RAY DEAN JAMES - My Life chapter 4

This is the 4th installment of my Dad’s life story. He wrote 30+ pages back in 1999, adding and embellishing a few more stories in conversations we had up until the time of his passing in 2015. The red italics are my attempt to add clarification and context.

We moved to Lebanon, Tennessee where my Dad drove a cab and sold moonshine out of the trunk, which he did off and on until the day he retired. I was in the third grade but didn't go to school much. In the early 1940s the US Army literally took over the state of Tennessee for war games and exercise planning and maneuvers, practicing for the Normandy invasion in Europe. For well over a year there were thousands of soldiers running all over the farmers' fences and farms. They would pay out dearly for all the damage they did. And to this day you can still find remnants in the fields and on the hillsides. Anyway, I started playing hooky and shining shoes and running errands for the soldiers in the camps. Some days I would make 5 to 10 dollars. My constant companion was a black kid known as Snowball. No other known name. Today we could never get away with calling a black kid "Snowball". Each day I would pretend to go to school and meet Snowball at our regular meeting place, grab our shine kits, and go "Soldiering". Several times the truant officer picked me up and carried me to the school where I got out of his car, walked through the front door, turned the corner and out the back door. It was while working the camps that I discovered a better way of making money. It was "showbiz". I purchased a kazoo trumpet and Snowball and I worked up our song and dance version of "Blues in the Night", a big song at the time.

I would play and sing and Snowball would tap dance. We were an instant hit and the soldiers would throw quarters and half dollars to us. And this was in the forties. We would take our money to town and go to the movies when we would have to separate, me downstairs and Snowball in the balcony. A sign of the times in the South. Soldiers would camp in the field behind our house and pay my mom to cook meals for them. They would send me to the store for candy bars and cigarettes and tip me rather well.

I spent a lot of time in a treehouse built by my brother Eugene. I always called him "Eugey". We would sit in our tree house and shoot up things with my BB gun. My mom's sister ("Sis"), visiting us from Cincinnati, brought us some lunch and I shot her in the butt as she was going back to the house. Sis was a very special person. She had polio as a child and her body was very contorted. She was a cripple but never let it stop her. She worked an assortment of jobs and always drove a big Chrysler. She loved me and my brother like we were her very own. In fact, years later when I married a girl who was Catholic, Sis was the only member of my family who would come to the wedding. In Lebanon, my Mom and Dad separated. My Mom decided to take me and my brother and move to Cincinnati where Sis and my grandfather lived. Mom's father. We all called him Pop.

Legend has it that my grandfather Malcolm fell in with a friend named Alvin around this time who was a bad influence. The two men frequently stayed out all night drinking and carrying on. It is probably more than I should reveal, but when Granny realized she had an STD she drew the line and left my grandpa. It was at this time that she took her two boys to live in Cincinnati. It was 1942. My dad was 8 years old at the time. He moved from the sticks of rural Tennessee to the concrete jungle of downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. It was at this time that he got his first pair of shoes. You read that right: For the first eight years of his life my father went barefoot.