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Jim Dick Crews and daughter
Melissa Powell.
James Richard Crews was born in a log
cabin on November 5, 1920, on a farm that lay behind where
the old Mayo's Barbecue building languishes today between
McKenzie and Huntingdon. From the beginning, his parents
Eva Mae and Dick Crews shortened his name to Jim Dick, a
singular act that fostered his gift of story telling over
years of explaining the quaint moniker. His life continued
to provide ample subject matter for his stories over 82
years of living, stories that - alternately hilarious,
wondrous, and touching - are as true as his name.
Jim Dick insists he was a mother's boy as a youth; he
loved helping her in the flowerbeds and recalls planting
flowers on his own in old tin cans he found around the
farm. But he was indisputably all boy as well. "I was a
big hunter when I was a kid; I hunted and fished all the
time," he declares with satisfaction as the memories begin
to well and spill. "I had an old Bayport 12 gauge single
shot; I didn't miss a squirrel with it, and back then if I
killed five squirrels we'd eat five squirrels."
He smacks his lips at the memories of squirrels cooked in
diverse ways by his appreciative mother. To a poor farm
family during the depression years, having a son who was a
crack shot was a big plus.
Jim Dick's repertoire of hunting skills included one
trick, however, that was all his own: "I had a habit when
I got in the woods, I'd pull my shoes off and hunt
barefoot through those swamps; I could slip up on a
squirrel with him looking at me!" he bragged with
matter-of-fact gusto, wondering why he was never bitten by
a cottonmouth.
With six children to raise, the Crews family's riches were
not of the monetary sort. Without a complaint, Jim Dick
sacrificed his high school education to help his father in
the fields. Friends he'd made in earlier years, however -
both boys and girls - still met at the farm for one of the
group's favorite pursuits: possum hunting. "Some of the
girls would carry the sack and some wouldn't," he grins.
The star of the possum hunts was "Old Jeff", Jim Dick's
trusty if aged hunting dog.
"It just looked like it done him so good for them kids to
come out there and go hunting," Jim Dick recalls, settling
back in his chair as if to sink deeper into his memories.
"He'd tree them and just keep treeing them."
No meaningless sport, besides providing his own family
with a tasty meal of parboiled possum baked with sweet
potatoes and onions, the possum hides and meat were sold
for 25 to 50 cents each; small change Jim Dick saved to
buy things the family needed, including a brand new cook
stove he bought for his mother for $87.00.
Jim Dick splurged for fun too, pooling his savings with
friend Coy Rich to buy a pair of roller skates. The
excited boys wore one skate each, pushing themselves
uphill with their unskated foot then balancing against
each other to speed down the other side in expedited trips
to Huntingdon.
Jim Dick's daughter and only child, Melissa Powell, sums
up the significance of the boys' creativity with her
astute observation: "Daddy, you didn't know it but you
invented the first skateboard!"
The young hunter gained friends of a different breed
during a squirrel hunting expedition when he spied a
raccoon stretched out to sun on the a limb of a beech
tree, then noticed a hole in the trunk beneath her. "I got
to thinking," he mused, "This is the time of year for them
to have babies."
Shimmying up the tree "just like a squirrel", he peered
into the hole at four or five sets of tiny, staring eyes.
"I reached in and got one and it started squealing," he
recounts, wide-eyed. "She came down the tree and I pulled
my arm out, skinning it all over, and punched her back up
the tree. I got hold of another one and put it in my
shirt," he continues, acting out his deed as if placing
the baby coon inside his shirt. "I punched her back up
again and put another one in my shirt and then skimmed
that tree all the way down."
As the coons grew older, they claimed the Crews' yard as
their personal territory, tolerating the family's pets
but, Jim Dick relates proudly, "if another dog tried to
come up in the yard they sent them away in a hurry."
Down the road from the house, the rambling pair of
inquisitive coons discovered in the split fork of a
white-oak tree a hollow that was home to a hive of
honeybees. "They'd go down there nearly every morning,"
Jim Dick says, describing the innovative pair's habit of
backing into the fork, then pulling their tails out to eat
the honey-coated bees that covered them, like kids with a
box of cracker jacks. "They loved that honey," Jim Dick
nods knowingly.
Not long before he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1941,
Jim Dick was on his way to Huntingdon in his Model A Ford
coupe, complete with rumble seat, cloth top, and a
windshield that folded down, when the sheepish critters
crawled out from under the seat to take their places
beside him. Bound to meet the bus that transported workers
to their jobs at the Milan Arsenal, he had no choice but
to leave the animals with the car, to the delight of
onlookers, who related the following morning, that the
coons had made themselves at home in the vehicle, crawling
all over it, including the tires, in their exploration,
without ever setting foot off the car or allowing
themselves to be touched.
Jim Dick's draft notice arrived just days after he turned
21 in 1941. The morning the Carroll County recruits left
by train from Huntingdon, Jim Dick was placed in charge of
the 65 men.
"Clelland Crossno was one of them," Jim Dick relates in
drama-tinged tones with raised eyebrows. "He would get in
terrible fights when he was drinking. I got to studying
about it and I thought, 'You know, he thinks a lot of me.
I'm going to see if I can get him on my side.'"
He took Crossno aside and appealed to him in confidence,
"I'm in charge of this group and I need some help. I could
use you but not if you're going to be drinking."
"He said, 'I ain't going to drink a drop," Jim Dick says,
shaking his head. Making Crossno second in command insured
his cooperation while adding a voice of authority to the
leadership team. "When he told them something, they
listened," he declares, "They were scared to death of
him."
The new soldiers, uninterested in another round of cheese
sandwiches and oranges that were standard fare on the long
ride, jumped at the chance to eat a real breakfast at
Brother's Café, an establishment Jim Dick had noticed
advertised in neon lights atop a hill near the train stop
in Nashville.
Skirting the objections of the conductor, Jim Dick and
Clelland Crossno marched the troops up the hill to the
restaurant.
"That man set us down to a big breakfast about like what
we have here," Jim Dick says with an expansive spread of
his arm. "Here" refers to Huntingdon Residential Center,
where Jim Dick has resided for the last month or so while
recuperating from a broken shoulder incurred in a fall at
home.
Following the hearty breakfast, the owner of the café gave
every soldier a cigar as they assembled to march back down
the hill to the train. Once there, the conductor heatedly
informed Jim Dick, "You'll hear about this."
"They can call me in the Army, that's where I'm going,"
answered Jim Dick with aplomb.
"I never was backward," he says, explaining his forthright
behavior, "Just like Melissa; she's got more nerves than
steel," he declares concerning his daughter who is active
in community and civic affairs.
Conscious of his family's poverty among a nation of
cash-strapped families, Jim Dick sent his earnings home,
making it possible for his brother and sister to attend
high school and for his sister, Marie Dowlen, to finish
business college as well.
Jim Dick experienced World War II as only an infantryman
could as a soldier of the famed 103rd Infantry, Arizona
Cactus Division, whose members distinguished themselves at
the Battle of the Bulge and in two months of fighting in
the Vosges Mountains to insure the freedom of the town of
Saverne, which lay along the main supply routes for the
U.S. Seventh Army and the First French Army. Their
objective attained at the Battle of Selestat and the
Alsace Campaign, the men engaged in more heavy combat at
the Saar River then the Danube River before assisting in
the capture of Innsbruck, Austria shortly before Germany
surrendered to end the war in the European theatre.
On a mission to route out German soldiers in one small
town, Jim Dick and fellow soldier and good friend Jack
Palacio of St. Louis, Missouri entered a building where
they found an old man in bed with his covers pulled up to
his chin, feigning illness. "You couldn't see anything but
his eyes and mouth," says Jim Dick, going on to describe
the man's bushy beard that poked above the covers.
Jim Dick pulled the covers back to reveal a 32 automatic
pistol and a Luger lying beside the man. "We just pounced
on him," he says, their greatest discovery made when a
German major was exposed between the springs and mattress.
Another time, the battle-weary soldiers of the 103rd
became the apparent victims of the fly-by taunts of a
German pilot, who daily buzzed the troops' wintry
encampment, circling three or four times to wake the
soldiers' prematurely to another cold morning.
After the third morning of interrupted sleep, Jim Dick had
had enough. "Big boy," he promised, "I'm going to be ready
for you tomorrow."
With steely resolve, he prepared his ambush, setting up a
gun where he thought it would prove most effective, then
went to bed prepared to be wakened one more time. When the
plane droned overhead the following morning, Jim Dick
dashed into the frigid morning, lying in the snow trying
desperately to fix his sights on the plane in the gray,
pre-dawn light. When his aim was just, he pulled the
trigger again and again only to face disappointment; the
gun was jammed, its trigger frozen.
The plane circled around once more and, unaware of Jim
Dick's efforts, landed his plane in a nearby clearing.
"You can imagine how I felt when he climbed out of that
cockpit with a white flag," Jim Dick says, awestruck.
"I've always known something greater than us was in
control; we think we're in control but we're really not."
Jim Dick recalls meeting the Russian 8th Army Division on
V.E. (Victory in Europe) Day at Brindle Pass when the war
was over. "We didn't know them and they didn't know us but
we hugged each other; we couldn't talk but we knew who
they was."
The soldiers entered a German camp in Hengstberg, Austria
in the postwar days, where a Jewish man named Leventhal
asked the soldiers for news concerning his people. Jim
Dick related the innumerable Jews he had seen "stacked
like cordwood - racked just like pulpwood higher than the
ceiling" atop a hill between Garmisch-Partenkirchen (where
the 1936 winter Olympics were held) and Innsbruck,
Austria.
At Leventhal's request, Jim Dick secured a jeep to take
him to the scene of unbelievable carnage. "He cried like a
baby, just cried and cried and cried," Jim Dick relates
sadly.
The end of the war was cause for celebration on any
account, and Jim Dick enjoyed playing on the division
baseball team in a tournament held at Innsbruck before the
troops returned to the States. Once on home soil, they
embarked on a 30-day furlough before reporting for Asiatic
training and service against Japan, with the war in the
Pacific still raging.
As luck, or providence, would have it, Japan surrendered
while Jim Dick was still on leave. His Army career ended
after three years, two months and 21 days of service,
after which he obtained his G.E.D. at Bethel College.
Jim Dick began working for Norton Manufacturing, dealers
in lumber and crossties. Not long afterward, he met Miss
Vonita McArthur who he married in 1946.
Melissa was born on his birthday, November 5, 1950,
prefacing a winter Jim Dick remembers in vivid detail.
On Thanksgiving Day, when Melissa was nearly a month old,
Jim Dick looked forward to a day of hunting with Vonita's
visiting uncle. The men took the beagle hounds rabbit
hunting that morning, then headed out again after enjoying
the Thanksgiving meal and fellowship with the extended
family. Before long, the men, who had ventured out in
their shirtsleeves in unseasonably warm weather, found
themselves near freezing with a storm moving in fast from
the northwest. Back in the warm house, Jim Dick was on the
floor playing with the baby when he heard stomping on the
front porch. Looking out to determine the reason for the
commotion, he was astonished to find snow had "covered the
porch plumb up."
"It stayed all winter," declares Jim Dick, "Just when it'd
looked like it was slacking off here'd come another one. I
didn't work a lick all winter, but my company sent a check
like clockwork. I had a time, I tell you, but I didn't
work a lick, we couldn't get logs out of the woods and the
mill couldn't run."
Jim Dick was eventually transferred to Memphis in the
company that had long since sold out to the Coppers
Company, commuting from his home in Henry. He quit after
28 years on the job after the union came in and ruined the
dispositions of workers who, Jim Dick, says, became surly
and uncooperative.
He enjoyed subsequent jobs as a policeman for the City of
McKenzie for seven to nine years and at the Carroll County
Country Club where he worked another 15 years. Over the
years, he also served as city judge for a time and as a
city marshal in Henry.
Jim Dick and Vonita (who worked at Holley Carburetor in
Paris and then at Brown Shoe Company from the time the
plant opened in McKenzie until it closed) retired at about
the same time, with common minds to enjoy more of the
traveling they had sampled over years of reunions with
other members of the 103rd.
"We had an army reunion every year; we had 41 of them,"
says Jim Dick. "I went to every one I could; we traveled a
lot; we've been everywhere."
"We're going to get on the road now that we're retired,"
Jim says he told Vonita. But a trip to the doctor changed
their plans. "We found out she had leukemia in a bad
stage, so we didn't get to make a trip," he shares
dejectedly.
With chemotherapy taking its tolls on the retired couple's
finances, Jim Dick returned to work for the Department of
Transportation.
"My wife died on the June 4th, 1994; she died easy, just
went to sleep," he relates with some relief for her
comfort.
He found no comfort for himself. "You talk about somebody
like to go crazy, I didn't know when daylight came," he
shares, the depth of his loss still apparent in the
tension of his voice and pained expression.
After a year of mourning, Jim Dick took the advice of
friends who suggested he seek like-minded companionship.
He began attending square dancing events at "641" in
Camden where he met Edna, who he married after a yearlong
friendship. The couple enjoyed eight years of
companionship before health problems recently forestalled
their joint happiness.
While Jim Dick hasn't given up on hopes for more travels,
he nevertheless enjoys old friendships and new and loves
sharing the endless, wonderful adventures of his life, not
the least of which are his grandchildren, David and Paula
and great grandson Grant (with another soon to arrive.)
"I've lived a good life," he says sincerely, "I love
everybody; I'd do anything in the world to help anybody."
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