‘Advertising God Since 1918′

It was the era of Burma Shave signs — those pre-interstate-highway years when oversized barn signs screamed “See Rock City,” or when other barns pitched tobacco ads like “Chew Bull Durham.” It was the fading heyday of two-lane highways when billboards appeared just off the road’s edge — sometimes dramatically so, while one’s car or truck pulled out of a sharp curve. It was way back when logos and signs and making one’s mark were viewed differently than today.

More peculiarly, it was when road signs that proclaimed ”Prepare to Meet God,” or  ”Get Right with God,” or “Jesus Is Coming Soon” appeared alongside highways all across America. To some, these were affirming messages — but to others, the seemingly ubiquitous religious slogans were annoying, even startling! The fact is, though: One Appalachian minister named Henry Harrison Mayes made most of them.

Had he sought publicity, Mayes might have become the era’s most famous resident of our hometown. But he did not. So during the 1950s most in our town viewed him as harmlessly eccentric, “a character,” a man of singular passions — the kind of person whom Charles Kuralt would champion when the CBS journalist began broadcasting “On the Road” reports from his journeys across America.

Among those of us who grew up in that mountain-rimmed valley, Mayes was known as ”the Sign Man” or “the Cross Builder.” He lived near the valley’s center in a cross-shaped house. He kept its lawn filled with cross-shaped signs. I never saw him in a car or truck. Instead, he rode a bicycle onto which a religious message board was attached. But most vivid of all, he created a massive cross of electric lights; that cross still hangs about ten feet from the ground along a mountain at the base of our town’s main avenue, and every night, the cross gleams above the entire valley, as if the sign were floating.

Mayes’ crosses were not some ploy of the Ku Klux Klan (which used crosses to send racist messages). Instead, Mayes was a sincere, humble man on a self-perceived mission. He designed, constructed and transported all of these signs at his own expense — at least that’s what we understood. Indeed, a host of other lore sprang up about the Cross Builder: That he had erected signs in virtually every state in the union; that he had named his children after earth’s planets (as part of a commitment to perpetuate his mission into outer space); that he even donated signs to NASA for future use on earth’s moon or on other planets. The stories seemed endless. Today, some of Mayes’ items are on display in the Museum of Appalachia in Norris, Tennessee — affirming that despite the man’s gnarly attributes, he was real.

In a sense, Mayes was to religious road signs what Colonel Harland D. Sanders was to fried chicken. For much of both men’s lives, they lived about fifty miles apart. Sanders was about eight years older than Mayes. Each focused on something common, something the rest of us took for granted. Each fashioned that common thing into products of his own creation. Then each reproduced those products nationwide. One of Mayes’ slogans might have appealed to the colonel himself: ”Advertising God Since 1918″!

Each man also linked his dreams to highways, to automobiles, to trucks and to a belief that, somehow, success in that era was wedded to the future of highways. Today, concerns such as global warming and ecology cause us to question such assumptions. But as a boy, I simply saw both men coming and going in our town. I understood that each acted, thought and used words in unusual ways. Yet I could not see what they saw, as if I were spiritually and creatively blind to the reality that a person’s story isn’t finished until long after his death. We do not author nor finish our life stories.We are all rough sketches, works in progress, glimpses and drafts of stories yet to come.

Alive Only by Stories

Some family stories had powers that took me years to appreciate. With one group of stories, for example, my maternal grandmother kept her husband alive. His name was Hampton, and he had been killed by a workplace accident nearly a decade before my birth.

At his death in 1941, he was forty-two, she thirty-six, and they had six children. In the years that followed, over thirty grandchildren would be added to their descendants. Yet only their four eldest children possessed independent memories of him. For the rest of us, Hampton remained alive only because Grandmother’s habits and words kept him that way.

People called her “Dovie” or “Loris,” yet her actual name was Delois (The name itself is as ancient a word as Hampton. Delois is either a variant of an Italian/French name, De Loisio, which meant “of the law,” or it’s a variant of the Old English, Delores, which meant “sorrowful”).

According to family stories, she relentlessly grieved his death for months. My own mother remembers Dovie spending day after day, face down across his grave. Years later during my youth, Dovie kept a framed photo of him hanging directly behind her chair in the homeplace living room. One could not visit there without his image looming above Dovie when she gravitated toward that corner beside the hearth and habitually sat beneath his portrait.

But it was her words and stories that brought Hampton’s hand-colored photo to life: Stories about the years when he worked in coal mines near Wise, Virginia. Others about their years in Maynardville, Tennessee, where he operated an auto garage and she, a cafe. Still others about them working together, operating a general store at the head of Big Creek near Sneedville, Tennessee. And stories from their final years together, when she ran the family farm and he worked construction jobs away from home–like the one where he was killed.

Through it all, he was a dreamer, and she, a rock. He took pride in well-shined shoes, while she loved developing lush, green pastures or raising healthy livestock. His singing voice inspired a myriad of congregations, but her laughter could trigger rainbows amid the darkest of storms. As a couple, they fit together like brandy and steak.

Tools in a toolbox on her backporch affirmed that, periodically, Hampton worked as a carpenter. In fact, a work desk that he made, I still use every day. But her stories burned in my memory that he fashioned coffins and gave them free to families who lost an infant or young child to death. A pair of gold wire-rimmed glasses and several hymnals remained from the years when he taught so-fa-la shaped-note singing schools throughout east Tennessee; but it was her stories that explained how my own parents first met at a singing school which Hampton conducted.

So, yes, I know that stories afford great powers. I have one grandfather, at least to my mind’s understanding, who only exists for me to write about because Grandmother Dovie loved him enough to keep telling his stories.

East Tennessee Porchtalk….

On weekends, my parents took me fifty-five miles south into East Tennessee where we visited relatives. Most of their homes contained a front porch. Indeed, my paternal grandfather’s house featured one continuous porch that graced every side of his house’s T-shaped floor plan, and each of its rooms opened onto a porch. Of course, this was the era before air conditioners, so porches (and trees that surrounded them) conditioned the air naturally.

Except on the coldest of days, we visited with relatives on their porches. For most of three seasons (spring, summer and autumn) they enjoyed sitting outside. Did that preference have its roots in our Cherokee ancestry? (Their most popular tribal designs for homes included three-sided, roofed huts that used awning-like animal skins to cover the huts’ fourth sides; and those animal skins, when propped up by poles, functioned like a porch.)

In any case, porchtalk in our families always included storytelling. We told stories about family members who had died or moved away, as if retelling the stories could, somehow, draw us closer to the family members who were gone. We also told stories about favorite family moments (holidays or various rites of passage like births, baptisms, weddings or funerals). Interestingly, most family members told the same stories the same way. If someone happened to alter a detail, several listeners would interrupt and correct the storyteller! So our stories were as much a set of recited rituals as they were group memories and lore.

In addition, our family storytellers often used the porch as a stage. The more important or dramatic the story, the more likely the storyteller was to stand up, to involve himself or herself with gestures and movements, and for children and other listeners to crowd along the porch’s edge — not unlike the way modern audience members crowd stages at rock concerts or the way Shakespearean audiences crowded the stage in outdoor theaters.

It was on a porch — just the two of us sitting side by side – that Alf, my paternal grandfather, taught me “The Lord’s Prayer.” On that same porch, at later dates, he recounted stories about how his grandfather (my great-great grandfather) dealt with having been born out of wedlock. Or how both of my great-grandfathers turned to moonshining and bootlegging in order to survive turn-of-the-century poverty in Appalachia.

For us, porches provided unusual privacy, an almost sacred site for communicating, and familiar chairs and vistas for soulful talks. “I wouldn’t own a house that didn’t have a porch,” one of my relatives repeatedly declared. I vividly recall the night, during the late 1950s, when the family conducted a wake for Stog, my maternal great-grandfather. He had died at the age of ninety-four, and his home overflowed with four generations of descendants. Suddenly, a loud crash interrupted the mourning. The homeplace’s long, wooden back porch collapsed under the weight of family and friends who had lingered there too long.

I also remember, a few years later, when deterioration necessitated that Alf tear down whole sections of his home’s continuous porch. He brought Grandmother to stay with us, and he explained, “Mom will be too upset” if she remains at home while workmen “tear her beloved porches off.”

So, yes, long before books or television or radio influenced me, I learned to love stories and to become increasingly fascinated with words and languages, primarily because of East Tennessee porchtalk. Our churches relied on pulpits, our schools on auditoriums, our courthouses on courtrooms, and the best of our mountain homes cherished porches most of all.

In fact, the love of porches may be universal. In a Ray Bradbury book, Switch on the Night, published in 1955 (about the same time as my childhood experiences detailed here), he wrote: “Heaven is a house with porch lights.” And somewhere in heaven, my Appalachian ancestors like Alf and Stog surely agree.

Appalachia’s Rich Traditions

We didn’t have a television until 1954. Even then, watching TV in eastern Kentucky wasn’t much. We got one channel, a CBS affiliate out of Knoxville, Tennessee. Interference frequently disrupted its broadcasts. The station offered more “dead air time” than shows. And except for an hour or so each day, mostly when we turned our TV on, its screen simply displayed “snow” or a “test pattern.” To us, television was just a novelty. We watched a few programs each week, but it contributed almost nothing to our lives or to my early fascination with words.

The same had been true for radio. Our home had one, but Dad disliked it playing music (Mom was the music lover). She had no interest in the sports (which he and I liked). So the radio–trapped between my parents’ individual tastes–usually sat in silence. More importantly, the Appalachian mountains that surrounded our valley home also blocked us from most radio frequencies until after dark. During the day, our radio reception included only a few, local stations, and most nights, we went to bed before our radio’s reception improved. That’s why radio didn’t influence me much, either.

So if neither books nor television nor radio influenced me, what triggered my early fascination with words and language. The principal influence was our Appalachian culture and its rich, oral traditions of porchtalk, storytelling, testifying and preaching. Prior to entering the first grade, I had no other exposure to powerful uses of language.

‘…Words Will Never Hurt Me’

It was a taunt that, during the 1950s, girls yelled when arguing with one another on our elementary-school playground: “Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but words will never hurt me!”

We were children in an Appalachian school, but I hated that chant. My spirit protested with the thought: Words have great power, and regardless of what you chant, words really can hurt!

I felt a similar resistance when Mother used the retort, ”It’s just words!” She said that, dismissively, anytime someone got upset about what she or others said. Once again, something within me rebelled. Her saying “just words!” flew in the face of the responsibility I felt for using words.

All in all, it was a tough lesson I was learning: Not everyone loved language as I did. Words were not alive to them, not wellsprings, as they certainly seemed to be to me.

Two decades later, when I was in my twenties, some important women in my life would chastise me about my views of words, language and ideas. “He would eat them if he could,” one said disparagingly (to a mutual friend) about my love of books. “You do know that ideas are not real,” another woman yelled angrily during an argument with me, then added: “I say that, and yet I repeatedly watch you act as though ideas are more real than people. You’re nuts!”

Of course, I knew then (as I do now) that people are real in that shared reality we call sanity, and that words are real in a different sense. However, I don’t really understand how — even as a child — that I came to intuit these feelings and ideas.

Our home did not teach me the sanctity of words. It contained only a handful of books: A copy of the Woman’s Guide to Health, a copy of the King James Version of scripture, a New Testament that Dad carried during World War II and the published history of his battalion in Patton’s Third Army. That’s it, until the late 1950s when my parents purchased Childcraft and World Book sets for my sister and I to use.

So what was the source of my reverence toward language and words? As far as I can tell, the source was Appalachian culture….

Presidents, Pinhookers and Patton

It’s unspoken among some on my father’s side of the family — how key words shaped our lives.

My great-grandfather — an uneducated and willful moonshiner, bootlegger and mountain farmer — became incensed when President Woodrow Wilson led America into the First World War. It seems that the president had campaigned on the promise that he would not send American soldiers onto foreign soil (at least that’s how my great-grandfather remembered it), but after the election, the president reversed himself.

History has vindicated President Wilson’s decisions, but at the time, my great-grandfather was enraged. He repeatedly, and publicly, criticized the president and, in the process, verbally threatened the president’s life. That led to my great-grandfather being arrested. Words matter–particularly if one uses them to threaten a president.

The shame and controversy that surrounded my great-grandfather’s life irrevocably affected my grandfather. At the time, Alf was just a boy, although a resolute one. At the age of twelve, he broke a team of oxen, built a wagon, hooked the oxen to it and left home. Alone, he travelled north to Harlan County, Kentucky. There, he became a pinhooker — meaning that he gathered or bought loose coal and resold it for profit.

After a year or so, my manchild/grandfather earned enough money to return home and begin sharecropping. By age seventeen, Alf also started to preach — as if words of the younger might somehow redeem the elder. Then two decades later, during the Second World War, our family came full circle, so to speak.

Dad — by the time I knew him — was a true man of action: “The strong, silent type,” which his era so admired. Yet it always puzzled me why my father was so silent. I got only one clue, just before Dad died. He gave to me a small card that he had carried in his billfold for half a century. I never knew him to cling to words or quotations, except for this card, which contained the now-famous prayer:

Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies and establish Thy justice among men and nations.

My father (and about a quarter of a million other soldiers) received this card from Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. on December 22, 1944. On the reverse side, the card contained a personal message:

To each officer and soldier in the Third United States Army, I wish a Merry Christmas. I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. May God’s blessing rest upon each of you on this Christmas Day. G. S. Patton, Jr.
Lieutenant General
Commanding, Third United States Army

In an inexplicable way, it had all come full circle. My father — serving as a Third Army soldier during the Battle of the Bulge — received a prayer card. His life was on the line, literally. He was living out what my great-grandfather protested against, during another war, a generation before.

But there was one thing more. December 22, 1944 was my parents’ second wedding anniversary. Dad, separated from Mother by an ocean and a war, somehow bonded with this tiny card, its prayer and its Christmas greeting.

Who knows what Dad really experienced? All I do know is that stories like these, which I first heard as a boy, helped convince me that words matter. For words landed my great-grandfather in prison, words became my grandfather’s route to redemption, and Patton’s words somehow filled my silent father’s soul.

Like Marks that Last

Last night I located it: That old scar on my right side, parallel to my navel, just above the waistband of my underwear or pants. But my middle-aged eyes can no longer see it. I only found it by slowly examining my sides with my fingertips. Soon, my right thumb discovered the scar’s deep, ridged tissue. After fifty-four years, it remains. The emblem has not vanished.

I call it an emblem, but it’s actually the result of a fleeting, childish moment, a simple accident when I was three years old. That was long before I went to school or learned to read or write, but also before I held a book or understood how books relate to language. So this scar reminds me of my earliest experiences with words.

These are the facts: Mom was pregnant with my only sybling, a sister. I felt threatened, jealous or needy at the time (who knows?). I was an attention-seeking three-year-old, dressed only in underwear and perched atop the seat of a kitchen chair.

Nearby in the floor were rows of sealed Mason jars. Earlier, Mom had filled some of them with cooked tomatoes and others with tomato juice. Later, when Dad came home from work, the jars were still cooling.

Mom ushered him into the kitchen to admire her day’s work, then giggled and called out to me, ”Come, show your father how you entertained me this afternoon.”

That’s when I crawled onto the kitchen chair and began imitating how my grandfather looked and sounded when he preached. I groaned, chanted, shouted for emphasis and rolled words in my mouth. I gestured broadly, squatted, lept and kicked. I acted as if I were in a trance.

My parents laughed, encouraging the performance, but suddenly I lost my balance and toppled onto the Mason jars. Several shattered. Tomatoes, tomato juice and my blood squirted in various directions. That’s when Mother’s laughter turned to screams….

A half century later I ponder that incident — not because I fell, injured myself or terrified my parents — but because it reveals how captivated I really was by my grandfather’s use of language. Like an ancient soothsayer or a native American medicine man, like early Christians who spoke in tongues or celebrated writers under the sway of muses, our family’s preaching patriarch was marked by the gospel as words. “When I preach like that, I’m in the spirit,” he later told me. And that ancient style of preaching marked me. It seized my imagination. It was one of the earliest forms of language usage that I studied. I studied it enough that, even as a small child, I could imitate it. I’ve got the scar to prove it!

Papaw’s words mattered to me — even before I understood them. His words possessed power. And I wanted to emulate that.

During his long ministry, Papaw founded seventy-seven mountain churches. People called him “Alf,” but his actual name harkens back centuries ago to England’s poet/king, Alfred the Great.  My Appalachian grandfather baptised, conducted weddings or funerals or ordinations for, or he counseled, thousands of people. Therefore, even though Alfred’s formal education stopped in the third grade, his words mattered. They left their marks.

‘Rose is a rose’ Is NOT!

I was at a loss for words when I first read a version of this blog entry’s title. Clearly, Gertrude Stein was smarter than I. But I gathered she was playing off Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (”… a rose by any other name…?”), which I did understand. Gradually, I decided that the word, rose, evokes the reality of a rose. That must be Stein’s point, I concluded. In addition, her idea bolstered my growing belief that words matter. Words have power. Words evoke.

Years earlier, when I was three years old, my father struggled one night to make me sleep. As an incentive, he promised to take me hunting with him the next morning if, in fact, I immediately went to sleep. His words had power. I easily fell asleep.

The next morning, I awakened, dressed in fifties’ era jeans, shirt, cowboy vest, chaps and boots (a child’s version, anyway), then rushed to the kitchen for breakfast. But Mother said matter-of-factly that Dad had gone.

A half century later, I can still recall the rage — yes, rage — that overwhelmed my three-year-old self. His words the night before had real power. They evoked an image. My child brain, the next morning, expressed that image as best I could by the clothes I put on. But when reality hit me, rage followed like a smack.

That’s the first time I remember being at a loss for words. My mind could not conjure up words for that hurt. And devoid of words, my spirit raged. Yes, that day, words really mattered. And their absence, transformed into rage, felt as crimson as a rose.

At a Loss for Words

For years, I was rarely at a loss for words. I’m from a family of porch talkers, tellers of tall tales, jokesters, a preacher/patriarch, some local politicians, several attorneys and more than a few people who love/loved words.

In that sense, many in our Appalachian family are word people — hence this weblog’s title, “Words Matter” — and often, I’ll be writing about experiences when words really do matter.

I’ve reached an age, however, when I find that some life experiences now leave me at a loss for words. So I’ll also be writing about moments when, somehow, words do not readily come.