Laurens Electric Cooperative

Despite drought and pests this harvest season, 80-year-old Leonard Earl Davis still harvested a bumper crop of vegetables from his Gray Court garden. "It's been dog days all my life," he jokes.

He’s been at it for several years, often giving corn, butterbeans, squash, okra and watermelons to shut-ins, friends and residents of the Laurens Memorial Home.

With his trusty 1949 Farmall Cub, Davis says gardening is a pleasure. Besides, the tractor is a lot easier to farm with than the beasts of burden he grew up using. "It beats a mule all to pieces," Davis says.

Davis recalls when he and his late brother, Richard Ervin Davis, used mules to pull wires for Laurens Electric Cooperative. That was in 1940. Davis was 13 at the time and the cooperative was just getting under way. Many farmers helped pull co-op wires through the countryside. Other workers would follow, gradually building the Laurens Electric lines that brought power for the first time to rural families like the Davises. "Me and my brother pulled wire all around there, in the Possum Kingdom community," Davis recalls. "We made 10 cents an hour."

The brothers and the beasts toiled close to home ("across the river" from Gray Court, Davis notes). Sometimes they went "way on over yonder," he notes. "We would leave mules on other people's farms and go back to them the next day."

Working through the summer, the Davis brothers pulled lines through thickets and briar patches. Davis remembers men they'd see digging holes - by hand - for the co-op's first poles. "If it was rocky, they do some shooting with dynamite!" he notes.

Pulling the lines wasn’t easy, he says, but of course, "We didn't pay no attention to it because everything we done back then was hard work!"

Davis, who retired a few years ago after a long career in heating and air, electrical and plumbing work, used his skills to recreate his family's "home place" behind his house on Hwy. 101 South. The Davis residence is not served by Laurens Electric, but the "home place" has some features, like a wood stove, that were common in the early days of the cooperative.

Lined with family photos and furnished with some vintage pieces, it's also a place to reminisce. Davis and his wife, Grace, like to have guests, too — Sunday School classes and family gatherings. "We got a big family," Davis notes.

He and friends recreated the "home place" using materials Davis salvaged, including "the windows, the front door, the trusses, all the insulation, the bricks underneath it. I enjoy doing this. I've been doing this ever since I semi-retired," he notes.

Davis also enjoys going to Wasson's store, he says, to get "a shopping bag full of peanuts. I parch them in the wood stove and invite friends."

He recalls, "I grew up with wood stoves, what you called a Home Comfort, a big old stove. On the door it had piece of chrome with shock of wheat. I saw one just like it in the Pickens museum."

Talk of the stove reminds Davis of the family’s early uses of electricity. "My daddy kept after my mother, he'd say, 'Quit fooling with that wood stove and get an electric one.' She wouldn't do it. She said, 'I don't believe that an electric stove cooks as good.'" Later, she came around.

Rural families often had little money to spare for anything more than electric lights, he says. Before Davis joined the Navy during World War II, he remembers, "We didn't have no refrigerator nor nothing. Momma did iron with an electric iron. The bill was a dollar and something a month - but a dollar or something a month was hard to get a-hold of!"

Farm families made do, however. Davis recalls, "The roads was all dirt and muddy. I remember my Daddy taking a mule and a scoop pan to work on the road to pay his taxes."

"After his boys got up to pretty good size, he got a job at Regal Textile in Ware Shoals," he says. His father worked as a mechanic. "Man, we was living then. He was making about 12 or 15 cents an hour!"

A handsome, hand-made frame full of photos draw Davis deeper into the past. One picture shows one of his childhood haunts, the old Flat Rock School. The school had two sessions each year, Davis says, both revolving around crops: "One was for you to get out and hoe cotton in the spring and then in the fall, you'd get out to pick cotton."

A class photo brings to mind a tornado that struck in 1933. In it, Davis sees one classmate whose house was blown down; she lost five family members and was severely injured herself.

A family photo reminds him how his father and his uncle also worked for the state at the John G. Richards School for Boys outside of Columbia. The men never adapted to some modern ways. "Neither of them drove," Davis says. "I would pick them up at the bus station in Laurens and carry them back on Sunday so they didn't have to ride the bus both ways."

Memories of loved ones seem to warm Davis like an old wood stove glowing. "We kept our mother 97 years. Her grandmother was 99 when she died," he notes. “I guess we've been pretty lucky, our family."

Hard times a matter of perspective

Leonard Davis talks about the hard life that rural people lived when he was young, but he also keeps it all in perspective. It's all relative, after all, and Davis' relatives had it even harder, as he describes.

"My great-grandmother, she really come up hard. She had four boys. They came and got her husband, carried him off to the War (Between the States). They say he enlisted but they come and got him. Her oldest boy was eight. The boy brought the mules to the house. (The father) got his horse and saddles and left with the man that come after him. He went to Charleston, stayed there a pretty good while. Then they transferred him to northern Virginia."

Davis' great-grandfather died in battle there. Through some effort, a few years ago Davis found the Virginia cemetery where his great-grandfather and fellow Confederates rest. He likes to visit. "It's a different feeling there," he notes.

Davis' generation had their own trial by fire in World War II but the young men were eager to serve. He chuckles and recalls how his oldest brother, Louie, tried in vain for months to enlist -- in almost every branch of the service. "He tried in the WAVES and the WACs," Davis jokes, referring to women's branches of the service of the era. Louie finally got his wish with the Air Corps – with near-tragic results.

Davis himself was only 17, just shy of 18, when he also felt the call to duty. "I begged my daddy for four months to sign for me to go in the Navy. (I didn't want to go in the Army. I told him, I said, 'I don't want to walk. I want to ride.') He wouldn't do it," Davis remembers.

He continues, "Me and him was in the woods over there one day a-cuttin' a great big old tree. We got the tree down and he sat down on that log. He'd done got pretty old and he looked at me and said, 'Son, I'm gone do something and I've put more thought in it than I've ever put in anything in my life. I didn't know what he was talking about. I thought he was talking about that log. He says, 'I've thought about it and thought about it, about you joining the Navy. If I don't sign for you to go in the Navy and you go in the Army and something happens to you, I won't never get over it.' So I went and signed up the next day!"

Davis served aboard the Navy cruiser Honolulu. In September, he attended a reunion of the ship's crew in Nashville.

During World War II, Leonard Davis served in the Navy aboard the cruiser Honolulu. This photo was taken in Santiago, Chile, Davis says.

Some of the cruiser's original crew couldn't be there: The Honolulu was among the ships damaged when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The Navy put it on a floating dry dock and had it repaired – "like new," Davis says – in Portsmouth, Va.

Davis first came aboard the Honolulu after it had been rebuilt. The Honolulu sailed the Mediterranean but, after the Allied victory in the Europe, it was ordered to the Pacific. When the Honolulu approached San Diego to take on supplies, Davis recalls, "You couldn't hardly tell the town from the harbor, there were so many ships. They sent us on to Portland, Oregon."

Among other duties, Davis and a crew of about 15 sailors worked on the Honolulu's seaplanes. Occasionally, they'd earn some flight pay, riding along with the pilot. "We were in the back with a 20mm cannon," Davis says.

The pilot had a gun that was timed to fire rounds through the propellers, he notes. The plane's take-off procedure was even more amazing, to hear Davis tell it: "It sat in a catapult. They put the engine to full throttle, then catapulted it out with a six-inch powder charge. The bosun's mate was the one that shot us off. It was an experience."