Dedication

DEDICATION


“. . . to see those men whom God has placed above kings and ministers by giving them a mission to fulfill, rather than a position to occupy.”

Alexandre Dumas




These are magnanimous words but fatherhood is noble business. My father, a farmer, never read The Count of Monte Cristo, but he loved to read and to learn and he encouraged me to do the same.
I spoke with my father every day by phone during the last three years of his life. He always ended each conversation by saying, “I love you more than yesterday, but less than tomorrow.”
My father was not a rugged man, but he had the strength and courage to say what so many rough-hewn men dare to think. Each time he said “I love you,” he heaped diamonds, pearls and rubies into the treasure chest of my heart, and I am a rich man because of him.
Therefore, I dedicate this book to Harold Martin, a man who fulfilled a duty that some “great” men shirk. Nevertheless, the most honorable achievement for any man entrusted with the care of a child is the one in which my father excelled: fatherhood.

Foreward

FOREWORD

There is much good sleep in an old story.

German Proverb



“. . .Benny’s aimin’ to play all of these tapes when I’m gone. I hope they’re interestin’ to him.”

Harold Martin, Audio Journal


My father’s favorite book, which he read eight times, was Gone with the Wind. Wistful by nature, a lover of history, he, like me, would have loved to have a window through which he could look back to the past, particularly his own past. He spoke often and lovingly about the days of his youth, and I loved to listen to him.
During the last summers of his life, my father would sit often in a 1950s-era green metal lawn chair in his front yard on White House Road in Moneta. He would watch in awe as hundreds of cars a day would speed down a road that he recalled was once covered with gravel.
I never thought I would live to see a day when there wouldn’t be a single mule in this community, he once said from his perch, gesturing to the horse-drawn plow that still sits to this day under one of the willow trees. Just like that civilization of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, my father’s way of life was gone with the wind; the Moneta that he remembered as a farming community had been slowly but steadily swept away and engulfed by the larger Smith Mountain Lake community. Even the little hamlet of Moneta was all boarded up by the time he died. It resembled a ghost town in a Hollywood Western.
“We are a resort town now,” a store owner casually remarked to me during a conversation in early 2006.

My father told me much about the days when mules did the work of tractors and a trip to Bedford was a special treat. A raconteur with a dry sense of humor, he also had an uncanny ability to mimic some of the more comical characters in the community and even when I was a teenager, when I was sure that I was much smarter than he, I found his stories and reminisces both interesting and funny.
After my mother died in 1996 at the age of 56 from heart disease, my father’s own heart condition seemed to worsen quickly, so I began to write down on paper every funny story, joke, word of wisdom, wistful remark and farm fact that he ever told me. I gave him a cassette recorder to use when he felt inspired to share a story, and some of his remarks, now digitally preserved, appear in this work in italics.
For several years after his death, I sifted through musty briefcases, desks, dresser drawers and other nooks and crannies and discovered to be true what I had long suspected: my father was a packrat. However, the photos, receipts, advertisements and other bits of memorabilia speak volumes of both my father and his times.
I hope subsequent generations will not forget that Moneta was once a farming community. Though this hamlet has been transformed into one of Virginia’s premier vacation destinations and a resort town, many people who call it home now do not remember the graveled country roads and soft drinks in glass bottles bought from general stores. Surely they know little, if anything, of Dr. Sam Rucker and the small tool shed-size building where he treated patients like me as late as the 1970s. For them, I share some memories of another day. For them, I say, “Come and look through my window for a while.”

Someday, few people will remember that “Downtown” Moneta” was known once as the area of the village at the closed rail crossing, while “Uptown” Moneta” was further along State Route 122, past the library and post office, near the Shop Rite Grocery Store. This town had a bona fide country doctor, milk plant, post office, snack bar, train station and several general stores. So, here is my contribution, in words and pictures, to my hometown’s past, a past that should not be forgotten while we are enjoying the bounty of the present.
Dear Dad, you have no idea how interesting “the tales” have been!

A Hollywood Movie Set

CHAPTER 1

A HOLLYWOOD MOVIE SET

“Fame is a bee.
It has a song
It has a sting.
Ah, too, it has a wing”

Emily Dickenson


Even Tinseltown couldn’t save my hometown.
In the early 1990s, Touchstone Pictures filmed a portion of the movie, “What About Bob?,” which featured Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss, in Moneta, Virginia Who could have predicted that my school bus stop, an old, rickety, turn-of-the-century general store, which sagged mournfully under the weight of its’ many years, would ever achieve cinematic fame? How did a major motion-picture company ever find this little place for its film?
Moneta’s brief fame, demise, and, now, resurrection, is due to Smith Mountain Lake. This 500-mile shoreline body of water was created by Appalachian Power Company in the early 1960s when a dam was built at Smith Mountain Gap. Though the primary goal of the project was the production of electricity, a recreation destination was obviously expected to be a by-product of the effort. When the $66 million dollar project was completed in 1966, yacht clubs, marinas, public boat launches, an airport and a state park followed. People came from all over the United States both to relax and to live in one of the surrounding counties, giving credence to a truth purported in another film, “Field of Dreams”: “If you build it, they will come.”

Until the late 1990s, State Route 122 was intersected by the railroad tracks of the old Virginia Railroad. Those tracks essentially cut Moneta in half. Due to increased traffic by a rising population and the danger of fire and rescue squad service being blocked from parts of the community when trains passed, the Virginia State Department of Transportation closed the railroad crossing and constructed a bypass for Route 122 around the little village. Quaint little Moneta was gone.
Though I grew up only a few miles from the lake’s shore, I never learned how to swim. I rode a boat twice. I fished more in the Rock Castle Creek that bisects our farm than I did on Smith Mountain Lake. Yet the lake was an important part of my experience growing up on what had been a 140-acre tract of land my father dubbed The Kasey Seats Farm. Tourists, boats and water skis meshed in my boyhood experiences with tractors, barns and milk cows.
Thank goodness for those tourists who helped sustain our family meat-packing business and other area enterprises! Once, a patron in our store made a prophesy long before the bypass came through town: “You’ better hope that this place stays a secret, or so many people will move in here that one day you won’t be able to recognize it.” She was right. Though Moneta remained no more than an abandoned movie set for a few years after Disney packed up, a new Moneta is, as of this writing, under construction.
Long before he died, my father gave up trying to recognize everyone who traveled along White House Road. When he was a child, he said, you might see only three or four cars travel the road each day. He often recounted the time when his younger brother, Jack, who, when hearing a car approach Ayers’s School, which was a one-room schoolhouse on White House Road on the site where my Granddaddy Martin would later build a home, raced first from one window to watch the sole automobile pass until it was completely out of sight.

Probably, White House Road would still be a relatively quiet, though paved, little country road had it not been for Smith Mountain Lake. Certainly, Moneta would not have been known by Hollywood had it not been for it. Those first tourists who came here to boat and fish were customers in all of our businesses and have become our neighbors and friends. Now, several generations removed, they, too, are part of the rich history of this area. A new town is being built all along the bypass, and another generation of residents will live, work and die here.
I grow a bit wistful, though, when I realize that the days are gone when travelers on Route 608 would sit in their cars at that old railroad crossing and wait for the train to pass. When I was a boy, I looked forward to hearing a train whistle as we approached the crossing because it meant we would have to sit and wait for it to pass. It was fun to count the cars as they sped by, to watch the tracks bounce up and down under the weight of their heavy load, and to anticipate its end so that I could wave at the man in the caboose.
Though there are few visible reminders of the Moneta I recall from those days I caught the school bus at the old general store, the railroad tracks are still where they were over a half-century ago. The trains still come through Moneta, and they make the same familiar, wonderful sound now as they did then. The people I remember from those days are gone, but several generations of non-farmers have lived here since Smith Mountain was built and they have respect for the areas’ history and its’ farming past. Moneta will have a new generation of shops, restaurants, and even a “Mayberry”-style community. So, instead of a ghost town with boarded up shops, Moneta is thriving. Just like those heavy rail cars carrying their load down the tracks, life here keeps rolling right along, too.
I wonder, though, if TouchStone Pictures producers could find a suitable backdrop to film another movie in this area now that the picturesque hamlet of Moneta is gone. Only time will tell if the capricious bee of Fame will find another suitable flower in this lovely section of Bedford County upon which to rest. It is one sting that this community would, probably, love to have again.

A Man of the Land

CHAPTER 2


A MAN OF THE LAND

“If a man owns a little property, that property is him, it’s part of him, and it’s like him. If he owns property only so he can walk on it and handle it and be sad when it isn’t doing well, and feel fine when the rain falls on it, that property is him, and some way he’s bigger because he owns it.”

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath


“This story begins some 63 years ago, approximately December 10, 1932. That’s when we moved over to the Dabney Place. I remember the day very well. Willard, Jack and me (my father’s brothers) got off the truck down here at my grandmother’s place at the foot of the hill here and the rest of them went over to the farm to start unpackin. We got so wild that along about 11 or 12 0'clock, our grandmother walked us through the woods up by what is now Jackie Tuck’s place over to the farm.
We lived there for 25 years and had a pretty good time there. We had plenty of food. We raised wheat and corn and pork. A fellow asked my brother, Willard, one time how we made it through the Depression. Willard said that we didn’t even know it was going on because we had this farm and plenty to eat and our daddy had a job at the American Viscose in Roanoke. That lasted until the late 1950s when the plant closed down.
Mr. Hurt and some different men lived on the farm and helped us. Finally, Aubrey Krantz came and stayed quite a few years. We lived a pretty normal life. Later on, Daddy got sick and had diabetes. He sold the farm and moved over to the Kasey Place.
The Kasey Place was sold two or three times. It seemed that all of the Martins owned it. Finally, me and Willard got it in the late 40s, then I bought it from him in 1948. We lived there about 5 years. I remember how his first wife, Ann, used to cry because she was from the city and had never lived in the country before, but she pulled through.
One of the things Mama Jirdie (my father’s paternal grandmother) told me was that where our house is now was once called the Kasey Seats. There were church services that went on here on Sunday evenings.”

The Audio Diary of Harold Martin



My father had, as all farmers do, reached down many times and grasped a clump of earth in his hands, held it, contemplated it, and felt a kinship with it. Whether the soil was dry because of drought or rich and fertile due to prayed-for rain, he was one with the land. At the end of his life, he was able to understand just how much he had loved it.
One summer afternoon in 1995, while sitting in the front yard under one of the willow trees, my father recorded a bare-bones account of his life on the Kasey Seats Farm. The steady pace of the July tourist traffic can be heard in the tape’s background. Since my father, unbeknownst to him, lived by the Shakespeare dictum in Henry V that men of few words are the best men, he left out a few details about his life.
During his lifetime, my father moved only about five three miles from his birthplace and he enjoyed only a few travels away from home. He took a seventh-grade class trip to Washington, DC in 1938 (with the requisite $5.00 in spending money); he traveled to Tennessee several times to visit his brother, Willard and while there visited parts of Kentucky. Once, with my mother, he took a bus trip through the Pennsylvania Dutch country. When he worked with my grandfather, who was a construction superintendent for a large firm, as a timekeeper and general laborer on various high school construction sites, he worked in Danville, Blacksburg and Culpeper, Virginia.
My father was a farmer, but not a rugged man in the image of a John Wayne or a Matt Dillon. Rather, he was a John-Boy Walton who did not pursue his college dream. He held education in the highest regard from his early teenage years until his graduation from Huddleston High School as Class Valedictorian in 1943. For my father, teaching was the most noble of all professions. He taught Sunday School for 30 years and spent hours each week preparing his lesson. He was an avid student of Thomas Jefferson’s life and the era of the antebellum South. He relished trips to Monticello, Appomattox and the Booker T. Washington National Monument.

My father’s youthful ambition was to teach. My Grandma Martin and her sister, Sally, attended Radford State Teacher’s College, now Radford University, in 1921 for two six-week summer sessions to earn first-grade teaching certificates. Upon graduation, my Grandma Martin came home and taught at Ayers’ School, a typical one-room schoolhouse that was composed of the first seven grades. In my grandmother’s spare time, she and her sister taught their father, Bruce Thomas (B. T.) Huffman how to read and to write. My father loved to tell me this story because he thought it was an act of great love, and he kept my Grandma Martin’s teaching certificate until his death.
Often, my father would recall that his high school years included the chores of helping his siblings with homework and corresponding with their teachers when necessary. He would lull his sister, Sue, to sleep while studying, rocking her crib with his foot while he rocked himself back and forth in a rocking chair. In 1943, the erstwhile student, who dreamed of becoming a Latin teacher, set out with his high school diploma and valedictorian award to pursue his dream.
During his senior year at Huddleston High, my father said he wrote to “every college in the South” to obtain admission information. But, for a meek, sensitive farm boy, traveling out of state would have been akin to traveling out of the country. Instead, he opted for nearby National Business College in downtown Roanoke. He tried to commute from home, but the combination of a long drive on winding country roads, the farm work that awaited him when he got home, and a youthful lack of self-confidence overwhelmed him. Soon, he left school.
For the rest of his life, my father recalled his last day at National Business College. He had finished the withdrawal paperwork and was leaving when he encountered one of his professors on a stairwell. A few steps above my father, the teacher looked down and said, “Martin, you’re leaving us already? I’m sorry to hear it.”
“I should have turned around and stayed,” my father often said.

Granddaddy Martin, though, felt he had made the right decision. He had wanted his son to be at home on the farm like the other boys in the community. Now my father would be where he should be, “where he belonged.” With Granddaddy’s help, my father bought his farm, which was originally 140 acres, and he built a dairy barn. Soon, he was milking a herd twice a day, seven days each week.
But the Coble Milk Plant in Moneta (where Lake Christian Ministries is now located) eventually closed, and my father, like his father before him, had to find work off the farm to support his family. He joined the construction firm that employed my maternal grandfather and from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, they worked on elementary and high school job sites in southwest Virginia. When my grandfather was forced to retire due to work-related injuries in 1973, my father found work first at Rubatex Corporation in Bedford (he was laid off after three months) then at Klopman Industries in Bedford. It was his last job at a meat-packing facility in Evington, though, that changed all of our lives.
My Uncle Willard, my father’s oldest brother, had a successful surveying business in Knoxville, Tennessee. Soon after my father took the meat-packing job, Uncle Willard began the difficult task of convincing my father that he should go into business for himself by operating his own slaughterhouse. Uncle Willard even offered to finance the venture. My father, though, proved to be an initial hard sell. Yet, after friends and family helped to convince him that he should take a gamble, my father, after firmly but graciously refusing his brother’s kindness, decided at the age of 50 to roll the dice and give the business a try.
Martin’s Meat Processing opened in 1975. It became a success not only because it met the need of a large number of farming families that still butchered an animal for family consumption, but my father, just like his father before him, was an extrovert. His personality, combined with my mother’s own sociability, was tailor-made for the public, and their business prospered. In later years, as my father prepared to retire, he phased out custom slaughtering to sell retail cuts of meat to the Smith Mountain tourist trade, and both my parents and grandparents made new friends.

When he assumed the nicely fitting role of gentleman farmer and business owner during the last quarter of my father’s life, he finally became comfortable with the path his life had taken. He loved to talk about farming and farming techniques. He was fascinated by Thomas Jefferson’s farm at Monticello and how the President had made wise use of his resources. He made soap with beef fat and lye and sold it to customers in his store. He loved to explain to them how tobacco and corn was grown and harvested, how to raise cattle and when to plant certain vegetables for a garden. He loved to regal them with farming stories from the days before tractors and hay balers.
My father had taken a gamble when most of us have lost the energy to take one. He had taken a huge bet, though, and won. Armed with a strong religious faith, sustained by the help of a loving brother, family and wonderful customers, he had achieved a comfortable level of success. He would always regret not fulfilling his youthful ambitions, but he had been offered a second chance to make a living on the Kasey Seats farm and he did not waste it.
Farming, Dwight Eisenhower writes, looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field. My father dreamed of using a pencil instead of plow but he let his life take another turn. However, his sacrifice, fight and struggle on his land gave him a love for the land and, eventually, a love for the life that he chose. He was proud that he, too, like Jefferson, was a farmer. “I have done what I came here to do,” he told me several months before he died. He was telling me that his life’s work was over. But, he was also satisfied by his life. My father was satisfied, too, that his hard work had given his son the opportunity to use the pencil he did not get to use.

A VIEW FROM THE PORCH

“Nothing impresses the mind with a deeper feeling of loneliness than to tread the silent and deserted scene of former throng and pageant.”

Washington Irving


While visiting my father and grandmother one Sunday afternoon in the late 1990s , I told my father that I wanted to leave the city and build a home near the Kasey House (more on this in a moment). I would make the daily one-hour commute to my job in Roanoke with WVTF Public Radio, raise a few head of cattle, have a big garden every year, and cut firewood for the stove I would have in my spacious basement. Patiently, my father would listen to me dream aloud while we sat at the kitchen table, and then he made what was for me a curious observation about my future:
“Just remember that when I’m gone, this place won’t mean the same to you.@
I couldn’t understand this sentiment because he spoke often and affectionately about the past. Besides, I loved this 98-acre farm in Bedford County, Virginia, and he knew it. I first thought he was trying to convince me yet again that little money was to be made on a small farm, but he had already made and lived that point well over the years: “Its too far to drive every day, and you’ll just wear out your car, and you can’t work in the city and raise cattle in the country, “ were refrains that he could have set to music.
I never learned how to be a farmer. I picked up knowledge by living on a farm, of course, but I never plowed a single row or baled one bale of hay in my lifetime. I never raised a single cow, pig or chicken. What I know about agriculture, I had observed. I had, though, fulfilled his biggest dream for him (and for me), by earning a college degree. I had a good job, too. So, he had no reason to be scared that I wanted to come back home, uneducated, and with no prospects,

to tend a small farm and live in poverty.
“When we left the Dabney Place (the farm where he and his siblings grew up), we never did go back,” he said.
“Daddy, you didn’t have to go back! You can look out the kitchen window and see the Dabney Place from here!” I replied, nearly laughing aloud.
“Just wait and see.”
I will never feel differently about this place, I said to myself. My father and I never mentioned the subject again. I would, though, often recall the conversation. My overambitious farm plans depended on my father being around to “watch over things,” or to make sure I knew what I was doing. He would, I thought, enjoy letting me take over the responsibility of the cattle and the land. While I was at work, he could “put out the fires” that would occasionally crop up. With his experience and his counsel, I would continue a tradition. With him still around, the farm would still feel like home.
However, I did not take into account that my father was no longer able nor had a desire to put out fires. Farming a roughly one hundred-acre farm is always part-time work but a full-time responsibility. Sometimes, cows get through fences and out onto the highway. I would not be able to leave my full-time job in Roanoke to go chase cows in Bedford County. Finally, my plans did not take into account that my wife, Kathy, reared in the Raleigh Court area of Roanoke City, had no desire to live on a farm.
Finally, my fathers’ death ended all of my plans.
On a chilly weekday October afternoon, two months after my father died, I traveled from Roanoke back to his home to meet with a contractor who would replace the decades-old furnace that had worried my father for years (more on that later, too). Soon, my grandmother would take ownership of my boyhood home. Though her own home had fallen into major disrepair since my grandfather died in 1983, her new one needed plenty of work, too.

After my meeting, I went into the living room and sat down. Although there was about an hour of daylight left, I had closed the curtains to give me an extra measure of privacy; there had been many welcome condolence calls and visits lately, but on this day, I craved solitude. But the silence that I encountered this day was foreign, peculiar and unwelcome. Although a huge void had been left in my family when my mother died in 1996, this place had still felt like home.
Just a few weeks ago, my father and I had sat in the kitchen and talked while my grandmother prepared dinner. Now, just a few weeks later, the house was completely empty. My grandmother, who had lived with my parents during the last two years of my mother’s life and almost a year after her death, was now back in her own home and she came over with me only on Sundays to visit with my father. On this afternoon, with her gone, too, though, this place that had once been home was empty for the first time. An odd, unsettling stillness had crept in here; it was the silence that death leaves behind.
A thin layer of dust that had settled on the furniture during the past few months was an odd sight. The familiar smell of the home and its resident had faded away. Almost overnight, it had become just an empty old house that needed a new furnace. I didn’t sit and ponder this silence and this strange place for too long after the contractor left. No sooner than I sat down, I had to get up and leave. Sometimes, silence is not golden.
I walked outside and crossed the field separating my father’s home from the Kasey House. This dilapidated dwelling, which was built in the late 1870's by John Kasey, a former Bedford County government official, has been in the Martin family since 1939, the year my father’s uncle Garland purchased the 98-acre tract of land. After my father became the owner in 1948, he named the farm the Kasey Seats, because in the late 1800's, worship services were held on the very spot he built his home in 1955. The services were held outside, and makeshift pews were
fashioned from old boards laid across blocks and tree stumps.

Several barns and tool sheds were added to the Kasey House plot in the 1950's but they, like the old clapboard home itself, are slowly falling down. Since I was a young boy, I have enjoyed walking over to this farmhouse to stand inside the doorway of the little side porch that leads into the kitchen. From here, I would admire the view of the surrounding countryside that had always been, for me a lovely, peaceful panorama of beautiful pasture and forest. As a teenager, I would dream of the world that lay beyond those trees and dream of the day when I go out to see it.
The Kasey House played a prominent role in several generations of Martins, including mine. My paternal grandparents lived here in the late 1940's before building a house about a mile away, on the same road. Afterwards, my father, his older brother, Willard and his first wife, Ann, lived here briefly. In the early 1960's, after my parents had married, my maternal grandparents moved to the home site and tore down the house’s crumbling front porch and placed a mobile home on the spot.
On this October afternoon, I came to my hideaway to think about my recent loss. Many times over the years I stood here and let my mind wander in all directions while I admired the beautiful landscape and enjoyed the country silence. Now, though, this place was no longer as silent as it was when I was a boy playing in what had once been a front yard, when far less cars traveled White House Road.
Just as my father’s home had been a few months ago, the Kasey Place had once been alive, too. I could almost see my uncle in his cattle truck, pulling up the driveway to unload a new purchase of livestock; my grandfather at work in his tool shed; my mother and grandmother hanging clothes on the line in front of the cherry tree, and my father mowing hay on his tractor. I remember coming home one afternoon from school to find my first bicycle, which was a gift from my Granddaddy Martin, resting on its kick stand in the front yard.

But I saw only death and decay on this October afternoon. Even the Kasey House and my view had lost its appeal. It was now just a ramshackle reminder of a different way of life, in a very different time. I knew nothing was going to bring me solace on this day because I was grieving over my loss, but I also knew my life, and my life here on this farm, had permanently changed.
I went into the house, passed through the kitchen into the parlor, and almost tripped over an old cardboard box. A few old kitchen chairs, an old vacuum cleaner, ironing board, broken cups and saucers, old books, records and toys had cluttered the floor for years. My first bicycle, with three decades of rust on it, was part of the pile, sharing a grave with old magazines, records, and other discarded items from my family’s past.
Of all the junk in the room, the bicycle caught my attention. I remember how excited I was and how much I loved it its bright red color and white stripes. I must have seen that old red bike here a hundred times over the years, but today I saw just a rusted, useless piece of metal, beyond repair and appropriate in its tomb, an old, abandoned farmhouse listing toward the pasture separating it from my fathers’ house. Both its purpose and its time were gone, just like the rest of the junk that littered the parlor floor.
So this is what my father meant when he said the home place would not mean the same to me when he was gone. The past is filled with lots of old things that you just cannot or do not want to keep. We cannot or should not want to relive our past, but instead we should desire to live for today.
I looked around the parlor of this old farmhouse and was struck by the contrast from the living room I had just left. My fathers’s house use needed some work before my grandmother could move in, but, compared to what I was looking at now, the thin layer of dust on the lamps and the television didn’t seem so bad after all. Yes, the furnace needed replacing, the floors needed some work and the bathroom needed a complete makeover, too, but at least it was not as bad as this! Furthermore, my grandmother’s new home had all its windows and was not listing to one side!

As I walked out back through the field to my car, I recalled some of the many times my father said that he had enough trouble paying for his own home over the years to even think about restoring the old Kasey House. With no insulation and only a few small fireplaces in its two bedrooms and a small, coal-fueled Warm Morning stove in the parlor, it wasn’t a cozy, warm and toasty place to be, he recalled. As a teenager, you slept with as many blankets under you as you did over you because the draft beneath the straw mattresses was unmerciful. Blankets were like gold to farmers. His Uncle Lynn, Granddaddy Martin’s brother, once half-jokingly remarked that in his day a smart man looking for a wife would want to know how many quilts she had and if she knew how to make them at all (which my Aunt Beulah did)!
No, my father would say, the Kasey House would keep the rain and the leaves off of you, but little more. Furthermore, life was not a story book tale for my father when he had lived at the Dabney Place, or even here. For him, unlike me, there were no picture book images or views in his mind. He had worked hard here. He and my mother, in his words, had “made their stand” here. But for me, this place had been just a pretty place to look at.
Several months later, at a personal property auction, I sold that old red bike in the Kasey House. In hindsight, I almost regret it because my grandchildren could have had one more memento from their grandfather’s boyhood. But there’s barely enough room in my shed for their own bikes and toys, much less an old rusted one.
My view from the porch was beginning to change.
As I walked back to the house, I looked out into the backyard and saw Jackie Tuck, a friend and neighbor who first took care of the farm after my father died, and one of his sons, Tracy, in the pasture behind my father’s house. Father and son had borrowed my father’s tractor. Jackie was using the front-end loader to lift his son high up into the apple tree to get the fruit near the top before it all fell to the ground and rotted. I looked longingly at what they were doing. Then, I drove back to my own home, and life, in the suburbs.

LOVING YOUR NEIGHBOR


“Our prejudices are our mistresses; reason is at best our wife, very often heard indeed, but seldom minded.”
Lord Chesterton, Letter to His Son, April 13, 1752




“Today is May the 28th, 1998, and, it is Thursday. We are balin’ hay. We have hay rolled up and hay not yet cut. This has been the best hay year that we’ve ever had since we’ve been in this country. I talked to Jerry Meador yesterday and he said it was the best hay year that he had ever seen.
And while we we’re talkin’ about hay, I thought about Mamma tellin’ us that down yonder at the Tradin’Post (a nearby general store, a few miles from the house), there were two old black women and their brother that lived there, Dolly and Milly Hudson. Mamma said these women used to pull crab grass out of people’s corn fields and put it in bags to winter a cow. I thought today we could’ve easily carried them a roll if they were here now.
Now, these women, Dolly and Mille, they made baskets out of splits, and I used to go with Uncle Emmet Martin , that was Granddaddy Martin’s uncle and Grandpa Lee’s brother. He would go out in the woods and I would go with him and he would cut a little oak and make splits out of them. I’d go with him to carry them down there to them to make baskets. They were great at it, too. They would make you a bushel basket for a bushel of corn or a half a bushel basket for half a bushel of corn or a gallon and so forth down like that.”

The Audio Journal of Harold Martin


A slave is buried on the Kasey Seats Farm, and his grave site, I am told, is in the cow pasture somewhere along the Rock Castle Creek. Supposedly, the man escaped from a nearby farm, was chased into the pasture, shot, and buried unceremoniously where he fell. My father often wondered about the man who tried to free himself from his captivity and who had not been fortunate enough to escape his captors.

I do not recall knowing one black farmer during my childhood. At that time, African-Americans in our community had not progressed far past the level of Dolly and Millie Hudson. Of course, I knew more than one individual who worked for white farmers. Both my grandfather and my father hired young men from the community of African-Americans that still thrives along a portion of Hendricks’ Store Road, near the first Shoprite grocery, to get up hay each summer.
Ingrained in my mind from my earliest recollection was my fathers’ steadfast belief that “blacks have been mistreated in this country.” I have heard him say, while recollecting on the civil rights movements of the 1960s, that had he been born black, he would have gladly marched right alongside the other protesters. My father worked with my grandfather on a construction site in Danville when a group of high school students marching to the Municipal building were turned back by fire hoses and he recalled how shoes and clothes had been torn from their owner’s feet as they were driven back behind police lines.
My father, of course, had also seen instances of prejudice practiced against blacks closer to home. Once, at a Moneta business during the early 1940s, he witnessed a “colored” man whom he knew who was refused service because of the color of his skin. “They oughta had a sign in there that says ‘no niggers allowed in here’,” the embarrassed man said loudly as he walked back outside the establishment after being refused the purchase of several sandwiches. His remarks, my father reasoned, were not confrontational, but to salvage some measure of self-respect following his humiliation. Dejected and with his pride wounded, the man slighted himself to make his audience laugh and his humiliation easier to bear. If the crowd laughed with him, not at him, he could, perhaps, preserve at least a shred of his dignity.
“Now they could’ve taken that man’s money but they were too ignorant,” concluded my father.

Although I never asked him, I wonder if my father had ever felt guilty for not speaking up for his acquaintance, or even offering to go back inside the business and make a purchase for him. Probably, he did. Maybe fear of his own humiliation prevented it. Perhaps, being a young man, he was not offended over an incident that was, for the time, commonplace. But, as the years went by, he no doubt reflected often on the event and regretted that it happened. Though he was not and could not have been completely free from prejudice (he had used the “n” word and so had I), he knew it was ugly and wrong and he taught me that God made us all and loves us all the same.
My father must have thought about that missed opportunity often while watching the turbulent Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s unfold on the evening TV news. But overcoming prejudice entirely is not always easy to do. My parents enrolled me in a private school, Otterburn Academy, established in 1967 and located on Route 122, from grades 1-11 as a result of the white migration out of the nations’ public schools. Whether right or wrong, they did what they thought was best for me. My father would have gladly used his tractor to take hay, without charge, to Dolly and Milly Hudson. In our butcher shop, my parents would often give a discount to or include a free gift of meat to the poorer people in the community, who, regardless of their skin color, would come in shopping for the cheaper, end cuts of beef and pork. For them, it was just the right thing to do. A man with a tractor, able to help a neighbor, any neighbor, who was less fortunate, was, both to my mother and father, an obligation. As he looked back on other early events in his life, so, too, was helping a black man to make a simple purchase in a country store. He didn’t do that, but he shared the experience with me many times over the years and, in doing so, he taught me not to reject people because of the color of their skin. As Lord Chesterton would agree, it is best to mind the wife.

A KINDRED SPIRIT

“Have we not all one father? Hath not one God created us?”

Bible, Malachi 2:10


On a picture-postcard Sunday afternoon in October 2001, I stood on the fishing pier of Smith Mountain Lake State Park in Huddleston with a visitor from Uganda. The recent horror of September 11, 2001 seemed many worlds away from this quiet paradise. I looked at my new friend, who lived in a world that is many worlds different from mine, and pined that my father could not be here, too, to meet a man whose life would have undoubtedly fascinated him.
Wilson Okaka had just commented that Appalachian Power’s engineering feat was “a creative use of natural resources.” “Nature has blessed this place,” he said with a sigh, as we looked out over the vast expanse of water before us. Suddenly, this reverie was broken when his eyes caught what was, for him, a strange sight back on shore.
“Those fishermen are throwing their catch back into the water!” he cried in astonishment. “Back home, this is unprecedented. There would be a great tug-of-war if you tried to get a Ugandan to throw his fish back into the water.”
“These fellows were probably participating in a tournament,” I reasoned aloud. “We have lots of them here.”
“In Uganda,” Wilson, retorted, “men do not normally fish for sport.”

My guest’s visit to America was sponsored by the International Association of Audio Information Services, a membership organization of reading services providing the printed word to print-impaired individuals. Our course, developed in cooperation with the United States Telecommunications Training Institute, an organization offering tuition-free technical and management training in telecommunications and broadcasting to qualified participants from countries throughout the developing world, was How to Develop an Audio Information Service.
Wilson, who was 43 at the time of his visit, was president of the Northern Uganda Press Association. He was also a lecturer on Environmental Communications at Kyambogo University in Kampala. He has served as Assistant Secretary in the Ministries of Information, Labour, Energy and Culture and Community Development. His curriculum vitae lists 22 papers at various conferences and seminars throughout Africa and abroad.
Now, Wilson Okaka had traveled to Roanoke, Virginia from Africa to learn what I could teach him about radio broadcasting. I was in awe of this man, though. How can I justify his long trip to America after I have taught him all I know? Will it be enough? How can I ensure that he will have a truly worthwhile experience in this country?
On the shores of beautiful Smith Mountain Lake in Bedford County, I breathed a sigh of relief as Wilson viewed the spectacle back on shore. It would be just as important for him to see America and how Americans live as it would be for him to see WVTF’s transmitter atop Poor Mountain. Indeed, we would learn much from each other, and we did.
Wilson loved what he saw during his seven days in Virginia. Along with Smith Mountain Lake in Bedford County, he ate in a fast-food restaurant for the first time (King Burger, he called it), stared in amazement at the size of the Walmart Supercenter at Valley View in Roanoke, and visited my family farm. Proudly, I showed him a horse-drawn plow my father used as a boy, thinking he would be impressed by this piece of Bedford County agricultural memorabilia. I was humbled, though, when he said that he had seen many of them. Ugandans, he said matter-of-factly as he munched on an apple he had picked from a nearby tree, still use them.

Wilson did not come to Roanoke for a tour, though. He came to the United States on a mission. Ten percent of his fellow countrymen have vision problems which are due, in no small part, to inadequate health care. The rate of illiteracy in his homeland is absurdly high. Many people who can read are unable to afford to buy newspapers and magazines. At the time of this writing, the wage of the average Ugandan was 40,000 shillings a month. 2000 Ugandan shillings equal one American dollar.
The average Ugandan has no experience with cable television, DVD players or iPods. The average Ugandan does not even own a radio. As early as five years ago, there was only one government-operated station in the whole country. Now that the industry has been privatized, there are now about 70 stations, and Wilson sees in them an opportunity to bring the printed word to the vision-impaired and the illiterate.
Wilson took home a model of how we meet the needs of Americans who can no longer read standard newsprint. He was impressed by both the model and the cadre of volunteers we depend on to make it a success. He asked many questions. He read scores of newspapers, magazines, brochures and training materials I gave him. Then, he asked more questions.
“I am thankful to be here,” Wilson said to everyone he met.
I, on the other hand, was thankful to hear him express this sentiment. Though a great gulf separates our lifestyles, he was not critical of ours but, instead, applauded it. Less than a month after the horrific terrorist attacks on our soil, it was refreshing to hear someone from a developing country praise the United States and its way of life.
“If I were banished to a desert island,” Wilson said at our dinner table on his last night in America, I would only ask for two things: a radio, and a Bible.” A Bible in Uganda is both rare and expensive. In August, Wilson allowed himself an extravagance, and he purchased a new King James version at a cost of 20,000 Ugandan shillings. He plans on keeping it at his office.
“This way,” he explained, “if something happens to my old one,” I’ll have a bit of security.”

I knew my father well enough to know that had he been living to hear Wilsons’ remark, he would have given Wilson the keepsake Bible that belonged to one of his friends who had lived and worked on the farm where he had been raised. He never would have forgotten a story of such simple faith, and he would have told it often to others.
I had been feeling very insecure for the past few weeks. I looked at Wilson, a man who had no qualms about boarding an airliner and traveling 20 hours from home to a nation still reeling from one of the worst tragedies in its history. Wilson’s visit made me feel secure, and it gave me courage, too. How refreshing it was to remember that we are a very prosperous nation, and Wilson helped me to see just how much for which we have to be thankful .
“We have been very refreshed by what we have seen here today,” said Wilson when we left the dock at the State Park and headed back to the car. I looked at him and realized just how much this visit to America would mean to this man; it would be the trip of a lifetime.
Yes, Wilson, I thought, we have.