I Jumped at the Chance: Loyal Jones Interviews Sidney Saylor Farr 22 September 1999

I Jumped at the Chance Loyal Jones Interviews Sidney Saylor Farr 22 September 1999 Loyal: Tell me about your childhood and growing up in Bell County. Sidney: I'm the oldest of ten, what eventually were ten children. And, therefore, soon, when I was six years old, my mother started teaching me how to cookbecause she needed the help with the younger children. Stoney Fork is a community like you could find many places in Appalachia—a few houses scattered, built alongside the creek, going right on out to the head of the hollow. I was born in 1932, so my earliest memories are of the Second World War ...and how scared I was when the airplanes would fly over, 'cause I was afraid they were going to drop bombs on us. I'd hear the adults , talking about places like Tokyo and other places y y where famous battles were fought. ...I lived on the side of Pine Mountain, and planes would crash either there or in West Virginia. Somewhere through those mountains ever little while planes would come over searching for them, and it always terrified me to see them. They'd come over our house and then almost go out of sight down beside the hill, and then they'd turn and make a circle and come again and then go back again, and I remember being so scared for a long time. Years after the war, if I heard a plane at night sounding like that, I'd get terrified and couldn't sleep. But getting back to the community where I lived—we were very poor. The closest road was about fifteen miles away. L: How far were you from Pineville? S: About fifteen miles. I don't know that it was ever measured. . . . We had a dirt road . .. along the creek bed and just little foot paths. And they were big enough that you could ride horses. L: But not take a wagon? S: No. And I remember when I was little, we needed to go to Pineville for something, and mymother taking us children, and we walked all the way down to where the highway started and thenwe caught a Greyhoundbus that went into Pineville. But after the War, there was a great building boom all overthe country, and so there was need for lumber and stuff, and saw mills came in and started cutting the timber. .. . L: Well, what influenced you the most there in your community? S: I guess I'd have to say it was the people. L: The people, your family? S: The men and the women and the storytellers. ... We didn't have books, or magazines, or anything that we ever bought. When I was real young, I had an aunt, Aunt Dellie, whose parents lived in Pineville. And sometimes they could get, if the Pineville Public Library was discarding books, a box ofbooks and give them to her to read, and then she'd give them to me. And I read everything she gave me,just like she had read it before me. One book I remember was the book of the Mormon faith. I read all the way through it, but I was so confused. You know, I'd never heard of anything like that, and I didn't know what it was about, but it sounded dreadful, you know, because I couldn't understand it. And I asked her what she thought it meant and she said, "Well, I don't know." She said, "I got confused when I read it." But, you know, neither one us thought it was a bit funny or peculiar that we read every word in that book, though we didn't understand it. ... L: Well, now, also from the religious point-of-view, the folks at Red Bird Mission, which were then Evangelical United Brethren, did they have a mission on Stoney Fork? S: Yes, they came over, the preacher from Red Bird. See, when they founded the mission there, it was a three-pronged thing. They founded a school and a church and a hospital, and in about '48 or '49 they started coming to Stoney Fork and...