking about several other gyms. One i recall had less seating than Heights. It was on a mountain.

Heights regularly played Sewanee Military Academy and St. Andrews School in sports. Both were in Sewanee, Tennessee, atop Monteagle mountain and near The University of the South, one of the prettiest college campuses i’ve ever seen. The military academy as with nearly all of those which were across the Mid-South in my days is gone. St. Andrews, an
Episcopal school, is extant. i suspect they have new gym.

My first trip there was as a member of the Heights’ B-team basketball squad. With the varsity we rode up in the winter of 1960 with the varsity team. The varsity team was good, and looked even better. They had long-pant and jacket warmups. The JV’s had a pull-over tee worn over the uniform singlet and their shorts.

Normally, that would not be a problem. But the St. Andrews gym was tiny. It made the Heights gym look like Madison Square Garden.  There was no basement. There was no balcony. A 2×6 piece of lumber about five feet in length had been nailed at an angle roughly nine feet from the floor. This seating allowed two or three students to climb up and sit. Any other fans had to crowd in the available space on the floor not occupied by the team, coaches, scorekeepers, timers, and assorted hanger-ons. i’m guessing maybe twenty fans could be in the gym for a game.

That meant the visitor dressing rooms were about 100 yards away. The JV team had dressed and was ready to go the gym. Basketball shoes, shorts, and our pullovers. We opened the door and a blast of cold air smacked us in  our faces along with snow flurries. It had not been snowing when we alit from the Heights bus and entered the dressing room, but there was already about an inch of the white stuff on the ground for our traverse to the gym.

i can now testify it is difficult to run in Converse All-Star basketball shoes with a skiff of snow on the ground. But we made it. And we won. Handily, much to the chagrin of the dozen of students sitting on those 2×6’s.

This post is beginning to have no end. i have two more stories emanating from my original crazy thought, but i’ll save them until later.

It has been noted by a couple of Heights cadets there was another term bandied about in those days of yore, which i omitted. While the senior school cadets called the junior school cadets “Goobers,” they modified the term to label themselves as “Geebers.” The town boys (also a term used to describe us’n’s who did not board but also the term for non-Heights cadet boys), i.e. Lebanon High School males, did not distinguish and called us all “Goobers.”

i hope this explanation muddles it up more for the uninitiated.

But i tried to explain. i really did.

This might get a bit confusing. There are, according to my Merriam Webster, Unabridged Dictionary, thirty-four definitions of fit.

Nah, i’m not throwing one, a fit that is. There are times i would like to throw one. But i’ve come to realize in my old age, it does absolutely no good and has some negative impact on my digestive system, not to mention this old man’s blood pressure.

And this “fit” ain’t addressing my wardrobe. It couldn’t because damn near everything doesn’t fit anymore. i’ve been needing to lose about 20 pounds (more actually, but i’m not going to admit it), but i don’t run six to fourteen miles four or five times a week anymore and a three-mile fartlek at old man speed won’t get it done, especially when i’m wolfing down Maureen’s chef quality food and sneaking out for burgers occasionally.

The “fit” i’m talking about is related to that running mentioned above. But it was a long time ago before i really started running “running” after i bought a pair of twenty-dollar Adidas running shoes at J.C. Penny’s in College Station, Texas around 1977 — i ran in those shoes without socks until the soles were about ninety percent shoe goo; i might still be running in them, except someone inexplicably stole them while i was in the sauna, jacuzzi, and shower in the Diego Garcia gym in the middle of the Indian Ocean in 1981. Guess the thief was impressed with the shoe goo and the smell since they had never been washed — and after i bought those shoes, i finally figured out i wasn’t supposed to sprint. That’s when i began running almost every day. i was never really fast and never ran a full marathon, but it became something that was extremely rewarding.

i miss it.

As old men do, i was thinking about earlier times and realized i had run quite a bit, long before i started running “running” on my own.

It was Castle Heights. For four years, i was probably the most “fit” i have been in my life. It began with pre-season football (even pre-school) two-a-days, always concluding with an interminable number of forty-yard sprints until the end of the season. Then for the first three years, it was B-team basketball. And in the spring, baseball wasn’t super fit exercise, but Mike Dixon and i, along with most town boys at one time or another played pickup  basketball games almost every day, weekends included, and Mike and i were known to play one-on-one after baseball practice  and would have until the cows came home, but Mrs. Fahey would kick us out because her apartment wall abutted with the gym proper wall, or we would realize it was past time for supper at home — and that’s when my mother was “fit” to be tied.

However, one thing i remember about “fit” back then in the dark ages was after JV practice had ended. Frank North was a football man, assistant coach to Stroud Gwynn. He also was our B-team basketball coach. We sort of played the way we wanted to play, and Frank would yell at us if we messed up — Pretty much the same in baseball, and i never understood why Jimmy Allen wasn’t the head baseball coach from the beginning. Now Frank was a nice guy who believed in us being “fit.”

Our practices began at two after the lone post noon-mess class — i must confess i don’t think i ever went to a 2:00 to 4:00 drill on the drill field. Football, basketball, and baseball practice always conflicted. Practice ran about forty-five minutes. But did we call it a day and either go home or back to our barracks? Nope. Frank had us running. There wasn’t a great deal of places to run during basketball season. As the varsity took to the court, we climbed the stairs to the fans’ seating area.

Now i loved that old gym, but it was not conducive to large crowds. Seats were one long bench across each side and about four rows of the same bench seats in the west end zone, all in the balcony. There was only a wall on the east end of the court, no balcony. In big contests, cadets sat on the balcony floor with their feet hanging over the edge. i’m guessing the capacity probably topped out at less than one hundred.

But that balcony was a good place for Frank North to have us run. And we did, all the way through varsity practice. We ran in a single line. When we got to the east end wall, we would turn, jump up on the bench seat, run around to the other wall, turn and jump down from the bench seats to the balcony floor and repeat. Lap after lap.

i don’t recall ever really being tired from those runs.

i was fit.

The most fit (not fittest as some folks believe) i’ve ever been.

Now when i get up from a chair, i often think about how fit i was. Didn’t smoke until i graduated. Didn’t drink. Didn’t even drink coke. That stuff would cut your wind, they said. Just ran and played some kind of ball nearly every day.

Until the cows came home.

Note: For those who aren’t from Lebanon or younger than fifty, “Goober” may not be understood. At Castle Heights Military Academy, the senior (high school) cadets called the junior (elementary school) cadets “Goobers,” i.e. peanuts. Somehow, i guess, some Lebanon High School boys decided “goober” was enough of a derogatory term and began using it for all of the Heights attendees. As we did in those days, we didn’t take umbrage unless it was detected the issuer of such a label was mean in intent — as the Virginian said, “Smile when you say that” — and it became a term we laugh about and simultaneously take pride in still today. We don’t whine about “Goober” needing to be eradicated from history.