My Grandparents

Long ago and seemingly in a different world, I have a memory of my grandparents burned into my consciousness. This memory has risen up in my mind because I was reminded that yesterday (Jan. 27, 2012) would have been my grandfather Malcolm H. Fouts would have turned 104 years old. He died in 2000 at 92 years old. My grandmother Laura, was born in the same year and died in 1992 at 84.

I often think of them and the world they lived in. Both being born in 1908 in Pike Co., KY. Yea, so far back in the hills they had to pipe sunshine in. As odd as that sounds it is not far from the truth! The mountains were so steep and close together the sun must have been hidden behind mountains much more than flatlanders can imagine. They married in 1925 at the age of 17 just a few weeks before grandpa’s 18^th birthday. Unlike what is said of early marriages in our society being such a ‘tragedy’ and unlikely to last, they were married 67 years before death separated them. It was really another world. Within a few years of their marriage, the Great Depression hit, gripping the country in “hard times” for at least 15 -20 years. It was World War II that finally created an industrial ‘boom’ for war materials that supposedly brought the country out of that depression. But at the cost of thousands of dead young Americans and millions of other peoples around the globe.

This was the world that shaped the lives of my grandparents. Most of their families were coal miners or subsistence farmers, or both. Grandpa, fortunately was born with an uncommon ability to build houses. I say he was born with it because from what I have learned he build his first house when he was 16 years old, for his parents. I never saw the house since it was gone before my memory, but from the descriptions it was a very good house. As far as a career was concerned, grandpa never looked back. He build houses for the rest of his life, mostly as an independent contractor. Often building the houses single handed without a helper. I ask him one time how he managed getting the rafters and walls up by himself. It was a short answer that he assumed I should be able to understand, all he said was, “ropes and pulley”.

At some point in the early 50’s, they uprooted from the mountains of Pike Co. and moved to southern Ohio to fulfill their “dream”. It was to own a farm that was not entirely on the side of a mountain. The purchased 100 acres, (maybe more I am not sure) of fairly good land near the village of Dundas, OH.
What always strikes me as remarkable is that they had the courage and determination to leave home and family, when they were nearly 50 years old and go to a new place. These days that would not seem very strange in that we are a very mobile nation of people. But understanding a little bit about their culture and the mindset of mountain people of eastern KY, moving off at that point in their lives was really a remarkable thing. But they had a “dream” and followed it with success.

One cannot really comprehend the ‘world’ in which they lived most of their lives. Eastern KY in the 1920’s was a good hundred years behind most of the country, as far as modernization was concerned. I believe it was around 1946, after the war before electricity even came to their “hollow”, if my memory is correct. That would mean they were almost 40 years old before they could have had electric.

Our nation stands on a thin edge this very moment of slipping into another great depression. This time though, it would be very different than in my grandparents youth. Most of the modern things that people now would have to “give up” (and many already have), the people in eastern KY in the 1920’s did not have to begin with. It is a true saying, that you don’t miss what you never had. But to have such a comfortable way of life as most Americans have today and then lose it, seems to me to be much harder than if you had never become so ‘comfortable’ to begin with.

We think back and feel sorrow for the hardships those folks had to suffer in their youth, it was a hard life and no doubt about it, but I can’t help but think it also gave them life lessons that they would never forget. In my grandparents case, I know they never forgot. Even in their “golden years” (that farce of a cruel joke that society advertises about growing old), after they had sold the farm, they continued to grow a very large garden, only giving it up when they were not able to get out the door to tend it. They understood very clear the value of having food grown and stored in case of “hard times”.

Another thing that always struck me about grandpa was that he always seemed to have a good sense of humor with a quick laugh and ready smile. About the only time I have ever seen his ‘blood pressure’ raise is when politics would come up. He too, had a very serious opinion about how things ought to be run.
We think of hardship these days and for some people there is serious hardship, I would not want to make light of that fact, but when you sit with older people and visit knowing some of their history, you grow to admire their ability to coup with serious hardship. My grandparents had 12 children, only 8 of which grew to near adulthood. Two of those, a daughter who died at 21 giving childbirth and a son who died at 19 in an automobile crash, did not live very long. They lost several children at young ages, one I know was 5 years old. That is “hardship”, no matter how you look at it. Most of those events happen at the same time the nation was in deep depression or serious wars. In addition they had two sons who served in combat, one in Korea, one in Vietnam. Thankfully, they both came home.

Most of us “common people” have some hardship in our lives, that is just the nature of living. But when we reflect on the fortitude of our ancestors we ought to learn some lessons that should help us. Don’t ever think things are so bad they won’t improve, sometimes we just have to ‘tough it out’ and wait until our circumstances change for the better. Yet, they did not sit back in defeat and give up, they kept on toward their dreams and to my knowledge we quite content to live simple lives on their farm. They always had several cows, hogs and various critters around the place; food on the hoof you might say. But when you have seen what can happen so quickly to an industrial society, my thinking is, they were not about to give up living close to the land from which they could and did, gain food, shelter and as much security as this world can provide.