Diary of Two Motorcycle Hobos #essentialsofrec #recovery #Lois #AA

By Lois Wilson

PART IX

Coronet, Fla.

Wed., April 21, 1926

Arriving here in Coronet on Sunday, we set up camp on a farm outside of this little mining town. Our tent is pitched in a pasture overlooking a duck pond and marsh. We never can be lonely, for not only five children play around the tent all day, but every kind of domestic animal known to man, and a number of undomestic ones, are near at hand. The pasture is the abiding place of seven cows, two horses, a mule and a goat. Innumerable guinea hens, turkeys and chickens with their respective families, come often to visit. In the next field are a bull and three calves, the latter coming home for their meals night and morning, and in a far-off corner dwell a couple of hogs and their piglets. Eight large black ducks inhabit the pond as well as several marsh hens and their chicks, whom I have seldom seen but often heard, their singular call higher than that of the guinea hen. Lots of blue, white, and gray herons alight at the water’s edge daily. The boys say a baby alligator lives in the pond, besides several water moccasins and hundreds and hundreds of frogs with almost as many voices. The baby frogs squeak, the grown-ups honk, and the big old grandaddies grunt, just like a pig. What a cacophony they make at dusk!

Several cats and dogs wander our way frequently, old Buck, the big shepherd, who sleeps by the hour under the motorcycle. One of the cats ate our butter last night and stole our bacon the night before. When Bill got up to shoo her she was so scared she dropped the bacon and, with a splash, jumped right into the middle of the brook. Last night a cow kept rubbing herself against the tent. Bill helloed and banged the canvas, but nothing would stop her until he got up and threw a stick at her. Such are trials of the camping life!

Most of the people we have met so far have been tourists or sojourners like ourselves, but the Englishes, who own this farm, are real Florida crackers, and seem to work just as hard and long as the farmers up north. We buy milk, butter, eggs and strawberries from them very reasonably. I sent Mother a couple of jars of homemade guava jelly. But the Englishes have also given us a lot of vegetables, milk, hot biscuits. They had us to supper a couple of times, too.

Old man English has had sixteen children, ten by a previous wife, and six by this one, among which are adorable two-year-old Rita, spoiled by everyone, and boy twins, Lloyd and Moyd. The latter more appropriately should have been named Voyd, as he is a bit empty in the upper story. But that is rather unkind for Moyd is sweet and likeable. He is very fond of a billy goat and will say: “Watch me stand on my hind legs like Billy.” Then he’ll raise one leg, wrap it around the other and lift his arms in the air. Billy, by the way, keeps us awake at night, running up and down a fallen log near our tent.

The first wife’s bunch are all married and moved away except a son living nearby with a nice young wife and cute baby, with whom we suppered one night. Their shack was very primitive, with no glass or even paper in the windows, just wooden blinds that shut out light as well as cold.

Mrs. English, Senior, is pretty and capable, but doesn’t seem to know how to turn a house into a home. Everything is clean enough but not tidy or attractive. The children, and perhaps the elders too, go to bed wearing all their day clothes. Saturday night we heard the mother say, “Now din’t ye go to bed with them dirty clothes on. You put on clean underwear and a clean dress afore ye go to bed tonight.” It doesn’t seem a question of poverty--just a custom, I guess. Bill and I think our manner of living is rather rough and ready, but our tent and cooking arrangements are trimmer and more orderly than their houses.

Mrs. English raises hundreds of baby chicks in incubators and breeders. The boys found a couple of marsh hen’s eggs, which she hatched in the incubator, but the chicks died soon after she put them in the brooder. Although the hens are brown and white, the little fluffy chicks are solid black.

While swimming in the pond today, the boys saw a big water moccasin. They weren’t a bit scared, they said, because a moccasin could not strike while in the water.

Coronet village and phosphate plant, newer and more attractively arranged than Brewster, are also company owned, this time by the Coronet Phosphate Co. After inspecting their Hopewell and Pembroke mines, the latter about thirty miles distant, we found them both to be in the same apple pie condition.





Birmingham, Ala.

Mon., April 26, 1926

Because of splendid roads on Thursday and Friday, we reached Florida’s panhandle, about four hundred miles from Coronet, and camped the first night near Lake City. On Friday it was getting dark, and we had traveled about ten miles beyond Marianna, before we found a farm near which to camp. The spot seemed ideal--on real grass, under real northern oaks without any hanging moss, and quite a distance from the house. It took Bill a long while to get water, as the old Negro farmer had only a two-quart pail to let down into a deep well. Later Bill told me long narrow strips of newspaper hung from every foot of the rafters in the cabin, probably to keep flies away.

In the meantime I started to get supper with the aid of the electric light Bill had fixed before leaving. Soon I heard a car drive up and stop near the tent. Turning my light to see what was up, there, coming through the bushes, with the lights gleaming on his white strips, was a big burly black prisoner. Believe me, my heart jumped. Managing to deliberately walk over to where Bill’s army pistol was kept and to put my hand on it, I said, “Good evening, and what can I do for you?” Politely returning my greeting, he replied, “Is yall in trouble?” I told him, no, that we were camping for the night. Whereupon a white man’s voice from the car said, “All right, Tom, come along.” The car turned around and went down the road--but only two city blocks before stopping.

It was then that I really began to be scared. I kept hearing noises in the bushes and threw my light this way and that. Once, positive that something was moving nearby, I got quite panicky, and sure enough, there was an old sow walking sedately down the road. I thought Bill would never come. Then definitely hearing someone walking up the road, I called, “Bill?” There was just a guttural response, so I called again. This time a negro’s voice answered, “Who-all is you?” I said I had made a mistake, and he went on up the road.

By the time Bill finally came I had worked myself into a “fine state.” Taking the pistol in one hand and me in the other, he walked us down the road to see what this was all about--a black prisoner’s camp. Evidently the guard had seen our light and heard the motor climbing the bank and thought we were in some kind of trouble, so came to investigate. We were greatly relieved to know my prisoner was not an escapee roaming around the woods. It had been too dark when we arrived to notice the prison camp.

The rolling farm country in Florida’s panhandle apparently has more intrinsic worth than the rest of the state that is so greatly touted.

The day after the prisoner episode we made only about one hundred and fifty miles as the roads were terrible--actual corduroy in spots. But we found a nice pine woods in which to camp, fifteen miles south of Montgomery, Alabama. The next day, upon arrival in Birmingham in the rain, we hunted in all four directions for a suitable place to camp, but the farther out of town we went, the deeper we got into foundries and smelting furnaces. We had come into Birmingham over steep Red Mountain, with farms only at the top and didn’t want to climb the mountain everyday, so, as we were tired, wet and dirty, we took a room in the Caswell Hotel and enjoyed the luxury of hot baths.

In the morning, however, we did find a lovely camping location, about seven miles from town, near a village of about a dozen cottages--Fulton Springs, a tiny health resort. They say folks from Birmingham and environs come every day to drink from the spring of iron water, but we have seen no one. The hill on which we are camped overlooks the little village, rolling pasture and wooded land. Eighty-nine cows from a nearby dairy farm, the sound of their bells always in the air, wander over the hills, but luckily seldom come too near. The thrill of spring is in the air, which we missed in Florida.

Thrushes sing all day as well as at dusk, in the dogwood trees under which we are camped. We raise a whole flock of goldfinches every time we come up the hill. Besides lots of cardinals and bluejays, there are stunning redheaded woodpeckers, unlike any I have seen, their bodies divided in thirds, red head, white breast and wings, and black tail. Only a few mockingbirds are about. Thistles in Florida and the north are purple; here they are either deep red or yellow. Many of the dooryards are gay with red or pink ramblers and a low brilliant purple flower, more intense than healall, grows in the grass. In the woods low wild pinks abound, as well as an unusual short-stemmed, large-bloomed purple violet.

Now for the purpose of our sojourn here--coal and iron. We had a most interesting day yesterday, going through the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Co., owned by U.S. Steel, a tremendous plant, devoted entirely to the making of rails. Workmen handle four-ton red-hot ingots of steel as if they were rubber, shoot them here and there, turn them over and draw them out into long rails, with miraculous skill and speed. The mechanical perfection of the operation is astounding; everything is on such a huge scale it takes your breath away. It is both thrilling and terrifying to watch several hundred tons of molten metal being poured out of a Bessemer converter into a waiting car. In one place we saw water showered on a full car of hot coke to cool it, causing so much steam one would think a whole village was afire.

The blast furnaces look like huge organ pipes of different lengths, sticking up in the air. Bill, very much impressed by the steel plants, keeps saying, “Wham, blam, go the big wheels.” Actually, there are very few wheels in evidence--just those in Bill’s imagination.

We hear there is coal under one-seventh of the land in Alabama, and we know we are camped right over a mine. It was spooky to see miners, with black faces and little lights on their caps, coming out of a hole in the ground at the foot of our hill. I am anxious to go down in a mine, but Bill thinks we won’t be able to get permission.

The Negroes in the south are lots of fun and very different from their northern relatives. One day while sitting in the motorcycle waiting for Bill, a tall thin Negress, all dressed up, gnawing a gaunt ham bone as she was ambling by, stopped to ask me if I was selling dresses. Upon my negative response, she then asked, “Does y’all tell fortunes?” Not seeming to believe my denial, she stood for some time gazing at me and munching her bone. As she walked off, she said, “Ah sure do want ma fortune telt.”



Muscle Shoals, Ala.

Mon., May 17, 1926

Here we are at the famous Shoals! We left Birmingham about noon and drove the hundred and sixty-odd miles in time to camp before dark, on the shore of the Tennessee River. Traveling home is certainly easier than our southward trip. Then, with a good start, we felt lucky to make a hundred miles. It is not only the better roads and more comfortable weather, but the machine is behaving splendidly--we haven’t even lost a carburetor or a rear wheel!

While in Birmingham we visited both the Alabama Bi-products Co. And the Lehigh Portland Cement Co. Everything seems handy there. Coal, iron, lime, cement rock, clay, water power, as well as good farming and lumber land, are all close by.

People were so friendly that almost every evening we were invited to visit one acquaintance or another. Bill had a glorious time hob-nobbing with presidents, and chinning with colonels. But I didn’t dare call up Winfred Ager (the son of the minister who married us) because we are so raggedy after our year’s adventure.

Our drive yesterday was lovely, through weeded country and good farm land, crossing several large rivers, the Black and Tennessee among them. We ferried across the latter on the strangest boat, a rear-wheeler with flapping wings on either side and a one-lunger gasoline engine. As there were no decks, the ferry slid sideways like a crab, to the bank, let down one of its wings and ashore we rolled. More fun!

There are great plans for the development of the whole area around Muscle Shoals, because of cheap water power, but Bill does not agree with the idea of government ownership or management.

We are not stopping in Pittsburgh as first planned, but are driving straight home, in order to be on time for Kitty’s wedding. Now that we are on the home stretch, we can hardly wait to get there.

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NOTE 1973

Because of an accident on the motorcycle I discontinued my diary. The following account is set down from memory.

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Just outside of Dayton, Tennessee, I was driving on a sandy road, which apparently ran straight ahead, when suddenly, hidden by a large barn, it made a sharp angled turn to the right. I tried to force the wheels, but the sand was too deep and over we went. Bill, in the sidecar, was thrown over my head, breaking his collarbone as he landed; I twisted my leg, causing water on the knee; the equipment flew in every direction; and the trunk burst open.

Luckily a man in a car soon came along and drove us, dazed and badly scratched, to a doctor in town who set Bill’s shoulder, bandaged my knee, and there being no hospital, settled us in a hotel room over his office.

During our week’s stay there, Bill and I tried to picture what the town had been like the year before during the Scopes Evolution trial. We imagined William Jennings Bryan as he paced back and forth on one of the hotel’s five fancy grill-railed balconies rehearsing his speech, and Clarence Darrow with his chair tilted back against the wall and his feet on the rail, haranguing a coterie of youths; while the streets were crowded with visitors come to hear the great orator and see the show.

It wasn’t too long before we were able to return to the fateful corner. The man who had picked us up had collected all our duffle and put it and the motorcycle into the barn, as he said he would. Although the door was left open, and more than a week had passed, not a single article was missing; even such attractive and easily packed items as the traveling clock, compass and radio were all there.

We made arrangements to have the motorcycle and most of the gear shipped to Brooklyn. Then in a few days, when the doctor said we could travel, we took the train for home.

Although we were in plenty of time for the wedding, I made a sorry looking matron of honor, when, with red gashes on my face, I limped up the aisle.