William Duckett

(Tape reviewed 6-30-01)

Interview with William W. Duckett

(some comments from Mabel Duckett)

Leicester (Sandy Mush), N.C.

Conducted by Stephen Cain

Tues. Aug. 4, 1998

(Tape 1, Side A)

Cain: Interview with Bill Duckett, 7 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 4, at his home at 146 Robinson Cove, Sandy Mush. The first one is just kind of a question of identify. I spent my childhood in Tennessee, but really grew up in Michigan, so I am a Yankee. Be that as it may. There are some people that are country folk, some that are city folk. Are you a mountain man?

Duckett: I wouldn't say mountain man.

Cain: How do you see yourself in terms of that kind of identity? Just a North Carolinian, just a country person, just a farmer?

Duckett: Well I'd say I have a rural background. The mountain man, you know, that is sort of
Duckett: Yeah.

Cain: It's an image, okay. You like Sandy Mush?

Duckett: Yeah.

Cain: Because you fought for it for a long time.

Duckett: Yeah.

Cain: And it's in the mountains. I agree with you on that image, sure. But let me ask you a different kind of question, and I'll get at it more in particular later. The folks that live in Sandy Mush as a rule, I'm talking about the people that have lived there all their lives. Are they different in any ways from your average person that, say, lives in Asheville or lives in the Piedmont? Are there different sort of ways and values that are typical of up here?

Duckett: Well, you know, things have changed in the last 20 year. Everybody knows everybody, or used to, you know, and you have a lot of heritage, you have families which goes back to the Civil War, but it's changing, you know, when you get new people moving in. A lot of our young people moved out after World War II, got jobs. Population went down for several years. Now it's picking back up.

Cain: Yeah, but the new people coming in. Some become part of the community. Others.

Duckett: We have, it's a lot, they have different attitudes, you know. Some come and they get involved and want to be a part of it. Some don't seem to be, just want to be left alone. Most of your local people won't push 'em if they don't want to be part of it. We have a lot of different types of people that's moving in.

Cain: We'll get more on that a little bit later. When did your ancestors settle in this area, to the best of your knowledge.

Duckett: Well, I was talking to one of my cousins. She found out that one our ancestors was a Revolutionary War veteran. He's buried over at Leicester at the Brick Church. I think it is the

oldest grave in the cemetery, 1810.

Cain: That's when he died?

Duckett: Yeah.

Cain: That's not too long after they fought with the Cherokee. That was the late 1700s that they pushed them.

Duckett: Now I didn't know that until Sunday, she was telling me.

Cain: There was killing going back and forth.

Duckett: Yeah.

Cain: That's known as having long roots in a community, going back 180 some years.

Duckett: A lot of my people were in the Civil War, on both sides.

Cain: Any stories handed down from those days?

Duckett: Well there's some but I know whether I need to tell or not.

Cain: I'd heard about one ~ it's on a different tape -- who started off as a Confederate and ended up as a Yankee.

Duckett: Yeah, that would be one of my great grandpas. His wife drew a Civil War pension till in the '70s. He married three times, and it wasn't divorces. They died, you know. And the last one was a lot younger than him. They had several children. He died, and she lived into the '70s, I guess.

Cain: 1970s?

Duckett: Yes. She drew a Civil War pension.

Cain: From the Union side?

Duckett: Right. But I heard my daddy tell a story about when they got discharged. Him and this other fellow, coming out of Virginia, making their way home, you know, and they met up with this black. I don't know what they call him, took care of the horses for the officers. So they took his horses away from him. One of them was a stallion. He was well known as one of the best horses that had ever been in Sandy Mush because he was hot. (Laugh)

Cain: So he sired some horses for people?

Duckett: Oh yeah, for years. They all traced them back to him, you know.

Cain: That was a Union horse?

Duckett: Oh yeah.

Cain: So people felt better about that?

Duckett: I guess.

Cain: Hey, you know, the South gotta have something out of this. Mostly, it was up in Tennessee that you had people out of the same families that were on both sides.

Duckett: But this was right in there, too.

Cain: Most of the people I talked to said, "Confederate, of course!" but I wasn't quite sure that was everybody.

Duckett: No, it wasn't. It was mixed.

Cain: I know up in the Cumberland area there was a lot of guerrilla warfare that went on, and then people who formed companies that were little more than bandits, ambushing people and being nasty, and there was a lot of bad blood that lasted well into the 20th Century. Was there any kind of that here?

Duckett: There was some. A lot of older people, they still were sensitive about different sides of the Civil War.

Cain: One of the things that has really impressed me. As you go into the cemeteries, or your open the phone book, you know, and there's a lot of Ducketts and a lot of Surretts and a lot of

Kings and even a lot of Woodys, but I don't know whether they are the same as the Cataloochee Woodys or not, and just a lot of families that have been around here for an awful long time, and folks marry back and forth. I don't mean incest marry, but over the years, who do you know, who do you marry? It seems like a lot of people who have been here for a long time are related at some distance.

Duckett: Well there's not a lot of marrying within the community since I grew up, but with automobiles and everybody got to traveling more, moving around, so it sort of changed.

Cain: But you still have a lot of relatives in this area.

Duckett: Oh yeah. About everybody's related.

Cain: That's what I meant. How important is kinship, family and kin, here? Do people put a lot of stock in it?

Duckett: Some families do, and some families don't. You have some families that don't get along that well, don't keep in touch. A lot of it is, I think, the way we were brought up. I know my mother's family, they was always strong on family ties. They knew every cousin they had. The other side wasn't that way.

Cain: I was reading a story about the reunions in Cataloochee, all the people who have been evicted by the National Park Service. And a lot of the original folks have died. Their children and grandchildren and marrieds that are coming back because they sense something was lost when they left and they can get something back, a sense of renewal. But they play what was described to me as the great southern game, which is, "Who are you?" Which really means, "Whose kin are you?" And that you could identify a person by knowing who he was related to. Does that still go on here?

Duckett: Oh yeah, some. We have several different family reunions at the end of the year. A lot of times when they meet they don't know each other. A lot of times now they'll use name tags, so you'll get a clue.

Cain: I gathered there was a lot of people kind of taking care of each other, you know, an uncle gets old, and there is someone.

Duckett: In the days back when my parents were living, they did. There wasn't nursing homes. When your parents got old, you took care of them, tried to make them as comfortable as they could, and a lot of them died at home, you know, maybe up in years, and the medical, there were a lot of things you couldn't do much for, and they didn't think about not doing it. Now, you don't have as much of that. Some people will, but most of the time they are put in nursing homes. Well I know a nursing home can be a fine thing that has to be used.

Cain: My father died of Alzheimer's, and his mind was totally gone for five years. He didn't recognize anybody. He couldn't speak. But Mabel (Miss Mabel Duckett) was telling me that when her mother was real sick and had a tube, she spend seven months in a nursing home with her. I thought, oh wow, that's something. But you don't see that as much as now as you used to 20-40 years ago?

Duckett: No. No. You don't

Cain: Tell me about your old home place. Did you have an old home place, a place where you grew up that was?

Duckett: Yeah. My sister lives there now. It's next door. She stays there, and she's never married so she's always lived there. It hasn't changed that much. Cain: You have good memories of that place?

Duckett: Yeah. It's pretty good. There's some of the good old days weren't that great. I mean, it wasn't all good. The houses were cold, and it just wasn't as comfortable as they are now. A lot of people talk about the good old days, I don't think they've been there. (Laugh)

Cain: Well, you hear stories particularly about people who grew up in log cabins, and the kids would sleep in the loft of the story-and-a-half, and the boards would be a little separated.

Mabel Duckett: Snow inside.

Cain: You got it, but most of the time, they tell the story as a kind of a fond memory, although at the time I'm sure they were freezing like anything.

Bill Duckett: But you know, people back in that time, they had it tough. It was hard work, and you had more differences in, maybe you call it classes of people. A few people owned most of the land. A lot of the rest worked for them, you know, sharecroppers.

Cain: Even up here?

Bill Duckett: Oh yeah. And they didn't make a lot. They clear ground and get to tend it so many years for clearing it, and then when that was up, the landlord, it was his, and you had to move on and dig up another. They lived off the land. They had to be tough. They had to store their food, dry apples.

Cain: I was reading some stuff that was done during the Depression where the WPA Federal Writers Project went around and just did stories of people, and some sharecropping right here, right in this area.

Bill Duckett: A lot of sharecropping. Then you had a lot of people died young. My mother's father died when she was 15 years old, he was about 40, typhoid fever, wiped out a lot of their family.

Cain: About when was that, the typhoid?

Bill Duckett: I'm not sure. I guess it was in the, I'm not sure about it, probably in 1918.

Cain: That was when the big influenza epidemic came through.

Bill Duckett: But they had typhoid here and then the influenza, too. And then it killed a lot of people. I know she had a sister that was about 15 when she died, and two or three of them survived. It was tough.

Cain: So the good old days weren't all that good.

Bill Duckett: No. I mean, and then my grandmother raised a big family. Everybody had big families. The boys had to take over the farm when they were teenagers, so you can imagine how much responsibility that would be for 16, 17-year-old boys. And then about the time they got to be big enough to go with it, World War I drafted 'em.

Cain: And then, with big families. Some of the farms were pretty good sized.

Bill Duckett: Well they were big, and they then wasn't managed like we do now, and they would wear out a farm.

Mabel Duckett: Yep.

Bill Duckett: I remember a story they told, you know. You didn't have TV A, you know, it's time to increase production and get, a lot of these old hills washed away, and they wasn't producing anything.

Cain: And you got too many kids, so, if you have 100 acres that you can plant, that's pretty good, you can support it, but if you've got six kids, can't divide that in six and anybody make a living.

Bill Duckett: Right.

Cain: So they have to go off and look for jobs?

Bill Duckett: They did. A lot of them was able to get good jobs. Then there's some went on to college, got an education. I guess our community, I don't what would be the normal for a rural area, but we had a lot of kids that went on to school. My mother's people were put a lot of stress

on education. A lot of these old timers, they try to get their children to go on if they would, you know, if they could, if there was any way they could manage to pay for it.

Cain: There certainly were enough schools around. I was looking at the census figures for Sandy Mush over a number of years. A lot of the people that got their education left.

Bill Duckett: Yeah.

Cain: Because there wasn't an awful lot to do if you had a four-year college degree and living out here.

Bill Duckett: No.

Cain: I mean the Asheville labor market wasn't all that great. So, Sandy Mush has lost population of young people.

Bill Duckett: Yeah.

Cain: Which is your future.

Duckett: Yeah.

Cain: And getting in outsiders, some of whom are part of the community, and some of whom aren't.

Duckett: Right.

Cain: What do you see for the future of Sandy Mush?

Duckett: Well, the way it's heading now, and I think it's not just Sandy Mush, it's all the area in Western North Carolina. I think it will be developed, building, people live, maybe a few acres and a house. A lot of retirement homes, summer homes. The land's already gettin' priced out of the market for fanners. A neighbor has land for sale. You wouldn't even consider buying it because you know you can't pay what he's got to have. He'll sell it to a developer. We have a, you might have heard somebody mention it, a farmland preservation program.

Cain: How well is that working?

Duckett: It does pretty good. It helps some about, a lot of times you have people move in and they are not familiar with farming and they've griped about some of the routine things you do, like the smell and the spraying and the cows a bawling, and flies. They would like for you to quit, you know, but it's sort of a deal where I was here first and I was on record as being a farmer, and this has been an active farm, so when you bought it, if you'd checked, you'd have known I was into farming. So it would give you a little advantage legally if somebody got fancy enough to sue you.

Cain: But then taxes?

Duckett: Taxes are being saved by a law we have in the state now that you can get a deferred taxes for farm land, and if you sell it, you have to pay back the difference between the farm land value and the commercial value or whatever the actual value.

Cain: It seems like, without that then, people would be losing their farm because of taxes.

Duckett: Yeah they would. They couldn't pay 'em. You're getting lots now, used to, I know in 1960, we bought where the barn is down there, we bought land there $600 to $700 an acre, and we thought that was pretty tough. Well over on the hill, they are developing it across on Willow Creek, getting $3,000-$4,000 a lot.

Cain: And more.

Duckett: And more. And then you're valuing my farmland for that, and there ain't no way I can pay it.

Cain: That barn is kind of interesting. Now Waldrop built that?

Duckett: Yeah, Will Waldrop.

Cain: How old is that barn, maybe?

Duckett: I don't really know. I say, I would be guessing. Mabel would probably know.

Cain: I thought it was, like, 19 teens.

Duckett: I think it was, I believe there was an old man told me one time that that silo he helped, he talked a little bit unusual, he said he "earthed it out," dug out, 1910 I believe.

Cain: Oh, I'm pretty close then. But that roof. It's got that sort of pyramid.

Duckett: If I'm not mistaken, that's a hipped roof.

Cain: Yes, it's a hipped roof, but almost like a pyramid. There is one other little barn down the road that has a roof like that, too, but those are the only ones I saw in this area. Will just came up with it?

Duckett: I guess. I don't know.

Mabel Duckett: Did he build that?

Bill Duckett: Yeah, I think he did.

Cain: You bought up all his land then or just part of it?

Duckett: Just part of it. It was a big place that sold to different people.

Cain: How long did he run that store there? Or how long was the Waldrop store there?

Duckett: I don't know. He died before I can remember. I don't know what year he died, probably in the '30s, early '30s, maybe the late '20s. He was a fairly old man, and he moved here. Somebody might have already told you this. He was a cobbler. All he had was a cobbling outfit to make shoes. Well, he married this Worley, and he wound up buying most of the land and prospered. He ran the store, blacksmith shop, the mill. He could write deeds of trust, or wills or deeds.

Cain: Designed some houses.

Duckett: Yeah.

Cain: Mrs. Payne's house. He designed that, didn't he?

Duckett: Yeah.

Cain: On Sandy Mush Creek.

Duckett: Yeah.

Cain: Ask you a little about families. A lot has been written about mountain families that portrays the man as the patriarch, the big boss. I don't know. There's all kinds of families. I've met some women up here that I thought ran things pretty much themselves, but is that, can you generalize at all about what kind of gender role, the role of women? Has that changed over the years?

Duckett: You couldn't hardly ever say it was a stereotype. Every family was different to a degree. Some, the men were pretty much that way. A lot of times, the women maybe was, maybe was, a little discretely. There was one old fellow told me one time a man didn't have to be much account to make it if he had a good woman. The women, really, back in my grandmother's time, she was really the lifeline of the family. She made their clothes, done the wool and the chicken and the eggs and the butter. Of course, my grandpa thought he was, but as far as actually making things happen, I guess she had as much to do as he did.

Cain: Talk a little bit about neighborliness. You had a bypass, how many?

Duckett: Five.

Cain: Quintuple. Back in February. What happened with the neighborhood when you were laid up?

Duckett: Well I was surprised at the support I got. A lot of people called, came to see me, were willing to help. Makes you feel good, you know.

Cain: Calling you up to wish you well is real nice but there were some people.

Mable Duckett: Every morning.

Duckett: Came every day.

Cain: Fed your cattle:

Both: Yeah.

Duckett: Helped any way they could.

Cain: You said there was so much they were getting in each other's way?

Duckett: Yeah. They worked out a work schedule. No use everybody being here. Alternate days. So they worked out their schedule, and they got the job done, so it looked sort of bad. I got a little bit worried, you know, when you find out they don't need you at home (laugh). I got scared.

Mabel Duckett: Well, we had the flu too.

Cain: That was a measure of what people thought of you.

Duckett: Well I appreciate that. Some of the people that helped were new people that moved in, and one fellow, he only helped just to be a part of it and see what was going on, which is fine. We, after all of this, in July, we had a little get-together and invited them all in and had a cookout, the ones that helped. They enjoyed talking about it.

Cain: That kind of thing, I wondered, does it happen as much now as it used to?

Duckett: No. No, it don't. It used to. People didn't have government programs to take care of the people that were down and out. They used to, if anybody was sick, offered to go in and do what they could, you know. They'd have barn raisings, corn shuckings, and bean stringings, any excuse to get together.

Cain: When you were young, did you do that too?

Duckett: Oh yeah, some. There wasn't as much as it was. If somebody needed a tobacco barn, they'd get together and have a log raising. Everybody would come in and build a barn in a day or two.

Cain: Other than replacing Bill Gillespie's barns that burned a couple years back, the last barn raising I heard about, Don Reeves was telling me about up on Duckett's, no, Dogget's Mountain, just before the Korean War, how they were out were doing the saddle notches, he and some other men just putting it up. Can you think of any other barn raisings in the last 30 years other than Gillespie's?

Duckett: I don't think I can.

Cain: What changed? How come it doesn't happen any more?

Duckett: Well, one thing. People, at that time, were getting into tobacco. Everybody needed a barn. Burley tobacco just came in.

Cain: When did burley come in, about?

Duckett: It was about 19 and I'd say 30. Started maybe. Right after the Depression. First started out shaky. When they first started selling, sometimes they wouldn't make a thing off it. But the government got to supporting it through the allotment acreage, putting a minimum price on it. It helped a lot of people out on these small farms.

Cain: So to get some cash money.

Duckett: That was a sure thing. Almost the only sure thing you had. Everybody had small allotments. You didn't have anybody with over a couple of acres. That was your Christmas money, paid your taxes. The rest of what you could make varied a lot, but that tobacco, felt pretty good that you were going to make a little off of it.

Cain: Most of the people today, there are some that can be full-time farmers, but most of them.

Duckett: No, not many. They hold jobs. You make so much more than you can farming.

There's not much profit in it. Fences are high.

Cain: It really shocked me — I guess it shouldn't ~ when I heard that they were bringing in crews of Mexican labor to.

Duckett: Well you take kids, after they get big enough that they can get a job, a lot of times they can make a lot more than minimum wages. You can't survive on minimum wages, and that is all farm labor can pay. The Mexicans will work for minimum. Local kids, if they get a high school education, they can get a better job.

Cain: What about church? How important is church, religion in the community?

Duckett: It's real important. I think, I don't know the percentage of faith. We have a lot of people that's not too involved in the church but they still respect it, and you have several people that use it, what some say is, "match, hatch, and dispatch." That's about it. Then you have some, you know, pretty faithful. I personally think it's pretty important. We have churches that are fading out because of attendance, like. Payne's Chapel.

Cain: That's been quite a few years since they had service there.

Both: Right.

Duckett: Some churches on out Leicester are closed, Brick Church on Leicester Highway. I don't know. That used to be the hub of the community.

Cain: The church?

Duckett: That was the social. That was where you met. Somewhere to go. And now, there are so many other things to do. A lot of your younger people, they go some other way. Have a few that still support it, but if you don't have the young people involved in it and interested in it, it's going to fade out.

Cain: That's I think happening all over. Some churches have been real lucky and successful in attracting kids but, the other thing is, you had so many churches in Sandy Mush.

Duckett: Yeah. You know, churches were a little bit political. After the Civil War, you had Southern Baptist, Northern Baptist, Union Baptist, all these different things. I think it grew out of that. It shouldn't be that way.

Cain: Well, you had the independent churches, too, the Holiness churches. I don't see too many of those around any more, but they used to be, little store front churches ~ not store front, that's a city thing — but somebody would build a chapel and somebody else would preach and you'd have two or three families and they would sort of go on with their own reading of the Bible.

Duckett: Our church. A lot of people come back for homecomings. Then you have a lot of people who want to be buried at their old home church.

Cain: If I said someone was a "good liver," is that expression "good liver" mean anything to you?

Duckett: Well, it would be, it wouldn't tell me a lot about what you meant.

Cain: It's an expression I've heard some people use. Let me go in a different direction. What's important to you in how you regard another person? What are the qualities that are important to you in someone else?

Duckett: Well to me, a person that's honest, he tells you something (and) you don't wonder what he really means. Straight forward. Well, if you are honest, that just about covers other aspects of your character.

Cain: You have been very active in trying to preserve the community. One example would be the nuclear waste. When the government proposed — I haven't read all the materials on that, but they were talking about up here on Sandy Mush using this as a deposit for nuclear waste?

Duckett: Oh yeah. There was about 120 square miles involved in this. It was not only Sandy Mush. Crabtree. Part of Pines Creek. Some of Spring Creek. It was a big project. If they'd have pulled it off, it would have cost almost as much as the space program.

Cain: Was Sandy Mush the center of it or was that just a piece of it?

Duckett: Sandy Mush was the center. Sandy Mush was pretty much the hub of it.

Cain: How did you end up taking a leadership role?

Duckett: Well, I sorta got into that by being, well, I was president of the Community Club, seen as one who could get along with different segments of people. Some of the people that was raised here, they just wanted to choose up and go start fighting everybody else. I don't want to sound like I'm bragging, but I did try to see everybody's point of view. A lot of the new people wanted me to do it. The old people wanted me to do it, so I wound up sort of in the middle, trying to keep us from getting too far out, you know, making fools out of ourselves.

Cain: Bush came as vice president to Asheville, and you met with him.

Duckett: Right.

Mabel Duckett: He's got a picture.

Cain: Was that for show, or did he really listen?

Duckett: I think he listened. It was, naturally, going to be some politics involved, and he was here for a Republican rally or something, but they got us a chance to meet with him. One thing I think that turned this thing around, maybe. I don't know how serious it was or how far it would have gone, but the secretary of interior came and met with us, Hodel?

Mabel Duckett: Yes.

Duckett: He used to be secretary over in the Department of Energy, but he had another position and he came and met with us and just about promised us that it wouldn't happen.

Cain: I heard that there was some geologist from Western Carolina that took a year to study the strata.

Duckett: There was two of 'em. Leonard Weiner. They worked with the state. There were two geologists. What was the other? I can 't think of his name (Carl Mersake).

Cain: I can look it up, but they were able to show there were cracks in the rocks that would have.

Duckett: It wasn't suitable. It wasn't anything like they had come up with in the Department of Energy. See, what they were using, I understand, was some older data, and what these state geologists found didn't match.

Cain: If it had gone through, it would have destroyed Sandy Mush?

Bill Duckett: Yeah, we would have had to have left.

Cain: The quilt. Whose idea was the quilt?

Duckett: The women in the community

Mabel: The Community Club.

Duckett: They got onto that idea.

Cain: Do you know if there was one person that came up with it or was it sort of a collective?

Duckett: Do you know whose idea it was?

Mabel Duckett: I guess Betty made it, Berry Duckett.

Duckett: Probably Betty Duckett.

Mabel Duckett: And then the Hearns. I guess Betty and Julie.

Duckett: Julie Borg.

Mabel Duckett: Yeah. We met and decided to get everybody to make a block of what Sandy Mush meant to them.

Duckett: Talking about that nuclear waste deal. I got a lot of credit for a lot of other people's work. We had some people that came up with some good ideas and good plans and so I guess I got ~ no, I know I did — I got a lot of credit for other people's labors. Seems like the new people were really more upset about it that the older people who lived here. Of course, they was, too, but a lot of the new people knew more about how to stir things up. (Laugh).

Cain: That's something I know.

Duckett: The way that Hodel got here is sort of funny. This lady that lives out here, she's from Florida, I guess.

Mabel Duckett: Florida.

Duckett: She came down. She said, "Did you know Hodel was coming to dedicate something at the park ~ do you know what it was? I forgot what it was. Anyway, they said it would be good to get him to come here, you know, so we wrote a letter to him, and I signed it. So her and this guy and his wife took her down to Tennessee where they were having the dedication ceremony, so she crosses a picket line and gets to him and hands him that invitation, and he accepts it.

Cain: So you had a community meeting here. Did he meet with the whole?

Duckett: Yeah, yeah. That was a big turnout. He came in.

Mabel Duckett: On a helicopter.

Duckett: One of the biggest thing we've had happen to us. Came in on a helicopter and landed at the Community Center, and I guess we had 300 or 400 people there.

Cain: Was it pretty polite, or were they yelling at him?

Duckett: It was polite. We had it organized. I made a little talk on behalf of the people. Then he answered our questions. He said, "Well, I'll tell you this message: That the chances of a meteorite falling and hitting somebody here today was about as likely as having a nuclear waste dump in Sandy Mush."

Cain: So he was pretty much saying you won your battle.

Mabel Duckett: Yeah. It was a relief.

Cain: Did that pull the community together.

Duckett: Yeah. But everybody sort of got over it.

Cain: A little bit more on the economic changes. People going off to work. I guess we already covered that about the difficulty of staying and making a living.

Duckett: Well a lot of people in the community, when they got retirement age, they wound up selling their land. If they didn't, the kids did. A lot of it wasn't kept in the family. The landowner who done the farming, when he got too old to do it, the children didn't want to. Maybe they had their own thing going, so they wound up, if the parent didn't sell it, the kids would. And when it gets, all of it changing hands, it was going into something besides farming.

Cain: So really the Sandy Mush that you grew up with is passing.

Duckett: Yeah. Yeah.

Cain: Are there things that you kind of want to hold on to? I mean the changes haven't been all bad. I'm thinking, you wouldn't have had your heart fixed if it was all the old ways, and you talked about life could be pretty hard before you had a lot of the modern conveniences. So you gained some things and you lost some things. How do you see it on the balance?

Duckett: Well, I guess, you know, most of my age, we're getting on the latter part of our life as far as it making a lot of difference. Mostly, to me, what really matters is (tape end).

(Tape l,SideB)

Cain: Do you use a middle initial.

Duckett: W.

Cain: What's the W stand for?

Duckett: Wayne.

Cain: Well, we were talking about the next generation. Kevin is working here on the farm.

Duckett: Yeah.

Cain: And when you decide to retire, will he take it over?

Duckett: That's his plans, you know, if he can make enough. Well, his wife works, and she really contributes a lot to the income, you know.

Cain: She works in?

Duckett: She's got a.

Mabel Duckett: Works in Asheville.

Duckett: As a beautician. She's got a good business. He likes farming, the lifestyle. It's just a matter of making enough to be able to do it. My other boy, he won't ever probably be too much into farming. They both the like the land.

Cain: Where's Stephen now?

Bill Duckett: He's a. He went to school and got his degree in agriculture and he's an extension agent in Buncombe County.

Cain: Does he still live out here?

Duckett: Yeah, they live down on Worley Cove. He went to Berea.

Cain: Sure, in Kentucky.

Duckett: Learn and work their way through. He always sort of wanted to go to college. His grades were pretty decent, so he was able to get some scholarship. That would have been about the only way we could afford it.

Mabel Duckett: He' working on his master's now.

Cain: Oh great!

Mabel Duckett: Going to be UNCA.

Cain: I had to get older and quit to do that.

Duckett: Well they have a good deal with extension.

Mable Duckett: They pay for it.

Duckett: That's one thing they encourage them to do when they take the job, is to agree to get their master's.

Cain: You've been lucky then. Both your kids are still here. And still part of the community.

Mabel Duckett: Steve was in Franklin for four years. Then he got this job over here and transferred. He was 4-H agent over there.

Cain: Oh, I want to know a little bit more about growing up, and one of the things that I heard, and I don't want to get into too personal stuff, but I heard that Sandy Mush used to be pretty rough.

Duckett: It was. It was tough. Had a lot of. Well, this far out, you didn't have much policing. Didn't have any sheriffs department deputy out here unless they had a warrant for somebody. A lot of moonshine.

Cain: I've talked to some folks about that.

Duckett: Yeah, they had stills scattered all over the hills. Some families, you know, that was one of the main ways of making it. And of course you had others that wasn't involved in it at all. And then after World War II, we had a lot of veterans. They were drafted or joined. When they first came back, they were pretty wild. Did quite a bit of drinking. Then there was one segment of them that just couldn't get a handle on it, and then some did. They had a lot of things to get

over.

Cain: I heard about the Hannahs. It was tragic.

Duckett: Well now I could name different ones that came to a bad end if I wanted to, a car wrecked, or shootings, or cuttings, different things.

Cain: Bill Gillespie was talking about people that he had buried ~ somebody who was driving a tractor who wasn't sober enough to keep it straight. He was talking about his own family, though.

Duckett: Well, his family was into that problem too, some.

Cain: Oh I know. It can destroy a man or make him. He saw the tragedy of it.

Duckett: Old Bill, he's a good one. Me and him, we were good friends. He's done a lot of good. Trying to support people when they are having bad times.

Cain: That's part of what I like so much, the sense of neighborliness that I sense in people.

Duckett: It's always been, you know, people been pretty good to help each other. You get, I don't know how it is where you grew up, but some people never been involved. I know a little story I like to tell. Down there feeding one morning. It was raining. I was hauling silage. An old fellow, he came up to look at some property for sale. He pulled right out in the field to turn around. Of course, he just bogged down, which was stupid. And he came down wanted the tractor to pull him out. I said, "Yeah, I'll help you in a little bit." He had on a suit and tie, all dressed up. He was a real estate agent or something. I got a chain on tractor. I was mad. My heart really wasn't in it. It's one thing to be that dumb, not knowing where else to turn. So I backed up to his car. He got out. So I just pitched the chain to him. (laugh). I pulled him out. He got messed up a little bit crawling down in the ground. I was feeling a little better by then, but he started on, he says, "What do I owe you?" He jerked out his wallet, you know. I said, "Just pass it on." He said, "What do you mean pass it on?" I said, "Well, you help somebody else. Somebody needs help, you get in there and help 'em." So he looked at me like I was crazy. I came on down, and he come down and stopped and waited, and I got off my tractor, and he said, "I will pass that on." I said, "All right. That's good." (laugh).

Cain: That's beautiful. He didn't know what you meant.

Duckett: No. But that's, you know, people around here, they always been ready to help somebody. There wasn't no price on it. People do it if you need it. A few, once in a while, take advantage of that, but most of the people don't.

Cain: I read a lot about trading work. Most of the people knew each other pretty well. They wouldn't keep exact account. You may have worked a couple days or sent a kid down to help somebody else when they needed something, and then it would go the other way back again.

Duckett: Yeah, that's sort of funny you mentioned that. We do that now. There's a boy that lives over in the other, Garrett Cove, people bought a place down here, they're from Pennsylvania. And they moved down. He was just a teenager, I guess. Wasn't too old. But he got trying to grow tobacco. And he didn't know the first thing about farming. He was green as grass. So some of the neighbors tried to help him out. So he got into swapping work, we call it. He come over one day when I was cutting. He said, "Do you need a hand?" I said "Yeah." Must have been 20 year ago. We've been swapping ever since. No money changes hands. I reckon we're coming out all right.

Cain: You said he's originally from Pennsylvania?

Duckett: Yeah.

Cain: Now is he still an outsider?

Duckett: Still outsider? Not really. When he first came here, he was sort of a renegade type,

you know, we had the hippie movement. He sort of got into that. I guess he smoked a little pot. His parents were worried about him. They would say, "I wish he would go on to college." He went a little bit, got married, quit, came out here and didn't have enough farm to really make a go of it. You know he finally got straightened up after he was in his 30s and started going part-time to UNCA, wound up getting his degree in chemical engineering and now he's got a good job, 40 year old and still growing a little tobacco. You know, he got turned around. Just took a few years to get his head on.

Cain: When I was down in February, I ran into Gary Morris over at Clark's Cove, is that it?

Duckett: Yeah, Little Sandy side.

Cain: White beard. Degree in finance from Ball State University.

Duckett: Is that right?

[Part omitted]

Cain: I think that about wraps it up.

(tape end)

Return to Top  Return to Sandy Mush Chronicles  Return to Oral History Collections