John Cronin Russell Davis, Sr. (My Father) Part VIII

Part VII-h: Four Grandchildren of Andrew Russell and Josephine Davis

John Cronin Russell Davis, Sr.
(My Father)
Part VIII

• For the Cronin Davis family living in Tuscaloosa, Alabama during the middle of the 20th Century (1951-1959), life was ordinary, regular, predictable and stable. The older brothers played sand lot baseball in the vacant lot across from Whitfield Gibbons’ grandparents’ home which was one block east of where we lived. Whitfield and his mother and sister lived with his grandparents. Whitfield organized snake hunting excursions which included Cronin Jr. and Charles. As I remember, they would go out at night and take a long stick with two prongs at the end which had been whittled into points. These sticks were used to trap the snake’s head in between the prongs. The snake hunters would bring the snakes home and put them in large jars which contained the preservation solution. If you were invited into the basement, you could see a virtual zoology lab which had what I thought were hundreds of snakes—more than Noah had on the ark. Whitfield knew how to “milk” a snake’s venom. This only gave me the creeps just thinking about it, but it didn’t scare the stew out of me like the tarantula fights that were staged by my older brothers.
• Our clapboard sided rental house was perfect for the propagation of huge, I mean, gigantic spiders. Webs were all over the south side of the house. The spiders were captured in small fruit jars and then placed in a box to do Gladiator style battles. To watch these vicious contests between two hairy Araneide creatures gave me nightmares. This situation was on exacerbated by the fact that the large spiders were able to penetrate the siding and, in some mysterious way, work their way into the back bedroom which was actually an enclosed back porch. On many nights when I went into the shared bedroom to get into the iron-framed double bed which thankfully I didn’t have to share at this stage of my life, a tarantula would be sitting on the pillow ready to inject its poison into my neck as soon as I settled my head on the pillow. There would be a blood curdling scream that was louder than an air raid siren. My father or someone would come to the rescue and slay the black dragon. I got into the habit of always sleeping at the foot of the bed in a sideways position with my head slightly hanging off the bed. I’m sure that this sleeping position is the cause of my back trouble at the 5th lumbar which has plagued me all my adult life. No amount of vacuuming the webbed corners of the room seemed to deter the infestations of spiders. After Cronin and Charles left home for college or the Marines, I was allowed to sleep in the front bedroom with Larry. Arachnophobia was not a word in my vocabulary in those days, but the fear of spiders continued way into my adult years. My father sometimes would imitate me when he saw a spider. He would say, “Watch out, Ronnie, there’s a “spydah!” This is the way I pronounced “spider” in my southern dialect.
• Besides snakes and “spydahs” there were other baneful creatures that inhabited homes and yards in the Deep South--roaches and huge black, orange striped grasshoppers. Spraying insecticide on a very regular basis never seemed to matter. The large oak trees around homes seemed to produce armies of roaches that never ran out of reinforcements in the battle to scare the daylights out of children and adults alike. I never saw a small roach. They were always at least six inches long with twitching wings and had the speed of NASCAR races. Roaches could never be caught because of their speed and the keen ability to fake the direction that you thought they were taking to escape your stomping foot. My mother was the only one I knew who developed the uncanny ability of stepping on a roach bare foot. I don’t have the intestinal fortitude even to describe the outcome of the “unfortunate” roach. Suffice to say, it didn’t get away!
• The “Texas” grasshoppers, as we called them, were descendants of the Biblical grasshoppers from one the Ten Plagues that Moses was commanded to lay upon the Egyptians in his quest to get Pharaoh “to let my people go.” One grasshopper alone could decimate an entire day lily bed in a matter of hours. They could copulate and produce a zillion progeny overnight when you thought you had killed the last one the evening before with a gasoline, soaked firebrand. My wife and I have lived in Michigan for more than 35 years. We came here to teach music at a four-year liberal arts college. That was the reason for the move—to find work. However, if you ask my wife why we moved to Michigan, her answer will not be to seek employment but it was to get away from roaches which don’t seem survive above the Mason-Dixon Line. In fact, to this day, when we visit relatives in Alabama, we NEVER leave a suitcase open and unattended. As soon as the item you needed from the suitcase is secured, you immediately, if not sooner, zipped the bag tightly shut and all the while kept a panoramic eye open for any clandestine invasion of the infamous cockroach. We well remember once after returning home to Owosso the fear that struck everyone in our house when I discovered, to my horror, as I was placing a pair of trousers from the suitcase back into my closet, that a dreaded cockroach had barnacled himself on the trouser leg for the 900-mile trip back to Michigan. The white-glove inspection began immediately to determine if there were other invaders present in the rest of the baggage.
• In November of 1960, my parents purchased their first home at the ages of 45. There house payment was around $100 a month including taxes for the entire life of 30 year of the loan. That story next time around. (to be continued)