Keith Wells

Interview with Keith Wells Leicester (Sandy Mush), N.C. Conducted by Stephen Cain Aug. 8, 1998

(Tape 1, Side A)

Cain: Keith, are you a mountain man?

Wells: Pardon me?

Cain: Are you a mountain man?

Wells: Yes, I would say so. I've lived here all my life.

Cain: And your family, when did they first come to Sandy Mush, to the best of your knowledge?

Wells: I really don't remember if I've ever heard, back three or four generations. We've been here all of our lives, but when the actually came here, I've probably seen it on a tombstone down at the church, but, you know, the first tombstone, but I don't remember.

Cain: It would have been sometime in the early 1800s?

Wells: I would think so.

Cain: Actually, I was down looking at. Would that have been the Methodist?

Wells: Yes.

Cain: Does your family do dairy as well?

Wells: No. Not our immediate family. I have a cousin up the road that dairies, but we've been in beef cattle all our lives.

Cain: Was your family kind of married into some of the other families. I know a lot of people I've talked to seem to be related to about half the folk in one way or another.

Wells: My granddad Raymond Wells married Phoebe Brown, which was no relation, but she did grow up just up the road here, a neighbor you might say, or practically a neighbor. And then my dad married Lillian Payne from Madison County. She grew up in Meadow Fork. And my first wife was from out as South Hominy, above Pisgah School out there. And then she left me after nearly 20 years of marriage. And when I remarried a few years later, I married Barbara Brown, who lived on South Turkey Creek over in the Leicester area.

Cain: The division between Leicester and Sandy Mush is the two Turkey Creeks?

Wells: Yes. More so North Turkey Creek, actually.

Cain: That's actually in Sandy Mush, though, North Turkey Creek?

Wells: Okay, technically I guess it is part of it. We used to vote together at one time.

Cain: Leicester is closer to Asheville. Is there, do people make much of a distinction between Leicester and Sandy Mush? Your mailing address was Sandy Mush until they shut your Post Office.

Wells: Well, actually, our mail comes through Leicester, so our mailing address would be Leicester. But, yeah, I think over the years I've noted some distinction between the feeling about Leicester and Sandy Mush. Sandy Mush was considered to be a little more out in the sticks. A little more hillbilly maybe, hillbilly country possibly, which may be true to a certain extent, not necessarily so. Some people out here are just as intelligent as they are in Asheville.

Cain: That is one of the things I wanted to get at, which is the attitude of people toward people in the mountains. One of the people I was talking to was Burder Reeves and Betty and their daughter Robin. And she worked with computers in the merged hospital Mission-St. Jos. And she just gets all the time, "If you're from Madison County, you've got to be dumb." It just burns her as anything because she's a bright young woman.

Wells; Right. Right.

Cain: I was wondering how much of that attitude there was towards people who are from the

mountains. You talk about hillbilly, and that can be a friendly term or it can be kind of like a put-down term, too.

Wells: Right. Yeah, I think maybe there might be a little less of that than there used to be, but over my life I have noted some of that attitude along from time to time, and it does kind of gripe you.

Cain: This cove, Willow Creek. Hi Brian. Brian is it?

Wells: Yes.

Cain: We talked when I was here in February. I was taking pictures of barns.

Brian Wells: Oh, okay.

Cain: I was just wondering if there were any family stories, anecdotes that have been handed down that would come to mind, things your ancestors have done.

Wells: My memory is not as good as it should be. My Uncle Richard, who lived over here in the old homeplace, my great granddad's homeplace, he was my granddad's brother, Uncle Richard. He would be my great uncle. He used to love to dance, and they had a famous person there one night at a dance, or one Sunday afternoon or whatever. And right now I cannot think of who it was. It was somebody that was on the radio back in those days and was very well known, but I can't for the life of me remember who it was. I might remember later.

Cain: This was in the '30s?

Wells: I think so. That would be close, anyhow. I was born in '46, and it was before my time, I'm sure. So, yeah, it probably would have been back in the '20s or '30s.

Cain: He liked to dance.

Wells: Yes.

Cain: What kind of dancing would he do?

Wells: Some kind of square dancing. I'm not sure if he did any buck dancing or just plain old clogging or whatever.

Cain: That's gotten kind of commercial now, the team clogging that would go to the fairs.

Wells: Right.

Cain: But people used to do it just for pleasure, not for show.

Wells: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They would have music here at his house and get together and dance.

Cain: What was his name again?

Wells: Richard Wells.

Cain: And he was your what relation?

Wells: Great uncle. He lived out here in a big two-story house that you showed me a picture of, and he grew up there and lived there until he passed away.

Cain: That's really an unusual house. It's an "I" house because it's two stories high and one room deep except for a kitchen ell, but then it has two porches, an upper porch and a lower porch. And who built that house do you think?

Wells: My great great granddaddy John Wells, I believe, had that house built.

Cain: And that would have been before, probably before the Civil War?

Wells: Yes.

Cain: And that's a frame house, though, so there's no log underneath it?

Wells: Right.

Cain: Are a lot of your kin still living in this area?

Wells: Several, but also several have moved out. Actually, I have more relations, more relatives that don't live right in this immediate area than I do that live here. My Uncle Collie, one of my granddad's brothers, I believe he was the oldest brother, he moved to Marble, North Carolina, out near Murphy, and he and his wife had about, approximately ten children, eight or ten children, and those children had children, so more live out there I guess than right here on Sandy Mush.

Cain: It can be kind of hard to make a living off of a farm these days.

Wells: Yes it is.

Cain: Is that one of the reasons why people, young people, moved out?

Wells: Yes. They go for the better paying jobs, and sometimes it takes them quite a distance away, of course. Sometimes, just to Asheville.

Cain: How important is family and kin to mountain people, well, to you?

Wells: Very important. It is a big part of my life. No value can be placed on the relationship with your family.

Cain: There is the immediate family — your wife and your kids and so on — but then the cousins and the uncles, and it's been my impression that country folk in general and mountain people in particular really do keep track of and are part of the larger extended family, much more so than city people. Is that an accurate impression?

Wells: I feel like it is. I couldn't really speak for the city people since I'm not a city person, but I think you're right. I think that heritage just means more to our life, probably, than it does to the average city person.

Cain: Tell me about your homeplace?

Wells. I grew up on Bee Branch Road, which is off of Willow Creek Road down here. We lived there the first 14 years of my life. They used to talk about moving out several years before we actually did. I would dream about it at night, and it was a bad dream to me because that was home. It was nice, peaceful valley.

Cain: Tell me about the house itself.

Wells: It was a basic two-story frame house, a good-sized house. I've never measured it, but I would think it had probably a little over 2,000 square feet in both stories.

Cain: One front door?

Wells: Yes.

Cain: Was it more than one room deep?

Wells: Yes. It was two rooms wide.

Cain: Is that place still standing?

Wells: Yes.

Cain: Is it in the family or.

Wells: No, no. The Barretts own it now. The wife is from New York, and the husband is from Jamaica. And they've done a lot of restoration on it since they bought it a couple years ago. They are really helping the looks of it. It was in decent shape for the age house it was, but it did need a lot of repairing. They're doing that.

Cain: It pleases you that it's taken care of?

Wells: Yes it does. Sometimes when I pass there I smile. Hate to see something like that go down.

Cain: Yes. Does the idea of homeplace mean as much to the younger generation?

Wells: Well, I'm 52 years old. It would be hard for me to say for sure, but, I guess that's kind of a yes and no. I was about to say no, but I hesitated because I can sense in my children a loyalty and a sentimentality for the farm and the homeplace that you really, maybe on the surface, you might not realize it was there, but deep down it is.

Cain: (daughter?) Is she still in the area?

Wells: No, she lives at Jacksonville, North Carolina, which is near Camp LeJune. Her husband is in the Marines there.

Cain: Do you think she'll ever come back?

Wells: Probably, after they retire, if all goes well, if they live to retirement, I really feel like they probably will. He's from New York, and she's from here, of course, and I plan to leave her some land over on Bee Branch, and she thinks they might want to build something over there sometime in the future.

Cain: How about Brian? Does he know what his plans are?

Wells: No.

Cain: He's still living at home?

Wells: Yes, he's still living at home, and working some different jobs, but nothing permanently. He's not settled in all that much yet.

Cain: Your step-children, Ronnie?

Wells: He's in Oklahoma. He's working out there. He works from Oklahoma out to Texas and back, some kind of construction job.

Cain: And Danny?

Wells: Danny is in Lincolnton, North Carolina, which is down on the Piedmont. His wife is from there. He went down there to go to a tech school two years, stayed with his dad while he was down there, went to tech school, finished up, got a job down there, so they're there. They've thought about coming this way, moving back here sometime, maybe, but that could go either way.

Cain: There aren't that many jobs.

Wells: Right.

Cain: Unless you work in Asheville and come out, but even Asheville isn't, doesn't have all that many good jobs.

Wells: Right. That's true.

Cain: And Terry, she's 19, or he, that's a him.

Wells: He's working at Lowe's over here in Asheville on Patton Avenue.

Cain: So I guess you've got some here and some not. You said Barbara was raised.

Wells: On South Turkey Creek.

Cain: There was a lot written about mountain families that portrayed the husband as the patriarch, the ruler of the family.

Wells: Ruler of the roost.

Cain: And I wasn't sure whether that was kind of the truth or the myth or if that was something that was changing? Of course, it varies from family to family.

Wells: That's true. If it ever was true, or the rule, it has changed some over the years because now it's more of a closer to 50-50 deal. Not many decisions are made in the families that I know of without, you know, it being discussed between both spouses.

Cain: Does Barbara work outside the house? Does she help you on the farm?

Wells: She's a beautician. She runs a beauty shop just the other side of Canton. The reason that far. It's just 12 miles across the mountain in good weather, you know, of course she doesn't go across there much in the winter much because of the possibility of ice. But the reason she is over there, she was in that beauty shop before we married and that's where her customers are, so she just continues to work over there.

Cain: Of course, when women have jobs on the outside, that makes them an awful lot more equal.

Wells: Right. That's true.

Cain: I see that you are a church person.

Wells: Yes.

Cain: You go to the Methodist Church?

Wells: Yes.

Cain: Tell me a little bit about church in your life.

Wells: Well, that's one of the most important parts of my life, if not the most important part. My family is very high on the list, of course, and that's my responsibility first, just to care for my family. To love them, but I try to put God even above them, without neglecting them.

Cain: Not either-or.

Wells: Right. It's both, a combination of both, God and family first, and preferably others second, and self on down the line somewhere. That's hard to do, really, but if we are to be our brother's keeper and treat others like we would like to be treated, it needs to be something like that.

Cain: I think there are five active churches in Sandy Mush. Four Baptist ~ Ebeneezer, Jones Valley.

Wells: Chestnut Grove.

Cain: Chestnut Grove.

Wells: Three active Baptist and one active Methodist. And then Payne's Chapel is closed up.

Cain: I thought there was one other Baptist. I can check that. One of the things I was looking at — I'll ask you about the Methodist Church in a minute.

Wells: Excuse me. You might be thinking about Beulah Baptist on North Creek.

Cain: Right.

Wells: See, I don't consider North Creek really part of Sandy Mush even though technically it probably is.

Cain: The attendance at some of the churches has gone down over the years. I was talking with Rev.

Gillespie, and he may have two dozen people in church on Sunday.

Wells: Yes, I've noticed that at revivals down there, that there isn't attendance that there was 10-15 years ago.

Cain: What do you think is happening?

Wells: Well, frankly, I wouldn't want to step on anybody's toes about that particular situation. But Bill Gillespie was pastor down there years ago, about 20 or so years ago, and that congregation, I would say in eight or ten years, however long he was there, that congregation probably doubled. And after so many years of being there, he felt the call to move on to another church. During the time that he was gone, the congregation went down for some reason or other. I really don't know what it was.

Cain: I get the sense. Well, I'll ask it as a question. Is church as important in people's lives generally in this area as it used to be?

Wells: From what I've seen and heard about even the years before I was born, I'm afraid not, on the average, because a lot of people have moved in here, and some of them don't even go to church. I'm not sure there are any atheists in the area. There might be some agnostics, but, you know, when you have population moving in from several different states, you're going to have a lot of different beliefs and some that don't believe.

Cain: I wonder. Sandy Mush as a community, not just a geographical area but people who know each other and are together, and the church is a part of that community.

Wells: Right.

Cain: And I look at the people coming in, and some, like the chiropractor and his family, seem to becoming a part of the community. But I run into other people, too, who just come from the outside and they talk to each other and they never talk to.

Wells: Right. Kind of band together, or visit each other, and if we don't visit them, they don't visit us. It's not that we have anything against them, and I don't feel like they have anything against us. It's just in some cases, like you're talking about, we just don't have a lot in common with some of these newcomers.

Cain: It means changes for Sandy Mush.

Wells: Yes.

Cain: And a lot of the kids go, and new people come in who aren't a part of the community. Do you worry about the future of Sandy Mush? About what it will be 10, 20, 30 years from now?

Wells: I'm not sure that I worry. I certainly try not to, but there is some concern. I am concerned as to what it will be like. Let's see, I'm 52 years old, what it will be like if I live to be an old man or what it will be like, after I'm gone, for my children and possibly grandchildren to grow up here if my children do elect to stay here and/or come back here.

Cain: And that's because there are good things about Sandy Mush that you value?

Wells: Yes.

Cain: There is an expression I've heard, someone may be referred to as a "good liver." Does that mean anything to you?

Wells: Good liver? What comes to my mind right off the top of my head is someone that kind of is okay financially and has a pretty good life. I'm not sure that that is what that is referring to. That was the first thing that came to mind.

Cain: If you were to measure the worth of someone ~ not financially but as a person — what would be the important things in that person's character that you value?

Wells: Honesty. Decency. Virtue. Hopefully, they are Christian. They live for God, have given their life to Jesus and live for Him. These things, a value can't be placed on them, certainly not a monetary value. And when I referred to the good liver a while ago,while I was talking, I thought of this more sacred aspect of good living which I know is more important, but that was just what came to mind first, I felt that might have been what someone was referring to when they said good liver.

Cain: Well, it's one of those things that means different things to different people.

Wells: Right.

Cain: Are there ways in which the way people live in Sandy Mush ~ not everybody but in general ~ are different, in your impression, from the outside, from say in Asheville or the Piedmont, the flatlands.

Wells: I think on the average, I think Sandy Mush and the other surrounding rural communities around

Asheville, I think that it's true, Weaverville probably, some of the others over in Hay wood, here and there. Yes, I would think so.

Cain: Neighborliness?

Wells: Yeah, I feel like there is a bond here between the original people that grew up and lived on Sandy Mush and some of the ones that come in here, like the chiropractor, David Urion, you referred to earlier, and Bob Buzzerd and his wife Marge, who came here from Alabama. They just fit right in. They're one of us now. So it's not that we reject outsiders or anything like that. It's a lot in the attitude.

Cain: I'm trying to think of Bob. Is he Larry Cook's friend, that they work together sometimes.

Wells: Larry did a lot of work for Bob when Bob moved in here. He had Larry do his excavating, grading for his house site and barn site and so forth. Larry was one of the first people he met when he came here. He lives up in the Garrett Cove. He's about 63, something like that.

Cain: I was up Hog Eye yesterday, and he and Larry, Larry took the afternoon off, and they had this old sorghum mill.

Wells: Right. That would be Bob. (phone call)

Cain: Your parents are still living?

Wells: Yes.

Cain: But they've both had strokes?

Wells: Right.

Cain: Are they still able to live at home.

Wells: Yes. They're both at home. My dad's had three strokes, and my mother's had two that we know of. If she had any smaller ones, we're not sure about that. But mother's right alert. My dad, his third one hurt his right side, his right leg and arm, quite a bit, but he has recuperated some from that and is doing fair.

Cain: They live in the area and you look in on them. Do you have other brothers and sisters in the area?

Wells: I have one sister Beth, and she spends a lot of time with them. Her husband passed away three years ago, so she lives with them. He went on a fishing trip the day before his 50th birthday and, bad arteries, he had a massive heart attack and blood clot that took him away. Her being single now, that gives her more time, you know, to help them than she would have had otherwise.

Cain: So when I was talking about the importance of family, that would be one example of how it works in real life, being able to help care for your parents rather than having to worry about putting them in a nursing home or something like that. For a while, then, they can stay here.

Wells: Right. My mother was in a nursing home, was about three weeks there during and after Christmas. She had fallen and broken her hip, I believe the 15th of December. So she was in a nursing home there a few weeks and, believe me, it's not like being at home.

Cain: No, I know, but you go through the rehabilitation. We were talking about neighborliness. When was the last barn raising you can remember?

Wells: When Bill Gillespie's barn was hit by lightning and burned down. Neighbors got together and helped build it, not just close neighbors, but even neighbors from over here and out at Leicester and so forth. I'd had trouble with my right shoulder, had a bone spur right under this tendon and that tendon came in two not long before that, so I gave him some money rather than actually helping physically on the barn.

Cain: But that was pretty unusual. I was talking with Don Reeves, and he could remember one that he took part in back just before the Korean War but didn't remember any since up until Bill Gillespie's.

Wells: In my lifetime, that's the only one I can think of right off the top of my head. We used to get together at night and have corn shuckings.

Cain: Tell me about that.

Wells: That was a lot of fun. We kids. We'd shuck corn a while, and then we'd get out and wrestle. Folks would bring soft drinks. They'd have a big tub or two of soft drinks on ice, and that was part of the reason we went, of course, was to get a Pepsi or a Coke or whatever.

Cain: So they would go around from farm to farm at different times?

Wells: Yes. One night, say when my Uncle Jess Brown and Cousin Buster got their corn together in a big pile down here. They'd just pile it up on the ground outside, where it's handy to get to.

Cain: You do that at night?

Wells: Yes.

Cain: And there would be a big meal?

Wells: Ah, there may have been. That was back in my very early life, back in my childhood, and I don't remember some of the things that went on, I'm sure, but some of the men would, of course, would have a little jar of moonshine to sip on.

Cain: Now that I heard about. The people that I talked to, I guess they hadn't done it for soft drinks when they were kids, but they talked about there'd be a jug, a half gallon, way at the bottom. Once you got all the way done, you could have the jug. Not so much doing that any more?

Wells: No. There's not much corn grown here for grain any more on Big Sandy Mush. The majority of the corn grown is for silage, and then there's a little for roast ears for eating, but very little grain corn.

Cain: Sandy Mush, I hear from a number of people, some time ago used to be pretty rough. Had a reputation for being pretty rough.

Wells: Yes, and it's been hard to live that down, so to speak. Some people, when you say Sandy Mush, they still almost shiver, I guess you might say, cold chills run up their back or something. In my lifetime, I've heard people say, "That's a rough place, aint it?"

Cain. Yeah. Yeah. Yet I go around. Everyone I've talked to has greeted me friendly. Haven't even gotten an ugly stare. But, well, was it liquor?

Wells: I imagine that was part of it. When I was a child and a teenager and I guess really in my 20s, there were several alcoholics, a good number of alcoholics that lived on Sandy Mush. Some of them have quit, started going to church. Some of them passed away due to rough drinking life. Drinking too much takes its toll. But there are not, as far as I know, as many alcoholics on Sandy Mush as there used to be. But I'm sure that entered into it. Sometimes on the news, I've noticed when there is a shooting or a killing in the Leicester area, on the news they say "Sandy Mush" when it's not really out here on Big Sandy Mush. Maybe technically it was on or close to part of the greater Sandy Mush area.

Cain: So you get a reputation and it's hard to shake it.

Wells: Right.

Cain: And there used to be a fair amount of moonshine.

Wells: Oh yes, yes.

Cain: I'm not looking for any names or anything. What about today? If you wanted to get a half-gallon for a friend, would you know where to go?

Wells: Personally, I don't. If there is any being made on Sandy Mush and if I wanted to, say for a friend like you say, a visitor, I probably could make two or three phone calls and find some, I would think, but I don't fool with that sort of thing, so I'm not sure, but I feel that I could, really.

Cain: And it's not what it used to be, anyway.

Wells: Oh no! I remember seeing smoke up the valley here on Willow Creek years ago. I guess it's been 15 years. One day, on a clear day, there was smoke going straight up I guess 300-400 feet. Little circle of smoke, not big around at all. They usually did it at night.

Cain: To hide the smoke.

Wells: Right. Why that wasn't at night, that particular day, I don't know. Maybe he was behind or had a larger order or something, and decided to take a chance on cooking that day. I never saw that many times in my life but I did several years ago on that day.

Cain: I was talking several days ago with Mabel Duckett, and that cove she's on. They found, and this goes back years ago, seven different pits that had been dug. They weren't active stills, but they kept stumbling across them all across their place.

Wells: What about that? Just on that one farm? I have been, in my life, have been out squirrel hunting and so forth and I've seen, oh, I guess, in my life, three or four places that I was quite sure probably was a still at one time, sunken places in the ground.

Cain: One of the things that's really changed is the economy. What you can grow to make a living. You said you hadn't done tobacco for a couple of years?

Wells: Right.

Cain: How important is tobacco just to get people money for their pockets.

Wells: People in this area, that was, as far as farmers — that's what we're talking about --1 suppose it was the number one cash crop, burley tobacco. It's harder to make a profit in it now than it used to be. It's labor intensive, and if you grow much, if you grow enough to keep up with what you need to buy in this day and time, and there is so much labor involved, and labor is so high and undependable, it has just about gotten to be a no-win situation as far as I'm concerned.

Cain: If you had a big family.

Wells: Like they used to.

Cain: Then you could involve the whole family at the times of year it had to be hung:

Wells: Right.

Cain: I guess that was the most labor-intensive.

Wells: Yes.

Cain: But I see now crews of Mexicans. I never thought you'd see Mexican labor in the mountains.

Wells: That's just come to pass in the last few years.

Cain: But you can't hire farm labor at a cost that you can afford?

Wells: No, not really.

Cain: I know there used to be share cropping and tenant farming. Is that pretty much a thing of the past, too?

Wells: Just about. There's a little of it, but not much. Most of what share cropping that is done now, that's not the individual's only source of income. Used to, that was the share cropper's way of life, his way of making a living and feeding his family.

Cain: But he would rarely get far enough ahead to buy land of his own, share cropping.

Wells: Not very often. Occasionally someone did. I know one man up the road here, James Caldwell, started out share cropping on our farm with us. And now he and his family own definitely in excess of 100 acres and lease more than that from other people, and they've done quite well. I think they have about 40 acres of tobacco this year, couple acres of tomatoes, probably 20 some acres of silage corn, and quite a bit of hay. He has worked.

Cain: That is impressive.

Wells: He has really worked.

Cain: When you look at how things used to be out here growing up, there are benefits of change. I was talking with Bill Duckett. He had six heart arteries replaced back in February (Note: It was actually five).

Wells: Yes.

Cain: If it had been days before modern medicine, he wouldn't be alive. So modern change has been good for him in once sense, as an example. But other things get lost with changing times. What is your sense of that balance between what has been gained and what has been lost as times have changed?

Wells: I have mixed emotions about that. There definitely are advantages and disadvantages to what we call progress. The heart bypass surgery that Bill Duckett had. My dad had it about a dozen years ago. He wouldn't still be around. Hurley Prestwood, who was at supper last night (Community Club potluck), had it about a dozen years ago, more or less, and is in great shape for his age today. He's 78 years old and still very active. He weed eats, he raises tobacco, hay, with his family. His son and grandsons help him, but he's very active, very fortunate and very agile for a man his age. But I don't know which there would be more of, the advantages or disadvantages. That would depend on who you talk to, I'm sure, personally. I feel like it pretty well balances out, I guess. I love some of the advantages, and I question some of the disadvantages. One thing as far as we're concerned here in Sandy Mush, in my opinion, we'd probably be better off financially as farmers if we were still using horses and horse-drawn machinery. The tractors, the fuel and everything, all this modern machinery that we buy is so expensive, and our profit margin is low on the farm, that really, financially, we probably would be better off if we were still farming like the Amish farm with the horses and so forth.

Cain: Well, It's kind of hard to grow a big crop.

Wells: Yes, yes. That's true.

Cain: The farms that make money are the big factory farms, 1,000 acres or 10,000 acres, with the big equipment and the flat land in Iowa and elsewhere. It's hard to compete with a farm like that.

Wells: Yes, that's true. Their profit margin doesn't have to be all that large in order to make a

reasonable profit, where ours needs to be larger because it's on a smaller scale.

Cain: In terms of the values of the people, times they can spend with each other rather than, has that changed?

Wells: From what I saw as a young person and child and what I've heard from my parents and grandparents, it has changed. You'd think, with all these modern conveniences and high horsepower tractors and so forth, that there would be more leisure time. And we do tend to maybe tend to find a couple days now and then or a weekend to get away and take a little short vacation, but as far as visiting with our neighbors and really being neighbors, we don't do that as much as our ancestors did, unfortunately, and that's sad.

Cain: Okay. That answers a lot of my question. So, modern conveniences haven't really saved us all that much time?

Wells: No. It takes time to keep them working, keep them repaired and ready to go.

Cain: And then there's television.

Wells: That's a big thing. That television is a big factor. If there were no TV, we would visit more like our ancestors did. I'm glad you mentioned that. That's unfortunate, but it's true.

Cain: I watch it, too, but then I can't get my kids away from it either.

Wells: Right. It's okay in its place, but it's overdone.

Cain: That's it (tape off/back on)

Wells: As a child and young person, we hoed all of our tobacco, hoed all of our corn, chopped the weeds out of it, cultivated it with horses. While my dad was cultivating the corn and tobacco, my mother and sister and I were hoeing, chopping the weeds out of it if there were any weeds left behind the cultivator, and hoeing every stalk, two licks with the hoe to each stalk, one on each side. That was quite a job, so some of those good old days weren't quite as great as we might remember. But it was good exercise.

Cain: Exercise you valued more in hindsight.

Wells: Right, right. Yes. Then it was drudgery, especially on a real hot day. But that saved buying, but back then there weren't any herbicides. It saved the cost of herbicides, and family labor was there and available, so that reduced the cost of growing the crop compared with what it is today.

Cain: When did you get your first bicycle?

Wells: That makes me smile. I would guess I was about eight years old, just guessing, trying to remember kind of what size I was. I was small for my age. I had trouble straddling it and couldn't get it to going by myself, so my dad and Walter King, a friend, got me up on a little hill over there on Bee Branch there at the homeplace and helped me get started. Away I went, right down the valley and into the Bee Branch. That's where I landed, right in Bee Branch, and fell over. It wasn't long at all, maybe that same day, I was peddling it, riding it myself once I found I could balance. It was really no problem. I was rather athletic. That makes me smile to remember that.

Cain: Did tobacco pay for that bike?

Wells: I really believe that an aunt and uncle in Asheville gave me that bike.

Cain: Oh, that was nice.

Wells: One of my mother's sisters and her husband, I think is where it came from, but I'm not sure about that, it's been so long. If not, tobacco might have paid for it. I'm not sure.

Cain: That was just a question. Do you remember when electricity came to this cove?

Wells: When it came to Bee Branch, where we lived, I do.

Cain: You were about how old then?

Wells: Again this is just a guess, but I would think I was probably about six years old, more than likely. If so, that would have been 1952.

Cain: It would have made more difference to your mom than to you? Or not?

Wells: Probably, but that also let us get a TV, and I remember the first Saturday we were getting that TV, when they got it hooked up. If I'm not mistaken, the Lone Ranger was on, so, I'd heard him on the radio, and that was a big day in my life.

Cain: So you got to see him in person?

Wells: Right.

Cain: On the little screen.

Wells: That's right.

Cain: I'll let you go to your hay.

(end)

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