"Boy, that was years ago," Brown Foster says often as he recollects events from yesteryear as a boy growing up in Carroll County.

Willie Brown Foster was born on August 29, 1905 about a mile from Concord Baptist Church in McKenzie. He was the last child born to Franklin Brown and Sara Elizabeth Belew and came along much later than their other five children. Brown never knew two of his sisters who passed away in the first few years of life; one fell into the fire at around two years of age and the other succumbed to measles. He barely remembers his third sister who died in her father's arms of tuberculosis when she was around 21 years old. His brothers, Otis and Winnie, fared well, but, as they were quite a bit older than he was, Brown grew closer to the 16 nieces and nephews who were nearer his own age.

As a student, Brown walked to Young's School in Christmasville along dirt roads. Even the main roads were dirt, he says: "We didn't know nothing about highways back then."

The school building had 3 separate rooms for teaching and plenty of mischief among the students who were undeterred by the fact that punishment came in the form of a whipping in front of the entire school.

"I used to get several," Brown says quite proudly.

The boys often ventured into the cane thicket near the school where Brown explains they would cut a "great long cane" which was then used to make popguns. Sheets of paper from school tablets were rolled snugly around a length of the cane to form the barrel of the gun while other pieces of paper were chewed into wads of ammunition. The cane was "popped" inside the barrel to shoot the wet wad at unwary targets.

Brown's uncle was a teacher who traveled to school in a horse and buggy that was stored in a stable at the school during work hours. At recess, the boys rolled the girls down the hill in the buggy. When Brown slipped and fell one day, the buggy ran over him leaving tell-tale tire marks on his legs which he then had to explain to his parents.

He used to play hookie as well, he says, but despite his mischievous ways, he paid close attention to his studies and found ways to make learning more fun.

"Me and Brayden Fuzzell used to get together and put on a program at school," he recalls. "We'd get up and sing before school. I liked to never have learned my multiplication tables but I finally did, and me and him got up in front of school and sang them off."

His formal education ended after the eighth grade.

The "Doodle Hack" from Christmasville store was a novelty to children and a convenience to rural families who could buy grocery items right off the wagon.

"In the winter time they used to buy rabbits," he said, recalling one "frosty morning" when he sold a rabbit to the store for a dime that he spent to buy a French harp. "I can play a French harp pretty good," he says.

Living near the Turnpike River bottom meant plenty of opportunity for fishing for Brown and his father, who used homemade fish traps rather than hooks to catch their quarry.

"My daddy was a great hand to fish," Brown says, "In the spring of the year, on rainy days when we couldn't go to the fields, he would take his pliers out and get a big round slick wire and cut the wire to wrap around front; he would make it plumb round."

As he describes the making of the fish trap, his hands work imaginary wire into a circular shape with strong wires bent inward to let fish into the barrel of the trap from which there is no escape. Thinner bailing wire is used to tie the pieces of the trap together.

Baited with a hard loaf of bread made especially for the trap by his mother, the trap yielded a twice per week harvest of fish. "Lord, we eat fish going and coming," Brown recalls.

Old fashioned hog killings took place later in the year when Brown's father and his neighbor would cook three to five hogs at one time in a big vat.

Corn was ground in a gristmill to make cornmeal. "We used to eat some corn bread in those days," Brown declares.

He lived with his brother, Otis, for a few years during which, it seems, there was never a dull moment. "Otis was always into something," he recalls with a gleam in his eye, "So him and another boy killed a snake. We lived in big house with an upper room where we slept, and me and one of boys slept together. I went to bed early that night and they had taken that snake and rolled it up on my side of the bed. I laid down on that snake and jumped down and butted my head against the door!"

He scrambling down the steps but there was no escape, as the boys at the top of the stairwell threw the snake on him as he ran.

Practical jokes were common amusement for Brown and his friends. "Oscar Patterson had some boys who were always pranking one another," he says, setting the stage for another funny tale. Brown's father smoked homemade tobacco that he made from the dried leaves of tobacco plants. He describes how his father took the "great wide tobacco leaves" and worked them between his hands when they were dry to crumble them into the tiny pieces that he packed into his crooked-stemmed pipe.

When he wasn't looking, the boys slipped the cap from a 22 cartridge into the tobacco, and when it made contact with the fire the pipe blew up, leaving Brown's father sitting there holding the crooked stem in his mouth.

His other brother, Winnie, was a barber in Christmasville, charging a quarter for a haircut and a dime for a shave. "He taught me how to cut hair; I used to be a barber," he says.

World War I brought trains bearing soldiers through the town of Trezevant as they made their way to training grounds. "Boy, that's been years ago," came the oft-repeated slogan.

"The soldier boys sat in the windows and waved at the town," he says.

As the trains passed, the soldiers called, "We're going after the Kaiser; we're going to get the Kaiser," he recalls.

"They didn't get him either!" he declares, "He was the cause of World War I but he was smart enough he got out of it."

Kaiser Wilhelm II, the 9th King of Prussia and the third emperor of Germany, was forced to abdicate on the 9th of November 1918 whereupon he fled the country with his family and lived in Holland for the rest of his life.



 

The end of the Civil War was only 40 years before Brown's birth and he grew up hearing his Uncle Jim (Foster) tell stories of life as a soldier at Shiloh.

During breaks in the battle, Confederate and Union soldiers often talked to those who were their neighbors as well as their enemies. People came bringing food and the soldiers also ate from the peach orchards at Shiloh, leaving the big peach seeds on the ground.

Brown's mother was among those who visited the battlefields. "Anybody could go there that wanted to," Brown explained. She took some of the seeds home with her and planted them in the back yard where in later years they bore fruit.

It was while sitting in a peach tree during the war that Brown's Uncle Jim was shot "clean through the wrist." After the battle, he drug himself to the now-famous "Bloody Pond" to wash up. Lying at the bottom of a slope, the pond had collected the blood of soldiers killed along the hillside until the water was as red as blood.

To care for the injury, Brown says, his uncle wrapped a silk cloth over a pencil which he then pushed through one end of the wound and out the other to drag out the maggots that had hatched there.

When the war was over, Jim walked home.

One of the most exciting events as Brown grew older was when his father ordered a 1924 Ford for $352.72 from Charles Forrest.

"I could hardly wait for it to come," he says with still-bright eyes. "Boy that's been years ago!"

Brown had been "laying by corn" and had come to the house for dinner when he learned the call had come saying that the car had arrived by train.

He went to McLemoresville to pick up the car where, he says, "Clint Montgomery learnt me to drive it and I came back home. My brother's wife wanted to go to McKenzie so I told her I'd carry her for the price it cost to go by train."

His old playmate Coley Walker went with him for a ride and on the return trip through McLemoresville Brown let him drive.

"I thought he was going pretty fast and there was a curve in the road, then the road came on down to cross a little creek. At the foot of the hill he went around and knocked the banister of the bridge out. Boy, I sure hated to go back home." The young men left the car parked and walked the few miles back home.

In 1929 he worked at Trezevant's U-Tote-Em grocery store, taking orders and filling them from the warehouse that occupied the site where Southern Biological (Southern Scientific Inc.) is today in McKenzie.

"On Saturday night we worked until 12:00," he recalls.

Mr. Curtis Newberry, who ran the store, lived with his wife in a house not far away from the store. The couple had a "great big dog" who was trained to jump over Mr. Newberry's walking stick and would jump back and forth over the stick.

His most extraordinary trick was more practical, however. Mrs. Newberry would send the dog to the store with a note to her husband requesting some item she needed. Her husband would place the item into a paper sack that he twisted closed and placed into the dog's mouth, that would then head dutifully up the road toward home.

Brown married Estell Myrtle Cantrell on February 12, 1933, a day chosen by his wife who had decided she wanted to get married on Abraham Lincoln's birthday. The couple was married in Bell Brown's house in McLemoresville. Bell Brown and his family ran the switchboard for the old telephone system.

For several years, the new family lived and farmed with Brown's father. His mother had passed away suddenly when Brown was 27, after which his father married his Aunt Lalu (pronounced Luler), who was his mother's sister.

Brown and Estell moved to a farm between McLemoresville and Trezevant where they sharecropped for two years before moving back to Christmasville where Brown farmed with his brother for a number of years. When they moved to the 19th District, he continued farming and learned firsthand the value of neighbors when he became sick in the same year that his crop failed due to drought.

Neighbors brought their tractors and planters to help put down a second planting of cotton to replace that which had failed to thrive.

While farming between Trezevant and Atwood, Estell worked at the Milan Arsenal for a time before she was laid off during the Korean War.

Brown operated an egg route for Carroll Acres, a farm owned by Lyndell Patterson on Hinkledale Road in McKenzie.

In 1945 Brown and Estell joined the Republic Grove Baptist Church where he is now the church's oldest member and was for years the superintendent.

He became the janitor at McKenzie's Grammar School, which was located where the Middle School is now, during a time when a coal-burning boiler heated the school. Brown would start work as early as 4:00 in the morning to be sure the fire was built and the rooms warmed before the teachers and children came to school.

Burning coal meant that the cinders had to be shoveled out of the furnace regularly into a bucket that was then dumped outdoors. He revisited his own mischievous childhood when some students took the spent cinders and dumped them back into the furnace after he had cleaned it out.

Brown and his wife took joined forces as janitors at the Methodist Church until his retirement in 1973.

They spent much of their retirement years traveling and visiting friends and family.

Brown lived alone after his wife's death in 1990 until 1993 when he moved into his daughter's home. After a series of strokes and a heart attack which led to surgery to insert a pace-maker, Brown moved to Oak Manor Health Care Center where he is a champion bowler and wins at Bingo every week, he says. He animatedly describes how the residents at Oak Manor bowl using 9 pins that are set up in row. "You take the chair and go around, and you have 3 round balls with air in them and you pitch the balls and knock them down!"

After 96 years, Brown says there is much left untold. He and countless others of his generation are a treasure of interesting information and history.

Brown has two daughters (Jane Pratt and Faye Gaskins of McKenzie), four grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.