Page 168 - a-columbia-county-boys-recollections-and-memories-of-columbia-county-florida-(2012)-lenvil-h-dicks

A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

Helds that had been cleared during the previous 2 years, and these fields still had a lot of standing
stumps there which were in the way of plowing, and I can recall that my daddy hired a many a stump to
be dug out by hand, by some fellow who came by looking for work, and that my daddy paid him 5 cents
per stump, that he could dig out with a shovel, and lay on the ground where it could be dragged away by
the mules.

Even so, a lot of these men would make 50 or 60 cents per day, which in those days was sufficient to put
groceries on the table. After a session of stump digging had been finished, daddy would take a mule and
tie a chain around a stump and drag it up to the sugar shelter where we cooked syrup in the fall and
winter, and he would chop the stumps up into fire wood both to fire the sugar boiler, and to fire the
fireplaces in the house. I will say that John Dicks swung the meanest ax 1 have ever seen. He could bring
an ax down into a stump with what looked like very little effort, and split it wide open in a way that
would have taken me 10 to 15 licks to do. He would do it in one lick. I have often thought that, as
skillful as he was at swinging an ax, he would have probably made a professional golfer if he had been
living in these times we now find ourselves in.

Back to Eric and Golde, when I was in High School the school was only 3 blocks from where Golde and
Eric lived, and quite often 1 would walk the 3 blocks over to their house at lunch time and eat lunch at
Golde’s house, and she always seemed glad to see me, and glad to feed me.

Also Eric and my other brother-in-law, Olis, who was Emerald’s husband, would take me squirrel
hunting and dove hunting with them, and it was from Eric and Otis that I became a pretty good shot at
bringing doves down on the wing. They showed me just how to lead the dove, which means that when a
dove would fly by, you did not fire your shotgun directly al the dove. You fired a little ahead of the
dove, and this lead distance would vary with the speed that the dove was moving, and the distance away
that the bird was from where you was standing when you shot. Most people felt very fortunate if they
could shoot down 7 birds with a box of shells, which was 25 shells, but the best dove shot I ever saw
was Eric’s younger brother, Ernest Markham. Ernest just simply did not miss, and where the rest of us
would be tickled to death to have gotten 10 doves out of a box of shells, he would always get 20 or more
birds out of a box of shells. A dove is an awful fast flying bird at times, and slow flying at other times.
Ernest had the knack of judging that bird’s speed and adjusting the lead distance of a bird so that he very
rarely missed bringing one down. He also taught me something else about dove shooting, and that was
to save my ammunition unless the bird was well within range. Most folks made the mistake of shooting
birds that were too far off, but not Ernest. He did not waste any shells.

In about 1963, give or take, Eric developed a black melanoma on his back, which the doctors diagnosed
as an extremely fast growing cancer, and the fatality rate of the black melanoma in those days was fairly
high. Naturally, both Eric and Golde were quite concerned about this cancer, and Eric finally consented
to have it operated on. Apparently the doctors got all of it, because he seemed to fully recover and have
no more problem with it.

While he was recovering, I started thinking about perhaps I should try to repay Golde and Eric for some
of the many places they had taken me, so I started them to thinking about going on a trip with Julie and
me to Alaska. Eric resisted this idea, as he did not want to be away from the store for the whole month,
and also since he would not consent to fly in an airplane, it meant driving all the way across the United
States, and then driving 1200 miles of unpaved road across Canada to Alaska and then to touring Alaska
in a car, but he finally consented to it. I had recently bought a brand new 1965 Lincoln Town car, which
I had special ordered. This was a beautiful car and had red leather interior back in the days before leather
became more or less standard in new cars. The four of us greatly enjoyed that trip to Alaska and Eric I
think was really glad after it was all over that he had gone, because he saw many, many things that he
would never have had a chance to see otherwise, such as Yellowstone Park, the California Redwoods,
and the tremendous Canadian Rocky Mountains. That was quite a trip and we all enjoyed it but 1 would
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