Category: Remembrances

My Farming Years

January 9, 2026 | Farming, Remembrances | Comments
Nineteen fifty to 1960 were my farming years, the first three years and two months as my father’s partner. (He also practiced law). On June 29, 1950 I turned twelve, and on that day my father bought for $1200 a John Deere MT tractor for me to operate, retired our draft mare team Maud and Bird, and fired our resident farm tenant. The tractor dealer, Nelson Wimmer, to whom my grandfather had given in 1934 a seed and fertilizer retail business he founded in 1919 that never made money, converted it to a John Deere dealership that prospered many decades. Read more

Dollars and Sense

October 27, 2025 | Non-fiction, Remembrances | Comments
Reflections on the Cost and Value of Education I entered college 70 years ago at age 16. It was at Hampden-Sydney College. Room, board, tuition and laundry combined were $1,000. I had it only because of a bequest from a childless aunt. I traveled to and from campus by thumb. Home was on a farm in Montgomery County, Virginia. Read more

A Simple Life

September 17, 2025 | Poetry, Remembrances | Comments
When I was young And saw how much My father loved our little farm I formed the wish To farm there always for my living Then he died When I was fifteen Net worth $29,000 My mom and I soldiered on For seven years more Farming just as he had Read more

Denny and Joe and Lucky

September 8, 2025 | Remembrances, Short Stories | Comments
Two more different individuals ever lived than Denny Poole and Joe Prince. Yet they were best friends. Joe was a Virginia bachelor grain farmer (peanuts, soybeans, corn, wheat). He worked at it seven days a week, March through October. November through February, Joe was a quail hunter, six days a week. Sundays he walked puppies and looked for quail hunting territory. One word described Joe: intense. Read more

The Hardest of Times

August 20, 2025 | Remembrances | Comments
My father’s life was a continuing battle with failure. He was sustained in his struggles by a sense of humor. Born in 1897 to an Appalachian farmer-livestock trader father and a direct descendant of Shawnee abductee Mary Draper Ingles mother, his formal education ended with high school, from which he did not graduate. In 1915 he bought in partnership a livery stable in Christiansburg, Virginia, its business ferrying drummers between the Cambria train depot and the hotel on Christiansburg’s courthouse square. Alas, Henry Ford’s Model T quickly felled it. Its assets were auctioned for creditors May 1, 1917 on the courthouse steps. Read more

Fred B. Leggett Jr.

July 9, 2025 | Fred B. Leggett Jr., Remembrances | Comments
Fred B. Leggett Jr. died July 5, 2025 at his home in Danville, Virginia. He was eighty-eight years old and predeceased by his wife, Joan Allen Leggett, who died November17, 2024. He is survived by his children, Fred III, Will, Mike and Helen Reynolds. Read more

Last Brace – A Memorial Day Tribute

May 25, 2025 | Henry Caruso Jr., Jim Heckert, Remembrances | Comments
Once Upon A Time, at the storied field trial grounds at Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, daylight was running out. There were two more braces to run, but only time for one. No one wanted to stay another day. What to do? The four handlers with dogs in the last two braces: Dave Grubb, George Tracy, Henry Caruso, Jim Heckert. By agreement, all four dogs were run together in a last brace. Laughter flowed throughout from handlers, judges, gallery.  Read more

A Memory of Bubba

May 14, 2025 | Bubba Moreland, Remembrances | Comments
With the shock of reading Bubba Moreland’s notification of death today on Facebook came a flood of memories of being with him and his mutual best friend Luke Weaver. For those who did not know them, Bubba handled Luke’s bird dogs in open competitions, and they were brothers in all ways but blood.  Read more

My Nanny

March 25, 2025 | Remembrances | Comments
Nanny was my maternal grandmother, Ethel Blevins Privett, born in 1867, daughter of Dr. John Faulkner Blevins of Selma, Alabama, born 1838, 18th graduate of Tulane Medical School in 1858, Captain and Assistant Surgeon in Law’s 44th Alabama, present at the Sunken Road at the Battle of Antietam and a half dozen major Virginia battles of the Civil War,  and afterward assigned to hospital duty to care for the wounded in Richmond, and after that war, a practicing physician in Selma until his death there in 1901. Read more