A tale From Long Ago and Dangers of Today

After a quiet day at home catching up on some work, I had a phone call from my older brother, Max. We talked for two hours. We laughed and reminisced about our childhood, family members and as usual, I heard another new story I had not heard before.

Max is ten years older than I, so he can remember and tell me things I was too young to have known or things that happened before I was born.

Tonight he told me about the time our oldest brother, Ray, was left behind after attending an event with his FFA class. Ray had gone to school that day and, with others, was taken to the agricultural event, a Fat Cattle Show, at Cudahy Packing Company.

When the meeting ended, the teacher went home. Those boys who had no one to come and pick them up had no way to get home. My parents lived on a farm many miles from the packing plant.  The other two boys also lived long distances away.

When the school bus came by that afternoon and Ray did not get off, Mother was alarmed. Our family did not have a telephone, and Daddy had driven the truck to work at the mill.

I can imagine how worried my mother was when her son did not come home. Where could he be? What was he doing? Where would he sleep on this cold winter night? She was stranded with no way to contact the school or anyone who might know where her son was or why he did not come home.

The next afternoon Ray arrived on the bus with his brothers. He told his family that he had spent the night inside the packing house in a warm office. After all the employees left and locked up the building, one of the other boys managed to pick the lock on the outside door. The three forgotten boys went in and found an office door open. The place was warm, and they settled down and slept there all night. Before the workers appeared the next day, the three boys left and walked back to the high school. No one knew they had camped out in the office.

I am sure my mother was overcome with relief. I can imagine her hugging Ray and him pushing her away as he was not one for affection.

What if? That is the jumping off place for fiction writers. What if starts the wheels in our creative minds working. What if that had happened today?

Mother would have been on the phone the minute her son did not get off that bus. She would be calling the high school and then the police, wouldn't she? There would be hell to pay, and the teacher would be fired. That teacher might even be sued along with the school. The TV news would have it on the six o'clock broadcast. Not my mother, but some mothers, in fact most of today's mothers, would be screaming and demanding blood.

Looking back on that experience, I realize that my parents had complete trust in Ray, at only fifteen, to handle a situation on his own. He was always far more mature than the other brothers, and they looked up to him all of his life. How Mother handled his missing all night and the next day, I can't imagine. I am sure she did not sleep. She adored her first born son. I think she was comforted   knowing he was level-headed and would not do anything that put him in harm's way.

Times were different then, early 1940s, and in our small town in rural Georgia, crime was not an everyday occurrence. But it makes me think about poor people of today who don't have the luxury of cell phones for themselves and their children. Do they have things happen with their children that leave them afraid and wondering where their boys are sleeping -- in jail or in an alley knocked unconscious? Our world today is a far different place and far more dangerous.

My heart goes out to mothers of boys who live in cities where gangs prey on young kids. In countries where criminals recruit young men into their organizations by threatening their families, no wonder those mothers will travel for months to find a safe place to live. Even chain link fences around them bring relief for those mothers. At least inside those fences their children are safer than they were back home. They have food and water. I can't imagine fear of such danger that even the most menial aid is life-saving.

But I can imagine the worry and stress of a mother having her children taken away to some place she can't go and where she doesn't know if she will ever see them again. That is heart breaking.