Interview with Bruce Crickard Interviewed by Dr. R. P. A. June of 1976.
ALEX: Did you know a fellow named Fowler?
CRICKARD: Well all the fellow I knew were rail road men and coal runners and
there was Enick in Elkins. He ran a restaurant there and a saloon in Huttonsville
that is all the Fowler’s I can remember in Pocahontas County.
ALEX: Did you make that cane?
CRICKARD: Yes, it a laurel root—mountain laurel. A little old short laurel.
I worked it out. I found it hanging upon the side of an Austrian Lumber camp. I
just took it off and worked it. Sanded it some.
ALEX: You had it a good while.
CRICKARD: Yes—I got a bear trap hanging up a lot of old antiques. Fellow
come along and wanted to buy it. I say no—I got to have something to keep people
out of my corn patch, you know. Last year they got it all then picked the beans
off and took the corn. They didn’t dig the potatoes. I had a wash tub and a
board and an ax. I called J. Buckley. Yes, I’ll take it over you know, how Jay
wasn’t more than a block from the store. So, ole Jay went to lugging the stuff
over. “Here you can make you a living if you starve to death, its your own
fault” He came over one day to listen to the radio because we had the only radio
there. Here they came about noon and sit that stuff on the porch….way out he
said, “Here take this mirror you can hang it up and watch yourself starve to
death”. But, what happened we had sent everything to the laundry and we went
down and the bill was pretty high. So, he looked at my wife and said, “If, I had
a women like that I would make her wash, well she wasn’t about to wash on that
board. Well, I became the laundry agent. People would bring it in and I would
ship it out by mail. The laundry would pay the postage both ways. I’d make
enough to pay our laundry free. When, I was in the hospital there in Elkins,
they sent it to the Elkins laundry, when we moved away from there I recommended
Jessie Harman to take it over, then. So Jessie would come in to see me and
mentioned he didn’t get to thanking me for letting him have the laundry. That
really paid off. He said, “I really did well. You know they just sent me a sack
and I would take it over and weigh the whole sack that’s the way they shipped
it. When it came back, I just put a tag on it. Some just wanted it washed,
didn’t want it ironed, so they done that by the pound”.
ALEX: Tell me something about the logging.
CRICKARD: Well, we cut the logs and scaled them by the thousands and keep
each cutting crew separate. I had gone up the lumber camp—oh—it was a steep
grade about 10% I had gone up there about 1 ½ mile and Mr. Lang had asked me if
I was coming in if he could go up to Salty Fork. I don’t know, maybe. George
Wall was down there scaling up and maybe Lee Barnes all wanted to ride up to
Salty Fork. You know, I said, “yes, I’ll be glad to take you up. I got plenty of
room. Well anyway, I came down out of that switch—while I was up there—there had
come a sleet. Well, of course, about a ½ inch of ice had come on the track.
Well, as soon as I took the brake off, the motor car, it started rolling and Lee
Barnes would throw the switch. But, had 3 or 4 other fellow on there and instead
of slowing down the wheels just slid and took like a sled on a ski slope. Zoop!
You know. I’m sitting up there and I set the brakes, but it kept going faster
and faster. We got down there where there was an awful lot of brush, so we all
looked at one another and I said, You fellows can jump off a there if you want
to, I’m going to jump off right on down there”. But, anyway I’d set the brakes
by that point and I did jump off. It was running pretty fast, get faster all the
time you know, on that steep grade. It’s like an incline. Ol’ man Lang he jumped
off in a whole bunch of brush and got skinned knees, you know, it skinned him up
pretty bad. There was another bunch on there. They all got skinned up when they
jumped off in that first pile of brush. But, there was a running board on there.
I got out on there, set the brakes up real tight and just jumped off when it got
down where they'd cut through made a big cut through to the shale layer. The
shale was loose and it was soft there and I just landed out in the shale and
just let the motorcar go on.
I started on down the track and got about halfway off of the hill, got down
there and the motor car was just standing there. I’d put it in reverse gear and
thought it had come back to meet me….It stalled it, killed the engine and it had
just stopped. I went on down there, it was just setting there, and I got on it
and came back up. It had gotten off the ice when it got into lower altitude.
But, for about the first half mile it was slick there, now I’ll tell you it was
slick.
ALEX: What did your friends think when they saw you?
CRICKARD: They didn’t know what to think when they saw me come back. I said,
“that I thought I’d come back and see if they had been killed”. I was used to
hopping freights then. If, I saw a log train and wanted on, I hardly ever slowed
the engine down. I’d just hop on. Sometimes, when I’d be out and coming in and
run into snow or ice, you couldn’t get an engineer to run into Spruce. Why, I’d
just get up, unlock the engine, throw the switch, go down and hook on the
motorcar and just run the engine in. She (referring to his wife) went along once
and we got stuck in snow, a foot of snow. I said, “Well you just sit here.
You’re good and warm.” We had heat in the motorcar. I said, “You just wait here
and I‘ll go get the engine”.
So, I went and got the engine and hooked on the motorcar. But, I couldn’t
let her ride in the motorcar, was afraid the snow would throw it off the track.
I got her up in the engine. I had her sitting up there and she was blowing the
whistle and ringing the bell. She thought she was having a big time.
Once, when we started in from Spruce we got up to Dunlaps. We went back and
got number 7 and a box car. It was zero weather and so Hymie said, “Lets get a
stove and make a fire and get some heat in the boxcar.” So, we fixed it up
before we left Slaty Fork. We got up to where the state road goes through there
at Mt Airey, and the engine just took off, there was ice, and run over the top.
There was no bridge there. We worked there until about 3 o’clock in the morning
digging that ice and getting the engine back on the track. Couldn’t go on to
Spruce. Sat around and decided to go back to Slaty Fork and get a bigger engine.
Went back to Slaty Fork and, of course, we held on to the boxcar with the
stove and added a caboose. We got over the Cheat where they’d made the big cut
going over to Spruce and this engine and boxcar just run off into the snow
again.
Hymie said to me, “What are we going to do?”
I said, “there’s no use in us trying to do anything. We had better get a
section crew and a flatcar and try to haul some of this snow out of here. It’s
the only thing we can do”.
Well the boxcar was up pretty high and the railroad was kinda raised. It was
down there, just through this on the Cheat side. I said, “Well we might just as
well get on with it”. I jumped off into that snowdrift and went in clear over my
head. Well, I dug out of there, pawed my way out.
We spent an hour walking a mile, maybe more than an hour and got down to
Spruce. Got indoors and built a big fire in the stove and took some refreshments
and waited for breakfast. Well I laid down on the bed. I said, “Hymie, you
better lay down”.
No, I’ll sit here. There was a big rocking chair, he laid back in it and it
wasn’t but two minutes til he was a snoring!
So when the breakfast bell rang, it didn’t even wake him up. I said, “Which
breakfast do you want to eat, first or second shift”
“Oh,” he said, “lets rest a little longer”.
I went back to sleep and he went back to sleep and we didn’t wake up til
almost nine o’clock.
Hymie, he was trainmaster—in charge of the trains. He said, “I’ve got to get
out of here”.
I said, “Don’t you want breakfest?.
“Aw,” he said, “they won’t feed us”.
“They’ll feed me anytime. We’ll just go down and take a plate and go in the
cook room”
We went down and they’d cooked some beans and they were done. So, we got a
plate of beans and a cup of coffee, fried potatoes, two or three fried eggs and
went into the dining room and sat down to eat.
Well, he gets out and he gets two flatcars and about twenty-five Italians
that were loose….colored folks-----. It took him with them men and everything,
until three o’clock that evening to free that engine and get it back on the
track. They worked all day and had to haul that snow out of there. But, finally
he came back in. Course, I heard the train whistle then and I knew they’d got it
on the track then.
They blew the whistle at Mt Airey crossing…..cause they hadn’t put the road
the cut through there.
We cut ice off of the track as thick as that cushion there. Didn’t have many
tools, only just an old……tool, just what the engine crew’d carry.
Wife: Who was drivin’ the engine?
CRICKARD: Walter Goodman.
Wife: You’d work yourself to death.
CRICKARD: Oh, I had the whole train crew.
Wife: Well, it seems like Jim Barber was doin’ it all.
CRICKARD: Well, he was doin’ most of the diggin’ and cuttin’ that ice out.
The rest of them would work maybe 10 minutes, then go in the boxcar. Like to
froze to death.
I said, “ Well you ought to put on clothes, you could stand Alaska”.
They went over there and the snow was blowin’ so bad it’d just cover you up.
It snowed about as fast as we could shovel it out. We spent pret’ near all night
there.
Wife: We had that same experience when we came back from our honeymoon. The
train ran off the track, the very same place.
CRICKARD: I had to leave my motorcar at Cass in the shed. Didn’t we have it
then.
Wife: And here I was up in that engine and the thing off’n the track. But,
when they got it cleared…they sent for us some way, didn’t they? Got me down
there…we were all dressed up in our fancy clothes. We had to unpack, get out
wool socks, boots. We thought we were on a honeymoon.
CRICKARD: Well, I’ll tell ya’….
Wife: I remember because our anniversary is the same day as theirs, but a
few years later. They were married in ’26 and they were married in ’34. I
remember its’ been about 50 years ago that you picked me up in a motorcar and
took me to Spruce.