The Scent of Memories

I just returned from a southern vacation with sister Karen at her St. Simon's Island, Georgia residence then on to brother Rod's beach house at Anna Maria Island, Florida. We three siblings enjoyed the luxurious ocean settings where everything smelled so pure. There, we reminisced about the smells we remember from our lives in David, Kentucky, our coal camp home, owned by Princess Elkhorn Coal Company Organization.David is remembered by many as a very progressive coal camp with many amenities.

We could almost smell the melted tar as we talked. Pools of the black, thick melted paste were a side benefit of having "black top" roads. We loved when they tarred the road up our hollow. In the summer, The melting wonder emerged from sides of the road onto the edge in perfect puddles for playing. We used twigs and Popsicle sticks to paint and write on the sidewalks with the sticky ink. Karen and I wondered if the large heart,with "1952" spelled out in tribute to our grandfather's death, still exists there somewhere on the broken concrete in front of the vacant hillside where our house once stood. Next time I visit David, I'll look for it.

Tar drawings rarely fade away.

Butter, lard, or bacon grease have unique smells too as when they are rubbed all over the body to help remove the tar we got all over us. Nothing would get it out of our hair, though. I can feel Mother jerking my hair and fussing as she tried to make me look "half way decent" again. I don't think she jerked Karen. Karen was too sweet. I always blamed Mother for my horrible haircuts and the gaps in my straight bangs. but maybe that was her only choice. We usually did just what we wanted to and never quit playing in tar. Mother said, "When you have six children, you let them do pretty much what they want to do". So she was liberal with our fun, but we (especially myself)got whippings for more serious things like lying, talking back, or being disrespectful to others.

We remembered Mrs. Saunders, our first grade teacher and her wonderful scent. We wondered what she wore, maybe an old-fashioned talcum? We knew it wasn't Evening In Paris cologne.

Pond's Cold Cream--mother's beauty secret, which most of us continue to use (even Rod) to this day. I yearned to grow up and someday, smooth the precious cream to my throat while looking into the mirror like my beautiful mother.

'Under the floor", the packed earthen space under our house, had a musty smell all its own. We played endless games, did "plays", found old, interesting clothes and things that were as much fun as toys, to us. We were fortunate that our house was on the hillside and required 9 steps to reach the front porch, which meant we could stand up in many spaces under the foundation. Our damp, dusky playground narrowed as it met the slope of the hillside backyard.

All the company houses were alike, and aligned in perfect rows. The number of steps up to the porch varied though--back then, they didn't level the hillside to build houses like they do today. Once we lived in a house with only 5 steps and playing "under the floor" was not nearly as adventurous as under the floor with 9 steps. We mostly crawled around and hid down there.Our hilly yards were as natural as the unmined terrain.

Uncle Otis had built a shower room under "the seventh house on the right" our primary address for most of our life in David. It's the house that had nine steps. We moved in when Uncle Otis and Aunt Ora moved to town, Prestonsburg. We considered the shower a real luxury. In the summer, Daddy showered there after work. How nice is that! Once he yelled,"Peggy, bring the Twenty-Two! Peggy ran down under the floor and shot a blacksnake that was in Daddy's shower room. We were all proud of her marksmanship and surprised that Daddy was so startled.

Mentioning Daddy's shower, brings up the smell of Lava soap. A rough grained bar that smelled terrible, but removed more of the ingrained coal dust than milder soaps. Sometimes, we had to use Lava, too. I hated it.

Daddy was a gorgeous young man and I remember how clean he was and how good he smelled on weekends when he dressed up in a starched white shirt, perfectly ironed handkerchief, suit, hat, the whole works. He smelled so good. Did he use Old Spice or Mennen After-Shave lotion? I'm sure it was one of those standards.

We remembered the smell of Daddy's lunch box, laden with coal dust and a bit of leftover lunch cake for us. Daddy's work clothes were always the last load and we remembered the smell of them sloshing in the gray scummy wash water.

We remembered the aroma of fresh strawberries we picked over the new-road hill at Quemine's old mountain home.

We remembered the odor of Daddy and Mother's cigarettes--menthol Kools and Salems, which had just been invented to soothe the throat. We learned to hand Daddy a lighted Kool when he had an black-lung or asthmatic coughing spell. Cigarettes weren't unhealthy back then--at least there was never any news that they were bad. I loved the way Mother looked when she tilted her head exhaled into the air just like the movie stars we had seen magazines and movies. Very sexy. Not so pretty was the way a cigarette would hang from her lower lip while she did the household chores. She didn't bother looking for an ashtray, but often laid her burning cigarette on a window ledge. Our white enamel window sills were always laced with burnt brown stripes.None of the Bussey children smoked, except for the occasional rebellious experiment.

Ahh, the fresh pine that Mother cut from trees in the hills, filled our house with the aroma of a forest as she nailed the branches and placed pine cones all over the book shelves and onto the front porch--with blue Christmas lights, if she had them. All our Christmas trees were real, too, but were often collateral damage, turned over during the big fight Mother and Daddy were sure to have. Christmases, even today, are not the best of Holidays for me.

We remembered Mother, always creative, picking weeds from the hill and transforming them into beautiful arrangements with the magical gold and silver aerosol paint recently invented, and finally stocked at the Company store in the early 50's. The company store itself had a smell of ceosote and oil, used to reduce the dust on the wide hardwood board flooring. Progress, I suppose. Oh yes, Mother also spray painted almost all of the few dishes we had, and even drew on the curtains with spray paint. Her creative urges just couldn't be contained, even in her suffocating environment.

Sometimes we ate lunch at the fountain and still remember the smell of those wonderful hot dogs wrapped in waxed paper and the smell of the ice-cream freezer when we dug deep to find Popsicles, Fudgesicles, "Imps", Push-ups, Creamsicles, and other frozen treats. We charged these luxuries to Daddy's check, of course, and often caused him "go in the hole" on payday, when another fight was sure to break out at home. Of course we saved all the ice cream sticks for playing in tar, etc.Some days we went home for a lunch of fried Balogna sandwiches or Pork n Beans with a cold cheese sandwich and a sweet pickle. The lunches at the fountain were special, though, and we often broke the rules to eat there.

The creeks smelled of sulphur until the Company enclosed them with huge (I guess, about 4 ft diameter) concrete tiles and covered them with earth. We observed this miraculous construction and loved playing "Banner" and making risky jumps from tile to tile. When a bigger boy was our "Banner Man", the leaps became longer and more dangerous. We had small injuries from time to time, but no one ever told us to quit playing on the tiles. We never called this game the fancy name of "Follow the Leader", but it's the same game.

The Company built us a swimming pool using coal miner labor, which earned the miners' families punch cards for free swimming. Brother Rod also worked on the pool and earned a period of free swimming for all of us. People came from all over Floyd County to swim in the David pool. It may have been the only public pool for several years. We got to meet town people, see some of our P-burg high school teachers there, and especially cute boys from Prestonsburg.Yes, we lived in a progressive coal camp and we all fell in love at one time or another at the pool.Sister Peggy was friends with Johnny Dep's mother, Betty Goble, and has a great photo of them and their friends around the David Pool.

All the Bussey children, (except Toby) became expert swimmers.Toby worked as a lifeguard, anyway, and got a perfect tan using baby oil laced with iodine,or at times with butter alone, while we swam our summers away. Baby brother Johnny could swim like a fish by age 3 and got really dark in summers. Mother let us go there alone, trusting the good lifeguards to look after us. Besides Toby, the pool hired some David athletes and qualified swimmers to help patrol the pool.

Karen and I had snow white hair that smelled of chlorine and was tinted green all summer long, every year. I don't think we had summer sandals back then and the blacktop was so hot we had to run to cross the scalding roads to get home in time for supper. The rule was supper on the table by 4:30, but no eating until Daddy was ready. Whenever he was ready, the food had to be hot. Eight to Ten of us would sit around the dining room table. There were 10 people in our house when 2 beloved nieces came to live with us for 3 years.

After supper, the girls had to clean the dining room and wash and scald the dishes. It was a hated job, but we had to get it done everyday--as we became old enough. Then we'd run outside to play "Round-Town", "Go Sheepie Go" , "Tin Can Alley", "Needles-Eye Doth Supply", jump rope, or hop-scotch, on the road in front of the house. Sometimes, we just went into the hills and played until dark--swinging grapevines, climbing trees, playing jungle girl, cowboys and Indians, or another of the endless games we loved. The rule was to be home by dark, and we were dared to make noise because Daddy would be trying to sleep for another hard day at the mines tomorrow.

Fortunately, after 1952, we had television so had some way to entertain ourselves without disturbing Daddy. We kept the volume way down.

I didn't mind going in before dark. There was a large Tulip Popular I had to pass on the way home and after dark, it cast a fearsome shadow that I had to run through to get home safely. As if the Indians lurking in the hills weren't enough to worry about. I wish someone had told me back then, that no Indian Tribe ever made their home in Kentucky. It was good hunting ground and good for forays into the settlements, but the tribes always returned to their real homes. This knowledge would have greatly alleviated my nights of fear way up my hollow in David.

In summers, at night, we were already clean from our day in the pool, of course, and from sliding on soap in the shower rooms, so I doubt we ever took a real bath in summertime. We'd come in at dark, play or read awhile, listen to music on the radio, then fall asleep in our bathing suits. Can this really be true?

I won't mention the smell of burning tires for warmth while we played outside in winter. I must stop this flooding of memories and give you a break, if you're still reading. These memories flood my heart at times and represent part of the double-edged sword of life in a small coal camp on the left fork of Middle Creek in David, Floyd County, Kentucky.

Peace,
Judy