Post sixteen: Stocking up food, and robbers.

     Our cook stove was wood for many years. Mom canned hundreds of quarts of food over a hot cook stove in the summer, and when winter started we always had a good supply of food stored away. The potato house was full of potatoes, sweet potatoes were piled under the house, and gallons of molasses were stored from our one mule power mill. The smokehouse was full of pork, and the cellar had hundreds of jars of canned food. We could have lived for years on what we had in the fall. I suppose this over stocking was a throwback from the Depression, when food sometimes ran short, I hear.
     Dad had no patience with people who took a shortcut and spent too much money on store-bought food. He heard a neighbor child come in the store at Wing one day and order, “A loaf of bread and a pound of baloney.” He did not say anything at the time, but later he made it plain to us that was about the ultimate in living too high. That mindset remained up until the day he died. Once, many years later, after Barb and I married, Barb was trying to be of help while Mom prepared dinner. She was preparing potatoes. She admonished Barb, “Be sure to not mention to John that these are instant potatoes.” He also had no patience with people who built a brick house, or got a loan to build a house. “The Gillums were not like other people.” Although Dad was hard, he was a good dad. He gave me great freedom to roam the bottoms and mountains I loved at a very early age. Mom constantly worried. Her 5-year-old baby was roaming the mountains alone. I never got lost, but as Daniel Boone once said, I was sometimes bewildered for long periods of time! He always worked hard, and made sure his family was provided for. He was always totally honest and fair in his dealings with others. He had no tolerance for me going to “Honky Tonks,” but I never wanted to go there anyway. My sisters never got to date in high school, but they all turned out well. He helped instill in us a strong “do-right mechanism,” which has served us well, and kept us out of trouble.
     I was once present at the great robbery of Turner's Grocery, though sorta cluelessly. I was sitting in the back of the store with my friend Don, waiting to get his basketball patched. A strange guy came over and asked him what he was doing. Don showed him the patch. He took Don outside and expected me to follow. When I did not, he looked at me, hesitated, then, realizing I looked pretty clueless, he took Don outside and started patching his basketball. His buddy then proceeded to rob the cash register while Mrs. Turner was in the back. I continued reading the funnies. They left, and when Mrs. Turner came back, she realized she had been cleaned out. She called ahead; they were caught and got a year and a day.
     Turner's store was the center of everything in Wing. If I ever got a nickel ahead, I sat in there touching the coke to my tongue, letting the wonderful taste fade, and doing it again. You would be surprised at how long I could drag a coke out. Buell Turner fixed flats the hard way. It was lots of work in those days.