Excerpt from interview with my father

Conducted on October 4th, 2009 at his home in Wilmore, KY

W: Tell me about a memorable childhood experience.

R: Well…let’s see…there’s so many memorable times to consider.

W: Tell me about a memory that involves some of your childhood friends.

R: Well…did I ever tell you about the time we found Fred Waldrop’s shoe?

W: Yes, but tell me again.

R: Okay. Fred was a pretty bad drunk. He would sit around on the apron-wall where the road curves under the bridge and drink whiskey. Most of the time he would pass out, lying on top of the knee-wall, until Rhodie would come around and collect him.

W: Rhodie was…?

R: Rhodie Winkle was an old lady neighbor. She kind of looked out for him. Anyway, one evening he was drunk and decided to cross the bridge. Well, you know how the bridge is…there are catwalks on each side and two sets of tracks down the middle. Apparently, Fred passed out on the tracks. No one really knows why he was on the tracks. But a southbound train hit him and scattered his body everywhere. It was like a bomb had hit him. He just exploded.

W: oooh…pretty gruesome…

R: Yeah. About a year later (I must’ve been ten or eleven, sometime around 1948 or 49), a bunch of us kids were playing down in the river-bottom under the bridge. You know the stone piers that support the legs…?

W: Yeah, yeah.

R: We used to climb on top of the pier that was on the bank. The other one’s out in the river and you can only get to it by boat and you can’t really climb it. But the one on the bank, at that time, had a mature elm tree right beside it. We would climb the tree and jump out onto the top of the pier. It was kind of like a little hideout. We would build fires up there, play marbles, throw rocks into the river, that kind of stuff. Well, that day it was me, Billy Baker, Duckie Anderson, and…ah…I can’t remember who else. There might’ve been one or two other boys. It’s a funny thing; they’ve all been dead now for a long time.

W: What happened on that day?

R: Well, we got up there and were just foolin’ around, and I was looking down in the hole where the bridge support goes into the concrete…it really wasn’t a hole, just a little space between the support and the rock. Well, I saw this old leather shoe, and I pulled it out to show the other boys. I noticed it felt heavier than it should and there was something white sticking out the top. I sat it down, and all the boys crowded around to check it out. That something white was a bone, and when I pulled it, a whole foot came out. It was just the skeleton of the foot, but all the bones where still attached by blackened, dried skin and cartilage I guess. Even the toes where still attached.

W: That’s really gruesome…

R: Yeah, but to a ten year old boy it was a real find. At the time, we didn’t put two and two together right away. We didn’t know who the foot belonged to, but we took it down. I held it in one hand and shimmied down the tree. We all ran as fast as we could back up the road and up the lockhill, yelling at everyone we passed that we had found a foot!

W: What did you do with it?

R: When we got to the store, we proudly showed our treasure to Ms. Isom, told her where we found it. She was a little upset that we had brought a foot into her store. But she took us out on the porch and stopped Brigham Freels as he was going by. She told him what we’d found, and he said “Boys, I betcha that’s Fred’s foot.”