Larry Hodges
My Father'S Side Business
Most of my family in North Carolina made and sold whiskey. One summer, my dad sold it, but he didn’t make it. He bought it from other people. One summer, we went up there, and he wanted me to leave Keith with him. He said, “Leave him with me, and I’ll teach him how to make money.” I knew what he was talking about and said, “No, he ain’t staying here, I’m sorry.” I think Kayla, I mean, Teresa stayed a little, and then they brought her home later on.
He literally had these wire milk cartons, and he put them out in the yard for people to sell. When he would buy the liquor, it would be in a gallon jug with a sealed top, just like a milk jug at a store. A guy bought it from him, and he would put them out in the yard and put baskets over them. One time, I was talking to my mom, and she said, “Well, we got raided last week. They came in here looking for whiskey.” She said the federal man sat right on top of the whiskey and didn’t even know it.
He got caught one time, and when he went in front of the judge, the judge told him he was too old to go to prison. The judge told him he had to quit making liquor, which he didn’t. He didn’t make it back then; he might have made it when he went to jail in front of the court, but he just sold it at his house. He also sold it through a friend of his who ran a liquor store, and they would sell those little shot bottles. That guy would save them for him, and he’d go get them, boil them out, and that’s how he would sell it.
The day we were going to bury him, the day before, they had a big ice storm. We had about three or four inches of ice up there, and we had to break the ice to get into the church. It was just a mess. We were sitting there that morning, getting ready to go, and there was a knock on the door. I went to the door, and it was a big old black guy. He said, “Is Troy around?” I said, “Not right now.” He said, “Well, where is he at?” I said, “He’s going to be with Jesus.” He then said, “Well, come and get me a little bit of spirit,” and I said, “Well, we don’t sell it anymore.” I told him, “You have a great day,” and he walked off.
My Father: A Complex Man
My dad had a little notebook. I was looking through that thing, and there’s no telling how much money people owed him who were going to pay him when they bought bottles. I don’t remember what he got for it. He and I didn’t get along when I was young, but later on, we ended up mending things, and we got along really well. He loved my family, and he loved Judy and everything. He was the type of guy who could make money. He’d buy something that was junk, keep it a year or two, and end up getting more money for it than he paid. I didn’t take after him in that way. If I want something and I really like it, I’ll buy it if I have the money. If I don’t, I won’t. He was always willing to deal, and he’d always tell me, “If you go look at a car, you look at it, and then go home and go to bed. The next day, if you still feel like you want to buy it, sleep another night. And if the car is still there the next day and you want it, go get it.” That was his way of thinking.
He was a good man. When he got older, he quit drinking and smoking. He ended up dying with lung cancer. He was in the military; he was trained to use chemical warfare. He was trained over here, I mean, at Anniston Depot. That’s where he trained. I asked him one time, “Did you know where Cullman, Alabama, was?” He said, “Yeah, me and some guys went to the theater over there.” I didn’t even know they had a theater, but that’s what he told me—they went to the theater up there.
My Mother's Strength and Family Dynamics
My mother was a little lady; she wasn’t very tall, and she had eight children: four girls and four boys. We lived in North Carolina when I was very small, and then we moved to Florida. She was a great mother because my dad would drink. He made good money; he was a machinist. We would see him on Sunday evening or something, he’d come in, but when he got paid on Friday, he was gone. My mother worked all the time, and she made sure we had clothes to wear and food to eat. We didn’t do without. I don’t know how their business went as far as money, but we never went without.
It was really funny. If you’ve ever been around Spanish people, they use their hands when they talk. They have to move their hands for some reason. She was talking to him one day, and I don’t know why I remember this, but she was telling him something, moving her hands. He said, “You got to stop working with them Cubans. You’ll get just like them. If I tied your hands, you couldn’t say nothing.” I remember him telling her that.
We, uh, I don’t guess he ever owned a home. I don’t know what he owned when we were kids, but later on, he never owned a house; he always rented. Then finally, after Judy and I met and got married, he met her family. Her family wanted to move, so he ended up buying their home. I guess it’s the only home he ever owned that I know of. He was over a very large plant that made all these little operators for windows, jalousie windows, and all that. He made the dies for a lot of those things. It’s like the plastic you see in a little plastic toy that squirts in there and makes it; well, this thing would squirt aluminum in there. He worked there, I don’t know how many years. I would have to say we moved from there around 1976. He and my mom decided they were going to move to North Carolina, and we didn’t like it there. So they moved back to North Carolina. We would go up and visit them.
When I tell you he could make money off anything, he wouldn’t rent a U-Haul. He went and bought a truck that was closed in with a lift on it, and it was an old one. He hauled all his stuff up there. When he died, my brother-in-law, who lived up there, and my baby sister lived right next to him. They bought some land. Back then, they moved a lot of houses in. There was a group of Indians whose only job was to move houses. They’d move them anywhere you wanted, so they got one moved in. They fixed it up.
My Brother's Life and Family
My brother lived in town. He was married one time in Miami. After Judy and I got married, he got married, and it didn’t work out for him, so they divorced. He loved to play ball, and that was his problem. He played ball all the time instead of taking time for his family. Then they ended up moving to North Carolina, when my mom and dad went up there. He made good money. He worked for a big company that made all these tunnels and parking lots at the Atlanta airport. They built big, huge buildings down there in Miami; he worked on that and made good money.
He ended up marrying an Indian girl. Dad told him, “You better stay away. When she gets mad, those Indians are hard to live with. She’ll go on the warpath.” But my brother didn’t pay any attention and married her anyway. She just passed away, probably about a year ago. This was finally the second time he’s ever been to Alabama. He came a while back; he didn’t get to come to church. Him and one of my older sisters, Jesse, who was eight years older than me, came with him. So we got to spend a little time when he was up here. They went home, so they’d go to church on Sunday. But they both did get into church; both he and his wife, Susie. We all prayed for them all the time that they’d get saved, and they both got saved. She changed some, you know. I don’t know what her problem was; I think she thought everyone in our family, everybody else, was against her or something. I can’t figure that out.
He has two kids, a girl and a boy. Two years ago, when he was in school, he never played many sports, but he could have been a good football player. He was built like a little Indian, muscly. He came in one day and told his daddy he was gay. That really bothered my brother because, him being a new Christian and stuff, he couldn’t figure out why. He called me, and I told him, “Son, I never had to face that, but you just gotta love him, no matter what he’s done. You love him.” He told me, “I ain’t going to no wedding.” So they did get married, and the person he’s with, their family is very well off. They have a big meat processing plant up there in North Carolina, and they have been everywhere overseas. They post something on Facebook all the time, which I don’t get on Facebook. He’s doing great now, and he’s really changed. We used to talk about 10 minutes if we talked that long. Last time I talked, we talked an hour, so that’s the difference, you know. And his wife, he might be talking to him, and I’d say something, and he’d say something, and you’d hear her say, “That ain’t the way it was.” But praise God, she was saved and everything. He’s got a great family.
My Baby Sister's Career and Family
My baby sister has one daughter and one granddaughter. She went up there and went to work for an Indian doctor who came to North Carolina, not an American Indian, but from India. She had been working with this doctor, kind of doing his bookwork, keeping up with everything, and running the office. He told her, “If you come with me, you’ll make more money than you ever made.” So she left and went with him, and it was a great move for her. He always bought her a brand new vehicle every two years; they had a brand new car to drive. She made good money. He had a huge clinic where you could get an MRI or x-rays, anything done. It was really big, and she handled all that stuff. I guess she took after my dad, working with people, the business type of it. It was her and this nurse who started with him.
One day he came in and called them both into the office. He said, “I’m gonna have to let you go.” It surprised both of them. The nurse was up in age, but she was still working. She’s still working and everything. But she still asked him, she said, “Dr. Bis,” was his name, and asked him, “What’s going on?” He said, “Well, so-and-so in there,” he had hired two gay guys to work there, and one of them was going to take her place, and the other was going to take the nurse’s place where she was. While letting them go, they told him, “Well, we’re going to sue you. You can’t just fire us.” So they did. I don’t know what happened; I didn’t get into their business, but it worked out, I guess, for them, and both of them quit and retired.
She is, uh, well, you’ve seen her, my baby sister. She’s a mess. She doesn’t meet a stranger. She’s pretty much like her in that; my mother was that way, and my grandmother was that way. My grandmother would not meet a stranger. She’d always introduce herself to somebody, stopping or getting on a train. She’d ride a train every once in a while. She was a little old lady, and she used to straighten me up with a big old switch off the tree. She’d grab my right arm and hold on, and here we go. I could run around her, and she’d hit me every time, and she never missed that ankle. She’d whip you on the ankle; she wouldn’t whip you anywhere else, and you’d be jumping. But she was really good. I spent a lot of summers with them, and I enjoyed that. She passed away, and I wasn’t able to go to her funeral. I hated that, but I was really sick and financially didn’t have the money to go, so I didn’t get to go.
North Carolina Roots and Historical Connections
So they ended up staying up there. I was up there; I went by and saw my grandmother’s old house, and somebody very well off bought it. It was an old house, I don’t know when it was built, but it had an upper floor and stuff. He went in there and fixed it up; it was beautiful the way he did it. You can go up there where my mother and them lived; they fought a lot of Civil War battles there. You have to go on that road; I think I can’t remember the name or the number, maybe Road 33, I think, but it goes from where my mom and him live into town. You can go on there, and there’s a sign that says “First Battle Line,” “Second Battle Line,” “Third Battle Line.” And they had an old hospital there that was still there. We went and looked at it. Then they have a building where you can go in, and it shows everywhere it went, how the battles were fought, and they had all kinds of old guns and cannons. When I was growing up, we’d go up there, and you’d see these people out there in the fields with a metal detector. I’m wondering, “What the heck are they doing?” They were looking for Civil War stuff from the fight. They have two old cemeteries right in there together.
Life in Alabama and Family Blessings
We were going to move there; we thought about it, but I’m glad we didn’t. I like where we’re at; I like Alabama. I liked it after I got up here. It was hard to get used to not just jumping in the car and running down to a store to get something. You had to go maybe a half a block or a block to a store, and you could buy something. It was a different world. The sirens at our home when we lived in Florida, we lived right off the bypass, and they were all night long. You’d hear sirens. I didn’t think I was ever going to get used to the quiet. But I did. Then I built an underground house. I wanted one thing I’m going to do it.
Then we found another old house, and then we found the 12 acres where we’re at, and we moved over there. That’s where we’ve been ever since. I can’t remember the dates. I’ve had a great life; I can’t complain. I have a great family. I’m fixing to have 25 great-grandchildren, so we’re blessed, and I don’t know if they’ve stopped or not; they never ask me, but I love them. I just had the birthday of one of them, Samantha, a little girl who turned one year old. And then my other Savannah’s little boy, one of her boys, is 12 years old.
We had a party over here Saturday, and then we had one Sunday I went to over at Tracie’s home. They had a big blow-up thing with water, you know, a pool at the end, and the kids had a ball. They got me a chair and set me down out there so I could watch them. We all went out there and sat in the shade. It had a little thing that worked off velcro; it stuck. It used to be a hose where the water was coming in, and it sprayed, and you could stick it anywhere anywhere you wanted. Well, one of my little great-grandsons picked it up.
Everyone started to laugh, “All that’s fun!” I told those kids, “I want to see. I don’t have to take a bath tonight. I’m already wet.” But I’ve been blessed. We had a goat, and I was small. We left, I think we moved to Florida when I was one year old, at six years old. My mother would, my dad ran the store, and we lived well. I’d ride up the old road; the store was right there, and the dirt road went right up to the store. So she put me in that goat wagon, put a note in my pocket or with me, and sent me towards the store. My dad would read it and put whatever we needed, she needed. Then we’d head back the other way. So, I guess they weren’t worried about losing me; he. I never saw my mother feed him anything, but he’d always try to give him something. I guess that’s how he learned it. I don’t know if I was the only one he ever did that to. I don’t remember him ever taking off. knew where to go. Oh yeah, my dad would feed him a little bit or something when he’d come to the store
My Mother and the Scottish Community
My mother went to this church. I don’t know how many years she had her own little pew with her name on it. She lived to be 93, still smart, had her mind about her, still drove a car, everything. The guy, one of the young men in the church, wanted to write a book about that community and the Bears Bill Community, what it was called. I think I gave the book to Keith because he gave me one when I was up there one time. But it tells the story of how they came in, and they were Scottish. So we were Scottish, and they had to find a preacher who could speak their language. I didn’t know that you just couldn’t; they couldn’t speak plain English, I guess. So they found a Scottish preacher somewhere and had him come in there, and he did the preaching in the church and talked to everybody, married people, everything. Their preacher was named Jerome Pope. It’s not the same one, but he’s been there a long time, and he’s a super nice guy. I’m 77, I think he’s either 76, I believe, but he’s a super nice guy. If you go to his prayer meeting, you’ll figure you’re going to be there a couple of hours because he’s the man that prays. I’ve never seen nobody pray as much as he prays, but he prays. I would have never known about that community if he hadn’t written that book. He told about the area and how it all got started. I don’t remember; I was so little.
Early Travels and Work Experiences
After I got older, I was probably, I don’t know, 12, 13 years old. They put me on a bus, and I’d go to North Carolina, and the same way they would put me on there, and I’d come back to Miami. I was never scared, but I told you about me having to go to the bathroom, and I didn’t want to get off. I prayed I wouldn’t get left. That’s the first time I rode, and the bus driver, I don’t know if my mom or somebody told him to watch out for me. So he did. He finally came back and said, “Sonny, you gotta go to the bathroom, or are you hungry?” I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I didn’t lose my seat. I got my seat and everything. I don’t know how many times I’ve done that, a lot of times. My mom would take us up there and drop us off after I got older, and she’d visit. Then I would, she, I’d either get a bus back, or she’d come and get me. I rode the bus one time from Sevierville, Tennessee, up there in Pigeon Forge. I stayed a couple summers up there. My sister lived up there. One had just passed away; she was 92.
One summer, I worked painting the chairs at the ski lodge, the ones that went up. I got a job doing that. Then there was an old ghost town there, a western town that had a train and all that stuff. They would hire you to park cars in the parking lot. I always wanted to be an Indian and ride a horse and chase the train, but I never got to. They never picked me, so. I’ve worked doing something all the time. In Miami, we sold newspapers. I had a paper route. I’d get up every morning before school, go around, throw my papers out, and then come in. In the evenings, when my little brother got out, we’d go, and we’d stand on a four-way, four-lane highway. He’d get them going that way, and I’d get them going this way. You just step out in the middle, and you walk down between the cars until the light turns green. Then you go over to the side. You hold your papers up; you have four or five in your hands, and I don’t even remember how much they were. People would have their money ready and get a paper. We did that.
Sometimes we’d go over to the farmer’s market, and we’d watch the farmers. Some things they’d keep and bring back the next day, and some things they’d throw out. There were just kids we didn’t know much difference. So we’d go over there, plunder through it, and whatever looked good or tasted good, we got it. Then we went around and sold. One time, we got these old radishes; this guy had a bunch of them, and we took them and got us little paper bags like that, and we’d go around the houses and sell them to people. I don’t remember what we got for them, but you could make money down there.
I remember my brother, the one just above me, Tommy. He had an ice cream route. I don’t know if you all have ever seen one. They take a freezer box, put two wheels, one on each side, and then it comes around like this, and then they put a bicycle frame on it, and you have handles. The front part moves, and you pedal it around. He’d give us some sometimes and sometimes he couldn’t, depending on what it was. He did that for a while. I never did that.
Moving to Alabama and Raising Our Kids
I worked at the same place for, I think, 13 years, and then I worked at another place for either 13 or 17 years. But I worked at another place right after that, because, like I told you, the other one, they built barracks and stuff, and that was my job. I should have stayed at that job, but we wanted to get out of there because it was getting worse and worse, and we had kids, and we wanted them to try to grow up in a decent place where they didn’t have to worry about getting beat up all the time and in trouble.
We moved up here, and both of our kids graduated from Fairview High School. I meant Keith. He never got in trouble, and neither did Teresa, but she would come home with four or five girls with her. We had more girls in our house than most people. She had all kinds of friends.
I remember one time, Keith came home, and I could tell something bothered him. I said, “What’s going on?” He said, “There’s a boy on the bus that’s aggravating me. He will hit me behind my ears like that. And he said, “I don’t want to get in a fight with him.” I said, “Well, you want him to keep hitting you behind the ears?” And he said, “Well, no.” I said, “Well, you got two choices: you’re gonna fight him, or you’re gonna try to fool him.” So, I said, and the guy lived around the corner from where we lived. I said, “Before the bus driver gets to drop him off, you tell him, ‘Me and you both are gonna get off here. One of us is going to walk to the house.'” And he did it. He said, “I did it.” The guy looked at him and said, “I just want to be friends, Keith. I don’t want to fight.” So he didn’t have to fight; he didn’t have to do that.
But his coach had told me and his mother one time, he said, “He’s got a gift with people.” When he played basketball, he never played football. I didn’t want him to play football; I didn’t want him to get beat up, you know. I said, “When you get in high school, if you want to play football, that’s fine.” But when he was younger, we tried him one time. Me and Judy talked about it and said, “Nah.” We’re not gonna let him play, but he didn’t. He never pushed it about playing football, but he was a good basketball player, and he kept the peace. He could do that, he said, “He can work with these boys better than I can far as keeping them under control and stuff like that.” He had a gift back then, even when he was just a kid, he had a gift.
Our Children's Lives and Levi's Adoption
I told you about his kidney problem? I think I did, and the little suit, yeah? God healed him of that, and after that, that was it. We didn’t have any real problems with him. Teresa, she was kind of like me. Judy was very sick; she was sick a lot, but Teresa was like me, she never got sick. She had children to raise. She has two girls and one boy. Keith has two girls and one boy. Yes, two girls, one boy, yep. Levi is adopted. His boy. He’s big, you know. I know he doesn’t play any instruments. He drives a truck for Walker Builders over here in Guntersville, big trucks, and hauls stuff around on the job.
Kelly and Keith ended up adopting him and Kelly fell in love with him, and Keith did too. So they ended up adopting him, and it was a God thing because I don’t even think they had to pay anything. They got a lawyer that didn’t cost them anything. He could tell you more about that than me, but they ended up getting him.
I think he is 20, he’s either 22 or 23, but he’s a big old boy. He ain’t little, he is big, but he’s bigger than Keith. I mean, he might go 300 pounds, I don’t know, but he’s a big, big boy. He was always big when he was growing up, a good-sized little kid. But I remember when Judy passed away, “We’ll stay with Papa so he ain’t gonna be by himself.” So, he and I were sitting out on the back porch and looking at the stars, and he said, “Papa, if we had a rocket, we could go see Grandma.” I never forgot what he said, but he, you know, he was a boy.
I had a jail ministry that I went to, and I used to tell him and Teresa both, “If you get locked up, I’m gonna let you stay a couple days. I’m not gonna come and get you right then. I want you to see what it’s like.” I really did mean that, but they never did get in trouble to get locked up.
My Second Marriage and Its Struggles
And then I got remarried, and that was a mistake. I married Judy’s first cousin, and she was eight years younger than me. Pretty. I mean, she was a pretty woman, and Teresa was her flower girl at her first wedding when she got married down in Florida. We stayed married five and a half years, and she was an LPN, smart, and knew everything about medicine.
You would have loved her if you’d met her. You’d have loved her. She was a great person. She could sing. She could write music. She was very, very talented. She called me and said, “Let’s go out and eat.” We went out to eat a couple more times, and she said, “You know, I know you love me, and I love you.” I said, “Well, you want to try it again?” And she said, “Yeah.” So, I went over to my buddy’s house that I went to jail with him. He was a licensed minister, and I was too. We went over there, and I asked him, “Can you marry us?” He said, “Yeah. Get your paper.” So we went to the courthouse, got it, and got married. Same kind of mess.
Point. She had four or five grandkids, and they all call me Papa, and I treated them no different. They were like my own. I told Keith, “I hate it.” At one time, I think he tried to talk to her, but she was set in her ways.
Accidents and Lessons Learned
I used to have a scar right there, but I can’t see it anymore. That might be it right there. I had gun blew up with me, and it went right here. I used to have a scar. I don’t know where it’s at anymore. It went in my arm. I was holding the gun like this. When I shot it, it went in my arm and went up into here, into my muscle. We went to the emergency room. Right off the bat, they thought she had shot me. They didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t take the gun. I threw the gun on the ground because I didn’t want to mess with that thing. So she ended up having to go out there to the government property, they call it. It’s part of the air base out there, and she rode with the highway patrol out there. That was my first wife. So they went out there, and they found the gun and brought the gun back, and he said, “Okay.” He said, “Okay that’s all I need,” because I told him when I went there, I said I had a gun blow up with me, part of the barrel is right here.
I was in there, and I was on the table, and I asked the doctors, “When am I going to get this thing out?” He said, “Well, when a nurse comes in here and can hold this thing.” I said, “I can hold it. You don’t know the whole thing. I held it open,” and he literally went up in there with a long pair of things, and he grabbed that thing. I felt him when he turned it, and he brought it right out the same hole that it went in. And he sewed me up.
It peeled that thing back, like crazy. So I gave it to one of Judy’s cousins, and he still has it. He lives in Florida. He got another barrel and put a new barrel on it. It was a 20 gauge shotgun, the only 20 gauge I ever owned. But it had one of these chokes on the front, and I never owned one like that. I was trying to break that dog from being gun-shy. My brother almost shot him. I saw the deer coming, and my dog was right behind him. My brother went to shooting at the deer like this, and he shot about four times with a 30-30. I guess one of those bullets came pretty close to the dog because the dog turned and ran. From then on out, he would run a deer, but if you shot at it, he’d make a big old loop, and then he’d come back to see if you hit it.
I should have left well enough alone. Until the day I gave him away and did the same thing, but he was a really good dog. He literally, I could put him on the back of my swamp buggy. He’d be behind me, and he’d start whining like his nose was in the air, and I said, “He smells a deer.” And I stopped, and I dumped him out, and it wasn’t but five minutes before he’d be running a deer. He could literally smell them. He had a good nose, but that’s, you know, that was stupid, and my fault because I fell and I was in some grown-up stuff, and I had no idea the barrel was in the ground. I was in that fix, I thought it just fell, and it fell right on the ground. When I picked it up, I shot it, and Judy said to me, “You know, it might be something in that barrel.” I said, “Nah, ain’t nothing in there. I looked at it.” And I don’t know how much of it was, but I figured that choke, you know, they screwed down to make it tight, make your shot go smaller, and I might have had it tied down all the way down, and I just couldn’t get it out.
And then I got hit in the head. I worked on a crane. I got my head busted. I think I told you all about that. I worked with my father-in-law at night on a crane. He could operate these big cranes. Down there, it wouldn’t be a Florida or Miami if it wasn’t for the lakes because that’s how they got the dirt to put in there where the swamp was. And we’d go in there and dig out where the swamp was. I don’t remember how many acres, but it was a big area. This crane was so big, you could drive a power wagon. I had a power wagon that was a greaser truck, oiled it, and greased it up. Everything had all the equipment on it. You could put that truck in the bucket; that’s how big it was. It was a big old one.
The guy running it during the day should have fixed that cable, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to mess with it; it was a little aggravating, but not bad. So, my father-in-law saw it. It started splintering a little bit, breaking. He said, “We got to fix that.” He said that stuff comes apart and comes back here and will knock our heads off. So, we go down, and he sets the bucket on the ground. You have to go in there and knock, there’s a wedge that goes in there. The cable goes in and turns.
There’s a wedge right here, that goes in here, and it wedges that cable in there. So we changed it out, and I took the torches, cut it off. He said, “I’m gonna swing it up and lock it.” What you do is, you have to swing the bucket and swing it out and snatch it, and it locks it in. Well, he did that, and neither he nor I thought, “Well, it’s gonna come out,” right? So I’m down by the water washing my hands. And when he came over me, that cable came out. And it had chains on there, they were that big around, one of them would have killed me. But the cable, I guess, when he went over me, it hit me, you know, went off my head. The bucket went flopping out, and the cable hit the ground after it hit me. It hit the ground, hit the water, and everything.
He almost hurt himself getting off in there because he thought he killed me. You know, people say they see stars, and I’ve seen stars, but he told me, “You hit the ground. You were right back up.” So I said, “Well, we need to do something about this.” So, we went to the hospital. Of course, they had a darn Cuban doctor in there. He shaves half of my head, the hair off my head, sews it up at a place about that long. And he told Judy, she’d come over there, and my father-in-law went home. So on the way home, well, before we’re home, she says, “You can’t go to sleep.” So, I might have to watch you until tomorrow and see how you do. I don’t know why you can’t go to sleep, but there’s something when you get hit in the head like that, if you go to sleep, you might not wake up. So, she and I both tried to stay up, and next thing you know, we woke up, and it was morning. I made it. That’s why I have a saying, “Lord watch over fools and idiots.”
I’ve gone into a canal in a car. Did I share that with you? I went in the canal, and I had a ’57 Ford Fairlane two-door, and it had a four-speed. I had a 312 high-performance engine and a big old Holley carburetor. That thing would fly. I mean, it was fast. My buddy Larry Taylor, who drove up with him, and another guy, Norman, was his name. We went out there to go hunting. We planned on sleeping in a tent, but the mosquitoes were so bad you couldn’t sleep. All you could hear was buzzing around your head, and they were biting you. So we decided to take turns riding up and down by the river in my car.
Now, this is something. When we were going over there, this area where we were wasn’t far from where we lived after we got grown and bought our homes. They had missile bases out there. I’ve been out there with my Jeep. You could hear a siren go off, and then all of a sudden, that missile would come up, and you could see about two feet of it, a pretty white one. It looked like they were about that big around. But we were going in to go hunting, and here’s an army truck. We pull up there in the road, and the canal runs right through here, goes under the road and goes on towards their base over there, and they’re all standing there looking down in the water. So we pull over. I said, “What’s going on?” He said, “There’s a deuce and a half down there.”
An army truck, one of the big ones. That thing was in the box, and you can hear. I could hear a humming noise, and I said, “What’s that humming noise?” He said, “Well, that’s a pump keeping the water out of that motor so it won’t ruin the motor, so we got to get it out.” And he said, “Somebody else will get out. We’re going to stockade.” That’s what he said. He said, “We just weren’t paying attention, and I got too close on the road giveaway, and the truck went in.” And then there were three of them in there, and so, man, I, we said, “That was scary.” He said, “Yeah, it was scary.”
So we got back in there, and we’re riding up and down the road. And it comes my turn to drive. You’re still getting bit. I don’t know, mosquitoes. There’s a hole they can get in, you know, and I didn’t sleep much. So it was my time to turn, I mean, to drive. We’re going down there, and they start breaking day a little bit. You know, they say when you go to sleep, whatever you’re looking at is what’s in your mind, what you’re imagining. And I know I had to have been asleep to run off the darn road, but I could still see the road, you know. Next thing I know, on the left-hand side was the canal, and it was overgrown real high. There were little saplings about that big. Next thing I know, I hear “pow, pow, pow” I look up. We’re running over the saplings, and it had about a 10 foot embankment for the water, and the car flipped up and landed like this, upside down.
I never got scared. I never got panicky. I always remembered, “Stay until the car stops. Don’t get out until it stops.” So I grabbed hold of the steering wheel. I could hold my breath. I had good breath. I was holding that steering wheel, and I could hear the gravel on top of the car that slid down and sliding down on the embankment, and the water started coming. Old brown water started coming in, and then the headlights. You could still see the taillights and headlights when it was at the bottom, and they finally went off. But when it finally stopped, Norman was in the back, and when it hit the water, it popped the back glass out, so he was able to swim out. Now you have to think, you’re upside down in this car.
And so I had Taylor’s window was rolled all the way up. And mine was about that far down. And I looked over there, and he’s just clawing like this, you kno w, he doesn’t know which way to go. I grab him, I shove him through that hole in that window, and he’s almost out. And I’ve about run out of air. So when he’s almost out, I try to go out, and he still had his feet in there, and he’s kicking. So they got out, and they were on the bank. They thought I’d drowned. I remember coming out, putting my feet on the bottom of the canal and pushing with my legs, and I came flying up out of the water. He said, “We thought you drowned.” I said, “Nah, I’m here.” And I told him, “You know, boy, there’s got to be a God because we should have been dead.”
We finally walked to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law’s house. They lived out there in a subdivision, so we went out there to their place, and we got them awake and everything. Well, they were up, but we, they brought the trucks, a big old company’s trucks out there, and I dove down in there. Hooked chains to it, and then we pulled it back up on the road, and I was going to come back and get it with a trailer because the motor wasn’t hurt. I mean, you could drain the water, oil, all that, you know, it was in good shape. The body was shot, but the transmission had the four-speed and all that. It was fine. So we got back, and I came back with a truck and a trailer, and somebody had come through there, and they must have had torches because they cut the motor mounts off and the transmission mounts off.
And they slid it right out of there. It had to be a little wrecker or something like that to get it. Yeah, stole it. It was gone. Well, you can go out through there and find all kinds of cars where people were using them for target practice, stealing them. They steal them and strip them, take everything off them, and then they shoot them full of holes. I probably shot some full of holes myself. But I didn’t get it. It was gone. I wasn’t meant to have it, I guess. I didn’t have my license. I was a teenager. I didn’t even have my license. I was just stupid.
Friendships and Reflections
Anyway, when I got older, old Taylor, my buddy, he was about that much shorter than me. A little chunky guy. Man, I mean, we’ve walked so many miles in those everglades. It’s amazing. If I got to a big hollow, a pile of water, I didn’t think I wasn’t gonna walk around either. We’re gonna go through that baby, and I’d get in there, and the water would be this deep, and I’d look back at him. He’d say, “You gotta stop.” But he’d follow me. Man, he said, you know, when he passed away, and I was at his funeral, they asked if anybody had anything to say, and I said, “Well, you know, old Taylor, everyone knew us. They called me his brother and sisters. I was family. I was just like a brother to him.” So they said, “Well, I said, ‘He used to follow me through those swamps everywhere I’d go. He’d be right behind me.’ I said, ‘Now, I’m gonna have to go follow him because he’s gone home to be with the Lord.'” And thankfully, he got saved.
Down there when we used to go hunting, Keith and them used to go, and —- and stuff. He had a place in Rockford. Have you ever been there? It’s right down near Alexander City. And he had 30 acres of land in there. When he got really bad off, I’d go down there and stay with him for two or three days and keep the place cleaned up. Mow, whatever needed to be done. He was a master electrician too. He worked for the school board. That’s what he did. And he had all kinds of work; he did work for doctors in their offices. He had doctors and lawyers who’d hire him to come in and do wiring and all this stuff. And he was tight with that money.
Man, I remember going to their house, and on Friday evening, you could eat four or five hot dogs, but during the week, he only got one or two. His daddy worked at a laundromat delivering clothes. You wonder what kind of money. I didn’t know you were always thinking about money, but that’s what it was. But this was the most humble man you ever met. I mean, I thought the world of him. He said, “Yeah, on Friday, Daddy got paid. He brought a big old pack of hot dogs. We can eat as many as we want.” Yeah. But yeah, he was a good one. He was a Vietnam vet; he went to Vietnam and got home. He’s the one that baked bread. You know they were going to send him over there, and he wanted to volunteer, and he volunteered, and he baked bread. He said, “I baked bread all night, and during the day, everybody else is out fighting and doing this, I’d stay right there.”
Yeah, he lived in Homestead, Florida. You remember that when that hurricane hit, and they had that Serpentarium that had a big old picture of a snake, a python. It was a big surface area. You could go there and watch. His guy’s name was Hoss. He bought every kind of snake. There’s only one I ever knew they’d been bit by a coral who didn’t die, but they would take his blood and use it to help people who had been bitten by different snakes. He had that snake down there right in the front; he had a big old stone pipe. Not a python, but a cobra head right out there, and when that hurricane came through, it blew all that stuff away. The snakes got out, and stuff that was in there. Oh my, that’s the same way with the python. That’s how they got down there. They had a place out there; they were growing them. And during Hurricane Andrew, it blew all the buildings away. Of course, all the snakes got loose, and now they’re everywhere. Yep. Yeah, but they’re gonna spend a lot of money trying to get them out.
They have a tree called the Melaleuca tree that grows down there. Somebody got a bright idea wherever it comes from, what country it came from. You can plant it. It dries the water up, soaks water up, takes a lot of water, and it’s like a paper tree. You can just go up to it and peel off the bark. But it’ll grow like that. It’ll grow that thick. You can’t even squeeze through them sometimes, and they grow like a hammock. They call it a hammock. It’s just a big area that has all that, and they got them in there, and they started growing everywhere, taking over. So now, they had to go in there and dig them up and burn them. You can’t go in there and just burn them and leave the roots in the ground. They’ll come right back up because they grow wherever it’s kind of moist and wet. That’s where they grow, and so now they’ve been doing it for years, digging them up out of the ground and burning them. I don’t know how it is now down there, but they used to be everywhere. The Melaleuca trees. It had to come from over Africa or somewhere because they were weird looking. I mean, they, and they would grow thick. I mean, they grow. You go in there, and if you got in there, and they grew up some, you wouldn’t get out. I mean, that’s how close. I’ve seen them grow this close, and some would be this big around. But it was amazing because the bark, you could just walk up to it and start peeling it off.
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Larry Hodges Session 1
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