Ward Poag-Center, Tennessee

From what I've been told, Mamma and Daddy got married in 1925 or '26. After I was born, Aunt Delphia accompanied us to Murfreesboro where all three of them got two year teaching certificates at Middle Tennessee State Teacher's College, now Middle Tennessee State University.

The last time Daddy and I went to Hohenwald, he pointed out a house, where he bought a teaching job from a Lawrence County politician for $25. The job was in Center, Tennessee, where he and Momma taught both sides of a two room schoolhouse.

My earliest recollections in life are of Center, a cross-roads community out in the boonies. There was the two room schoolhouse, a general store and a grist mill for grinding corn into meal or wheat into flour.

The cross-roads was located where one chert-paved road dead ended onto another. Chert is a mixture of clay and a flint-like quartz rock. The rock shards are mighty sharp and chews up car tires like they are going out of style. But nobody cared. There was not a single car or truck in the community. Everybody traveled by foot, horse, mule, wagon or buggy.

As I mentioned, Mamma and Daddy taught both sides of the two room schoolhouse but then Daddy came down with tuberculosis. He was sent to a sanatorium in San Antonio, Texas. He stayed there for more than a year.

I don't remember the time Daddy was there. My first memories are of Momma and me living with Uncle Mike and Aunt Pat Murphy on a farm just up the road from the schoolhouse. I don't know whether they were blood kin, but I do know everybody was treated like family.

Uncle Mike was a Republican in an area where most people thought of a Republican as a mean "sumbitch" dressed in a stovepipe hat and long black coat that went chasing little kids around with a stick. Uncle Mike was not like that. He was a jolly Irishman who loved life, people and a good joke.

I loved Aunt Pat's cooking. She conjured up some of the best cakes and pies I ever laid a tongue on. And like most three or four year olds, I wanted the pie or cake before the meal, but Uncle Mike convinced me I didn't want to do that because that was the way Democrats ate. And if the Democrats ate like that, it was bound to be wrong.