Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [28]
Finally, Red came back from Washington and said he was prospecting for minerals. They packed up the family in an old 1933 Dodge and put their belongings in a two-wheel trailer they made. Every night, Angie would find a creek and cook dinner. Around St. Louis, the motor bearings tore loose. That meant they had to drive slowly one day, then spend the next day fixing the bearings. They did this all the way to Washington.
Doo told me he got so thirsty in Utah that when he saw this lake he begged to get out and take a sip. His Daddy told him it was salty, but Doo wouldn’t believe it. He found out the hard way that his Daddy was right. It was the Great Salt Lake.
It took them twenty days to get across the country. They finally broke down thirty miles from their town, and Red’s boss had to tow ’em the rest of the way. They settled down, but it was the middle of the Depression and there wasn’t much money going around. The kids got put back two years, every one of ’em, because of their Kentucky education. One day Red took off again—didn’t say a word to anybody, and Doolittle was left responsible for his mother and the nine kids.
Doo was in the first year of high school when he finally quit. He says he did pretty good, and I believe him. He had to walk four miles to the school bus every morning. He also had to get food for the family. He saved up for a shotgun and a few shells, and he used to sneak up on the pheasants so as to not waste shells. He’d go to the potato farms after the farmers picked what they wanted. Anything they didn’t grade, he could take—and there were plenty of good ones left.
Some guy made Doo a deal that if he would clean out the chicken houses, he’d give Doo an old Ford that was hardly used. And another time Doo used someone’s bulldozer to clear a road to a creek, and then he’d go after salmon. You ain’t supposed to get salmon when they’re swimming upstream to spawn. But if you’re hungry, you do. So Doo would take a pitchfork and watch for small-sized salmon, because the big ones were all bruised up from swimming in that tiny creek. He’d get a whole load of ’em, and his Mom would smoke enough for the winter. One day the game warden caught Doo and said by law he should run him in. But he knew Doo’s folks were hungry, so he told him to take those fish straight home to his Mom. Once when a deer got hit by a car, the game warden was supposed to take it to the hospital to get it fixed—but he brought it to Doo instead to kill and clean.
Doo was still out West when the war started. He and other men helped make lookout towers because they figured the Japanese would attack from the Pacific Ocean. Doo wanted to join the service real bad, but his Mom was so scared about a war breaking out on the West Coast that she decided to go back home to Kentucky. She didn’t drive, so Doo got what was called a “hardship driver’s license,” which they gave to kids who were underage.
By this time they were driving a ’34 Chevrolet, and Doo built a two-wheel trailer out of an old car frame so he could haul his Mom’s old Maytag washer back to Kentucky. He wasn’t full grown yet, maybe around five feet, two inches, so he had to put wooden blocks on the pedals of the car and an apple box on the seat to raise him up some. He loaded his mother and brothers and sisters in the old car and they took off. All they had was sixty-eight dollars and some ration stamps for gas.
But it was the same deal coming back as it was going out there. The rear end fell apart in Iowa City, and the whole family had to camp outdoors again while Doolittle tried to fix the car. He finally talked his way into working in a car shop, where they taught him to use one of those flame-throwers that cuts cars. He worked for four days, and then a guy in the shop fixed the rear end for him.