O is for Odie

I go by either picture so take your pick. Odie Langley, Jr. first born of Odie Langley and Martha Katherine Flood Langley. I came into this world on March 24th 1947 (I know I'm older than dirt) at the Rocky Mount Sanitarium delivered by Dr. William Wall. It was the big hospital in Rocky Mount at the time and and been long since torn down with fewer by the day remembering it.

Don't know what Dr. Wall was smoking that day or a couple of days later because somehow I ended up with 2 birth certificates, both signed by him. One was dated the 24th and the other the 26th. My mother always assured me I was actually born on the 24th. All this came home to me when I needed a passport to go on a cruise and went to Nashville, NC to get a copy of my birth certificate and they asked me which one I wanted. Yes, they even had both of them on record at the county building.

As I have mentioned in a previous post I grew up kinda/sorta in the grocery store my dad bought from his dad after getting lucky in a poker game one night at the store. Later he married my mom and built a house a stone's throw from the store and very close to my grandparents house. I have been told that my mother would get up and discover me missing early in the morning only to find me later in bed with my grandpa. I really don't remember any of that and even finding grandpa dead in bed one morning. I was very young when he died so the only real memory I have of him was riding in his horse and buggy. If I didn't have a hat on he would make me one out of a paper sack.

My sisters Linda & Marie came along after I was about 2 and then about 3 so were were very close in age. I tried to stay as far away from them as possible and spent a lot of my growing up years in the woods with my faithful dog Poochie (looked exactly like Benji). She lived for about 13 years & I found her dead in front of her dog house one morning so she went peacefully.

Much of my young to teen years was involved with farming to some extent. My dad had a couple of acres of land that he always planted something on to sell in his store. It might be tomatoes, watermellons, field peas, peppers, squash or whatever he wanted and my sisters & I had to harvest the crop. One year he went absolutely crazy and planted cotton. That was just a bad experience. As we got older we were allow to work for other people getting the tobacco crop in and usually that meant handing tobacco to a person who tied it onto a stick that was hung on racks in barns with heaters that cured the tobacco taking moisture out of it. I really did love the smell of freshly cured tobacco. We would come home from school and have to go to the tobacco tying room where we would gather carefully a small handful of tobacco by the stems and after grouping them so that the ends of the stems were all even we would take one very pretty leaf of tobacco and wrap around the stem ends tightly and end by securing the stem of that leaf inside the bundle. Then the bundles where placed on sticks for further processing. Now they cure the leave in bulk barnes and the careful, tedious process is long forgotten.

That's how Odie spent most of his childhood. I was a quiet boy, very shy but glad to have had the experiences I had when I look back on them. I'll give you more about me later. Have a great week everybody.