Читать книгу Smokey and the Fouke Monster: A True Story - Smokey Crabtree - Страница 9

Time rolled on. Three of my four sisters got married and moved out on their own. I got big enough to work for money

I hired out to the cotton farmers. I helped chop the grass out of the cotton, when it was starting its growth. After the cotton reached maturity I helped pick it.

With this money I bought school clothing first. Then I bought a .22 rifle, steel traps, and things I had never been able to have before, with what was left.

The first real job I ever had was for a sawmill man. His name was Charlie Williamson. He was a big jolly man. He loved children and had a lot of respect for us three boys. He talked to me and treated me like he did the grown men who worked for him.

At the mill, there was a long chain with little cups on it. It ran in a conveyor like form, carrying the sawdust away from the mill. The sawdust would pile up at the end of the chains where the drags were emptying the dust.

My job was to keep the sawdust spread and keep sticks from getting in the chains and shutting the sawmill down.

He called it doodling dust. I was paid a dollar a day I really got into the big money. I was very proud of my job and worked very hard for him. When school started I went back to school.

During that year the war with Japan broke out. I was fourteen years old at the time.

When school let out for the summer, I talked Mother into letting me spend a few weeks in Texas with my eldest sister and her husband.

While I was with them the government offered my brother-in-law a real good job in California, working in a shipyard.

They talked Mother into letting me go out there with them and they would pay my way back on the bus.

We packed his old Ford car full of household goods and left out for California, stopping at times to fix us a bite to eat.

We stopped at night, pulled off the road, and put some bedding down on the ground to sleep. Once we reached California, work was plentiful. All three of us got a job at the shipyard. I got on as a messenger boy.

They furnished me with a bicycle to ride and I delivered blueprints and messages all over the shipyard. The shipyard was about four miles from one end to the other, so I got my exercise.

My Mother and sister at home got a good job at the ammunition depot in Texarkana, Texas. We were really in the money then. In a short time we were able to give the forty acre home place back to the man who owned it. We found twenty acres up the road, about four miles toward Fouke. Mother hired some help and they soon had a house built on it.

I liked California and I knew I could be more help to them there, so I kept working. I was going to school at night and working in the daytime.

My being extra small turned out to my advantage, for once in my life. They needed welders badly In the bow of the submarine the welder had to be extra small to get in the tight places. The welding had to be done by experts. I was selected for the job because I was very small. At that time, my weight was 94 or 95 pounds. I received special training eight hours a day for months. I was still being paid like I was working. Before I was sixteen years old I was among the best in the welding field. Despite this, my mind never left Sulphur River and the bottom land for very long at a time.

I got loose from my work when I could and carne back to enjoy the outdoors.

During my welding job at the shipyard and my time in the Merchant Marines, I was also engaged in boxing.

For four years or so, I fought amateur fights only I fought in most all the tournaments on the West Coast.

Smokey Crabtree during his boxing career, 18 years old.

I loved to fight, even as a small boy In California I had a chance to take training from the best. I took the training serious and did real well. I won most all my fights.

After about four years of amateur fights, I was told by the Athletic Commission that I couldn't fight amateur anymore. They said I would be taking advantage of the inexperienced fighters in the amateur tournaments.

I was forced to turn professional or get out of the business. Here came all the cheap and phony managers. They were waiting for this, they came by the dozens.

They didn't want to spend four years of hard work training a fighter It was easier to steal one that someone else had trained.

They would ask me out to dinner, as a rule. Then their line was, "I have been watching you for the last four years. You have got what it takes. I can get you in the big money faster than anyone in the business." They would offer me a deal. I would ask for a few days to think about it. During the time I was thinking it over, another one would approach me.

He would say, "I have seen you around in public with the crookedest manager in the business."

He would call the name of a manager that was waiting for me to sign a contract. He would show me a clipping from the newspaper where some boy had suffered brain damage in a fight. He would tell me that man was his manager. He was so money hungry that he matched him with someone out of the boy's class and got him hurt. Stay away from him or you will be in the same shape.

Then the next day, here came another one. He showed me all the nasty things the good one had done.

It was plain for me to see that I was the boy that would get hurt, so some guy in a pin stripe suit could get by without working for a living.

As long as it was for fun and a contest of skill and wits, I enjoyed it. The professional part involved things that I didn't care for.

I have fought several times since, but only for the benefit of others. I usually fought to raise money for crippled children or charity.

I would fight a man just to accommodate him quicker than I would over a misunderstanding.

Smokey Crabtree during his Merchant Marine career,

19 years old.

Smokey Crabtree at 20 years of age.

When I was eighteen, the government needed men in the service and was drafting them off their jobs. I volunteered and went into the Merchant Marines.

I traveled all over the world during the next two years, meeting strange people, good and bad. I observed very closely, learned well, and remembered for a long time. Two years of this and I was well educated in what the world was like and I wanted no part of traveling around.

The war ended about that time and I went back to my welding profession in California.

I soon met a very, very special girl. Her name was June McCloud. She was still in high school and only fifteen years old. She was very smart and looked a lot older than she was. She was living with her parents in Alameda, California. but they were from Oklahoma. She had lived most of per life in the country as I had. I got to know her folks and they were a fine family.

Our wedding picture, Smokey Crabtree and wife June, taken in Reno, Nevada, five minutes after we bought the marriage license.

They were like me, they had come from the poor side of the tracks but inside they were the finest.

I only got to take June to the movie a couple of times a week. Her Mother said that she was too young to date steady. This went on for several months.

I asked her to be my wife and she was willing, but there was her parents. We talked it over and we knew for sure her Mother would never consent to the marriage. We figured if she found out we. were serious about each other, she would stop us from seeing each other

We slipped off to Reno, Nevada and got married. You did not have to be of age. There we were wearing twin sweaters and blue jeans when we were married. Her Mother was very upset for awhile but soon got over it. Our plans were to save money and move back to Arkansas so our children could be raised in the country, away from the big city In the country people lived more or less off the land, instead of each other.

I wanted to protect my children from the queers, dope fiends, and crooks that had the big towns infested.

My idea on this was to go someplace in the woods. Odd people are allergic to work and in the country you usually have to work for what you need rather than kill or rob your neighbor. I very well knew where this place was, Fouke, Arkansas.

We got our family started sooner than we planned. We were married only three months when June became pregnant. We were very happy about this, but we started worrying right away about the doctor and hospital bills.

Within four months we had saved up one hundred dollars. We wanted the money to be in safe keeping. I went to the Post Office to deposit the money in postal savings. When I came back, I was carrying a .20 gauge automatic shotgun. It was a beauty, a Model II Remington, the finest gun I had ever seen, and I owned it.

June was very upset for awhile, until she saw how I felt about the gun.

I said, "Honey, they quit making these guns during the war This is the first gun like this I have seen on the market since I've been big enough to work for money It cost me one hun fred one dollars and fifty cents."

It was a dream come true.

I told her, "When we go back to Arkansas, this gun will help feed us and I will work twice as hard now that I am broke."

She soon forgave me. During the next few years, we lived upstairs, downstairs, and beside every nationality in the world, some good and some bad.

Families were all crammed together like fish in a can. Neighbors were fighting over the oddest things.

I saw a two hundred and fifty pound man hit a beautiful lady with his fist and knock her at least twenty feet. All this was over which way he was going to turn the boards on a yard fence he was building. She was his next door neighbor. He was building a fence for his yard. He was putting the unfinished side of the fence toward her house. She wanted the smooth side of the fence toward her house and the fight was on.

When you mowed your lawn, your neighbor would come after you if some of the grass from your mower flew over on his lawn.

When you watered your lawn you had to make sure none of the water got on his grass. He would have you in small claims court for drowning his grass. These things made me sick inside.

I am the type of man who wants to help the man next to me and that was usually what got me into trouble.

We got tired of paying rent and living in undesirable places. We made a down payment on a house. It was so close to our neighbor there wasn't even room enough to walk between our house and his. A few days after we moved in the house I saw him outside watering his lawn. I wanted to be neighborly, so I went outside and walked over to him. I told him I was his new neighbor, my name was Crabtree, and extended my hand in friendship. He looked me over, layed down the water hose, and went over and turned off the water He turned his back to me, walked inside his house, and left me standing there like a fool.

We lived in that house for two years and I never knew his first or his last name. This, and many more reasons, was why I was saving to get back to the country

Smokey on a deer hunt in California.