Larry Hodges
Session 1
June 30, 2025
Table of Contents
Early Years and Miami Life
My name is Larry Hodges. I was born in Dunn, North Carolina, in 1948, and my parents moved us to Miami when I was six years old. We had to move because my baby sister had really bad asthma, and they wanted to get away from the cold weather. So, that’s what we did. We moved down there, and it was a great place. It was a great place to live. It wasn’t like it is now. So, I was just a regular boy. I stayed in trouble sometimes. I tried to stay out of trouble, but I was a boy
Meeting Judy and Our Young Marriage
I got to be about 16 or 17, and I played ball, ran track, and was on the wrestling team. I went to school with my wife, Judy. She was born in Cullman in 1956. I never knew her when we were in school. She had come for just a little while, and then they moved back to Alabama. We were probably in the fourth or fifth grade then when she was there, and me too, at the same time. Well, I don’t know, back when I don’t see. We got married on June 9, 1966.
I had just turned 18; she had just turned 16. Her mom and dad had to sign for her. They offered to buy this and buy that for us if she didn’t get married, but she decided to take me instead. The way I met her was through my best buddy, Larry Taylor. We grew up together down there in Miami. He called me one day and said, “Hey, this little girl I met one time in school…” He knew her from school because he went to the same one, but I didn’t. He said, “She’s moving back here. How about coming over and helping us move?” So, I did. I went over there and helped him move and everything.
This is kind of funny: we were always playing jokes on each other, and I saw this gallon jug. It was clear in there, and I thought, “That’s probably moonshine or something they brought from Alabama.” So, I took the top off. It was ammonia! I put the jar back down, put the lid back on, and I told my buddy Taylor, “There’s some shine over there behind that store, and the door’s right there. Take that jug and take a big old swig of that stuff.” He liked to have fallen out when he did.
But we were that way; we always joked and everything. Well, her parents wouldn’t let her date unless it was a double date. So, he says to me, “You want to go out on a double date?” And I said, “Yeah.” So, we went out.
Two or three days later, I get a call from her. She just said, “I wanted to call you and talk to you.” And I said, “Well, Larry’s not over here.” I thought she was looking for Larry, but she wasn’t looking for that Larry; she was looking for this Larry. So, we got to talking, and everything just clicked. I told her, “Look, he’s my best buddy. He’s been my buddy since we were probably eight years old. I have to ask him first.” And she said, “Well, I’m not serious with him. We’re not serious.” I said, “Well, I have to ask him first.” So, I went and asked him. He said, “No, man, you go ahead.” So, we dated a little while and ended up wanting to get married. Like I said, I was 18, and she was 16.
Early Married Life and the Vietnam Draft
We got married, and I worked. I was a workaholic, really; I worked all the time. I got to where I was doing a lot of building swamp buggies and welding stuff for people. We had a little apartment, the first one we had. We moved into that thing, and there was an older couple next to us. I’d say they were probably about 25, and we thought they were old.
One day, she says, “I’m going to have them for Thanksgiving with us.” I said, “That’s great, you know, we need to get to know them.” So, I came home from work, took my bath and everything, and I said, “You got everything ready?” She said, “Yeah, got turkey cooked and all that.” Well, they came over, and she wanted me to carve the turkey. I asked, “Where’s the neck and the gizzard and all that?” And she said, “This one didn’t have that.”
So, I said, “Sweetheart, they’ve got to be somewhere.” I started looking up in the turkey, and there it was, still in the little bag it came in. So, I got it out. She said, “Don’t you tell nobody about that!” But we were really happy when we were that age. My buddy, Larry, ended up meeting the girl he wanted to marry, and they were going to move. His mother had moved to Tampa, Florida, and he wanted us to go with him. So, all four of us loaded up. We went to Tampa, and he got married, and we came back. We were on their honeymoon, but not with them.
We came home, and it was the time when Vietnam was going on. I had already had my physical, and he and a bunch of my buddies I went to school with all had our physicals about the same time they called us down. What we found out was that she was pregnant. She called me one day on the phone while I was on the job working. She called me and said, “I’ve got a surprise.” And I said, “What?” She said, “I’m pregnant!” I said, “Well, that’s great!” I mean, I was what, 19 or 20 then. She got pregnant in ’68, and had Teresa on September 14th, I believe it was. I might be wrong, but I believe that’s when.
So, I came home, and we were both tickled, and her mom and dad were tickled. So, her mom and dad said, “Y’all are going to move in with us.” They had a big old house, and her mother wanted to help take care of her. You know, she was worried about her because she was their only child.
About a week later, I got a letter from Uncle Sam saying I had to report. Taylor and a bunch of the guys I went to school with all got one about the same time, and you had to go to Coconut Grove down there to report in, you know. I was at work when the letter came, and so she called my brother. I worked for my brother; he ran the company, and I was on a job somewhere. He told her where I was and gave her the number. So she called, and the woman I was working for and her husband’s wife came out. She was just bawling. She said, “You… no, she got… she says, ‘You’re on the phone,’ and she’s bawling.” So, I went in there and picked up the phone. I said, “What’s wrong? Are you okay?” And she says, “You got a letter today. You have to report to the military.” And she said, “I’m breaking both arms and both legs!” I remember her saying that.
I also talked to the lady I was with. I asked her, talking to her, I said, “I found out I’m pregnant.” And the lady said, “Well, I’m sorry, you know, he’s already… the only way you’re going to get out of this, he’s going to get out of going over there, is if you receive another letter before it’s time to go.”
So, I think it was like three days later, I was on a job again, and she called. She was bawling. She said, “The letter came!” And that woman told us, “As soon as you get that letter, you call.” So, that’s what she did. She called that same day, and they reclassified me to 3A, so I didn’t have to go. I missed that.
When I was 18, I hunted in the Everglades. I mean, I started hunting there probably when I was about 12 years old with my brother-in-law. We didn’t know what we were doing, wading out through those swamps. It wasn’t even daylight, and we could have easily gotten snakebit. But I loved being out there, and my buddy said, “You go. You’ll fit right in over there, you know, because that’s all there is.” But it went on, and they all went. Taylor went; Alwise was one of my best buddies; us three kind of ran together, and they both went, Taylor and Alwise both. Judy did write a letter once in a while and asked them how they were doing and checked on them and everything. Taylor, when he went in, he…
He was getting ready to load on the plane. They were out there on the runway, and an officer came up and said, “I need three volunteers.” Everybody told him, “Don’t volunteer for nothing,” but he said, “Literally, something told me to volunteer.” So, I raised my hand. Well, he went to Vietnam, and he baked bread in Vietnam. That was his job. He’d bake bread all night and be off during the day when everybody else was on, and he said it was better than being out there shooting at people or people shooting at you. Pretty rough stuff. He ended up getting hurt and came home.
Expanding Our Family and Moving to Alabama
But it went on there, and she had Teresa. She was just the sweetest thing in the world, and we were a big family. There were eight of us in my family. I can remember my mother putting me on the cotton sack and telling me, “Don’t move, you stay here, I’ll be back,” and the rows were as far as you could see. She’d come back, and I can remember, because every time I go up there after that, we’d go by that field, I’d say, “Right there’s where you put me on that side,” because she said, “Yeah, that’s it. That’s where it was.” I remembered it.
We were never sick. I mean, I never took an aspirin. I don’t know how long it was before I ever took an aspirin, but we just weren’t sick. Well, Judy was sick. She was always… the first year we were married, I think she was in the hospital five times. They didn’t know what was wrong with her. The only thing they gave her was another pill. When she was 18 years old, she was taking, I think, 16 pills every morning, and she was taking pills later on during the day, but they couldn’t figure it out.
So, we wanted to have another child. She’d get pregnant, and then she’d lose it. She lost three. Then, when she got pregnant, she was carrying Keith. The doctor told us, “You’re going to have to just about stay in the house all the time, you know, keep elevated. Keep your feet elevated as much as you can, and stuff, don’t go riding in a car for any distance.” And it was pretty rough, and she made it and had a really bad delivery, but it was rough. He came out, and we were just tickled to death. I believe she tried to get pregnant again, and she lost it, so we gave that up. We said, “Well, we got the two that we’re supposed to have.”
Then, Miami was getting really rough. We bought a home. I remember you had to have $500 down, and our rent was $87 a month. I worked at night, doing night work, and made that $500. It was a Cuban family, and us, we were the first two to move into the subdivision right there. So, we got in there and everything, and we were doing good. The kids were growing and everything.
Teresa got in first grade. She’d come home crying, and Judy would say, “I don’t know what’s going on.” She said she didn’t like to go to school; she cried if she had to go, and she cried when she came home. So, one day, I was over that way, working. I was out measuring jobs, and I went by there. There was one teacher. I don’t know how many kids were in the room, but it was a pile of them, and she had a whistle and a ruler. If she wasn’t blowing the whistle, she was slamming the ruler down. I can remember it’s like being right there.
So, we decided we were going to put her in a private school. It was a Christian School not far from us, so we put her in there, and she went for about a year. Before we ended up moving, we ended up moving up here on July 4, 1976. We rolled into Cullman County, and we were… my father-in-law and I owned some land in Florida, in the Panhandle, and we had planned on going up there and living. My father-in-law went up there, and they had a trailer on their lot and everything, and we were going to get us a trailer and live there, but we didn’t. We went to the schools one day. We didn’t like the schools. So, we thought about it, and we ended up deciding we were going to go to North Carolina and went up there to visit my mom and them, and there wasn’t nothing going on. No, no.
Settling in Cullman and Home Building
Florida, I did it. I don’t know. I started doing that. I quit school when I was 15 years old, and I went to work. My mother signed for me to go to work, and I worked with grown men. I mean, I’d done a little bit of everything and worked kind of work for the company we worked for. But we decided we were going to move up here and everything, so we went by and it was right out of Tallahassee, right on the coast, and got her mom and dad’s trailer. And the guy came from Cullman. He was some friend of someone my father-in-law.
They were Dyers and some kin to them, and they said he’d come down and haul the trailer up here. So, we met him, and we got the trailer ready to come up here, and we came up. And we found some land that first time we’d come up here, and I ended up buying it. A couple of acres it was, I think, two and a half acres. My father-in-law lived on one, and we lived on the other, so they moved the trailer in there, and everything got it set up. I was their favorite son-in-law, the only one they had. And I did most of all the work. Yeah, and stuff.
So, I took off. We had… we paid $12,500 for our home. And we… however long we stayed in it, I don’t know. Three or four years, maybe? And we decided we were going to move, and then where we lived, we knew everybody on both sides of the street, and they gave us a block party, and we’d had a real estate woman come out that morning and put up a sign in our yard. Bob DuPree was a fellow that was throwing a party for us, and he and I were good friends, so that evening we went down there.
I never drank. Coming up, you know, I just never did. I had buddies that drank, and I, you know, I’d go hunting with people, I’d say, “As long as you don’t… you know, you ain’t hunting drunk, but you can drink a little at night, but you ain’t going out there with a gun in your hand.” I was pretty strict.
We went to that party that night, and some of those guys were saying, “We’ve never seen you take a drink all these years.” So, they started mixing me up a drink. “You’ve got to take one, try it one time.” It was one of the big Tupperware glasses. I can remember that. I think it was pink. I don’t remember the color, but there, and they were pouring everything in it. Yeah, and then they put crushed ice in there with it, and I drank that. And my brother, my brother next to me, the second from the oldest, he came to the party. And he’s sitting around the couch, and he and Judy flew up dancing. Every woman asked me. I was dancing with her, and I remember Judy telling me, “Tommy asked me.” I didn’t know he could dance like that, and she said, “Well, I didn’t either.” So, that goes to show you how stupid you can get when you get drunk, or you know how it affects you.
But we were getting ready to go, and it was probably one o’clock in the morning, to go back to the house, and there was a couple that came up, and Bob said, “Look, these are some friends of mine, both of them just came out of the army, and they’re looking for a house, and can they go down there and look at it?” So, we went down there, and they said, “Yeah, man, we love it. This is nice. It’s fenced in the back. I built an extra room on it, and everything had a carport.” So, we… Forward. So we got it.
“We’ll pay you cash money.” Then the next day after we decided to let them have it, I got thinking about the real estate lady, you know, and I hadn’t. I never sold a piece of property or a house, so I said, “Well, she’ll have to get her commission, you know.” So, she came by the house. I called her, and she came by the house. She says, “Mr. Hodges, you just leave my sign up, you don’t have to pay me anything until you get gone, move out,” because it was a couple of weeks before we ever got out of there. And I said, “Okay.”
So, we sold the house and loaded everything up in a big old U-Haul truck. Then we left out, coming up to Alabama. When I got up here, I didn’t want to lay floor covering anymore. I didn’t want to do that, you know, I wanted to do something different. So, a friend of the family, he worked out at Addison at the trailer park out there. So, I said, “I’m going to go out there.” I went out there, and they hired me that day. I went out there, I did everything. I started nailing boards, and when I got through, I was plumbing and wiring.
So, I stayed there. I can’t remember how long, but I got looking at the money I was making, and I said, “I can make this in two days laying floor covering.” So, I finally went back to doing it. And Judy tried, you know, she tried, said, “No, don’t do it. You’re fine. We’ll make it.”
Because when we first came up and got the property, we set their trailer up. And then I built a barn in the back to hold everything that we had left until we got us a house built. And there was a fellow who lived up above us. We lived down in the bottom, and it kind of went down like this, then went back up another hill. And, uh, I know they couldn’t see that. But, yeah, we bought that. So, I built the shed and everything down there, and there was an old fellow on top of the hill. He came down there, and he said, “Y’all interested in a trailer?” And I said, “You got one for sale?” He said, “Yeah, I got one,” he said, “It’s only two bedrooms.” And we went up, looked at it, and everything. He said, “I’ll take twenty-five hundred dollars for it, and you can have everything in it.” They said, “The deep freeze got me, didn’t it?” And everything.
He said, “I’m getting out of Alabama. I can’t stand the tornadoes every time one comes. I gotta run, get to a hole somewhere.” So, he moved. We had to pull the trailer probably 200 yards down to where the property was. And so we got it down there and got it set up. And I built a big old room on the back of it, a 20 by 24, I believe it was, and that was our bedroom and stuff, and the kids each had a bedroom. Yeah. So, then, we stayed there a while, and I kept working.
I worked in an underground house, and I was amazed at that thing. I said, “Man, this is nice. You go to bed. Don’t worry about it, let it blow, you know.” So I told Judy when I came in from work, I said, “We’re going to build us an underground now.” So that’s what we did. In that hill that went behind us, we had it dug out with block walls, you know, concrete pouring concrete, and then had block all the way around about that much of it stuck out of the ground. And on the sides, because the hill went down, I put… we had them put some retaining walls out like this, and I filled all that in with dirt, and so it made it even all the way around. And then I left windows. These windows were two foot by three foot or something like that. So, in case something happened, you can crawl out it, you know, you can get out of it. And so, we had that thing, stayed in that thing until we finally sold it.
Now, we bought it from Redstone Arsenal. And they had taken it back from a guy. They couldn’t make the payment, so we ended up buying it and sold our house to a young man from Texas. And he ends up running Heritage Funeral Home over there on Eva Road. So, we stayed, you know, we stayed there where we were, and it was an old farmhouse. I mean, they had hay in it, bags of bags of corn seed, all in it, and everything. So, I got in. I started cleaning up and came to find out the house was 90 years old. It had old sills in the bottom of it, the framing of it, and it was… I thought it was like a 24 by 24 or something. And it was old. I mean, it had the high… well, the ceilings weren’t real high, but it had the wall studs were like nine foot or something like that. And I didn’t know that, but that was… that’s a different story. But I worked on that thing, and we rented a little trailer not far from us. And we stayed in that.
And then we found a little old house that we moved into while I was working on this one, trying to get it where we could live in it. And literally the house… the house we rented, you could walk from the hallway right out the back. The bathroom right out the window wall was all rotted out and everything. It was a mess. And the mister, the guy that owned it, was Mr. Graham. And me and him just hit it off right off the bat when we met each other, you know. And I told him, “I tell you what, I’ll give you fifty dollars a month, and I’ll fix all this. All you got to do is furnish all the material.” I said, “I’ll fix the bathroom up. I’ll get carpet. I got old carpet that we’d taken up that looked good, you know.” And we, I put carpet all in the thing, and it was… I guess it wasn’t a shotgun house, but you could get to the front door and look right out the back door. I think that’s what they call them, but Judy loved it. Had a big old living room and had three bedrooms, big bedrooms and stuff. Nice kitchen. And we lived in that until I got our place over there done.
Faith and a Fateful Injury
But I went to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church. That’s where I got saved. I got saved there in 1988. I remember it was in November. And I can remember where I was. Off the side of the church, two little areas that people set, and I was on the right-hand side. And my heart… I thought my heart was coming out my chest. When the Holy Spirit got a hold of me, and Judy, she said, “I could hear your heart beating.” And it was, it was just banging.
So, I went up, and I accepted the Lord and everything, and right off the bat, I got to working in the church and whatever they needed done, everything. And so I had a good friend of mine that went there. His name was Don Sayer. The Jail Ministry. And he hadn’t been doing it long, and he asked me, he said, “How about coming with me to Jail Ministry?” So I said, “Yeah, okay, I will.” So we, we would leave right after church, and we’d go by and get us a little hamburger. And eat it. Then we’d go on down there, and we’d go to the county jail, the city jail first.
At one time, the city was separate from the county, but they got it. They got it all fixed together now, but I went down there for, I think, four years to Jail Ministry and led people to the Lord and got to talk to a lot of people. But Don’s there now. If anybody was called to do what they were doing, or supposed to do, he was called for that because he’d tell them old boys. The first thing he’d say to them, “I’m glad to see you all here. I hate you’re here, but that’s the way God works. God brought you all by here and dropped you off so we can tell you about Jesus.” And so we did that.
I was a Deacon in the church. I was one of the youngest Deacons in the church, and then I got hurt. We were on vacation, and I think it was 1985 when I got hurt. We were up there for one of my mother’s birthdays, and all of us usually showed up, and we had rented a little community center up there. Playing out there, playing football, and it was supposed to be touch. And my baby brother. He was a big man. We both were probably 200 pounds then or 215, and I’m running with my arms in the air, and I don’t even know he’s coming. I sure ain’t thinking he’s going to hit me. He drove me right under my arms right here. And I literally, me and him both went to the ground, and I literally felt meat tearing in my back. I felt something tear. So, me and him both were on the ground, and Judy comes out there. “You okay?” I said, she says, “Uh, they were trying to get me up.” I said, “Leave me lay here. Let’s just let me lay here. I’ll get up.” And I laid there for a little bit, and I told her, “I felt something tearing in my back.”
So, I got up and just kind of shook it off, and we were staying at my mom’s house in one of her bedrooms, and the next morning, my legs wouldn’t work. So, I had them get me out on the floor and get my feet on the floor. And I would, I tried walking. I got where I could walk and everything because we still had to drive back from North Carolina to Alabama. And so we, I got where I was okay. I was walking, felt good. I said, “I’m fine. I’m fine.” And I came back here. And I’d be out working on a job, and I’d go to get up, and it felt like something was sticking me. I mean, I’ve never had a knife. I tell a doctor, I said, “It feels like somebody’s sticking a knife in me.” And I said, “I’ve never had one stuck in me, but I mean, I believe that’s what it felt like.” And they x-rayed me and did all kinds of stuff, never could find anything. Said, he says, “You’re eaten up with arthritis because of the work you do, you know.” And so, I said, “I understand that. But,” I said, “this ain’t arthritis.”
A Health Crisis and a Miraculous Recovery
In 1988 or ’89, I told Judy I was on a job working in West Point. And I, I went to get up, and I coughed up a whole handful of blood. When I got home, I told her, “Something, something ain’t right.” I said, “They, they haven’t found it, but I shouldn’t be coughing up blood.” But then we were praying, you know, praying to God, that He’ll heal me. And we did that for about a year, and I’d go up and let them anoint me with oil and everything. It wasn’t happening.
So one day she heard of a thing where they have doctors, Christian doctors in an organization, and you call. And you can, you know, meet one of them, talk to them. So she calls and met this Dr. Stan Faulkner. And so we went down there to see him. And at that time, he was in HealthSouth. He worked on athletes and stuff like that. And so we go down there. And he said, “I’m going to send you over at Highland Park. They got an MRI over there. They just started.” And when that day I went, the girl told me that was doing so, “If it’d have been a year earlier, you could have got it for free,” but it cost us a thousand dollars out of my pocket. And so we went, and they did it and everything. And he called me the next morning, and he said, “You got to come back down. We got to figure out what we’re going to do and everything.”
And he told me, he says, “You got ribs torn loose from your spine. That’s what was hurting me, you know.” And he said, “They’re already turning in.” And when they turn in, that’s why they touched my ribs. My ribs would bleed when they touched it, and I didn’t know that, but he said, “Anything touches your ribs, they’ll bleed,” and I mean your lungs. It was touching my lungs, and so, he said, “We’re going to figure out.” And he said, “We’re going to pray.” “I’m going to have my church praying, and you have your church praying, and God’s going to show us what we need to do.” So, that’s what we did, he said. “You come back, and we do about a myelogram or a tomogram where they use… put the dye in your back and everything.” They did that and found out. Sure enough, there were two of them torn loose, and my back was… I had to have it fused in three places in my back. And then we finally decided how they were going to do them, and they thought where they going to cut me right here and go in, and they didn’t know for sure. So, they ended up cutting me from my belly button all the way around my left arm to the back of my neck. And I went through.
I was in surgery for eight hours. And what was really, what was really amazing, Judy was down there with me in the next room. And she, we’d been going to the storm pit a couple of days earlier before I was supposed to go down to the hospital. She falls and breaks her coccyx bone, you know. So, Dr. Faulkner, we went down there, and Dr. Faulkner said, “I can fix it, you know,” he said, “I’ll work on both of you. I’ll work on her first, and then we’ll work on you.” But they had eight doctors, and they were working on me about eight hours, seven, eight hours. And I remember being in ICU.
Post-Surgery and Career Changes
When I was in there, Alabama and Auburn were playing football that weekend. So, the nurse that was with me during the day, she was all dressed in orange. And when I was, I mean, I liked football. I never did get into the Dolphins, and they practiced right by our home, where we lived in Miami. And so I didn’t think much about it, you know. But I seen that orange, and I remember all these people say, “Well, orange is Auburn and red’s Alabama.”
So, she said to me, I’m laying there, you know, trying to get recovered, she said, “Mr. Hodges, who do you like?” And I kept looking at her, and I know I was on drugs or something. I like Auburn. I like Auburn. She said, “Well, I’m glad you like Auburn.” Well, that night, when the nurses switched, the one that came in that evening was wearing all red. She’s Alabama college, and I really had… when she came in everything, she’d come over there and was talking to me and everything. And a guy was in the bed next to me. He kept screaming and screaming, “I’m dying, I’m dying!” But I wasn’t hurting when they did it. I mean, it took care of my pain.
And so, she asked me the same thing, she said, “Who do you like, who are you cheering for?” I said, I kept looking at her, too, and I said, “Alabama.” So, I wasn’t really that bad off, you know. But, I got better and everything, and I was told not to go back to what I was doing and everything. But I drove a gas truck for a while. I was always worried about running over somebody and killing somebody driving that gas truck, you know. I’ve always had an old saying, I don’t know who said it. I heard it, but I said, “God takes care of fools and idiots,” because I really shouldn’t have been driving that thing. The first diesel truck I ever drove in my life, and I was hauling 9,000 gallons of fuel behind me, and I did that for almost three years. And then I, I got to thinking, “Man, I can make what…” And I was making good money, but I had to drive from Birmingham from here to Birmingham. It was…
With these other three guys. There were three of them, four of us, and this one guy he loved to drink, and he’d stop. We’d take turns driving our vehicles, well when it was his time to drive, he’d always stop at the beer joint up there, I think in Gardendale or somewhere. In the car, and people were coming in and out. Like, you know, somebody’s gonna see me sitting here with this spiritual? And I said, “I don’t need to be doing that.” So, I told him, “I’m gonna start driving.” So, I did that for a while, and then I went back to laying floor cover for Walker Builders, and I worked with them. I think 15 or 17 years, a long time.
Another Healing and Industrial Health Hazards
I guess that’s about my story. I mean, I got another time. Oh, God did heal me with my lungs, because I got to where I laid down at night and felt like something was inside my lungs, moving in my chest. And I told Judy, “There’s something, something ain’t right.” So, we went down there, and they went down with the light and everything. And he said, “I had this stuff in my lungs,” and I figured it was from the sand in the floors and all that asbestos that I’d breathed from all those years. “When it covers inside of your lungs, you’ll die,” he said. “We can’t replace your lungs.” That’s what he told me, so we went back home and everything.
That Sunday, the Lord told me to go up. I mean, He just spoke to me, like me talking to you, “Go up.” And I went up, and praise God, the church I went to believed in healing, praying for you, and anointing you with oil. I asked them to pray for me, you know? It all went on like that. They did that, and I told Judy when we got home, “I’m going to be fine, you know? It’s going to be okay.” And so, I had to go back down a month or so later, and they were going to go back down and look. They knocked me out to do it.
When I came to, Judy was standing there, crying. Right off the bat, the devil tells me, “It’s worse; I’m the worst.” Yeah, and so the doctor came up and said, “Mr. Hodges, somebody really likes you because… it’s gone. Really,” he said, “whatever’s there is gone.” And that’s why Judy was crying; it was happy tears. “You’re coming to, and then your wife’s crying.” Yeah, but they were happy tears.
But the fellows that I worked with—there were two of them—both of them died with lung cancer. They’re both dead and gone; they’ve been dead and gone for over 10 years. I always wore a little mask, one of those little paper masks, thinking it was better than nothing. I always thought that. I bought a sander that would pick up most of the dust, but it was still blowing up in the air, and you were breathing it. However, it was nothing like if you were sanding it with a regular sander. We didn’t know then that we weren’t supposed to be doing that. The government came in before I quit laying floor cover and told us to put a layer or something over the top of the wood and then put your material down. They don’t want you moving it, cutting into it, or taking any of it up because of the asbestos in it. So we did that, and I stayed out.
Judy's Illness and Legacy
Then I got to where Tim was wanting somebody to work in the warehouse that he could trust. He said, “You know,” and he was trying to give it to me. I said, “Man, I don’t have good enough education.” I said, “I’d do it, but I know somebody.” He said, “Who?” I said, “My wife, Judy can do it.” So she came up the next day, and they met, and they hired her. I knew she would be honest. She didn’t lie to people. I’ve seen her sell carpet to people, and she’d say, “If you just pay a dollar more, you’ll get a better piece of carpet, and it’ll last you longer.” But if this is what you want, we’ll sell it to you. And Tim told me one time, “That woman can sell Eskimos Ice Cubes.” I’ll never forget that.
She started getting sick then. They never really did—she was always sick; something was wrong with her all the time and stuff. As I said, she took a lot of medicine. But they found out she had Lupus, and it was really bad. It had messed her liver up pretty badly. So we were in and out of the hospital, you know, in and out, in and out. She hated to give that job up. They had just built a brand new Carpet Barn across there. She was over the whole thing. She had her own little office where she was supposed to go in, and she went in and decorated it and stuff. Well, then she really got bad off, so she couldn’t go up there.
I know old Tim Walker, you know, Tim Walker? He was our boss. She called him while I was down there, and she told him, “Tim, I want to see you.” So he came down, and she told him, “You know, I love you, all you boys. But you need Jesus. You need to get saved, you know.” And supposedly he did. I don’t know, he still lived a rough life a little bit afterward, but he was good to us. And when I say “them,” boys treated her like she was their mother, really, because when Cee Buck was in Hartsville, that’s where he really died. In Hartsville, he was going up there, and Judy—they got Judy to come, got her, and took her with them up there to see him. He’d done turned kind of a dark color. There wasn’t no saving him and stuff.
That’s how they felt about her, and when we would go on trips—they’d win trips and stuff, and they wouldn’t go on it. They had more money; they could go and do whatever they wanted to. So they let us go. We went on a couple. Then we went to Las Vegas, and we went to Disney World, I think twice. And then one day, Judy said—well, that was before she got real bad off—she said, “I’m going to make a ledger. And when all these come up, everybody that works in here is going to get a chance to go on a trip.” She said, “There’s no sense just me and you going on that trip.” And I said, “Hey, that’s fine with me, darling, I don’t have any problem with that.” That’s just how she was.
They made money. The carpet companies give you money if you buy so much carpet from them. They’ll give you cash money, and she put that up. And every whose name came up that month, or every two or three months, she’d give that amount of money to them. So it was getting put out evenly. She fell in the house one day and broke her hip, broke her leg. So we had to put her in the nursing home. I couldn’t take care of her; I was taking care of her, but we had to put her in there. I’d go down there and stay with her until they’d run me out.
She was just really getting bad off, and one day I noticed she was swelling really bad. I mean, her stomach was getting really bad. What happened? She got a hole in her large and small intestines, and all that was going inside of her. So we went to Caraway. That’s where we were, she was going, and Dr. Hill, he’s a good Christian man, he asked her, “We will have to, you know, you’ll have to have bags and all this.” But he said, “Your liver…” He showed me pictures of her liver. Her liver was black, and it looked like the moon; it had little crater things all over it. I mean, it was awful-looking, and he said, “Her liver will go out, and that’s what’s going to happen.” So she had me and the kids come in there, and she told us, “I want to go home. I’m tired. I’m tired of being stuck and probed and everything.”
When we were in the hospital, they would have interns come in, and the doctor would come in and ask both of us, “Would it be alright if these interns come in here and talk to Judy and all because they’re learning? They got to learn from somebody that’s dealing with this.” So that’s what they do. They come in, and I don’t know how many times they did it while we were in the hospital. “I don’t want anything. I don’t want anything else done.” So she ends up passing away in 2001. Something will get you, you know, your face will turn colors and all this, but she had internal Lupus.”
I took her up, we went to a clinic in North Carolina. The doctor said that if I’d had her maybe 10 years sooner? But, you know, that was what he was saying. He said they had her taking 100 milligrams of steroids a day, every day. One time I had her on that, they had her on OxyContin, and then they had her on a pain pill, Lortab, in the evenings. But we were just… I mean, you never knew when she was going to go down, you know. She’d be feeling okay. The next thing, boom, she couldn’t even talk to you. And so it finally got her. I want to say she was 56. I might be wrong. We got married in ’66, so you would have to figure it out.
She battled with it. They said she’d had it all of her life. That’s why she stayed sick. They never knew what was wrong with her, and we’d go to the doctor, and they’d just give her another pill. They didn’t know. So it was just one thing. But God’s been good to us. We always prayed that He would use our children for His glory. That was one of our prayers. I mean, you don’t know. We were married 30 years. Her birthday was the 15th, and my birthday was the 13th. She died I think, the ninth or something like that. So she never did see her next birthday, but I believe she was 56 when she died. Keith was… I can’t remember how young he was, but I want to think he was preaching. I might be wrong. But I know he had surrendered to preach when she was sick, and then all this happened, and boom. It went downhill from there. But God’s good all the time, and I believe that. I’m not… when we came home, me and Keith, I rode with him home. We stopped at a red light, and I literally shouted. I literally shouted, and I said, “She ain’t going to hurt no more”.
Reflections on Family and Fatherhood
But yeah, I was brought up rough. My dad, he drank, and you know, there are a lot of chizzes. When they drink, they get mean. And I seemed like I was the one that would buck up to it. When I was, I think, 16 or something like that, I had to leave home because I almost shot him. He was hitting on my mother, and I told him, “Don’t hit her no more.” He said, “Well, I’m just going to hit you, boy.” And I had just bought myself a 12 gauge shotgun at a pawn shop. But I didn’t have time to get a shell in it. I had time to grab it. Praise God, yeah. But he walked right up to that gun, to the barrel, and he said, “You know, you ain’t got the nerve to pull that trigger, the hammer back.” I had the hammer back because you didn’t look in the house we lived in. The back door was right as you come out of our bedroom. The back door was right there. I looked over at my mother, and she was doing this, and she was bawling. And so I just grabbed the doorknob, opened it up, backed out, and I went and lived with my brother.
When Judy and I got married, Judy told me one day, “You got to make something right. You got to get things right with your daddy. You don’t need to be like this.” So we did, you know, and he thought the world of her; he did. And I’m sure he loved me too, but I mean, you know, when you’re slammed and knocked around and everything, it doesn’t look like it when you’re a kid. No, and it doesn’t feel like it. He was tough, but I mean, I was tough on Keith too. After Keith and Kelly married and he had moved out, he came over one day. I’d bought myself a riding lawn mower, and before that, I had a push mower, and he said, “What’d you do that for?” I said, “Because I had somebody to push it, so now I got to push it.” I’m old. The expression on his face. I said, “Hey, my pusher’s gone.” Well, that’s about all I can say. That’s a mouthful, I guess.
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Larry Hodges Session 2
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