November 2007 Interview with Wallace Hart Beckner By Isabelle Chewning [Items enclosed in brackets [ ] are editorial notes inserted for clarification] [Tape 2, Side A] Isabelle Chewning: Today is November 19th. My name's Isabelle Chewning, and I'm back to interview Mr. Wallace Beckner a little bit further. We had to stop last time because I was headed off to work, but hopefully we'll be able to finish the questions today. If you wouldn't mind, Mr. Beckner, I know we talked about your neighbors last time but I wasn't sure exactly where some of them had lived. Can you help me out with that? You mentioned the Runkles. Where did the Runkles live? Wallace Beckner: The Runkles lived, and it was the Runkle home place, was where Claude Bare and Ada lived out here [get address]. And of course no one's in the home right now, but the grandson, Booper Bare, is right below there, built a house right beside it [get address]. Isabelle Chewning: And was that Mrs. Ada Bare’s family place? Wallace Beckner: Yes. Isabelle Chewning: She was a Runkle? Wallace Beckner: Yes. Isabelle Chewning: And you mentioned the Hutchesons. Wallace Beckner: The Hutchesons bordered our farm on two sides and that -- it belonged to Robert Steele Hutcheson who was kind of a businessman here in the county, and then later his son, Dr. Hutcheson in Roanoke was the owner of it. And then it's been sold numerous times since that, and actually it's been kind of subdivided. Isabelle Chewning: And you mentioned the Wades. Can you tell me where the Wades lived? Wallace Beckner: All around us. [Laugh] Isabelle Chewning: Lots of Wades. Wallace Beckner: Yes. When I was married, my wife was from Fishersville. When we came up, I said, "Don't ever say anything about anyone in this community because they're all related." Isabelle Chewning: [Laugh] But where did Mr. Bud Wade live? Wallace Beckner: Mr. Bud Wade lived adjoining our farm, you can see it from here. The house has been torn down, or it practically fell down from termites, and a new log house was built there about two years ago [get address]. A great couple from near Atlanta moved here and built the log house there. Isabelle Chewning: And how about Mr. Kite Wade? Wallace Beckner: Mr. Kite Wade lived actually over where Richard Whitesell lives now [10 Anderson Farm Road]. That was the Kite Wade place or-- well it was called the Mortar [??] place when he was there and we now we call it the Kite Wade place. And he [Kite Wade] drove a school bus. He and Bud [Wade] had owned one together and they drove it kind of a day apart. Mr. Kite was a -- he was kind of a horse trader and livestock trader, too; in other words, he dealt with horses mostly but if somebody wanted to trade a cow for a horse he'd work something out too. [Laugh] And his daughter, Bernice Nye lives in Brownsburg now [2843 Brownsburg Turnpike]. And of course see -- and Virginia Whitesell was his other daughter. He had four girls. Isabelle Chewning: And was Ruth Beard one of those? Wallace Beckner: Right. Isabelle Chewning: I see. Wallace Beckner: And Mary Frances--. Isabelle Chewning: Your sister Mary Frances? Wallace Beckner: No, Mary Frances Wade married Roscoe Poole from up in Dutch Hollow. They lived, I think, kind of in the Waynesboro area, over the years. Isabelle Chewning: Did you go to school with those? Wallace Beckner: I was in school between Bernice and Ruth. Ruth was the youngest and Bernice was next, and I think there were -- let me see, yes, Ruth was a year behind me and Bernice was a year ahead of me. Isabelle Chewning: We had talked a little bit about your time in the Service in Japan, and then I don't think we got around to talking about what happened when you got out of the Service. Wallace Beckner: I got out of the Service and went to Hampden-Sydney for awhile. I did not graduate there but I attended -- because I had some problems in Service and college. I had a nervous breakdown, which it actually happened in the Service. And so I came back to the farm and worked here. Isabelle Chewning: Were your parents still living? Wallace Beckner: Yes. Isabelle Chewning: When you came back? Wallace Beckner: Yes. In fact when I came back from Service, came in through Washington, Fort Lawton, Washington, on the west coast, and received my discharge there and came by train through Chicago and then on down to Washington. And in Washington, a good friend of mine from- who was with me all the time during Service, lived in Staunton; and for some reason, I just wasn't ready to come home. When we got to Richmond I said, "I'm not going home," and he said, "Yes you are, Beck." And I said, "Well, for some reason I'm just not ready." And of course I had a brother living in Richmond and he was at med school. But he talked me into it. So I came on home and rode the bus then to Lexington and got a taxi to bring me out. And it was two or three o'clock in the morning, and I slipped in the house, and I was going upstairs to the bedroom, trying to be as quiet as possible, and I can hear my mother now say, "Is that you Wallace?" Isabelle Chewning: Oh she knew. Wallace Beckner: And they knew I would be coming home sometime soon but I didn't get a chance to slip in. Isabelle Chewning: She must've been so happy to know you were on your way home. Wallace Beckner: Yeah. And so I worked here for -- about '56 I think, I went to work at Burlington, or it was Lee's Carpets of Glasgow then. And I worked there 34 years, retired from it. And I was an administrative manager there, and that was the customer service end of it, and I've listened to all the complaints that people have had. Isabelle Chewning: [Laugh] Well Lee’s Carpets was a pretty big industry then, wasn't it? Wallace Beckner: When I went there, there were about 1400 employees there. And of course it actually covered about 40 acres of ground, the buildings and manufacturing and storage and so forth. And it was a big business and [employed] people from all over the county. They ran a bus, a school bus for employees. One came to Fairfield, one went out in Collierstown and one went toward Bedford and one went toward Roanoke. So you had an influx of employees from, you might say, all around. But I don't know whether I should say this or not, but I'll say it anyway. They had the monopoly on industry in the county. And between that, and Lexington being a college town, other industry was not welcomed. Because Lexington wanted to remain a college town and Burlington, Lee's Carpets, wanted to have the monopoly on the industry. So that's one of the things -- we talk about our county economy now and the lack of industry and so forth. It goes way back, the restriction; not really the restriction, but the discouragement of anything else coming in. Isabelle Chewning: Inhospitable atmosphere for new industry then. Wallace Beckner: Right. Isabelle Chewning: Was it still Lee's Carpets when you retired or had it changed to Burlington? Wallace Beckner: No it was Burlington for probably 15 years, before that. Isabelle Chewning: Did you start in the administrative end or did you work yourself up to being an administrator? Wallace Beckner: I started as an inventory control clerk in broad wool, because in those days carpet was made out of wool. And of course when I left there were no wool carpets being made at Glasgow at all, it was all synthetic fiber. In fact, this carpet right here [indicates carpet on floor of his house] is known as Kodell fiber, which was a byproduct from Kodak Company. And it has the qualities of wool as much as anything that's been developed, but they could never get it as fire retardant as they would like to. So it was only used a few years. Isabelle Chewning: Well it certainly looks like it's held up. Wallace Beckner: It's probably 30 years-old. So, as I said, it has great qualities except it's not fire retardant. Isabelle Chewning: And did all the supplies, materials, raw materials come in on the train at Glasgow? Wallace Beckner: Yes. Of course when I first went there everything was all wool, and of course it came in in huge bales, about 3 feet square and about 4 to 8 feet in length, baled up of wool. And that, all the wool that goes into carpet, it's imported from India, Pakistan, places like that, because the fiber is coarser, and can be used and it has more wearing ability. American wool is what goes into sweaters and things like that. Isabelle Chewning: I didn't know that. Wallace Beckner: Because it's a fine, softer wool. Isabelle Chewning: It's just different types of sheep? Wallace Beckner: Different type of sheep, and some-- there was one type of wool that came from Pakistan that if you look at it through a magnifying glass it looked rough, and it looked almost like, shall we say, a horse's mane or something. And sometimes -- well all of the carpet had wool blends in it. You didn't use one type of wool, you used three or four, and in some cases even more than that, different types of wool, and spin them together and process them. And that you gave you the wool blend and like it gave some -- like one might have more wearing ability, another might have more ability to curl down to create designs and so forth. So I started out in raw wool, inventory clerk. Isabelle Chewning: And worked your way up. Wallace Beckner: Yes, and so-- but I was the Administrative Manager for 26 years. Isabelle Chewning: Oh you worked your way up pretty fast then. Wallace Beckner: Yes, I was very fortunate. I had several good breaks. I was scheduling production after I left raw wool, and I did something that I thought was very simple, in scheduling, and giving a report to the Superintendent by just using a scale of saying we have this many types of orders to make this type of carpet. I would have a scale across, by days and weeks and months and so forth; this'll run us up till the, we'll say the 5th of December, in 12-foot looms. Now we've got some others that'll run us, a short order, but that will only last two days. But it gave them a way to plan their schedule because we used to be known -- you'd work 7 days one week and 4 the next. So, and this helped in the area that I was scheduling in, and so they put in Customer Service at Glasgow. Then they asked me to do the administrative end. So I had to hire – well, one time I had 33 telephone operators that were taking orders from all over the United States. Isabelle Chewning: That's a big operation. Wallace Beckner: Yes, it was. Isabelle Chewning: And did your crew work five days a week? Wallace Beckner: We used to say when we hired them, it's like Mrs. Smith has been wanting carpet for two years and finally she has the money, or she's finally decided what she really wants; so she places an order for it. And she could care less whether somebody is out sick or whether the order got there Friday. She would like to be able to go to the mailbox and pick up her order the next day, but she knows that's not possible; but the following day she's got hopes for it. And so, in Customer Service, we had a vice-president that told us “You will stay open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, if the public demands it.” So we hired people under that aspect. Now they didn't have to do it all the time, but let's say they knew that if the occasion arose that they would do that. And as he said, it's like a filling station on the interstate: somebody's got to be there, whenever the need is there. So we operated under those conditions and we had -- we took orders and we processed the orders two shifts, in the office, and a skeleton shift on the third shift. And that -- because we would receive the orders and we had to get them ready for the mill and tell them what piece of carpet, because we had 3000 to 5000 rolls of carpet in the warehouse and we had to tell them which roll to cut it off of, on the order, and where the location where that roll was. Isabelle Chewning: So you were an inventory manager too then almost. Wallace Beckner: Yeah. And so yeah, it all tied together. Now later, we started into with what we called flexowriters. You've probably never heard of that. Isabelle Chewning: No. Wallace Beckner: You know the calculator, the big monster calculators that they had, then they went to flexowriters which gave- you could type in the size, like a 12 by 15, and you'd hear it kind of buzzing, and then it would print out then what the square yards were. And you would type in the price and it would extend it out, and so forth. Then we went from that to the monster computer which the first one was about the size of this room. [Laugh] And when I left there most of the people were using laptops. And you notice, I don't have one, I don’t want one! Isabelle Chewning: It's awfully easy to get dependent on them if you have one. Wallace Beckner: And so sometimes I'd feel embarrassed when someone said, "Give me your email number," and I'd say, "I'm sorry, I don't have one." But I'll survive. Isabelle Chewning: [Laugh] You probably will, you'll do just fine. Can you tell me about when you met your wife? Wallace Beckner: I met Lula in, let's see, about '44 or '45 -- it was in '44. Isabelle Chewning: So this is before you went in the Service? Wallace Beckner: Um hmm. We were in -- well both of us were on the Presbytery’s, Youth Council. We had a retreat up at -- above Rockbridge Baths, Goshen Pass there. It was New Monmouth Church had a cabin -- they called it a cabin, it was a large kind of camp there. And many churches used it and so forth, and the Presbytery had a retreat there. And I met her there. She was a District Chairman for her area which was -- as I said, she lived in Fishersville and went to Tinkling Springs. And I, of course, went to Bethesda. And so that was that. And I went in the Service. Isabelle Chewning: What was her name? Wallace Beckner: Lula Shaver. She was the only girl and four boys. Isabelle Chewning: And is it s-h-a-v-e-r? Wallace Beckner: Um hmm. Her father was in charge of maintenance of schools in Augusta County. They later gave him the big name of Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds. And her brother took over then, after her father retired in the schools. And so I got a letter from her, after I went in Service, and we started corresponding. And I laughed and said that she took advantage of me because the day I got her letter it was rainy and dreary, and it was in I guess you'd say boot camp. And when mail call came, we had been out picking up cigarette butts on the ground. [Laugh] Isabelle Chewning: [Laugh] She caught you in a weak moment then, didn't she? Wallace Beckner: Yes. And so we corresponded during Service. And I went to -- overseas in November, and--. Isabelle Chewning: What year was that? Wallace Beckner: That was in '44. And she sent me a fruitcake, and I got that fruitcake in February, and we ate every crumb of it. [Laugh] Isabelle Chewning: [Laugh] I bet you did. Wallace Beckner: It was dry and it was hard but people, the guys were almost ready to fight for it! But I got, I guess it was a week before I got my first letter, from the time I left the United States in November, until I got my first letter, because we were moving fast and the mail didn't get up with us. And so I got that letter one day and the next day I got 27 letters. Isabelle Chewning: Oh, she had been busy writing letters, hadn't she? Wallace Beckner: Well they weren't all from her, they were from home, and my two sisters were pretty good about writing and so forth. Isabelle Chewning: And so when you were in the Pacific, was your brother [William Beckner] in Europe at that time? Wallace Beckner: Yes, he was coming home actually. Because see, I was in before the war with Japan was over with; but the European war surrendered before that. So he was on his way home when I was over in the Pacific area. Isabelle Chewning: Oh your poor mother. She got one home and then had to send the other one off the other direction. Wallace Beckner: Well I volunteered. I wasn't drafted because – But, as I said, Lula and I corresponded during those three years. And then when I got back, why I proposed. Well we had led up to it in letters over the years and so forth. And I proposed to her and she said she would marry but she wouldn't accept a ring, she was afraid her mother would get upset at it, being the only girl. [Laugh] So it was a couple of years before that happened, before she would take the ring. And of course her mother, well her whole family accepted me as one of the family. In fact, her brothers would, I think would've taken up for me before they would've her, it seemed. She was -- had been the only daughter. She was -- I won't say spoiled, but she was -- let's say she was hard to convince of things sometimes. Isabelle Chewning: [Laugh] And had she gone to college while you were in the Service? Wallace Beckner: She was working. She had finished at Dunsmore, a business college, and she was working for the Augusta County School system as Secretary to the Superintendent. But she always wanted to do church work. And so she was doing -- helping Dr. Dunbar Ogden at the First Presbyterian Church there in Staunton, on weekends. And he talked with her, and she got a scholarship to Flora McDonald through -- with Dr. Ogden's help and so forth. Because her father’s concept was that a woman's job was either in the home or maybe a secretary or something like that, or teaching but generally was very limited. His concept of what a female's position was in the world was different. So she went on her own, went to Flora McDonald. Isabelle Chewning: Where was that? Wallace Beckner: It's in, near Asheville, North Carolina, and not too far from there. And so she had a work scholarship there, and she worked in the Treasurer's Office. And the lady that she worked for there was an old maid, shall we say, and very domineering. And the first year when they were sending out W2s to all the employees there, at the college, she [Lula] typed up the letters and the envelopes and like she put Mr. or Mrs. or Miss So-and-so. And most of the employees were black, and Mrs. Brown, her boss, made her retype all of them. She said, "We don't use Mr. or Miss or Mrs. for these employees." Isabelle Chewning: Oh. They didn't get titles of respect. Wallace Beckner: No, there was no title of respect. And of course that was heavily black populated there, and a lot of Indian blood there too; there was a settlement of Indians not too far from there, I think about 8 or 10 miles from there. So then she -- two years and then she came back and she taught at Beverley Manor until we were married. Isabelle Chewning: When were you married? Wallace Beckner: In '51. And I’d built the house in 1950. You know when you go fishing, you bait the hook. [Laugh] So, but the--. Isabelle Chewning: So it's this house that you built? Wallace Beckner: This house, but it was much smaller. We added on both ends of it after we -- over the years. In other words, we kept a mortgage all of our lifetime. [Laugh] Isabelle Chewning: Well it must've been pretty good bait. [Laugh] Wallace Beckner: And after we were married Mr. [Floyd] Kaye, the [Rockbridge County School] Superintendent, gave her a job teaching at Fairfield. But in August of that year, she went to see him about -- or went to the principal, and he sent her to Mr. Kaye -- about which room she would have. And she was teaching a combination of first and second, that was what it was. She finally found out that she would be teaching in a little wooden building beside the Presbyterian Church there [5508 North Lee Highway], with a coal stove in it. And she went in to talk to Mr. Kaye about it. She said, "I don't know, I can't -- I don't know about building a fire and keeping it going," in these little potbellied stoves and so forth. And she found out that she would be teaching this combination class of students who, let's say, maybe their IQs or home environment were not up to snuff. And so it ended up she said, "Well I will not teach under those conditions." He said, "Then you won't have a job." So she went to secretarial work and was secretary to Mr. Samples, who was Superintendent of Lexington schools. And then the County PTAs were behind it, wanted to put music in the schools. And so they pretty much gave -- left it up-- and Mrs. Jen Heffelfinger was one who worked in this area about it. And they came to Lula and asked her if she would teach music. It was part-time. So she taught music, I think, at Rockbridge Baths, and I don't know whether it was Fairfield or not. But I know she had -- she taught music at Brownsburg and she had the Glee Club at Brownsburg. And I think she did that three years, and then she reapplied and she got the second grade at Brownsburg, and she taught the second grade. Well she taught 34 years all together, between Augusta County and here. And she went -- the year that our youngest son, Jimmy, would've been in the second grade, she and Wilma Mast switched grades. She taught the third and Wilma taught the second, for that year, so that she wouldn't be teaching Jim. She taught Wally, and that was enough. He complained all the time that he always had to stay -- had to be at the back of the line, he never got a chance to do this or to do that, that the other students did. Isabelle Chewning: I had Mrs. Beckner for the third grade. I think I was supposed to have Mrs. Mast but she was sick for a year maybe. Wallace Beckner: Could've been, I don't- may have been when Carrie was born. So that I don't know. Isabelle Chewning: I enjoyed having her for a teacher. Poor Jimmy, poor Wally. Wallace Beckner: Jimmy, she never taught Jim, because as I said they switched that year; and so that was good, because Jim would've given her a rough time. He's a different personality from Wally. Isabelle Chewning: [Laugh] Oh those second children. Wallace Beckner: Yes. [Laugh] Isabelle Chewning: So you got married then in 1951 and moved into this house. Wallace Beckner: Um hmm. Isabelle Chewning: And when you were working at Lee's, were you also farming? Wallace Beckner: Right. Isabelle Chewning: In partnership with your dad? Wallace Beckner: Yes. Isabelle Chewning: When did you have time to do that? Wallace Beckner: Evenings, Saturdays -- didn't work on Sunday, except feeding and so forth. Isabelle Chewning: Was it primarily a beef operation at that point? Wallace Beckner: Mostly. And also during that period of time, I used to buy all the calves that your grandfather [Madison McClung Sterrett, Sr.] had at the dairy. Isabelle Chewning: Bull calves? Wallace Beckner: Um hmm. And I raised -- I had some milk cows that I would raise the calves on, and sell them as vealers, during that time. So I've -- the last five years, I've been farming, supposedly full-time, for the first time in my life, and yet I’ve farmed all my life. But after I got out of the Burn Center five years ago -- of course my wife had Alzheimer's and it was becoming progressively worse, at that time. And I said, "I will not go back to work, I'll stay here with her." So of course at that time I was working at the Farm Bureau. I'd retired from Burlington in '87. So I've been retired the first time for -- 20 years ago. And then I retired from Farm Bureau at Fairfield, it'll be five years ago. Isabelle Chewning: Let me look through my questions here and see what else we might have missed. Wallace Beckner: There was a question, something about when did mechanism -- I can't talk this morning -- first came to the farm. We bought -- Dad bought the first tractor in 1946. That was when they first switched back, from World War II, from military production to, shall we say, normal production farm equipments. And I bought the first combine in 1954, and that was, I think, the first combine in Rockbridge County. Isabelle Chewning: That was a huge piece of machinery. Wallace Beckner: Yes. Isabelle Chewning: So did you do a lot of combining for the farmers around here? Wallace Beckner: We did custom work. Carl Reese, “Big Eye” as we called him, operated it, helped me operate it. He would run it during the day and then I would come home from the plant and get on it and we would -- then work as long as it didn't get too tough or something. And we would start out at Rockbridge Baths, because the river bottom's there, and the grain would ripen about two weeks earlier there than it would in the Spottswood area, which is high. So it'd give us a longer working -- operating time. And so we would start out with barley there, and move through, and then we'd go back and start out with wheat which is generally about two to three weeks later maturing than barley. And then we'd do the wheat through the area, in Rockbridge Baths, here in the Brownsburg area, and then move over to the Spottswood area. And then sometimes there would be rye and oats after that, that we'd go through. So it was – I’d say we kept it busy for about two months. Isabelle Chewning: And who were some of the farmers that you did custom work for? Wallace Beckner: Well up at the [Rockbridge] Baths, we did it for the Chittums, and Jake Mohler and the Fixes up there. And in this area, we used to do a good bit for Ed Patterson when he lived in Back Draft; he and Ag lived back there when they were first married, and they had the Moore place down there, which was a big farm then. But we traded back and forth. He had a square baler and I didn't, and so he would bale my hay, and I would do his combining. And then all the farms around here-- the Mohlers that lived on the Hutcheson place; McCurty's that lived on Miss Dot Wade’s place, right below us here. And well just all around, the Bare's and everybody. We did all of the combining that was done. Now it started out, people didn't like the idea of the combine because they said wheat wouldn't -- hadn't gone through the sweat and such things as that, you know. Isabelle Chewning: What did that mean? Wallace Beckner: It dries out to a point, and then there's still some moisture in the grain, and it kind of will stay there for a period of time. I'm talking about maybe a week. And it used to be when you'd cut it with a binder and you'd put it in the sheaves and shocked it up, it would be probably a month before you'd get around to threshing it with a threshing machine; so it dried it. But people had the concept that it hadn't gone through the sweat, so when you put it in the garner in your barn- in your granary, it would sweat and mold on you. Well, that turned out to not be the problem that farmers thought it was going to be. You waited until it was good and dry, and then you were all right. And Tom Bare ran it after “Big Eye” [Reese] wasn't able to. He helped me a couple of years. Isabelle Chewning: Was it still the same machine? Wallace Beckner: No, it was a different machine, and we had two that we ran several years. When we did two, one we did a lot of grass seed, orchard grass seed. And one year we got about 40 acres to do up at Fancy Hill, next to Natural Bridge. And we had two big truckloads of orchard grass seed, if you can imagine. Isabelle Chewning: That's pretty small seed. Wallace Beckner: And we used to do it for Bruce Slusser; cut a lot of grass seed, Fescue seed for Bruce, up on the Lyle place, which is on up around the turn there, the first road leading off, after you pass where Bruce lived [Cloverdale, 4216 Brownsburg Turnpike]. We went up there. Isabelle Chewning: How much did they cost, combines? Wallace Beckner: Well I bought it -- the first one I had, I don't remember what I paid for it, because it had been used one year. Isabelle Chewning: Did you have to take a loan to buy it? Wallace Beckner: I usually did. And I know in '64 I traded in the first one, and I bought a new one, and it cost -- it was 1964, and it cost 6400 dollars, which nowadays that's a used vehicle, a used car. But at that time it was a lot of money. Isabelle Chewning: And where was the equipment dealer, where did you buy them? Wallace Beckner: We had a dealer in Lexington. It's on the lot where the -- well it's right above the Italian restaurant [Café Michel, 640 North Lee Highway], that's where you would go in there, there at East Lexington. And the new buildings that are built back in there, government buildings and so forth, that was all the Baker -- Bud Baker had it. He was a Case [equipment] dealer, and they, the Baker Brothers had I think four dealerships. There were six brothers. One of them happened to be a vice-president for Case, and so that enabled them, after the war, to get – to have priority in getting new equipment. And but Mr. Bud Baker, who operated the one up here, when they sold that out-- in fact he tried to talk me and my brother Bill into buying it -- he went to Augusta County and started Augusta Tractor Company. Well he called it Staunton Tractor. It was next to Rowe’s [Restaurant] there, on [Route] 250, and later they moved up to their present site, which his son operates now. And another brother-- of course he went to International Equipment -- another brother kept Case but they went out of farm equipment and went into construction equipment. And they had built a new place just closer to Staunton. It's up there where Augusta Equipment is now, that sells New Holland; but they sold out. Isabelle Chewning: What kind of tractor was your first tractor? Wallace Beckner: The first tractor was a John Deere B. When I got home from Service and it was over there in a little shed that they'd built for it, and I looked at it and I said, "Where's the motor?" [Laugh] Because all this empty space between that and the front part. And I didn't know what two-cylinder putt-putts were like then. And so that was the first one, and we're still using John Deere equipment. Isabelle Chewning: I see all those big John Deere's over there. Do I see you sometimes go by with a bale? Wallace Beckner: Yes, taking it out to Larry McKemy’s [1870 Sterrett Road], round bales. But we have a putt-putt over there. It's a 1959 model, diesel. They had just gone into diesel then. And that, it was manufactured in November and they stopped making two-cylinder John Deeres in December of that year. So this is one of the last models. And we use it in the summertime with haying for raking and things like that. Isabelle Chewning: Did you all have any help on the farm while you were working at Lee's Carpet, or was it just you and your dad doing everything? Wallace Beckner: Well it was just me. Dad died in '56. Isabelle Chewning: How old was he when he died? Wallace Beckner: I think he was 75. Isabelle Chewning: How about your mother? Wallace Beckner: She died in '85. She was at Sunnyside [Presbyterian Home in Harrisonburg, VA], when she passed away. Isabelle Chewning: How long was she down there? Wallace Beckner: About three years. She had been in other homes because there wasn't an opening at Sunnyside. Isabelle Chewning: And then did Wally move into the house soon afterwards? Wallace Beckner: No, Wally was -- he was still small then. Dad -- the last statement that Dad made before he passed away was -- during a blizzard he took pneumonia and Dr. [Tom] Bosworth came out and gave him some medicine on a Sunday. And he -- Wally would stand in there, and he would stand up on his tiptoes to look at it to watch Dad walk up from the house up there. So he was real small then. And in fact he was born in '54, and so he doesn't remember him. But I had him with me that Sunday night, and he said, "Wally, now come back to see me," and that's the last words that he spoke to any of us that we know of, and so forth. Isabelle Chewning: So your mother was there quite a while by herself. Wallace Beckner: Well she was there several years, and then she went to two different homes in Waynesboro and one in Fishersville. Of course, in those days there were more just homes that would take several adults in, and so forth. Because here she would wake up and get up in the mornings and she would maybe eat a little bit of breakfast, and then she'd lay down on the couch and sleep, go back to sleep, and when she'd wake up again, she didn't know whether she'd eaten or hadn't eaten. And I had a nephew that's -- he was in the sixth and seventh grade -- that stayed with her two years, and I just finally told my sister, "This is not being fair to him." So we got her in a home in Waynesboro. And of course both of my sisters lived in Waynesboro, so they could check on her. And then she finally got into Sunnyside. But at that point she was -- she never adjusted. If she'd gotten there earlier she probably would have. She never adjusted. And her room was on the end of the building, it was a second story high room, and she would look out, and there was a meadow there and you could just see the top of the barn, and that was home [to her]. And they had difficulty with her striking out to go home. And so, but a friend came by and they walked to the chapel and sat, one Sunday morning -- and that's what they'd always do. But anyway they had been to breakfast and the friend said, "Well I'll come by and we'll go to church together." When she came by, Mother had laid down and passed away, slipped away. Yeah. Isabelle Chewning: How old was she? Wallace Beckner: She was -- she must've been 80 or 81, something like that. But she was from a large family. I think there were 13 in her family. Isabelle Chewning: What was her maiden name? Wallace Beckner: She was a Hart, Fannie Hart. Isabelle Chewning: And that's where you got your middle name. Wallace Beckner: Yes. I'm half-hearted! [Laugh] Isabelle Chewning: [Laugh] We talked a little bit about who -- individuals that stand out in your memory. I know you mentioned Miss Trimmer. Are there others that you have particular memories of in Brownsburg? Wallace Beckner: Well Miss Trimmer, of course, taught me. And Mrs. Patterson, Mrs. J.K. Patterson, she was the math teacher in high school, and she had taught Algebra and Geometry and Trig so much that she knew all the textbooks, and she would say, “Well look on page such-and-such, example such-and-such.” And she was a real unusual person, a lady that I had a lot of respect for. And they lived down there where Mr. [Milton] Reid lives now [Sleepy Hollow at 2645 Sterrett Road], there in Brownsburg, because your grandfather [Madison McClung Sterrett, Sr.] bought the land, the farm, that went to that. See that used to have a lot of land that now belongs to you all. But during the war – well, first of all she was very strict in her class, yet very calm about it and all. And we used to always say if you had chewing gum in your mouth and you never chewed it, she must've been able to smell it because she knew it [laugh]. And of course you weren't allowed to do that in classes then. But it was -- that was during the first part of the war, when Mc [Sterrett] and I, your Dad and I-- and every once in awhile she would say, "You go into the class, close your books, let's talk about world events." Of course in those days in Brownsburg they had electricity -- we didn't have it here. And you'd listen to the radio and some big, an invasion here or something like that. And she would say, "Today, the events that are going on today are just as important today as Algebra is." Isabelle Chewning: Oh. Wallace Beckner: And she would talk about it, and we would discuss it and so forth. And it might take all class, all the class period of time, or it might, if it took half then we would go to that. She also, lots of times when she knew we had, this got into Geometry and Trig, some really, things that we didn't understand, didn't know, you'd come to class, you know, upset, because you weren't prepared, you didn't know how to do it and so forth, maybe. And she could sense it, and maybe her years of experience had taught her when it got to that point. And she’s say, “All right, just close your books.” And she'd read us Uncle Remus. Uncle Remus and Brother Rabbit in the Briar Patch. And she could read it with so much emphasis and dialect that it was fascinating. And, you know, after 10 minutes of that, and you relaxed, and then we'd start class. Now, she didn't do this every day. It was, you know, maybe, well, during the war, maybe one day a month or something like that, or various times like that, but she had a great sense of the human being and recognized tension. She was very patient with her teaching and so forth. She told her mother that she didn't do much visiting from the school because she said, "I don't have any children, or never had an operation so I don't have anything to talk about." [Laugh] But she was a great teacher. I mean, I had good teachers. Mollie Sue Whipple. She wasn't -- she was Mollie Sue Hull when she came there. She and a Miss Montgomery both came there, and I think they boarded with Mrs. Wade, I’m not sure. Which was characteristic in those days, you know, teachers came in and they boarded with people around the community. And she taught down in the lower grades, Mollie Sue did, and Miss Montgomery taught the seventh grade. And I think that's the first year that we were in the brick building, which was in '39. Anyway, we kids used to josh and laugh and say, “Well, now, tomorrow is Miss Montgomery's time to wear-- [End of Tape 2, Side A] Isabelle Chewning: You were telling a story about Miss Montgomery? Wallace Beckner: Yes, Miss Montgomery. We would laugh and say, “Sell, it's so and so's time, Miss Montgomery's time to wear the striped shirt -- blouse tomorrow,” or something like that. Because they traded clothes. They were about the same size, and of course, just out of college. And back in those days clothing wasn't, let's say, they were more tradition than they were competition, like we are today. Isabelle Chewning: Are there other teachers that stand out in your memory? Wallace Beckner: Well, along about that time we got our first male teacher, a Mr. [Al] Lunsford, and I believe he was the one who coached the first football team at Brownsburg, which I think only lasted one year because, as I said, during the war there were no sports. There was Physical Fitness and calisthenics, but no sports; basketball-- as I said that was the end of football until a number of years later, baseball, or none of that, it was always physical fitness during the war. And as I said, Mr. Lunsford was a teacher, and I think he taught history, I'm not sure, or maybe geography, I'm not sure. Because both of those were stressed a lot in those days, and of course, during the war, geography was even more crucial. But we had two brothers in one of the classes that Mr. Lunsford taught and their name were Christ [pronounced “crist”]. And for the first couple of months he called them "Christ," and of course that was humorous to us young people. And we didn't dare laugh out loud, but we would smile and then after the class we'd say, "Hey, you righteous guy!" But we had a number of other teachers that I really didn't remember too much about, didn't make that much impression. We did have a lady, older lady, who taught, and she taught history and she should have been in a college because she loved to lean against the desk (and it would creak and groan because she was a big lady), and shut her eyes and lecture. And whenever she closed her eyes and got wound up, you'd hear an eraser hit the wall over here, or a piece of chalk or something. And she became more afraid of the principal, Miss Trimmer, than we did. Because Miss Trimmer would get on her. And so the boys were prone to go away on weekends and mail her a card and send it back to her and sign it, "love you, the Lone Ranger," or something like that. [Laugh] Isabelle Chewning: [Laugh] You were naughty boys! Wallace Beckner: And it got to the point where she would give us a test every morning when we walked in the class. First thing she gave us a test on the lesson we were to have for that day. And that became a real tragedy because it worked -- you'd study. And then we found out that you didn't -- she wasn't always recording the grades because there were too many to do that every day. So we found out you got the same grade whether you took the test or not. Some few studied it, and took the test, some kept their books open and took the test, and some of us just didn't take the test. And we all passed. So you can understand why it became she was more scared of the principal than we were. [Laugh] Isabelle Chewning: [Laugh] How about relationships with the black people in the community? Did your family have any relationships at all with the black community? Was there a black community that was sort of at the Brownsburg end of this road, Dry Hollow Road? Wallace Beckner: There was the house at the intersection out there, we called that Schoolma’am’s house [1486 Dry Hollow Road]. The black teacher [Miss Carrie Peters] who taught at the school which later became the cannery there in Brownsburg [lived there]. When they closed that [school] then they bussed the students, of course, they had got buses by that time, and bussed the students to Lexington. Now, the school in Lexington [Lylburn Downing] was a very high level school. In fact, they got, we used to say they got things at their school that we couldn't get at our school. But the relationship with the black people, you know, they were just-- it was still a feeling, you know, they had their own church, their own school and so forth. But they were respected, you'd meet them on the street, you spoke to them, and they would speak to you. Isabelle Chewning: Did you know their names? Wallace Beckner: Oh, yeah. Isabelle Chewning: And were there any around your age that you ever played with? Wallace Beckner: Well, not really, because, as I said, well, first of all, we were not-- we grew up here on the farm, we didn't go to Brownsburg regular, once very couple of months. And now they would help, the boys and the young people and so forth, would help the farmers around or different people, and so forth. Now, they had their own problems within themselves on weekends, and sometimes the sheriff would have to come out and take somebody in, but generally by trial time they'd all forgot it, and they didn't know nothing about it, so they wouldn't testify against each other. I have to tell you one good one, though. There was a fellow by the name of Jim Brown, a black fellow, very likeable, but he was quite a character, and he worked for Fred Whipple at the dairy. Some weekends he would get carried away after he got paid, so he didn't show up for work on Sunday and Monday to milk, so Fred would lay him off. And then about two weeks later, he'd end up hiring him again. And on one of these lay-off cycles he was in Carl Swope’s store there, where the antique shop [Old South Antiques, get address] is now. Well, I remember it as Mr. Supinger’s store, and before that I think it was Mr. Whipple's store. But anyway, Jim was in there one day setting on the chair that didn't have a back on it but it was up against the middle post in the store there. And they were teasing him that Fred wasn't going to hire him any more. And he said, "Well, I can go and get a job anywhere." And Carl Swope said, "Jim, you know you can't go anywhere and get a job." Said, "Who would recommend you?" And I can see him now, he looked up at Swope and he said, "You would, because I owes you money!" [Laugh] A lot of truth there! And one other time Jim was laid off and he had a toothache and he's setting on that chair, same chair I was talking about, and some of them made it up that they would pull that tooth. So they got a pair of pliers and somebody pulled his-- I don't remember who was it was-- pulled his arms around back of him and Frank Patterson pulled his tooth. Isabelle Chewning: He actually did pull it? Wallace Beckner: He pulled his tooth with a pair of pliers and then they loaded him in the car and took him to Lexington and bought him a fifth of whiskey. So he was happy! [Laugh] The stores were the center of entertainment. Isabelle Chewning: [Laugh] I remember. They called it "loafing" in the stores. You'd just sit there and hang out and gossip. Wallace Beckner: Yeah, particularly on rainy days. It was-- and whoever didn't show up that day was the one that was the guinea pig-- Isabelle Chewning: They talked about? [Laugh] Wallace Beckner: Yeah, they talked about. Isabelle Chewning: You mentioned the Schoolma’am’s house. Is that the house that's still there across from J.L. Swisher's? Wallace Beckner: Yeah, that's it [1486 Dry Hollow Road]. And there were also black people lived up here on the top of the hill where the Tillery's are [1139 Dry Hollow Road]. Isabelle Chewning: I don't know where that is. Wallace Beckner: Do you know where [John] Runkle has his shop, out here on the road? You see those cars setting there [1054 Dry Hollow Road]? Isabelle Chewning: Oh, okay. Wallace Beckner: Going toward Brownsburg. The house setting right on the crest of that hill up there, right against the road. Black people lived there. I don't remember, some black people lived there and then a fellow came in and married someone. And he was a black man but his name was White, so we used to say, "Mr. White, he's black but he's white." But now-- Isabelle Chewning: Did the road always go out to Hays Creek Road or was there a short cut from Dry Hollow over to Brownsburg? Wallace Beckner: No, this is the road in my time that always existed. Now, years ago this road didn't exist, it crossed down here back where the forks in the road is down here [at the intersection of Dry Hollow Road and McElwee Road], right above that. And it came up through that back hollow, you see those cedars through there, and came on up and went up through the Hutcheson's place, and went out across the McManama place where Freddie Whipple bought [1397 McElwee Road], and came out over there onto the road over there, going up Walker's Creek. But it crossed down here, circled around, and came out down at the Blockstons [??] in front there, went down to Oak Hill where Oak Hill School was right below McElwee Chapel. And right in that turn, there's a trailer setting back in there now [77 McElwee Road], that was the road that continued there and went down Grove Creek and came out down there on [Route] 39 where the fill-in is. You don't know where the fill-in? Okay, where 252 and 39 meet. Just going down, before, you kind of go down like this and then go up. That road used to come about halfway down there and go in where it is Hart Road now and come back up the creek a ways across the creek and went down and then went back onto Rockbridge Baths. Isabelle Chewning: Is it named Hart Road? Wallace Beckner: Yeah. Isabelle Chewning: Is it named for the Hart's in your family? Wallace Beckner: Yeah. But I can remember, and that was a big deal, when they hard surfaced the road, [Route] 252, through Brownsburg and on down through. I remember my mother and my aunt talking about it, they had to sign right-of-way papers for them to widen the road through here, I mean, through Brownsburg on down. They also filled in that road where you turn into Hart Road, and, oh, it's -- the creek is down probably 50, 60 feet below that, they put in a culvert there, I mean, a big concrete bridge, and hauled dirt and hauled dirt and hauled dirt. And in the flood of '69 [Hurricane Camille], the water was so great that it built up and took that out again, and this time in '69, then they went up around the turn up there where the dumpster is [on Route 39, Maury River Road], going up toward Rockbridge Baths. And if you look on both sides up there, you see this galded [??] earth, you know, red clay, and so forth? That's where they gave them the dirt to refill that in. In fact, we came over it the night of the flood, probably within an hour before it went out and had no knowledge of it at all until the next morning [we] found out. You could put that barn over there in what was washed out. Isabelle Chewning: I remember that flood, too. We just didn't have the notice that you get now with all the hurricane warnings. Wallace Beckner: No. And I'm not so sure but what maybe it isn't just about as well. [Laugh] Isabelle Chewning: I know I had gone out to the movies the night before, and my mother wouldn't have let me go if she'd known bad weather like that was coming. Wallace Beckner: Oh, gosh, no. Isabelle Chewning: Do you remember any particular events in Brownsburg that stand out in your memory? Wallace Beckner: As a child I remember a lot of talk about Mrs. [Mamie] Morris' church [Friends Lighthouse Mission Church] out there [formerly located next to 2671 Brownsburg Turnpike]. And the reason why I did is because Bill Allen, who lived next door down here, he went out there, attended church out there. And I guess that was kind of the first venture into the Pentecostal type of churches that sprung up in later years, and some of them becoming very prominent now. In fact, when I was in Japan, there were some orphanages that survived in Japan and they barely got enough food, but they didn't have anything like soap or anything like that. And they were supported by, there was one there from the Church of the Nazarene. Church of Nazarene, and there was another one, but they weren't so called line denominations, that had orphanages there, that we didn't know anything about. We went into Japan and found them, you know. And of course, we gave them their first candy bars and first soap bars and a few other things. So I had a different respect for some of the so-called, what we thought, "minor" denominations for the work that they had done, do, all over the world. Isabelle Chewning: Did you meet Mrs. Morris? Wallace Beckner: No, I was a small child when that happened. I just heard him talking a lot about going there and then over the years he worked a lot, would come up here and help me and then I'd go down there and help him because he didn't have any equipment much and he farmed about 50 acres. So he'd always tell me about that. Because he was very religious, he loved to tell you how many times he'd read the Bible. He would sit down there on the porch and read his Bible, and sometimes he should have been out in the field working. [Laugh] But going to school, of course-- well, my aunt that passed away while we were living -- I was 9 or 10 years old -- that lived with us, and that's the first time I ever heard the word “cancer”. She died with cancer. Isabelle Chewning: Whose sister was she? Wallace Beckner: My mother's sister. She was a Hart. Never married. And Dr. Leach did the surgery. And Dr. Bailey would come and give her a shot once a week and leave morphine for her, and it was a, as you well know, a long drawn-out 18 months shall we say, from the time she had surgery until she passed away. But Dr. Bailey would come and give her her shots. He was a great hunter. He and Bud Wade used to hunt quail and pheasant so much, you know, they had their dogs trained and so forth, they were great hunters. In fact, it was told about they were hunting on the other side of Rockbridge Baths, and an old fellow over there, that he would -- he always had more horses, he never did work them, but he always kind of had a bunch of horses for companions. And they were hunting birds over there, or went over there to hunt birds, quail. And Bud knew the old fellow, so he said “Well, I'll go in and ask him if we can hunt here.” And of course, he and Dr. Bailey and Emerson Huffman -- there were four or five of the men that hunted together. So Bud went in and he came back out and the old fellow had told Bud, he said, "Yeah, but will you do something for me?" He said, "That old horse standing at the side of the yard there," said "he's so old and he should have been dead but he isn't." He said, "I'll let you hunt if you'll shoot him, because," he said, "I just can't do it." Anyway, Bud came out and he said, "That old ‘blankety-blank’ man won't let us hunt, so I'll just shoot his horse!" [Laugh] So he shot the horse, and the rest of them were back in the car with the motor running before Bud got back. [Laugh] They were ready to leave. So they were quite a bunch of people who worked hard and played hard, too, shall we say? Isabelle Chewning: [Laugh] And practical jokers? Wallace Beckner: Oh, yeah, well, that was, as I said, the center of attraction and amusement in Brownsburg, was the stores and so forth. They pulled one on -- did I tell you the one about Charlie Sandridge and the box? Isabelle Chewning: No. Wallace Beckner: Well, Charlie would come in and then he was always kind of reared back and kind of spoke with almost false authority. But you know -- and they saw him coming in, and so that was the farm store where Mr. [Dick] Barnes lives [8 Hays Creek Road]. They had a building back there that was part of it. But anyway, they saw him coming and Bruce Slusser, when he came in, he said, "Charlie", said, "Ocie's [Supinger, the phone operator] been trying to get a hold of you all day, all morning." And he said, "What'd she want?" He said, "Well, she wants you to call this number in Lexington. Said they had a box for you." This was the week before Christmas. So he goes to the back of the store and cranks up the old phone and says, "Ocie, get me--" and gave her the number in Lexington. Well, she rang it in Lexington, and he said, "This is C.W. Sandridge." When they said "Hello," he said, "This is C.W. Sandridge. I understand you've got a box for me." "This is Harrison's Mortuary." Isabelle Chewning: [Laugh] Wallace Beckner: Charlie turned around and walked out and he didn't come back to Brownsburg for two days. [Laugh] You know, it was things like that that went on. Fred Whipple and Bruce [Slusser] was still living here then, and Sam McLaughlin, he would come in from camp, you know, over at Camp Briar Hills [formerly located at 2508 Sterrett Road], which was up on the hill next to y'all. And one day they saw Dr. Moore come in. And you know, he lived, adjoined y'alls farm on the back side on Goose Creek [955 Goose Creek Road]. And he was a biologist, I think, I'm not sure. Anyway he taught, I think, in college somewhere. They saw him coming one time and they started talking about their work in labs, Fred and Sam. And they said, "Well--" and when he came in, they said, "Yeah, we did a lot of study on reproduction of mice." And they said, they kept talking about it and Dr. Moore kept getting closer and closer and listening and so forth, and Sam said, "but we had trouble." He said, "We had to put a little window in the side of a mouse to watch the reproduction process, but," he said, "we had trouble with it." He said, "with the body heat, it would fog up inside." [Laugh] And Dr. Moore said, "Well, what did you do?" He said, "We made a little windshield wiper that worked back and forth in there." [Laugh] Dr. Moore believed them. So you could figure on, as I said, somebody's going to get a joke pulled on them or a prank of some sort, just about every day. But that was entertainment. And it's like Lorene and I talk about. You know my friend, Lorene Steele, she grew up on the next farm down here [address?]. And we say so many times-- her father was a sharecropper and as she said, we didn't have anything, but we had food to eat. And she said mom made our dresses, for the three girls, out of feed sacks, because you could buy feed in sacks then that had prints printed on it, you know, you could use it just like you go to the store and buy bolts of it. But we laugh and say we were poor but everybody else was poor, too, so we didn't think anything about it. Isabelle Chewning: That's just the way life was. Wallace Beckner: We were poor, everybody else was poor, so everybody did the same and enjoyed the best they could. Isabelle Chewning: You mentioned your aunt dying of cancer and your father having polio. How about other diseases? Was your family pretty healthy? Other than normal childhood-- Wallace Beckner: Yeah, um-hmm, yeah. Isabelle Chewning: Do you remember your small pox vaccinations? Wallace Beckner: Yeah, I remember that. I had a scab on my arm, you know, like they would come up? And we went chestnut hunting and I climbed up a little old chestnut tree and it leaned over for me and I knocked it off, and mother give me the dickens when I got home. In the fall of the year we'd go chestnut hunting and chincapin hunting and so forth. And that's when chestnut trees, before the blight killed them all, you know. They were a smaller chestnut but they were very rich, they were more tasty than the present, large Chinese chestnuts. Isabelle Chewning: Did you just eat them? Wallace Beckner: Um-hmm. Isabelle Chewning: Eat them raw or roast them or? Wallace Beckner: Either way. We ate them until we got home and then we'd roast them. But when I was a child, you know, like Lorene said, we always had food to eat. You had your own meat, you know, from hogs and so forth that you'd butcher, and a cow. Beef was not -- it was kind of a luxury. Or if somebody had an old cow that was too old to produce, they'd shut her up and feed her corn for a couple of months and then slaughter her and generally divide her out in the community, you know. One family'd take one quarter and then another'd take another quarter, and then maybe next year they'd have a cow, and they'd, you know, pay them back. Of course you didn't have choice cuts like you have today. You had soup bones, and so forth. [Laugh] And hang it up in the smoke houses and it was cold enough in those days that it would, you know, keep for-- Isabelle Chewning: You smoked beef, too? Wallace Beckner: Um-hmm. So you had soup. You didn't have steak, but you had soup bones and things like that. And those were the luxuries when you did that. Isabelle Chewning: Did you have a big meal for Thanksgiving and Christmas? Wallace Beckner: Yeah. Those were special days. We used to, as kids growing up here in the community, it was -- of course, you had to go to bed, you didn't stay up Christmas Eve and so forth, you had to go to bed. Of course, when we were younger, we were told that Santa Claus wouldn't come if we didn't. But next morning it was seeing who could put off the first firecracker in the morning. Isabelle Chewning: Oh, firecrackers for Christmas. Wallace Beckner: Yeah. And so of course if you had money you could buy firecrackers that were about that long, and they really gave a bang, but they could take off your fingers, too, if they got bit. And then you could buy the squibs, those were the smaller ones, and of course if you could afford them -- it didn't cost very much -- and they would come tied together, a string about like that, and if you got rich and you'd strike a match and light it at the front, and as the fuses would light up, it really sounded like a machine gun. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. In fact, when Bruce Slusser got married, we went out to serenade him and somebody laid a package of squibs in his window, in his bedroom window and lit it up. That was about ten o'clock at night, you know, after they'd gone to sleep, and so forth. Of course, house was surrounded with people with guns to shoot and cut-off saws, those round saws with a hammer, you'd carry that with a wire and hit on that and that really would wake you up. Isabelle Chewning: Made a big noise? Wallace Beckner: Oh, gosh, make your ears tingle. Anyway, they did that, and Bruce and Mary Belle finally came to the door and we'd made it up. He didn't have his shoes on because he was prone to run around without his shoes on. Anyway, we grabbed him and put him in a car and we took him up around Collierstown and let him out barefooted. [Laugh] We didn't know it, we knew about where we let him out, but, you know, Bruce knew so many people, and he went to a house up there close by where we let him out and they brought him home and he got home before we did. [Laugh] Isabelle Chewning: [Laugh] Was his family all a big Democratic family? Wallace Beckner: I reckon. His father was a timber man. He had a sawmill, he had people that worked for him, you know, to saw logs and drag them in with horses and stuff like that, and he sold lumber. But he also had the first, I think, automotive dealership in Lexington or the county. He had the Ford dealership in Lexington, and Dad bought our first car from him, which was a 1926 Model T Ford. And then later he traded that in on a 1933 closed car. And that was the year they came out with the airplane doors, the suicide doors, that unhinged at the back and they opened out this way. Which were great for getting in, but if they ever came unlatched or something, it either cleaned the car or whatever you hit, one of the two. But Mr. Slusser was a man -- he was a good man in one sense of the word, but he was strictly business. He'd help anybody, but he was very demanding and he had a temper that was uncontrollable. I've heard Claude Bare talk about Harry Slusser, you remember Harry? Come to school when he was in high school all bruised up and so forth where his dad had tromped him in the stable at the barn because he didn't do something. I mean, he had a terrific temper. Later years, you know, he fell out with Dr. Walthall at New Providence, and they came to Bethesda. And a year or two later he was elected an elder. But anyway, we were having evangelistic services and Mr. Walthall was there, which was customary, you know, for local ministers to come in. And they asked him, Dr. Walthall, to lead in prayer. And when he did that, Mr. Slusser went up and got Mrs. Slusser off of the organ stool and took her home and -- 'cause he didn't want any part of it and so forth. And later on, he apologized to the Session and they later went back to New Providence, but he had a, just an uncontrollable temper. But Bruce was the second marriage. His first wife, Harry's mother, died, and he remarried and Hugh and Bruce were to the second wife. By that time, the old man had gotten over some of his frenzies, dangerous things and so forth. Isabelle Chewning: How about George Slusser, was he part of that family? Wallace Beckner: He was Bruce's older brother. There were three to the second wife. And of course he was killed overseas during World War II. He was a year ahead of me in school. Isabelle Chewning: Was your family partisan? Did they typically vote Republican or Democratic or were they independents? Wallace Beckner: Dad served as the Democratic judge at the electoral polls for years, and then I did when he stopped. I did for a number of years. But I remember one time when they had the primary election in the summer, it was somebody from Staunton who was running for Lieutenant Governor. I don't know whether he was a Timberlake, I think he was a Timberlake, I'm not sure. But a real nice man, everybody either knew him or knew of him. He had a great reputation and so forth. So when the votes were counted that year at the polls, everybody had voted Republican, even the Democratic judges and so forth and all. [Laugh] So I think -- like myself, I've served on the Democratic Committee. When the Clerk of the Court died, Mac Gilliam and his daughter [Catharine] that lives there in Brownsburg, came to me and said that the Democratic Committee would, if I was interested, they would support me to be appointed Clerk until the election, you know, regular election time came up, and then they would support me as a candidate. And I said, “No, I can't do it.” I said, “I've got a good job at the plant now, I know what I'm doing there, this I wouldn’t know.” So I said no, and of course that's when, the year that Bruce [Patterson] came back for Richmond and decided to run for it. And I never told him that until when [Mr. Beckner’s late wife] Lula passed away, he was doing some things that had to be done in settling the estate. And he was such a gentleman, he didn't sit behind his desk to me, he sat in the chair out in the office, you know, and discussed it. And I told him about that time. He laughed, and he said, "There's been plenty of times I would have given it to you!" But I got real upset at the Democratic Party after that when the County Chairman's wife was running for an office. And Wilma [Mast] and Lula [Beckner] and a number of women in the women's clubs would take her to sales, to any, you know, public gathering or anything to promote -- she wouldn't -- she wasn't aggressive, you'd introduce her and she wouldn't say anything about what she was doing. She lost. And he [the candidate’s husband] lectured the Democratic Committee group for about an hour on our failure to do so forth and so on. And then there was so much mud slinging. Like in the past election [for Walker’s Creek District County Supervisor], I told Pat [Patterson] and I told Buster [Lewis], I said, "I am out of politics, at my age." I said -- and I feel both -- well, all three candidates -- are good friends of mine. And I said, "I'm not going to support openly anyone, and when I go to the polls to vote, to me that's as private as my prayer is tonight." And so -- and both of them asked me if they could put a sign out front and I said, “No, Wally will let you put one out, maybe, but I won't.” And so that's just the way it is, because I said – Buster [Lewis], when I was on the School Board, worked so hard for me and we've always been friends and so forth. And [Pat Patterson’s parents] Mary and Frank [Patterson] supported me when I was on the School Board and worked for me. And well, I told Pat when he came -- because he started out early -- and I told him this, and he said, "I understand you, I see your laboring with it, I'm not going to try to push either way because I understand where you're coming from." Isabelle Chewning: When were you on the School Board? Wallace Beckner: Oh, gosh, it's been a good many years ago, a long time ago. It was when, it was about the time that Floyd Kaye left, and who was the next Superintendent? Anyway, I was on the School Board and that's when they were appointed by an electoral board. And [Bruce Alexander] Alec Lipscomb [Sr.] was on the Board from our area. And Halstead Dunlap, Billy Whitmore from Natural Bridge, and I forgotten who they all were. Anyway-- Isabelle Chewning: What were the big issues you were facing then? Wallace Beckner: Well, during the time that I was on the School Board, and not that I had that much to do with it, but we started kindergarten. We put in the eighth grade, and we started building the Vocational Tech School. That was when the first go-around to build the consolidated school up there, and then prices went up, bids came in higher and the Supervisors wouldn't support it. But the federal government mandated the technical school, so they went ahead and built that, you know, and it operated for a number of years before they built the consolidated school. Isabelle Chewning: I'm going to stop the tape and let you look through your notes and let you see what you haven't-- [End of Tape 2, Side B] Wallace Beckner Index A Alfalfa · 19 Allen, Bill · 24, 53 Armentrout, Frank Fertilizer Agent · 29 Armentrout, William · 4 Automobiles 1926 Model T Ford · 57 Model A · 11 Model T · 32 Ayres, Janis Wade · 6 B Bailey, Dr. Brownsburg Doctor · 2, 54 Baker Brothers Equipment · 46 Bare, Ada · 33 Bare, Claude · 33, 58 Bare, Tom · 45 Barter System · 61 Beard, Ruth Wade · 34 Beckner, Bernice · 5, 18 Beckner, Frances Hart Death in 1985 · 47 Mother · 3 Beckner, Jimmy · 10, 42 Beckner, Lula Shaver · 39 Dunsmore Business College · 41 Engagement · 41 Flora McDonald · 41 Music Teacher · 42 Teacher at Beverly Manor · 41 Beckner, Mary Frances · 5, 18 Beckner, Wallace Hart "Bunny" · 1 Army · 21 Bethesda Presbyterian Church · 13 Birth · 1 Brownsburg School 3rd Grade · 8 Democratic Judge at Polls · 58 Deployment in WWII · 40 Farm Bureau · 44 Farm Chores · 25 Farming · 43 Hampden-Sydney College · 35 High School Graduation in 1943 · 17 Lee's Carpets · 36 Marriage in 1951 · 42 School · 8 School Board Member · 59 Beckner, Wally · 42 Beckner, William Grandfather · 3 Beckner, William III · 5, 40 82nd Airborne · 23 DuPont · 22 Hampden-Sydney College · 22 Valedictorian · 18 Beckner, William Walter Brownsburg Academy · 16 Death in 1956 · 47 Democratic Judge at Polls · 58 Father · 3 Handicap · 16 Polio · 3 Teacher · 4, 16 Bethesda Presbyterian Church Bible School · 13 Electricity · 24 Blacksmithing Taught in School · 19 Blackwell Family · 3 Borden Grant · 4 Bosworth, Tom Brownsburg Doctor · 47 Bosworth’s Store · 60 Brown, Jim · 51 Brownsburg Barber Shop · 6 Cannery · 11 Doctors · 2 Doctor's House · 2, 61 Farm Store · 61 Pool Hall · 60 Saturday Night · 6 Shoe Repair Shop · 15 Stores · 51 Undertaker · 60 Brownsburg School Animal Science Class · 19 Bus · 11 Football Team · 17 Home Economics · 15 Shop Class · 19 Vocational Agriculture and Shop · 8 Building Practices Circa 1800 · 5 Bustleburg Ball Park · 62 C Camp Briar Hills · 55 Campbell, Dr. Brownsburg Doctor · 2 Cannery · 11, 32 Carr, Ed Bethesda Caretaker · 14 Carwell’s Garage · 62 Chestnut Blight · 56 Chickens · 27 The Gaps · 27 Chittum Family · 44 Christmas · 57 Church of the Nazarene · 54 Cisterns · 25 Conner Family · 3 County Fair · 20 D Decatur · 28 Depression Era · 14 Dry Hollow Road · 3 Dunlap, Halsted School Board · 59 F Farm Store · 61 Farming Alfalfa · 19 Butchering · 33 Cattle Drives to Highland County · 32 Chickens · 27 Combine purchase in 1954 · 44 Combining Grain · 45 Corn Planter · 60 Crops · 29 Fertilizer · 29 First tractor in 1946 · 44 Grain Sales · 31 Granaries · 31 Veal Calves · 31 Fauber, Bennie · 26 Fulwider, Mr. Mail Carrier · 12 Future Farmers of America · 20 G Gardening · 32 Glover, Dr. Veterinarian · 28 Grandview · 13 H Harness, Mr. Bethesda Minister · 20 Hays Creek Mill · 30 Heffelfinger, Jen · 15 School Music Advocate · 42 Horses Charlie · 26 Farm Work · 30 Horse Trading on Court Day · 31 Huffman, Emerson · 54 Huffman’s Filling Station · 61 Hunting · 54 Hurricane Camille · 53 Hutcheson Family · 34 Hutcheson, Robert Steele · 34 I Irby, Mr. Superintendent of Schools · 8 K Kaye, Floyd Superintendent of Schools · 42, 59 Kennan, Dr. Raphine Doctor · 2 Kirkpatrick, Robert Borden Grant Deed · 4 L Layman, Mr. · 20 Agriculture Teacher · 15, 19 Leach, Dr. · 54 Lee's Carpets · 36 Lipscomb, Bruce Alexander, Sr.. · 59 Lunsford, Al Teacher · 49 M Mast, Wilma · 42 Mast's Mill Rockridge Baths · 30 Matheney, Harvey · 61 Shoe Repair · 15 McClung, Mote · 7 McClung, Sally Reid · 7 McClung’s Mill · 30 McCurdy, Fred · 31 McCurdy, Mr. Fertilizer Agent · 29 McCurdy, W. A. · 28 Rockbridge Baths Funeral Director · 60 McElwee Chapel · 9, 13 Evangelistic Services · 24 McLaughlin, Sam · 55 Miley Family Decatur Undertakers · 60 Mills · 30 Mohler, Betty Jean · 11 Mohler, Henry · 11 Mohler, Jake · 44 Mohler, Nell Wade · 11 Montgomery, Miss Teacher · 49 Morris, Mamie · 53 N New Providence Presbyterian Church Bible School · 13 Youth Group · 13 Nye, Bernice Wade · 34 O Oak Hill School · 8 P Patterson, Bruce · 12 Clerk of Court · 58 Patterson, Ed · 12, 27, 44 Patterson, Frank · 20, 51 School Bus Driver · 12 Patterson, Mrs. J.K. Math Teacher · 48 Uncle Remus · 49 Peters, Carrie · 50 Polio "White Swelling" · 3 Poole, Mary Frances Wade · 35 Poole, Roscoe · 35 Potter, Buck Blacksmith · 61 Practical Jokes · 54 R Railroad Depot · 28 Ralston, Dr. Bethesda Pastor · 14 Raphine Train Depot · 31 Rees, Frank Fertilizer Agent · 29 Reese, Carl "Big Eye" · 45 Combine operator · 44 Reese, Ralph Wayne "Weasel" · 62 Roads, Paved Raphine · 31 Runkle Family · 3, 5, 33 Runkle, Bobby · 5 Runkle, John · 5, 62 "Grasshopper" · 62 Runkle, Russ · 5 Rural Electrification Act · 24 S Samples, Mr. Superintendent of Lexington Schools · 42 Sandridge, Charlie · 55 School Bus · 12 Serenading · 57 Shorter Catechism · 10 Slusser, Bruce · 45, 55, 57 Slusser, George · 58 Killed in WWII · 58 Slusser, Harry · 58 Slusser, Hugh · 58 Slusser, Mary Belle · 57 Softball · 62 Springs (Water) · 25 Steele, Lorene McCurdy · 27, 55 Sterrett, Madison McClung Sr. · 43, 48 Sterrett, Mc · 8, 26, 48 Dairy Farming · 26 Stuart, Bob · 8 Stuart, Boyd · 8 Supinger, Ocie Telephone Operator · 55 Supinger’s Store · 6, 51 Swisher Family · 3 Swisher, Henry · 11 Swisher, John · 11 Swope, Carl · 51 Swope’s Store · 51 T Tannery Tanning Bark · 28 Tolley, Clarence · 23 Tolley, Fred · 23 Tractor John Deere B · 46 Trimmer, Osie · 18, 50 Principal · 17 Troxell, Clint · 7 U Uncle Remus · 49 V Veterinary Work · 28 W Wade Family · 3, 34 Wade, Bud · 6, 27, 34, 54 Barber · 6 School Bus · 13 Wade, Harold Miller at McClung's Mill · 30 Wade, John · 12 Wade, Kite · 12, 27, 34 Horse Trader · 34 School Bus · 13 Wade, Ott · 12 Wade’s Mill · 30 Wade’s Store (Bustleburg) · 27 Walthall, Dr. New Providence Minister · 58 Ward, Elizabeth First Grade Teacher · 9 Watson, Miss Home Economics Teacher · 15 Whipple, Fred · 6, 51, 55 Whipple, Mollie Sue Hull · 49 Whipple’s Farm Equipment Dealership · 60 Whipple's Store · 51 White, Mr. · 52 Whitesell, Virginia Wade · 34 Whitmore, Billy School Board · 59 Williams, Dr. Brownsburg Doctor · 2 Williams, Mrs. 3rd Grade Teacher · 10 Wiseman, Carl · 27 Woody, Lynn Agriculture Teacher · 19 World War II · 2, 17 Deferments · 21 Hiroshima and Nagasaki · 21 Occupation of Japan · 22 Radio · 23 Rationing · 17, 61 Z Zigler, Mr. Agriculture Teacher · 19