Tobacco, Tents, and Thieving in the Thirties

My Mother and the Tobacco Thief

                My mother’s participation in athletic activities have appeared in previous blog postings. Bernyce Smith Gates, my mother, loved to run – whether around bases, driving to the basketball goal, or in foot races.

                Many traits, tendencies, likes and dislikes of her father, Calvin Callcayah Smith, emerged in my mother. Ruben Hopper, even after reaching the century mark in age, reveled in recounting Grandpa’s baseball pitching prowess. Mother chuckled as she told of Grandpa outrunning a mean cow across the pasture. This didn't just occur once. Mother said the pernicious cow would raise her head and charge. She said Grandpa was “picking them up and putting them down" but always outrun the cow.

                Mother first ran "with a purpose" as an eight-year old. Her family had recently moved to the Betts’ place, owned by Lora Kirk Betts, an original Osage allottee, and leased by my grandparents, specifically so Mother could walk to school.

The Bend was in the throes of the Great Depression along with the rest of the nation. Families, unable to afford housing, pitched tents and lived in them. The families had helped Grandpa and Grandma with some of their farm work so had gotten permission to put their tents on the place Mother’s parents were leasing. The temporary dwellings were erected on the Betts’ land, west of the small bridge over the creek, not far from the house where Mother and her parents live.

My grandfather used tobacco. Interestingly, he was not a smoker when he served as a medic during World War I. One of the army doctors credited his non-smoking status as the reason for his survival of the Spanish flu. This was documented in the blog posting entitled The Spanish Flu Pandemic: http://bernadeanjgates.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-spanish-flu-pandemic-of-1918.html

For some reason, unknown to Mother, her father began smoking. He developed a cough. His persistent cough and the knowledge that his father died from complications due to pneumonia prompted Grandpa’s switch to smokeless tobacco.

One of the older boys from the “tent people” families came up to their house. Always a keen observer and quick thinker, my mother watched him go into the pantry of their house and come out with her daddy’s tobacco stash. He was sneaking out of their home. That big boy was stealing her daddy’s tobacco. She would have none of that.

Mother - age 9

He started running. The determined eight-year-old pursued him with all her speed. She yelled, “That’s my Daddy’s! You’re stealing it.”

Whether it was her swift running, the vengeance in her voice, or his own conscience, for some reason, he dropped the stolen tobacco pouch and scampered away. The gutsy little girl retrieved the stolen tobacco, but never confronted the boy again.

Grandpa would later lose his naturally-beautiful teeth to periodontal disease early in his life. At the time, dentists could do little but extract the teeth and fit the patient for dentures. By the time I was born, however, as Grandpa would characterize it, he “had laid it down” as a matter of his spiritual awareness, so I never saw him use smokeless tobacco.

The admiration of her maternal grandmother triggered my mother’s first experience with tobacco. She observed her beloved grandma, Rosa Jarrell Rainey, dip snuff. As a little girl, she wanted to emulate everything her grandmother did. Only one try of snuff from her grandma’s little snuff can taught her that was an experience she did not want to repeat.

Virgil - age 6

Mother adored her uncle, Bill Buckley, who had married her mother’s sister, Emma Rainey Buckley. For some reason, she and her cousin, Virgil Noel Rice, stumbled onto some cigarettes discarded by their uncle, east of their Grandma Rainey’s house. She didn’t remember which one initiated the “smoking experiment” – just that they agreed. The two cousins lit up. The horrible taste caused them to cough and spit. At age 9 and age 6, she and Virgil agreed wholeheartedly that smoking was not for them. That was the end of tobacco use for them both. Mother diligently warned Angie and me about the health dangers of smoking from lung diseases, citing dearly loved family members who had shortened their lives with tobacco use. Mother valued her teeth, emphasizing proper care of them, recalling the destructiveness of the periodontal disease to Grandpa’s teeth.

Our mother’s dentist praises her 92-year-old teeth at each checkup. Angie laughs about nurses trying to get her teeth out when she was hospitalized in 2011. Mother tried to convey the teeth were attached, but, with the nurse’s fingers in her mouth, Angie had to come to her rescue, telling the nurse “the teeth don’t come out.”

Gladys Rainey Smith, my maternal grandmother, could assert succinctly her beliefs. Frequently, I have heard her quote and comment, specifically, on tobacco use in light of Romans 12:1:

I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God,

 that you present your bodies a living sacrifice,

holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.

With a humorous twinkle in her eye, she would say, “You are supposed to present yourself as a living sacrifice. Not smell like a burnt offering!”
  
Personal Note: Candy cigarettes packaged to realistically appear as the actual tobacco cigarettes gained popularity decades before our childhood. However, when  Angie and I were children those lookalikes could still be found in the candy aisle. Mother never allowed either of us to select the candy cigarettes. I think I was the one more drawn to the "play" cigarettes than Angie. Even though no adults in my family smoked, mimicking a grown-up activity appealed to me. 
            However, my earliest memories recalled asthmatic episodes. Even though the occurrences of these diminished as I approached adolescence, the remembrance of struggling to breathe caused me to refrain from trying tobacco in any form.