Born in a Chicken House: Don't Try N Git Bove Yer Rasin'

Born in a Chicken House: Don't Try N Git Bove Yer Rasin'

This is the memoir of the fifth of ten children born in the Appalachian Mountains in the county with the lowest per capita income within the United States. His ancestors originally hailed mainly from the United Kingdom, settled along the Atlantic Coast in the 17th and 18th centuries. Then, they gradually migrated to what later became West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, often becoming isolated in the Appalachian mountain’s backwoods and hollers of those states, maintaining, and embellishing some of their customs, folklores, and tales. His lineage was part of that early migration. Some stories and experiences handed down by his grandparents are retold here in the vernacular of the language heard spoken in his formative years and during his own experiences growing up in that area. This area was so rural and isolation so severe it was almost like a completely different culture with people speaking a different language. His father struggled to support an ever-increasing family taking in whatever work he could find such as farming, coal mining, forestry, or any kind of day labor, yet it was hardly enough. The family had no insurance, no electricity or indoor plumbing and the kids walked to a one-room schoolhouse (supported eight grades) that their father had also attended. The philosophy of trying to better oneself or to get ahead in life was considered trying to get above one's raising or putting on airs, i.e., sinful. Life was grim growing up, and there was hardly enough for the bare necessities. An abrupt change occurred when he was 13. The family was uprooted from the solitary, peaceful, country living and moved to the big city slums. If that was not significant enough, he was enrolled in an almost entirely black school until he graduated from high school. He was able to experience what it was to suffer in the minority and his hillbilly brogue maligned him further. On his eighteenth birthday he decided to avoid the Army draft and joined the Air Force to get his commitment out of the way. Over forty-one years later her retired as an Air Force Colonel having spent thirty years as an officer and over eleven years enlisted, gained a wife, and two adult children and one son-in-law, and a multitude of friends' and comrades and experiences along the way. A lot of dreams had come true.