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I would never have heard of Joe Hutchison had it not been for a story my father told me sometime in the 1990s as the two of us went for a Sunday drive out to Oak Grove, past the farms where he’d lived and worked as a boy. I will start with that tale.
After us boys left home, Daddy hired Joe Hutchinson, and he farmed with Daddy two years as a hired hand. He was crippled, barely could walk, but boy he could play a violin. That's the reason he and Daddy come in together. When Sarah left home and I left, Daddy didn't have anybody to work, and he hired Joe. He farmed with him two years I think before he sold out and moved to town. He played with Glenn Goble. Glenn would know Joe Hutchinson real well. He'd sit there with that little ol' stub leg stuck out, and he could fiddle! Glenn'd sit over here and play that old tambourine. I don't know who Joe's folks was.
Joe Hutchison in fact lived with my grandfather’s family for those two years, and he appears with them in Thomas Pound’s census for 1940:
With that brief and bare-forked listing we have told the essentials of the man’s life--but only the dead part, not the quick. This is one reason no person in his right mind reads encyclopedias: we want the quick, not the dead.
Joe Hutchison was born in Ozark County in the far southern part of Missouri--right down on the Louisiana line--on May 10, 1899. The dates is correct, but my good friend, cousin, and Sherlock Holmesian sleuth Ruth Coker of Texas informed just today (23 August) that my whole account of Joe is wrong because the records available at Amazon.com are mistaken. Put simply, she finds that Joe was never adopted by anyone. The record confuses him with the Ezzell boys adopted from his mother Maggie’s previous marriage.
Further details come from the censuses and the Chandler newspapers. The 1900 census finds Joe at the age of two in his birthplace, Big Creek in Ozark County. The community must have been very small, for today Wiki lists Big Creek merely as an “inactive township,” taking its name from the Big North Fork Creek. The county seat of Ozark County is Gainesville, organized as Ozark County, named after the Ozark Mountains. On January 29, 1841, iIt was renamed Decatur County, after Commodore Stephen Decatur, from 1843 to 1845. After that year the name Ozark County was restored.
Joe’s first census appearance came when he was a small child, two years old, and of course living in Big Creek. It lists his parents and their ten other children. The next census repeats the first one, with the minor exception that Joe’s full name Joseph is used. The major changes are two: his home now is listed as Chandler, Oklahoma. and himself is shown as the stepson of Doctor Lee Hutchinson. In that designation, “Doctor” is not a title but his step-father’s given hame. Joe is listed as a farm hand. Whether his leg has already gone bad, we have no way of knowing. The census doesn’t say.
The 1930 census, inexplicably, is missing. The 1940 census is given above. listing him as a laborer living with the Pounds family. Doubtless, this is the period remembered by my father’s story, who is the only one to describe Joe’s bad leg, calling it a stub. My father is a reliable narrator, though like any good storyteller he exaggerates details for effect. It should also be noted that his narrative is complete. He gives a visual impression and stops, for that is all he knows. My father was born in 1918, making him twelve years old at the time Joe is staying with his family. Twelve years is an impressionable age, but through the eighty years that he lived he had a fine and retentive memory. This means that he and Joe didn’t work together, a fact which I can’t explain. We would expect them both to be picking cotton. We are left to guess that Joe’s bad leg didn’t allow him to do that kind of work, in which case the condition of the leg must have been extremely bad. We are also free to guess that Joe may have had a lazy streak, using his leg to avoid hard work and then finding himself free of his misery when it came time to play the fiddle. My grandfather Tom Pounds, like Joe, had only a fourth grade education, but he was large minded and liberal. He may simply have accepted that Joe was lazy and let it go at that.
Grandpa too, played the fiddle, though I never heard him play. That’s the refrain of the song I wrote three decades ago, feeling sentimental about my granddad’s fiddle playing.
True enough I never heard him play, but I’ve seen him sit by the hour tapping out rhythms on the arm of his chair. He loved church music as well, and he led the singing in the country church he attended, but what I heard from the soundboard of his chair arm were not church rhythms. They were the rhythms of fiddle music.
Once in a sentimental mood, I made a song about him. I borrowed the melody and two of the lines from John Prine’s “Grandpa,” but the rest of it is mine. The chorus mentions the now defunct and vanished town of Merrick, which was about seven miles from Fallis. Here’s the first verse, while the whole song is in the Appendix.
Grandpa was an orphan,
mother died when he was ten,
The farmin families all around
took the four youngest in.
Grandpa was the oldest,
took the other three out to work;
That was the start of his farmin life
in that Lincoln County dirt.
The fiddle playing may have created a special bond of sympathy between the two men, Joe and my granddad. Like Joe, my granddad had been born in Missouri, but he left that state at the age six to come to Oklahoma, led by his father George and mother Celia Olson, who was a Swede. George too was a man too lazy to farm, but his first love was not music but gambling. Legend has it that when Celia died in 1906, Tom just turned fourteen came down with a sickness that kept him bedfast a week or more. To while away his time in bed, he attached attached a length of wire to a broom handle and improvised himself a one-string fiddle, which he soon learned to play. That’s the legend. However it was, at the age of twenty-two Tom was playing fiddle at country dances around Merrick when he met Roxie, his bride to be. She was fourteen, the same age as Shakespeare’s Juliet.
Returning now to George Pounds, when his wife died in 1906 from overwork and
George Pounds, 1941
too much childbearing--nine children in sixteen years, the last one still born--he farmed out the bigger kids, put the younger ones up for adoption, and headed for the pool hall. He would have whistled as he walked, but he didn’t walk. He had to get a ride.
George, again like Joe, had a bad leg, in his case seriously bad. He suffered from an ax wound that had been left untreated in his childhood, and by the time he was grown could not walk without crutches. He died in Chandler in May 1941 at the advanced age of seventy-eight, and my aunt who nursed him said that his room smelled of gangrene and honeysuckle. Tom’s wife, my grandmother, had no sympathy for George and told him he got that bad leg from dancing too much.
There was no joking in Joe’s case. He died sometime after 1942, which is the date of the last record we have of him--his WWII draft card record. It’s a jewel for the researcher because among the otherwise world of dehumanizing records, it gives his physical description. He had brown hair, a ruddy complexion, hazel eyes, weighed a hundred and thirty pounds, and stood five feet and six inches. Finally, the 1940 census gives his
occupation as stone mason and notes that he has been unemployed for 12 years, which dates his injury to 1928.
The Chandler news clippings about Joe are only four in number but still invaluable because they reveal his human side. In November 1927 Glenn Goble and Joe spent Sunday with Lee Palmer for the 4th of July celebration at Oak Grove. Glenn is widely known around Lincoln County as is the Oak Grove Quartet, in which he was the lead singer (high tenor). Interested readers should consult my essay. Lee Palmer was the father of Daisy Palmer, an eighth grade teacher at Oak Grove who is legendary among my family for my father always spoke of her with gratitude and affection. Ms. Palmer taught penmanship, and of course the pedagogy she chose was the famous Palmer method of starting with strings of loops. (There is no kinship between the founder of the method and Ms. Palmer.) She wrote my father a letter encouraging him to go to high school. It is a perfect example of Palmer penmanship, and in my essay about her I discuss the letter and include a xerox copy so the reader can admire her penmanship. My father prized that letter all his life.
On July 5, 1928, we read about the 4th of July celebration, an event that brought with it even more excitement than Christmas. “Winners in the various minor events were: Pie-eating contest, Alfred Edmonson of Meeker, first, and Robert Bowers, second. Sack race:
Joe Hutchison, Chandler.“ Of course he won the sack race.. He’d had years of practice locomoting on one leg. A few weeks later, still in the month of July, we read, “Little Joe Hutchinson of Chandler is visiting relatives here this week.” “Little Joe” unfortunately calls up memories of Bonanza, but in fact at a hundred and thirty-five pounds Joe was a small man.
In October of 1932, an “old -time fiddler’s contest” was held, and Joe won fourth prize. He wouldn’t have won even that if one of those Stoneking boys had been in the contest. The reader may remember when Chandler was visited by the Stoneking brothers many years earlier--in 1903 it was when Stirling Price Stoneking was coming down the steps of the courthouse and a gun-crazy Englishman (today we’d call him a serial killer) named Matt Fooks shot him dead in revenge for a fracas in a fast moving wagon in which Fooks had a leg cut off by a wagon wheel when the vehicle wrecks. I told this story in my first collection called The Lonesome Death of Billie Grayson but what Fooks liked to do was marry women kill them, then claim it was an accident in order to collect the life insurance.
Oak Grove sometimes had its own social column, though if memory serves it ran for only a year or two. On April 18, 1935. we read that “Mr. and Mrs. W. P. Goble and family and Joe Hutchison spent Tuesday in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Jimmie Webster and family.”
I wasn’t born until 1946 and so can make no claim to certainty here, but my father frequently talked about the Webster family of Oak Grove, a large family of whom he had nothing but good things to say. I don’t know how far my memory can be trusted here but about 1973 I bought my first SLR camera and with that fine lens I took a picture of a man we called “old man Webster who drove a junk wagon around Chandler. Both he and his wagon were in their eighties, and I remember he would sit patiently on the wagon seat persuading his horse to pull that iron-wheeled wagon up a steep street next to where we lived.
Old Mr. Webster, Chandler, 1973
Then about ten years ago David Alsip took me out to our classmate Brent LaGere’s hunting range east of Davenport, and we sat in the office there with three or four other guys, one of whom was surnamed Webster. My dad frequently talked about the Webster family of Oak Grove and had nothing but good things to say about them. This fellow wanted to know if I’d like some apple-flavored whisky they made and I said sure. It was in one of those little brown jugs (holding a gallon) with a hook near the snout so you put two fingers through there and sling it over your shoulder to drink from the spout. I had one swallow and found it very tasty. If that was a test, it was the easiest one I ever took.
Returning to the census, we’d be ready for 1940 but I have nothing new to add-- which brings us to the year 1942, when men of all ages had to register for the draft for WWII, and here for the first time we strike pure gold. We learn Joe’s full name, birth date, height and weight, complexion, and his next of kin. This last is very important, for the news articles mentioned above suggest that Joe has a close relative living in Chandler but he’s never named. The kinsman turns out to be his older brother Dan, fifth of the children of Doctor Lee Hutchison and his wife Martha Jane McGee. The parents had nine children. of whom five survived infancy--a survival rate that was about average for families in rural states like Arkansas and Missouri (where they lived) and Oklahoma (where Joe lived).
World War II Draft Card
Joe’s card gives Dan Hutchison of Chandler as the person who will always know his address. Dan is Joe’s main link to Lincoln County and he’s a solid one. His wife Janey Wilson was born in Tryon, and his kids graduated from Chandler High School. Janey’s father was James Franklin Wilson of Carney, who died in 1920.
His perfectly narrated obituary which appeared in the Ponca City News in 1957 states his life clearly and in exact detail.
Hutchison was born in Gainesville, Mo., Jan. 14, 1884. He spent his early life there and attended school in Missouri. In 1911 he moved to Chandler and farmed in Lincoln County for 30 years. Ten years ago Hutchison moved to Ponca City, where he was employed as a carpenter.
With this fine obituary, our revels now our ended, but the nature of the drama described here requires a brief summary so that the writer can confess his errors--not that they are truly errors. This essay has grown organically, and I think that is proper.
We started out with the story of a crippled man, humbled by poverty and ill health and we have ended with the portrait of a man from a fine family who cared for him. The first view came from my father’s story, which is accurate as far as it goes, it just doesn’t go very far. My father remembered Joe from a low point in the latter’s life, something that can trip any of us when we are distant from our family and forced to do menial labor in order to survive. We do not know enough to understand what happened to Joe, with our only account being four brief snippets from the Chandler newspapers in which we see our man doing what he does best--playing his fiddle.
When did the reconciliation between the two brothers take place? It may have occurred only with Joe’s death in 1945. In the intervening years, the U.S. had fought a world war, and war can radically change a person or a whole society. In my imagination, the reconciliation took place when word reached Bill of Joe’s death. As the older brother, he was placed in the position of the father in the biblical story awaiting the prodigal’s return. Only this was not a father-son story, it was a tale of two brothers, and its prototype may be the story of Cain and Abel but with major changes. We have no reason to imagine the fraternal rivalry and hatred of the biblical story. However, it happened on the surface Joe and Dan had become estranged, but not in their hearts. That is clear on Joe’s 1942 draft registration when he lists Dan as the one person who will always know where he is. This is stated with the confidence of an unshaken love. Words float along the surface of our lives. It is the deep down things that matter.
Sources:
Pounds, Wayne. “Daisy Palmer: Teacher at Oak Grove.” The Ghost Roads of Fallis Oklahoma and Other Trails, Some Arriving from as Far Away as Virginia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Kansas & Texas. Monce IL: Kindle Books, 2023.
_____. “Matt Fooks Kills Price Stoneking.” The Lonesome Death of Billie Grayson. 2nd edition. Columbia SC: Kindle Books, 2018.
_____ . North of Deep Fork: An Oklahoma Farm Family in Hard Times. Charleston SC: Create Space: 2011.
_____. Tales My Grandmother Never Told Me, with Journeys Through the States of . . . . Columbia SC: Kindle Books, 2024.
Appendix
Grandpa Was a Fiddler
with a nod to John Prine
Grandpa was an orphan,
mother died when he was ten,
The farmin families all around
took the four youngest in.
Grandpa was the oldest,
took the other three out to work;
That was the start of his farmin life
in that Lincoln County dirt.
Grandpa was a fiddler
but I never heard him play,
Played for country dances
way out Merrick way;
Rolled his own Prince Albert smokes,
a hard workin man and poor,
Voted for Eisenhower cause Lincoln won the war.
After they got married,
Grandma made him quit that fiddle;
She didn't want him dancin jigs
with the children so little.
He'd take them all to Sunday school,
whether near or far,
Taught the adult Bible class
and led the singin in the choir.
Grandpa had a pair of mules,
their names were Ben and Pete,
Finest mules in fifty miles,
never had been beat.
When the county crew was buildin road
and couldn't pull out a stump,
Ben and Pete walked off with that thing
and left the county boys standin dumb.
Grandma came out west by train,
all the way from ol' Kentuck;
They missed the train they were supposed to be on
when Uncle Henry got off and got drunk;
But that train derailed and fell in the river
and most of those people died;
Just goes to show a little whiskey's OK
as long as God is on your side.
Grandpa was a fiddler,
but I never heard him play,
Played for country dances
way out Merrick way;
Never owned an acre of land
a hard workin man and poor,
Voted for Eisenhower cause Lincoln won the war.
Archie Pounds, about 1993
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