Ep. 7 - Francis Hebert: Louisiana Freight Train Hobo - Miracles in Meat

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Music.

(00:14):
I'm Shane Thibodaux, fourth generation butcher at one of the oldest meat markets in the world.
My great grandfather started this business by slaughtering one cow or pig at
a time and selling the cuts door to door on horse and buggy.
Today, our products are enjoyed across the globe.
I'll attempt to give you some insight as to how we got here and explore the
challenges we've had along the way.

(00:34):
At Bourgeois, our mission is to preserve our heritage generation after generation
through legendary Cajun flavors and the development of relationships, not customers.
Since 1891, Bourgeois has maintained age-old culinary traditions that fuel the
South Louisiana lifestyle.
Over the past 133 years, our Cajun products have gained global recognition,

(00:55):
and for tens of thousands of
folks around the world, the Bourgeois Cajun Lady logo is a symbol of home.
Today, the fourth-generation butchers sit at the nine-foot maple block with
loyal customers to discuss the adventures, skills, and passions that guide each of their legacies.
These conversations will become priceless resources for future generations of
any industry this is our way of maintaining the spirit purpose and traditions

(01:19):
of our lost arts in a world of change 133.
Music.

(01:48):
All right, episode seven of the Miracles Meet podcast. Today we have Mr. Francis Hebert.
Mr. Francis just turned 96 years old yesterday.
I'm holding in my hand a book written by Mr. Francis that was published, I believe, last year.
So he got a book published at, you know, 94, 95 years old, which is impressive on its own.

(02:13):
But here we go. I'll read the back cover of the book as an intro.
Francis A. Hebert, born 1928 in Southwest Louisiana, self-motivated to make his way early in life.
He was a farm and field worker, freight train hobo, U.S. Army Air Force soldier,
construction worker, trucking business owner, and inventor.
Now, if that doesn't pique your interest, then I don't know what will.

(02:36):
I read his book. If you're in either location, Thibodeau or Gray,
you can find this book on the shelf or near the register somewhere.
Grab it, give it a read, It's not a long one. It's very interesting,
very thought-provoking, and you should have tons of questions after you're done.
And maybe you read it already, and maybe you'll have some of those questions
answered somewhere within this podcast.

(02:59):
It's a long one, so buckle up and get ready, because we'll get into all of those
things I just mentioned. Here we go, Mr. Francis.
Well, so we, you know, I met you through Popeye's Spars.
You were about the same thing? Yep. Yeah, running into Mr. Francis at Spars, if you ever...
If you're ever in Spars, you know, I don't know, before 8 in the morning,

(03:22):
you're going to see Mr. Francis Day. He's going to be sitting. Yeah, I'll go there.
Well, like this morning, I got there at a little bit before 6.
Right. Like about 10 minutes to 6 or something. I leave home at about 20 minutes to 6.
You know, it didn't take me 10 minutes to get there.
And you've been doing that for how many years? A long, long time. I don't. 10 years?

(03:48):
Probably. Yeah. Probably that much, yeah. And our grandpa would go meet you
there almost every morning.
Yeah. And that's how we met. But what's your earliest memories of Pawpaw or
the meat market in general?
Well, I knew it existed. I knew it was there. And I didn't know your grandpa.

(04:09):
I knew him well when I saw him, but I didn't know him well in the early years. You know, I didn't.
And I really started talking.
We really started talking a lot when he would come to spars,
and he'd sit down there, and he was my age. He was a little older than me.

(04:32):
He was three years older than me, and we'd sit down, and we'd talk,
and we got along fine, and we could talk because of the age.
The AIDS thing put us in the same page, you know.
And we could talk about many different things that other people didn't know what we talked about.

(04:53):
And so we got along fine. Yeah, we got along fine. What did y'all mostly talk about?
Well, we talked about like when he started the meat market. He was a butcher.
You know, he would butcher his own cattle. And he did that for a long time.

(05:15):
And he tried.
He told me, he said, you know, when I'd buy cattle a lot of times,
I was the one that had to get him.
I'd have to get the cow or the bull or something.
So he said, I thought I'd get me a horse. And he said, that didn't work. That didn't work at all.

(05:37):
He said, I found out I was not a cowboy.
So then he got a rifle. and then he said i had to pick the damn thing up and
get it in in the trailer you know so he said none of it was great but he said
that's what i did that's what i had to do you know.

(05:57):
Remember i remember one thing he told me one time he said that meat market didn't
just happen and it was work.
It was work and it was continuous.
And he said, I tried many things, many things, in the cooking of sausage and

(06:21):
everything else, boudin and all that stuff, all that cheese.
He said, that didn't just happen. I had to come up with the plan to make that.
And then he said, I had to make something that people bought, people wanted.
You know, it don't matter what your taste is.

(06:43):
It's your customers. You've got to please customers, you know.
And he said, so it didn't just happen. It was a lot of work,
a lot of, he said, I had to do a lot of thinking to come up with what I have now.
And he was already out of it. Your daddy had it at the time. Yeah.

(07:06):
And, yeah, he said it wasn't all that easy. No, no, no.
Now, you were raised in Gibson, right, Mr. Francis?
Yes. I was born and raised in Gibson, yeah. So when was the first time you went into the meat market?
Were you a kid? Were you an adult? No, I was an adult.
Well, hell, I didn't have any money.

(07:29):
And those days money was hard to come by but i was i was a grown person i remembered that,
and the crackling that y'all used to make oh man i ate a lot of them mr cleave
used to make a lot of time i would when i passed that i'd stop just to get me a bag of cracklings,

(07:51):
because they were good. They were good.
And I never heard anybody say they wasn't. They really were good.
And that's the reason why I started stopping there. And your grandpa,
I'd see him sometimes, and all we'd do is say hello.
We didn't have no connection, you might say.

(08:12):
I think the connection...
I saw your grandpa a time or two in his boat, fishing, you know.
But, hell, I see a lot of people.
And your grandpa didn't fish bass too much. He'd fish catfish.

(08:32):
Catfish and perch. Yeah, catfish and perch.
And me, I was bass. I'd fish bass only.
Me unless I wanted to eat fish then I would catch me a few sockeye you know
but at Sparge we'd sit there at the counter and we'd talk and we got to know

(08:53):
each other pretty well and.
We got along just fine we was like I said before the age bracket the age bracket
was such that we could talk Talk about things, you know.
Speaking of age, Mr. Francis, your birthday was yesterday. You're 96.

(09:16):
Happy birthday. Yeah, well, I was 96 yesterday. Yes, sir. That's right.
I heard you went to Spars and they had something special for you.
Well, they had a pie. They made you a pie.
Cool. They never made me a pie, so you must have done something.
They had a pie, a lemon meringue pie, and that sucker was this big, man. Great.

(09:40):
And one of the waitresses there made the pie. And she's a very good cook, very good cook.
And, yeah, they had a very, very nice pie.
Everybody there ate pie.
We should have made it. I'm sorry. I already missed that. Oh,
yeah. They love you over there. They came in. They stopped.
They were talking about the podcast, and we told them you were coming on tomorrow,

(10:04):
and they're excited to hear that.
So they'll all be itching to listen to this.
Yeah. Well, let me see. Han.
You know Han. Yeah, she know you.
Yeah, she told me. She said, Mr. Francis, do you know what that's about? I said, no.
I said, no. I don't know. No. She said, well, she don't laugh.

(10:27):
She said, well, she said, it's nothing that'll bother you.
She said, because you talk all the damn time anyway.
You never shut up. That's funny. You're always talking.
So it'll be right up your alley. And, yeah, she know you all very well.
Oh, yeah. I know this. Yeah.

(10:48):
You know, she's been there a long time. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
She's been there a long, long time.
And she's still there. I talked to her this morning. Talked to her this morning. She was there.
We like that. We always like seeing, you know, when we go in there,
we like seeing you and Papa or whoever, you know, the regulars.

(11:10):
Yeah. The regulars. They got a little spot to drink coffee and BS.
And that's cool. And we, you know, we love to have something like that at the
old market. Some little stools at the counter where people just show up and
have a little coffee. Yeah. Hit the road.
Yeah. That would be really cool. You know, a coffee shop.
For a coffee shop to be success is success.

(11:36):
It's got to be where, I don't know what word to use. I don't know what,
I know what I want to say, but I don't know.
It's got to be a place where people can go and be comfortable.
Yeah. You want to walk in and feel like you walked into your own house.

(11:57):
You can be comfortable. You can sit there and drink coffee, and if you get something
on your chin or something, it don't matter.
Somebody will tell you, wipe your chin.
And everybody there is, oh, we talk about each other all the time.
All the time. That's fun. It's a constant thing.

(12:20):
And nobody leaves mad. It's a constant thing.
And that's the only way it can work. The atmosphere of walking in.
I know some places I don't go because I don't like, I look around and I say,

(12:40):
I ain't got no damn business here.
Everybody else do the same thing. They may not say it, but they feel the same
thing. And they know that.
Spars knows that. Oh, yeah, they know it. They keep it a certain way.
They know it. With intention. They know it.
Don't complicate this. Don't complicate this.

(13:04):
People come here to talk, to visit, and it's something that gets to you.
Like me, I've been going there for a long, long time.
I don't know how many people I met there. Many, many, many.
That I wouldn't have met in my life if I wouldn't have gone there, you know.

(13:25):
And even today, well, your grandpa, your grandpa and I, we got to be pretty good friends.
We talk, oh, we talk, man. We talk.
We say all kinds of stuff. And sometimes I'd be home, you know,
and doing nothing or maybe messing with that book, writing in that book, writing that book.

(13:49):
That was a job, man. That was a lot of work.
The phone would ring, and it was your grandpa. He said, you know who this is?
I said, no, I don't know who it is, but I did know.
Well, he said, this is Lester Bourgeois. That's who the hell this is. And he said, I'm hungry.

(14:12):
I am hungry. I want to go and eat. Can you bring me somewhere where I can eat?
I said, yep. I said, I'll be there shortly. Put my pencil down,
take off, go to his house. And he was there waiting.
Man, he said, I'm hungry. God damn, I'm hungry.

(14:33):
He said, where can I go? I said, well, you got spars unless you want to go somewhere
else. Well, we went to Disalmon's.
You know, we'd leave Cleveland.
I said, by the way, I said, Lester, I said, you're an old man, huh?
Yeah he said I'm getting pretty damn old I said you don't drive do you no I

(14:56):
drove my car in the bayou well yeah that's what he done do you know it in the bayou yeah,
And I said, well, look at me. I said, do you feel comfortable sitting in that
damn passenger seat there?
I said, you might say this is the blind leading the blind.

(15:16):
Because I'm not very far from you, you know. Yeah, he said, I'll watch you.
He said, I'll pay attention. I'll pay attention to you.
Keeping you in check. Yeah, yeah. He said, I'll pay attention to all that you got going.
But that's the way we talk, you know. So it was not the way it's supposed to be, you know.

(15:41):
Or the way at one time, a thousand years ago, that's the way it was.
Men would get together and talk like men, you know.
They didn't make no big deal out of popping them off and trying to make yourself
believe like you're something.
Yeah, what you are, you know. And that's the way it was.

(16:04):
That's just the way it was right there.
It was just as common as that.
So you turned 96 Wednesday, correct?
Yes. And you were born 1928. Yep. And where were you born?
I was born in the house at Gibson, in Gibson.

(16:26):
And that was 1,000 years ago. That's what it looks like. What was it like 1,000 years ago?
What do you remember from your early, early, that's the Depression.
Shane, I'm going to say this.
The difference is huge. I bet.
The difference between now and then is huge.

(16:49):
It's huge, especially in Gibson.
Now, you've got to keep in mind, Gibson was isolated.
It's in the western part of Terrebonne Parish
there was no such thing as jobs around
Gibson unless it was in timber
like the Donner sawmill the Donner sawmill was a cypress mill all they cut was

(17:18):
cypress trees and they hired a lot of people it was a big operation,
Donner was a little community that was built around the sawmill.
When the sawmill left, boom, everything was gone.
There's nothing left, nothing left. But that was the only, you couldn't get a job.

(17:44):
There was no other job until later on, like when I was about seven or eight,
or even before that, maybe six, seven, eight.
Rice fields. In Gibson, they had four rice fields, four of them.
Now, that's a lot of rice.
And I was a kid, and it's in that book.

(18:07):
I was hired to keep the birds.
And those days, they didn't have two or three birds. You'd see a cloud of birds,
red-winged blackbirds.
Man, And the sky was full.
And when they would land on the rice, that weight of the rice,
the stalk would bend, and the seeds would fall in the water, and it would mildew.

(18:35):
The rice would mildew. It was no good.
So keeping the birds out of the rice field was a must.
You had to do it, because they would wipe you out. And that was my job.
You were about seven years old? Yeah. And how would you keep them out?
You'd just go? Yeah, you were just like a big scarecrow? You'd go run around? Oh, no.
You'd shoot them. I had a .22 rifle. Oh, a seven-year-old with a .22.

(18:59):
I had a .22 rifle, a single-shot .22 rifle, and a 12-gauge shotgun, double-barrel.
I'm a little kid, and I'm loaded down with guns and ammunition.
Hell, yeah. I had a bag that would
hang around my neck, and it was full of ammunition, full of ammunition.

(19:22):
Every morning, that rifleman would give me the ammunition, and he said,
this afternoon when you leave, I don't want you to have one shell left.
Not one. That's awesome. You shoot them. Keep the birds out.
And that's what I did. Was it your rifles? Yeah.
Where are they today? You still have them? that rifle

(19:44):
that rifle i believe is in south carolina and it belongs to my sister this is
the story there my daddy when he died he was on his deathbed and he asked me he said,
francis her husband had just died her husband had just died he said look he

(20:10):
said i don't have all that much,
but he said, what I've got, I would like for it to go to my daughter, Alice.
That was my daughter's name, my sister's name.
I said, that's fine with me. That's fine. I said, I think you're right.
So that's what happened. Everything, including that rifle and that shotgun belonged to her.

(20:35):
It was her. He wanted her to have everything. So that, it was hers.
And when she died, which was not that long after herself, she died.
Then it went to her kids.
And her kids were kids, you know.

(20:55):
The property and everything went to her kids. And that's what a rifle is.
And I know, I can't say for sure what's that, but I do know that it was her brother.
It was her brother that got the rifle. That's cool.
Someone still has it. To me, that rifle would be worth a million dollars.

(21:19):
I bet. just to look at it again.
But that's gone. That is gone. That's gone.
So what did your parents do? What did your dad do for a living?
My daddy was, my daddy was,
well, he farmed and he worked for Norman and Burrow Lumber Company with pool

(21:44):
boats that to pull timber out of the swamp.
The big steam engine, you know.
It was a boiler and a steam engine on a barge that was built for that.
And you'd pull the damn big old drums on there.

(22:05):
The cable would go very far out in the swamp, and they had pins on the, they had chains on,
big, great big chains on the cable with pins on them about this long,
and they'd grow a hole in the tree and put the pins in there and you'd pull them.
Pull the logs to the pull boat, which was in a canal in deep water.

(22:31):
And then you would raft the logs up and tow them to the sawmill that was in,
the sawmill was in Morgan City.
And I've seen rafts of logs. Now, this is the truth.
Logs were rafted up in by the black for a mile long.
The raft, they'd make rafts with logs. And I told you, the thing was a mile long, man.

(23:00):
And it, it, it was a long time.
That's the way they did it in those days, and that's what my daddy did.
At first, the job he had while he was doing farming,
and on weekends, he had a job going out there to that pull boat,

(23:25):
and they had a great big camp.
They had a big two-story camp, and he was a watchman over the weekend,
from Friday to Monday because they'd go home on Friday afternoon and they'd come back on Monday.
Well, that was his job.
And then later on, the engineer that was actually operating the engine,

(23:51):
I don't know what happened to him, to tell you the truth, I don't remember.
But he left and my dad took over his job running the engine.
And that was until every last log was pulled out of the swamp.
Norman and Bro was not a cypress deal.

(24:12):
It was tupler. They cut down tupler trees and they would haul the tupler trees out.
Didn't mess with no cypress at all. It was just tupler.
And some big ones. I mean, great, big logs.
And until that run out then there was nothing that was nothing but it wasn't

(24:37):
long it wasn't long after that,
that the second world war was in the beginning the second world war was when
Germany that's what created.
That's what created the second world war the Germans took Poland, and when that happened,

(25:00):
England knew that they were going to be in the bullseye because that's what Hitler wanted.
He wanted England, and he wanted it for a very good purpose.
That was to keep the United States from having a place to land,
place to work out of, and...

(25:25):
Created jobs, like the P.T. boat.
The P.T. boat was built in New Orleans, and it gave a lot of work.
That was a lot of work for people.
And then they made dry docks, what they call floating dry docks.
And floating dry docks were the two huge barges that had an opening in the middle.

(25:51):
They were hooked together and they could actually pick up a ship in the ocean.
They called it the dry dock. It was a floating dry dock. They made that.
A lot of the parts for it was made in Morgan City.
And a lot of work, man. Lots of work. Seven days a week. War.

(26:12):
The war. That gave people jobs.
And that's when the American people changed. right there.
Take my word for it. There was a change in the air.
People started to act different. They started to be different.

(26:32):
They had a job to go to. They're making money.
They could do things that they didn't dream about doing before.
And the American people People started to change.
Look, I say this just the way I'm saying it because I, my young, I could see it.

(26:56):
I could see the change. It was like a cloud on the horizon. It was changing.
And would you believe that it has never stopped? never stop changing changing
right it has never ever stopped,

(27:20):
People change, change, change, change, and they still are. People are changing.
I don't know why. I don't know why.
You see, old, I want to tell you this because it's the truth.
Because one day you're going to be old. I hope so. If we do something right.

(27:43):
Yeah. Yeah, you're going to be old.
And I do believe that you're going to look back and say,
older people are treated different okay i know that i see it i know it i feel
it and i know it older people have a tendency and i try very hard not to let myself fall in that rut,

(28:08):
old people have a tendency to be a little bit strange to young people not necessarily
in a way that you would say it's strange because you're crazy or nothing. No.
We don't think the same. We know we don't think the same. We know we're not the same.

(28:29):
And we know we're old. There's a difference. There is something in the air.
It's a change. But Shane, you know, I say this, and I always will say it,
because it's true. The American people are changing right now.
I don't know if you watch the news.

(28:51):
Like this morning in Washington, D.C., people were protesting Israel and I don't know what else.
Burning flags, defacing government property, including the Liberty Bell.
Well, they spray painted the Liberty Bell, wrote a lot of different things on it that was not good.

(29:16):
People are demonstrating today. People call a demonstration today anything they want to do.
They don't want to set fire to your place. They set fire to it.
It's not right. It's not right. It's just not right.
I don't know why it's that way. Except I know this.

(29:40):
I'm going to say something that's going to sound very strange.
There are no more John Waynes, okay?
Now, that may sound ignorant.
It may sound dumb.
But the West was the West. Yes, our country, the western part of our country,

(30:06):
was tamed by less than 10% of the people.
The others were hiding behind rocks, hoping that everything would fall in a pleasant way for them.
But there's a very few that put their neck out there to make the change that

(30:29):
needed to be made to get where it is now.
To get where it is now. That was the beginning of getting where it is now.
And they got people today that would destroy it like that.
It kind of goes back to what you said earlier. You were talking about the officer.
They had so much time to think and think and think and think because they want the perfect plan.

(30:53):
Yeah, yeah. When you come in and you just have a plan and you do it now.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. I've heard that said before that a decent decision
now on time is much better than the perfect decision too late.
Oh, yes. Absolutely. Absolutely, absolutely.
Yeah, it goes, it's like what we said with the officer.

(31:13):
A lot of officers, they want to have the decision.
That's the only decision is the right decision. Well, they don't want to be
wrong. And it comes too late sometimes.
Yes, yes, yes. And the case you're talking about was very, very serious.
Because you got to keep in mind, We were there, and the daytime over there was 24 hours a day.

(31:41):
And then little by little, it would start getting dark.
And then after a while, it was about two months' time. It took about two months.
But in a little time, there was no daylight at all. It was dark.
And an airplane could not get to us.
And the only way out was an airplane that you could not get out in well,

(32:06):
you could get out with dog's legs.
We didn't have the sled and we didn't have the dog. So it was a must that that airplane be moved.
It had to be moved now because the airplanes that are due to come and get us

(32:28):
are waiting in Newfoundland.
Newfoundland was way east of where we were. And they can't go anywhere until
that plane is off the runway.
Because the plane was right in the middle of the runway. So it was,
look, everybody said, boy, we're in trouble.

(32:50):
If that plane is not moved, and if it's not moved in a hurry,
they won't be able to come get us.
We're going to have to spend the winter here in the dark, however way we could.
And nobody wanted that. Nobody wanted that. And, of course, a lot of the people,

(33:13):
and that included the officers, wanted to go home.
They had been there seven months. Right. And we were isolated on this island.
And myself, I didn't care.
I really didn't. I was having fun.
I probably would have cared if the airplane couldn't come and get us because

(33:38):
the dark, hell, it would have been hell. It wouldn't have been good.
So it had to be done. Yeah, and you stuck your neck out, you stepped up,
and you made something happen.
I looked at it. When I got there, I looked at it, and I said,
well, this is not a problem.
I said, it's not a problem at all.

(34:01):
I said I didn't move it in less than two hours And the major heard me And that's
how I got started That's how I got mixed up in Because he said you better be able to move.
So let's go back to Seven years old And maybe a little bit after that I know
because I read some of the book And I know From some of the stories I've heard,

(34:26):
But you got out of here You left Gibson Yeah Yeah. And?
I left Gibson and went on a tugboat. That was your first time out of Gibson? Yeah. Tugboat. How old?
12 years old. 12 years old. And in those days, remember, the war had started already.
Not with Japan. Mm-hmm. Not with Japan.

(34:48):
But in Europe. In Europe, you know, the United States never did declare war in Europe.
It was, I don't know, they had a name for it. I don't quite remember what it
was now, but they didn't declare war in Europe.
And they said that they had a political reason to do that.

(35:09):
And anyway, they did. But when I was 12 years old, all the grown men that could
be a soldier was being drafted.
This would have been in 40, 1940?
Oh, yeah. It would have been in.
Yeah. The war was 41 to 43? Huh?
41 to 43 was the war. Yeah, something like that. So you'd have been getting ready, getting ready.

(35:34):
Okay, so you leave Gibson, and you hit a tugboat to do what?
Well, we were moving oil barges. So you had a job. Yes, I had a job,
Ben. Can you imagine that?
And I was making, I thought I was making lots of money.
And I was making money, yeah. I had a job. and moving barges,

(35:54):
oil, you know, everything.
Just, I would say that 90% of what we did was oil-related, you know, oil-related. Right.
Or maybe gas, because we did move gas barges, barges loaded with gas,
aviation gas and or vehicle gas, because there's a difference.

(36:19):
And that's what we did. That's what we did. And where were you moving to and from?
Well, Sun Oil Company, I'm sure you remember that. You've seen that name.
Okay, yeah. Sun Oil Company had an oil field in Chacahoula.

(36:39):
And the oil field in Chacahoula, they put in a pipeline to some big tanks.
And the tanks are still there in Gibson in the front of my daddy's house.
And that tugboat used to come and pick the barges up.
And what was a 12? So what were you doing at 12? What did they have you doing?

(37:03):
What was your job? I was what they called a deckhand.
So anything and everything. Everything, everything, everything, everything.
But I wanted to go in the engine room. I wanted to be, I wanted to operate the
engine and I knew it was going to take a while.
But after about seven or eight months, something happened that I just remember

(37:27):
now, that the engineer quit, or he got fired, one or the other, I don't remember.
And the skipper asked me, he said, you think you can operate that engine? And I said, I know I can.
Do you know all the bells and the whistles? They said, yep, I know every one.
Okay. And did you? Oh, I did. I knew every sound that had to be listened to.

(37:55):
The skipper was in the wheelhouse, and the engine is way down in the hole down
there below water level.
You look out of the porthole, and in rough water, you see water. That's what you see.
Signals, the skipper would send signals with a bell.

(38:19):
He'd ring a bell, and that bell would tell you what to do.
Forward, reverse, slow, medium, fast.
Everything that you needed to know came from that bell.
And it was a bell about this big with two hammers on it, two hammers,

(38:40):
one on each side like that.
And that's the way I got my direction.
What to do with just two hammers. And you learn that real quick. It's no big deal.
But don't make no mistake. Oh, you make a mistake, all hell breaks loose, you know.

(39:00):
Because if a tugboat needs to back up, it better back up, not go forward, you know.
Because it's been damaged. So now you're 12 and you're on the tugboats and you
made another move after that. You got out of state.
How did that come to be? I got out of what? When did you get out of Louisiana?

(39:22):
That was a train ride. But that was how long after this? I stayed on that tugboat about two years.
And I was in Plaquemine, Louisiana. I remember Plaquemine.
It was in Plaquemine, Louisiana. Louisiana, and Plaquemines had a locks,
a set of locks that you could get into the Mississippi River,

(39:45):
or if you were in the Mississippi, you could get out through the locks.
And we were coming out of the locks into Plaquemines, and how about that on those barges?
Saying, you know what? I kind of like the job, but it's getting to be dull,
you know? It's getting to be.

(40:07):
I want to do something there. I'm going to ride trains.
That's when I made the decision right there in Plaquemine, Louisiana.
What did you know about trains? Did you know someone else who had done it?
No. No. You just seen a train on a track. I saw them all my life.
And you just thought you wanted to get on one. The train used to pass.

(40:30):
I could see the trains pass from the house where I lived in Gibson in the day.
And they had a lot of trains.
Well, you see one train a day that used to be five or six in my day.
There was a lot of trains.
And I used to say to myself, that's my way out of this town.

(40:51):
That's my way out of Gibson.
And I kept thinking about that. And I said, well, that's what I did.
I jumped the freight train and I got on the freight train I didn't know nothing
what train was it do you remember no no and.

(41:13):
It's not the same company it's today gotcha like Southern Pacific Southern Pacific
I was I knew that name like I knew my own because I used to watch them and the
name The name of the company was the Southern Pacific,
and it went all the way to the West Coast.

(41:36):
And I said, that's the one I want right there. And...
So to ride a freight train,
it's not like taking a trip in a car or anything else,
anything else at all, because you normally want to find a boxcar to get in,

(42:01):
because you got weather, you got rain, you got hot sun, you got everything. thing.
The boxcar was your refuge, you know.
And when it got dark at night, you need to sleep. You need rest, you know.
And you rested as good as you could in the boxcar.
So that meant that you didn't see where you were.

(42:24):
The train is traveling 50, 60 miles an hour, and you're not show where you are.
You have no signs. There are no signs along the railroad telling you the name of anything.
The only thing that you could get the name of the nearby city or town was a water tower.

(42:46):
If you'd pass right next to it, you could see it.
If you passed close enough to a water tower to see the name written on the water
tower, you knew where you were.
What's the first water tower you remember seeing? The first water tower,
I was way far from home, way far from home when I saw this name.

(43:08):
And it was Santa Fe.
The Santa Fe at one time was a train company.
Mm-hmm.
You see how it goes now? The Memphis and something like Memphis and Topeka Santa Fe.

(43:36):
That was Memphis, Topeka, Santa Fe. That's it right there.
I remember that. I remember seeing that Santa Fe.
That was in New Mexico.
That's how far away I was from home. And, all right, you get on a train for

(43:57):
the first time. You were about 15, right?
Oh, I was less than that.
I was traveling near. I was in my 13th year.
All right. And you get on it, and you just know that you're going towards the
West Coast, right? Or did you have a destination?
No, I had no destination. destination well yes i
did have a destination i wanted to go as far as

(44:20):
the trains went and that
was the pacific ocean they went to all to los angeles and that you couldn't
go no further than that and and what was the motivation to do this job or just
did you wanted a different different view i just wanted to do it,

(44:42):
saying, I want to do this. I want to ride these damn trains and I want to see
what's left in the world.
I was so used to Gibson with nothing.
I wanted to see what the world was like. You didn't know anyone that had gone?
No, no, no, no. So you can't ask your buddy what it's like? No,

(45:04):
no, no, no, no, no. There ain't nobody. You can't?
Yeah. You didn't know.
The only The only person that you debated anything with was yourself.
Nobody. You debated things with yourself.
And you didn't have no time set up to do it.

(45:25):
You got up, or if you were in a boxcar and you woke up in the morning,
sometimes the train was moving, sometimes it wasn't.
You'd say, well, let me look around and see what's going on.
And you'd pay attention to the whistle. always listen for
the whistle because the whistles it's what the train is going to do you know

(45:46):
oh yeah you learn those whistles quick you'd get off you'd stop in the city
and you'd get off and maybe find some work find a job i did it several times
several times and i stayed there,
The first time that I got off a train looking for work was I was in, I needed to eat bad.

(46:09):
I was, you know, you got no food. You got no food.
You get weak and you get, you got to eat.
And I got off the train in the biggest little city in the world.
And I didn't have to walk but about two or three hundred yards and in those

(46:31):
days they had service stations, you know, service stations.
Not what you see today. Yeah, you put your car up there and somebody would put
the fuel in the car, check the cars, the oil and all that, clean the windshield.
They had somebody there to do that and I went to I saw that station and I needed

(46:59):
to eat and I needed water so I got both I got the water and I actually got a middle aged man.
You know, if he had a job, he'd say, well, what do you want to do?
I said, I'll do anything for food. I don't want no money, just food. I'm hungry. All right.

(47:22):
See, the next time a car comes in here, you ask him what he wants, do what he wants.
Whatever he tells you, you do.
If he wants the windshield clean, you do it.
And put gas in the car, and you collect the money. him.
Oh, I said, this sounds like all right. And I was familiar somewhat with service stations.

(47:47):
Not that I worked there, but I was familiar with them.
So I did that, and when it got dark and he was going to close the station,
he said, where are you going to sleep tonight, boy?
I said, wherever I can.
He said, well, he said, if you want we can sleep right back here.

(48:09):
And the shop. Well, that was a good start. That was as good as he'd get. I was off the ground.
I didn't have to worry about no nothing, getting the best of me, and it worked out good.
The man's name was Mr. Bevilacca. Can you imagine? I remember that name.

(48:34):
His name was Bevilacca. He was a foreigner, and you could tell he was a foreigner.
You could tell the way he acted, the way he walked, the way he talked and all of that.
But a very nice fellow, a very nice fellow and he had several service stations. He had more than one.
And he had a plant. He had his own tanks and delivery, both plants that he would

(49:01):
furnish his own restaurants.
I mean, own service stations and he had a house-moving business, moving holidays.
I worked at everything. Man, I did every damn thing. So you stayed there a while.
Yeah, I stayed there a while.
I stayed there a while, and I liked it there, man.

(49:24):
Hell, I said, this was something for me, man. Hell.
While you were there, the train you got on, it goes and does it come?
I'd see them pass all day. Would you ever see the same train you got on?
Oh, no. Well, you couldn't tell.
You wouldn't know? Oh, yeah. No, you couldn't tell. No. They all look the same.

(49:47):
But that's the place. And I got that in that book.
What made me leave, what made me leave was I was told by an elder,
an old man that worked for him.

(50:08):
You know we talk you know on the
side nobody hears he said
i guess you know that the reason why that old man treats you the way he do is
because you look just like his son and his son just got killed in the navy and
his wife was the same way i noticed that when she'd give me food to eat all the time.

(50:33):
And I noticed that his wife would look at me strange, you know. And I say, you know what?
This is not going to work. I got to get away from here.
I can't. To me, this was a rainbow.
It was the part of the day that a rainbow, man. Everything was going good.

(50:55):
But I couldn't stay there. It didn't feel right. No, no, no,
no, no, no. All right, where you went next?
I took a ride. Look, I had money. Hey, I had money. How much money?
I probably had around $200, because he would pay me $6 a day,

(51:19):
and he'd give me food, and he would buy my dinner, you know, my dinner.
Not the breakfast or supper, but my dinner.
So, hell, I had money. I didn't go nowhere. I didn't have nothing to do,
you know. Nothing to do but work.
I bought a ticket, and I went almost into Canada on a Greyhound bus.

(51:44):
And then I said, you know what? I don't want to ride that damn bus here.
All these damn people around me.
I got off, and I started checking the railroad. wrong.
It wasn't long, I found a switchyard. I was told what a switchyard was, and I walked there.

(52:06):
And sure enough, I got in that switchyard, and sooner or later,
a train pulled up and stopped to put water.
You know, a steam engine's got to have a lot of water.
And they get a lot of coal, too.
They got to refurbish the coal car. and I got on the train and I was following

(52:28):
the Canadian border into Montana, Wisconsin.
I remember going into, I remember passing by the stock, you say,
look, you want to talk about stockyard in Chicago?
Maybe you read about those things. Man, they had 10 miles of stockyard, cattle.

(52:52):
Cattle, man, God damn. There was cattle everywhere, a stockyard,
you know, and the train passed right by.
And the train was going east, and I said, you know, I don't want to go east.
The eastern part of the United States didn't interest me no whole lot.

(53:14):
So I got off again, and I hitchhiked all the way to, I wound up in Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
And I caught a ride there on a train. You see, a long time ago,
they didn't have trains from the north to the south.

(53:34):
All train lines went east and west. You either went west or you went east, one or the other.
But they didn't have, they didn't go south.
They didn't do that. I don't think they do much today. I don't think so.
That's what I did. And Santa Fe, New Mexico in those days wasn't much, no.

(53:58):
When you got on that first train, or let's call it the second.
No, when you got on the Greyhound, you bought that bus ticket.
What kind of looks are you getting when you're a young kid and you're traveling around by yourself?
Are you getting looks or is that a normal thing? And you see other kids on their
own running away from home.
Now, come again? When you got on that bus, nobody looked at you funny? Oh, yeah, I was dirty.

(54:24):
They asked where your family was and where you lived? No, no, no, no.
I never, ever had that happen.
The only thing that ever happened, because I was a bum, because that's what I was.
Man, I was a railroad bum. You were a hobo. A hobo.
Where I was hitchhiking to get

(54:45):
to a switchyard and a deputy passed and he stopped and he picked me up.
And he wasn't talkative very much.
He said, look, he said, I'm not going to ask you a whole lot,
but I'm going to tell you one thing.
I am going to take you through that little town.

(55:06):
I'm going to take you through there and I'm going to drop you off where you can get on a train.
And he said, but if you turn around and come back to that little town,
I'm going to put your ass in jail.
Don't do it. Don't do it.
To myself, good old America. I'm going to get put in jail if I go back to town.

(55:29):
And I knew I was laughing about it too. I was laughing to myself.
Hell, I look bad, man. I was in bad shape.
Clothes, shoes, and everything else. Did you have anything with you? No. No.
Pocket knife? Nothing.

(55:51):
What other kind of jobs did you pick up? One job I picked up was in California on Sunset Boulevard.
I worked as a busboy in a restaurant.
And I mean a nice place, considering the time it was, you know.

(56:16):
This was a hell of a nice place. Great, great, big restaurant.
And the one thing I do remember, they had a lot of mirrors on the wall.
They had sections of the wall that was all mirrors.
You could see the front of you. You could see the back of you.

(56:36):
You look up, you could see yourself from there.
You could see from the top. They had mirrors above you. The damn district,
it was a hell of a nice place.
And it was all for rich people, you know.
But I was a busboy, and I stayed there a long time. I say I stayed there a long
time. I stayed there over two months.

(56:57):
I know it was over two months. Make any friends?
I guess you might call it friends, but an acquaintance, you know.
When you traveled, you know, doing the trains and the buses,
you were always by yourself? Yes, by myself.
I did not want nobody around me at all.
Nobody. Did people try? Did you ever have another hobo want to join you?

(57:20):
There were several trains I was on. I knew that they had a couple of hobos on
it. No, we didn't make them.
They were just more or less like me. They didn't want no company.
I guess it's competition, right? If you have another hobo with you and you stop
at a new town and you try to get a job, they might get the job.
Well, that could happen.

(57:41):
You probably don't want that. That could happen. Now, you got to remember,
a long time ago, they had what they called the hobo jungle.
Hobo Jungle was a place where hobos, you know, got together.
They would get together. They would find out where this place was one way or another.

(58:06):
And they had food. I've looked into this.
This is a place where they could easily get on and off the trains undetected, correct?
That's right. And another thing, the town next door, which wasn't very far,
would furnish groceries to keep you awake.

(58:28):
Yeah, don't come to town. Oh, no, no, don't. If we see you in town,
we're going to beat the devil out of you.
That they would bring food, potatoes, onions, and cabbage, and food that you
could cook beans, pretty much all kinds of stuff like that, stuff that didn't need refrigeration.

(58:49):
And, oh, yeah, and you could cook.
They had frying pans and stuff, and they'd give us oil, cooking oil and stuff.
It was okay. They called it the hobo jungle, and it was a safe place you could
sleep, and I never heard of any one hobo trying to hurt another one or stealing.

(59:14):
Hell, nobody had nothing you could steal.
I read that there's a hobo code of ethics.
There's 15 rules that you have to follow if you want to be a hobo.
Well, I heard of them. You might have written it. I don't know. No, no, no.
I've heard of them, you know, and one of them is, you shut up unless you act.

(59:41):
If somebody asks you something, you answer.
And the other one is, don't think you're welcome.
Don't never walk up to a hobo and think you're welcome. He probably don't want to see you.
He's got nothing to say to you. He knows your condition, you know his.
That's all. That's it. and where you're going is not important.

(01:00:04):
Not important to him or, you know, where he's going is not important to you.
So you're by yourself. You're by yourself. That's all there is to it. One time I was...
I was in a gondola, and the guy was coming.
He was walking on top of the train, and when he got in the gondola, he saw me.

(01:00:28):
He didn't see me until he got there, and he got in, and he passed by me.
Going to the other end of the gondola, he was going to keep going,
you know, getting on the top, going on the train.
And he turned around and looked at me. He said, I've never seen a little boy, no boy before.

(01:00:55):
Did somebody put you on this train? Yeah. Hell, I was young.
I was young, very young. He said, I never saw a boy riding on a train.
Did somebody put you on this train? and I started to say something and he turned around and left.

(01:01:16):
That was the only mention of ever.
Look, I was about 13 and a half years old, something like that.
I wasn't very old. No, I was a kid. That's what I was.
And he looked at me and he said, did somebody put you on the trip? I said, no.
Did you have a nickname? Never did.

(01:01:38):
Never did. Never did. I read that a lot of hobos have nicknames.
No, I myself, look.
Hobo Jungle one time, I didn't like it.
I didn't like it because there were other people there. I thought it would,
there might have been 15, you know.

(01:02:01):
And they were all much older than me. All much older than me.
I didn't have no conversation.
I couldn't say that I could have a conversation with them. I didn't have a,
you know, because of the age difference, you know.
And I always was, Because even today, I'm by myself.

(01:02:22):
I don't want a crowd around me. I like to be, people say, how in the hell do you live by yourself?
I say, it's very easy, very easy.
And I live by myself today, right today, right now. And I always,
I was, when I was a kid, I was never home.

(01:02:45):
I was by myself. i didn't have no friends
and riding the railroad no
friends i didn't want none i didn't
i didn't i didn't i didn't want to see nobody i didn't
i didn't care you know didn't matter it just
didn't matter that's all this dude you know so you remember the guy from the

(01:03:06):
first place you got off on the train but do you you remember any other names
or people you met along yes uh uh This guy was a...
I went to his house.
Was his damn name. I knew his name all my life. I knew this guy's name. He was a...

(01:03:31):
You know, I'm sure you've seen pictures or read about it or maybe in the movies.
What they call a tree topper. They climbed the tree.
In those days, there were no chainsaws. It was by hand.
They hanged the saw on that belt and they'd climb a tree way to the top and

(01:03:57):
they knew where to cut it, you know.
And they'd cut the top of the tree off. The whole damn top would come down.
And the reason they were doing that was the tree's tall.
We're talking about trees 125, 150 feet low.
Tall, you know. And if you cut them and when they fall down,

(01:04:22):
they'll break because of the speed they fall and the lance, they'll break or they'll split,
which will ruin the timber.
So they cut the top off to make sure that didn't happen.
And that's what he did for a living. In those days, there was a lot of that
going on. He was a tree topper.

(01:04:44):
He was not very big, but a very powerful built man. You can tell he's a very strong man.
I'm trying to think of his damn name. Well, you stayed with him. You stayed at his house?
Yeah, I stayed at his house. Did some work? Yeah. Oh, yeah, we worked with him all the time.

(01:05:05):
That's the way I earned my food.
So, how'd you get from the hoboing to your time in the service?
Well dad a a a a a a his name was maybe I'll not say his name but.

(01:05:28):
The family well. I knew the family well from before I left Gibson.
And he wanted to go in the service.
He wanted to go in the service and he was old enough. He was 18.
But I wasn't. I tried but they wouldn't take me, you know.

(01:05:52):
And they just kept putting me off, kept putting me off, kept putting me off.
And one day, one of them told me, he said, look, he said, you've been bossing us for a year.
Get your daddy to sign some, they gave me the papers.
He said, you get your daddy to look at these papers here.

(01:06:14):
And he said, if he want to sign them, you come back here and tell us,
and we'll go over there, and he can sign them with us, and you're going to be in the Army. me.
So I said, okay. And I did just that. And I went in the army.
You had gotten back home. How did you get back home? I skipped that part.

(01:06:36):
So you came back home from the West Coast. Oh, yeah. You came back home and then joined the army.
The last trip I took coming back home is, It was one that I remember well,
because certain things happened.
You know, a train ride is repetition, you know, repetition.

(01:07:00):
What you did yesterday is pretty much what you're going to do today.
You're just not going to be in the same place, that's all.
But on this trip, I got on a train.
I got on a train in Lake Charles. I'm on my way back,

(01:07:20):
to New Iberia. I didn't know I was in New Iberia. I didn't have no idea where the hell I was at.
But it was in the morning, it was at night, it was dark and I could hear the
roosters crowing and I could hear dogs barking.
Rooster crowing and dogs barking. And I said, oh damn, I'm not in town because

(01:07:45):
they don't have no roosters in town much.
So I got out of the boxcar, and I started walking down the track,
and I could tell it was daybreak.
You know, I could tell the weather from night to day.
And he got a fella, I noticed, in the back of me following me.

(01:08:06):
And he got a lantern. He got a railroad lantern. And that's why I knew he worked for the railroad.
Because he had a railroad lantern.
It was red and green. One side was green, one side was red.
So I slowed down, and he caught up with me, and he was checking the switches.

(01:08:27):
You know the switches that let trains on and off the main line?
And he was doing something.
They had a bunch of them in that area, and he was checking them.
So when he got to me, he asked me a few words, you know, not much.
And I asked him, I said, what time will the next train pass going east?

(01:08:53):
He said, well, he said, it'll be right around 8 o'clock. Well,
that didn't mean nothing to me. I didn't have no watch.
Now, listen, he said, this is a true train.
This train left Lake Charles, and when it left Lake Charles,

(01:09:15):
it's not going to stop until it gets to Avondale, or Avondale by the Hurlone Bridge.
He said, it's going to don't stop anywhere.
I said, well, no, I don't need that. I said, how fast is it going?
And he said, look, he said, the speed limit here right where you're standing

(01:09:35):
for that train is 30 miles an hour. What?
30 miles an hour is fast.
He said, look, he said, to get on it, you got to be damn good.
And he said, if you got to get off of it before it get to Avondale,
you better be damn good, too, because it's not going to slow down much.

(01:09:58):
So I said, well, we'll see. So he left, and he went back to his house.
He had an old house, not far from the track. That's where he came from.
And after a while, he come back.
And he had a paper bag in his hand, and he handed it to me and said, Here.
He said, I know you're hungry. I said, Oh, yeah.

(01:10:20):
And it was a sandwich, homemade bread and salt meat, which was very popular
in those days, you know, very popular.
You salt meat uh didn't need no refrigeration you know and it's self-preserving
man i ate that sandwich god help me i could have ate i could still be eating that.

(01:10:44):
That was the best savage I ever ate in my life.
And I ate that darn thing. And sure enough, it wasn't, it was a wall. It was a wall.
But I heard that train coming. I could hear that damn train getting mild.
I said, well, here comes the, hey, look. Now we'll find out if you are a hobo.

(01:11:09):
Man, that train come down and he slowed down, slowed down. And when you're a
hobo, you know what the train is doing.
You can instantly tell.
You can tell by the sound and the couplings.
From one link to another, you can tell by the sound they make.
He's slowing down. He's slowing down. He's slowing down. He's slowing down.

(01:11:33):
I said, I'm going to get on that damn train. When they passed by me,
I picked up a stick. I looked at a stick that I was going to catch.
I took off running as fast as I could run.
And when that step got past Bob and I reached out and grabbed it,
like to pull both arms off, man.
And I went sailing through the air. It wasn't the first time that happened.

(01:11:56):
But in this time, I was like Superman, man.
I hit the ground and flipped over and turned there.
I said, well, I didn't break nothing. That's good. I got up, looked around.
He said, I'm going to get on in there. God damn, I got after it again.
The second time I grabbed it and held on.

(01:12:19):
I was like a flag flyer.
And that's why those school kids were throwing rocks at me.
School kids going to school. They just saw a hobo flying through the air. Yeah. Perfect target.
Yeah. The school kids going to school had to wait till the train passed so that

(01:12:39):
they could continue their walk to school.
And they'd take them down railroad rock. Bang! I'd hear them hitting the side.
I'd hear them hit the boxcar, you know.
I said, that's what I need. And send them a picture, shoot them, throw rocks at me.
But anyway, I climbed up on the top. at about the car, and I turned around and waved at him.

(01:13:03):
I said, you're the one who's got a problem, buddy, not me.
I said, you're the one with the problem. That's what I'm saying to myself.
And the train was gone, and it showed up. They never stopped.
Never stopped, nowhere.
It passed through Gifton, Georgia, 70 miles an hour.
Never slowed down, nothing.

(01:13:23):
But when he got to Shreve, you see, at one time, there were three switch tracks
in Shreve. I think they're still there.
They're not used, but they were still there. Three switches.
And the speed limit anywhere, the speed limit for a train when they pass a switch

(01:13:44):
line is 25 miles an hour. That's what it is.
25 miles an hour is faster than you think. That's like jumping off of a running horse.
You know, a horse run, normal run is about 25 miles an hour.
That's like jumping off that horse.

(01:14:06):
I said, well, here we go. When he got to Treva, I said, I've got to get off,
because it ain't going to stop till he gets to Avondale, and I don't feel like hitchhiking back.
So I jumped off. Oh, what a jump.
I hit the ground so hard and i tumbled and tumbled and tumbled and tumbled wound up in some bushes,

(01:14:31):
right there was solar coal got down off it right right there was solar coal
shopping and why i jumped off man i found out i found out then buddy,
It kind of knocked me out. It took me a little while to get my directions.

(01:14:52):
And then I walked to Chacahoula. And when I got to Chacahoula,
they had a fellow that I used to go to school with many years before.
And he had an old truck. And he said, get in. I'll take you.
He said, I'll take you to Gibson. I said, okay. He brought me home.
The fellow's name was Como. I don't remember his first name,

(01:15:15):
but his last name was Como.
So when I was a kid, maybe before high school, I must have been 15.
Me and my friends, we would go to the Schriever tracks right there.
My mom lives on 20. And we would go, and sometimes the trains would link up
somewhere around there.

(01:15:36):
So they might come to a stop, link, and then go back the other way.
Yeah yeah and they might go link something this way and then go back this way yeah yeah yeah but,
we've been known to get on them and and ride them
around yeah and we would we'd like to get on them ride them
down the back project and then jump off and then we would start making our way
back and if one comes this way we'll come on yeah and a couple times we found

(01:15:59):
a big chain of like flat just flat beds just just nothing yeah and while they're
still going slow we would get on them and And once they start picking up speed,
we would run across the flatbed and we would jump the gaps. Yeah.
Kind of like a train treadmill.
Yeah, yeah. And we did that. And a couple of times we had too much fun for too

(01:16:20):
long and it started to pick up speed and we'd have to just jump off and roll.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we wasn't going 25 like you were, but I've had that.
I know what it feels like to jump off of a train. Yeah. Yeah, you jump off.
Look, when you're on a freight train...

(01:16:42):
You got to be careful about one thing. You never jump off the back end of a car.
No kind of car. Like a boxcar. You never get, if the train is headed this way,
you don't get on the back end of a boxcar to jump off. Or to jump on.

(01:17:04):
No, you don't do that. Especially to jump on.
Jumping off is bad but jumping on you what happens if you don't make it you you dead.
That's that's what happened if you don't hold on to that rail when you jump

(01:17:25):
off and you jump on the back end you're going to swing around between you're
going to swing around in the gap between the two cars,
and that's all wheels down there.
Those wheels are right there.
You jump off right here, and those wheels are right there.

(01:17:45):
You don't have to make but just a short.
The ladder is right at the end of the boxcar.
Well, if you can't hold on and you fall off, your body is swinging just like
a gate, and you fall off right on the rail. It's over.
It's over. You learned that just by watching.

(01:18:07):
I wonder if those boys remember throwing rocks at you today.
I wonder if they think about it.
You know, I don't know. That's a good question. I don't know.
They were having fun throwing rocks. I bet.
I bet they were. They were having fun throwing rocks at me. I guarantee you
that. And it was boys and girls.

(01:18:29):
Man, look. They had a whole bunch of them walking to school. Ooh.
Throwing them rocks at. Let's get into the military. You got your signature.
Yeah. And then you went, where'd you go next?
I went to Shepherd Field, Texas. Had some training. That's where you did boot camp.
That's where boot camp was, Shepherd Field, Texas. And after boot camp?

(01:18:52):
After boot camp, I went to, to tell you the truth, after boot camp, I went to Florida.
But for just a little while, because then they shipped me from Florida to Washington State.
Can you imagine it? And I went to school over there, and it was heavy equipment school, big engines,

(01:19:21):
and big machinery that was used to build runways, drag lines, dozers,
everything that was used to build runways.
And I stayed there in Spokane, Washington. That's where I was.

(01:19:43):
The name of the field was Geiger Field.
Geiger Field in Spokane, Washington. I stayed there about two and a half months,
I guess, something like that. And then went back to Florida.
And then it wasn't long, they sent me to Tucson, Arizona.
School? Yeah. And it was all Indian. Everything was diesel engine.

(01:20:12):
Did make us tie down a brand new engine. Oh, they had engines there.
Several names of the day that got that done.
You see, General Motors later on called that engine GM.

(01:20:32):
General Motors, you know. They called that engine GM.
But in those days, it was Gray Marine, Gray, G-R-E-Y, Marine.
We had to tie the engine down. I mean, every boat,
tie it down and then put it back up and step by step by step by step and then run it, run the engine.

(01:21:01):
It was on a stand, radiator and everything, crank it up, make it run.
And after school, where'd you head? I went back to Florida.
And this was your base. You were stationed. That was my base, Florida.
MacDill Field, Florida.
And that is where, it wasn't long after that.

(01:21:27):
To my first trip to the Arctic. My first trip to the Arctic was not the North Pole.
It was, the name of the place was Crystal One.
They had three crystals, one, two, and three. And that was on what they called the Crimson Trail.

(01:21:50):
Now the Crimson Trail was for the airplanes that were built, war planes.
Planes in the United States went to Europe, and they'd have to cross Canada
to get to Newfoundland, and then they would cross.
Your dad, by the way, your grandpa was in India.

(01:22:15):
He knew about those planes. Those planes would come through,
they'd leave Newfoundland, and they would go to India, to a base in India because
the Germans wouldn't shoot them down there or they wasn't there.
And that's the route they took, Crimson Trail. And they had three different places in Canada.

(01:22:41):
That was there to refuel or if they had problems or whatever,
they could get it done. They could land. They had a runway.
Well, that's where we went. I went to Crystal One.
Crystal One was right on the tree line.
You see the Arctic in Canada and Alaska, the same thing.

(01:23:07):
You got different things.
You got trees. It starts off with trees. And lots of them. All kinds.
Pine trees, spruce trees. all kind of trees, redwood and everything else that
people saw and used for lumber.

(01:23:28):
But then there's another stage, another stage, another stage.
Crystal One was at the stage where there was bushes, just bushes, no trees.
No trees at all. It was just bushes about three or four feet high.
Three or four feet high, that was the maximum. and the ground was very soft.

(01:23:50):
The ground was very spongy because it was permafrost.
The ground used to freeze, you know, and then when it would thaw out, it was spongy.
That was my first trip to the Arctic, right? That wasn't the Arctic,
but that was my first trip to the North.

(01:24:12):
And the following year, I remember the company commander was,
he called us all in line, you know how they do in the military,
and said, look, he said, I need 10 volunteers.
No, he said, I need nine. He said, because I know Sergeant Hebert won't go.

(01:24:39):
That's what he said. He said, I know that Sergeant Hebert won't go.
I know he's going to want to go. So I need nine more volunteers to go to the Arctic.
And he said, I'm talking about the Arctic. I'm not talking about no Mickey Mouse. This is Arctic.

(01:25:00):
And it's extremely cold. So you're going to be isolated.
You're going to not be able to get mail nor send mail.
You're not going to be able to listen to music. You are isolated completely and totally.
If your mama and daddy die, you won't know it until you get back. Now that's it.

(01:25:26):
And I said, good, let's go. Sign me up. Let's get going. And that's when I went.
That's when I went to the Arctic. That was an experience, yeah.
The Arctic is the Arctic. What's the most memorable times you had there?
Well, when I killed that polar bear, that was one that I remember well.

(01:25:49):
They had a polar bear, a huge polar bear.
He was big, great, big thing.
And he was in... Look, I want to say something. What?
On Canadian land, okay? We were American troops on Canadian soil.

(01:26:10):
We had no say-so. We had no guns.
We had tools to build a runway. No guns.
But the Canadian Maori, they had a Canadian Maori that was there, and he was the boss.
If he said you can, you can if he said no you don't yeah because it was canadian

(01:26:36):
soil you see what i'm saying so this bear was and i knew i got to know him real
well i got to know the guy very well nice guy,
they had this i saw this bear and he was right there and i was and he was right
close to our campground, our camp, our area, you know.

(01:26:59):
So I went and I told him, I said, man, they got a group. I said,
they got a polar bear sitting.
I said, he's sitting down on the end of the lake right there. He said, what?
Yeah, and he come outside and look. Yeah.
I said, I'd like to shoot that sucker.
He said, well, he said, you can. He said, he's in an area where they got people

(01:27:24):
that pass, you know. Yeah.
American troops. So he gave me the rifle and a box of shells.
Now, it was military bullets.
It was not the kind of bullets you use to go game hunting, you know.
A military bullet, it's teal jacket.

(01:27:47):
And it'll go through an oak tree and you can't even tell. The bullets don't change.
It's a very powerful gun, .30-06.
He said, yeah, take this, put him about the shells.
He said, you think you can kill him with about the shell? I said, I hope so.

(01:28:08):
Anyway, I went out there, and I shot at that trucker.
I shot three times at him. I was about 400 yards away from him, at least, at least.
And the first time I shot, I saw where the bullet hit.
I saw in the rocks, in the dirt, where the bullet hit.
Right in line, perfect line with the bear, but too low.

(01:28:32):
The second shot, boom.
The bullet would hit further up. The bullet hit about 100 feet this side of the bear.
I said, I got you, boy. I got you now.
The third shot, I shot, and I thought I'd hit that trucker.

(01:28:53):
Sitting down in the water, just like this. And he had his side and partly back,
but his side was like this. I was over here.
And when I shot, in just a little bit, he took his hand and he was rubbing his head.
I said, you know, I hit that bear. It showed up.

(01:29:14):
When I killed him, I saw where the bullet hit. Right in the back of his ear.
Between his ear and his skull, So the bullet just barely ripped the skin.
That's how close. I just about got that sucker the third shot.
But then he got up. And he got up and he was upset.

(01:29:35):
And then I kept shooting him. And he got closer and closer. He kept charging.
A polar bear is not afraid of nothing. Oh, no. Don't need to be.
They're absolutely fearless.
And I finally got him. I finally shot him. and he went down.
But he was close. He was about 75 feet from me.

(01:29:56):
He went down and...
I put him away with a bullet in his head. But that barrel was huge, man.
It was huge. I'm telling you, the mom told me, she said, he weighed 800 pounds up.

(01:30:18):
She said, well, I don't have a scale yet to weigh. She said,
but I know he's bigger than a horse.
His body was bigger than a horse, you know. He was big, man.
He was big. big and that was that was that was something for me but then they
wouldn't let me take the hide,
because it was canadian property someone come get it or did the mountie keep

(01:30:43):
it yeah the mountie yeah you better believe he guessed he he didn't want me to have it and i had a dog,
dog I called Emo.
The dog was a husky that was given to me by the Maori, a little bitty thing,
and I fed him and took care of him, and me and the dog got to be good friends.

(01:31:08):
I wanted to bring him home, man.
No, you won't. Nope. You can't.
He said the dog is going to stay right here, and showing
up he did but i didn't have
no problem i didn't have
no problem i really didn't i know

(01:31:28):
some people that that was there that did have they
did have problems you know and they had problems that most of them or just about
all of them were people that had a girlfriend or something and they knew when
they got back the girlfriend was going to be gone.

(01:31:49):
But anyway, some of them had a little trouble adjusting, you know?
Yeah. What was it like for you when you came back?
Oh, nothing, man. Nothing. I was...
When I came back, I got... I got discharged on March 17th.

(01:32:11):
And when I got back, to the United States, it was in September.
It might have been October. I'm not going to—it was either September or October.
I think it was October because I remember the first snowfall,

(01:32:34):
and I mean snowfall. I mean it snowed.
And I remember thinking, damn, it's September.
It's September in Florida, and it's snowing here.
And I mean it's snowing. And the temperature was somewhere around zero, you know.

(01:32:55):
The average temperature of the place where we were, the average temperature
year-round was three degrees. That was the average.
And then it went down all the way to 60 that
hurts huh oh yeah that's a different kind of
but we we had the clothes we we had clothes oh we we had clothes man sure now

(01:33:23):
they send the military to cold weather training they send them up to be trained
on how to deal with the temperature before they go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, the clothing was a must. You had to wear it, or you'd freeze to death. That's what you'd do.
But it wasn't bad. You know, you'd get used to it.
So you got back in the States, and did you start looking for work immediately?

(01:33:48):
No, I got back in the States.
I was still in the Army, and I was going to be for at least the next four or five months.
Winter months and I was and,
I was well when I got back to the States I got to go home you knew you were

(01:34:12):
coming home well I got to go they gave us a little furlough and I went home
and there was no changes there was not much work going on,
especially for a young man like me with no old, you know, just coming out of the army.
Debating whether I ought to sign up again and stay in the military another three.

(01:34:37):
Well, you couldn't re-enlist for three.
You had to re-enlist for at least six years.
Oh, wow. So I said, God, dog, that's a long jump. So I was in a dilemma there.
But I finally said, I know, I'm going. I'm going to get out of the military.

(01:34:57):
I'm going and I'll see what happens. And that's what I did.
And what kind of work did you find? The first job I had after I got out of the
military was driving a dump truck.
Here? Yeah, in Morgan City.

(01:35:18):
All right, so you came back home, home. Yeah. And did you think you wanted to
stay home at this point? No.
You just needed a job? No, I wanted to go.
I wanted to go. I didn't give a damn where. But I wanted to go.
But I got a job driving a dump truck. I remember that well. A brand spanking new dump truck.

(01:35:39):
And it belonged to a right farmer, but he'd rent the truck out to contractors moving dirt, you know.
And that's when they were building some big buildings and warehouses in Morgan
City, and that was for offshore, offshore drilling.

(01:36:01):
Now, I couldn't go offshore. They weren't going to take me.
They wanted older people, you know. But I worked there a good while.
And then there was a contractor doing work there, putting up these buildings.
And one day he walked up to me and said, look, he said, I'm going to offer you

(01:36:22):
a damn job. It's better than driving that truck.
And you're going to make a lot more money.
He said, do you want it? He said, I need somebody.
I'll tell you, make more money, yeah, I'll tell you. So I took it,
and I went to West. The company was Sam Coraline.
Sam Coraline, that's the company name.

(01:36:44):
Them a good while. I worked for Sam Corleone about three years, at least three years.
And in that time, I got married, got married.
And then I went to work for Texaco. No good, no good, no good.
There was nothing about, there was nothing at all about that job that I liked, nothing at all.

(01:37:10):
So I knew I wasn't going to stay.
I'm going to stay because I got to right now. But eventually I'm gone. I quit.
And that's when I went to work for Hupp City Contractors, oil field contractors.
And it was booming at this time. Oh, it was booming, man. Yeah.
Seven days a week. Seven days a week.

(01:37:33):
Work, work, work, work, work. Board roads everywhere. Everywhere you'd look,
you'd see a rig, you know? And what were you doing?
I was operating a dozer. Okay. I went to work there as a dozer operator and or crane.
Crane. The crane work.
Not drag line, but crane work.

(01:37:55):
And I stayed there. I stayed there. I worked there for a good while.
But I could see a need for trucks to move the lumber.
To Podroads, you know. And the contractor had some old raggedy trucks out there that wasn't no good.
And they never had a good driver on none of them.

(01:38:18):
So I said, you know what, I'm going to go into the trucking business. So I bought a truck.
I bought a Ford F600 with a 35-foot through-off float.
Now, you ain't talking about much, I'm telling you. the truck and the trailer
the change and the binders was under $10,000,

(01:38:44):
under $10,000 and in six months it was paid for I paid for it in six months
you had the money to buy it no well I had some,
very little but I had you laughter.

(01:39:04):
I knew Treckler very well. I knew a fellow by the name of Toops that was the salesman.
And I talked to him for a month before he finally decided.
I said, Toops, look, I know I can pay for the damn truck.
I ain't got no money now, but I know, I know that I'll get to work.

(01:39:27):
The work is there. I don't have to look for it. I know where it's at.
And if I got a truck, I'm going to pay for it quick, real quick.
He finally took me. Threw a half trailer cut and I told him the same thing.
At first, he gave me an old trailer, an old trailer, but it was all right.
But it wasn't new. It wasn't very good, either.

(01:39:52):
And I finally talked him into giving me a new one. I had a little money.
I gave him a little money.
And I said, look, I can't pay you now, but I will. Bill, I'm going to pay you
every damn dime that I get, that you will get paid. So I paid for the truck.
I'm trying to think of that guy through Australia Company.

(01:40:17):
Boy, he was worried. He said, do you know what they're going to do to me?
They're going to fire me because of you.
But you're going to be the blame. I'm going to get fired because they want their
money. and every time I say money to you, you turn your back on me.
You ain't got no money. Nope. Not there, but I will.

(01:40:37):
And I said, by the way, the last payment, I'm going to bring it to you myself.
I'm not going to put it in the mail. I'm going to bring it to you.
He said all he did was laugh and shook his head. And I did just that.
The last payment, I went and brought the money.

(01:40:57):
I'm trying to think of his name I knew his name so well but it's starting to fade,
and I said this is what I owe you this is what I owe you for that trailer you
gave me so much hell about I said
you paid I said and if you want a little interest I can give you that too.

(01:41:20):
You something i need another trailer i saw that coming i said i said i need another trailer bad,
i did because i got to work i know i got to work he said well go ahead out there
and pick whatever you want whatever you want that's yours and that's the way

(01:41:42):
it went right there through australia.
And that's how I got started in the trucking business.
So you started your own business, and you were doing the driving?
Oh, yeah. And you were going to make the sales? Oh, yeah. At first,
I was doing the driving. Oh, yeah.
All right. And then what resulted in that? What was next?

(01:42:05):
Did that business do well? Oh, yeah. Look, you could make money.
You could make money now. Now, yeah, look, well, they had to work,
and I was there, and I knew the work.
I knew it well, and I wanted to do it.
So they had another guy that was doing more or less the same thing I was doing,

(01:42:30):
and he had family problems.
I guess you know what that is. And he was also a drunk.
He drank a lot, and I knew he wasn't going to make it.
And one day he came by he had three rigs and one day he come by me and he said
look he said I'll quit I'm gone I'm going out of business.

(01:42:56):
You something. He said, you need those three trucks, okay? He said, you need them bad.
He said, because if I sell them to somebody else, they're going to run you off.
They're going to put pressure on you and run you off. I said,
you know what? He's probably right.
So, I went to the company that I was moving lumber for a lot,

(01:43:19):
Hub City Contractors, and I told them the problem, and they say, okay, that's good.
So they bought him out.
They bought him out and I took his place in moving whatever he was doing, you know.
And from one truck, I went to four.

(01:43:39):
No good. I didn't like it. I much rather it when I had one driving myself.
But that's not the way it worked out. and there I was I was full truck to that
to keep track of and you had to hire,
people hire people and put

(01:44:01):
up with things and oh it was a mess and then things got bigger and bigger and
bigger and they got work work work work work I needed a low boy got a great
big rig I mean a big rig big low boy moved,
big drag lines and big doses.

(01:44:22):
Well, I had one big one, and then I had one medium-sized one,
and there were problems.
There were just problems all the time, all the time.
But that was life. That was the trucking business.
And I did that, and I liked it. I worked all the time, a lot of work, lots of work.

(01:44:47):
Long time i know from reading
the book and from hearing some stories that you you're
a creative type and you've you've come
up with some old some of your own ideas and you have a couple inventions and
a couple patents on some maybe some parts or or equipment i don't know what
the parts are i don't know what the things are can you explain maybe the first

(01:45:13):
maybe the first thing that you
created or invented or you put a patent on?
The first thing, the very first thing that I worked on and got a patent on was a board denailer.
Board road, you know, the board road, oil field type board road,

(01:45:35):
was nailed down with 50 penny nails.
And a 16-foot board, they had five nails, one on each end. Three in the middle.
Yeah. Rolling up. But anyway, the first thing was that board road.
A board denailer.

(01:45:58):
And that's one thing they used quite a bit. They used quite a bit.
The next thing was a board.
It was a machine designed to help. You got to know what goes on when they lay lumber.
You see when they lay lumber, they got a winch truck that picks up a bundle

(01:46:19):
of lumber, 50 plank, 50 boards.
They go and they put it down, and then the people that are laying the lumber
got to walk back and forth from the bundle to where they're laying the lumber.
In other words, you got to walk back and forth for every board.
Okay. Takes a lot of time.

(01:46:41):
Was built, you put the lumber on the machine, and the machine would move.
They had three bundles. You could put three bundles of lumber on the machine.
All hydraulic. Everything was hydraulic. And the machine would move as you needed the lumber.
If you were laying lumber on the board road, as the machine would move, as the board road would.

(01:47:10):
As you laid the lumber, you moved the machine a little closer. You never had to walk.
You just dumped the board off, you know what I mean?
And that was a machine that you— This is something you needed for you,
so you created it for you to use?
Or you just saw—you had a vision of— Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

(01:47:35):
yeah. Yeah, that was something that was highly visible.
Remember, there are certain, the board road, you got to stop and think of this.
You're handling boards that got big nails in them.
The best you could do, the property owners, at one time, they used to have some

(01:47:59):
clippers and they cut the nail off.
The property owners didn't want that. then he brought them damn nails on that
property some of them were farmers in that tractor,
pick up a nail and ruin a tar you know so they had to quit cutting them off
so they'd bend the nails but the nail was still in the board they had different length boards.

(01:48:29):
Do you know what kind of nightmare or what kind of machine you're talking about
to handle all the problems?
All the problems that go along with putting that board down and or taking it up.
There are so many you just can't get to because the machine would have to be too big.

(01:48:52):
The machine would have to be monster to go through the process of doing all
that needs to be done so what you do is you you do what needs to be done the
most and try to put that together,
to do the biggest part of the lifting you might say you know and that's all

(01:49:17):
you can do And if you don't do that, you'd have to build a machine 75 feet long or maybe longer,
12 feet high, with all kind of unbelievable contraptions on it to handle everything.
It costs too much money. The machine would cost too much money.

(01:49:39):
So you do what you could only go so far, okay? You can only go so far to have
to settle the problem, only.
And that's what I did. And they used that machine a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a whole lot.
So that concept is still what they use today?

(01:50:01):
Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Today they got plastic.
Today they use match. They don't use lumber at all.
Lose your lumber. I mean, don't use lumber. They use a very small amount of lumber.
A very small amount. But the majority of location sites are a board road.

(01:50:25):
It matches. Plastic. Plastic matches.
And they work well. Is that the ones that they roll up?
No, you don't roll. They don't roll. No. They just set them out. That's right.
It's 8 feet wide, 16 feet long, and a machine.
They used an excavator to put them in place, you know. Okay.

(01:50:48):
And they worked well. They worked real well.
There's no more boards on board roads. No more. That's not used. It's just not.
Got away completely from the boards.
What was the process like getting a patent on an idea you had?
Well, the first one was, I was null and void. I didn't know.

(01:51:14):
So I got a lawyer, a patent lawyer, a patent lawyer from Washington, D.C.
His family was from Donisonville.
His family was the cane farmers in Donisonville.
And I never will forget that guy. His name was Tebow, Robert Tebow.

(01:51:36):
I mean, a good guy, very good guy, but he could drink. Ooh, a guy could drink.
He drank a lot, you know. But he knew patents.
There was nothing he didn't know. He worked for John Deere, and he worked for Kane Machinery.
I'm sure you, what the hell did God name that own?

(01:51:59):
Kane Machinery before John Deere showed up. Chemical?
Yeah. Jake Giordina? Jake Giordina. Jake Giordina, yeah.
My mom worked for him for years. Oh, is that right? Yeah, at Chemical before
John Deere. Yes, all right. Yeah.
Well, Jake Giordano, he worked for, this patent lawyer worked for Jake Giordano and Kane Machinery.

(01:52:29):
And he worked for several companies in the area, including John Deere.
Not Deere, but elsewhere.
And he knew, oh, he knew everything about patents. But from then on, it was not no problem.
It took time to get a patent. Well, in those days, I don't know now.

(01:52:55):
You could probably do it on your phone now. Well, I don't know.
Well, I'm saying that's how far we've come. I bet you could do the whole thing
on a cell phone. Or on maybe that thing. Oh, 100%.
100%. But it usually took about
two years to get from day one to where the patent was actually issued.

(01:53:19):
Two years. Did you get the patent with the intention of selling the patent,
or you just wanted to have it?
I saw the company that used this stuff paid me pretty well. They paid me pretty well.
But it was a yearly thing. At the end of the year, they paid me pretty good.

(01:53:46):
But you sold them the patent, or they just wanted to, they're paying you to
use the... Yeah, they were paying me for the use. The use.
For the use of it, once a year. And it was all right. It was just one company that did that?
No, no. A couple of them. And then there was the jackknife device.

(01:54:09):
Now, that was not the first.
That was, the jackknife device was 10 years later.
This was trucking? Huh? This was a tool for trucking? Yeah. And what did it do?
It stopped trucks from jackknifing. And how?
And this, by air brakes, it was around. It was around, now look,

(01:54:36):
you're asking me to explain something that's not that easy.
It was a device that, I'm going to say this.
It uses air to cushion this. No, no, no. No? The only part that air played was the brake.

(01:54:57):
Trailer brake. The truck or trailer.
Truck or trailer. If you put it there, you see an 18-wheeler,
you got to pedal just like in any other truck for the truck and the trailer.
But the trailer got a hand lever that you put the brakes on just the trailer. Yeah, okay.

(01:55:19):
Just the trailer. And it's got to work off of either one, from either one,
the truck or the trailer.
Bricks. Now, but the air is the only thing that was used.
The air was used for the brick on the device.
The device was controlled by a spring, a clock spring.

(01:55:45):
I had to get made. I made the device, okay and i made it to use this spring
but i didn't have the spring i had to get the spring made,
and do you know i caught hell i tried all major spring makers that i could get

(01:56:09):
a name of i'd call them and talk to them no no we don't do that we don't do that we don't do that.
Well, one day I got the name of a company in Fort Worth, Texas,
of a company that made spring.

(01:56:29):
And I called them and I said, well, what you're asking us to do costs a lot of money.
I said, well, how much? I said, well, you tell me the story and I'll tell you how much.
So I told him. I said, I'm working on a device that I need this spring,
and it's a strong spring.

(01:56:51):
The spring was an inch and a half wide, 360s of an inch thick,
and it could open 30 feet.
They had enough coils that it would go 30 feet and then pull back.
Yeah, we can make it. Yeah, the engineers here can make that spring.

(01:57:13):
But it's going to take some engineering and then we got to get the material
and then we got to make it i said how much now this was at a time when a dollar
was a dollar okay and he talked i said i need to know i said because you know
i said i don't want to mortgage the house for.

(01:57:35):
That was a lot of money I said okay they made the spring and in about three
weeks I got I had to draw them,
and I'm not an artist but I had to draw them exactly what I was talking about
make sure that the engineer get it right I wanted an eye,

(01:57:57):
when the spring was going to be fastened on each end I wanted a teardrop what
they called a teardrop you know Yeah, we can make that.
And they made it. And when the spring got in, I looked at it.
I said, that's just what I saw.
And I put it on, and it fit just right. Yeah, it fit just right.

(01:58:20):
And that was the jackknife device.
Now, that, if I would have gotten much money for all the patents I had,
as I did with the jackknife, I'd be like Jake Giordano. I'd have a lot of money then.
Because i i got well paid i did get well

(01:58:41):
paid for that yeah and it's a
device it's mounted to the
trailer trying to understand what the device was
on the trailer you could it's something you could put on in anyone could buy
it for their truck and trailer oh yeah yeah in any kind of trailer yeah and
it and it works in this way once you back up and you start getting close to

(01:59:04):
jackknife and it breaks everything. It stops.
A jackknife is a jackknife that's a kingpin. The trailer got a kingpin.
It's a pin. It's about three inches in diameter.
Well, it's not three inches in diameter. It's less than that.
But it's very strong. It's malleable steel.

(01:59:25):
And it fits on the fifth wheel. The trailer, fifth wheel is about this wide,
fits on there and they got a lock that locks the fifth wheel to that pin.
And when you put the brakes on the tractor, remember the weight shifts forward.
A lot of tractor trailers don't have front wheel brakes. The front wheels don't have brakes.

(01:59:50):
Some got brakes that you can put on or off. You hit a switch and it'll stop
the air from going to the front brake.
They got a lot of different things. thing
but when you when you put the brakes on
the tractor the weight shift forward which makes that pin which makes the trailer

(02:00:11):
want to bend the trailer is pushing and when the trailer got a load on it it's
heavy and it's pushing that rig and a lot of times the rig will just want to.
To control. And that's what they call a jackknife. And a jackknife is not funny. It ain't funny.

(02:00:33):
All hell breaks loose when you get one. Now this would stop that.
And I know it would stop it. There is no question at all that the jackknife
device would stop a jackknife.
You would not have a jackknife.
But because you couldn't. The cable would hold it. Now you I want to say this.

(02:00:58):
If you wait, the device got to stop the jackknife before it starts because a
jackknife, once it gets so far out of line, you ain't going to stop it.
Nothing going to stop it. Nothing. You can put a cable as big as your leg and
it's going to break something because the weight is tremendous,

(02:01:21):
you know. You got to keep it from getting to that position.
The jackknife device got to keep the truck and trailer in line.
And when it's straight, it don't take much.
It don't take much to keep it straight.
After it turns, it's too late.

(02:01:45):
After the tractor trailer goes sideways, it's over. you.
That was when they gave me a lot of money for it. And that's one that you sold? Yeah.
I sold it to a company in New Jersey. Have you seen them on trucks?

(02:02:05):
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Was that cool to go see?
Yeah. Was it cool to go see them on a truck for the first time?
Was it what? Was it cool to see what you invented on a truck to go look at it
and see people buying it?
Oh, yeah. There were companies in New Jersey that did have it,

(02:02:35):
and there were companies in Canada, too,
that had it because of the cold weather,
you know, snow and freezing roads.
And they had a patent. I had a patent in France, England.
Seven countries. I had a patent in more than three countries in Europe.

(02:03:01):
You have to create a new one in each country? Yeah, yeah. Yeah,
you have to have a patent in each country.
And in the United States, a patent lasts 17 years.
And some countries, it lasts longer than that, but there was a fee attached to it.
You had to pay a fee to keep the patent active, okay? Some countries.

(02:03:28):
And you had to do that. You had to do that. Okay.
Country's got a different, it's different, you know, it's different.
Did you ever sell any in the other countries?
I remember them telling me they did, but I didn't see that because that was
in New Jersey and I'm in Trigger.

(02:03:49):
I didn't see it with my own eyes, them loading them up or shipping them,
you know. But they told me that in Italy, Italy, I got a letter.
I got a letter one time from the Transportation Department of England.
And you should have seen that letter, man. Oh, they talk about the Queen's country,

(02:04:15):
the Queen's there, the Queen.
It was all English, you know.
And they were interested. it. And of course, the thing I told them was the only thing I could say.
Look, I sold that. I don't own it.
You got to get in touch with the people that own it, you know.

(02:04:36):
And I know they did, but I don't know what happened.
You know, I know they did get a hold of it, but I don't know for sure what happened. No, I don't.
But I couldn't say anything. I didn't own it. You know, after you sell it, you sell it, you know.
So the inventions and those pieces of equipment, you know, they showcase your creativity.

(02:05:01):
But a few years ago, you wrote a book. You started writing a book.
What year did you start? Let's do this. What year did you say,
I'm going to write a book? And then what year did you start writing the book?
Well, I thought that the year was 91. I was 91 years old.
Well, you go back six years, that'll give you the year. I was 91.

(02:05:29):
Myself. I even said to myself, you know, you don't have much business doing this, Christian.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. To start with, you don't have no education.
To start with, you don't have this, you don't have that.
You read a lot of books, but reading a book that somebody else wrote is not

(02:05:49):
like the same as you writing it.
But I didn't have nothing to do. I'm sitting there, man. Man,
I said, God damn, I got to do something.
Physically and mentally. Physically and mentally, I could do it. Okay.
And just like those patents, whenever I did anything,

(02:06:13):
those patents, I got, I think I got, I think I got 10 or 11 patents of different things.
Thing power driver stuff i'm even forgetting i'm even forgetting some of them

(02:06:35):
you remember the last bill you remember the last time you forgot about one of
the patents you invented.
No but i have i'm sitting here i know i know that i got 10 or 11 patents,
but it's starting to skip my it's not something I think about every day.

(02:07:02):
The book was the book was a monster thing for me okay not that it should not that it would be for an
author they write a book every year or some up to three of them here I am I
know how to read a book but writing a book is something else so I bought pencil

(02:07:27):
and paper I bought a lot of paper and a lot of pencil and I wrote it longhand,
and it took me a good while to get started.
But once I got started, you'd be surprised.
Where did you do it? Where did you sit? The first time you grabbed a piece of
paper, you grabbed a notebook?

(02:07:47):
Did you go buy a notebook? Oh, yeah. And you said, this is my book. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Notebooks and paper like you got that. And where did you go sit?
Where did I do what? Where did you sit?
In my living room. You sat on a chair? At the counter. And you said,
all right, I'm starting my book. That's right. And then what you wrote?
I started writing. So what we see in the first page, that's where you started?

(02:08:11):
Or you had to mix things up after it was said and done?
Oh, yeah. Some of it I threw away.
Look, when you write a book about a lifetime, you can't put the heart before the heart.
You know, you start with A, B, C, D, you know, you put things where they go,

(02:08:37):
you know, and you can make a mistake just like that. You gotta think about that.
And then you gotta go, this was a long time ago.
This wasn't yesterday. This was when I started that book. I was five years old.
And then I gradually, as the book progressed, I was going to the next stage, next stage, next stage.

(02:09:07):
And I had to be very careful. And people asked me, Abel, why did you put the crow in there?
I said, that's very simple. I needed a character in the book.
The crow is a character in the book.
I didn't want the book to be a I, I, me, me, okay?

(02:09:33):
Because you got to be careful about that. I, I, me, me, you know?
I put the crow in there as a character, and it needed to be there.
It needed it. It needed to be there. And I also knew a lot about crows.

(02:09:53):
Yeah. I knew a lot about them because when I was little and when I was shooting
birds in the right field, I knew about them, too.
It's funny because you don't know what an outside reader sees when they read the book, right?

(02:10:13):
You only know what you meant and the way you wrote it. So when I read it,
I get to take the crow and I can come up with whatever reason I have for why
you got to what the crow is all about.
Or maybe I'm going to learn at the end. What about what the crow is?
The crow in the book is a character to do just exactly what I did with him.

(02:10:38):
He was a mentor to me in the book. He was a sort of a mentor to me in the book.
And he was an aggravation. That's what I was to him. He was an aggravation to me.
If you look at it, mental aggravation, mental aggravation.

(02:11:01):
That's what he was. And that's exactly what he was. When did you get the idea
of the crow? Right at the beginning?
Pretty much. Yeah? Pretty much. Because I knew I needed a character in there.
And I didn't want to put a person or a fictitious person. I didn't want that.
The crow fit just right to me.

(02:11:24):
And that's why the crow was there. and a
lot of people actually be they're telling
me they said you you make the
crow famous i said well that's good that's good i at least i accomplished something
it's super interesting what that did for for someone that reads it you know

(02:11:46):
it's very it seems like you knew exactly how
it would make a reader feel when they read it. But you didn't know that. No, no.
It was like a perfect accident. Yeah.
It's cool. Cause it's like, it's, it's artistic.
It's very artistic. If you would have meant to do it. Yeah. Yeah.

(02:12:08):
But you didn't. No, no, no, no.
I just, I just had to have that.
I had to have that character. That's all it's doing. It had to be. and learn.
So I have read some books. I read one book in particular.

(02:12:29):
I don't remember the name, but it was about authors, all about authors.
And they were in Miami, Florida.
That's where they were. They had, for some reason or other, they had grouped
up like a little convention in Miami, Florida.

(02:12:49):
And then he went to talking about the problems and the authors had the money.
The money was always a big deal.
And every one of them said, look, I wrote this book.
And when the book was released, I made pretty good money.

(02:13:11):
But three or four months later, I wasn't making none. man, my,
you know, it didn't last very long.
I said, you know what? That makes sense.
Because the people that want the book got them right off the bat.
And then after that, it was, you know, give and take again there, you know.

(02:13:34):
But it was all about authors and that way of writing and that way of making
a living. that their living was not guaranteed.
No, no, no, no, no. Their living was not guaranteed.
They didn't know how that book was going to affect the people that were gonna buy it.

(02:13:58):
And for them, they had to sell it. They had to sell it.
Old, you know. And John Griffin, John Griffin, I believe you mentioned him a
while ago, that one of the books John Griffin wrote.
Now, John Griffin is a good writer. There's no question about that.

(02:14:22):
But he wrote a book, and the book was no good, man.
I mean, no good at all. And I'm saying to myself, I'd look at the title.
I said, this is John Grisham.
He wrote this book.
But the more I'd read, I'd say, this book is no good.

(02:14:46):
It don't have nothing. It don't have nothing.
And then my son read it, and he didn't like it.
And he looked at what the book was rated at.
On his computer, and it was rated as a three. You know, three out of ten.

(02:15:09):
Now, look, when you're an author and your book is rated a three,
you better go find yourself another job.
But John Griffin wrote a three book, and he was good, buddy.
Oh, look, John Griffin wrote the book The Lincoln Lawyer.
You know, The Lincoln Lawyer.
And they made a movie out of it. They made a bunch of... Yeah.

(02:15:34):
It's just to write a book. Okay?
I'm writing that damn book, yeah. How much time?
A year. How many hours a day? Oh, sometimes five, six hours until my eyes get tired, you know.
And then sometimes I'd get upset and I'd throw it away. Boom.

(02:15:56):
Throw the damn paper in the garbage can. Start again.
And then I got, I talked to a publisher and I talked to a publisher in Dallas and Ville, I met a guy.
I met a guy from Thibodeau one day at, it was at Waffle House.

(02:16:19):
It was at the Waffle House.
He was eating breakfast, and I saw he was reading a book that I had just finished,
a paperback that he was reading.
And I thought, I said, you like that book?
Yeah, he said, pretty good. And we went to talk, and I said,
you know, I said, I said, I'm trying to write a damn book.

(02:16:40):
And I said, I got me a whole gang of problems.
And I said, I don't know too much. I'd have thought of some of them.
He said, I know somebody who can help you.
And he gave me a phone number. Called that number. And I did.
And it was a publisher in Donisonville. A woman.
I said, God dang, look at you.

(02:17:03):
So I went and see her. I went and see her. and I brought my script,
my transcript with me, and she looked at it, and read, read, read.
She said, look, don't stop.
Finish it. Finish it, because what you got here is better than you think.
Finish it. I said, but, she said, finish it. I'm telling you, finish it. I said,

(02:17:30):
but you just don't understand that. I'm about to blow my brains out over there.
And you're here to finish it. But anyway, I said, all right.
She said, what you have, is it better?
She said, you can write better than you think. They told me that.

(02:17:52):
Not much. But anyway, I kept going.
Then I got disgusted. I said, to hell with it. And I called her up. She had my transcript.
She said, well, what do you want me to do with this transcript? She said, I got it.
What do you want me to do?

(02:18:13):
I said, burn it.
Throw it away. Throw it in the garbage can. Do anything.
I said, I'll quit. Nah. She said,
is it okay for me to email this transcript to some authors I know in the New Orleans area?

(02:18:36):
I said, well, yeah, go ahead.
And that's when that lady from Madison, Manteville, she's an author and an editor, edit books.
And she got it. And that's when she called me.

(02:18:56):
And she told me that, man, you got to finish.
You got to finish because this is a good book. I said, what?
What'd she say? She said, yes, it's good. You got some good stuff here.
And I'm thinking to myself, what the hell?

(02:19:20):
What's so good about it and she said you know what she told me she said I wish
I could write that good I said what that.
Now, that is the way the book went, right there.
And so I finished it, and she read it, and, oh, boy, she said,

(02:19:41):
this is a good book. This is a good book.
Now, you wrote it pen and paper, and then you had someone type it up for you? Yes.
My son's wife typed it. She typed.
Was she like the original editor? Did she edit the grammar and everything?
Everything no she didn't do no editing wrote

(02:20:04):
it just how you wrote all she did was type what
i wrote and that's where
the fun comes not from me the
editor the editor told me she said look she said this is gonna cost you a lot
i'm gonna take this book and i'm gonna edit this book and i'm gonna put everything

(02:20:25):
in this book in order the way that an artist a real real,
a real author would do.
I'm going to write it, rewrite it the way authors do it. I said,
no, you won't. You say, what?
I said, that's right. I said, I don't want you or anybody else to rewrite my book.

(02:20:49):
I'm the one who spent all the damn time writing it, see?
I want it word for word, just exactly the way it is.
I said, the only thing I want you to do is correct my spelling,
put the exclamation marks and all where they need to be in the English language,

(02:21:12):
and put the periods and the commas and all of that.
But you change no word. Don't change one word at all, just like it is.
Oh, she said, that's not doing all.
She said that's that authors don't do that
i said i do do it now that's

(02:21:36):
what she done she that's exactly what she did she said this is your business
and this is your time and this is your book she said that's what i'm gonna do
and that's the way the book ended right there she edited that way.
Then look, you gotta get a cover.

(02:22:00):
You gotta get what you call a, they got several things you got to get.
They got a number that you gotta get and they got a.
What the hell they call that everything you buy got on a box yeah the serial
number yeah you got to get all
that and I said well okay she helped me get it she helped me get it all,

(02:22:26):
and that was it the book come out,
you read it after it was once you got the hard print in your hand you read it again oh yeah I read it,
oh that book oh I read that book about six times and
that's the truth i'm reading now i'm reading
a little bit every day a little bit every day do you

(02:22:47):
read it to remember i read i read it
no i remember the book well i remember the book well do you critique yourself
as you're reading yes yes yes yes that's what i'm doing i'm paying attention
to what i did that i would do different that i would do a little different you know and now a.

(02:23:10):
Two months after the book comes out, they make a new edition.
You know, they fix a couple things or they add something that they thought was important. Yes.
I read it and I see where I could have done better. Okay.
And it's too late. The book is out now. But, yeah, I do that.

(02:23:32):
I do that. But that was the book.
That is a For somebody Who just do it like the way I do It's a monster thing
It was hard It's a monster thing Are you glad you did it,
It's a monster thing You know You.

(02:23:55):
So you started when you were 91 Do you wish you would have done it In your 60s,
70s Or are you glad and you needed it for this time To have I'm glad I waited.
Look, you know, there is a thing about getting older, okay, that you have to

(02:24:16):
admit, and you have to change.
I don't believe, when I was 50 or 60 years old, I couldn't have wrote that book. No, no, no, no.
I couldn't have wrote it. I really couldn't have.
I didn't have the—there was something missing, and I know that when I was 50

(02:24:40):
or 60 years old, there was something missing that didn't fit, didn't fit.
Me that I'm glad I'm glad I'm glad
I was 91 every day you would would
you think other people should do the same if
they ever thought about it they had the idea like man I should write these stories

(02:25:03):
down you know what I believe it depends on the book it depends on the book you
see that little old book I wrote goes back to where you got to remember remember
remember remember remember you You know, you got to remember.
It's something you got to. I even took a trip to Gifton and went and read tombstones

(02:25:28):
to get the right date to make sure that the editor wanted to know certain things about certain people.
I said, what you want to know that for? Well, she said, in my type of work,
I need to know everything. Yeah. Okay.
I'd go to the graveyard and read names and dates of when they died and how old

(02:25:55):
they were and all that stuff.
And that woman called me yesterday. Yesterday was my birthday.
When I got home, when I got home yesterday from eating, from gone eating,
I wasn't home 10 minutes. The phone rang.
I go up there and it's her, that editor. And she told me, well,

(02:26:16):
she said, how's your birthday?
I said, oh, well, I said, I just come from eating. Now I'm full.
And we talked an hour. We talked at least an hour.
And she's a very educated woman. Very.
I mean, very. Thank God.
That woman. She sounds smart. She know the English language like you wouldn't believe.

(02:26:42):
Now, you might not think so, but the English language to her is a Bible.
I mean, if it ain't right, it ain't right, you know. It's got to be right.
And that book, she wrote it that way.
You've got to be right. And she know. Oh, she know.

(02:27:06):
And she keep telling me, did you start your other book yet?
She said, you ought to write another book because there's nobody in the world
that can write another book that would be like yours.
She said, I edited your first one.
She said, I never seen nothing like it. But she said, I'm jealous because I

(02:27:30):
didn't write it, you know.
She said, I really like that book. I really do. That's really cool to hear.
Yeah. Did you talk about your perpetual motion device much in the book? Yeah.
A little bit, right? Yeah, a little bit. What else is there to know about it?
When did you start with that idea, and how far did you get with it?

(02:27:52):
Perpetual motion is something that I thought about all of my life. All of my life. Why?
Because it's very interesting. Someone, you heard it from someone? No, no, no. No.
I just say to myself, there is no reason why perpetual motion,

(02:28:16):
as of right now, nobody has done it.
And there's about 10 million people in the world doing it.
At least 10 million people that are working on perpetual motion.
Some of them are universities, And they have contests between two universities
as to who's gained, who gained a little bit.

(02:28:43):
That's very interesting. Man, you talk about interesting.
It's something that will dig into your mind.
It's nonstop. There is no way. Hey, look, I'm going to say I had a wheel,
a wheel that was 30 inches in diameter, 30 inches.

(02:29:08):
And I went through the process of making sure, step by step,
when I made that wheel out of four sheets of plywood,
four sheets that are cut in a circle, 30 inches in diameter.
But I made sure that the outside edge wasn't even.

(02:29:28):
You know, the outside shell, like you see the top of this cup here, is perfectly even.
Okay. That's not good at all. Okay.
For friction. Friction.
Take this and turn it because of this smooth finish with no deviations at all, with no bumps.

(02:29:56):
You know a golf ball? Look at a golf ball.
You'll see that it's not smooth. You know why? That's because of friction.
Exactly what I'm telling you right now. Friction. Friction, those little dips,
those little bitty dips in the golf ball creates the friction.

(02:30:20):
It disrupts the friction, okay? And that's what you got to do.
So you start right off the bat making every effort to eliminate friction,
okay? And to eliminate friction, it can't be smooth.
Smooth grabs friction. It grabs it. And it don't let it go.

(02:30:46):
If you got a dip in this cup, when the friction gets to that dip, it dissipates.
And you got to start again.
But in that little time that it dissipates, it's got to start again. You're frictionless.
Frictionless. That's perpetual motion. You don't want no friction of any kind anywhere.

(02:31:10):
So you got to start from the very beginning. And then you got the center of the wheel.
You look at it from the wheel is facing this way and you look at it. This is the upside.
This is the downside. You turn into the left, whatever you do,

(02:31:32):
right side, you got to pick up. You got to lift.
There will come a time in the rotation of that wheel that if it's past the center
line, you're going to have to pick up. How do you get around that?
To make anything turn, a perfectly balanced wheel is useless unless Unless you

(02:31:58):
put it on an engine where it turns high RPM, then you want perfect balance.
For perpetual motion, a perfectly balanced wheel is just dead weight.
It's got to be offset some kind of way.

(02:32:18):
Now, do you know how many different directions? Do you know how many different
positions you got in a 32-inch wheel?
They got a million and above.
Because you got the distance from the center, you got the distance from the
top to the bottom, from the center to the right or to the left.

(02:32:42):
All in there, in there, a quarter of an inch mean plenty.
Means plenty.
So, you know how long it would take you to go through all of them? A lifetime.
A lifetime of paying attention to every single move you make even if it's no

(02:33:09):
more than the wizard at Pentelmark.
In fact, that's a lot. Or could be.
In the wrong place. The right place would be good.
Perpetual motion gets so difficult. And perpetual motion,
you don't measure your 30 inches in diameter means the circumference is three

(02:33:37):
times that plus of the slight amount.
So you don't use that because it's got, what did I mean? What did I say a while ago? Variable.
Variable. Now, let me tell you why you don't have a variable.
At 30 inches in diameter, you measure how far the wheel would roll on a flat surface.

(02:34:06):
On a flat surface, you take the wheel, you make very fine little scratches where
it don't affect the wheel at all, and you make a start to something that don't move,
that's solid, that will be in the same place. And then you roll the wheel.
And you measure the distance that the wheel travels from here to here.

(02:34:32):
Not the circumference. I mean, not what the circumference tells you,
but what the travel tells you. That the wheel travels.
That's the exact way to do it. There's so many things you've got to remember,
so many things you've got to do, and you've got to be perfect.

(02:34:55):
It's got to be perfect. This is something you messed with your entire career?
My entire life. You had it in the shed, and you would come home and take it with you?
No, I didn't have it physically.
Physically, I had it for about the last 10 years in my garage.

(02:35:16):
But all before that was here, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking,
every step, every step, every step, every step.
And they got a lot.
They got a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot.
A lot of people that work on perpetual motion work with a wheel. They work with a wheel.

(02:35:44):
Because they wanted to turn you know they wanted to they wanted to move you wanted to turn,
and the just stop and think of all the places on that wheel that would make
a difference if you took weight away or if you added a little bit right.

(02:36:08):
The mayor, it's a high number, a high number.
And from the center to the left, the center to the right, the top to the bottom. Oh, God help you.
What's the longest you got it to run? Huh? What's the longest you've got yours to run?
I was within less than two inches of making that circle.

(02:36:32):
Now, remember, if it makes one, it'll make a million.
Well, it's perpetual motion. It'll continue. All it's got to do is one,
one circle, one complete circle plus.
Plus, it's got to be a plus because without a plus, you stay where you are.

(02:36:56):
You've got to be perpetual motion.
I'm going. I'm going.
If it makes it one circle, you got it.
You got it. Just that simple And you came close And you came close,
Well, yes, I came close I came close But you see that little That little bit

(02:37:21):
of space that I needed to make That's a million miles,
That is the That is when you really get down.
It's a mile It's Out of this world Out of this world because you remember what
it took to get there. And where are you at now with the project?

(02:37:44):
I give it up. Oh, I give it up. I moved it out of the garage.
It's gone. Did it make you mad? No.
Just one day you had enough. Because now I get up and I wake up at night sometime
and, you know, the gears start turning and I think about it.
And I think about what I did, what I could have done, and I know that I don't have time, okay?

(02:38:11):
It takes time to cover what you may have to cover unless you're very lucky.
You know, you could be lucky and hit it the first day,
or it might be 50 years to get to that one spot And until you do, you ain't got it.

(02:38:37):
You don't have it. That's it, that's it.
And I am, now look.
Mathematicians like Bo there,
most of them will tell you no you
can't do it because to start with perpetual motion would break all the rules

(02:39:02):
right it would break all the rules that the universe were gone and there's,
people who can create a program and they put in calculations and you could tell
them what measurements you want and they hit run and it'll say yes it works or no it doesn't work.

(02:39:25):
But you have to sit there and tinker with it. You have to change it.
Oh yeah, oh yeah. And it's fun and you like it.
Perpetual motion, there's no directions in the book.
There's no directions written anywhere that you can do it.

(02:39:46):
Some people say that there's a lot There are a lot of directions that are known
by man that you can't do it.
Einstein, you know what Einstein said? He said, that is not my field.
That is not what I work on. I work on space.

(02:40:08):
That space is my field. perpetual motion may one day get done but it's going
to be very difficult very difficult that's what Einstein said Einstein is not a mathematician is he?
He was kind of smart I heard he was pretty smart but he is a mathematician he

(02:40:34):
said it's going to be very difficult and I said I said to myself,
yeah, you're sure right about that.
It's very, very, very difficult. But there are lots of people working on it. Oh, believe me.
Believe me. A lot of people.
All over the world.

(02:40:56):
So you've had, throughout your life, some success in business.
Or I'd say a lot of success in business.
You invented a bunch of things. You have a bunch of patents.
You wrote a book at 90 you
know 90 plus years old what what
of those things are of other things
are you most proud of i'm gonna

(02:41:20):
tell you the truth about it you know the word
proud i think i
know what it means i never felt
like i never i never got that feeling you know i never i never feel like I never
feel like I did anything that pretty much anybody else couldn't do if they would

(02:41:44):
have tried you know if you would have tried.
I tell people today, they got a man that I know real well right now, very highly educated.
I mean, this guy got education.
He went to school until he was 30 years old.
Very educated. And he liked to, look, he wrote short stories.

(02:42:11):
He showed that to an author, and the author told him, throw it away. You got no style at all.
And it hurt his feeling, man.
She said, that woman, he told me, he said, that woman told me I got no style.
I didn't want to say nothing, but I said to myself, yeah, she's right.
You know, because I read some of them. I said, you got no style at all.

(02:42:39):
I don't have no, I don't have no feelings about being proud of it, you know.
You know what I feel like? I could have done a better job.
Is it a feeling like you all, because you were always kind of chasing the next
thing, you're always looking forward to the next?

(02:43:00):
Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. So you were kind of like a perpetual motion device.
Well, yeah. It makes you go. It makes you go, make you go, make you go.
And that was, look, if you're going to ride, I'm going to say this.
If you can ride a freight train, or not one, no, many, many,

(02:43:25):
many, many, many freight trains.
Get on, get off, get chased by a street yard watchman with a damn club who want
to knock the hell out of you.
Be hungry all the time, be thirsty, don't know where you're at.
If you can do that for two years, all the rest is null and void.

(02:43:49):
I'm telling you. Picture yourself right now.
You put that pencil down, put that thing off your head, and you close this building
up and say, there, I'm with it, I'm gone.
You go to Shreve and you jump on a freight train.
That's hobo. That's what the hobo do right there.

(02:44:10):
And then you keep going. You just keep going.
You've got to push. shit. Something is pushing you. You got a desire to go.
Go, go, go.
Today, I hear a freight train whistle blow. You want to get on it?
I put my head down just after. If,

(02:44:34):
Driving my car, and I passed by the railroad track, but it got drained.
I can't take my eyes off. I love it. I just love it.
There's nothing I can do. Nothing I can do. Oh, it's over. I'll never do it again.
But I can tell you one thing. I sure liked it.
I sure liked it. And you would not believe the education involved in that.

(02:45:01):
You on your own you got nobody dictating nothing to you you look at a bird flying
you say you know i have nothing on me fella i can't fly but i'm doing the next best thing.
That's what i'm doing and it's it's a feeling there you get a feeling,

(02:45:27):
you're you.
Nobody else and it's a good feeling a lot of people don't have that they don't
have anything that they've experienced like that well they miss the boat they miss the boat,
it's a feeling that you have of I wonder what I wonder what I wonder what I'm

(02:45:51):
gonna find I wonder Wonder if I'm going to find.
I wonder this. I wonder that. Because you don't know. You just don't know, you know.
Maybe it's because it's too easy to know everything these days.
Because we have the computer and we can look up whatever.
Before we go on vacation, I catch myself doing this. Before I go travel somewhere,

(02:46:16):
I want to see it before I get there.
But that's probably not the best idea. Let me tell you.
The best trips I ever took in my life in a car. I didn't have no destination.
I don't want no destination. What the hell do I want a destination for?
Now, some people say, you've got to be crazy. You've got to know where you're going. I say, why?

(02:46:40):
Why do I have to know where I'm going?
I'm riding. I'm looking around. I'm looking.
I'm not. The destination don't mean nothing to me.
This destination is not something that I think a lot about.
I don't think about it. It's kind of like a rule, right?

(02:47:02):
It's like putting another rule on yourself. Well, you're right.
That's more or less you're right. You're right. Look, I can't very easily say.
You see, all the other things were things that I did, including to learn to fly a damn airplane.

(02:47:26):
I wanted to. Look, man, I wanted to. I said, Dale, I want to fly that damn thing.
I want to know what it's like.
I see them fly. They pass over here. My truck yard was by the airport.
I said, I want to learn.
And I did. I did. It's something that I didn't want to let go.

(02:47:52):
And let me tell you one thing about letting things go. go
if you let them go too long you'll never
do them you're not going to do
it if you if you if you procrastinate too
long you won't do it you won't do it something keep you from doing it it's a

(02:48:12):
high risk thing the possibility of possibilities are pretty much the same both
most ways I might and I might not make it.
And I never thought about it. I said, the hell with it. I'm going to make it.
You know, I'm going to make it.
And that's the only way. The only way.

(02:48:35):
Who in the hell, I don't hardly know, I'm not a good writer.
Who in the, I got no education in words and everything.
Do you think I got any business this trying to write a damn book,
but I did. I said, I'm going to do it.
I'm going to write the damn thing.

(02:48:55):
And I got it published with the words that I used.
There's not no editor. No, the words I used, that's in every one of them in the book.
So to sit down and say, well, I can't do that.
Don't tell me, man. You don't know what you can do. You got to try.

(02:49:19):
But look, I'm not anymore. I'm so damn old that it's pathetic.
I can't do it no more. But if I could, yeah.
You might have another book in you. Let me tell you something that I used to
think and almost happened.

(02:49:39):
Well, I'm going to tell you what kept me from doing it. Was I got married.
And then I thought it was out of the question.
But if it would have gone six months more before I got married,
there's a place I would have gone, and that's Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa.

(02:50:01):
And that's where I'd probably be today in Africa. Because to me,
that was a very interesting country.
Very interesting country.
And I still think it is. Yeah.
I would have really liked that. Yeah. And I read about that mountain.

(02:50:23):
It's big. It's big. It's a great big thing.
Yeah, I would have liked to go on there and live. And live there.
But that's another question. Not in this world. Not in this world.
Well, maybe your next book could be a fiction.
And it could be about the little boy from Shriver who made his way to Mount Kilimanjaro.

(02:50:48):
Well, yes, but I can't see as well as I used to, and I can't write as well as
I used to. I can't write. I can't type.
So I'm kind of now at a point where if I did it, it would take me three times longer.
It would take me a long time.

(02:51:11):
I think I could do it, but it's, you know, you think you can do something,
but that's a timeline, you know. It takes time.
And no, it's, you know what I think sometimes?
I ain't got no damn business even saying this, because you're all going to laugh. I think,

(02:51:36):
thing in life that I got to do.
That's the reason why I'm still here. I don't know what it is.
I think I'll find out one day.
I think that's the reason why I'm still here. The good Lord said,
I'm going to keep you down there, and your back can hurt, your legs can hurt.

(02:51:56):
Everything about you is going to pieces, but I'm going to see to it that you're
able to do it, and you got to do it.
I hope it wasn't this podcast. Huh? I hope it wasn't this podcast.
I didn't hear. I said, I hope it wasn't this podcast. It better be as far as tomorrow.
I like that. Well, you know, what the hell would happen if you went through

(02:52:24):
life and you didn't think?
Tell me. It'd be easy. Huh? It'd be easier. Huh? It would be easier.
But you didn't know. Why would you?
I don't know. I don't think he'd get very far. No, no, no. Thinking is the only
thing that gets you there.
Oh, you got to think. You got to think. You cannot get anywhere without thinking.

(02:52:49):
At least I couldn't. I couldn't. Even today, I got to think about my damn stick.
You can't? Yeah. Well, here's what I got from you. I mean, I got,
if there's something I think I want to do or there's something I want to try,

(02:53:09):
then I need to just try it. I need to just do it and try it now.
Oh, yeah. Right? Oh, yes. I think everyone could hear that. Oh, yes. Yes, indeed.
Do it. And benefit from hearing it as well. You got to, if you want to do something
and you got something in mind, it's something that.

(02:53:29):
Even if you got to break a few rules. Break them. Break them.
100%. Break them. Yes, indeed.
Break the damn rules and fight the people that'll come after you.
And they will. And they will come after you.
Because you can't live by damn rules that somebody else makes. It's very hard.

(02:53:54):
It's very hard to live.
Well, to me, it was. When I was young, I'm gone. There was you.
You do what you want, I'm gone. I'm just leaving.
And I enjoyed it. Look, I was hungry.
Many, many, many times. I was thirsty many, many times. And I didn't care.

(02:54:20):
I did not care at all. I said, you know what I would say?
I'd say, one day, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to be able to eat.
I'm going to run into some food and water, and I'll eat and drink.
Until then, I'll do what I got to do.

(02:54:40):
You, you, you, and I can't blame anybody else for where I am or what,
or the life I'm going with, because I'm the one that picked it.
I'm the one that decided to do this, nobody else.
So, I got no problem. If I was young, like about 12 or 13 years old,

(02:55:07):
I'd get on a damn freight so fast you wouldn't believe me.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Because I liked it, you know. I really did like the continuous adventure.
It was continuous. It would never stop.
Up and but now in my age no no no no no no no i'd have trouble riding the path

(02:55:33):
in your train no no they're nicer than you think.
They make some nice ones now well all right we're almost going on four hours
here this i know you might not think much of this but people are gonna like
this just like they like your book you didn't You didn't think it was much to nothing,
but people are going to like to hear from you and hear about all these stories.

(02:55:57):
And people are going to pick up some life lessons along the way.
And it's going to touch a few people. And that's kind of what we set off to
do. And we did it. I guarantee you we did it.
So I hope you like it once you get to listen to it. All the girls at Spars are going to listen to it.

(02:56:18):
That's going to be on Facebook? It'll be. It'll be on our website.
Oh, yeah, your website. Yeah. Yeah. But we share it to Facebook,
and we know how to get it out to people.
Yeah, yeah. And there's people that want to hear it. Well.
But there's a lot of people that want to hear you know i

(02:56:40):
never did think that that nothing i ever did
would interest anybody else i never did
that was never uh never never a choir that is never something i thought about
that's not nothing i thought about i thought about the negative side where people

(02:57:00):
say well he's i'm not surprised he did it because he's nuts you know he's crazy But,
you know, I heard a fellow on television say,
not long ago,
politics, politics.
He said, one of the reasons why we have so much trouble now in our politics

(02:57:25):
is because we don't have any John Waynes left.
We don't have none. Like I said a while ago about the West,
five or six or seven percent of the people came to the West,
and the others waited for the good times, you know.

(02:57:46):
That is going on today.
That is happening right now, right now.
What I don't understand about the United States or the government is why do
they let a handful of people do the things they do that accomplish nothing?

(02:58:10):
It accomplish nothing.
They call it demonstration.
We're trying to let you know what we think.
And my thought is, you don't think at all.
There's something wrong with you. You don't have no thoughts.

(02:58:33):
And let me tell you something else. There is a right and there's a wrong,
and I don't care who says so other than that, because there is a right and a
wrong. These people are wrong.
They are wrong. own. If you put a gauge on them, but look at what they do. Look at what they do.

(02:58:58):
Look at some of the things they say.
Look, you know, I believe that,
if you could take 10 or 15 people, stand them up on a corner and have them holler
and cut up and burn the American flag and But...

(02:59:22):
On everything they see would make a change, well, so be it.
But they don't. Don't make no change.
That is not going to change nothing.
In my lifetime, I never saw where it changed anything.
It don't change nothing but show that you, my friend, are stupid. That's what you are.

(02:59:49):
You ought to be doing something else. Other than what you're doing.
And I'm sure that you could do it.
Because you're sure not accomplishing nothing now.
Except make people mad at you. A lot of people mad at you. So.
Well, as Grandpa said last week, if you can't solve a problem,

(03:00:13):
it's because you're too stupid.
It's just true.
All right, Mr. Francis, we had fun doing this, and I can't wait to hear it.
I can't wait to get some feedback from the folks out in town.
Now, I know that – I know the people that – I know the people that's part are

(03:00:37):
going to look at it. I know.
Oh, yeah, we're going to make sure of that. Yeah, you can believe that.
We're going to make sure.
Now, Facebook, is that a – Look, you know I don't know anything about Facebook.
I don't know anything about a cell phone. I don't know anything about this thing here.

(03:00:57):
That thing right there scared the hell out of me. But you know how to fly a plane. Oh, yeah.
What's the big deal? Oh, yeah. That's a lot harder than this stuff.
When I was 12 years old, let me tell you something. I think about this sometimes.
I think about it. I'm in a tugboat.

(03:01:19):
And they work, on the tugboat, you work shifts, six-hour shifts.
You work six hours, then you're off. Six hours, then you're off.
And then when you're off, you better get some sleep, you know.
Go to your bunk and sleep.
You work six hours, then you're off. You work six hours, then you're off.
I used to hang around the wheelhouse because about 2 o'clock in the morning,

(03:01:43):
And the skipper or the mate, depending on who was on watch steering the boat,
would get a little sleepy.
And he said, look, everything is all right.
Everything is okay. This is at night now.
Take this damn wheel here. All you got to do is stay between the bank. That's all you got to do.

(03:02:04):
And just about the time he'd leave and go in his room, I'd look up ahead.
There's a boat coming, man. lights all over the place, left green, left green light.
And then God dang, look at there.
That boat with the tow I had.

(03:02:26):
I knew what to do. I'd get on my right. I'd go on my right as far as I could.
And there's some lights in the intercoastal canal.
For instance, you got piling with lights on it.
And those lights are for tugboats at night. That's what they're for.
That's to keep you off the sandbars or something like that. You know?

(03:02:51):
So I look at those lights, and I look at the tug coming. I said,
there ain't much room between that light and that damn tug.
I got to pass that. I passed 15 feet from that tug.
And when the two boats got together, the tug going this way,
and I'm going this way, I mean, I'm meeting him.

(03:03:14):
We blowed away some boop, boop. That means good morning or good evening or good
night. Hello, buddy, or something like that. Anything.
It's a meeting. It's a hello, you know.
I pass that, and I boop, boop. And I start laughing.
I say, I wonder what that guy would think if he knows it's a 12-year-old boy.

(03:03:39):
I wonder what would go through his mind if he knows they got a 12-year-old boy
steering that damn boat.
I'm sure he remembers that. I remember that.
Sometimes I remember that and I buzz out laughing.
I give him that hell of a thing. He ain't got no idea who it is.

(03:04:01):
You never know. All right, Mr. Francis.
Appreciate you coming on. All right. Hell of a story. Thank you for watching.
Music.
All right that's it for this episode of the miracles to meet podcast we ask

(03:04:22):
that you share it with at least one person in your life that you think needs
to hear it um you know if you got a little something from it you got some little
goose pimples or just gave you some feel goods um You know, send it to someone
else. Let them feel that too.
And if you loved it, please leave us a five-star review. That'll really help out.
And if you only loved it like four stars or so, please do not leave a review.

(03:04:46):
Same thing with the one through three. Not interested in any of those, only five stars.
If you have any personal questions or comments about the episode,
shoot them over to Bourgeois Meat Market on Facebook or Instagram.
And we'll reach back out. and if you have any ideas for any cool future guests
please shoot those over too we're all always interested in hearing um who else

(03:05:10):
is out there and what kind of cool stories we might be able to bring into this
place see you next time thanks for listening.
Music.

All Episodes

Ep. 7 - Francis Hebert: Louisiana Freight Train Hobo

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

Crime Junkie

Ridiculous History

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 7 - Francis Hebert: Louisiana Freight Train Hobo