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| My father, Jewell Bell (25) with my mother Olive Tatum |
Lately,
I have been thinking a lot about my father. Perhaps it is because I am
approaching the age at which Dad left us. As I look at myself and think back on
him, I am struck by how much harder his life was than mine has been to this
point. I realize that much of that was because he worked so hard to see that
his children had better lives than he did.
Jewell
Thomas Bell was born at home in Milner, Columbia County, Arkansas on September
22, 1904. His mother suffered a hard labor, and she never had another child.
Being a “one young’un,” as they were called in those days, was not an
experience he enjoyed.
Dad’s
childhood was shaped by tragedy. When he was still an infant, his mother went
blind. We learned later that the blindness was a result of a childhood head
injury, which sparked a benign brain tumor.
But when he was growing up, his mother’s sisters drummed into Dad’s head
that the strain of giving birth to him caused his mother to go blind. This
guilt trip plagued him all his life.
My
grandfather, whom we called, “Pappy’” never recovered from his wife going
blind. For years, he spent every dollar he could get his hands on taking her to
doctors all over the region seeking a cure. Unfortunately, the state of
medicine in South Arkansas in the early Twentieth Century rendered his efforts
fruitless. In the process, he ended up losing his farm and having to work as a
logger in the lumber industry. Relatives
from a fairly large extended family helped care for my grandmother. After
losing her sight, she had become a complete invalid. When Pappy had to cook, their meals were
usually dried beans and cornbread.
Dad
was apparently an avid student. Years later, he could still conjugate Latin
verbs and quote many passages of poetry. Given a decent education, he could
have had a bright future. But as World War One erupted in Europe, family
economics trumped such considerations. Dad grew to man-sized by the time he was
in the eighth grade. Big enough to do a man’s work, Pappy pulled him out of
school to work full time in the woods as a logger. He would support his parents
for the rest of their lives.
Despite
his circumstances, Dad managed to become something of a musician, although he
couldn’t read a note of music. He played a mean honky-tonk piano and also
played the fiddle in the manner of Charlie Daniels. He could hear a tune once
and then play it on either instrument. This ability to play “by ear” was not
passed on to his children or grandchildren, but two of my grandsons, Thomas Bell and Evan Williams,
inherited it. Being a member of the band at the country dances of the era was a
apparently a good way to attract girls. At close to six feet tall with black
hair and a wiry build, Dad was devilishly handsome.
At
some point in the late 1910s or 1920s, Dad and several other young men from Columbia
County decided to go up to work the Kansas winter wheat harvest to earn extra
money. Winter wheat is harvested in July, when the crops in Arkansas are still
immature. Dad told me of this adventure late in his life. Piling into an old
Ford pickup, they drove north on the dirt roads of that time, often camping in
the woods on the way. Once in Kansas, they had no trouble getting work. The
mechanized equipment the Kansas farmers employed fascinated Dad. They had huge
steam-driven tractors and combine machines. Dad learned how the machines
operated and how to keep them repaired. He would work with machinery for the
rest of his life.
After
returning to Arkansas, Dad learned to set up and operate the complicated planing
machines that smoothed the good Southern Pine lumber of the region. There were
no computers in those days. The sophisticated machines were set up manually, continually making adjustments
until the boards produced exactly matched the industry-issued templates. The
precise quality of boards from Dad’s machines became legend in the pine lumber
industry.
Dad
spent the rest of his working life in the lumber industry. Still the primary
support for his parents, he did not marry my mother until he was past 25. From
that point on, his primary focus was on supporting his family. Times were hard
in those first years of the Great Depression, but Dad always managed to find
work of some sort. He told me later that he was completely out of work only one
day during the Depression.
Our
family was definitely what was called “working class” in those days. Some
politicians called us “little people,” but that always rankled. Dad routinely
worked 50 or 60 hours a week. Because he was a foreman, he didn’t get overtime
pay. But we had a roof over our heads, good food on the table, and decent
clothes on our backs. My brother, Tom, and I were encouraged to do well in
school and to look beyond our circumstances for the future. We were both given
formal music training and played in the high school band. Our parents helped as
much as they could, but we also had to work for our education (I worked an
average of 30 hours a week at Safeway during my high school years).
The
inherent danger of working with heavy machinery finally caught up with Dad.
While in his forties, his left hand was caught in a machine cylinder, and he
lost the middle finger of his left hand. Besides losing the digit, that
accident robbed him of his ability to play music. Then, in his early sixties,
he caught the same hand in a powered roller, breaking almost all the bones.
With only one working hand, he could no longer work.
In
his retirement, Dad was a voracious reader. But like so many people of his
generation, he became inactive in his retirement and his health slowly faded.
Having smoked heavily all his adult years, he developed severe emphysema, which
robbed him of breath. I didn’t get to be
with him in his last days. I was on Guam in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in
October 1983 when he fell and quickly succumbed to his injuries. On the way home,
I thought of what I might say at his funeral. I conjured up images of him
playing piano in God’s jazz band. But Dad had asked for a simple graveside
service, so there was to be no eulogy. Perhaps that’s why I’m writing this now.
He was a good, hard-working man who loved his family.
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