Volume 8, Number 6 - Winter 1984
I Remember
by L. E. Paugh
I am not a writer but I can remember a few happenings in my own life as a boy growing up in the hills sixty to sixty-five years ago. At eighty-one years of age, I’m not so young anymore.
I think of the stories told about the hillbillies, and, as we come back to the hills to visit, I notice the roadside stands and gift shops with people working dressed to look like hillbillies. To me they look like a group of clowns or scarecrows.
I think, as a kid, I was about as much of a hillbilly as any. As a rule we wore bib overalls and a blue chambray shirt, no underwear and rough work shoes. In the winter we wore rubber shoes. I am speaking as a farm boy.
When we went to church or Sunday School, we would try to have a new (or nearly new) pair of overalls and a light dress shirt, usually no tie. We would have a pair of Sunday dress shoes. In the winter we would have a coat from a suit of clothes and wear a coat. One could most always find a coat from a place that sold used clothing. THAT is how us hillbillies dressed!
All this was years before I became a telegrapher and boomed around the country working Western Union and Railroad jobs.
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