My grandfather was born in Muhlenberg County Kentucky. It was where the Scotsh Irish immigrants settled after moving from Ireland to Virginia. Muhlenberg was also the home of Merle Travis, Warren Oates. James best, John Prine, and Don Everly. He worked in the coal mines, not in the ground, the coal mines of Muhlenberg were what are called surface mines. The earth is stripped away and the coal removed. Shortly after World War 2 he moved to Evansville Indiana, where he bought a house and the five of us moved in with him. He got a housekeeper, a cook, and someone to watch the property.
The reason he needed a keeper was because he made part of his living hauling coal in Evansville for home heating. He also went to Florida during the winter to work at the fairs and circuses. The strange thing about that was that it was during the latter part of the heating season. I can’t explain it as I was too young to even know what was going on.
He had a 2 1/2-ton truck that he used to hail coal, and then he would drive it to Florida with his sno-cone machine and popcorn machine. His popcorn machine was a commercial version he purchased, but his sno-cone machine was of his own design.
I remember that machine very well, it had a four cutting edge blade that he designed driven by an electric motor. A block of ice placed in a box above the cutting blade when drug across it produced the purest snow I had ever seen. One fourth of July my dad took it out to Stringtown Hill for the soap box derby. We kids sold sno-cones to the public and they sold like hot cakes. We ran out of syrup, but they continued to by the cups of snow.
I don’t know how his winters in Florida went, but I bet he did quite well. One day he was cleaning out the truck after his return and he dropped a bag of change in our gravel driveway. We helped him gather the money. Then he told us any additional we could find was ours. It was amazing, we three kids used it as a bank, and would once a month or so dig around out there and come up with the 36 cents to get the three of us into the Woodlawn theatre to see a movie.
Oh, those childhood memories
