Spotlight On!

James Kenneth Kimbrell, I

 He was born: 2 Dec 1920 in Rutherford County, NC and died, 21 September 1989, in Spartanburg, SC. He was 69 years old. His friends and family called him "Grey". He was a farmer and a textile worker, a weaver in the weave shop, the loudest and nosiest part of the mill. He worked in Spartanburg, SC at Beaumont Mills, which manufacturer cloth from cotton. Dad worked there for many, many years and  Mom said that Phil was a baby when Dad began working in the mill in addition to the farming.

   Life on the farm was not easy, but we did have electricity at the old home place, near Chesnee, SC. It was this three room house we older kids grew up in and Becky, Robert, Russ and Angie were born while we were living there too.

   We didn't have indoor plumbing. The "outhouse" was  below the back of the house, down a well-worn path past the peach tree. The, seventy foot deep, well where we drew our water, was about fifty feet from the kitchen door in the opposite direction of the outhouse. It was near the china berry tree at the other side of the house.

   Once when I was drawing up a full bucket of water from the well, my fingers slipped off the iron handle. In an instant, the handle spun out of control and came down with a powerful blow hitting my left shoulder. Needless to say, it taught me a painful lesson to stop daydreaming on the job.

   We drank from a communal dipper that stayed in the water bucket on or near the kitchen table. We all drank from the dipper because our parents were raised that way too. If we were "fortunate" enough to drink out of a glass, we'd refuse to drink after each other.  

   Did You Know?...

Our old home place was, originally, 76 and 1/2 acres until a neighbor decided the natural spring, near where our properties joined, belonged to them.

   Dad and Mom had, generously, allowed the Willingham's, Mrs. Splawn's elderly parents, to use the spring for many years. Her parents lived in a dark, little, three room shack, down in the woods behind the Splawn's house. The little spring, in it's natural state, had been about the size of a large grapefruit, and was the only water nearby for the elderly couple to use. After the Willingham's passed away and the Splawn children grew up, a fence was erected by the Splawn's, claiming that spring and a strip of land with it. Later, the spring was destroyed by that same neighbor's Angus cattle. I witnessed it myself. A bright spot to this story is the fact that the man who bought our old home place, I like to believe, had the land surveyed and now has the spring and the strip of land back. He, I'm happy to say, is an excellent caretaker of the old home place.

      In the photo above of Dad and me,  you can see a good part of the old house. It's one of my favorite pictures because it shows how the house looked in 1948. Imagine me, 3 or 4 years later sitting about ten feet from that kitchen window, eating chicken dirt. I call it that because chickens always scratched around in the yard. That's my very first memory, me sitting on the ground looking up at Mom standing in the doorway, and me putting a spoonful of dirt into my mouth. I've repeated this story before but when I look at the photo above that's the memory I get, so, I think it's worth repeating for those of you who hadn't heard it.

(more on page 6.)

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