Keith Tillotson
The Divorce (1927)
I had to be about [ten when my parents divorced], cause Mom got married in December in 1927, I think. They couldn't get along, I guess. Dad left, and that was it. I don't know where he went – I know he went back to Nebraska. 'Course he come to visit one time, and he brought his new wife with him. I remember we were walking down in Harlan. I'm walkin' with Dad, and here comes Mom. They didn't even look at each other, walking on the street. He come home to see me. He had a 1928 Ford. That was when they start to get the gearshifts.
After Kenneth got out of grade school, he went out to Nebraska to stay with Dad for a while. When they got divorced, my mother got custody of me. I remember them saying it wouldn't make any difference. He'll come back – which he did. So, he spent some time out there. That's where he picked up religion. Dad left him with somebody who was really religious, and Dad went out on a harvesting route. He got a job with Massey-Harris Harvester Company setting up combines. That was a new thing – combines. A combine is what thrashes the grain right in the field. Just cut it and thrash it. [To Neal] Remember that [one] we rode in [when we were] in Iowa? That was to pick corn – used to pick corn like this [gestures]. That's the way I picked corn. The combine was the first thing – in those years.
So Dad got a job with Massey-Harris Harvester Company setting up combines. I don't know how long he worked at that. Dad never stayed at any job very long, it seemed like.
We're living on the farm, 'cause the grandfolks moved to town. Like I say, we got 35 acres. They kept off five acres – they thought maybe Grandma and Grandpa would want to build a house or something on that. So we couldn't use that. So we had 35 acres, and most of it was timber.
[We worked the fields] most all the time. You just never stopped. When I wasn't going to school, I was working. I got kind of mean in school after my folks got divorced. I didn't think about it, but I'd do all kinds of stuff. Like throwing a baseball back and forth in school. Cutting a hole in my desk – I had it gnawed in there about two inches deep. That was fun. I'd do something because kids would laugh, you know. One day I cut this hole, and the teacher caught me doing it. And she said "Bring that knife up here." So I brought it up and I just dropped it right on her desk. It went in to this desk, and she just broke it off. Stuff like that, you know.
Or, like throwing bullets in the furnace. The boys always had to get the coal to keep the fire going. I liked to do that, because I could throw some .22 bullets over there and watch them blow up – you could hear them go off. Fun stuff! I carried a rifle to school. We'd go home right through the timber. But I always had to leave it outside, you know – a .22 rifle. Prop it up against a tree someplace out here.
Anybody who liked to hunt [carried a rifle]. My dad taught me how to handle it. He gave Kenneth the .410 shotgun – this was when we were still in Iowa – and gave me the .22 rifle. I didn't hardly have the strength to cock it! The shotgun – I couldn't hardly cock that at all. Which was a small gun. [We hunted] squirrels, rabbits – stuff like that. He taught us how to go crawl through a fence with a gun. You don't set the gun up like this or lean it against the fence when you crawl through it – you don't want it to go off and kill you. He said to lay the gun through the fence, set it down, crawl through the fence and pick it up. Just little things, you know. Never point it at anybody. Don't ever point it at anybody. Today that's a thing that kids do – point the gun at somebody, and then "Oh, it went off accidentally and killed him." You didn't do that in those days. Everybody knew how to handle a gun – you never point it at anybody. You had a little cap gun for the 4th of July – you could play with those and point it at somebody. But not a real gun.
Most of the hunting went on in the wintertime. We ate them – squirrels, too. That's food. Pheasant – we never had a gun that was good enough for a pheasant, although you could get it.
I was going to school north of Red Line. I went with my cousin Iris – she went to the same school. Suddenly – I don't know why it happened, but I'm going two miles south to the other school. I was in third grade there. And this is about the time that my folks started to get a divorce, you know ... problems they had. Dad, before he left, he sold the old Scripps-Booth and bought a 1927 – it come out in 1926 – a brand new Ford. When he left, he sold it to a neighbor. So, he just left – I didn't see him again until 1928, with his new wife. Young was her last name – I just can't remember what her first name was.
So, right after that, that's when Perry [Gaer] my step-dad come into the picture. They were married in December 1927. So, my mother got divorced in 1927. I guess I was ten years old.