Between Editions: A Long Seven Days
PROTECTED CONTENT
If you’re a current subscriber, log in below. If you would like to subscribe, please click the subscribe tab above.
Username and Password Help
Please enter your email and we will send you a password reset link.
DAVE’S WORLD
By David Howell
This week’s column resembles a Betty’s Week format, starting with a few corrections and then a walk through the days between editions. That’s how her column started decades ago—Betty Shearer, for newer readers—correcting mistakes. Over time, it evolved into a weekly blog long before people were sharing personal experiences on social media.
First, let’s get Emmy Humphreys’ name corrected. She is not an Emma. Her granddad, my longtime friend Lance Humphreys, texted her name to me for a cutline, and I botched it.
Next, Minnie Mae McMinn’s obituary is republished this week with the correct photo. Somehow I got that mixed up, and I apologize to the family.
And I had Maggie Hill listed as Sydney Snider in the Christmas edition. That one is on me as well.
I’ll admit I had an uneasy feeling when I went to bed last Tuesday night after the paper went to press. It was a big edition with lots of names. It’s not unusual to sleep a little uneasy on press night, and I had only been dozing for a couple of hours when my wife woke me. Her father had taken a fall a little after midnight, and it was bad.
We realized his hip was broken, called an ambulance and got him to the emergency room in Oxford.
I got the papers delivered on time Wednesday, then spent the remainder of the day at the hospital as he was transferred from the emergency room to the hospice wing on the third floor. We made it through Wednesday, exhausted. I worked a little Thursday while my wife stayed by her father’s side. She called me around 2:30 and said I might need to head that way.
I guess we were in denial. He had been declining for months, especially in recent weeks, but when he was admitted with a broken hip, it didn’t feel like the end was near.
I made it to the hospital, called the hospice nurse, and she came to check on him. The morphine had finally eased his pain earlier that day, and he was sleeping. As we talked quietly about his breathing, he drew his last breath, passing away peacefully with his daughter holding his hand.
Charles Elbert Martin was a few weeks shy of his 94th birthday. He had lived with us since August of last year, and Charlotte took good care of him. As he was dying, she thanked him for taking such good care of her. They were very close, and she was his only child.
He was born January 6, 1932, in Holcomb, a community he never left. He grew up farming, starting behind a mule and plowing many a row as a kid. Sweet potatoes, corn, cotton, hogs and milk cows — hard work was simply part of life. He once told us that as a boy he carried a sweet potato in his back pocket “mite near every day,” along with peanuts, and could eat a whole watermelon in one sitting.
Farming was always a passion, though it didn’t always love him back. As a teenager, his father gave him a two-acre cotton field of his own. He said the stalks were five or six feet tall, and loaded with cotton. He lost it to an early freeze, the bolls didn’t open.
He picked cotton as a teenager, often weighing and dumping the sacks gathered by other hands before heading back to the field himself. Two hundred pounds a day was common, he said, and he picked 300 pounds on more than one occasion.
With the money from his cotton crop, he bought his first car, a 1947 Mercury. He was proud of it — until he tore the transmission out of it. I always heard he had a heavy foot. When the soybean market collapsed in 1980, his farming days came to an end.
He spent most of his adult life as a carpenter, building houses across this area well into his late 70s.
My connection to my father-in-law was easy. He loved the outdoors more than anyone I’ve ever known. In a time when deer hunting was a community affair, land was rarely posted and Walker hounds were essential, Charles would put down his hammer for the entire season.
He also loved turkey hunting, long before it was commercialized. When turkeys began repopulating this area, he started chasing them. And of all his hunting passions, quail hunting — or “bird hunting,” as he called it — may have been his favorite. Thankfully, his memories of hunting, especially quail hunting, his favorite, were vibrant until the end.
He moved in with us nearly 18 months ago and my wife made sure he had a home-cooked meal almost every night.
We buried him Monday morning. My brother preached, his grandson (my step-son) sang, and I delivered the eulogy.
This was a first for Charlotte and me, burying a parent, and it wasn’t easy. We have been married for 22 years and I learned a lot from Mr. Charles, especially about turkey hunting, gardening and improvising – he could fix almost anything.
I am going to miss him, but it is like everyone tells you, life goes on. I had missed the open houses at both banks last week, along with other exciting developments. the installation of the HVAC on the roof at the restaurant across the street from the office, the Pie Hole, formerly known as Hometown Pizza.
I can report that Randy Yates is getting close to reopening, he will serve pizza and the salad bar we all love will return. Katherine Montague, who will help Yates when she is not in the classroom, promised to fill us on all the details about the new restaurant very soon.
Now to finish another edition, more names. Hopefully this week, they’re right.
