The Shadow
This may be the hardest Shadow column that I have ever written.
After having written hundreds of columns of the Shadow, I can honestly say that I have enjoyed my work. However, there comes a time that your mind and body tell you it is time to retire. I know that most people will say I am looking to the day that I can retire. In my case, I know that I will miss writing the column and many of the folks that read the column each week have told me they will miss it also. This is the last Shadow column that will be printed in the Virginian Review as I am retiring today.
First of all, I sure am glad that the weatherman was a little off when he predicted that we may get some snow and a lot of rain out of the super storm Sandy. We were fortunate not to lose any power and we had very little rain and the wind was not that bad either. I will say, for once we were warned and knew that the storm could be very bad and most of the east coast buckled down and got prepared for Sandy as best they could.
Like I said the Highlands was lucky!
Speaking of Sandy, the weatherman kept saying that we were going to get a number of inches of rain, but we got very little. Part of West Virginia, just across the line from Virginia around Elkins, got more than a foot of snow and all we got was a little skiff on the top of some of the mountains in Alleghany County.
I got to thinking about the hard rain that we were predicted to get and remember as a kid growing up during the Depression of the 30s when I had only one pair of shoes and they had to last me until spring when I could go barefooted. Some of the years the shoes did not last, at least the soles did not last, and I would get a hole in the bottom of my shoes.
That is when I would get a good piece of cardboard and put in the shoe and that would last very well, at least my foot was not touching the ground, that is, unless it rained and the cardboard would come apart fast.
I can not tell you how many times that happened while I was growing up in the 30s but each fall my father managed to buy me a new pair of shoes and that was no easy task with seven more kids in the family and times were hard.
I remember Granny Averill at Low Moor, the grand older lady of 105, telling about putting cardboard in her shoes because there were holes in her soles, so I was not the only person that went the cardboard route to keep the bottom of my feet from touching the ground.
My wife fried chicken legs for supper tonight and I like chicken legs because you can hold a chicken leg and eat it, but back in the 30s, I learned to get a lot of meat off the neck of a chicken. With eight kids in the family and my father and mother, my mother would fry every part of the chicken including the neck. If you have never tried to eat a chicken neck, let me tell you there is not a whole lot of meat on the neck but if you work it right, you can get the most of the meat off.
I don’t think that you can buy chicken necks nowadays, but I bet you eat some of the neck in the hot dogs and chicken bologna that you buy. The label will read chicken and pork parts in the hot dogs. Now you have found the chicken neck.
You have to be careful when you cut the chicken’s head off and not cut the head too far down on the neck.
You may be cutting off some good meat and an awful lot of chicken neck bones.
Over the years in the column I have told you about coming in from school and eating an onion sandwich with maybe mustard on it and to a hungry boy and not much more in the refrigerator it tasted real good. That may be the reason that I still like onions and eat them regularly mostly in brown beans and as part of a sandwich.
I have my wife fry onions in my eggs at breakfast and that is a real treat too.
Another stable that we got a lot of during the Depression was flour gravy and hot biscuits, with a little fat back grease in the gravy to add a meat taste to it, that was real eating on a cold day too.
We had one more item while I was growing up. First I will ask you if you remember the small grocery stores that seemed to be on every corner during the Depression days of the 30s? Well, in each store was a wooden keg that had salt fish in it and for some reason my father loved them but it took some time for me to even like them. We had them every Sunday for breakfast. I finally did take a liken to them and even to this day I still like a good mess of salt fish.
There was a restaurant in Clifton Forge and I think that many of us have eaten there. It was called the Bull Pen.
This restaurant was set up to feed the trainmen on the C&O but did cater to the public too, and they featured salt fish on the menu and it was a big hit.
As you read this column over the years, you could see that my family was poor but so was everyone else on the street where I lived and the funny part about it, we did not know we were poor.
I will say this about growing up. I can honestly say that I did not go hungry in all that time but raising eight kids on a little of nothing played its part on my parents and in the later years they had a lot of medical problems and I know that it was from worrying about where the next meal would come from for eight kids.
None of my brothers and sisters are still living but if they were, they would tell you that we had loving parents that did the best for us under trying times. God was good for my family and still is for my family in 2012.
As I close this one chapter in our lives, I thank you for being a great bunch of readers and I have held back a couple of good rumors because you never can tell when our paths may cross again.
God bless each and every one of you!
Buck Rumpf, the Shadow.
