My father, Wilson Shivers, was born in Worcester County near Pocomoke City in 1910. His family moved to a farm near the village of Allen in Wicomico County in 1917. The first time my mother saw him was when he drove a horse and wagon loaded with family possessions through the village and past the general store where my mother was watching from the window.

The story he always told about that move was that his father and the owner of the farm they were moving to had traded properties and each had agreed to leave the wood for heating on site. Unfortunately, dad’s family found no wood when they arrived on an unseasonably warm January day. That night, he said, turned cold and windy, and the old house was drafty. Four years later they were able to have a new house built.

Dad loved to tell stories. Dad had a story about his courtship of my mother. His best friend was a fellow named Phoebus Jones. It seems that Phoebus was too shy to visit my mother alone, so asked his friend Wilson to go along with him. You know the end of that story!

Mom and dad were married on February 7, 1931 after he turned 21 on January 22. His mother wouldn’t give him permission to marry until he reached that age!

When his family moved to our farm, when he was 7 years old, locals told him that the ghost of a headless dog often turned up by the ditch next to the lane. He often told of riding his horse on his way out to the village and hearing something scratching in the brush by that ditch. At the time, he was sure it was that headless dog, although he never saw it. Dad always loved horses and we had them on the farm during most of my growing-up years. When he was younger, dad was an avid fox hunter on horseback. In later years, when the local men would just park their pickups by the wood and let the hounds go just to hear them bark, dad dropped out of the fox hunting business!

Another of dad’s favorite stories involved a horse or a mule, this time attached to a wagon, which he was driving. The animal was crossing a railroad track and stopped dead still, with a train speeding toward them. Dad said he managed to back it up, but the mule had to turn its head to keep from being hit by the train. Another horse yarn that he loved to tell was that he had been able to lift a horse. Of course, none of us believed him, but he explained that he started lifting up the front end of the horse when it was still a colt. As the horse grew and became accustomed to that exercise, it even began to help, so dad was still able to lift it well into its adulthood. Of course, that disillusioned me, because I had imagined dad standing under the midsection of the horse and raising it over his head!

Dad liked to talk, and these are only a sampling of his stories, told at gatherings of family and friends. I wonder sometimes in this electronic age if this is a custom that has been lost. He also had some colorful turns of phrase. When things were not going well for him, he would say that the devil was sitting cross-legged on his shoulder. If he was especially hungry, he would comment, “I’m so hungry my belly’s shaking hands with my backbone!” If the sun was shining during a rain shower, he said that it was going to rain the next day.

Dad always said that he started smoking as a youngster, smoking corn silks. As a result, he had asthma, and by the time he was in his early 40s, emphysema. He saw a specialist in Washington, D.C., who told him that if he wanted to live, he had to quit smoking. He stopped then and there, never smoked again, and lived for another 35 years.