My father’s childhood was somewhat normal, with his father, mother, and three sisters living together in Craggy, a small area outside Asheville, NC.His father, Robert Wade Allison, unlike most men, was very independent. Having a job where he worked for someone else did not appeal to him; instead, he ran a small grocery store at the end of the Old Leicester Highway Bridge.  He was a stern and frugal man who said what he meant and meant what he saidMy father told the story of how, as a young boy, his father got him a bicycle and told him never to ride it in the street. One day, his father caught him riding on the street, crossing the bridge. His father took the bicycle and tossed it off the bridge into the river. That was the only bicycle my father ever had. It was a hard lesson, but one that may have saved his life, given the poor condition of both automobiles and drivers at the time. When my father turned 11 years old, the Great Depression hit, and over the next nine years, what he saw and experienced left a memory of loss like a scar. This “Depression mindset” made him frugal to the point of obsession. Over time, his father was unable to keep his store since supplies and customers with money were scarce. He realized that to survive the Depression, his family would need to become self-sufficient.

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With the money he had saved over the years, he purchased a large parcel of land on the side of a mountain in the Mills River area, off Boylston Highway. Moving there and building a log cabin meant my father would have to drop out of school and help the family.

The kitchen had a dirt floor, a wood-burning stove for cooking, running water, kerosene lamps for light, and an outhouse with a Sears & Robuck Catalog.  The family survived the Depression by growing a garden, raising chickens for eggs and goats for milk, and hunting deer, rabbits, squirrels, and possums.  They would capture possums at night in a toe sack, with the help of dogs, keep them in a cage, and feed them for weeks on cornbread and buttermilk until their fur became shiny, before preparing them as meals.

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My grandfather was never one to sit still. The first cabin was just the beginning. He dreamed of a bigger house, built higher up the mountain, surrounded by an apple orchard. That dream became the next great family project.

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Clearing land, not in an open pasture with a tractor, but on the side of a mountain with a plow and a mule, was how my father spent his teenage years, rather than in school.

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My father told me about the day he wanted to go on a date but wasn’t allowed to go until the plowing was done. So, my father lodged the plow into a tree root and made the mule pull till the plow broke. He convinced his father that it was an unforeseen accident. In retrospect, one could see this coming. You have a stern, no-nonsense father making the unbreakable rules, and a teenage boy fantasising about the warm, affectionate embrace of an attractive girl.

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My father was now in his late teens, and although he still helped at home by supplying fresh meat from hunting in the mountains and by doing other chores, he wanted to earn his own money. He got a job with the phone company as a lineman. With the money he earned, he enrolled in a flying class to fly a Piper J-2 Cub and soon got his pilot's license before he turned 20. The family would tell stories about how my father would fly this single-engine plane high over the cabin and let a roll of toilet paper unroll before cutting it up with the wings. 

One day, while repairing a line atop a telephone pole, he noticed an attractive young redhead sitting on her porch. He wanted to get to know her, so he called her number, told her he was with the phone company, and said he was checking the quality of their connection.  He asked her to put the phone down, step away, and say “testing 1-2 -3”.  She complied with his strange request, after which he said the connection seemed to be really good and that he really appreciated her taking the time to help him verify that, and if she would be so kind as to step out on her front porch and look up at the top of the telephone pole and give him a wave he'd appreciate it as well. She was amazed at this request, but her curiosity was aroused, so she went out on the front porch and waved at the handsome young man hanging from the top of the phone pole. He waved back, and that was the beginning of a romance that lasted for the rest of their lives.

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​My father was drafted into the Army around 1940, at age 22, and sent to a basic induction center. From there, the Army began quietly sorting men not by pedigree, but by usefulness. They were looking for men who could be trained, who didn’t break under responsibility, men with calm hands and sharp eyesight.  Men like my father, who took the initiative to become a pilot while still a teenager. He was pulled aside after basic training and sent to a Signal Corps photo school in Washington, D.C.  This was the nerve center for processing classified images. After training, one of his first assignments was to film a test explosion at sea that produced a large mushroom cloud. Probably an early test of an Atomic explosion.

A video from the summer of 1941 shows my father returning home on Army leave. After a grueling 15-hour train ride from Washington, D.C. to Asheville (train speed at that time was about 40 mph), he was picked up by friends and driven past familiar landmarks such as the Craggy bridge (where his bike was dropped into the river) and the Church of the Redeemer (where his grandparents were laid to rest), eventually arriving at the rough dirt road leading to the log cabin he helped build. He brought the Army’s camera with him, allowing his sisters to film his arrival and later capturing scenes of family life, including a reenactment of mountain folk drinking moonshine from a jug. Since the jug was empty, they allowed the children to participate in the reenactment.

 

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