Bob Sanders: Need a lawyer? Call my uncle

We were talking about Uncle Kelley ...

Among his other accomplishments, he studied law books, just on his own.

It was rumored about that he knew more law than some lawyers. All of this while actively farming the place, with the help of a wonderful succession of hired men and share croppers. Artie, Melvin, Fred, Phil.

He and they managed to somehow make the grueling, never-ending, boring, monotonous business of farming seem like fun, seeing who could handle those 200-pound fertilizer bags the easiest, running to the creek to cool off, working till dark on Saturday, then driving around The Community on Monday and taunting their neighbors for being behind in their work.

During the dinner break, he’d lie in the relatively cool dogtrot, head propped on an overturned straight chair, and read the Birmingham Age-Herald and work the crossword puzzle. He showed me how.
After Grandpa died, Kelley became the man of the house, looking after Grandma’s needs, and she kept (a very neat) house and cooked for him and her and whichever hired man was there at the time.

But the important thing was how lucky all of us nephews and nieces were to have him. He was never too busy to haul a load of us to some swimming hole, or to the big fair, 30 miles away, or to a football game, or ...

When he was driving the pickup/school bus, the seats of honor were in the cab. Cousins Willadine and Virginia Dale and I were regulars, and we’d also pick a lucky commoner each day to ride in the holy spot, making a total of five people in a cab much smaller than today’s pickup cabs. A safety inspector would have fainted. We’d play word games, if we weren’t too squeezed to talk.

When it snowed that time — not the snow, but a pretty good one — when I was in maybe the 11th grade, we’d all get in his car and take off, regardless of the snow.

“Let’s go up to Kent’s.” “OK.” If we stalled on ice, like on steep Bickerstaff Hill, we’d scrape around a little with a shovel and push, push, push and go on our way.

That was the time when Kelley, Virginia Dale and Willadine posed in the partially frozen-over Little Yellow Creek in their bathing suits. Not me. I snapped the pictures.

After Grandma died, Kelley moved into what had been the sharecropper house and batched, eating most of his meals in town. He was flexible.

He might, on the spur of the moment, suggest that we go to Birmingham to see a ball game, and we would. When some of us began to get married, he never quite understood why we
couldn’t just take off that way anymore.

As time passed, we nephews and nieces gradually went off to work or to college (he became a huge Auburn fan after I, and later my brother, came here to school), but when we went home, all of us would converge on his house for some rip-snortin’ Rook and domino games.

He was 60 when Hodgkin’s disease, like a hungry lion on the back of a Cape buffalo, finally dragged him down.

Bob Sanders is a longtime radio personality with WAUD in Auburn and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.