Folk Tales...A Taste Of What's Coming
Last year, Miss Callie renewed her endeavor and asked the help of local writers and other members of the community to contribute articles of interest concerning Pontotoc County in the aforementioned categories. Miss Callie expects to have all submissions in manuscript form by June 1, 2005. Shortly afterwards, Miss Callie will surrender the ready to be published material to the Pontotoc Historical Society, which plans to publish the book and sell copies as a fundraiser project for the society. Believe it or not, Miss Callie selected a couple of articles previously published in Ridge Rider News to include in the new book. It’s not too late to submit an article or two for consideration, but folks need to hurry. (Contact RRN for more information) To give readers a foretaste of the forthcoming book, RRN is pleased to share one of the unpublished stories written by one of our own readers, who happens to be Miss Callie’s younger son. So, sit back, relax and if you are old enough to remember 1952, you’ll enjoy the following article: SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO DO WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO by Jerry Young I’m not sure just when Coley, and his partner Nig, became part of my life, but they were around by the time I started to school in 1948. They were a fine pair of mules, especially Coley. He was huge, and tremendously strong. And he was smart. My Daddy told me more than once while I was growing up that Coley had more sense than a lot of people. He cared a lot about Coley, and Nig. The thought of selling them never entered his mind when the time came that they could no longer work. They stayed with us until they died natural deaths. My relationship with our mules began when I was around seven. Every now and then my Daddy would let me ride Coley. When I got on him I would become whatever character I was reading about at the time. A lot of Indians and outlaws bit the dust while I was sitting way up high on the back of that mule. Eventually I started to go "get the mules" when Daddy or Larry needed them. I would find them and throw a rope around Coley’s neck so I could lead him to a stump and put his bridle on him. We never had to put a bridle on Nig to get him to come to the barn. He would follow Coley, no matter where he went. And Coley went a lot of places. Coley’s ability to open gaps and lean on fences until they broke enabled him to get out and visit around the neighborhood when he wanted to. Occasionally, Coley would go to town. He liked to go to town on Saturdays when everyone else would be there (this was the early '50's). I was nine the first time someone called and told us Coley and Nig were in downtown Pontotoc. I found them over by the old stockyard on Reynolds Street. I got a bridle on Coley and rode him out of town, with Nig following us. We attracted a good bit of attention as we left town with me hoping no one I knew would see us. I went to town several times to retrieve Coley and Nig and although I didn’t know the really good words, it was on these trips that I became aware of how therapeutic cussing could be. Coley and Nig could drive you to cussing. They could be very stubborn. A lot of times it was Coley, not my Daddy, who decided when it was time to take a break from whatever they were doing. The only time I ever heard my Daddy cuss was when he was plowing with Coley and Nig. My sister, Kathy, was nearly grown before she realized that a certain word Daddy used pretty often when he was plowing was a cuss word. No matter how contrary he could be at times, Coley was really a good mule. We had truck patches all over our farm and Coley and Nig helped us raise a lot of peas and corn and butterbeans and water melons, and we raised cotton too, until the government started paying us not to plant it. They also snaked logs up to the house for firewood. And they brought a lot of joy and excitement to a bunch of kids who attended my Mother’s kindergarten and who I’m sure still remember those rides on that slide as Coley and Nig pulled them all over our pastures, something that’s not in the kindergarten curriculum these days. Coley was affectionate too; like a dog. And he had those big brown eyes. I talked to him. And although he couldn’t talk human, he could express himself in ways that made me believe that he was listening to me. And even though he almost drove me and Larry and my Daddy crazy at times, there was something about Coley that made me believe that if there’s a mule heaven, and if there’s not, there should be, Coley will certainly be there, and Nig might make it too. Coley’s desire to be affectionate was not always good. He had this thing about newborn calves. He wanted to be close to them. He wanted to nuzzle them and lay down by them. After a calf came up dead, we started making sure that when one of our cows was due to have a calf, we put her in the barn a week or so before she was due so Coley would not be able to get to her that first couple of days. After a day or so, Coley would not pay any attention to the calf. But if Coley could get close to a calf during its first 24 hours of existence in this world, he went kinda crazy. By the age of ten, I was very much aware of Coley’s attraction to newborn calves. One afternoon during the summer of 1952, I heard a cow over in the back side of our pasture lowing and bellowing. I did not know what was going on but I knew I should go check on her. I didn’t have any trouble finding her. Before I got halfway there, I could hear Coley snorting and braying. The cow, Bossie, had decided to have her baby in a thicket full of briars, honeysuckle and kudzu. It was really thick but Bossie and Coley had trampled down a good bit of the undergrowth around that baby calf. Bossie had gone into pure mother-mode and was trying her best to kill Coley. I wasn’t worried about Coley hurting Bossie, or me, but I was not at all sure what Bossie would do if I picked up her baby. I thought about walking away and going to get some help but there was no one home and we did not have any neighbors that could handle the situation any better than I could. So I told myself, all you have to do is walk up in and amongst that crazy cow and Coley, pick up that baby calf and take her to the barn, which was only about a quarter of a mile away. So, I did just that. I walked in amongst both of them and picked up the calf, but before I could take two steps, Bossie forgot about Coley and attacked me. She butted me and knocked me down I let the calf go, got up, retreated, and gave Bossie as good a cussing as I could at the time. No one would have ever said anything, or even known about it, if I had walked away and let Coley and Bossie fight it out. But I had been to Shiloh. And I knew about Antietam, and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and how men from Mississippi did what they had to do in those desperate days. I was a part of all that tradition and knew I had do what had to be done on that day. So I found a stick, a good stout one, and I walked back into all that uproar and hit Bossie just as hard as I could right between the eyes. I almost knocked her down. I told Coley to get out of my way, picked up that baby calf and walked out of that thicket with her. By the time I got out of the thicket, and headed down hill toward the barn, Coley and Bossie had joined me. They stayed right beside me, snorting and bellowing and pushing me back and forth between them. Bossie had all kinds of yucky stuff coming out of her mouth and nostrils that was getting all over me. There was a field that I was able to get into at the bottom of the hill. That put a barb wire fence between me and Coley and Bossie. It was easy going across that field. But Coley and Bossie could still see me and were waiting on me when I got to the other side. I again had to make a choice. I could leave the calf safely inside that barb wire fence or I could take her on to the barn, about 400 yards away. I knew Coley would not be able to get to her if I left the calf in the field, but I did not know whether the calf had been able to nurse since she was born. I knew one thing for sure. She was making noises like she was hungry. So there really wasn’t anything I could do but put the calf through the fence, go through myself, pick her up and then head toward the barn. Bossie started knocking me around as soon as I went through the fence. By this time, she did not know what she was doing. She was crazy. She knocked me down several times. And Coley was right in there with her. But I had made up my mind to take that calf to the barn and getting knocked down a few times only slowed me up a bit. By this time Coley knew that he wasn’t going to do whatever he wanted to do with the calf. He was just caught up in the madness of it all. Four hundred yards is a long way when you are ten years old and have a squalling calf in your arms whose mother is slobbering all over you and trying to knock you down with every step you take. But I finally reached the barn and put the calf in a stable. Then I let Bossie in with her and told Coley that he might as well go back to doing whatever he had been doing before the calf was born. He left and joined Nig who had been watching the entire incident from a distance. I don’t remember what I did the day before that day, or what I did the next day. But I remember that day. And I remember being kinda surprised that no one seemed to be that impressed when I told them what happened. I later realized that they were part of that tradition too and expected me to do what I did. I did what I had to do that day and when all is said and done, and they start taking names and keeping score, maybe that will be a plus for me. Oh, I’ll be able to show that during my life I helped a few people along the way. And my friends will report that I always did what I said I would do and never lied to them. Maybe those things will count for something. Whatever . . . I’m not too concerned. But if that calves’ mother has anything to do with the bottom line score, and perhaps she will, then I’ll be OK because Bossie will tell whoever’s keeping score that what I did that day was as good a thing as anyone has ever done.
Fish Fry 2005 Saturday July 23 Certain members of my family have questioned why RRN does not plan its anniversary celebration to coincide with its June 1, anniversary date rather than wait until one of the hottest months of the year. We actually did that once, several years ago, but we’ve since ramped up the attendance level by inviting more guests and selecting fried fish for the menu. A backyard fish fry, for more than one hundred guests, requires the help of at least two cooks and the teamwork of several assistants. Assistants can usually be lined up at the last minute; cooks cannot. In my circle of friends, Lee Gordon and Jim Hess are the best cooks I can muster for frying fish. Both Lee and Jim are full-time Ministers of Music in their respective churches. Their social calendars are filled with church weddings during June, a popular month for weddings. In addition to weddings, either of my friends is apt to be off on a church sponsored trip during any given week of summer. So, finding a weekend that both Lee and Jim are available for frying fish isn’t easy. Remarkably, this year, I had a choice of either July 23 or July 30. I chose Saturday, July 23rd. I didn’t figure into my plans a "heart attack" factor, so the grounds may not be up to par, or at least they won’t be, if I heed my wife’s warnings and the warnings of friends to not over do it physically for the rest of the year. In addition to cook’s assistants, I’ll be looking for volunteers to help setup canopies, tables, and chairs a day or so prior to the fish fry and for volunteers to help take it all down and return the borrowed items to their rightful owners. Featured entertainers this year will be Fred and Bobby Carter of Mulberry, Florida, whose musical genre is Classical Country. Fred and Bobby sang and played for the party a couple of years ago and were well received by our guests. While it’s not realistic to expect every reader of this newsletter to attend the fish fry, each reader should consider this as his or her invitation. I don't have to have your decision this far in advance, but don't forget to respond by mid-July.
Bodock Beau Ranchers 2 - City Slickers 0 Country wisdom is mostly just good old horse sense. The following anecdotes should prove my point. A rancher was herding cattle in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.
The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses
and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the rancher, "If I tell you exactly
how many cows and calves you have The rancher looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure. Why not?" The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.
The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports
it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he
receives an email on his Palm Pilot Submitted by Ken Gaillard No Bull A big-city lawyer was representing the railroad in a lawsuit filed by an old rancher. The rancher's prize bull was missing from the section through which the railroad passed. The rancher claimed that the bull must have been hit by the train, and wanted to be paid the fair value of the bull. The case was scheduled to be tried before the justice of the peace in the back room of the general store. As soon as the rancher showed up, the attorney for the railroad pulled him aside and tried to get him to settle out of court. The lawyer did his best selling job, and finally the rancher agreed to take half of what he was asking. After the rancher had signed the release and took the check, the young lawyer couldn't resist gloating a little over his success, telling the rancher, "You know, I hate to tell you this, old man, but I put one over on you in there. I couldn't have won the case. The engineer was asleep and the fireman was in the caboose when the train went through your ranch that morning. I didn't have one witness to put on the stand. I bluffed you!" The old rancher replied, "Well, I'll tell you, young feller, I was a little worried about winning that case myself, because that darned bull came home this morning." Share this article with a friend.
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Folk Tales, Facts, And Fabulations is the name of a yet to be published
book, one conceived by Callie B. Young more than two decades ago. Through
the years, Miss Callie has collected a number of articles written about Pontotoc
by persons who are either natives of Pontotoc or else lived here at some
point in their lives. A number of articles were lost a few years ago when
the individual helping Miss Callie with the effort suddenly moved away and
managed to lose a lot of manuscripts in the process.
