Fred Eugene Crain, born in 1925, entered eighth grade (“high school” in those days) at Mountain View High School (Greenville County, S.C.) back when students graduated from high school after eleven years of public school.
His family lived on a small farm. His only sibling (his brother, J.B.) was three years older than he was. J.B. took agriculture when he was in eighth grade and for at least three years in high school. Most boys in the Mountain View Community studied agriculture as an elective subject during their high school years.
“Daddy gave J.B. a calf to raise,” Fred said, indicating that when J.B. signed up for agriculture, their father supported J.B.
Fred had decided he didn’t want to be a farmer. When he arrived home after his first day in eighth grade, his mother, Lillian Parker Crain, asked him, “What did you take?”
He named his regular classes plus his electives: bookkeeping, typing, and writing (journalism).
“You didn’t take agriculture?” his mother asked.
“No,” Fred said.
“Sh . . . ,” his father said.
“He didn’t say the word, but I knew what he meant,” Fred says.
Fred says he felt as though his father didn’t think as much of him after that.
WORK
On her milk-and-butter route in the City of Greenville, Fred’s mother had a customer who ran a glasses-making business. That customer offered to train Fred because he, then 16 years old, had graduated from high school.
“They offered to train me to grind down glasses,” Fred says.
Nothing was said, then, but Fred had no car to get to Greenville, so he continued working on the family farm from age 16 to 19. He then went to work in “the mill,” Southern Bleachery in Taylors, S.C.
“I rode with Jim Few,” Fred says. “J.B. wrote home from the Army [84th Infantry] and said he’d sell me his car for $300, and I could give the money to Mama to keep for him.”
The car was a 1937 Ford V8 Coup, black, with white-wall tires and shades over the headlights. He probably bought the car in 1944, as he recalls. (J.B. had been in the Army for about a year, then.)
“The shades were to keep your lights from shining so high into other people’s eyes,” Fred says. “They dressed up a car, too. I put fog lights on it, too, and put a mirror out of the left side. All sporty cars had one sticking out there.”
Frances, Fred’s wife, says, “When he came to see me, he’d get out of the car, take out a handkerchief and polish up the hood ornament before he’d come into the house.”
“You couldn’t get cars back then,” Fred says, adding that even in 1950, after World War II ended in 1945, cars were still being rationed. “We kept the 1937 till we traded it on 1940 Chevrolet.”
They later bought a 1950 Chevrolet.
“New,” Fred says. “Mist green, white-wall tires, two-door. We drove it to New York, Cincinnati, and Memphis, Tennessee. It drove good and rode good. It was a good car. We traded it in on a 1957 Ford Fairlane, black and white with a few miles on it.
“One Saturday evening, we were driving up through Greenville and saw a 1958 Impala Chevrolet, cream and light blue-teal. We traded that ’57 and drove home in a new car.”
Fred’s father, Carl Clyde Crain, rode with Fred when Fred decided to trade that 1958 Impala on a used Rambler.
“Daddy said nothing,” Fred says. “Then, after I’d traded, Daddy asked the salesman how much he wanted for the Impala. Daddy pulled his billfold from his overalls and paid the man cash.”
Fred kept the Rambler six or eight months.
Later, they bought a black and white Ford they ordered from the factory.
“We had to wait on it about a month,” Fred says. “Seems like it was a ’67 model.” The factory had to produce the style and color Fred and Frances chose. It wasn’t available at the dealer’s location. Later, Frances hit their mailbox with the car’s tail end on an icy day.
“I sold the ’67 and got a ’77 Oldsmobile, two-tone, orange and beige,” Fred says. “Then we got a Buick, as I remember.”
COURTING
Frances says that when she and Fred were courting and her mother would look out a window and see Fred arriving, her mother would say, “Here comes that Fred Crain, again. I told you . . . ”
Mrs. Hawkins told Frances that courting on Wednesday night, Saturday night, and Sunday afternoon was too much.
Frances says when her mother said, “I told you,” she meant to remind Frances of the Wednesday-Saturday-Sunday statement she had made.
“The first time I dated Fred I was 13,” Frances says. “He was 15.”
Fred’s older brother, J.B., went by and picked up his date, Betty Roberts. Fred rode with them to pick up Frances.
“Mama had said, ‘You will not leave here with two boys,’” Frances recalls. “But J.B. picked up Mary Roberts, first.”
Frances said that her father left “the seeing after the daughters” to their mother.
Frances first “date” with Fred was rather tame. They went to Hovey Parker’s house to “make music.”
“My mother had to date with her family sitting in the room with her,” Frances says. Her mother had six siblings.
“There were seven children in all in Mother’s family,” Frances says.
Fred got his license at age 16, and his father let him drive the family car to see Frances.
One time, after Fred had bought the 1937 coup from his brother, he was getting into his car to go and see Frances. His parents walked out to the car as he was ready to leave.
His father said to his mother, “I think he’s going up there too much.”
Fred’s mother said, “Aw, leave him alone, Carl.”
Fred, sitting in the car, started forward and spun his tires as he rounded the big oak tree in the middle of their circular, red-dirt driveway.
Fred says about his 1937 Ford: “Paint wasn’t as good as it is now; it was hard to polish.”
BROTHER
Fred remembers that J.B., his brother, “got in a ditch” the first time J.B. drove by himself when he was about 17. Their father said nothing about J.B.’s accident.
“That was J.B.,” Fred says. “But I don’t want to be colic-ing about it.”
J.B. (Jesse Benjamin) was named after his two grandfathers: William Jesse Parker and Benjamin Crain.
“J.B. dated the Bull girl,” Fred says. “Her name was Mary Earl Bull. Mama would make comments about some of the girls he dated. She kidded J.B. She’d say to him about the Bull girl, ‘You going to see the little heifer?’ She wasn’t too fond of the Bulls, I guess. J.B. also dated Clarabelle Paris. He was most serious about Eva.”
He later married Eva Fowler when he was in the Army.
Frances remembers that Martha Lou Trammel and her claim on Fred.
When she was in high school and at the school, somebody asked Frances whom she was dating.
“Fred Crain,” Frances said.
Martha Lou said, “He’s dating me, now.”
Here’s the story behind that conversation:
One weekend, Frances left home overnight to visit someone without telling Fred. He arranged a date with Mary Lou Trammel.
“I took her to prayer meeting one time,” Fred says.
COW
Frances says she thought milking a cow was “something” (rated highly). She learned how.
“Soon, I had one [cow] to milk, myself,” she says, indicating that the job wasn’t a lot of fun, then.
PLOWING
“J.B. would plow till after dark,” Fred says. “Daddy liked that.”
A neighbor, Palmer Collins (called “Pell”) commented that he saw J.B. plowing as the sun set and that all he could see was J.B., the plow, and the mule on the hill in silhouette against the fading sun. (Floyd Collins raised hogs.)
“He was a worker,” Fred says about his brother. “I think they thought J.B. was the ‘smart’ one in the family.”
Years later when they were adults, J.B. and Fred were talking with someone, and to that person, J.B. said about Fred, “He’s the smart one in the family.”
STINGS
Fred says his father gave him tasks to do that were too hard for his age level.
“Daddy would put me on jobs I wasn’t old enough to do,” Fred says. “He might say, ‘Get that cradle and cut those briars on that gully till we get back from town.’ Daddy acted like I could do more than I could.“
His father said things that stung, things such as “You ain’t worth a fart in a whirlwind.”
“You can ruin a child by the way you talk to them or by things you say to them,” Fred says. “He didn’t say things like that after I got about 13 or 14.”
Fred remembers that his mother wanted a girl for her second child because she already had a son. He says his mother told someone, “I wanted a girl, but I got a little old fat boy.”
PASSINGS
Fred talks about J.B., whose wife, Eva, died from cancer on Feb. 13, 1989. J.B. died on May 24, 1989.
“A week before he died, he went with us [the Golden Age Club of Faith Temple Church] to Myrtle Beach on the bus with seniors. He was nervous on the bus. He’d sit up close to me and say, ‘Watch it!’ like he was afraid I’d run into something. He and I roomed together at the motel.”
Fred says J.B. was “afraid of change.”
“He didn’t like ‘change,’” Fred says. “He didn’t want to go anywhere, but if you could get him away to some place, he seemed to enjoy himself. I remember that after the war, J.B. went to the back steps [of their parents’ house] and just cried.”
J.B. told Fred about leading, one night, a squad in the Army. (J.B. was a U.S. sergeant in the 84th Infantry in Germany.) They heard a mine explode, and the squad lay all night in a snowy ditch, waiting. In the morning, they discovered that a cow had stepped on a mine and died.
THE BLEACHERY
When Fred first worked at Southern Bleachery (he started at age 19), he and Frances, who started work there at age 17 during the same week Fred did, worked four days on and three days off with 10-hour days.
“We had one hour for lunch, and we traveled 30 minutes to work and 30 minutes home,” Fred says. “J.B. spent some years at Southern Bleachery. He worked in the White Room, driving a lift truck.”
Fred worked one year in the White Room and then transferred to the Finishing Room in Southern Bleachery. That room is where Frances worked.
Frances says that her boss, Jess Mullinax the top man over the Finishing Department, said, “I’m going to bring Fred Crain up here, but the first time I see you talking, I’m going to throw you both out the window.”
At one point in her times at Southern Bleachery, Frances’s boss was Ed Gilmer, the plant engineer.
CAT SCRATCH
When Frances was a child of about four or five years old, she was lying on her family’s back porch and a cat she didn’t know visited their house.
“A cat came up and scratched me on her face,” Frances says. “It was a spotted cat, brown and white.”
She told her mother about the scratch, and Frances had to take shots to prevent rabies. After she began taking 21 shots over 21 days, someone shot the cat while it was under a house. Authorities tested the cat and found it to be rabid.
Her father had to take her to the doctor each day during those 21 days.
MAD DOG
“Mad dogs were common back then,” Fred says. “Mama would say to us when we were going somewhere, ‘Watch for mad dogs.’ We might be in the cotton fields and see a dog running down the road, and somebody would say, ‘There goes a mad dog.’ Those mad dogs was bad. You stayed a little scared of something all the time, afraid one was gonna slip up on you.”
He recalls an incident.
“I remember a black dog that came along,” Fred says. “He was a medium-sized, hound-looking dog. He was trotting along and slobbering. I was over there in the cotton field, as I remember.”
Reportedly, Fred’s father, Carl, had someone drive Carl’s A-Model, and Carl, holding his single-shot shotgun, stood on the running board of that car. They followed that dog.
And when they came near the dog, the dog turned and started running toward the car. The car had stopped, and Carl was standing near it. He said his shotgun was known to misfire and that worried him. But as the dog ran toward them, he fired and the gun discharged, taking the dog down.
“I think they shot him up around Bishop’s [house],” Fred says. “That [mad dogs] was a constant thing to watch out for when I was growing up. I never heard of inoculating dogs till I was grown.”
HYMNS
Fred talks about “Almost Persuaded,” and old hymn often used after sermons as preachers invited people to accept Christ.
“That’s the kind of song that’ll make people who are standing up and holding to the backs benches shuffle from one foot to the other,” Fred says.
SLAIN IN THE SPIRIT
Fred talks about a “slain in the Spirit” incident involving Pastor Julian Walker.
Fred says that Pastor Walker was attending a meeting and the preacher was praying for people and they were being “slain in the Spirit” (falling down involuntarily).
Fred says Pastor Walker determined that he would go up for prayer but that he wasn’t going “down.” He wouldn’t be pushed over. The preacher touched Pastor Walker on the head, and he went down.
“Before I knew it I was on the ground,” Walker said.
GOLF
Fred recalls that Pastor James “Jimmy” H. Thompson said, “If you see me chasing a little white ball across a field, you’ll know there’s something wrong upstairs [he pointed to his head].”
