Old Song

My grandfather, Eury Damkeeper, Ed Eury, taught me a song he sang in his youth around the turn of the 20th century. It goes like this:

Oh! The boys and girls we used to go afishing to the brook,
With spools of thread for fishing lines and bended pins for hooks.
Oh! How often have I wished for those bright days again,
When little Rose, and Nell, and I went swinging down the lane.

If you have heard this song would you please contact me and let me know if there are other verses.

National Emergency

The United States, with unemployment hovering around 20 million, is certainly in an emergency. Why doesn't the president declare it so and implement measures to get us out of this mess?

Snake Bit

Bertie, Ed and Ida Eury's second daughter, had crossed the Eury Dam to visit Aunt Lizzie and Uncle T. McNeill. She often crossed the Dam to visit her Grandmother and Grandfather Haywood who lived across the river. Sometimes she and her older sister, Bessie, visited and played with cousins living across the river. While Bertie, who would a few years later marry Andrew Hamilton, was coming back home she was bitten by a copperhead snake or a puffing adder snake, they never determined which kind of snake it was. She limped the rest of the way home on her swelling, aching leg. As days passed and her leg swelled more, it looked as though she might lose it, but finally the leg began to go down to its regular size. How happy her sister Bessie, who would later marry George Lewis, Ed and Ida were to see Bertie well again.

Unemployment Benefits

Shame on all those members of the Senate who are denying the extension of unemployment benefits to the needy unemployed. It's cruel to punish so many families.

Black eyed peas

My grandfather, Arthur J Edgar Eury (the dam keeper at Eury Dam), and grandmother, Ida Haywood Eury, had eight daughters and three sons. The oldest daughter, Bessie, and the next oldest, Bertie, went to school at the Parker School House. Like most children they carried their lunch to school in a pail, usually a lard bucket. One day they were seated under an oak tree having lunch when another student, a boy, walked by and said, "Look what a delicious lunch Bessie and Bertie brought today: blackberries!" Aunt Bessie and Aunt Bertie never corrected the boy. What they were actually having was black eyed peas.

Our Grandchildren's Prospects

All my life I've heard politicians draw our grandchildren like pistols. If we spend now, they say, our grandchildren will have to pay the bill later. Suppose we stop spending now. Do you think our grandchildren will benefit from that? What about our roads? Don't you think they'll have to spend to improve them then if we don't spend to improve them now? What about our schools? Don't you think they'll have to spend to improve them then if we don't spend to improve them now? Those are only two examples of why we should spend now to improve rather than leave it to our grandchildren to spend more to improve. If we spend now to help the unemployed, doesn't that help our grandchildren? If we spend now to create jobs, doesn't that help our grandchildren? If we spend now to help businesses create those jobs, doesn't that help our grandchildren? All my life I've also heard, "You must spend money to make money." Our economy is stalling because we refused to spend enough to rev it up. We must spend now. And we must spend a lot more than we've spent so far. We must spend now so our grandchildren won't have to spend a lot more later. We must spend now for our grandchildren's sake.

Got a chew?

My Grandfather, Ed Eury, used to tell about a character named Buck Newton who he often saw walking the roads around Mount Gilead. Once Buck flagged a train down. When the engineer stuck his head out of the cab and asked Buck why he had stopped the train, Buck asked, "You got a chew of tobacco?"

The engineer said that he didn't chew tobacco.

"How come you to stop then?" asked Buck.

Bury Electric Wires

I recently heard an electric power executive state that it would take 200 years to bury all electrical wires going into private homes and businesses in this country. Good idea. Think of all the jobs it would create, and the savings we would reap by preventing losses from open wire power outages.

Parker School House/Ghost Rider

One late winter afternoon when shadows were lengthening, several Eury kids were coming home from a long day at the old Parker School House in Montgomery County. They (Bertie, Clyde, Madie, and, I believe it was Cliff) laughed and talked as they walked the narrow dusty road to their home beside Eury Dam. Suddenly, they heard a horse galloping toward them at high speed. Thinking they would surely be run over if they stayed in the road, the kids scampered into the woods beside the road. After watching and waiting for what seemed an eternity, the hoofbeats ceased abruptly, and no horse or rider appeared. Those kids ran the rest of the way home and burst through the door all talking at once to tell mother Ida about the ghostly horse and rider.