My parents were in their mid-twenties when I was born on February 13, 1923, the second of their five children. My brother Roy, a year-and-a-half older, was in every way my big brother: he would grow up to be six feet, four inches and weigh about 250 pounds. My wife Glennis called him "the gentle giant," but as a kid, I gladly trailed behind a big brother twice my size. Nobody picked on me.
We lived in Myra, on the upper Mud River, which was just a few farmhouses, a post office, and a country store. Our white clapboard house stood next to a cornfield. When I was about three, we moved to Hubble, where Dad went to work for the railroad. I remember him coming home with his face and hands bandaged from a flash fire when he shoveled coal into the firebox. As young as I was, that incident made a deep impression: I realized for the first time how hard he struggled to shelter us from the cold. Until then, I had no idea what Dad was up against, how tough life really was. But Dad wasn't a brooder or a complainer. In fact, he was a great prankster, and a real marksman with a slingshot. An old lady neighbor had a milking cow and every evening she'd come out and milk it in a field next to the railroad tracks. Dad would sit on the porch and shoot pebbles at that cow; the old lady milking on the other side couldn't figure out why Bessie kept kicking over her bucket.
Dad made home-brew with yeast and malt, and wine in grape season. I worked the bottlecapper, the first mechanical thing I ever understood. Mom got all over him because he stored his bottles in the basement to keep them cool and they were always blowing up. West Virginia was a dry state, and you either made your own or got mighty thirsty.
I was still a preschooler when we moved to Hamlin, which seemed to me like a big city, with a main street and a bunch of stores schools, and churches. Hamlin was a town of four hundred. We moved because Dad began work as a natural gas driller, contracting out with a string of tools in southern West Virginia and Kentucky. We lived in a three-room house across from the grade school. Roy and I slept in the family room on a studio couch that opened into a bed. By then we had a two-year-old baby sister, Doris Ann. Shortly before Christmas, when I was four-and-ahalf and Roy was six, we were sitting on the floor in the family room playing with Dad's 12-gauge shotgun. Roy found some shells and loaded the gun; he accidentally fired and the baby was killed. For our little family it was a time of terrible shock loss, and suffering. I suppose some parents would've locked away any guns following such a tragedy but Dad didn't. Shortly after the funeral, he sat down with Roy and me. "Boys," he said, "I want to show you how to safely handle firearms." I'm sure Roy carried this heartbreak with him until his own early death from a heart attack at age forty-one. He and I never again discussed it, nor did my parents. Years later, Glennis asked my mother about the accident but she just didn't want to talk about it. That's the Yeager way; we keep our hurts to ourselves.
Those were tough times with Dad just starting a new occupation. If you've ever seen two growing boys wolfing down food, then you know what Mom was up against. She cooked us mush for breakfast which was plain boiled white cornmeal served in a bowl with milk and sugar. She made more than we used and set it aside until it got rubbery, then she sliced it, fried it, put butter on it, and that was supper. Some evenings we'd have only corn bread and buttermilk. When the weather turned cold, rats nested in that little house, and I once chased an enormous rat running off with Mom's pan lid. Around that time, I also started school. We were seated alphabetically, and I sat back in daydreamer's row with the other Ys. I lived for vacations and weekends. We kids spent most of our free time running around in the hills. We made walking stilts from tree limbs or spent whole days up in trees, jumping like monkeys from one sapling to the other to see how far we would get. We built log forts and staged wars, using slingshots and rubber-band guns. By the time I was six, I knew how to shoot a .22 rifle and hunted squirrel and rabbit. I'd get up around dawn, head into the woods, and bring back three or four squirrels, skin them and leave them in a bucket of water for Mom to cook up for supper. Sometimes I got so engrossed in hunting, I was late for school and got chewed out by the principal. I also used to fish for suckers and bass in the Mud River.
We ran barefoot all summer. On Saturday night Mom made us wash our feet, getting ready for Sunday school. On Sunday night, our feet were sore and blistered from wearing shoes, and our family joke was that the first pair of shoes we had, we wore out first from inside out. In summer, Mom canned blackberries and made jelly and jam; Roy and I sold blackberries for ten cents a gallon, a source of additional income. Dad was gone all week, but sometimes when he came home on the weekends, he brought a cantaloupe-a real treat-or a watermelon, which you could buy in those days for a nickel.
The Great Depression began when I was eight, but it had no real impact when you were already so low on the income scale. Dad got regular work in the gas fields. When a family named Baker was forced into foreclosure on their mortgage and lost their home, the bank approached Dad, and we moved into what I thought was a palace on a hill-a two-story, four-bedroom house with a big parlor and a smokehouse in back. Dad got the place, plus two small city blocks that went with it, for signing a note for $1,800. He worked hard, was known for his integrity, and the bank figured he'd manage somehow to keep up on his monthly payments.
Now we had a garden and a cow, slopped hogs, and raised chickens. I could wring off a chicken's neck when I was six. Mom pickled corn and beans and made sauerkraut. In the fall she made apple butter in a thirty-gallon copper kettle, and as a treat, she added sprigs of peppermint. We kids had the job of keeping the fire going. She also boiled sorghum molasses, a source of syrup all winter. We had no refrigeration, but we used the smokehouse when Dad slaughtered a hog. One time, he and a neighbor teamed up to kill a five-hundred-pound hog. The guy shot it between the eyes and Dad walked up to it to slit its throat and bleed it, when that hog suddenly got up and ran off. Dad jumped on and rode it through the streets as if it were a runaway horse. It carried him two hundred yards before he succeeded in slitting its throat.
After a hog was killed and bled, we kids covered it with burlap sacks and poured steaming water over it, to set the hair before scraping it off. Dad did the butchering. The hams were cured with salt and hung m the smokehouse; meanwhile, Mom cooked and canned souse meat (better known as Philadelphia scrapple). She also cured bacon, rubbing sides with salt and pepper and hanging them in the smokehouse. Vines of Concord grapes grew out back, and we kids harvested hickory nuts and black walnuts in the woods, as well as berries and wild persimmons. Mom used the nuts in cakes and candies. We also brought back pawpaws, an almost tropical fruit that grows only along the western edge of Appalachia, in West Virginia, and tastes halfway between a banana and a peach.
From time to time, Dad let me go on hunting trips with some other local men, shooting deer, bear, quail, and wild turkeys. To us, hunting was like harvesting nuts or fruit; we never killed more than we could use. Every kid in Hamlin was raised with a gun and there were few, if any, poor shots; even so, I was pretty good. Shooting is a matter of good eyesight, muscular control, and coordination. Roy, for example, was a little more high-strung: his hands shook before he squeezed the trigger. I never got excited or flustered sighting on game, that wasn't my nature. And somehow I was usually able to spot a deer hidden in brush before anyone else. I had exceptional 20/10 vision.
My sister Pansy Lee and younger brother, Hal, Jr., were born in the house on the hill. But for a long time, Roy and I did all the chores. With Dad being gone so much, Mom raised us. If we got too rambunctious, she told Dad about it when he got home, and he brought out the heavy artillery-his leather strap. I got my first licking for calling a neighbor "McCoglin," instead of "Mister McCoglin." Roy and I ran errands, weeded in the garden, slopped the hogs, and milked the cow twice a day. I cannot remember a moment when there wasn't something to do. I wasn't big enough to be a rowdy kid, but I wasn't above mischief either.