Hard work earned a buggy chassis and a whole lot of fun

Dad and brother Wix were hired to build a barn for Bryant Miller on a place that he bought out next to the old Wallace place. Louis Carter was living on the Wallace place now.

It seemed that when we would move, Louis and Ruth would rent a place close by. Louis rented Dad 40 acres that could be cultivated, across the road from his house. Dad had Bob and Charles turn the ground and work it up. Then he sowed the entire field in oats for a hay crop. This crop did so well that people were saying that Choc had more oats than Carter had liver pills. Mother’s cousin, Leonard, was a cattle trader as well as a farmer.

Leonard would saddle his horse and head out on Monday mornings and each week head a different direction. One week he would go to Huntsville and stop at farms and buy cattle. He had places arranged with families so that he could spend a night. He would go to Huntsville and hire a couple of young men with horses to help him gather the cattle he bought and drive them back to his farm.

Leonard bought mostly young steers as they would bring more on the market. He told Mom that he could buy her some good grade heifers for a reasonable price as there was no market for them. With Dad now out of a regular job, Mom thought it best to start her a dairy herd so she could sell milk and provide for her large family. During that year, Leonard bought her about 20 heifers, and that Carter’s oat crop sure came in handy.

One day David and I were on our way home from taking Dad and Wix their lunch when we passed the Ingle house. We saw a buggy chassis was pulled out of the barn. We stopped and asked if it was for sale. We didn’t have any money, but we thought we could some how trade him out of it. If we had to we could talk Charles into making some kind of a deal for it.

Mr. Ingle said he had no use for the chassis, if we would pull all the weeds out of his garden and feed them to the hogs, it was ours. When we got home, we told Mom of our deal, she said, “If you make the deal, you have to keep it.”

The next day we started pulling weeds and feeding them to the hogs. After a little over a week, we had all of the garden cleaned of weeds. Mr. Ingle came out and said, “The buggy chassis is yours.”

He helped David and me put on the shays. Then with David in the shays guiding and me pushing, we went up the road with our week’s work. Mother came out to inspect our endeavor and said, “You boys have done a good job, and have learned something in the process.”

David and I took the shays off the buggy chassis and put them in the garage to keep them dry. We then took lumber and fashioned a seat and footrests on the chassis. We tied some of Dad’s plow rope to the front axle so we could guide it. Now we had the best play toy we ever owned. We started near the garage and one would guide while the other would shove off. Then he jumped on and rode it down the hill to the apple shed.

When Dad came home, he told us that we weren’t to go down a big hill. We could ride it as long as we stayed on the small hill. A day or two later, Bob and his friend, Floyd Henson, came by and took over our play toy. As I have always said, “Bob will be a sergeant in the Army, because he acted like one from the day he was born.”

He didn’t know the meaning of “Would you, or may I?” He always spoke direct demands.

Now he and Floyd had taken over David’s and my buggy chassis and were riding it down the hill. They then decided to go over to the big hill. David and I told him that Dad said we were not to ride it down the big hill. They didn’t pay us any mind and up the road they went toward Henson’s pasture and the big hill. At the top of the hill they sang a verse of “Casey Jones” and with Floyd guiding, Bob pushed off and down the hill they went. About half way down the hill, they hit a big rock and were thrown upside down into a briar thicket. They worked their way out and started walking off until they saw Dad standing in the road watching them. Now Dad was the sergeant!

He said, “You boys got the chassis in the briar patch, and now you boys are going to get the chassis out of the briar patch and take it back where you got it. And don’t let me see you on it again!”

That was one time that David and I won our case. When Wix came home he looked the matter over and told David and me that he knew where we could get an old oval water tank that would just fit the chassis. He said that he could bolt it on and we could put the shays back on and we would have a one-horse cart. We could then harness Kit, the mare, and hitch her to the cart and go wherever we wanted. We thought it was a good idea, because we were carrying water a quarter of a mile. Now we could haul it. Wix put the tank on the wagon and it turned out to be the most useful thing on the place.

Dad told us we could use it for anything useful, but we couldn’t use the mare to joyride. Mother got three 10-gallon milk cans, now we didn’t have to carry water a mile for the quarter of a mile. We would go down the road to the gate near Frank Martin’s house and down the trail to the spring and fill up the three cans and two buckets and saved a lot of work. Frank Martin got two 10-gallon milk cans and we hauled water for Frank, too.

We now could hook up the mare and take Dad and Wix their lunch.

Naomi Martin and I were good friends and schoolmates. She asked me to go to church with her. They went to the Christian Church that was north of the high school. Frank and I would take the Model T Ford and he would drive to his mother’s house. She lived in the house east of the school that was later bought by the school. At this point, the children would walk to church and Frank would pick up his mother.

Grandma Martin was blind. One night she woke up the family and told them the schoolhouse was on fire. Although she was blind, she was sensitive to light. The fire was not the schoolhouse, but the lumber yard across the road from the school. The Martins later moved to Washington or Oregon.

Mrs. Martin was an Ingle and they lived next door to her family. The Ingles and the Martins were good neighbors and we enjoyed living neighbors to them. The Hensons were our neighbor on the north and they were good neighbors also. The Pitts visited mostly the Louis Carter family because we had known them for a long time. Ruth Carter was a Graham and Dad had known her before she was married, they both lived around Avoca. Mom would be the midwife when a Carter was born, and Ruth would return the favor when a Pitts was born.

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Editor’s note: Joe Pitts (19202008) was a native of Pea Ridge and regular columnist for the newspaper. He began writing a column for The Times in 2000 initially entitled “Things Happen” by Joe “Pea Patch” Pitts.