His Blog - His Words
GARANDAD’S LIFE PART 7 Posted on November 21, 2012 by Martin Jones
GRANDDAD’S LIFE PART 7
I think that my father must have been born into the first generation of Joneses
that did not have a son named Martin. Daddy was a very enterprising man. They
tell a story on him when he was a kid. He was with the group pulling bolls
(harvesting cotton by hand and putting it into sacks which were dumped into a
wagon to be taken to the gin.) A cold front blew in. Carroll told the bunch
that the first thing he was going to buy with his earnings was a good pair of
long handles. As he grew older, he managed to find him a way of earning a
living without pulling bolls. He was an admirer of his grandfather, Martin E.B.
Jones. When his grandfather was older, he retired off the Indian Reservation.
By that time Frank McNair, my other grandfather, who was a Baptist preacher in
the area, became acquainted. I do not know how Martin E.B. Jones managed to
have a little nest egg laid by, but evidently, he did. At an early age Daddy and
his grandfather became owners of a truck, and Daddy started in the trucking
business. He hauled cotton bales to the compress, and cotton seed to Vernon. He
would go to Bridgeport, which was some distance east of Thalia and get a load
of coal and peddle it out. I have forgotten whether he and his grandfather were
partners, or he borrowed the money from him. But knowing my Daddy I would bet
that he soon bought out his grandfather and got out of the boll pulling
business. When there was nothing to haul with his truck, or even when there
was, he would get a job at night working at the gin. Trucking in those days was
a daytime thing. Trucks had no headlights. His first trucks did not even have
a cab.
