Page 234 - 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

Sometimes after daddy had brought us candy home 1 would say to Rodney “Rodney, let’s play a game.
You be daddy, feeding the hogs com, and 1 will be the old hog that he is feeding so you throw your corn
out to me and I will eat it like a hog.” 1 don’t guess Rodney smartened up until later on, because he
would very cooperatively start throwing his corn out on the carpet, and I would make snorting noises
like a hog and gobble it up. I usually ended up eating more of Rodney’s corn than he did.

He is not going to appreciate my telling this on him, but at that time he was pretty dumb.

After 1 had gotten my degree from Stetson and was attending Baylor, after Rodney graduated from
Columbia High School in 1951, he joined the Navy. I had been in the Army, and I guess he didn’t want
to be like me.

He took his Naval Boot Training at the big Naval Base in San Diego, California, and when he finished
boot camp and was ready for an assignment where ever they were going to send him, they had a pre­
assignment interview. The Officer who interviewed Rodney asked him why he joined the Navy, and
Rodney told him that he wanted to see the world. So the Officer assigned him to the Naval Air Station in
Jacksonville, 60 miles from where Rodney was born and raised, and he spent all four of his enlistment
years at the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville.

He bought an old used Mercury automobile, which really turned out to be a very good car, and after he
got off duty in the afternoons many times he would drive to Lake City to take care of his tobacco crop.
He grew a tobacco crop all 4 years of the time that he was enlisted in the Navy, and by the time he was
discharged he had already accumulated enough money to buy his own equipment and start farming.

That is what he did, and he got to be quite a large farmer, in the early days raising laying hens as had my
mother before him, although he did it on a much larger scale than ma did, and grew a big crop of
tobacco every year, and accumulated cattle to the point where he eventually has one of the largest black
angus herds in North Florida.

I will say that Rodney has done much more, and harder, physical work than his older brother, but he has
been one of the few very successful farmers in Columbia County.

He ended up with Grandpa Tyre’s old house, which had previously been occupied by R.J. Robinson and
his wife, Beatrice, who were the parents of Rodney’s wife, Norma. So in effect, she just moved back
home. Her daddy R.J. Robinson had bought the old Will Tyre house and a good portion of the Will Tyre
Farm, and that is where Norma was raised.

As I write this part of my book, it is April of year 2012.1 am 83 and Rodney is 78. He will turn 79 on
Ih
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July 18 , a couple of months before I turn 84 on September 10 , (Lord willing.) My health and
Rodney’s health seem to be about the same, and we are the last two surviving members of the 8 children
which God gave to John and Pearl Dicks. Fay passed away just two months ago.

After Rodney and I both grew up, we had a lot of dealings with each other, all of which were
satisfactory to both of us, and I believe that starting in the summer of 1957, and for several years
thereafter, we grew tobacco together. Since Rodney was the true farmer in the family, he would plant
the tobacco, and fertilize and plow it, taking care of it until the tobacco was mature enough to begin
picking it. Although he planted the tobacco, and inasmuch as the Government restricted the number of
acres we could grow, we felt the necessity of seeing there was not a missing hill of tobacco in the entire
tobacco patch, so after he planted the tobacco it was my job to hire and bring a crew out after school and
on Saturdays to replace those plants which did not survive the original planting, and to water them down
so that they would have a real good chance of surviving.
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