I met Joe Prince November 14, 1973, introduced by his brother David, a life insurance salesman seeking prospect referrals from me, a 35-year-old lawyer doing estate planning in Richmond, Virginia. Joe was a grain farmer in Sussex County, forty miles south of Richmond at the village of Stony Creek. But Joe’s claim to fame was as a quail hunter of a special kind, the kind every city-bound quail hunter longs to have as a friend.
Joe hunted quail six days a week, November through season’s end, February 28 (or 29) in those days. The rest of the year he farmed seven days a week, sunup to sundown, growing peanuts, corn, soy beans and wheat. Before I met him he had also raised pigs, free range and many, but he had given them up because they impinged on his quail hunting time.
To call Joe Prince a character is an understatement. He was unique. He had entered military service before finishing high school, served as a radar operator aboard an Atlantic troop-transport ship, then returned home to finish high school and start farming with mules on his father’s small acreage around his home in Stony Creek, Virginia where tidewater and Piedmont meet, a land of flat crop fields, pine forests and swamps between.
His father had been a family physician and trial justice who heard misdemeanor cases like trespass-for-fishing posted mill ponds and speeding. He too had been a character who attracted audiences to his courtroom to hear his chatter from the bench. By the time I met Joe he had grown his farming operation into several thousand acres, some rented some owned.
The best one-word description of Joe was intense. His father had died in 1962, having practiced medicine in Stony Creek sixty years, starting by making house calls with a team and buggy. He had over the years delivered most of the babies born in a ten-mile radius, black and white. From this heritage Joe had inherited bird hunting permissions on most of the farms in that territory. Joe nurtured it by not hunting any farm too often and taking landowners quail dressed by Margaret Moore, his cook, who had hoed peanuts beside him after the War when he was starting to farm.
Joe lived by the Seaboard Railway track with and looked after his widowed mother, known to all as Mizz Grace, a sparrow-like arthritis-riddled firebrand who walked with one crutch and spoke her mind to all. Joe’s heart had been broken right after the War when the parents of his high school sweetheart forbade them to wed, and soon after she had died in a car crash. Joe dated occasionally thereafter, mostly widows, grass and sod, but avoided matrimony.
Joe was ambitious, driven to succeed and overcome an inferiority complex. One of six children and the only one without a college education (the source of the inferiority complex) Joe lacked nothing in native intelligence and was very well read, especially on current events and business news. Two of his brothers, John and Thomas, were eminent physicians. John an internist in Emporia, had been a cruiser commander in the Navy; Thomas was a heart specialist in Orlando. David sold life insurance successfully for Northwester Mutual, Virginia Anne, the only girl, was a career IRS audit examiner.
Joe was always on the lookout for two things, good farmland to buy at a bargain, and coveys of quail. For the latter pursuit he had an ideal partner, Bernard M. (“Denny”) Poole Jr., building inspector for Sussex County and as avid a quail hunter as Joe. Sussex was far from a hot bed of development, so Denny’s professional work was largely inspecting new house-trailer hookups and an occasional new Tasty Freeze. The trailer hookups were mostly on farms where Denny scouted for new coveys. Plus Denny had a secret weapon, his wife Ann, who operated a beauty parlor on her back porch and “did” the hair of all the ladies in western Sussex and could secure from them hunting permission for Denny (and Joe) on their farms. Denny was also a popular member of Stony Creek’s Volunteer Fire & Rescue Department which made him friends and yielded permissions. Joe did not hunt deer and traded deer hunting permission on lands he owned or rented for farming with deer hunting clubs.
Joe and Denny were a study in opposites, Joe high strung and mercurial, Denny calm and quiet and soft spoken. Denny was excellent with bird dogs, patient in their training. Both shot Remington Sportsman Model 58s and were deadly shots, quick and very competitive.
Joe kept a kennel of a dozen level-tailed pointers of all ages twenty feet from his kitchen door, all descended from a sire named Lucky from the 1950’s which Joe acquired as a pup from a dog jockey at Zions Cross Roads named Wilson and which became a legend in Sussex. Joe loved puppies and after we became friends I often gave him weanling ones I thought were promising. Joe’s development method was unvarying . He turned pups loose to roam 24-7, leaving food and water available at the kennel. This exposed them to accidental death by autos and trains, but those who survived learned to hunt for wild quail.
Joe kept an eye pealed for ambitious hunters with good noses, then when the season opened put them in his truck box. From there, it was survival of the fittest. That’s how The Original Lucky had become Sussex County’s best, having become reliably staunch the last day of his derby season. But that is another story.
This is the story of how Joe acquired the Cadillac Farm shortly before I met him.
Joe had just enjoyed a banner farming year. The weather had been good, the yields of peanuts, corn and soy beans strong, and prices for these commodities relatively high. To reward himself, Joe had just bought a new two-toned Cadillac coupe, dressed out with leather seats and all available optional features. Hunting season loomed, and Joe noticed a large pointer in his kennel seemed puny. He put it in the trunk of the Cadillac and drove it to the office of Dr. Carle Byrd, DVM in Petersburg, to be checked out. (Dr. Byrd was by chance a native of my home town of Christiansburg).
Arriving, he left the pointer to be examined and announced he would be back after tending to other business to pick it up. After visiting several farm equipment dealers to acquire machinery parts, he returned. The pointer had been examined and treated for worms and was ready to go home with Joe. He put the pointer in the trunk of his new Cadillac coup and struck out for Stony Creek.
About half way home Joe approached a tavern and felt the yen for a beer. Pulling into the gravel parking lot, he found an empty space in the shade of a tree in back and sauntered in. At the end of the bar he saw a high school classmate and fellow farmer nursing a Budweiser. Joe took the stool beside him and ordered a beer plus one for his classmate.
“How was your year, Sam?” Joe opened. For a half hour the friend poured forth a tale of woe. He had been late getting his corn planted, which was caught by a dry spell at a critical time. He’d planted beans behind wheat and the beans had thus also succumbed to too little moisture at a critical time. His peanuts, his principal crop, had been frozen after digging (late) and would only be good for oil. Joe realized his classmate had been at the bar too long and was tipsy and very sad.
Joe sensed an opportunity and pounced. After expressing sympathy (and refraining from mentioning his own good farming year) he opened, “Would you consider selling your farm.”
“If I could get a decent price, Hell yes,” his boyhood friend answered.
An hour later, Joe walked out of the tavern with a contract to buy the farm scribbled on a bar napkin and signed by both parties. Joe was elated. Then he recalled he had parked the new Cadillac in back of the tavern, and he walked there. Approaching the car, he was shocked to see his pointer, all eighty pounds of him, sitting on his haunches in the front seat behind the wheel.
Becoming restless in the Cadillac’s dark trunk, the pointer had chewed his way out through the leather back seat, demolishing it. Thus Joe’s new farm, bought proudly at a bargain price, acquired its name.