Dad Stories

     Dad was a butcher, a trade he learned when Mom said she wanted him to come home from sailing around the Great Lakes six months out of the year. By the time I was in the fourth or fifth grade he was a meat manager in a privately owned grocery store. As with any job there were things to happen that made a good story to tell when sitting around downing a cold beer with the guys. Here are some that I personally know about.


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     Take the time when he was working for Pat Sanford who owned C & S Food Market. In the old store the butcher shop was in the basement, most of the buildings at that location had businesses located in the basement, there was a print shop in the building next door and Dad knew the guys who worked there. One day the FBI raided the print shop and closed it down for printing counterfeit twenty dollar bills. I remember Dad talking to his boss about the raid, he said "what gets me is that I was next door working my butt off for a twenty and those guys would turn the crank a couple of times and have a few hundred without breaking a sweat".
   

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     Before Dad became a full fledged butcher he was an assistant butcher with a local chain called Logans in West Nashville. Back in the 1950's the Health Department didn't have any problem with grocery stores processing meats not inspected by the USDA.
     There were two guys who owned a farm, they would haul off the trash and vegetables that were rotting. They would feed the vegetables to their hogs then in the fall they would kill the hogs, cure their own hams and make their own sausage. One day these two guys were picking up the trash and started talking to Dad, they asked him how much it would cost them to get two country hams sliced. Dad told them he wanted the center cut from each ham, they thought that was fair.The next day the two guys came in with their hams, one ham weighed about 75 lbs the other weighed just over 80 lbs, the average ham weighs in about 18 - 22 lbs.
     Dad cut the hams but he only kept one of the center cuts which he took to a restaurant next door and told the owner, whom he knew, to fry the ham, a dozen eggs, hash browns and biscuits and call him when it was ready. There was enough ham that eight people had their fill.
     By my calculations those hogs had to weigh in around 400 lbs each.



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     Every now and then hunters would bring a deer they had shot and Dad would cut it up for them for a price, again the Health Department didn't mind. It was not unusual to find a deer carcass or two hanging in the cooler.
     Dad was now the Meat Manager for C&S. One day this customer comes driving in from a hunting trip up north, he had a moose tied to the roof of his car. He was quite proud of his moose as it dressed out at about 1000 lbs. This was a Wednesday and the moose had to hang in the cooler for a couple of days so Dad helped the customer get the moose in the cooler.
     Dad worked the next few days and was off on Sunday, when he came back to work Monday morning he went into the cooler and the stench nearly floored him. Seems the area where the bullet went in created a large bruise which went undetected and it rotted over the weekend. The smell was so bad it permeated into the beef that was hanging in the cooler and was owned by the store, they had to throw out everything in the cooler. This was the last time wild game was processed.


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     Everything was not all work and no play at C&S, to the contrary there were all kinds of shenanigans going on. There were two guys in their early twenties who worked at the store, Wayne and Dickie. Dad took a liking to them, they became his drinking buddies and he taught both of them the butchering trade. The three of them were full of practical jokes and adept at finding ways to have fun in the work place.
     On of the things they liked to do was gamble, one of the ways they gambled was to pull coke bottles. Coke bottles in the 1950's and 1960's were glass, every bottler made or had  made their own bottles and to distinguish theirs from other bottlers the city and state of the bottler was embossed on the bottom of the bottle. There were bottlers in every major city in the country. C&S had an area set aside for wooden cases of coke products and their competitors, during the holidays we would have several stacks of coke cases fifteen high.
     The guys would pick a case and pull it from the stack, each player would put up a quarter then randomly pull a bottle from the case, the one who had the city farthest away from Nashville won, in case of any doubt a quick call to AAA would settle the dispute.



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     When Dad was still learning his trade we lived in Lagardo, it was a farming community and Grandpa Riggan lived about a mile down the road. We lived in an old wood framed house, no indoor plumbing, no running water. We did have a wood burning stove and electricity for lights, maybe we had a radio but definitely no TV. In other words we were living in the country.
     On Sunday Dad's coworker, or maybe even his boss, came for a visit with his wife and a daughter who was about my age , that would be six years old. They came dressed in their Sunday finest as if they had just left church. We on the other hand were dressed as if we were going to help Grandpa with his spring planting.
     While the adults stayed inside and talked, Pat the girl and I went outside to play. There wasn't a lot to do as we didn't have a lot of toys especially for girls so we did boy things like climbing trees. We shared our yard with the landlords cows, they were pretty calm cows and didn't bother us but we did have to learn to dodge cow paddies.
     In the mean time the grown ups continued their conversation, at some point the bosses wife needed to use the bathroom and asked Mom where it was. Mom took the lady to the back porch and pointed to the outhouse some 20 - 25 yards from the house. As outhouses go it was a good one although it was several years old, there was no waiting as it was a two seater. The lady changed her mind she felt they would be leaving soon so she could hold it for awhile.
     In the mean time us kids were having a ball running around in the yard until me or Pat decided to climb a tree. The girl was dressed in a very nice dress and a very nice coat with a fur collar, she even had a bow in her hair and white stockings. Well the way she was dressed didn't seem to bother her, when we climbed that tree she was right there with us until she fell out and landed on her back on a fairly fresh cow paddy, This girl must have been a tomboy because she got up shed the coat and climbed back up in the tree.
      In the mean time the girls mother was starting to fidget as her bladder continued to fill up. Her husband knew what was going on and thought she was being rude and disrespectful so he continued talking guy talk with Dad even though his wife was urging him to leave. Finally they got up to go and came outside, the mother saw the girl and asked where her coat was. The girl retrieved the coat and took it to her mother who saw the remains of a cow paddy smeared on the back. The mother got a funny look on her face as she held the coat by two fingers, she said something like "oh no now we will have to by another one" and then dropped the coat on the ground.
     The husband, already ticked with his wife about the outhouse ordeal, picked up the coat and tossed it in the back seat saying the dry cleaners could get it clean. They loaded up and drove away.
     The next night Dad came home and told Mom that his boss sent his apologies. Turns out the boss was so upset with his wife that he made his wife ride all the way home with out stopping for a bathroom. Needless to say they never came back.



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     Back in the 1950's and 60's it was difficult to buy alcohol or buy a mixed drink in many communities around Nashville, the local communities voted whether or not to allow bars or liquor stores. The Donelson area said no to booze so Dad had to go out of his way to get what he wanted. He could drive almost into Nashville to a liquor store or just short of that was a bar called the "Shady Lawn", there was a liquor store in Old Hickory and a restaurant on Lebanon Rd that had a  little known bar downstairs. The closest place was a bootlegger down by the river off  Mc Gavock Pike.
     Legally Grady Campbell was a commercial fisherman by trade but by night, weekends and holidays he was a bootlegger. He had a somewhat run down couple of shacks down a long winding driveway on a bluff overlooking the Cumberland River, once you carefully maneuvered your way down the drive there was a large parking area. Grady ran his business with wife Mrs Campbell, his daughter Sadie and young grandson Junior lived on the property. Grady sold pint and half pint bottles of "Old Crow"bourbon.
     Grady had a large customer base, some of the best people in town could be found there at anytime of the day or night. I went to work with Dad when I was thirteen, that first Saturday night when we got off work Dad said we needed to make a stop before going home, I had no idea where we were going and was quite surprised to pull into Grady's parking lot which had half dozen Metro Police cars there. I didn't know what was going on but I dreaded the thought of having to call Mom to come bail me out of Jail. When I went inside with Dad there were the police sitting around a table with a glass of bourbon in their hand and a bottle of Old Crow on the table in front of them.
     Over the next five years I was in and out of all of Dad's hang outs, the place that was the most fun was Grady's place, I got to know Junior and even spent several hours one cold night riding sleds down the snow covered drive. Grady and his family even went camping with us on Dad's vacation two years in a row. I guess this qualifies as part of my misspent youth.


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     This next story started when I came home on leave on my way to Vietnam. It was November 1967 and I had thirty days leave, Linda was going to stay with Mom and Dad so we moved her lock stock and barrel to Tennessee, everything we owned fit in the back seat. Dad took time to do some things with us I think because he had no idea when he would see me again or if ever, I was after all going off to war.
     November was turkey shoot month, actually so was December, Dad had taken up going to turkey shoots on the weekends at the American Legion on Donelson Pike. The turkey shoots consisted of a bunch targets stapled to 2 x 4 s  and guys who would bring their favorite shotgun and pay a $1.00 per shot, you had to use their shells. The prizes consisted of  $10.00 cash, a certificate for a frozen turkey or a fifth of Henry Mc Kenna bourbon.
     Dad had a 12 gauge shotgun but he didn't like the pattern it held so he swapped with a friend of his who had a similar gun that held a nice tight pattern. I went with Dad one Saturday afternoon. We were doing pretty good until Dad got a few drinks in him so he turned over the shooting to me. I was doing so good that Dad would walk up to the guy next to me and offer him a side bet for a few dollars that I would come closer to the bulls eye.
     We finished the day with with a couple of frozen turkeys, about four bottles of Henry Mc Kenna, and somewhere around $125.00 in cash which he split with me. Except for the booze Mom and Linda were tickled pink.
     After I got out of the Navy Dad and I got back to going to the turkey shoots but it was hard to beat that day in November 1967.

   

     Dad was a good butcher and was widely know, if he lost his job in the morning he would have another by dark. He had a following of customers who didn't mind going out of their way to have Dad cut their meat for them. Like any job it had it's ups and downs and characters, I'm sure if Dad were here he could come up with more stories, who knows maybe I will remember more later.