Printed within this section in serialized form are unedited, pre-publication excerpts from the book "Virginia Boy: The True Life Story of Cletus Cubbage." Written in longhand over a period of years, the original manuscript comprises twelve notebooks. "Virginia Boy" describes the life and times of a widely-travelled Valley native whose primary interest has been music. Cletus Cubbage has played guitar, solo and in various bands and places, for most of his life and has written over 200 songs. His story is a window into traditional area life and values.
"Virginia Boy"
By CLETUS CUBBAGE
If you missed the first section, it's archived in "Word Preserve" as
Chapter I, Part 1.Chapter I: Part 2
MY HOME AND FAMILY We didn't have kindergarten back then and I started my first year of school when I was seven years old. I would be called for breakfast, around 5 o'clock in the morning. I didn't have to catch the school bus until 7:30, however, we had 4,000 chickens that had to be fed and watered. We also had, what was called then, our own milk cow. Mom would milk the cow in the morning and I would milk it at night when I'd get in from school. Anyway after this work was done in the mornings, I would then put on my school clothes, get my books and walk down to the state road where I would wait for the school bus to pick up my cousins and myself.
Back then, I believe there were maybe 40, no more than 50, kids that went to school from Lucas Hollow. There was a three room school house where I first started to get my education. We had the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grades there. The 3rd grade class also shared half of their room with the 4th grade. This school was called, Nauman School I don't know how it got it's name. I would go to this school until I had finished the fifth grade. This was a three room building about three miles west of Stanley. There was no running water and no inside bathrooms, the school was heated from coal and corn cobs. The man that lived on a farm beside the school would shell his corn and give the corn cobs to be burned for heat. Our school started at 9 o'clock, after we had pledged allegiance to our flag, and prayed The Lord's Prayer. My little girl now tells me they don't do this anymore in school. Sometimes I wonder if they don't respect God or their Country, why are they going to school???
My first grade school teacher was named, Helen Painter, she was a terrific lady and a very good teacher, I liked her right away. I really learned a lot from her, if us kids misbehaved she would take a ruler and rule our hands and crack our knuckles. She would bend your hand way back by your fingers and man did this hurt! Sometimes I saw her take a switch and whip some of the bigger boys, I only got my hand ruled a couple of times. I learned quick to listen to her and I learned to respect her. Now the bath rooms were something else back then, they were called toilets, they have been called little brown buildings, and some called them johnny houses. There was no toilet paper back then, what ever kind of paper you liked you used. Sears and Roebuck catalogs were very common back then and no one complained about this.
I passed my first year and was half way through the second grade, Miss Helen said, I was very good and gave me and a couple other kids my age the hardest test in the book, and we passed this , we were sent to another room to be in the third grade. This teacher was named Alice Lumsden, she was a very fine lady and teacher too. I passed the third grade and got a man teacher for the fourth and fifth grade. His name was Robert Level, I would sit with a friend to do our lessons together and when we finished our lessons we would get to whispering together about different things, and he would have me and my friend stand side by side and he would take a long strap and give us 10 licks with it, boy, did that hurt. The following year I would be sent to Grove Hill school, about 10 miles from Stanley.
At 12 o'clock a large bell in the schools steeple was rung and we had one hour for our lunch and after our lunch we could go outside and play. Our lunches were packed at home in brown bags. We would have water to drink with our lunch, after we had got in line and someone would take a water dipper and pour water over our hands to wash them before we ate. We also said Table Grace before eating. At 3 o'clock our day in school was through. We went back home on the same bus that we came to school on that morning.
My first job in the evenings was to feed and water all the chickens, milk the cow, and pour the milk in a separator, this divided the cream from the milk. This milk was poured over hog feed and fed to our hogs. The cream was later took to a creamery in Luray and sold. After my work outside was finished I would go inside and start my school homework until the rest of my family came in from the farm. My mom would get the supper, we now call this meal dinner, we didn't have electricity then, just kerosene lamps. After supper I would study my books. Mom and dad would discuss what they were going to do the next day. If we would have had TV then I would have been too tired to watch it. I heat my water on the wood stove to take my bath with, we didn't have running water back then. My brother and daddy dug a well and daddy walled it up with rocks, that we had plenty of on our farm, but, I'll never forget the taste of that water, it was clean and pure and the color of silver. This was about the usual routine through out the week. On Saturday morning, after the work was done at home, we hooked the horse to the buggy and went to town, at this time cars and trucks were hard to get, and we among lots of other people didn't have any.
Mom and dad bought a farm from a neighbor and borrowed money from the bank in Stanley to pay for it. They went to work at New Market, Virginia, at a poultry plant to pay the money back to the bank. There was a McCoy man that would come up in the Holler in the morning, with a truck and haul the people to the poultry plant in New Market.
I would go to the new place that mom and dad were buyin with my brother to work on it. We both would ride on the back of our horse to the farm. I was small then and my brother would do the work with the horse, he would plow the land with the horse and a one horse plow, back then there was a two horse plow, but it wasn't used much. I didn't have a lot to do yet, so to take up some time for me, my brother would make a small hole in the ground and make the top of the hole real smooth, then he would put a couple of big ants in the hole, I'd watch them try to crawl out. In the mountains where I grew up there were red and black ants. These ants were a lot bigger than regular ants, they lived under ground and would carry the dirt outside until they had what we called an ant hill. I use to take a stick and tear it open and watch them build it back again.
I learned real quick, Don't let them get on you, boy could they bite. My brother and me would ride the horse home to eat dinner. The bushes or briars had scratched my legs and the horse would be sweaty and it would get in the scratches on my legs and really burn and hurt. After we had our dinner I would pull weeds to give to our hogs, that we had in a pen. After every thing was taken care of at our house we went back to our new farm and then go home for that day. Mom and daddy would get in from the New Market Poultry Plant later, and we would have a good supper and rest to get ready for the next day.
