In 1931, The Champ, a movie starring Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper, captured the heart of America. The Champ told the tale of a down-on-his-luck boxer, but it wasn’t the uplifting story with a sad ending that gave Uncle Red the urge to high-tail-it off the family farm in Tightwad, Missouri. The reason? Because all 50 souls who called that tiny speck of hardscrabble land home, agreed on one thing. With Red’s rugged good looks, generous mouth and receding hairline, the big man from the Show Me State was a dead ringer for the famous movie star Wallace Beery. Uncle Red figured that once he’d made it all the way to tinsel-town, he’d get a starring role in a ‘moving picture’, playing Poncho Villa or Long John Silver. At the very least he could stand-in for the gruff-talking Beery.
It took almost 10 years for Uncle Red to fulfill his dream of future stardom. To bankroll the trip for her husband, Aunt Reno hocked her diamond engagement ring, packed her trunk and bought two tickets to a sun-kissed paradise that promised swaying palm trees, cool sea breezes, along with fame and fortune. On December 4rd, 1941 the couple boarded a sleeping coach on the Kansas City Southern Railway Company train. When they arrived three days later in Hollywood, California, the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Uncle Red immediately forgot his plan to break into the movies, kissed Aunt Reno a teary farewell, marched down to the army recruiter and tried to enlist. During Uncle Red’s physical he was told, “Sorry, Charlie, but you’re a four F’er.” Every time the doc laid his cold stethoscope on Red’s barrel chest, his out-of-sync, two-timing ticker would flutter and flap.
With America at war the movie industry tightened its belt. Red soon realized his chances of making-it as an actor was about nil, so he and Reno opened a gas station in Burbank, California. It was soon after V-J Day that Uncle Red and Aunt Reno, left California. On the way back to Missouri the couple made a pitstop in Vegas. When they returned a couple of days later to the farm in Tightwad, Aunt Reno carried a makeup case filled with silver dollars.
The Missouri winter of 1957 was unusually cold and snowy. Most folks in Tightwad blamed the brutal weather conditions on those damn Commies and Sputnik. To celebrate Christmas that year, our family traveled the 80 miles or so from Kansas City to Tightwad, were we bunked with Uncle Red and Aunt Reno in their two-story white frame, drafty farmhouse built sometime during the Civil War. It was one frigid morning. I was standing outside next to a roaring fire trying not to let one side of my body burn from the blistering heat while the other side turned blue from frostbite.
“If you’re chilly, Sis, throw another log on the fire,” Uncle Red ordered.
Sis was Uncle Red’s nickname for any girl under the age of 18. Trying to keep my eyebrows from being singed, I shoved a heavy oak log into the roaring inferno and quickly backed away. Once the fire died-down a bit, Uncle Red hefted a 50# bag of moldy oats and poured the contends into the black steaming cauldron that hung over the flames. Then he dumped in four 5-gallon buckets of water, 10 good-sized ham hocks, a gallon of blackstrap molasses, a 5# bag of cornmeal and the contents of canned goods (string beans, beet, carrots, etc.) that had gone south.
Uncle Red stirred the pungent, soupy mixture with a canoe paddle. Smacking his lips and giving me a wink, he asked, “You wanna taste, Sis?”
I bent over and pretended to puke. “Ugh. No. Just how long before it’s called dog food, Uncle Red?” I asked.
He laughed and looked down at the black and white high-strung rat terrier sitting at his feet. “When Dumont says it is.”
“Uncle Red, can Dumont really drive your tractor?”
“Of course, he can. Why, when Dumont’s standin’ on his two hind legs with his front paws on the wheel, his furrows are so straight they looked like they’d been surveyed.” The grouchy old dog growled when Uncle Red reached down to pet its head. “It was Dumont here who saved your Aunt Reno’s life when we was out there lolly-gaggin’ in Ca-li-for-nia.”
Of course, I had to ask, “How’d he do that, Uncle Red?”
“Well, when we were runnin’ the gas station, Reno used to do some mud slingin’. She wasn’t no gossip monger, either. Reno was declared the mud wrestlin’ champ of Burbank, California.”
“Wow.”
“But then Gertie Muller showed up. The short-haired German gal hailed from Fresno, claimin’ she was a stunt woman. It was durin’ one smack-down that the Nazi had Reno pinned face down in the mud gaspin’ for air. By jingles, when Dumont heard his mistress in distress, he jumped into that muddy pit and put the big bite on Gertie’s butt.”
Uncle Red started laughing so hard that I worried his butterfly heart would give out and flutter away, right then and there When he finally caught his breath, Red hitched up his pants and continued. “That episode ended Reno’s mud wrestlin’ career. It was the gas station that kept us goin’. Durin’ the war, gas went for twelve-cents a gallon, that was if you could find it. We were only minutes away from the movie studios. Sold gas to all the famous stars, we did, ‘specially once their ration cards got punched-out. We got a thirty-cent a gallon mark-up and a lot of damned autographs. Your Aunt Reno’s got ‘em all saved in her scrapbook.”
My ten-year-old eyes went wide. “Really, Uncle Red. You have autographs of real movie stars?”
“Yep, there was Clark Gable, Betty Davis…even Wallace Beery.”
Uncle Red banked the fire which brought the dog food to a slow bubbly simmer. He smacked his lips, gave me a tap on my noggin, and laughed. “Tell you what, Sis, the delicious aroma of dog food has made me mighty hungry. How ‘bout we go get us some bush meat for dinner.”
Me being a smart-aleck, I asked, “Why don’t you just eat what’s in the pot, Uncle Red?”
“I said it smelled good, but take my honest word, it tastes like road kill.”
“There’s leftover racoon in the root cellar,” I offered.
Uncle Red belly-laughed and pointed to the kettle. “Not anymore.”
“Good,” I said, thinking about how the grease from raccoon meat made my lips and fingers stick together.
Uncle Red chuckled. “Did you know that some folks consider raccoon meat a delicacy? A few years back, here in Henry County, there weren’t many of the masked critters. But some nice folks over in Jefferson County started bringin’ ‘em back alive, then sendin’ us their overpopulation of raccoons.”
“Is raccoon the kind of bush meat we’re after today, Uncle Red?”
He shook his head. “No, not today. Today, bein’ so close to Christmas, I got a hankerin’ for hare.”
With Dumont nipping his heels, Uncle Red started making tracks toward the back 40. I followed a short way behind, wondering what sort of weapon he would use to bring down the hare. He didn’t carry a rifle, nor did he have the hand-carved wooden slingshot that was sometimes stuffed in his hip pocket. All he had sticking out of his worn striped union overalls was a pair of old rusty plyers. When we were halfway across the stubble corn field, Dumont darted off to the right. The tiny dog started sniffing, stuck his nose in the snow, snorted, then froze like he was a birddog on point. The rabbit suddenly broke cover. In one continuous motion, Uncle Red pulled the plyers from his hip pocket and sent it whizzing through the air.
A Missouri Tale
That evening while dining on fried rabbit smothered in greasy cream gravy, my curiosity got the best of Run-Rabbit-Run-2013me. “That rabbit was running lickety-split and you didn’t even take time to aim. How did you do that, Uncle Red?”
The old man held his arm in the air. “It’s all in the wrist.”
After dinner, Aunt Reno tuned up her violin. When it came to trading guns, dogs, farm equipment and musical instruments, Uncle Red swore that his antique fiddle was a gen-u-ine Stradivarius. But no matter how many times I peeked inside the violin, sometimes using a flashlight, I never saw the maker’s mark. After a repertoire that included the traditional Christmas carols, Aunt Reno brought the evening to a close with The Missouri Waltz.
A few weeks later, back at Eastwood Elementary School, I wrote a paper about what I did during my Christmas vacation. The title of the essay was How to Field Dress and Butcher a Rabbit as Taught by Uncle Red. Of course, we had to read our work out loud in class. When I got to the gory part where an incision is made in the rabbit’s belly, and how to be careful not to slice open the colon or bladder, a boy in the front row turned white as a sheet and had to be escorted from class. I suspect he wouldn’t have been too fond of Uncle Red’s homemade dog food, either.