My Daddy's Daddy

This is my daddy and the following is what he

wrote about his daddy, my GRAND~pappy.

REMEMBERING OUR DADDY
By: Billy Sanford Crenshaw

Our daddy, Jessie Edward Crenshaw, or “Mr. Ellis” as most people knew him was born in Pulaski County, Georgia November 13, 1894 to Meredith Sanford Crenshaw and Nicey Lucretia Nancy Ann Cornelia Dixon.
On 10 October 1915, he borrowed a horse & buggy and drove to the Barlow farm and picked up Lola Barlow, daughter of William Right Barlow and Prezzie Lizzie Alva Rhetta Wynne Barlow. They drove to Cochran, in Bleckley County and the two were wed. Lola had turned 15 on April 29th of that year.

The two had the following issue: --5 sons and 2 daughters:
First born was a baby boy who lived five days and died. He was not given a name as was the custom in those days. So the family afterwards always just called him ‘Baby Brother’.
Second child was Thelma Louise, then Hazel Cleo, William Meredith, James Edward, Billy Sanford and the baby of the family, Samuel Leon.

Daddy was a hard worker, he had to be to provide for the large family that he and mother had brought into the world. Daddy was a righteous man, a Christian man who was well thought of by those who knew him. He was honest and respected and lived a good life. He was a Gentleman and a Gentle-man, always treating our dear mother with love and respect. Daddy read his Bible often and prayed daily. I remember daddy being called on to pray in church and it was his manner to kneel at the pew where our family sat to offer that prayer. He also served as the ‘Song Leader’ at church as we were growing up.

I never knew our daddy to say a cuss word. Nor did I ever know daddy to lay a hand in anger toward our mother, in all their 58 plus years of marriage. Sure, I heard them argue and fuss but never fight that I know of.

Although money was meager, daddy always had change enough in his overall pockets to ‘loan’ us .50 cents to go to the picture show, though he himself never went. And I don’t ever remember paying back those ‘loans’.

Daddy and mother really loved to go fishing together, to the creek, or river, or lake. He was one of the best, but our mother could out fish him. They would take us boys with them if we weren’t off somewhere playing in a ball game.
Daddy and mother did not have tackle boxes. Mother would sew together a cloth knap sack with a strap to go across their shoulder. In that knap sack they carried fishing line, hooks, lead sinkers, floats, a knife, pliers and a can of worms and anything else they thought they might need.

I mentioned a knife. Daddy always carried a pocket knife for what ever he might need it for. I can remember asking daddy to sharpen my pencil and he could put the best point on a lead pencil, as good as the sharpeners in our class rooms.

Daddy wasn’t a mean person, but he believed that we boys should behave ourselves and if we got too rowdy or misbehaved he would whip us with his belt or most of the time he would threaten us with the phrase, “Boy I’m going to get your jacket.” That saying was usually enough to settle us down. Now if we acted up around mother, her saying was, ”Boy I’m going to get a switch and cut the blood out of you.” I know that sounds terrible but a good switching was needed sometimes for hard headed boys. The switches were thin and strong and would leave streaks on us, hurt like the dickens, but do no lasting harm.

Daddy was a neighborly person, always speaking or chatting with folks passing our home. There would come a “Howdy Mr. Ellis, how you doing”? Most always, the reply would be, “Oh just tollable(tolerable), how you doing”? Then they would chat a while before the person went on toward the store or into town. I can still see daddy and his next door friend sitting on our porch swinging and talking, probably about what was going on in the Cotton Mill. Mr. Bob Lee was the friend and was a supervisor at the mill and daddy was a ‘fixer’, meaning that if something broke down, they would say “Go get Mr. Ellis, sometimes in the middle of the night they would come knocking on our door for daddy to come to the mill to fix a machine that had broken down.

In conversation, another word that daddy would use was ‘pshaw’, which is used to express irritation, disapproval, contempt, or disbelief. But when daddy said it, it came out as “shaaaa, I don’t belief that happened.” In fact one of the things that he did not believe happened was when the USA landed a man on the moon. Shaaaa, that didn’t happen, they made all that up in a movie studio somewhere was the way he would think.

Daddy had some peculiar ways about him, some were kind of funny. We sometimes get a chuckle when thinking about how he thought he could save a little gas by switching off the old truck at the top of a long down hill slope and just coast down to the bottom of the hill, then switching it back on and popping the clutch to make it catch up again. I have also known him to try burning kerosene in that old truck be cause it was a few cents cheaper. Can you believe that and gas was only 19 to 21 cents a gallon back then?

Daddy sure loved mothers cooking. I can remember her cooking a large pot of butter beans and putting a big chunk of fat back in the pot with them. He would dip out a plate full and cut off a big piece of the fat back to eat along with it, with some of mothers good old cornbread. There would always be some kind of dessert which he would always indulge in. Then he would go back to the fat back for a chunk of that and say, “I got to get that sweet of my mouth.”

Yes, our daddy was a good Christian man, a God-fearing man. I know he loved the Lord and the Lord loved him. May he rest in peace until the second coming of the Lord, then we shall all raise up and daddy will say “Let us all sing ‘Shall we gather at the river'.”

Happy Father's Day!