My Experiences in War and Business: One Man's Story of Success in America by Otis Earl Hawkins Foreword by Dan Quayle

Uncle Frank was known as the chief storyteller of O'Brien's Fork, West Virginia. One of his favorites was the story of Thurlow Dobbins. Thurlow lived in a one-room log cabin in a hollow. The only light came from a homemade tallow candle. He had to carry water from a spring that flowed from the side of a hill.

After Thurlow's teenage daughter had gone to Gassaway and had gotten a job in a restaurant, word came back that she had met a man, fallen in love, and married. He heard that his daughter lived in a house where, with the flick of a switch, the entire room became lighted and that fresh water was running right into her home.

One day, Thurlow decided to walk the twelve miles or so to Gassaway to see for himself if these reports were true. He met his daughter as she was leaving the restaurant and accompanied her to the little house where she lived. She flicked on the switch upon entering the front door and, to Thurlow's amazement, the entire room was lighted. He began running around the house checking the wonder of it all. As he came out of the bathroom, his daughter brought him a glass of water. "Father," she said, "after walking so far, I know that you must be thirsty. Here is a drink of water." "But I already drank," Thurlow replied, "I drank out of your spring."

While my uncle was known to exaggerate, this story very well could have been true. Some of the truly poor folks who lived in the cabins in the hollow with Thurlow may have lived their entire lives without venturing as far as Gassaway. The way to Gassaway was a narrow dirt road around the hillside adjacent to O'Brien's Fork from the mouth of the creek to its head. The road then crossed a hill the size of a small mountain and followed Little Otter Creek. Where the roads crossed the creeks, there were no bridges. With a few showers of rain, the road became a sea of mud. All travel was by walking or horseback.

During the 1920's and the Great Depression of the thirties, nobody on the creek owned a motor vehicle. Only occasionally, during the summer months, would a Model "T" Ford and later, a Model "A," venture down the creek road. It was usually necessary to stop driving after a few miles to patch the inner tube after the tires had hit a stone and had blown. The tube, when patched, and the tire, when replaced, had to be inflated with a hand pump. The man with the car became a hero, and many young men began dreaming of a job in Ohio. But that happened only when a man had gone to Ohio and had been lucky enough to find a job.

Years before, a railroad had been built across Braxton County. On the route from Elkins to Charleston, where it crossed Elk River, the small town of Gassaway had been built. With little more than a thousand people, it was the largest town in some forty miles. And, of course, they had modern conveniences there.

On O'Brien's Fork, we lived little differently from the early pioneers. With no electricity, there were no modern conveniences, no running water, and no bathrooms or inside toilets. There were no telephones, and radios, of course, were almost unknown. Mail was delivered in the valley each day on the back of a mule or horse. The only paper, the Braxton Democrat, came each week by mail to the very few who could afford the subscription price of $1.50 a year.

The creek and its tributaries were the home of some eighty families. Almost every family owned its own tract of land, usually about one hundred acres. These were called farms. There was usually enough level land along the creek to build a small home and some farm buildings. There was always a fenced-in plot of land where a wide variety of vegetables were grown. Most of the slopes had been cleared and were used to graze the family's animals. Usually, there was some better-laying land near the top of the hills where corn and other crops could be grown. Each farmer had a horse to plow the land and to do other kinds of work. Every farmer also had a few cows to provide milk for drinking and churning butter. Each farmer raised a hog or two for pork and had a flock of chickens. Most farmers had a basketful of eggs each week to take to a small grocery store to trade for the bare necessities. In the fall, when a cattle buyer came through, there would be a calf or steer sale. When families h ad a few dollars, they would order a few mail-order items from the Sears and Roebuck catalog.

It was normal for each family to own a dug well. A large hole would be dug into the ground by hand with a pick and shovel. When water started filling the bottom, the side of the well would be lined with a layer of stone. At ground level, the well was enclosed by a four-foot wooden wall that was built up around the well hole to keep people from falling in. Then, across the well hole, a roller was mounted so water could be cranked out of the well with a bucket attached to a rope.

Cooking and heating of water were done on an iron stove heated with a wood-burning fire. Since there was no running water, there were no indoor toilets or bathrooms. The toilets consisted of a tiny building out in the field known as an "outhouse." Since store tissue was unheard of, it was equipped with last year's Sears and Roebuck catalog and, in an emergency, a basket of corn cobs.

Since the small stores sold almost no food, bread was made mostly of corn. A bushel of shelled corn would be placed in a bag, put on the back of a horse, and taken to a small mill. The miller took a gallon of the bushel for toll.

My mother always told me that I was a large, healthy baby. She told me that I was bigger the winter before I turned five than I was at age seven. During that fateful winter, an influenza epidemic swept across the country, leaving a death in almost every family. In our family, it was a younger brother who died. While I survived, Mother blamed all of my problems on the flu. I had asthma. During damp, rainy weather, I had to be propped up in bed in order to breathe. My right eye had turned inward so that almost the entire eye was white. I was also highly allergic to eggs and any food with the slightest trace of eggs.

Grandpa Hawkins owned what was judged to be one of the better farms on O'Brien's Fork because he had a few acres of bottomland and his farm had a more gentle hilltop. It was usual for a farm to have a flock of chickens and a few pigs, but Grandpa also had a few extra head of cattle to sell each year. And when a company built a gas pipeline through our area, a good producing gas well had been drilled on Grandpa's farm. That company paid him $400 a year to keep the well, a large sum of money in those years.

My father was the youngest son and second youngest child in a family of nine children. Father built a small house beside Grandfather's and helped himself to Grandfather's crops of corn and other things as if he owned them. Father would sometimes find a few days' work with the gas company. Much of the time, however, he just seemed to be riding around on Grandpa's horse. Mother, who was four years older than Dad, did most of the planning and more than her share of the work. It was she who milked the cows and churned the butter. It was she who fed the chickens and the pigs. In the growing season, she raised a garden of vegetables. These vegetables were then canned and stored for the winter. I was the eldest of the children and there would be eight others. In the autumn, Mother would gather, shuck, and dry black walnuts. She would shell the kernels and ship them by parcel post to a buyer in Baltimore, Maryland. She would earn enough to buy my younger brothers and me each a pair of gum boots and some denims to wear during the winter. Until we were sixteen or so, we always went barefoot in the summer.

When I was seven, I entered a one-room school a mile away. There were forty-eight other students of all sizes; many were larger than the teacher in the class. The teacher was a small man who had gone to school in Detroit. Some of the boys boasted that when they were big enough to whip the teacher, there was no further need of schooling. Because of all of the fighting that year, the school got a bad reputation.

My second school year started seven weeks late. No one wanted the teaching job. Finally, a man was sent who had recently been released from an insane asylum. They said that he had never been crazy. He had just pretended to be insane to avoid going to the penitentiary. Crazy Good, as we called this man, had a huge amount of trouble maintaining any academic discipline. He was a big man, so none of the boys picked a fight. But no one was studying. Everyone was making noise or throwing wads of paper. One day, Crazy Good decided to whip the entire class. He went up and down the rows giving each boy and girl a few whacks. But he was crazy, and it was good that he happened to miss my row.

During my third year of school, my teacher was my cousin, Vena Moyers, who had been away to college. No big boys came to class. They would not study under a woman teacher. She demanded discipline from day one and informed the students that they would study and behave themselves or they would have to stay home. Our subjects were limited to the basics: reading, writing, and arithmetic, with a little history and geography. We had spelling bees to learn spelling.

Because of my one white eye, I was avoided. I was called "cockeyed" by some, an object of pity to most. This I would suffer throughout my entire school years. With no close friends, however, I had time to devote to my studies. The week of the spelling bee I would spend evenings at home trying to master every word in the spelling book. As a result, I soon became one of the best spellers in the school.

During the week of the arithmetic event, students would write columns of figures on the blackboard. This would include problems in addition, division, and multiplication. Again, I studied hard to win those events.

My formal education quickly passed. This was partly due to the way that we passed through books. When we finished one, we just moved on to the next. By the end of the year with this new lady teacher, I had finished all of the books in the school. I took the tests to graduate from the eighth grade and passed even though I was just eleven years old.

The year that I was in ninth grade there were only five in my class. The teachers of the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades were a young couple, Mr. and Mrs. Boggs, just out of college. Mr. Boggs taught English. This was the first time I had ever heard of nouns and pronouns. He also taught history-ancient and American. His wife taught arithmetic using a book called Business Arithmetic. It had chapters on all aspects of business, including banking, percentages, and every topic pertaining to running a small business. These two teachers tried to drill into us everything that they had learned in college.

In order to attend this school I had to walk four miles across hills to Rosedale. Later, I stayed with the family of my aunt who lived only three miles from the school. I learned a lot that winter from the young couple.

The next year, I lived with my aunt in Gassaway and went to school there. As a sophomore, after the year of intense learning in the small class of the ninth grade, it was easy for me to make 95 percent in the large classes at Gassaway. I learned very little that year and that would be the end of my formal education.

During my boyhood years, modern things began creeping into my life. The year that I was seven, word came from Gassaway that my uncle, Tom Miller, had purchased an automobile. He had a job on the railroad and had married one of my mother's many sisters.

One day, my father saddled Grandpa's horse. He rode in the saddle while I rode behind him on the horse to Gassaway. We put the horse up overnight in a stable that boarded horses. Uncle Tom seated us in his new Model T Ford. We drove the six miles up Elk River to Sutton. The road had been graded wide enough for two cars to pass. The car stirred up a big dust storm.

There were no paved roads in Braxton County at this time. However, Uncle Tom said, "Before long, this road will be paved. Now that we have a prison camp down Elk River on the road to Charleston, hundreds of prisoners are swinging sledgehammers ten hours each day breaking stone to form a base for the roadway. In a few years, there will be a hard road all the way to Charleston."

"Won't the prisoners all run away?" I asked.

Uncle explained, "There is a guard at each end of the group. If a prisoner runs, he will be shot without question. There was a report that one was shot and they just dumped the body in a road fill."

We rode the horse back to my home in the valley. I would not ride in an automobile again until I was around eighteen.

Shortly after my first automobile ride, word went up and down the valley that Simon McNutt had purchased a radio. It was pretty much common knowledge that voice could travel over wires as everyone had heard of the telephone. Still, there was much disbelief that sound could be sent through the air. Some of the older folks speculated that Simon-who had been seen stretching a wire to the top of a hill-hooked that wire into a whole system of wires that carried sound. In fact, that wire led to an aerial on a post on top of the hill.

One day when I was seven, I walked the two miles to Simon's place. Simon had me sit in a chair and placed some earphones over my head and ears. Simon kept turning the knobs on the large console unit. For some time I could hear only the sound of static. Finally, the static cleared and there was a sound. "This is radio station KDKA Pittsburgh. At the sound of the dial, it will be twelve noon." There was a long shrill sound for about a minute announcing the noon hour.

One day at school there was the sound of a motor outside. One of the boys looked out the window. "It's an airplane," he yelled. In an instant, all of the students jumped up from their seats and rushed outside. The plane was flying rather low. When the pilot saw all of the students, he circled around awhile. The teacher did not ask the kids to return to class that day.

There was much talk of seeing our first airplane. "Where did it come from?" "Where would there be enough level land for the plane to land?" "Why did he give our school such a lovely show?" Such events were a rarity in our area and were fodder for months of conversation.

When I was twelve, my father announced that he had purchased a farm. It was a 100-acre tract situated in a hollow known as Shanty Run. Farms along the main creek road were seldom for sale and would have been too expensive if any had been available. The price for Dad's farm was $500. He borrowed $200 from Grandpa for the down payment with the understanding that there would be three more $100 payments. Of course, he borrowed each of those from Grandpa.

Dad's new farm had a tiny strip of level land along a tiny stream. These kinds of streams were called "runs" and the area through which it flowed was called a "hollow." The level land was enough only for a few buildings and a patch for the garden. The person who had built the log house had already cleared several acres years before. The cleared land had been sown into pasture and would afford grazing for a few animals during the summer months. Most of the land was steep hillsides on each side of the stream. They were covered with a heavy forest of large trees and thick underbrush.

By the time that we were moved and the grain and fodder had been hauled from Grandpa's farm, it was late autumn. Father announced that he would clear a field for corn. He began the clearing process, working almost every daylight hour six days a week. He would rest only on Sunday. With a tool he called a "mattock," he began digging the underbrush from a steep hillside. The underbrush was placed in neat piles to dry so it could be burned. After the underbrush had been grubbed out, he began to cut the trees.

The house on the new farm was a one-room log cabin. Cracks between the logs had been filled with clay mud. There was a clapboard roof and on one end of the cabin there was a large log-burning fireplace. There was a small barn and a small house for the chickens. Six of us moved into the cabin: Dad, Mother, three younger brothers, and me.

The year before, Mother had fed lunch to men who were building a pipeline. She made enough money to buy a horse. We needed milk so my aunt, who had several cows, sold us a cow for $15. She agreed to let my brother and me pay for the cow by working the following summer. Since Dad helped on Grandpa's farm, he felt free to haul over the feed for our animals and corn for the family's bread.

Mother had meat from her chickens and a hog that had been butchered. Each week she would gather a basket of eggs to carry to a small store several miles away to trade for a few items, such as salt and baking soda. We lived on the food she canned and dried.

With six people the one-room cabin was really crowded. Dad had built a small outhouse a few hundred feet away for our toilet facilities. Like Thurlow, my brother and I carried water from a spring several hundred yards away. Logs for the fireplace and wood for the cooking stove were nearby in abundance.

When a tree came crashing to the ground, the limbs would be trimmed and placed on the brush piles. The body of the tree would be cut into logs that could be rolled together for burning. One huge hard maple had four big logs to its first limbs. "We won't burn these," Dad said. "We will take these to a sawmill. They will make great flooring. I want to build a better house." So we kept some of the better logs from the white oak and red oak trees. Before spring, he made a deal with a man who owned a team of horses and a wagon. He would haul the logs several miles to a sawmill. The lumber from the logs would be split among Father, this man, and the miller.

When spring came and there were a few dry days, the piles of brush were burned. The logs were rolled together in heaps and also burned. Then, the horse was hitched to a plow called a shovel plow to loosen the new land for planting corn. The corn would be planted in hills of three seeds together every four feet apart. Hoeing corn was one of the biggest jobs of the summer. That meant chopping out all of the weeds and placing fresh, clean dirt around each hill of corn.

Dad split palings to fence in a fairly level patch of land near the house for Mother's garden. That patch of ground would be the first to be plowed as early as possible in the spring. Mother had saved the seeds of every kind of plant from her garden the year before. The garden had to be fenced to keep out the chickens because they ran loose around the house and barn. There were also wild rabbits and other animals with which we had to contend. Once the ground had been plowed, Mother assumed all of the work in the garden. It would become the major source of food for the family.

First, she made a bed of fine soil that she sowed with radishes, lettuce, and green onion seeds. These would grow quickly when the weather was warm. They would be the first green vegetables the family would eat since the autumn before. Mother would sow and plant rows of cucumbers, green beans, red beets, green peppers, cabbage, tomatoes, kohlrabi, horseradish, onions for slicing, sweet potatoes, potatoes, sweet corn, and squash. She collected the seed from every kind of vegetable she knew.

Besides having food for the growing season, she canned, dried, and stored food for the winter. Some of the cucumbers would be picked small enough for pickling. Some would be allowed to grow bigger for slicing. There would be fried green tomatoes, ripe tomatoes for slicing, and tomatoes for canning. Green beans would be served during the summer, canned and pickled in stone crocks, and sometimes dried on strings. Cabbage would be made into slaw and kraut. Sweet corn would be eaten on the cob, cut off, and canned or sometimes dried.

Mother monitored her glass jars closely so she could can some of each item. She knew when her jars were full, there would be no money for more. Many items would be strung on strings and dried over the stove.

A cellar house had been dug into the side of a hill so food items could be stored without freezing. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, beets, and a few other items were stored on the ground in the garden. They were covered with a thick layer of straw and leaves, then covered with a heavy mound of dirt. In the winter, when the ground was frozen, a hole would be opened in the side and items could be removed.

A patch of Father's newly cleared land had been planted with cane sorghum. In the autumn, a man came through with a horse pulling a mill. The mill crushed the cane stocks, and the juice was boiled into molasses. The mill owner charged one-half of the molasses for his fee. We would have plenty of sweet things such as cookies and syrup for breakfast. Of course, we had no money to buy sugar or any kind of store-bought food.

When autumn came, there was a good harvest of corn. Father had built a pole building to store the large ears of corn. The corn stalks had been tied into bundles to feed the horse and cow. Our cattle herd had doubled in size since our cow had a nice baby calf. When the crops had been gathered and stored, Father began his same routine of clearing land as the year before. He would sow grass for pastureland on the hillside he had cleared the first year. Father had planned to have a real cattle farm. That fall, Grandpa gave us a young heifer calf. In a year or so we would have more cattle.

By the second autumn Father had collected enough lumber to build a new house. He cut some logs into blocks on which he put the foundation. The lumber was all rough including the floor. The only things that he needed to buy were the nails, a few windows, and some tar-paper roofing. A carpenter helped him for a few days. The four small rooms were much better than the one-room log house. It was built just in time, as Mother soon presented us with a set of twin sisters.

During the next several years, we cleared a new hillside field each year for corn and the pastureland would be expanded each year. In a few years, Father had a nice small herd of cattle with a steer or two to sell each autumn.

While I had been a sickly child, the ten-hour days of extra hard work with Father helped me become pretty strong. I had been allergic to so many foods that I sometimes had little food to choose from, making me much smaller than the other males in our family. However, I had pretty much outgrown my asthma.

It was rare that someone came walking through our hollow. The nearest church was miles away. There was nothing to do but work. During the many years on the farm there would be no electricity, radio, or telephone. We could not afford the price of a newspaper or magazine subscription, so there was little to read.

During my teen years, after working six ten-hour days, Sunday was a day of rest. On that day during the warm season, I would go with my little dog to the top of one of the highest hills around. The sky was always perfectly blue and the air was clear. On top of that hill I would sit and enjoy what I believed to be the most beautiful scenery in the world. On a ridge at the head of our hollow was a farm that a cattleman owned. The land was more gently laying than our farm and the soil was richer. That was my dream farm. It was for sale at $1000. At that time, having $1000 was only a dream.

Shortly after Dad bought our farm, I worked for a man to buy a pet lamb. The next fall I took it to visit a farm where there was a male sheep. The following spring, my ewe had two baby lambs. By my eighteenth birthday, I had a dozen head of sheep. I was selling some wool each spring and a few buck lambs in the fall. I had been hoarding every dollar until I had the sum of $50.

I had heard that a Dr. Burton in Weston was a great eye doctor who could fix my one white eye. That summer, I decided to go see the doctor. I walked the ten miles to Gassaway. By that year, 1933, a paved road known as a "hard road" had been built to Gassaway and there was now bus service. I bought a ticket for the fifty-four mile ride to Weston. Dr. Burton had a nice office in a beautiful home on a nice, quiet street. When Dr. Burton had examined my eyes, he asked if I had any money. "I have $50," I told him.

"I know only one doctor in the world who I would trust to fix your eye," he said. "He is Dr. C. A. Clapp in Baltimore, Maryland. I am sending you to Dr. Clapp. I am not charging you any fee. Dr. Clapp will operate even though you can't afford to pay. Fixing that eye will change your life completely." Dr. Burton then typed and sealed a letter to Dr. Clapp.

I rode the electric car to Clarksburg, West Virginia, where I got a bus for Baltimore and arrived the next morning. I walked a few blocks from the Greyhound station in downtown Baltimore to 513 North Charles Street. Then, I climbed a flight of stairs to Dr. Clapp's office on the second floor. I gave the doctor the letter from Dr. Burton. When Dr. Clapp and his nurse had examined my eyes, the doctor said, "I am sending you to the Baltimore Eye, Ear, and Throat Hospital. When you go there, give them the money you have. That will pay part of your hospital bill. I won't accept any of it. I will operate on your eye tomorrow morning. You will need to stay in this hospital a couple more days until the stitches are removed."

The doctor had explained that while my eye might very well be straight after the operation, the sight could never be expected to be normal. Two days after the operation, Dr. Clapp removed the bandages covering my eyes and took out the stitches. For the first time in my life, I looked into the mirror to see two normal straight eyes. The people of the hospital purchased a bus ticket back to Gassaway for me and gave me a small sum to purchase food. The remainder of my money on deposit would go toward a payment on my hospital bill.

As I walked along the road from the bus stop in Gassaway to my home, I realized that my life had taken a miraculous turn. No longer would people look at me as an object of pity. It had surely been the trip of a lifetime. Shortly after arriving home, I received two bills, one from the hospital for $60 and one from Dr. Clapp for $40 with a scribbled notation: "If paying this bill is a hardship, payment could be disregarded."

I had no intention of doing anything other than paying these bills. I had always believed that if you make a bill you pay a bill. I began looking for a buyer for my sheep. I was able to sell them for enough to pay the hospital bill. I then borrowed the $40 from Grandpa to pay Dr. Clapp. While Father seemed to disregard debts to Grandpa, I knew that I would not follow suit. I would repay Grandpa by working for him. Grandpa's wage rate had not gone up, however. It remained 50¢ for a ten-hour day.