Chapter 2
Early Years and Death
I’m not about to try and convince you I remember a lot about my early years. Of course I don’t but I did see some pictures, hear some stories and even saw some very poor quality 8mm films that kept breaking because they had become so brittle over the many years. From what I have put together, my life was better than most. It seems I actually had fun and I would like to share those magical memories with you.
My dad was the central character around the life we were living. Daddy seemed bigger than life in a way. In addition to my father, there was of course my mother and one baby brother. Brother’s name was Terry. Terry’s life and mine could not have been more different had we been born on opposite continents except for one very important aspect that bound us like Siamese twins. The alcoholism that united us was like glue and flowed through our veins as a genetic replica with only a single difference. Although our alcoholism was as identical as matching fingerprints, Terry’s personal hell claimed his life at the age of thirty-eight June 17th 1995. I know of no other reason, other than God tossing a coin, that has allowed me to survive acute alcoholism when my brother Terry, in fact did not. But…. I’m getting ahead of the story.
In the beginning, my family and I lived in Birmingham Alabama, the “Big City”. My mother thought the city is what she wanted from my daddy. Mother, as a young adult, wanted to be taken away from rural life and live the glamorous life the city could offer in the late 1940’s post war era as the opulent years of the “Baby Boom” loomed on the horizon. Both my mother and father came from backgrounds most people would consider poor as they were both born in August of 1930 in rural, farming communities. Daddy came from a large two hundred acre farm in a small town known as Harpersville where cotton was king. Mother grew up even poorer having been raised in a railroad shanty in a neighboring town called Chelsea. Both my mom and dad were born and raised in such a way that they were both greatly influenced by The Great Depression, WWII, Racism and many other social challenges of their time. My adult impression of my parents is, their history made them both very ambitious and determined people focused on what they wanted from life and the direction they wanted to head in. If I am right in my judgment of them, the above is a trait that to this day I personally greatly miss in regards to my on life.
About the time of my birth, my parents had purchased a typical “Ozzie and Harriett” type house in Birmingham and my father had become an adding machine salesman for a company called Burroughs. I can’t help but chuckle today looking back on the history of a company such as Burroughs. My birth year was 1955 and Burroughs was a major producer of adding machines and retail cash registers. As technology changed over the years, Burroughs became a computer manufacturer but was always playing catch-up and behind IBM. Again, I am getting ahead of the story here but my senior year of college, the University of Montevallo purchased a shiny new Burroughs computer. Failing with their many years of catch up with IBM, Burroughs ultimately became UNISYS and in 2000, when I was struggling with job issues a few months, I worked as a technician for UNISYS. When I entered through the front door of UNISYS, right there in a “trophy case” sat relics of the early days with adding machines and cash registers in a glass case. I remember the items appearing like something from a very old science fiction movie, almost not real and from another world. I remember smiling as I thought to myself of the day when my father grabbed one of those items, brand new in his arms, and presented a sales pitch to local Birmingham business owners beaming broadly with a smile as he held the very latest and greatest in technology and the modern promises of a post world war America.
Terry was born August 28th 1957. At the very moment of Terry’s birth, the reality of some life long health events regarding Terry arrived in my family’s life. Terry was born as an Rh factor baby. Now you would think someone could have tested for that and warned my family but as I understood it, the medical people goofed that up and didn’t catch it. My mother always told me that had she been warned about what could have happened if they had a second child, well they would have never conceived a second child. At least that’s what I was told. It’s also important for me to say, regarding the Rh factor consequences, the negativity only affects the second child and any subsequent children after that. This of course leaves yours truly here unblemished and brilliant. Well, as soon as Terry was born, the doctor knew something was wrong and test’s had to be performed immediately. Terry had to have so many blood transfusions as a newborn infant that the doc’s effectively replaced his entire blood supply. This massive number of blood transfusions was to later become a significant event in my brother’s life as he suffered continuing health problems. From his birth, Terry often had blood transfusions that at one time numbered 36 pints in just a couple of days.
As good as our modern life was, it wasn’t long before my father got the strong urge to move back to the farm he was raised on. He had gone to college, graduated 2nd in his class, served in the military during the Korean war, got a job with a major corporation, started a family, owned a nice home and now he was ready to go back to where he had come from. As far as I’m concerned, it was a GREAT decision.
What happened was over the months my parents were settling into the urban city lifestyle, my father had gotten home sick for the farm he was raised on. Harpersville was only an hour south of Birmingham and my parents often traveled “home” to show the brand new grandbabies off. As my father made these trips, he would often spend time with his father who was still an active and very busy farmer. Granddaddy Earl Baker, of course, had some chickens on his farm. For whatever reason my father began to get interested in these chickens and suddenly a few chickens became a lot of chickens. My father and grandfather, through their private conversations out and about on the farm, decided they would try and sell some eggs from these chickens. The very first egg laid by this new enterprise, my father proudly took to his Birmingham home and placed in the refrigerator so he could tell all visitors about his new business he was going to build as he would proudly show off the first egg. My mother’s baby brother, uncle Glenn, came to visit and my mother excitedly decided to show Glenn the “egg”. As my mother opened the refrigerator door, sure enough the egg began to roll and of course rolled off the shelf and splattered all over the kitchen tile floor. Perhaps that first egg should have been an omen to what soon became Baker’s Poultry Farm in Harpersville Alabama.
So, we moved. I was around five at the time making our move to the farm about 1960. My father came from a very old farm that has now seen seven generations. The farm had a large house for the farm owner at the time and a small house, known as the “weaning” house, across the dirt driveway we moved into. My father, being very ambitious and of course brilliant, was going to build the largest egg production facility in the southeast; well…. minus one egg. Looking back on it, my daddy did some amazing things for his time building a production poultry layer facility of 250,000 chickens with a goal of one million layer hens, which he never got to realize. Life on the farm seemed to offer all the hopes and promises of a glorious future as we began to pursue our “American Dream” through chickens.
I want to try and paint a mental picture of what 1960 rural Shelby county Alabama life was like, at least through the eyes of a five year old curious farm boy. Farm life was a magical wonderland with no rival but unfortunately, since I had nothing to compare it to, I would not realize until much later in life (and sobriety) how truly priceless my “home” was. If I could really change anything about my life it would be the decision to ever leave “home” as the Baker farm in Harpersville Alabama is truly the grandest place on all the earth for me.
Harpersville Alabama had one two lane state paved highway that ran right through the center of town called “280”. The center of town was one red light intersecting the state highway of 280 with a much smaller state/county road known to locals as highway 25. The intersection of Harpersville “quartered” the town with four 90 degree “pie slices” on each side of the red light dissecting the township into four quadrants. All four of these quarters were quite prominent pieces of real estate to the local community. These four “corners” were the township merchants and local retail shops or businesses of Harpersville and each possessed it’s on interesting history.
All four quadrants of property were simply dirt “pullovers” from the main highway and were very simple dirt/gravel driveways in front of the store front for that corner. The northwest quadrant piece of property was the prime location for Harpersville and contained a merchants store named “J. W. Donahue”. The northeast quadrant was “Jack Donahue’s” and if traveling west to east from Birmingham, these two stores would appear on the left side of the red light when traveling highway 280.
The other side of the road was the low rent district of Harpersville and struggled to stay in business and make a living, even unto this day. The south east quadrant has been the Harpersville Post Office, Insurance, Accounting, Insurance, Auto Sales, Insurance and you get the point. The south west corner was another Donahue relative but business there was so poor the name is not even memorable and various businesses somewhat mirrored the post office across the road.
J. W.’s store was by far the only place in town to consider visiting when leaving the house to go to “Harpersville”. The Baker farms were mostly the right side of 280 in the south west quadrant of Harpersville meaning you arrived at this property before reaching the red light when traveling from Birmingham. A quick and casual view might leave the sightseer with the wrong impression, that all this property was cotton fields but nothing could be further from the truth. For me, this area of Harpersville was Disneyland, King Solomon’s mines, Ancient and Modern Babylon, the Magic Kingdom, Wally World and tens of thousands of other wonderful places my imagination could carry me.
About two miles out from the red light in Harpersville and west on 280 was a right hand turn onto a dirt road that wound its way around in a 75% of a U shape back around to highway 25. The dirt road intersected back into highway 25 about two miles south of the Harpersville red light. This dirt road could have been called Baker’s highway as it was only Bakers that lived on this “loop”. As a matter of fact, at one time every square foot of property in this quadrant was in fact owned by a Baker. The local church and cemetery were located at the dirt roads dead end into highway 25 and is where my family is buried.
If you can imagine a ninety degree turn half way around this dirt road, Baker’s Poultry farm was right in that ninety degree turn. Earl V Baker’s two hundred acre farm, the land that became OldBakerFarm in 1996 was located right in that turn. My father, Ed Baker had purchased an adjoining 160 acres right next to granddaddy’s farm. And if that was not enough land to play on, my uncle Bill Bakers Ponderosa was also next door and Uncle Bill had 400 acres. (Uncle Bill was one of granddaddy Baker’s thirteen brothers and sisters and the oldest of that family). I could walk for a day on Baker’s Poultry Farm and not get off of Baker property when I was a kid.
My father was quite fond of going to J.W.’s store. It could be that JW Mercantile was full of hardware like hammers, saws, nails and men things like that and my father being related to me, perhaps he liked those types of things with the enthusiasm that I relished toys and candy. I never cared about any of the tool items as I had my on list when I heard we were “going to town”. I made it a point to never miss a trip to Harpersville or J. W.’s store.
Immediately upon entering the Mercantile, one might notice the dusty cement slab that served as a floor. Other distinguishing traits of J.W. Mercantile were the high ceilings lighted by dim tungsten incandescent bulbs hanging from frail electrical wiring. After entering the tall glass door, on the right hand side and near the front of the store so it could be seen through the plate glass display window stood the most marvelous “tree” that held dozens of small packs of toys. These toys were absolutely magical to a five year old boy. I could stand at that rack of toys all day long mesmerized. Packs of toys included toy soldiers, toy Cowboy and Indians, plastic guns, marbles, dominos, packs of cards, toy blue and grey civil war soldiers and literally hundreds of other items, each costing twenty nine cents. Once I could tear myself away from the toy rack, the next wonderland item was the “ice box” on the left and across from J.W.’s dusty check out counter. This dimly lit ice box was a large Coca Cola chest with a row of lids across the top. The lids lifted up and folded backward on top of the ice box to gain access to the contents inside. Reaching into the cooler one would find a large block of ice sitting in a few inches of ice cold water. Rolling around in this ice box of soft drinks would be delicious bottles of Nehi Grape, Orange Crush, small and large bottles of Coca Cola, Yahoo chocolate drinks, RC cola’s and dozens of other flavors of soda pop all colder than any other drink on earth. Any one of these ice cold drinks would cost ten cents and no tax!
And if the ice box were not enough magic for any citizen of Harpersville, the next magical rack of items would be the chewing gum, life savers and other candies. I was always held in a hypnotic trance with all the rows of wonderful life saver candies as my favorite would always be the colorful assorted pack. Any pack of gum or life savers was five cents, every piece of bubble gum was one penny and every candy bar was a nickel. These were mammoth candy bars that my small hand would not wrap around and if ones taste ran more on the salty side rather than sweet, packs of potato chips or peanuts were also five cents. I always dumped the peanuts into a cold bottle of Coca Cola. Of course there were moon pies to go with the RC cola’s, the south’s greatest delicacy. You could literally go into J.W.’s store with a dollar and shop all day. And if you needed a stamp to mail something, the post office sometimes diagonally across from J.W.’s store sold US stamps for five cents. J.W. Donahue was also the town mayor and it was easy for me to see why, anyone who held the keys to all the goodies he had would deserve to be town mayor. When J.W. passed away many years later, Harpersville built a park and named it after J.W. Donahue in his honor. Once again, that made perfect sense to me.
The last magical item of my childhood shopping memory was the blocks of ice. Outside the store was an “ice house”. The ice house consisted of a loading dock and a shed type of building that housed large blocks of solid ice. People actually bought these blocks of ice and I was always interested in how the handlers would work with these heavy blocks of ice. The ice employees had a “hook” that would fold into each side of the block of ice and clamp down so that the worker was able to use the extended handle to pick the block of ice up. The ice house workers would slide this block of ice into a large double bag to keep the ice frozen when placing it into your vehicle for the trip home. I never really knew what the blocks of ice cost as it was less important to me than the items inside the store.
Traveling the dirt road that ran around the “Baker” loop connecting the two highways, 280 and 25, was about as much fun as going into J.W.’s store. This dirt road was one lane and was obviously originally created with horse drawn wagons. The dirt road wound tightly around and between large oak trees and dodged old pot holes. Along the edges of the road was a very dense forest that always looked rather spooky. This dirt road twisted and turned as it connected each of the houses along the way. The dirt roads of Harpersville also had their unique name, “Dead Hollow”. It was along one of these stretches of dirt road and at the back of what was Uncle Bill’s property where Terry fell out of the truck for reasons I never quite understood.
Through these years, my father was very hard at work building his dream and my mother stayed very busy also working on the farm and building Baker’s Poultry Farm. I remember my grandmother across the dirt driveway being so nice to me and treating me so special. The unconditional love of a grandparent is a truly magical thing that has no rational explanation. I loved it! It was rare for me to see my father very often because he would go to work before daylight and it would be after my bedtime when he returned to the house. However, the moments I do remember my father were magical. Edward Walton Baker was truly the hero of my young life, let’s call it my first life as my life seems to have been separated into at least two separate lives with a “before” and “after”.
When my father showed up, I suddenly had a hero and I knew he loved me. He would suddenly come in from nowhere and announce to my mother we were all going on a vacation. Then, just like that we would be off to some far off magical and wonderful place. It was awesome! All of a sudden we would be on our way to Myrtle Beach South Carolina or Cypress Springs Florida. The Great Smoky Mountains in Gatlinburg Tennessee was on the list as was many other great locations throughout the southeast. Let’s see… there was also the “Dude Ranch” in Georgia, the Keys, West Palm, Tampa Bay and other Florida spots and just an endless list of other fantastic, magical places. I can’t explain why but we never seemed to travel west into Mississippi. However, when we did vacation and travel it was always to a new location we had never been to and one of the premiere vacation resorts of the time complete with exotic country club golf courses.
My father and mother always seemed to gravitate around magnificent golf resorts. They really liked playing golf and the house was full of trophies from the many golfing events they entered. I guess they were good, I was really too young to know much about it. As I grew up, golf became a part of my life as well, a treasure from my parents I could never repay and although in my adult years I seemed to have gotten pulled away from golf, I do, to this very minute, think of golf as the “Greatest Game Ever” and have many wonderful golfing memories.
I must have been around five or six during these vacation excursions. If so, that would make my baby brother, Terry, around three or four. I remember one vacation; I have no idea which one, where we were all on a golf course. Mom and Dad took us with them if you can believe it. My parents would get two of the riding carts and I would ride in one cart while my brother rode in the other golf cart. I guess I was being mischievous but something got into me that I was grown enough to drive the golf cart. That’s about the time my baby brother Terry decided to fall out of the golf cart traveling in front of me. Ooops, my golf cart just happened to run over my baby brother. Needless to say it didn’t kill him and I got in a lot of trouble. Spankings were something I was going to need to get very use to in my life but it really was not all my fault. I remember with clarity a warm summer day, along about this same time period, when my father was driving my grandfathers old pickup truck along some of the farms dirt roads and my baby brother Terry, once again falling out of the truck that my daddy was in charge of. My brother falling out of vehicles was an identifying event from very early in his life. I did notice my father did not get a spanking for his transgression as I did. I think these two events engrained a strong sense of fairness and justice in my young life as my later life would experience our nation’s judicial system more than once with great disappointment in the outcomes.
Christmas was spectacular! I have no idea what my father was trying to prove with the Christmas event but my house on Christmas morning always looked like the display windows in the big department stores in downtown Birmingham. I mean the living room on Christmas day was like the magical kingdom! There would be stuff everywhere. For instance, in the corner of the living room would be an Indian Teepee. I mean a real Teepee, big enough for a real family of Indians to live in. Of course, if you had Indians, then you had to have the counter part and I always had cowboy suits. Right down to the gun belt, boots and cowboy hat. I think my cowboy suit was usually black and Terry’s was brown. We each got these plastic Mattel Winchester rifles that shot “real” plastic bullets and our Mattel six shooters also shot the same bullets. Mattel was really big back then for kid’s toys and I dearly loved the Saturday morning Mattel commercials as I always watched the Saturday morning cartoons.
Christmas in the late 50’s and early 60’s always provide me a large train track, a car racetrack, a big set of Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys. A bicycle for both my brother and myself would be in the house, after all wouldn’t a kid like me wear one out on a farm each year? We got these big sets of Army men to play with. I suppose patriotism was still big after WWII, with all the John Wayne movies, but we always got Army men sets as well as Army suites to wear and Army play guns. I remember some of the Army guns we had would shoot a plastic “bomb”. I would always shoot those at Terry. We also got boxing gloves so we could fight each other and let all the grown ups have a good laugh at us fighting.
Now if that wasn’t enough, the grown ups got pretty neat stuff too. I remember pool tables, new golf clubs, shuffle board, darts, all kinds of stuff that I wasn’t suppose to play with. We all know about how long that lasted don’t we?
We prospered to say the least. Apparently my daddy was a very smart man. We got new cars all the time, I even remember a Cadallac and that was probably something really opulent back in the late fifties or early sixties for a farm family way out a dirt road in a rural county almost no one ever heard of.
I suppose things were just too good to be true. All of a sudden my father got very sick. No one knew what it was or what to do about it. He began seeing a lot of doctors and none of them knew what to do either. I know he started suffering really bad and would lay down at night and put hot towels on his face. Then his nose would bleed profusely. I don’t mean like a normal nosebleed but more like if someone just dumped a pint of blood through each nostril. My father also hurt a lot, we could hear him and I knew he was suffering. The list of doctors grew long in just a couple of months and still no one knew anything about my father’s illness. My daddy went to specialist after specialist. Finally someone wanted to send him to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota. One day in the fall of 1963 my mother and father left on a plane and went away. My brother and I stayed with my grandparents across the dirt road. My father never returned to the farm. One day later, November 23rd 1963 as a matter of fact, we were coming home from Christmas shopping as my loving grandparents tried to keep us busy and occupied and my grandparent’s house had lots and lots of people at it as we drove up. My grandmother started screaming and crying. I didn’t know what was wrong but when we parked and got out of the car, someone said my daddy had died that day. They named the disease one day before on November 22nd 1963. What killed my father was Wegener's Granulomatosis which is an inflammation of the blood vessels in the lungs, bronchial and nasal tubes. The disease that killed my father has been explained to me as an environmental disease, for instance there is “something” in a person’s environment that is killing them. Before medication was found, to combat this disease, in the years following my father’s death, patients were told to relocate. Today, medications used to treat Wegener's Granulomatosis include high-dose cortisone and the immunosuppressive drug Cytoxan but the good news is that no one has to die from this any longer if they seek professional treatment.
A day or two later my mother returned home. All of my life I have remembered the union, when my brother was seven and I was eight, when my mother came home from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota. Some friends and family had met momma at the Birmingham airport and brought her to our Harpersville home. As I entered our house, I sensed my mother was in the master bedroom at the rear of the house. I walked in the direction of voices as I began to hear commotion from my mother and daddy’s bedroom. As I approached the master bedroom door, I could sense my mother was sitting on the bed with Terry in her lap as mother was trying to explain to my baby brother about daddy being dead. Terry was crying uncontrollably as mother tried to console him. As I entered the bedroom, I stopped and stood in the doorway. After a few minutes, and no one noticing me, I turned and left the bedroom exiting back out the front door of our house. I have never been able to explain why but I never cried during this period of time and this is not because I did not love my father. As things turned out, I missed daddy every day from that moment forward.
This was November 23, 1963, the day my father died. My father was thirty three years of age, my mother was thirty three, I was eight, and my brother was seven. The president had been shot in Texas, my father had died and it seemed like a race war was about to begin. Someone had bombed the 16th street Baptist church in Birmingham Alabama and the mayor was using dogs and fire hose’s on blacks after a lady had refused to sit at the back of a bus one day. Great stores and Apothecaries like Woolworth’s were about to change forever as comic books and baseball cards would soon be fond memories. We were yet to loose another Kennedy as well as Dr. King and America had those days in her future. Painful race and political tensions lay ahead as well as great achievements in science and space as America would soon walk on the moon. Jet engines were revolutionizing the way we travel and Vietnam was heating up. The 60’s had begun with all the perversion, hallucinogens and insanity the mind could muster. I was living the first day of the rest of my life at the age of eight where I would feel alone every day from then on; living at the end of a lonely dirt road where nobody ever visited, in the small farm house known as the “weaning house”, in a tiny one red light farming town located in a rural county of Alabama. What would happen to us now?
