Having reached an age (84) when we tend to reflect on our past, three long-ago years stand out in my memory. I know the start and end dates of those years precisely: November 25, 1950, and February 24, 1954. The first was the day the Great Appalachian Storm of 1950 struck, the second the day of my father’s death from injuries in a car crash. You can learn all about the storm here.
Those three years did more to shape me and prepare me for life than any others.
On the first day I was twelve. That summer on my birthday, June 29, 1950, my father, a self-educated solo practice lawyer and farmer, retired our draft mares Maud and Bird, bought a John Deere model MT tractor, and fired the farm hand who lived in a small cottage on the farm. He bought the tractor, a newly introduced small tricycle model, on condition the dealer teach me to operate it.
He and I would thereafter operate our 130-acre hilly bluegrass farm with its 20 Hereford brood cows, 60 grade Hampshire ewes and 40 acres of alfalfa, with only occasional day-labor help.
My father was making $10,000 a year from his law practice and the farm. We lived in Christiansburg, Virginia, four miles from the farm, but would soon (1952) move to a newly-built and long delayed by the War stone rancher atop a hill, with views of the mountaintops in five counties (Giles North, Roanoke East, Floyd South, Pulaski West, plus our surrounding Montgomery.) You can see and hear its story here.
My two older sisters were off at college (Harriet, 17) and at work in the American Embassy in Paris as an interpreter (Mary Ann, 21).
Things on the surface seemed rosy for us, but a dark cloud hung over us: my father’s health was fragile. At age fifty-three, he smoked two packs of Camels a day, had suffered at least one heart attack, and was chronically short of breath. He worked very hard, a fact recently confirmed by the just-published 1950 U. S. Census Report, where he recorded 60-hour work weeks — that was for January when he was preparing income tax returns for farmers, merchants, schoolteachers, laborers, a big part of his practice, along with real estate and chancery.
The John Deere dealer gave me a half-day of tractor operating instruction and then I was mowing and raking hay and hauling it to our barn on a trailer after it was custom bailed by a neighbor. I weighed 100 pounds and stood 5’ tall. A Mr. Harris, who had just retired as a farm manager and bought his own small farm nearby, helped for hourly pay and use of our machinery. He would become my farming mentor after my father’s death.
I had accompanied my father on daily visits to the farm as long as I could remember. On Sunday afternoons, accompanied by my father’s best friend, Jack Atkinson, who operated a much larger beef cattle farm, we hauled in the trunk of our car bagged salt to be fed to the stock on both farms.
My job was opening gates and calling the stock to the salt, after it was spread on hill-top cow paths in small piles.
“Coo sheep, soo calf soo,… coo sheepy, soo calfie soo…(repeat).” They came in a rush, giving me a sense of power and my father and Mr. Atkinson grins. I had been calling them in every Sunday since age four.
We counted and inspected the stock, commenting on their condition, looked for birthing difficulties and newborns, signs of injury or illness, for pink eye or warts in the cattle, foot rot in the sheep, scours in the calves, signs of worms in the lambs. A universal farmers’ ritual. I loved it.
As a late-born third child, my parents had always treated me as an adult, taking me on weekend vacation trips to events like the West Virginia State Fair at Lewisburg and the Atlantic Exposition in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. We also toured the Pennsylvania Dutch country around Lancaster where Amish farmers traveled in buggies and farmed with horses and visited Morlunda Farm in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, home of the Domino strain of Herefords. All our recreation had an agrarian theme.
I have written of the Great Appalachian Storm in Defining Moment.
From 1950 to 1954, my years between ages 12 and 15, I enjoyed a typical small-town teen existence, entering High School, playing JV football, discovering girls, getting a drivers license. Summers were occupied by making hay with help from school mates (50 cents an hour), winters with feeding the stock with the tractor and at night Christmas through February standing vigil in the lambing barn.
Then on a fateful night in February when I was home alone on the farm, I heard the phone ring. It was a cousin, calling to tell me my parents had been in a car crash near Lexington. They were returning from Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore where my father sought help from a heart specialist. My mother was unhurt but my father was hospitalized. The cousin would drive me that night to Lexington.
Early next morning I went to the Hospital to see my father. He lay under an oxygen tent, very gray, and calling to his nurse for morphine. He greeted me, but was consumed by pain. His chest had been crushed by the impact. X-rays revealed a large tumor in a lung, likely cancerous. Surgery was impossible. He would die that night.
My mother was devastated. For two years she left her bedroom only when necessary to care for me. We decided to continue the farming operations. My father’s border collie slept outside my mother’s bedroom door. I went to school and looked after the farm chores.
In May 1955 I graduated high school. That fall I entered Hampden-Sydney College. Mr. Harris would feed the stock through the winter, overseen by my mother. She would sell our excess alfalfa for $1.25 a bale. It had been a good hay summer.
In May 1956 I returned to the farm and picked up with hay making. I would enter Virginia Tech as a day student in the fall and continue to operate the farm. After my junior college year I would enter law school at the University of Richmond, paid for by an unexpected annual scholarship of $1,400 (law school tuition was $1,000 so I had $400 extra toward room and board — room was $30 a month for a shared room in a neighborhood private home).
I returned to hay making on the farm in May 1959. After my second law school year in 1959-60 we sold the stock and cash rented the farm land to a neighbor dairyman. (My mother lived on the farm with my sister Mary Ann until mother’s death in 1999).
I would marry in May 1960. I would graduate law school In May 1961 and get a job in Richmond with McGuireWoods (then known as McGuire, Eggleston, Bocock & Woods). I practiced there to 2005 when I left to practice with my son Scott in a small-firm setting, which I continue to do full time.
I have had a wonderful life, filled with good luck, a good wife, good colleagues and friends, and splendid clients who are also friends. And a few good bird dogs enjoyed with my sons Scott and David. Those three years as a farm boy (1950-1954) shaped me for manhood.