Chapter 3
Life After Daddy
My father’s funeral was a major event in Harpersville Alabama. I realize today, the big turnout for my father’s funeral may have been because of daddy’s age. After all, he was only thirty three years old. Everyone in town did, however, know him and know of him, not because my daddy was a Baker per say but more because of the type person he was and what he had been doing in Harpersville. No matter the reasons for the large funeral turnout, it is a fact that everyone knew him and loved him and my father’s funeral was a huge event in my small, rural home town. My father had no enemies, except of course unless you count the conies but without the hoods, heck they were also at the funeral. As a matter of fact, the Klan may have held the most respect of any group for Ed Baker.
I had no concept of what young or old was, especially in reference to life and death. To me, you were either a kid or you were an adult, kind of an “us” or “them” sort of thing. I remember accepting the fact that adults died whatever dying meant. The town shut down the day of my father’s funeral. Of course I did not understand any of these normal events in life. All of these funeral and death happenings were new and strange to me. For starters, my father’s funeral was a closed casket funeral. I had no idea why but for an eight-year-old boy with a vivid imagination, I surmised that the simple truth was that my father was in fact not in the box. This is what I wanted to believe and this is what I did believe. Everyone kept commenting on how “strong” I was. Nothing could have been further from the truth. There was no need to cry if you were convinced no one was in the box. So… for many days and even years I expected my father to walk back into the house; which he never did.
Years later in my adulthood, I learned why my father’s funeral was a closed casket funeral. The disease, Wegener's Granulomatosis, was a disfiguring disease and I remember mother commenting how my father’s facial features changed during his illness. The facial changes were from what the disease did to my father’s sinus cavaties, which was very painful for daddy. Even so, for a great part of my life I always felt like this disfigurement should not have been enough to require my father’s funeral being a closed casket funeral. Daddy died out of state at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota and the body, when leaving the hospital, had to be taken to a nearby mortuary. Very late in life mother disclosed to me that she had always felt as though this Minnesota mortuary did not embalm daddy correctly. When mother left the Mayo Clinic and Minnesota with my father’s body, she said daddy looked just like he had when he died. However, when the local Shelby county mortuary was preparing my fathers body for the Harpersville funeral and they opened the casket, they discovered my daddy had turned black and was hideously disfigured; supposedly from the decomposition which had begun. This had only been a few days since my father’s death and bodies are shipped for funerals all the time. Something must have gone wrong in Minnesota and as far as mother was concerned, she and daddy had been taken advantage of by the long distance funeral home in Minnesota. My mother was a very religious and thusly forgiving person but I will point out she never forgot about this embalming injustice which would lead me to believe mother may have been somewhat unforgiving regarding how my father was treated after his death.
I certainly had no idea how life would change after November 23 1963, the day my father died and the world changed forever. Today, I know it is normal for a young widow to remarry. In 1963, my mother remarrying was inconceivable to me. For whatever reason, mother never did remarry either. At mother’s funeral, forty years later, the front cover of her service bulletin had a picture of mother and daddy’s wedding with the caption “Vow’s Given And Kept”. I heard mother say many times that the bible freed her to remarry because her husband had died. However, mother went on to say that she knew she would never find nor meet anyone else as good as what Ed Baker had been and that anything less would not do. I remember thinking how devastating it would be should she remarry. I mean after all, I was convinced that sooner or later, daddy would come back since he was not in the box to begin with…. Right?
As far as I was concerned we would of course continue to live in the small farmhouse across the dirt road from the big farmhouse. After all, the lady that seemed to love me the most was over in the big house. My mother was always busy. I did not know or understand things like estate, inheritance, life insurance, will’s etc. All I knew was that my father was not at the table when we ate which was not unusual. So, I continued to wait on his return thinking nothing had changed in life for any of us.
What was actually happening was my father had died without a will and in the state of Alabama in 1963, dying without a will was not at all the thing to do if you had a family you cared about. Of course, who would have thought a thirty three year old hard working man was about to die. My father did have a recently purchased life insurance policy for a great deal of money and these funds later proved to be very beneficial to my family. The fact that my father had not left a will meant his entire estate went to the probate court for disbursement and not up to the will of the family. That was probably a good thing because later in life I learned that everyone’s ‘will’ for my father was as different as night and day. The probate judge made a fantastic decision to split my fathers estate equally between my fathers surviving immediate family; my mother, brother and myself. Now why would anyone give large acreage of land to an eight and seven year old? That’s what happened. All of a sudden I owned as much property as my mother did. Of course I knew nothing about it but I later learned this judge’s action really hampered the business operations of the farm and normal living. My mother was unable to do anything with the assets left by my father since she did not own everything herself. Mother had to petition the court and buy mine and Terry’s part of my father’s assets and finally mother owned everything of my fathers with clear title. The probate judge was named trustee of the funds and I never saw any of the money.
It took a few years to settle all this but finally my mother was free to make some decisions. The first one was to get further away from the lady across the street in the big farmhouse. My mother built a very large house, bigger than the big farmhouse on the furthermost corner of the family farm where we lived peacefully for many years.
While all these events were happening something really news worthy was sweeping the nation. As I strained to learn about my small world on the farm, I kept hearing that some Beatles were coming to the nation. I knew this was bad because my grandfather kept trying to kill beetles in his cotton fields. I would hear the older people talk about how bad the beetles were for the cotton. Cotton seemed to be real important to everyone on the farm.
After we had settled into the new large house (larger than the big farmhouse the farm owner lived in) I learned something really special. Those Beatles were not bugs. A fantastic thing was happening that was going to change music forever in the world and I was missing it. All of a sudden everyone started having bangs with their haircuts. Of course I wanted my hair like that also. I quickly learned that those people were called communists and that I would forever have a crew cut on my head. This news was quite devastating to my budding masculinity as I was on the brink of puberty at this time; but of course I had no idea what that was either. No one spoke of these things on the farm other than one uncle, which happened to be my daddy’s middle brother; Larry, who later became a doctor. Larry told me to use lots of soap but I had no idea what he was talking about. Farm life can be very confusing sometimes, especially to a young, already confused boy.
We finally moved into the great big farmhouse on the other side of the farm property when I was twelve years old, making it the year of our Lord 1967. I was beginning to really look toward other adult males as roll models and yearning to do more masculine type things. I had already been driving tractors and trucks all over the farm. I had no idea, once everyone realized I could do these things, the family would start expecting more from me. Before I knew it, the family had a brand new indentured servant, me. I began cutting pastures, hayfields, building fences, cutting large lawns, cutting fire wood, clearing land and hauling hay. Hauling hay is without any doubt the hardest farm labor of them all. We had livestock which I had to feed daily. There were horses, cows and pigs and over the years I showed all of these animals in 4H livestock shows at the local county fair. Later, when I had my driver’s license, this list expanded to delivering eggs to local supermarkets, hauling cattle and pigs to market, making livestock feed and delivering it, and the list seemed to grow forever endless. I had begun a new life as a real farm hand and work to all of us was as normal as the sun rising and setting. My favorite farm chores were by far working the cotton fields. We had lots of cotton. At one point, we farmed close to a thousand acres of the fluffy white stuff. I spent many lonely boring hours in cotton fields but it was the most fun of any of the farm chores that had to be done. No matter what the job was I performed, the pay was always the same; $1.25 per hour.
The most dreadful chore on the farm was gathering eggs. My father had wanted a large chicken farm to produce eggs and we had chickens everywhere. Baker’s Poultry Farm had chicken farms all over Harpersville. We had so many chickens the family farm would not hold them all and my father had either purchased or leased acreage throughout the community to build chicken houses. These chickens produced enormous quantities of eggs that had to be gathered on a daily basis. Now picking up eggs during a normal day was not all that bad except of course for the smell of the chicken houses, which is not at all describable in print. However, what was a dreadful chore was during the winter, when the temperatures got down to below twenty degrees, the eggs had to be gathered at night before they froze. Remember, this was a poor rural family that had seen times such as the great depression when everyone on the farm went penniless for as long as three years. It was against the nature of every adult Baker to ever waste a single cent in any form. When the temperature at night got really cold, the eggs were subject to freezing which of course would ruin the egg. My family insisted on going out around 10:00PM at night during these times to gather the eggs and bring them into the large egg processing house where we cleaned and packaged the eggs for sale. I still remember the bitter cold nights when my fingers were so frozen I feared they would surely break. When finally coming in after these evenings, I would go to a sink and turn on very warm water to hold my hands under until the feeling came back in them. My hands would ache for hours before they would finally thaw.
On one of these evenings my family was working at night, I remember us all being in the grading house where the eggs were washed and packed for the super markets. Me being a small kid, I had no idea of time but it was well after dark and I can only guess my mother was thinking of getting me to bed as soon as she could. Mother sent me to the house with clear instructions that I was to take a bath and get ready for bed. Mother instructed me that she would be back in our house by the time I was finished. All of my life, I unquestioningly followed my mothers orders without hesitancy or question and this fact remained true through my mothers funeral many years later. I went into our home and entered our tiny bathroom. The light in the bathroom was blown and consequently out so my being an industrious young man from an entrepreneurial family, I remember remedying this situation by getting a nearby desk lamp and sitting the light on the edge of the bathtub. Their must have been a thousand times I could have died on my families farm from snake bites to falling through barn floors and this night in a tiny dark bathroom would be yet again one of those many close calls with my very own life. I remember so very clearly, just about the time foot steps were coming through the house from the front door, that swimming pools had lights in them and how great it was to be able to see the lit up water in the pool. I was just about to reach for the lamp on the edge of the tub to place it under the faucet as if it were a diving board when my uncle Larry walked by the bathrooms open door. Larry was soon explaining to me how electricity and water would turn me into a piece of well done bacon, my first class in modern electronics. I have never forgotten how short fractional seconds separate one from life and the here after.
The only spanking I ever saw my father administer was one time when Terry broke a large stack of eggs. I am sure it was an accident and Terry was too young to even know what he had done but for some reason the act really irritated my father and Terry got the worse spanking I had ever witnessed for breaking a large stack of eggs at the grading house that had just been delivered from the chicken houses. My mother was the punishing parent in our household and seeing her spank someone, usually me, was quite commonplace. However, seeing my father spank my brother was so shocking that it made quite an impression that I never was able to forget.
Now I have left out one important aspect of this time period. I have done so because I was in fact young at the time and knew very little about the adult world. However, there were some very important events going on during those years that are relevant to our nations history. These things are worth mentioning here because a great deal of our farm labor was of the African American race.
The conies, or KKK was very active in the county I lived in during the 50’s and 60’s. Now no one ever said anything to me about any of it and by the time I was old enough to pay much attention to the world and remember it, well most of this was over. However, I have heard some neat stories that need mentioning. Occasionally we would travel to a nearby rural town and I would see a lot of graffiti on buildings and other such things indicating something major had happened in that town the night before. Lots of painted KKK and swastikas all over walls and buildings. I have heard stories that my father was threatened by the conies and told that not only was he in danger but also his entire family was being threatened. My father was the type of land/farm owner that would give a job to anyone that came to the door asking for one. I have found out that my father went to great lengths to help the blacks, or at least be fair to them in our community. I remember events like a black man showing up at the door on a Saturday morning with blood all over his shirt. He would show my father the knife wounds in his arms. My daddy would take this man to a doctor and when the man got stronger, my daddy would let him work on the farm. Well… it seems the conies had a different way of looking at life than my daddy did. The KKK seemed to have a big problem with how my father treated the black people of our community. I never witnessed it first hand but I heard stories that my father was threatened face to face by the conies and was told that not only would his house be burned to the ground but every farmhouse on the entire farm would be destroyed. My father stood fast with his beliefs and continued to do what he thought was the right thing to do. When my father died, he was a very loved and respected man for these types of actions in our community, even by the conies. I have forever wished I had of known my daddy better.
