Three Boys

Three Boys and the Moving Pictures

 "Helen, look what I found."

James and his sister Helen were in their grandparent's attic in Sacramento. Their grandparents settled there after Granddad retired from the entertainment business in LA. Both died recently and James and Helen helped their parents go through the old folks' belongings, one of which was the shoebox James now held.

"Look at this," he said as he picked up an old photo lying on top of a notebook in the shoebox.

"Casino? Moving Pictures?" she noted. "Where was this?"

James turned over the photo to show her what was written on the back, "Rehoboth Beach, 1914." The family in the photo is unidentified, but it's not Granddad's. Must be a publicity photo."

"Rehoboth Beach," Helen scrunched her face in thought. "Isn't that in Delaware where Granddad grew up?"

"I believe so, but look, there's a notebook under the photo. It seems to be something that Granddad wrote."

James began to read from the notebook.

A friend from childhood passed away recently and I realized memories could be lost forever unless we care enough to share them. So I'm writing about one day of my life in a small beach town in Delaware that I realize now, as an old man, changed my life.

John, Buster, and I were fast friends. We were neighbors in Sussex County, not the next-door type city boys would be. This was farm country. Your neighbor lived some distance away. So it was with us. We were twelve-years-old. Well, I was the runt at eleven and a half, but we all were in the same class in the little four-room school in that part of the county.

John Nelson, tall and slim, a serious boy, was the oldest of a family of five kids and counting. Mom had three boys and two girls with a baby on the way. Being the oldest, John took the role of his pa's second in command. He was the one who got the cows ready for milking each morning and evening, although his sister Sally, at ten years of age, was coming along fine as the lead milk maid. Theirs was a small dairy farm, with twelve Jersey cows. In those days, before electricity and well before milking machines, relieving the cows of their bounty was by hand and bucket.

Mr. Nelson spent his time raising corn for the cows during growing season and working on the tractor during the winter. Grandpa had a steam tractor he took around to other farms to power threshing machines during harvest and ran a sawmill in the winter. Mr. Nelson grew up helping Grandpa and loved it. He loved working on machines, but the steam tractor, like Grandpa, was retired.

Me, I was the youngest of the gang and John and Buster teased me about my name. Early was an old Dutch name passed down in the family. My Granddad was an Early, as was I. But it was the English meaning that always seemed at odds with my personality. I was the fourth child with three older sisters and me, the first son. Pa joked that his first son wasn't early at all. I was also the one redhead in the family. Ma said Great-Grandma Matilda was a redhead and came from Irish stock. I wondered if she shared the freckles I had across my cheeks.

My family was tobacco farmers. We hired Mr. Nelson to cultivate the fields for us with his tractor, but the rest was work by our own hand. We planted the seeds in the early spring and rigged white burlap over them to protect them as they sprouted into young plants. The whole family would replant the seedlings in the fresh, new-turned soil. Then there was the weeding with more hoeing than I liked. But it was the picking that was the worst. We brought in extra help when the time came for that. The picking came in three to four waves as the leaves matured from the bottom to the top of the plant. I liked what followed the best, when they put up the tobacco in the barns to dry. Pa had two tobacco barns. They looked like log cabins where the builder forgot to dab mud between the logs. That was to allow airflow. I tied the leaves to sticks and handed them up to Pa to place in the top of the barn.