© By Abe Lincoln
The tiny building set along the Dayton, Greenville and Union City railroad line. It was built as a ticket and baggage office shortly after the railroad came to town. The small office was no longer used by the railroad and was sold to George Myers. It was his Gordon Coal Office. My mom didn't like the place because my dad went there, and she said it was "A place where old men loafed and told dirty stories."
When I was a little boy, I used to go there and listen to the men tell stories about some “loose” ladies in town—they didn't seem dirty to me. I didn’t know what the stories meant, but I laughed like I knew.
Old wooden chairs lined up against the office wall and beside each was a tobacco spittoon. Some spittoons were once brass, that shined, but now most were a brownish black where the tobacco juices and spittle had dried. My dad chewed and spit Mail Pouch tobacco juice.
I was careful not to bump those spittoons because they were almost always full and I didn't want to clean the stuff up if it slopped over the edge onto the oiled floor. Almost everyone chewed tobacco in those days and very few used regular store-bought cigarettes.
He smoked Bull Duram tobacco that came in a little bag with a drawstring. His wife, Esta, used a cigarette rolling machine to make cigarettes for him. It was her job before she fixed his breakfast. She put a clean piece of tobacco rolling paper on the little machine and poured a little tobacco from the sack onto the paper, and pushed the handle over and it rolled one cigarette that looked like one bought at a store.
Esta Flory, my neighbor lady, rolled cigarettes for her husband, Ira, a retired tinner—he made tin roofs and installed them. One day he fell off of a roof and never worked a day after that. He was the first man I ever saw who smoked cigarettes.
The end of Ira's nose was yellowish-brown from smoke and his fingers were stained yellowish-brown too. Mom said the long hairs growing on top of his nose came from him smoking so much. They were long hairs and when I was little, I couldn't keep from looking at them.
Most spittoons in public places, like movie theaters, were made out of brass and they were kept shinned-up like gold. Spittoons were everywhere—not just where men loafed—they were in the grocery stores, the post office, banks and in the butcher shop.
My dad never owned a regular spittoon. He used old coffee cans until they got to looking so bad that my mother who throw them out. Then he would have to go to the door to spit—that didn't last long.
He would use one of mother's glass Mason canning jars to spit in—that made mom mad. That looked worse because you could see, and evaluate the tone of the juices in the jar. So mom would get him a new can—anything you couldn't see through for him to use and she would grunt and cuss, under her breath while trying to clean out the canning jar.
When I first went to work at NCR, in Dayton, Ohio, they provided brass spittoons for any employee who chewed tobacco. NCR had crews who pushed carts filled with clean spittoons. They picked up spittoons that were filled with slop and left a clean one that shined like gold.
After my parents were divorced, before I started to school in the first grade, my mother became interested in someone; she said he was like Jesus.
She told me that you could always tell a carpenter from anybody else because they always had some fingers sawed off. He was missing two or three fingers on his right hand. He didn't loaf much. So he was like Jesus.
He was married to a fat lady who smoked Kool cigarettes and chewed tobacco—the slobbers ran out the corner of her mouth. She wasn't like anybody else I knew.
I told mom about her bad habits and she told me to mind my own business.
© 2005 Abraham Lincoln - All rights reserved.
