The Legends Of Veale Creek
Life was simple, hunting was great, and punishments were severe growing up under The Legends Of Veale Creek.
The three shaped a family from merely well-known to legendary in their respective areas. Born poor, raised to work, and proud to have served in the military, this trio prevailed where others crumbled. None were perfect, but their strengths together offset many of their weaknesses welding a framework to which hard-headed cousins anchored their lives.
Moses stood. Whether alone or with the crowd, he could no more back down from his position than could a rooster in a cock fight. People gravitated to him when times were lean expecting him to have the skills to make things better or at least the words to comfort; sometimes he had both.
He had tremendous skill with his hands. Tools were great for work but also used as “brushes” to give projects a bit of flair. This made patience hard for him when someone else – such as me! – was trying a tricky cut or drilling a hole at a tricky angle. He wanted us to learn from him and knew we needed experience, but many was the time he took a tool from my hand apologizing all the while but not being able to stand a second-rate production when he did it so much better.
When a person is right so many times in important matters, they tend to voice their opinion forcefully. Moses had an uncanny track record and subsequently wondered why he was not listened to more often. In his old papers, I found notes of a church business meeting where Moses was referred to as “Little Hitler.” I heard parent after parent ask him what they could do to help their child. (“After all, your children are Christians!”) He would bow his head, shake it, and gently tell them that they had refused to listen when the child was trainable; now the mold had set and their only option left was to pray.
Samson bulled. An unmatched physical specimen, he gained national notoriety as a U. S. Army boxer – then gave it up for the love of his life. When one of the hard-headed cousins did not make it home by curfew, he was given a verbal warning. The next night, he wandered in again at the time of his liking. Samson met him with an uppercut that lifted Cousin off his feet and deposited him on his backside across the room bouncing his head off of numerous objects along the way. Sure enough, that cousin learned to tell time by Samson’s watch.
He lived for his emotions and acted quickly on them. Many will talk, but Samson would do. He used his house for orphans, he used his car for giving rides to church, he used his money to buy food for the needy, and he used his time to teach. Persistent in his ways and hard to argue with, Samson never found a fishing hole he didn’t like or a pole he couldn’t snap in disgust. He owned a Pinto station wagon and a bright yellow Maverick.
Both Moses and Samson were beyond the norm at table games. Moses was the domino master and Samson the card wizard. They devoted hours of their weeks making youngsters play with them to see logic skills, math facts, friendly competition, attention to details, and just plain old fun with no batteries needed. Moses put masking tape around the Wahoo! board and numbered the holes. Nobody was allowed to count spaces after rolling the die; they had to do the addition in their head. Samson was a renowned math teacher. The same cousin who had to have his jaw adjusted to tell time later got his entire U. S. Navy class past a math test by calling Samson from a payphone for help on some study review problems; those men all became engineers on nuclear submarines. Failure was not an option in their minds. Both men resigned from teaching jobs when students under their tutelage did not take learning seriously enough. One resigned from a church Bible class and the other left public school for a short stint in the state hospital.
Solomon learned. Frankly, there was not an area where he did not have substantial knowledge. Award-winning mechanic, Navy fighter RIO, electrician, engineer, noted outdoorsman, and mouth-watering cook all rolled into one, Solomon yearned to impart all he had mastered. Sadly, it turned some of the cousins against him; they could not stand always having someone telling them a better way. Yet, this same quality inspired some other cousins to reach much further than their immediate circle because they wanted to be like Solomon.
He had the funniest collection of vehicles we had ever seen. His El Camino was fire-engine red with a DC-to-AC adapter under the hood so he could run an electric chain saw out in the woods. His step-side van had a porta-potty in it so he could drive a granny to the doctor’s office without her peeing all over herself. His two-tone station wagon (olive green bottom, white top!) had heavy duty shocks and truck parts under the rear so he could pull over-sized boats to the coast and fish for shrimp. But Solomon could fix them all. Working on cars lifted over his head on racks gave him tremendous shoulder and arm strength. During different trips to the hospital, he would be required to get shots in his shoulders. Nurses could not get the needles to penetrate his iron muscles and one nurse fainted after the third attempt. He was not flexing at the time.
An idiot changed his life. Unhappy with some tires he had been sold, he walked into the garage of the store where he had bought the tires. Solomon was working in the garage, but never saw the idiot who picked up a tire tool and cracked him in the skull. Then the idiot beat him some more while he was unconscious.
This didn’t slow down his brain. In fact, Solomon became more of a philosopher after this. It was partly due to how much time he had to spend in beds the rest of his life waiting for migraine headaches to go away. He had lots of time to think and reflect.
The legends were tough way beyond the measurable scale. Moses was in the hospital – again – when May of 1985 arrived. His heart was in terrible shape, but he asked the doctor if he could leave. When the doctor asked him what was the hurry, Moses replied, “One of my children is graduating tonight. Either you let me go, or I’ll put a nice hole there in your wall and just walk out.”
He was discharged.
Samson had major intestinal surgery. After going home to recuperate, he heeded nature’s call and sat in the restroom. During the strain, his sutures broke open and his intestines started pouring out into his hands. Not a problem. He sat there and held them while instructing his wife to call the ambulance, and that’s how the paramedics found him to take him back and fix him up again.
That would have been the end for me!
Near the end of Solomon’s life, his wife called their son because Solomon had gone out in the boat on the lake and not returned. Around 2:00 a.m., my cousin found his dad in the boat wrapped up in a minnow seine because the outboard would not crank. He had dropped his nitro pills in the bottom of the boat and could not pick them up. His dad was freezing and needing medication and his mom was worried so my cousin tied the boats together and took off for the dock. Solomon hollered out, “Wait!” My cousin stopped to see what this new emergency was and heard, “I need to show you where the new trotlines are!”
Well, at least he had his priorities.
These three had a job to do – be a father and a Christian to the best of their ability – and physical pain simply had to take a back seat to the work at hand.
All three loved to hunt and fish, and they imparted this love for the outdoors to their children. Not all of us shared their interest, but it was great fun being with them and watching them be so happy. On countless nights they retold how they shot four deer on top of a mountain when two of them were down in their lower back so the third had to lug all the venison down to the bottom.
And they taught us to respect older folks and traditions. Period. Solomon spent some time driving a truck; while going up a steep grade, he met a funeral so he pulled over. The loaded-down truck would not go forward again since it had lost its momentum and he had to back it down the highway and start all over. A lady in the funeral noticed this. Her husband owned a major company, and when she told him what the driver had done, Solomon ended up securing a major contract for the trucking company he worked for.
Out of that relentless respect came unmatched devotion to their parents and their wives. They didn’t move the parents into nursing homes – they moved them in with us. And we loved it. They didn’t always get along with their wives, but they had taken a vow and knew what it meant to stand by their word to be faithful. A cousin once asked Samson if he had ever cheated on his marriage. Samson looked him in the eye like it was the most stupid question he’d ever heard and said, “Why would I cheat on the love of my life?”
To a fault, they went out of their way to help others. Sometimes they knew the needy; sometimes they just enjoyed the feeling they got from being the giver. I saw Moses, with his huge arms, cradle a child who walked away from a wreck while he carried her to his house so she could wait there until the police finished interviewing the mother who also survived. There, the child wouldn’t have to stare at the blood and the other bodies. In tough financial times, Samson adopted a child – the ultimate example of opening up his own home. Solomon brought in fish, shrimp, and venison year after year so he could give much of it to the poor.
Realizing the stunts they had pulled themselves in their younger days, the legends were good to give their children second chances. They had the power to be abusive, the skill to bury us in the woods and just replace us, and the wisdom to have laughed at us while saying, “I told you so!” but that is not how legends are made. Moses boycotted the weddings of two of his own children when he felt they were making big mistakes. Then, when the vows were exchanged and the knot was tied, he bought them presents so they’d know the door was still open. As I reflect on the large group of cousins in their lineage, I wonder if this might be what would have made them the most proud: almost all attend church regularly, most graduated college, none have prison records that I know of, and most are raising children that are also respectful of older people and traditions.
I never heard them say complimentary things to each other. They were from an era where men were men. When I talked to them individually, however, they were in awe of each other. Samson told me two things about Moses I’ll never forget; first, Moses was the best he’d ever seen at going into a hospital and knowing just what to say to a patient to cheer them up and second, he knew how to raise children better than anyone he’d met. Moses told me Solomon was the surest rifle shot of anyone he knew and that if anyone could fix a car, he was it. Solomon confided he’d never seen devotion to in-laws like he saw in the way Samson looked after his wife’s father.
It was a small model of the talent that molded ancient Athens into an empire and the intellect that met in Philadelphia to frame the world’s greatest government. This trio came together for a glorious span of time, walking larger than life through our minds as we cut our own way into the world. When one cousin found fault with his dad, the other two were there to be an anchor for that child. When teenage years made each of us criticize our own father, the other two engaged us in conversation showing us just how smart our father really was and why we’d be dumb as dirt not to realize how good we had it. They taught us that tough men could really have fun when they were together without alcohol and vices.
And now they are resting together in the Veale Creek Cemetery, still teaching their children through their memories the way legends have always done.
The three shaped a family from merely well-known to legendary in their respective areas. Born poor, raised to work, and proud to have served in the military, this trio prevailed where others crumbled. None were perfect, but their strengths together offset many of their weaknesses welding a framework to which hard-headed cousins anchored their lives.
Moses stood. Whether alone or with the crowd, he could no more back down from his position than could a rooster in a cock fight. People gravitated to him when times were lean expecting him to have the skills to make things better or at least the words to comfort; sometimes he had both.
He had tremendous skill with his hands. Tools were great for work but also used as “brushes” to give projects a bit of flair. This made patience hard for him when someone else – such as me! – was trying a tricky cut or drilling a hole at a tricky angle. He wanted us to learn from him and knew we needed experience, but many was the time he took a tool from my hand apologizing all the while but not being able to stand a second-rate production when he did it so much better.
When a person is right so many times in important matters, they tend to voice their opinion forcefully. Moses had an uncanny track record and subsequently wondered why he was not listened to more often. In his old papers, I found notes of a church business meeting where Moses was referred to as “Little Hitler.” I heard parent after parent ask him what they could do to help their child. (“After all, your children are Christians!”) He would bow his head, shake it, and gently tell them that they had refused to listen when the child was trainable; now the mold had set and their only option left was to pray.
Samson bulled. An unmatched physical specimen, he gained national notoriety as a U. S. Army boxer – then gave it up for the love of his life. When one of the hard-headed cousins did not make it home by curfew, he was given a verbal warning. The next night, he wandered in again at the time of his liking. Samson met him with an uppercut that lifted Cousin off his feet and deposited him on his backside across the room bouncing his head off of numerous objects along the way. Sure enough, that cousin learned to tell time by Samson’s watch.
He lived for his emotions and acted quickly on them. Many will talk, but Samson would do. He used his house for orphans, he used his car for giving rides to church, he used his money to buy food for the needy, and he used his time to teach. Persistent in his ways and hard to argue with, Samson never found a fishing hole he didn’t like or a pole he couldn’t snap in disgust. He owned a Pinto station wagon and a bright yellow Maverick.
Both Moses and Samson were beyond the norm at table games. Moses was the domino master and Samson the card wizard. They devoted hours of their weeks making youngsters play with them to see logic skills, math facts, friendly competition, attention to details, and just plain old fun with no batteries needed. Moses put masking tape around the Wahoo! board and numbered the holes. Nobody was allowed to count spaces after rolling the die; they had to do the addition in their head. Samson was a renowned math teacher. The same cousin who had to have his jaw adjusted to tell time later got his entire U. S. Navy class past a math test by calling Samson from a payphone for help on some study review problems; those men all became engineers on nuclear submarines. Failure was not an option in their minds. Both men resigned from teaching jobs when students under their tutelage did not take learning seriously enough. One resigned from a church Bible class and the other left public school for a short stint in the state hospital.
Solomon learned. Frankly, there was not an area where he did not have substantial knowledge. Award-winning mechanic, Navy fighter RIO, electrician, engineer, noted outdoorsman, and mouth-watering cook all rolled into one, Solomon yearned to impart all he had mastered. Sadly, it turned some of the cousins against him; they could not stand always having someone telling them a better way. Yet, this same quality inspired some other cousins to reach much further than their immediate circle because they wanted to be like Solomon.
He had the funniest collection of vehicles we had ever seen. His El Camino was fire-engine red with a DC-to-AC adapter under the hood so he could run an electric chain saw out in the woods. His step-side van had a porta-potty in it so he could drive a granny to the doctor’s office without her peeing all over herself. His two-tone station wagon (olive green bottom, white top!) had heavy duty shocks and truck parts under the rear so he could pull over-sized boats to the coast and fish for shrimp. But Solomon could fix them all. Working on cars lifted over his head on racks gave him tremendous shoulder and arm strength. During different trips to the hospital, he would be required to get shots in his shoulders. Nurses could not get the needles to penetrate his iron muscles and one nurse fainted after the third attempt. He was not flexing at the time.
An idiot changed his life. Unhappy with some tires he had been sold, he walked into the garage of the store where he had bought the tires. Solomon was working in the garage, but never saw the idiot who picked up a tire tool and cracked him in the skull. Then the idiot beat him some more while he was unconscious.
This didn’t slow down his brain. In fact, Solomon became more of a philosopher after this. It was partly due to how much time he had to spend in beds the rest of his life waiting for migraine headaches to go away. He had lots of time to think and reflect.
The legends were tough way beyond the measurable scale. Moses was in the hospital – again – when May of 1985 arrived. His heart was in terrible shape, but he asked the doctor if he could leave. When the doctor asked him what was the hurry, Moses replied, “One of my children is graduating tonight. Either you let me go, or I’ll put a nice hole there in your wall and just walk out.”
He was discharged.
Samson had major intestinal surgery. After going home to recuperate, he heeded nature’s call and sat in the restroom. During the strain, his sutures broke open and his intestines started pouring out into his hands. Not a problem. He sat there and held them while instructing his wife to call the ambulance, and that’s how the paramedics found him to take him back and fix him up again.
That would have been the end for me!
Near the end of Solomon’s life, his wife called their son because Solomon had gone out in the boat on the lake and not returned. Around 2:00 a.m., my cousin found his dad in the boat wrapped up in a minnow seine because the outboard would not crank. He had dropped his nitro pills in the bottom of the boat and could not pick them up. His dad was freezing and needing medication and his mom was worried so my cousin tied the boats together and took off for the dock. Solomon hollered out, “Wait!” My cousin stopped to see what this new emergency was and heard, “I need to show you where the new trotlines are!”
Well, at least he had his priorities.
These three had a job to do – be a father and a Christian to the best of their ability – and physical pain simply had to take a back seat to the work at hand.
All three loved to hunt and fish, and they imparted this love for the outdoors to their children. Not all of us shared their interest, but it was great fun being with them and watching them be so happy. On countless nights they retold how they shot four deer on top of a mountain when two of them were down in their lower back so the third had to lug all the venison down to the bottom.
And they taught us to respect older folks and traditions. Period. Solomon spent some time driving a truck; while going up a steep grade, he met a funeral so he pulled over. The loaded-down truck would not go forward again since it had lost its momentum and he had to back it down the highway and start all over. A lady in the funeral noticed this. Her husband owned a major company, and when she told him what the driver had done, Solomon ended up securing a major contract for the trucking company he worked for.
Out of that relentless respect came unmatched devotion to their parents and their wives. They didn’t move the parents into nursing homes – they moved them in with us. And we loved it. They didn’t always get along with their wives, but they had taken a vow and knew what it meant to stand by their word to be faithful. A cousin once asked Samson if he had ever cheated on his marriage. Samson looked him in the eye like it was the most stupid question he’d ever heard and said, “Why would I cheat on the love of my life?”
To a fault, they went out of their way to help others. Sometimes they knew the needy; sometimes they just enjoyed the feeling they got from being the giver. I saw Moses, with his huge arms, cradle a child who walked away from a wreck while he carried her to his house so she could wait there until the police finished interviewing the mother who also survived. There, the child wouldn’t have to stare at the blood and the other bodies. In tough financial times, Samson adopted a child – the ultimate example of opening up his own home. Solomon brought in fish, shrimp, and venison year after year so he could give much of it to the poor.
Realizing the stunts they had pulled themselves in their younger days, the legends were good to give their children second chances. They had the power to be abusive, the skill to bury us in the woods and just replace us, and the wisdom to have laughed at us while saying, “I told you so!” but that is not how legends are made. Moses boycotted the weddings of two of his own children when he felt they were making big mistakes. Then, when the vows were exchanged and the knot was tied, he bought them presents so they’d know the door was still open. As I reflect on the large group of cousins in their lineage, I wonder if this might be what would have made them the most proud: almost all attend church regularly, most graduated college, none have prison records that I know of, and most are raising children that are also respectful of older people and traditions.
I never heard them say complimentary things to each other. They were from an era where men were men. When I talked to them individually, however, they were in awe of each other. Samson told me two things about Moses I’ll never forget; first, Moses was the best he’d ever seen at going into a hospital and knowing just what to say to a patient to cheer them up and second, he knew how to raise children better than anyone he’d met. Moses told me Solomon was the surest rifle shot of anyone he knew and that if anyone could fix a car, he was it. Solomon confided he’d never seen devotion to in-laws like he saw in the way Samson looked after his wife’s father.
It was a small model of the talent that molded ancient Athens into an empire and the intellect that met in Philadelphia to frame the world’s greatest government. This trio came together for a glorious span of time, walking larger than life through our minds as we cut our own way into the world. When one cousin found fault with his dad, the other two were there to be an anchor for that child. When teenage years made each of us criticize our own father, the other two engaged us in conversation showing us just how smart our father really was and why we’d be dumb as dirt not to realize how good we had it. They taught us that tough men could really have fun when they were together without alcohol and vices.
And now they are resting together in the Veale Creek Cemetery, still teaching their children through their memories the way legends have always done.