Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [11]
Daddy didn’t go to school much, but he could read and write some. He worked out-of-doors when he was young, farming and stuff. When he was about twenty, he met Mommy at the little church in the holler. They courted for around two years and then got married. They built their own little one-room wood cabin at the end of the holler. She would hold the boards and he would drive in the nails. Right after the Depression started, they began having kids—eight of them, four boys and four girls, in the next sixteen years. I was next to the oldest.
Daddy couldn’t get much work during the Depression, and we didn’t have money. I remember one Christmas when Daddy had only thirty-six cents for four children. Somehow, he managed to buy a little something for each of us down at the general store. He gave me a little plastic doll about three inches high, and I loved that like it was my own baby.
Daddy was more easygoing than Mommy. She did most of the correcting in the family. The only time Daddy would get mad was when someone would smart off at Mommy. Then he’d move right in there and settle it. He wasn’t one of those men that’s gone half the time either—he didn’t have no bad habits. He was always teasing Mommy, but in a nice way. If she got mad about something, he’d laugh and say, “The Squaw’s on the warpath tonight.” I never forgot that line, and I wrote a song about it when I got older. But you know—the nice way he treated her gave me ideas about the way I wanted to be treated. I still feel there’s better ways to handle a woman than whipping her into line. And I make that point clear in my songs, in case you hadn’t noticed.
Daddy was upset when he couldn’t find work in the lumber mills during the Depression. He was used to working hard. They didn’t have stuff like welfare checks in those days, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt started the WPA (somebody told me that stands for Work Projects Administration), which gave men jobs. This is why you go into homes back in Kentucky today and you’ll see pictures of FDR on the wall. Daddy would work a few days on the roads with a WPA crew and come home with a few dollars, as proud as could be. When he wasn’t working on the roads, he worked on his big garden and patched the house to get us through the Depression.
The WPA took care of me, too. The agent came up the holler and gave me a real “store-boughten” dress when I was around seven years old. Up to that time, all I wore was flour sacks Mommy sewed up as dresses. I kept looking at pictures in the Sears and Roebuck catalog and thinking how pretty everyone looked—but I never figured I’d get a chance to look pretty, too.
But one day this agent brought this little blue dress with pink flowers and dainty little pockets. Mercy, how I loved it. Daddy kept saying, “Don’t get your dress dirty.” I took good care of it and put it in the laundry bag, but we let our family hog run loose and he snatched that dress and just chewed it to pieces. Ruined it, he did. I must have cried for days.
When the Depression got better, Daddy saved enough money to buy a house with four rooms in it. It was down the holler, next to his folks, in a big, broad clearing. This is the family house you see in the pictures, with the high porch facing the garden and the hill rearing up behind the house. We had a spring behind the house for fresh water and a well in front. We had a new outhouse in the back. In the winter, you’d wait too long because you didn’t want to go outside in the cold. And then you’d have to run through the snow, hoping you’d make it to the outhouse. We still didn’t have electricity, and our bunch of kids still had to sleep on pallets in the living room at night. But we had four rooms instead of one, and we really thought we’d arrived.
Finally, the mines got to working again, and Daddy decided to support his family as a coal miner. He never worked in the mines before, and it must