Never Look at the Empty Seats

by Charlie Daniels

  My maternal grandparents lived just down the Carolina Beach Road from us. At the time I came along, my mother’s two sisters, Ruby and Greta, and her brother Buster were still living at home. Of course, I was the epicenter of attention, and don’t think I didn’t take advantage of the situation.

  My mother was an exceptionally pretty woman who had tremendous respect for education, which I think stemmed from never finishing high school. She had to quit school and stay home to help with the work and the younger children.

  This was not an uncommon practice in those days. Times were hard, and keeping food on the table and the family taken care of was considered much more important than finishing high school.

  My mother never stopped educating herself and worked hard learning the things she missed out on in school. She eventually became a bookkeeper, dealing with intricate math. This was in the days before computers, when columns of numbers were added on hand-operated adding machines and the sums entered into a book with a fountain pen.

  Although she had regretted not getting a high school diploma, more than anything else she had wanted her class ring. When I got mine, she was some kind of proud.

  I never told her that years later, on a wild night in El Paso, I pawned it for three dollars and never got it back. Just one of the many things I’ve done in my life that I’m not proud of.

  My daddy knew more about timber than any man I ever knew. He could look at a pine tree and tell you how many board feet of lumber it had in it or what kind of pole or piling it would make. He could cruise a tract of standing timber and tell you what it was worth. Millions of dollars changed hands on nothing more than Carl Daniel’s word.

  My maternal grandfather was the epitome of a man’s man: physically strong and capable, a mighty hunter and fisherman. He was a natural leader with the instincts of a frontiersman and was definitely the undisputed patriarch of our family.

  He could build a house or a boat, raise a crop, skin a deer, or run a trotline. Once, in his youth, he picked up a bale of cotton by himself. Graham Hammonds was gentle, charitable, and strongly devout in his later years, and I don’t believe there was anything he feared other than his Creator.

  He commanded a great deal of respect, and everybody knew him as Mr. Graham.

  My maternal grandmother, Mattie, stood just over five feet tall, and if God ever made a sweeter woman, I never had the pleasure of making her acquaintance.

  When it came to Southern cooking, she was the master, and in my book, she had no equal. She was loving and gentle, and I’m sure that the time I spent with her helped make up the positive side of me.

  I never got to know my paternal grandfather, as Poppa Billy died when I was only four years old, but Grandma Daisy lived until I was in my late teens. She was the prototype of a grandma: good-natured and jolly, a righteous woman who loved the Lord and could quote Scripture to fit just about any situation.

  Grandma Daisy and Poppa Billy raised nine children on a small Carolina tobacco farm in a house with no electricity and no running water and instilled in them a sense of right and wrong and a strong work ethic.

  They’re all gone now. But I know in my heart that this world is a better place for having them pass through it.

  My early childhood consisted of tricycles, puppies, swimming in the creek, picking sand spurs out of my toes, and trying to avoid red ant hills, or at least that’s how I remember it.

  The first songs I learned to sing were the gospel song “Kneel at the Cross” and “You Are My Sunshine.” I don’t even remember learning them. It just seemed I had always known them.

  The first song I remember getting emotional about was one my dad sang to me titled “Hobo Bill,” the tale of a railroad bum dying alone in a cold boxcar. It could literally reduce me to tears.

  I don’t recall how old I was when we got our first radio. But I do remember bringing it home and turning it on and, right then, beginning a lifelong fascination with a little box that rocked my world.

  There was The Lone Ranger, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Jack Benny. Then there was a scary show called Inner Sanctum that Momma and Daddy would listen to after they went to bed with the lights off. I’d hunker down under the covers in my little bed and see boogers all over the room.

  But most of all, what radio brought into our home was music, all kinds of music. Big bands were popular in those days, and the Dorsey Brothers, Benny Goodman, Harry James, and scores of others were all the rage. Many of them had their own radio programs or were featured on comedy or variety shows.

  Sunday featured gospel music, from the dignified choirs of the big churches to the energetic, guitar-powered Pentecostal praise and worship to the earthy harmonies of black spiritual songs. It all poured out of our radio.

  There were even shows like Afternoon with the Masters that featured classical, or what we called “long-haired music.” Everybody I knew avoided it like the plague.

  But the premier night of the week was Saturday and the radio show that our whole neighborhood was glued to. The fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel voice of WSM boomed into coastal Carolina at night like a local station, bringing the Grand Ole Opry into the homes of adoring fans all over the Eastern Seaboard and Midwest.

  There was Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Minnie Pearl, and Bill Monroe. Uncle Dave Macon would pick his five-string banjo and sing about ten-cent cotton and forty-cent meat, how in the world can a poor man eat. The square dancers would prance around to the lively hoedown sounds of the Fruit Jar Drinkers, the taps on their shoes clapping out the rhythm as they sashayed across the stage. We all listened and tried to imagine what it would be like to actually be there.

  It was an energetic, entertaining, and unparalleled hunk of Americana and made a profound impression on my young life. I listened in awe, having not a clue that one day I would stand on that same stage and go out over those same airwaves.

  I was raised in an atmosphere of love by parents who believed that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. My mother could wield a switch with the aplomb of an Olympic fencer, a talent she shared with most of the mothers of that era.

  The corporal punishment was meted out in accordance with the degree of the transgression. If it was a minor infraction, Momma would do the honors. However, if I stepped too far over that fragile line, Momma would bring out the big guns, “We’ll just wait until your daddy gets home,” which doubled the punishment because you had to dread it the rest of the day.

  My parents always explained exactly why I was being punished, and looking back, as the old saying goes, “I never got a lick amiss.”

  My love and respect for cowboys and all things Western started with those black-and-white cowboy movies that played in almost every theater in the South every Saturday afternoon. There was Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Sunset Carson, Tex Ritter, Bob Steele, and Lash LaRue. Of course I had my favorites, but I loved them all.

  They all had basically the same theme. The man who ran the local saloon had a gang of outlaws who robbed stagecoaches, rustled cattle, and tried to run people off their land. Usually the same bunch of actors played the outlaws in all the movies, and as soon as they appeared on the screen, every kid in the place knew who the bad guys were.

  They wore the same clothes and hats and rode the same horses whether they were robbing a stagecoach or hanging around the saloon. Except for the bandanna masks they donned for their dastardly deeds, they looked exactly the same. But for some reason, nobody could figure out who was making all the mischief.

  The country would be in chaos, terrorized by a band of desperadoes nobody could identify.

  Enter the hero. He’d walk into the saloon, beat up five or six guys, shoot the gun out of somebody’s hand, foil the evil plans of the outlaws, say goodbye to the girl, hop onto his silver mounted saddle, and lope off into the setting sun.

  They would never do anything as boring as kiss a girl. The mushier stuff was reserved for John Wayne and Randolph Scott and the guys who made what we called “high-class Westerns.�
� They ran during the week, along with the dreaded “love movies,” which were anything that didn’t feature cowboys or Tarzan.

  The boys who did the high-class Westerns kissed girls, got married, and occasionally even got shot, but Saturday’s heroes had never been known to take a bullet. They were tall in the saddle, fast on the draw, and the undisputed darlings of the short-pants set.

  Every boy’s prized possession was his cap pistol. You usually got it for Christmas and ran out of caps in a couple of days. Then you had to make the sound of gunfire with your mouth, “Pow, pow. Got him.”

  Those old Saturday Westerns were so heavily scored that the music was about as important as the plot and had to be included when you mounted your broomstick horse and played cowboy. “Make out like me and you are coming down off this mountain and see this bunch of fellers rustling cattle. Let’s go! Dun de dun. Pow Pow. Dun de dun. Pow Pow.” We never missed.

  Occasionally, the theaters would have live acts between the movies, sometimes variety shows. I guess they were the dregs of a dying vaudeville. But my favorite was when some country music artists would bring their road show to town. The music, the costumes, the lights, and the overall ambiance would totally enthrall me, and I think that’s where the fantasy of being onstage first started. The idea of standing in front of a crowd of people playing an instrument and singing has always excited me. It still does.

  When I was five years old, something happened that would change our world and help form many of my attitudes for the rest of my life.

  It was a bleak, cold Sunday afternoon in December. The whole family was gathered at my grandmother’s house when word came over the radio that the Imperial Japanese Air Force had bombed the US naval base in Pearl Harbor.

  President Roosevelt declared war. The news fell like a ton of bricks on the shoulders of a nation already deeply concerned about losing sons on the battlefields of Europe. President Roosevelt said that December 7, 1941, would be a day that would live in infamy.

  It was also the day America got her back up. The shock wore off and the mobilization was on. Provoked by aggression, fueled by patriotism, and empowered by almighty God, the American people had no doubt they would be victorious. Even in the darkest days of the war when the fighting went badly and the casualty lists were high, we listened to FDR and war commentator Gabriel Heatter and said our prayers knowing full well that no swastika or rising sun would ever fly above our beloved United States of America.

  Brokenhearted mothers buried their sons, hung a gold star in the window, and got back to the business at hand. The war effort was in high gear, and seeing this nation operating at 100 percent was an awesome sight.

  Recycling is not a new idea. It peaked during the war years as tin cans, old newspapers, scrap metal, and even used cooking grease were saved and collected to play some small part in winning. Hollywood did its part with movies like The Fighting Seabees and The Sands of Iwo Jima. When you saw John Wayne up there on the big screen, you got the feeling we just couldn’t lose.

  Besides making scores of patriotic films, movie stars volunteered for active duty. Others did USO tours or appeared at war bond rallies. The Hollywood of the war years and the Hollywood of today are a stark contrast.

  Wilmington, North Carolina, is a seacoast town and was strategically important to the war efforts because of the port facilities and a shipyard. German U-boats lay in wait in the waters a few miles off our coastline to sink the oil tankers leaving the port of Wilmington to supply our troops fighting the war in Europe.

  It was said that sometimes the ships were sunk close enough to the shoreline that the glow of the burning tankers could be seen from the beaches along our coast.

  The war was very real to us. In the days before sophisticated communications and satellite technology to keep up with the enemy, we never knew if the Germans would try to bring the fight on shore.

  Slogans like “loose lips sink ships” were prominently on display, and we had air raid drills and rationing. The enlistment offices did a brisk business, and everybody had a father, brother, or uncle who had gone to war.

  Due to a badly set broken arm that wouldn’t straighten out, my dad was classified as 4F, which meant unfit for service.

  CHAPTER 2

  SCHOOL DAYS AND THE REAL WORLD

  Well, life goes on, even in the middle of a war. The day came for young Charles to start school, which I did at William Hooper Elementary in Wilmington. I had gone there all of two weeks when Daddy changed jobs and we moved to Valdosta, Georgia, which might as well have been South Africa to a Tarheel first grader who had never been a hundred miles from home or out of reach of the sheltering arms of his doting grandparents.

  With the war going on, there was a housing shortage even in a small town in South Georgia. So we spent the first few weeks in the Daniel Ashley Hotel. I thought I was ruined. You take a wet-behind-the-ears country boy used to climbing trees and running through open fields and coop him up in a small hotel room with nothing outside the window but city streets, and you’ve got yourself a mighty sad little feller.

  I had no playmates, no creek to swim in, not even a front porch. About the only bright spot in my life was our trusty old Zenith radio that brought the world into my tiny domain and helped my vivid imagination run wild as I listened to the daily adventures of my radio heroes and pretended to take part in the action.

  As people went into the military and took jobs in the defense industry, the manpower shortage was acute. It even affected the schools, which had to scramble to find enough teachers, resorting to calling back into service some who had been retired for many years.

  My first-grade teacher in Valdosta was an elderly lady. I wish I could remember her name because I owe her a great deal. She came from a day before the modern teaching methods so adversely affected American education. A time when phonetics and basic math were taught in a hands-on, easy-to-understand way referred to as the “Three Rs”—reading, riting, and rythmetic.

  In my opinion, when the school system stopped teaching phonetics and instituted the “new math,” they left a lot of students behind. They never got caught up, unable to pronounce simple words or solve or even understand basic math problems. It’s a shame.

  In the meantime, the Daniels family finally got a house. Well, it was not really a house. It was an apartment, but it meant getting out of that hotel room, and it was in a neighborhood with trees to climb and kids to play with. I set out on a quest to make new friends, a task that was to become all too familiar over the next several years.

  Valdosta, Georgia, was not really all that different from the surroundings I’d lived in in Wilmington. The kids in the neighborhood came from working-class families, the basic environment was the same, and soon I was part of the bunch.

  During my Christmas vacation that year, I had a serious case of measles and stayed in bed for several days with an extremely high fever. I will always believe that is where my eyesight started going bad.

  It was a rude awakening the next year in second grade when I found out I had gone from normal to impaired vision in very short order and would need glasses. I would wear some sort of corrective lenses for the next sixty years of my life until 2014, when I had cataract surgery and a permanent lens implant.

  I’ll always remember a hot morning in June 1944 when Momma got me up early. We made our way to the Methodist church to join our fellow Americans who were praying for the sixteen thousand Allied troops who at that moment were landing on the coast of France.

  It was D-Day.

  The church was packed to the rafters, as mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers came together to beseech almighty God to protect the sons of America who were storming the beaches of Normandy.

  It was a bloody day, and German machine gun emplacements and artillery cut the landing force to ribbons. But on they came, wave after wave, until at the end of the longest day the backs of Adolph Hitler’s Nazis had been broken. The march to Berlin and the end of the war in Europe were in
sight.

  The D-Day operation was to cost more than nine thousand Allied lives, and the courage of those men should and will be honored as long as there’s an America.

  After I finished first grade in Valdosta, the family moved again. I started second grade in Elizabethtown, North Carolina, moved back to Valdosta for a couple of months, and finished the year back at William Hooper Elementary in Wilmington, where it all began.

  This was to become a pattern in my early school years. Between my dad’s company transferring him around and him changing jobs, it seemed like we moved constantly. I was always having to leave a set of friends in one place and make a new set somewhere else.

  Always being the new kid and wearing glasses made me a prime target for the class bully, and I had to take the glasses off and defend myself many times. I learned early about bullies. Most of them are really cowards at heart. They use intimidation and sometimes superior numbers to torment someone who is afraid to fight back.

  I knew I had to fight back and tried to give as good as I got. They soon learned that they could beat me in a fight but they were going to get bruised up in the process every time they tried it. They soon got the idea.

  One of the reasons we moved so much was that my daddy was an alcoholic. This has always been a hard subject for me to talk about in public. When you say “alcoholic,” the first thing that pops into someone’s mind is some disheveled, dirty, pathetic bum stumbling down the street, trying to find another drink, and this was not the case with my dad.

  Far from it. Carl Daniel was one of the best, if not the best, and most-respected timbermen in the business. Everybody knew it, and there was always a job available for him, even from a company he had been fired from before. He was just that good and that well thought of.

  My father fought his alcohol problem all his life and would go for as long as four years without touching a drop. But alcoholism is a disease and is always lurking just under the surface, waiting for a weak moment. Its victim gets confident enough to think he can have “just one.” Then it pounces like a tiger, and it takes almost superhuman strength to make it let go.