Daddy was a connoisseur of objects. Some might say junk. Some came from the salvage yard on the old White Settlement Road. He would take a load of rusty iron, copper wire salvaged from electric motors and brass plumbing fittings to sell by the pound, and then spend hours going through wooden boxes filled with dusty tools, screws, bolts and nails. He would climb mountains of oil field debris and sort piles of pipe and drill stem and come home with the red Chevy sitting just as low on the springs as when she’d departed in the morning. If a rancher requested a cattle guard of certain dimensions Daddy rarely had to buy new steel to fabricate it. Some of his purchases were less obvious. Once he came home with a pickup load of adding machines and cash registers—some big as a yearling heifer. Another time it was a truckload of non-functional TVs that illustrated the complete history of the television. My favorite was a beautiful polished maple cabinet the size of a small refrigerator with a four inch screen in it. Daddy did teach himself TV repair from a tattered manual.
There came a day when Daddy invited me and brother Tom to accompany him to one of his storied Meccas—First Monday. First Monday was “trades day” in Weatherford. Folks would gather along the creek for an old-fashioned country fair. The horse traders would have their ponies tied to the willows, currying out their manes and displaying saddles and bridles. Wire coops held bright-eyed bantam hens with bumble bee chicks peeking from beneath the swell of their breasts. Blankets on the ground displayed folded overalls, transistor radios, bone-handled pocket knives and kitchen utensils. Bushel baskets of dead-ripe peaches scented the air like a siren’s song. Rattlesnake watermelons lay serenely in the white oak shade like whales in the shallows.
Daddy drifted toward the rhythmic thump of the farm pumps and tractors. Beneath a spreading elm, an auctioneer was plying his trade from the back of a flatbed truck. Tom and I were drawn in by his patter and walked over to see the array of merchandise. A pitted cream separator wouldn’t bring a bid until they added a cardboard box of canning jars and a hand saw to the deal.
“Three dollars once? Three dollars twice? Sold for three dollars to the lady with the big bag of turnip greens.”
We watched the auctioneer crack jokes and charm people out of nickels and dimes as his assistants held aloft ladder back chairs and pickle crocks, shaving brushes, mounted longhorns and split willow baskets.
“What do you have there? Records? 45 RRRR-PM records!”
Tom and I traded glances. We had received a record player for Christmas that year. Two 33 1/3 LPs had been included with the gift—the Firestone Christmas Album and the Kingston Trio. We knew all the words to the Kingston Trio songs but I was confident I would do harm to “The Little Drummer Boy” with his own sticks if I met him on a starlit night. On a visit to Uncle Hatler, he had told me to look under his house for some old 78s. Braving the black widow spiders, I found Rosemary Clooney doing “Come Ona My House” and “If I Knowed You Was Coming Ida Baked A Cake” and several foxtrots. We were more than ready for some new music. And from listening to KFJZ, we knew that rockin’ songs like “Be-bop-a-Lou-la” and “Shake, Rattle and Roll” were released on 45 RPM records and here was an entire box full of them!
“There’s 20 or 30 45 records here. Buy the whole box. Wha-dam-i-bid?”
Tom and I went in a huddle and emptied our pockets on the ground. Midst the string and pocket knives and Indian arrowheads, we had almost three dollars in change. A modest fortune, but it was enough. We carried our prize to the edge of the crowd and pulled a disc from its sleeve. The A side was titled “Twilight On The Brazos.” The Brazos was only a few miles away! I flipped it over and the other side was “I’ll Build A Home.” I didn’t recognize the artist name. I would learn later that he was the president of the local Merchant and Farmers Bank. With a quizzical look, Tom handed me the next record from the box—which was a duplicate of the first. As was the next … and the next …
Multiples of the arcane: I guess we were just carrying on a noble family tradition.
