Daddy

This is my Dad. He was sitting in his back yard whittling on a cedar stick. He loved to whittle and could make shavings that would curl up so nicely. In the house he would get an old piece of newspaper and lay it down and whittle and let the shavings fall on the paper for quick clean up. He whittled all kinds of things. He made a few walking sticks with marbles in them. He liked to whittle pieces out with sharp points on them. They could easily be used for weapons! Then he would whittle some pieces out real sharp like a knife blade. He called them "liver splitters." They were sharp enough to split a liver that's for certain!

He had so many red cedar sticks. He had some in his smokehouse tied up in the rafters and he had some under the floor of the house. After he passed away we went through his sticks and some of them had funny writing on them. One had a little poem on it about Bush and Quayle written back when they were in office. My brother has that particular stick. One had animal pictures drawn on it (Dad was no artist) and by one animal it had something written and I tried and tried to figure out what it said. My brother looked at it and it didn't take him long to figure it out. It said "Gilly whomper." My Dad was always talking about a gilly whomper, just a word he made up!! We found some of the sharp sided ones with "liver splitter" on them, and some he had done some figuring on and written his name and address, etc. It was so neat to go through all those oodles (and I do mean OODLES) of sticks to see what might be found written on them. I still have some of his sticks. He always wanted to make sure he never ran out of red cedar for whittling. He had enough stashed away for 2-3 lifetimes.

This is Dad in his overalls (all he ever wore) that he washed with Clorox in the water and they got faded out. He called them his "cloudy" britches!!

My Dad always had a great sense of humor and he just loved life. You can see in this picture where he cut some off the bib off his overalls since they must have been too tight when he bent over or something. He had several that he had cut out like that. You can also see in the corner by the fridge the broom turned upside down and some sticks for whittling! He always laughed and said also that if someone come in the door you didn't like you could whomp them over the head with one of the handy sticks there!

We used to work in the fields and chop the weeds out of the tobacco and the garden stuff. It was a hot job. But he made it more fun by making up little silly songs and poems about the neighbors and different things that usually kept me laughing. It helped the time to go by quicker too.

He used to say this riddle; Jump up on Hiphop, hollor for Bumberry, to come run Tom Tigamaterry out of the World of Wigglemaworry.

Translated he said that meant; Jump up on the log, holler for the dog, to come run the groundhog, out of the cornfield!

Yep, Daddy loved life and he loved to laugh. We have had many a good laugh together and I can just see him now laughing so hard.