Evans “Buddy” King
Columnist
I was in the grocery store the other day doing a little Christzmas stocking up. I spied an item that must be seasonal – a bag of spectacularly colored apples – reds and greens – and brilliant oranges. I wasn’t used to seeing them packaged that way and I had to buy them. If nothing else it helps provide cover for the little white lies I tell my doctor and my health insurance carrier that “oh, yeah, sure, I always have fruits and vegetables around.” Never know when they might ask for receipts.
It brought back a poignant Christmas memory. I don’t remember how old I was, maybe eight, but I can still hear my father when I asked what he got for Christmas when he was a kid. He said, “an orange”. I said, not intending to be funny, “an orange what?” An orange bicycle? An orange baseball glove? An orange wagon? He said “no, we just got oranges”. Remembering that moment always fills me even more with love and warmth for my Dad – and anxious to tell the King family story.
In case I am losing readers at this point, there is one urgent take away here – learn about your families while you have the chance. It’s easier to chronicle and preserve now – in my youth it was mainly an oral history and I did not do my part by being a good listener as well as I would have liked. Take the time.
Back to the King’s of Christiansburg. My dad was the oldest of eight (there had been one more – another boy John – who died in early childhood in 1918 from the Spanish flu. The kids consisted of my dad (Evans), the twins Clyde and Cline, Elbert, Violet, Ruth, Pearl and Barbara. (No argument from me if you say they sure don’t name them like they used to – Aunt Barbara, the youngest, got off easy (must have run out of cool names by then). My grandfather was Charlie and my grandmother was Virgie Mae (no comment please), Virgie Mae Sutphin.
The first several years of my dad’s life were spent in a hollow near the Montgomery-Floyd County line. Huffville, a suburb of Pilot. I don’t think they knew which county they were in. They were the classic southern family of that era – post-reconstruction, pre-depression – subsistence farmers. I was away at college before I learned that “damn” and “yankee” were separate words. My father said that they didn’t even notice the Depression when it came along. They had lived it their whole lives.
When things got really rough grandfather Charlie would go to southern West Virginia and work in the mines – he was a mechanic and worked on the rail cars that hauled the coal out of the ground. He lived in coal camps and sent money back to his family. He worked underground some. Here is where the story gets a little more interesting. The King’s are known as a loquacious lot – we talk. A lot. But apparently this trait wasn’t from the King side. My dad said one time that he heard his father say “maybe 10 words in his whole life.” Charlie King was just a simple, hard-working, God-fearing man who did the best he could to provide for a family that got away from him numbers-wise. The penchant for talk, and a thirst for learning, came from my grandmother. In the early part of the 20th century, she obtained a “normal school degree” – which, from what I understand, entitled her to teach school – and she was determined that her kids would get educations, like it or not. I think they did like it, judging from the results.
My grandmother’s desire that her children be “properly schooled” led her to move the family into Christiansburg after my dad had finished the 8th grade – for the third time. His mother had been waiting for some of the younger members of the brood to catch up with him to justify the move. There had been no high school where they lived – just a bunch of King’s and Epperly’s and Huff’s and Turner’s, and an old one room school house. Altoona School I think it was called.
Christiansburg had about 1,000 residents when the Kings moved into town in the late 1920’s, making a substantial bump in the population. I like to say that they were the poorest family in town, but small southern hamlets of that era were not exactly swimming with Carnegie’s and Rockefeller’s, so they were probably typical, just a few more mouths to feed than most.
They settled on Craig Street, not far from the stockyard, the “economic engine” of its day. My vague memories (Charlie and Virgie Mae died close together around the time I was in 1st grade) are of a chicken coop in the yard and a small pasture next door. Smack in the middle of town. They knocked the back wall out and built rooms on to extend the house as more Kings arrived (Charlie and Virgie Mae apparently spurning overtures from Planned Parenthood as farm families did). They never owned a car. My mother taught my dad to drive when he returned from World War II – when he was already principal of the high school. Grandfather Charlie worked at the mill and was a handyman in town, still going to the mines when circumstances required.
Virgie Mae’s passion for education, and for a better life for her kids, was fulfilled many times over. All four sons graduated from college, my dad and the twins from Emory & Henry, Uncle Elbert from VPI. The girls, who my father said were all brighter than any of the boys, all finished high school and family legend (my dad) has it that each was valedictorian of her class. (The times being what they were, college was not in the cards for the girls.) The Kings of Craig Street had the largest number of graduates of Christiansburg High of any nuclear family ever, again per my father. Since families don’t get that large anymore, I think this record will endure.
The kids all worked hard – in school and at home. They all had after school jobs. The boys played sports, Clyde and Cline being among the better football players in the area. Cline eventually coached the football team at CHS for a couple of years while my dad was principal. My dad worked in a grocery in high school in addition to playing football and baseball. In college he worked in the campus cafeteria and sold class rings to get by, at the height of the Great Depression. Later, three of the brothers were in three separate graduate schools in New York City at the same time – my dad at Columbia and Clyde and Cline at NYU and City College. Around that time, the fourth son, the youngest, Uncle Elbert, began a long and successful career as an engineer with Foster Wheeler, also in the City. Pretty remarkable for a family from hillbilly country. Most of the kids served in World War II. All were solid members of their communities.
Inevitably, each generation takes the past more for granted than the previous one. For goodness sake, it’s the past. We assume that things are the way they are because of our own efforts and our own brilliance. How we got to where we are is irrelevant. We are born on third base and go through life thinking we hit triples. But every year at Christmas, when I see an orange, I count my blessings for the family that gave me the opportunities and the life I have been given
