The Hendrix family purchased this table-top radio in 1939. “When news reporter Lowell Thomas came on, all the children had to be quiet so Daddy could hear the latest news,” F.E Hendrix recalls in his memoirs.
What beyond money or aggravation will you leave your family?
My mom’s family has handed down letters posted from Scotland and Ireland nearly 250 years ago. In them, young men and women share dreams of freedom and success in America. My paternal grandfather, a carpenter, left me one of his claw hammers. Well used, the handle rubbed smooth to an ivory finish, it drove many a nail in lots of homes including those of eight of his nine children. Lessons learned—there can be reward from taking risks, and reputations can be gained from measure twice, cut once.
My mother will leave a written legacy to her family. For years she has pondered and captured in writing our family stories, from her fall off the loft onto the back of a pig at age 4, to the one about my brother and me (ages 5 and 7) becoming Native Americans using a neighbor’s redwood deck stain. She has chronicled the life of my son Campbell from birth, through treatment at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, to his burial on the family farm at age 4, including his impish way of performing for doctors and nurses a perfect, head-bobbing rendition of the Backstreet Boys’ “We’ve Got It Goin’ On.”
F.E. Hendrix, a trustee at Laurens Electric Cooperative, recently published his own written legacy, Looking Back on a Lifetime of Opportunities and Blessings. His initial aim in writing the book was to depict life in his hometown of Sugar Tit in the early 1900s, but he soon realized that his story was really about folks, friends and family who guided, assisted and encouraged him throughout the past 85 years.
F.E., or Francis Earle to the finicky among us who insist on full names, was 14 and it was 1939 when life changed in rural Spartanburg County. Electricity! Wash day was no longer centered around a 25-gallon iron pot just far enough away from the house to keep smoke from drifting inside yet close enough to save his mama steps. The electric washing machine and iron left F.E.’s mama more time to “mama” F.E.—not that F.E. was a mama’s boy!
Other good things flowed right along with the electricity from Laurens Electric Cooperative. No more kerosene lamps. Now there were lights at a flip of a switch. Iced tea was no longer dependent on a once-a-week delivery of a 50-pound block from the Greer Ice Company. A young, strapping F.E. most appreciated the electric stove and new heater. The “sto-wood pile” for the cook stove and the “firewood pile” for the open fireplace were a menace to replenish and a joy to abandon. Electricity also brought entertainment and news. Through a table-top radio that F.E. still owns, “The Lone Ranger called out to his white horse Silver,” correspondents tracked the Battle of Britain as it raged over London rooftops, and FDR and Churchill assured the world that Allied victory was at hand. F.E. and his brother, Everett, most enjoyed the broadcasts of World Series games. A radio plugged in on the back porch and turned up to full volume made cotton picking almost tolerable.
F.E. played first base for a baseball team that was part of a “high-class country league.” His team, Flatwood, drew from the rural area where the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport and BMW are now located. He lettered in basketball at Clemson in the early 1940s, and went on to enjoy a 48-year career in textiles, a continuing avocation for farming and 67 years (and counting!) of marriage. Shaking F.E.’s hand today, you can appreciate in its firmness the confidence that comes from being a man who could grip a basketball by one hand, claw a baseball out of the dust when thrown wild and low, and cut, split and stack two cords of “sto-wood” in one day. Lessons learned—a bunch!