Death is always but a moment away.
My father died of injuries from a car crash when I was fifteen. I had known his death was coming soon since age twelve.
How had I known? Because of a freak storm you can learn all about: Great Appalachian Storm of 1950.
On the Friday after Thanksgiving, our family woke to radio warnings of a fast-moving nontropical cyclone with devastating force. Deep drifting snow and sub-zero temperatures were forecast to arrive in the afternoon. Thanksgiving day had been mild and pleasant. I had turned twelve on June 29.
My father and I and our border collie, Jack, lit out about noon for our farm, four miles south of our town, Christiansburg, Virginia, to gather our sixty ewes and twenty grade beef cows and move them to where they could be sheltered, fed and watered.
The stock were spread out on 90 acres of steep blue-grass pasture. My father drove his ‘48 Dodge Fluid Drive two-door sedan across the pastures. When the ewes were spotted, Jack was released to gather them. Pops parked on a hilltop where we could see the action and he could whistle commands to Jack.
Soon Jack had the ewes and one ram (more of him later) gathered and headed to our barn at the farm’s south end. Its loft had been filled with baled alfalfa hay from our forty acres of hay land in August. The gate of the barn lot was open, and in an hour Jack drove the flock through it.
Pops drove from our hilltop to the barn and I swung the gate closed behind the sheep.
With Jack between us on the front seat, Pops drove back to the farm’s steep north end where Jack gathered the cows and herd bull and headed them toward the barn.
Our goal was to move them to a small pasture with a pond adjoining the barn to the south where they could huddle against the wind and snow and we could feed them hay from the barn. There I could, with an axe, cut the ice quickly freezing on the pond to afford the cows water throughout the storm. By morning at sunrise, ice on the pond’s surface would be ten inches thick. It was well below zero degrees F.
Jack worked the cows and bull diligently and in forty minutes had them in the small south-end pasture where I had already spread bales of alfalfa for them.
Jack then gently herded the sheep from the barn lot inside the barn.
We hurried to fill water buckets for the nervous ewes, bred to lamb starting Christmas Day, from a water line recently run from a nearby new deep well. I carried bats of third-cutting alfalfa, dropped from the loft, and placed them in the manger running east-west across the barn’s dirt floor.
Darkness was closing in and a howling winds blowing accumulating snow, forming deep drifts everywhere around us.
As we were assessing what else we should do for the stock, I felt a terrible blow from the rear to my bottom and my feet lift. I flew through the air and into the manger. I weighed about 100 pounds.
The ram had been lying in wait for me. I howled with surprise and pain and Pops, realizing what had happened, called out, “Are you hurt?”
The wind was knocked out of me, but when breath returned I said, “Just my pride.” We shared a laugh. With Jack’s help and my stock cane I drove the ram into a horse stall.
The Dodge was parked twenty feet from the barn’s door. It was dark now and the snow at least eight inches deep, deeper where drifted. We would have to put chains on to make it home. The road home, State Route 8, had not yet been plowed.
Pops would have to walk through the snow from the barn to the car. He was extremely short of breath, the result of smoking two packs of unfiltered Camels daily since he was ten (he was fifty-three). I had been watching him lose the breath to walk for several years.
I walked beside him, holding his hand to steady him, through the snow to the Dodge and opened the driver-side door for him. He barely made it, huffing every step.
I opened the trunk, removed the chains and lay them out in the snow. Pops backed the Dodge over them, and, lying in the snow, I connected the ends of the chains at the tops of the tires. My fingers, in thin jersey gloves, were stiff and near frozen.
Fortunately, the quarter mile from the barn to Route 8 was level or down hill across an alfalfa field. We made it from the barn to the highway and the chains gave us enough traction to move slowly over the unplowed road to town. We encountering deep drifts at each grade cut.
Finally, in forty minutes we were home. Pops was too tired to eat and after drinking a cup of black H&C perked coffee, went straight to bed. Jack was treated to canned dog food and after lapping lots of water was soon sleeping by my bed.
I told Mother of our adventure as I ate supper (I cannot remember exactly what but leftovers from Thanksgiving dinner, hot and delicious — she was a marvelous cook). Soon I was in bed and sleeping.
I woke sometime in the night and remembered in detail the day’s events. I relived the ram’s butt and walking Pops through the snow to the Dodge.
Then it came to me. Pops would not live much longer. From here on, I needed to think and act like a man.
In 1951 Pops and Mother began to build their dream house atop the highest hill on the farm. It was a modest ranch, but with three fireplaces and built of limestone salvaged from the remains of Indian-fighting Fort McDonald near McDonalds Mill and the village of Ellett, it was glorious. Its stones were shaped and lain on weekends by a Spanish stone mason who labored weekdays at nearby Virginia Tech where he oversaw the construction of its many massive stone buildings. He had come to America during the Great Depression to build the stone bridge arches on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
From the farmhouse lawn one can on a clear day see the mountain tops of five counties: Floyd’s Alum Ridge to the south; Roanoke’s Poor to the east; Giles’ Salt Pond to the north; Pulaski’s Draper to the west; and in our Montgomery, dozens all around.
In February 1954 Pops and Mother drove to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to consult a heart specialist. On their drive home near Lexington on Route 11 a dog ran into the highway and my mother swerved to miss it. Her front tires caught in gravel on the shoulder and when she steered to correct, the car shot across the highway and an oncoming car ran into the passenger-side door, crushing Pop’s ribs. X-Rays revealed a large tumor on Pop’s lungs. Lung cancer. He died the next day.
A cousin had driven me to Lexington the night of the crash. I went into Pops’ hospital room where he lay under an oxygen tent gasping for breath and pleading to his nurse for morphine. We exchanged “I love you” and the nurse escorted me out of the room.
I recall to this day the details of the storm and walking Pops through the snow from the barn to the Dodge.
The storm brought a record 62″ of snow to nearby Coburn Creek, West Virginia, killed 160 humans in that state, and 383 nationally. It impacted 22 states and brought winds of over 94 miles per hour to New York City and well over 100 miles per hour to New Jersey, New Hampshire and other New England states.
Pops’ estate tax return showed a net worth of $29,000. Ironically, the number would have been negative had he not died from an accident. Only a double indemnity rider on his life insurance made the number positive.
After Pops’ death, I operated the farm with the help of Mr. Harris, a dairy farm manager who, in retirement, had bought a small farm near ours. After graduating from Virginia Tech as a day student in 1959, and completing my second year of law school, we rented the farm to an adjoining dairyman, but Mother and my sister Mary Ann and her sons Nigel and Jack Hinshelwood continued to live in the stone house on the farm. You can view the farm and hear its narrated history through the 20th Century on a YouTube drone video: Word Farm Riner Virginia.