Rabbit Box Blog

No one would ever confuse my two grandfathers. Although they lived within five miles of each other and shared many acquaintances, they barely knew each other. As far as I know, they never socialized, except at rare gatherings when Mom and Dad pulled their families together.. Whether they liked each other or not I never had any indications. But suffice it to say that almost everybody who knew Nelson Shelton said they liked him. People usually nodded and said little when I said Charlie Lineberger was my grandfather.

“Oh, yeah, I know him,” was about all anyone would say.

Charlie Lineberger was a man of contradictions. He was a man who held beliefs so strong they could, and in fact often did, overwhelm the world of facts. He had a quick wit and a famous sense of humor, yet he was embittered and often difficult.

As the oldest son in his family, he by tradition would have inherited the family farm, or at least the lion’s share of it. Yet his youngest brother, Jim, ended up with the place. The family did not talk about why, except to repeat that Charlie was often too stubborn for his own good.

Whatever the events that caused his rootlessness, Charlie ended up without property during the Depression. He signed on as a carpenter with Duke Power Company and helped build the Riverbend power plant. A side benefit of the job was the right to sharecrop some company-owned land along the Catawba River. Through a combination of carpentry work, farming, and living off the land, the family barely managed to survive during the tough years of the 1930s and ’40s. 

Charlie’s wife Nellie died in childbirth, putting further strain on the family. Charlie was sure the doctors had let her die because he didn’t have money, and he never forgave them-or any doctor.

Though my father never spoke of it to us, we learned later that he and his brothers and sisters had known genuine hunger during that time.  There were days when they went to bed hungry.

Unlike his numerous Yellow Dog Democrat neighbors (remember, this was before World War II, and the political parties were very different from what they are today; this was the Solid South for Democrats), Charlie was vehemently non-Democratic and anti-Roosevelt. He saw the New Deal as a hoax. “It seems like the common man can’t get a break under this New Deal,” my father quoted him as saying.

But Charlie didn’t always accept breaks when they were offered. When my father was in the second grade, the school recognized the family’s struggles and tried to offer a little help by giving little Bobby his school books without the usual fee. Dad walked home his usual mile or so, and found his father working in the field. He proudly showed Charlie his books and told him the teacher said they would be free this year.

Charlie was incensed.

Grabbing Bobby by the hand, he stormed home. He got out the family’s emergency jar and found two dollars, which he handed to Bobby.

“You march right back to that school and tell that teacher that Charlie Lineberger does not accept charity,” he said. “If she won’t take the money, give the books back.”

My Dad did as he was told, and made an extra round trip to school, delivering the fee and the message.

Charlie was not a drinker or gambler. In fact, he didn’t allow alcohol or cards in his house. When Dad returned from serving in the Army, he brought along a deck of cards. He taught his younger siblings some card games, like rummy, 21, and casino, but not poker.

When Charlie saw what was going on, he confronted Dad about bringing the “tools of the Devil” into his home.

Dad protested that he was simply teaching the children some innocent games they could use to pass the time. He would never dream of gambling, much less teach them such things, he said.

“But even though you don’t gamble with cards, other people do,” Charlie said. “Once you start down that path, who knows how far you or one of your brothers might end up? And if it gets out that we are card-players, who knows what weaker souls might be led astray by our example?”

So Dad gathered up the cards and threw them into the fire. He disagreed with his father, but he was a loyal and obedient son. When he had his own household, cards became a popular activity, even more so than checkers. But he never forgot Charlie’s arguments. I know because he used them on me in my high school years to discourage me from going to dances.

Charlie was about as close to Amish when it came to technology as a Southern Baptist could be. He owned a car because he had to drive one to get to work and to church. If he wasn’t going one of those two places, it spent most of the time parked in the front yard. I never knew him to drive for pleasure. Mom remembers that when Charlie finally decided to allow a television into his house, Dad drove him to the store. He liked to watch wrestling and boxing on television, but he didn’t allow other kinds of entertainment. When his youngest child, Emily Jane, wanted to learn piano, he gave in and bought a used piano and paid for lessons, but on the condition that she play only hymns.

Dad used to tell stories about Charlie’s old Model A Ford. The car had no fuel pump and depended on gravity to get gas to the engine. The dirt road where they lived had steep hills going down across Dutchman’s Creek and up the other side. The Model A couldn’t climb all the way up the hill without losing fuel flow to the engine and stalling. So Charlie would go as fast as he could down the steep, bumpy hill to the creek, drive as far as he could up the other side, then quickly whip the car around to get gas flowing to the engine again, and back the rest of the way up the hill. 

As far as I know, Charlie never owned a tractor or other internal combustion-powered machines, although he farmed his whole life. He cut trees for firewood using axes and handsaws, hauling the logs out of the woods on a skid powered by Dolly, his work horse. He did have an electric Skil saw that he used in his carpentry work, but he worked construction most of the time, so the power saw was used off the farm.

When I went along on a trip into the woods to cut down a tree for firewood, the only power tool used the whole day was a chainsaw Uncle Sherman used to cut the wood into lengths after Dolly had dragged the log back to the house.

In my memory, the main feature of Charlie’s house was the quiet. There was no sound of radios or televisions, not even a ticking clock. As a result, conversation formed the center of the household. Charlie spoke in quiet tones most of the time, and the family followed his lead. 

Talk usually revolved around the work of the day, either planning it in the morning or reviewing it at night. Often there would be a story that related to the topic at hand.

The stories folded neatly into the larger narrative, without elaborate explanations or introductions. They were family stories that had been repeated many times, so everyone knew them. They were used to knit together the present with the past. If a friend was in the hospital, Charlie would repeat the story about the time the doctors had killed his first wife, my father’s mother. Charlie would say she was left untreated because he had little money.

“A poor man can’t get a break,” he would conclude bitterly.

Sometimes the story was a cautionary tale. If the boys had been horsing around too much, out would come the story of how Sherman, the youngest son, lost the sight of one eye when his brother Danny shot a matchstick out of his BB gun.

Sometimes the story would be a joke, such as how Marion, the one who grew up to be a Baptist missionary, had clipped the mule’s trace lines to his nose while playing radio announcer. He screamed in pain and had to have help getting free, but in later years it seemed funny somehow.

As strict and bitter as he could be, Charlie loved to laugh. He told funny stories whenever the family gathered. Sometimes the stories were surprisingly raunchy for a man of his religious beliefs. 

His youngest son, Sherman, inherited Charlie’s love of dirty stories. As a child, he got in trouble for telling one of Charlie’s stories in Sunday School:

Three moles were digging under the garden.

“Umm, I smell turnips,” said the papa mole.

“Oh, I smell carrots,” said the mama mole.

“Well, all I can smell back here is molasses,” said the baby mole.

Charlie was almost single-mindedly devoted to his family, to the extent that he did things like wading into the frigid river to retrieve traps that had been washed away from shore in a winter storm. He told my Uncle Marion that he had to risk pneumonia to save the family from hunger.

He also held all the rest of the family to the same standard. When their mother died, he told his three young daughters (Blanche, Gladys, and Margaret) that they would have to take over responsibility for running the household. They were expected to do all the cooking and cleaning and other “women’s work.” The pressure was so great that Blanche, the oldest girl, left home and married as soon as she could, putting an extra burden on the remaining girls and creating a rift in the family that was never quite healed. It grew even wider when Charlie married Iva Cloninger. Dad always said Iva saved the family; his sisters never agreed.

During World War II, Charlie told my dad that he would have to drop out of high school and work full time. With Dad’s older brother Frank serving in the Navy, there just wasn’t enough money coming in to pay the bills. Dad reluctantly did as he was told. In doing so he raised his eligibility for the draft, and he was told to report soon thereafter.

With an older brother already in service and the family dependent on his support, Dad could request an exemption. He asked Charlie for advice. 

“Go on to the Army,” Charlie said. “You can send most of your pay home, and if you get killed, your G.I. Insurance will pay the family $10,000.”

Charlie was quick to judge and stubborn in his opinions. When my Uncle Marion brought Polly, his eventual wife, to meet the family, it was summer. Polly dressed in the fashion of the day, when air conditioning was rare. She wore a modest but sleeveless sundress and sandals. Charlie took note immediately, and he afterwards told Marion, “do not bring that slut back to this house ever again. Anyone who dresses like a whore is unfit for you.” Anyone who knew Polly would find his judgement completely unfair, but he was adamant. Fortunately for their children (and the rest of the family) Marion kept seeing her. They married and had a long, successful marriage.

Mom remembers that when she and Dad were young marrieds, Dad tried to help his family as much as possible. He bought toys for his half-brothers Danny and Sherman, because Charlie had even less money than Dad and considered toys frivolities. Dad also started having Friday night meals at Charlie’s. He would buy hot dogs, ground meat for hamburgers, and all the fixings. He and Mom would take everything to Charlie’s, and they would cook the hot dogs over an open fire in the back yard.  Nobody had a grill in those days, so cooking out meant a “wienie roast” with hot dogs stuck on green sticks and held over the fire. 

Some people used old oven or refrigerator wire racks to cook hamburgers over an outdoor fire, but there were none available at Grandpa Charlie’s, so Grandma Iva cooked the hamburgers in the house. She used a wood-burning cookstove because Charlie would not buy an electric or gas stove. Firewood was something he could produce himself by cutting down trees on the farm, while he had to rely on (and pay) outsiders for other fuels.

Charlie accepted Dad’s kindness for several weeks, but then one day turned on Dad. “I’m tired of you and Marie sponging off us every week,” he said. “It puts too much burden on Iva to have to cook for all of you.” So the family cookouts ended.

When my brother Gary was five, he was stricken with a life-threatening illness which was diagnosed as nephritis or Bright’s disease (the symptoms were so similar the doctors couldn’t distinguish). He spent several days in the hospital, and Dad asked Charlie to keep my brother Charles and me. Dad gave Charlie money because, as Mom puts it, “he knew Charlie.” Most of what I remember about Charlie comes from that stay, and most of all I remember how it ended. Things went fine for awhile. We were both on our best behavior, and there was no indication of rising tensions that a nine-year-old could detect. Then suddenly Charlie told Dad that he could no longer tolerate how unfair our presence was to Grandma Iva, and we had to go. He seemed to cast most of his sudden changes of behavior as protecting Grandma Iva.

With Gary still in the hospital, Dad had no choice but to pick us up. Mom asked her parents, Nelson and Estie Shelton, if they could keep us. They said yes immediately, and Charles and I spent the rest of Gary’s confinement at the Shelton farm. Mom says they would not accept any money.

I remember Grandpa Charlie as a prodigious smoker of unfiltered Camel cigarettes. He knew they were harmful, even before the Surgeon General’s report of 1964. He laughingly called them “coffin nails” even as he lit up. He died young, in 1961, from multiple strokes that left him paralyzed on his left side. I remember him lying on a cot in the living room of his house, unable to speak, but grunting loudly and demanding a cigarette. He would not quiet down until someone, usually Uncle Sherman, would light one for him and put it in his mouth.

Sherman actually saved his life at least once by performing resuscitation when he went into cardiac arrest. CPR was not yet the standard rescue method, so he did back massage and arm lifts, but it was enough to restore Grandpa Charlie at least temporarily. But Sherman’s efforts didn’t work on the last attack, and someone called for an ambulance. Charlie died in the hospital, and Sherman blamed the doctors for not doing enough, continuing the family tradition of bitterness against organized medicine.