Western Kentucky University TopSCHOLAR® Faculty/Staff Personal Papers WKU Archives Records 1952 UA37/44 Tidbits of Kentucky Folklore Gordon Wilson Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/fac_staff_papers Part of the Folklore Commons, Journalism Studies Commons, Linguistic Anthropology Commons, Mass Communication Commons, Oral History Commons, and the Social History Commons This Article is brought to you for free and open access by TopSCHOLAR®. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty/Staff Personal Papers by an authorized administrator of TopSCHOLAR®. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ORIGINALS TIDBITS OF KENTUCKY FOLKLORE by Gordon Wilson Vol. VI Nos. 900-989, 999-1049 Tid Bits Article 900 Page l "THE BJOK SATCHEL 11 Late-s\Ulllller days remind me that schools are opening again, and school ties up all my memories, for I have been a pupil or student or teacher all my life and am now going into my forty-sixth year of teaching and fifty-eighth year as a student or pupil, And many things come baclc to me at this season, right now the memory of the old book satchel. It is probable- that nobody past forty ever heard of a book satchel. Books used to be rare and precious things, the property of the family, not of the state. There was a considerable investment in the books used by all the children of a b4! family, One of the devices to k~ep the books intact was the book satchel, It was in style so long that it became standardizedJ I know that the description of mine will fit your memory of yours, It was made of bed-ticking, with the stripes running up and down. The body of it was big enough to hold even the geography texts. A flap extended over the sack-like body, sometimes with a button, but I rarely saw a book satchel buttoned up. A stout strap was attached, made of the same stuff; this was put over your head, Your sntchel then hung down on one side, with that arm extending through the strap, That left your hands free to carry the dinner basket or bucket and to throw rocks at things along the way. If fellows had had to lay down their books every time they wanted to throw at something or protect themselves against a briar or a bad boy, there is no telling how serious life might have been, Learning, in the form of the books in the satchel, was safe while the learner trudged along on the flinty road to education, defending himself against a ho.iltile universe, ThiUUgh the book satchel was the chief protection against harm to books on their way to and from the school house, the book cover did its share in keeping books from falling apart or becoming scuffed up, Now, boook covers are made of oilcloth, cut to fit the book and sewed on in a deft way that defies telling about0 Tid Bits Article 900 Page 2 Tho method wo used became such a part of mo that I have my bird books vovorod in some water-proof cloth in bright colors, so that if I drop them, I will not havo such a hard time locating them again. When school was not in session, tho book satchel often came in handy when we wont to the country store, for it would hold a lot of stuff and could be carried handily, too. As it was made of such strong material, it lasted for years, so that we came to know a whole family by tho book satchels. Bed-ticking, somewhat, like the one-hoss shay, rarely wears out. It may become slightly faded after innumerable washings and after years of usage by various members of the clan, but for sheer wear I will put it against any cloth yet designed by man. Now, with free school books and a rather ob'fious tendency to leave all books at school, children do not lmow the daily chore of picking up some or all of one's books and taking them home, in a hope that time will be found to look at the lessons before the next daily grind. There are even teachers who do not want the children to attempt any learning away from the ideal set-up of the school plant. And, judging by many of the people whom I now teach, books seem to mean very little in modern children's lives. These old books, even the inherited ones, were ours. We felt that we were somebody, w:i. th our big geography books, with our slates, with our tablets, with our readers, I never heard that any of the books 1,ibbed off any J.earning on their o~mers, but if pride in having them could have Leen rewarded here and now, certainly some of us should be prodigies of knowledge. 11Get your book satchels, children; it 1s time to go to school," Tid Bits Article 901 Pagel IIIS IT HOT ENOUGH FOR YOU?" Before this essay reaches the newspapers in which it will appear, it is to be hoped that the terrible drought of 1952 will have run its course and that we can see green things again besides the few we have kept alive by daily' watering. And it is also to be hoped that the old-timers, with their former droughts of gigantic proportions, will be silenced temporarily, Already the official reports of the dry summer make 1952 a companion of 1930 only of the many years that I have known and seen. But I do not expect to make some semi-official of unofficial weather observers believe that anything can match many years that they have known. My chief hope is that I can learn a new reason for droughts. Wifw-beating was the chief offender in the older days, if we are to credit tra­ dition, At least, when the weather got of kilter at Fidelity, this was the chief reason given, A second one, often mentioned along with the first, was the refusal of someone to pay the preacher, There must have been a great outbreak of wife-beating and non-paying this year, Just about the time radios were becoming common, back in 1930, a big land-owner suggested to me that the drought was due, he believed, to the interference of the radios and the attendant electricity, I am afraid the old man has died of old age since the last record drought, but I am sure that he would say that the setting off of atomic bombs out in Nevada last winter abd fall caused this meteoric oddity. It gets pretty hard for one to account for a big thing like weather; and the party in poi,;er, the general cussedness of local conditions, the low state of morals, or just any other handy thing can be named as the cause, Probably any one of these would seem as reasonable to the person believing them as the study of meteorology itself, Along with this drought has come the old familiar belief that it never rains at night in July, The fact of the matter is that it has not done a very good Tid Bits Article 901 Page 2 job of raining in the daytime, not to mention night time. I can recall that Uncle Sim Knight, at Fidelity, clung to this no-rain-at-night-in-July theory through the years, even those years when the 11 rains descended and the floods came" on July nights and overflowed Uncle Sim1s fields along with those of others who were not regarded as weather prophets. Many times in this column I have suggested that some neighbor or friend of the, local weather prophet might have a source of great discussion or even neigheorhood division if he would keep, for a few years, a coeck-up on the weather and be ready to answer Uncle Sims and others who seem so infallible in popular estimation, I did this very thing when I lived as a boy at Fidelity and got some recognition for my accurate weather observations. On the other hand, I got some rather vicious side glances, for I seemed to be questioning Uncle Sim, who represented to Fidelity just about what the Law and the Prophets represented to the Hebrews. After a few run-ins with the clique who followed Uncle Sim, right or wrong, I learned to keep my records silently and ~ay nothing about them unless I was asked. I suspect that, to this day, though Uncle Sim died a half century ago or nearly so, many a descendant of those who knew tho patriarch still looks for the weather that Uncle Sim's signs portended. Personally, I hope that some of them have sighted a cloue., 11 no bigger than a man's hand," that portends a rain that will break a drought that would certainly have made Uncle Sim search diligently among his memories to match. Tid Bits Article 902 Pagel 11 IS IT TRUE THAT•••?II As a school teacher of forty-five years standing I have had many questions asked me. Sometimes I could rm,ko a sensible answer; sometimes I have said frankly that I did not knpw; a few times I have been able to put my questioner off until I could find out, I must admit that a large number of the questiohs are well put and are capable of a good answer; sometimes, however, I have been put on the spot by a question that started 111s it true that, 11 and then follows some perfectly silly folk belief that I cannot afford to mark as such for fear of hurting feelings.