A Boyhood in Ecru

Every other story in this archive has an airplane in it. This one comes before the wings — the world the boy left behind when he reported to flying school in 1939. Late in life, asked by his children to remember it, Bob set down the small-town Mississippi of his childhood: the night the lights came on, the cow he milked before school, a father starved for conversation, and a Halloween prank that brought a freight train to a halt.

Ecru

Ecru was a railroad town in Pontotoc County, north-central Mississippi — a creamery, a drugstore, a switching track, and a grade where the rails climbed out of town. Bob was the oldest of three boys raised by Dr. Eliam Baxter Burns, the country doctor, in a house lit by kerosene and a Coleman lamp. The Burns home was, by the standards of the place, a house of books and talk; the work was hard and the world was small.

The Day the Lights Came On

The defining event of his boyhood was not a flood or a war but a switch on a wall. When the great hydroelectric plants came on line at Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee River, crews spent a whole summer raising poles and stringing wire through town and wiring each house. Then, one day, the power was turned on.

“The outstanding event of my years of growing up in Ecru was the coming of electricity… The day the power was turned on, I recall my Dad gathering us three boys and telling each of [us] to turn the wall switch on and off about ten times. This was to make us familiar with the phenom[en]on of the room being lighted by moving a switch on the wall — and to prevent us playing at it.”

It is the perfect origin image for a man who would spend his life around the most advanced machines of his century: born into kerosene-lamp America, taught by his father to wonder at a light switch, before he ever wondered at an airplane.

Chores, Latin, and a Poem a Week

The three boys each had their assigned work, winter and summer, and the days were full of it. Bob swept the front porch and milked the cow morning and night; his brother Eliam — who would die in a training-plane crash in 1941 — kept the chickens and the hogs.

“My day, winter and summer, was first, to sweep the front porch. Then I milked the cow [morning and night]. Eliam fed the chickens and the hog or hogs… We also cleared the dining table and washed and dried the dishes. In summer, we also tended the garden with a weekly hoeing and weeding.”

Evenings were spent around the Coleman lamp in their parents’ room — the light “great compared to a kerosene lamp.” There was always homework: Latin, algebra, geometry, and the reading for English class. The town had no library, so books moved by exchange among a few households; Bob remembered reading Kipling’s Jungle Book. And every summer his father set a standing assignment.

“During summer vacation, my Dad required us to memorize and recite to him a poem, a different one each week.”

A Father With No One to Talk To

Dr. Burns was the rare educated man in a town that had little use for the things that interested him. His son remembered the complaint exactly.

“My Dad used to remark to me that his greatest misfortune in locating in Ecru was ‘that he had no one to talk to.’”

What he meant was that none of the locals cared to argue politics, religion, or science. Relief came once a year: a Boston Unitarian preacher would visit for a week, and the two men would sit on the front porch deep into the night, talking. The boy on the steps, listening, absorbed it — and carried that appetite for ideas all his life, eventually into a postwar friendship with the playwright Thornton Wilder.

Jake Leg

The Depression and Prohibition reached even Ecru. Bob, about ten or twelve, watched two of the town’s men — Lamar Lorick, who ran the drugstore, and the railroad stationmaster — pay a permanent price for a drink.

“We had two victims of jake leg, so called because of drinking a jamaca [Jamaica] ginger alcoholic brew which contained some adulterant which caused a paralysis from the hips down. They simply lost all control of their legs… mostly it caused more pity to see th[e]se two healthy men pay such a price to have an alcoholic drink. You must remember that this was before prohibition was ended and no booze was legal.”

“Jake leg” was real and widespread — a documented epidemic of paralysis from adulterated Jamaica ginger extract during Prohibition. In Ecru it had two faces the boy knew by name.

Cream on the Rails

And then there is the story his daughter Sue asked him to tell — the one with the freight train. The Burns house stood a couple of doors from the railroad crossing, near the grade where the rails climbed out of town. One Halloween, the older boys broke into the creamery, stole two five-gallon cans of cream, and poured a long stream of it along the rails and up the grade. Young Bob, somehow tipped off, slipped out the back door after bedtime and hid in the weeds to watch.

“He gathered speed really slow because of the load he was pulling, hardly more t[h]an a fast walk when he got to where the cream started. And immediately, the drive wheels on the locomotive began to spin. The train stopped and backed down the track for several hundred yards, then started up again. And again… the drive wheels began to spin again. Meantime, the guilty lads and I were in hysterics.”

Only when the engineer opened his sandboxes, sanded the rails, and backed off far enough for a running start did the long train finally claw its way over the grade and out of town. Bob ended the telling the way he ended his best ones: “And thats the truth.”

The boy who lay in the weeds watching a locomotive fight for traction would, within fifteen years, be hand-flying a B-17 through a wall of weather and leading bomb groups over Germany. But it started here — in a railroad town in Mississippi, in the last days before the lights came on.