Ralph Berrier
Page 30
His “nervous condition” worsened. His poor physical health depressed him. For the next five years, he spent months at a time in the VA hospital, where he was treated for “nerves and depression.” In 1983, he submitted to the VA an income / net worth statement that revealed that he had mounting bills and only $2,100 to his name.
That was the same year I spent an incredibly boring week at Boys State. We “delegates” were supposed to be learning all about state government from a brigade of old American Legion dudes. After a long week of drudgery and army chants, I couldn’t wait for my mother to rescue me and two high school buddies who had been imprisoned.
On the way home, we all joked about the old guys. I told my pals how the boys in my company … platoon, barracks, whatever they called it … how we laughed at the way one seriously old dude pronounced “MAC-Ar-thuh!” Those old bastards were a riot! We continued to yuck it up right up to the moment my mother drove us to the VA hospital to see my grandfather.
Papa Clayton spent a good chunk of the summer of 1983 hospitalized for his nerves. We met him outside, away from the depressing confines of the hospital, where carcasses of shattered men rolled around in wheelchairs, talking, sometimes shouting, to themselves. Broken combat veterans sat in the bleachers of the VA ball field where the local American Legion teams played—where I would play one day—and constantly razzed players on both sides. “Get this guy! He cain’t hit! This guy cain’t pitch! Come on now! You ain’t got nothing! Nothing!”
Papa Clayton looked well—but tired. We told him we had just attended Boys State—making it sound much more interesting and dignified than it actually was, and leaving out the parts about making fun of the old soldiers who shepherded us through the inner workings of government. He was proud of us ol’ Carroll County boys. He had spent his week in a VA workshop, making leather belts for me and my brothers. He hand-stamped our names on the belts, complete with silly-looking footprint and horse-head stamps. He even made a leather billfold for me. The workshop was meant to be therapeutic, a way for him to focus on a task and take his mind off all his troubles. I am sure I never wore that belt. It looked sort of 1970s-ish, and this was the ultramodern era of 1983.
My mom snapped a few pictures, then drove me and my buddies home from our week of state-sponsored hell. Papa Clayton disappeared inside the hospital, melting into the phalanx of old, decrepit soldiers, who, like him, were simply fading away. My buddies and I never spoke of the old soldiers at Boys State again.
• • •
Saford fared no better. He might’ve appeared a tad healthier than Clayton, which wasn’t saying much. Still, he didn’t look good. He smoked two packs of Salems a day, and his frame had withered to the point that one close friend said he looked like a Holocaust victim.
By the early 1980s, his personal life was a shambles. Clovie continued to accuse him of womanizing, and even though she might have been wrong this time, Saford’s track record did not allow for the benefit of the doubt. Their marriage was not long for this world.
Even Saford’s music suffered. He was still the front man for Buster Brown and the Thomasville Playboys, who played square dances every weekend. But somewhere along the line he and Buster fell out.
John Hofmann, the young man who came to Saford’s house to learn how to play the fiddle, became a close friend. During the first few years they knew each other, John and Saford fiddled nightly, swigging Dr Pepper, smoking cigarettes, and telling stories. John became a good fiddle player quickly. He accompanied Saford on several trips back to the hills of old Virginia, where they competed in every backwater fiddlers convention Saford knew how to get to. John even beat his mentor at one contest by playing one of Saford’s favorite tunes, “Sally Goodin.”
Within a few years, John was traveling to fiddlers conventions alone. He became a professional and by 1980 had landed a major gig as the fiddler for country singer Mickey Gilley right at the peak of the Urban Cowboy–mechanical bull era. At the pinnacle of John’s career, he played with Gilley during the 1981 Grammy Awards telecast. Saford, proud of his best pupil, couldn’t believe it when John sent him a Mickey Gilley tour jacket. Saford wore it everywhere, even when the weather was warm.
Saford made a few more close friends, most notably Bruce Moseley, a terrific guitarist who started playing shows with the Buster Brown band around 1984. Saford loved Bruce’s style—he was a tight rhythm player who could pull off blistering flat-picked rockabilly solos. Bruce was a cool dude, his hair combed back in a pseudo-pompadour like a Baptist preacher, and he knew every corny joke in the book. Saford was inspired by his playing. It reminded him of the swinging hillbilly music of the Orange Blossom Boys.
Alas, nothing good lasts for a Hall boy. Bruce didn’t stay with the Buster Brown band long. When he left, Saford thought about quitting, too.
Trouble was, quitting music would have left Saford with utterly nothing to look forward to each day. After nearly thirty years of marriage, he and Clovie were finished. She packed her bags and headed back to Virginia, leaving Saford with the house, from which he was about to be evicted. His landlord, Buster Brown’s father-in-law, had died and the property was for sale. Saford was about to become homeless.
He was in bad shape, financially and physically. He carried barely 120 pounds on his five-foot-seven frame, and he tired so easily that he could no longer perform his job at Thomasville Furniture Industries, Inc. Luckily for him, his boss was a good friend who assigned Saford mostly supervisory tasks that did not tax him physically. Saford’s lungs, damaged by years of smoking, tuberculosis, factory fumes, and exposure to poisonous gases during army training, seemed ready to give out. Like Mamo, and now Clayton, he was wasting away to nothing.
Saford Hall had squandered every relationship he’d ever had—with his wives, his stepson, and even his own twin brother. Now, on the verge of becoming a homeless man, Saford was sick, probably dying, with nobody to take care of him. He moved in with his stepson Larry’s soon-to-be-ex-wife for a while in a broken down house trailer, which really got folks talking. What had become of the gallant World War II hero, the man who had won medals and helped conquer Germany? He was now in his sixties, chain-smoking his way to oblivion in squalor. Saford had truly bottomed out. When he was diagnosed with an arterial blockage that required surgery, his only hope for adequate treatment was the VA hospital in Salem.
When he got to the hospital, a familiar face was waiting for him.
• • •
Sometimes, it seemed as if they shared one life force. When Clayton and Saford were together, they were strong, healthy, and, with notable exceptions, mostly happy. When they drifted apart, they grew weak, atrophied, and sick, their very bodies seeming to vanish like morning mist right before our eyes. This shared life force, or soul, or whatever you want to call it, is probably part of the mythology of twins—along with the myths that they can finish each other’s sentences; they’re always polar opposites; one is a leader and the other a follower; one is an old instigator, the other a peacemaker; one plays fiddle, the other banjo; and so forth.
Clayton’s health had been dreadful. His frayed nerves required yearly hospital stays at the VA. He was still partly debilitated from the stroke and had developed diabetes. He underwent colon surgery to remove a tumor, which was hard on the family, as we worried that he might have cancer and might not be strong enough to survive the operation. But he made it through, and as they wheeled him back to his room from the OR, he told Mom and Grandma, “I’m an old toughie.”
Damn right he was.
He had to be, because less than a year after the colon surgery, he was back at the VA for yet another major operation. A blockage in his left coronary artery needed to be cleared.
That was the same week in 1986 his twin brother checked into the VA because he had a blockage in his right coronary artery. The twins were together again, to have their broken hearts mended.
Their procedures were scheduled for the same time, an arrangement the ICU nurses hated
: “They’re identical twins! What if we get confused and give them the wrong medicine?”
But the twins’ surgeon, Dr. Jorge Rivera, instructed the nurses that the twins were to remain together. Making a mistake with their medications was not an issue. In fact, it was impossible. They suffered the same ailments and were on the same meds. He wanted them together for a bigger reason, which was now plain to Clayton and Saford.
“They are good medicine for each other,” Dr. Rivera told the nurses.
Lying in their hospital beds, awaiting their twin surgeries, Clayton and Saford made their peace with each other. Whatever had come between them—anger, bitterness, jealousy—had been eradicated by the sicknesses that nearly killed them. The twins survived their ailments and their surgeries, which not only removed arterial blockages but seemed to clear out the remaining resentment that had clogged their relationship. They were too old, with too few years left, to lose another day of their lives apart from one another.
Following his surgery, Saford returned briefly to Thomasville, just long enough to pack up his few earthly possessions. His old buddy John Hofmann was back in town, too, having left the road for good. John and his new bride had decided they would add a room to their house for Saford. John loved Saford dearly. The thought of having him around full-time, playing fiddles and drinking Dr Pepper until the sun came up, lifted his spirits.
John drove to the trailer park where Saford lived to tell him his plans. He arrived in time to see Saford packing the last of his things into a friend’s car. He was moving back to Virginia.
“You weren’t even going to say good-bye?” John asked his mentor and friend.
Saford was too embarrassed to answer. They shook hands and Saford climbed into the car and headed up the road, back to Virginia, back to the mountains, back home. John returned to his own home, where that night, reflecting on the loss of his old friend, he bawled like a baby.
A couple of Saford’s nephews put Saford in a trailer on a piece of Patrick County property owned by Johnny Vipperman, one of Saford’s many music-playing cousins.
Within months, that dumpy little trailer became the scene of some of the hottest jam sessions to ever hit Patrick County. All of Saford’s old pals came by to pick. Johnny Vipperman, who had played a week with Bill Monroe before being shipped off to the Korean War, and Clayton were regulars. The trailer was cramped and hot, a perfect terrarium for the rebirth of Clayton and Saford’s final act.
They would start over, they decided. They would start a band.
They were sixty-eight years old.
For therapy, Saford and Clayton put together a new band called “The Hall Twins and the Westerners.”
—MOM, 1994, THE GENEALOGICAL BOOK
And this is how I really remember Clayton and Saford: standing on my parents’ front porch, identically clad in blue-and-white checked shirts and matching tan cowboy hats, Saford sawing the fiddle, Clayton cradling a guitar. Alongside them was a band of similarly dressed, mostly gray-haired musicians. The twins looked rejuvenated, healthy and happy.
The date was June 7, 1992, my birthday, just two days after my wedding day. My parents threw Ruth and me a postwedding party headlined by the famous Hall Twins and the Westerners. A large crowd of family and friends sat on folding chairs in the front yard, listening to and enjoying the show. My extended family from Roanoke and Richmond had heard the Hall Twins many times. Ruth’s family from Maryland, on the other hand, had not. The simple, country scene of old guys playing bluegrass and Western songs at a cookout was probably a bit unsettling to such sophisticated folks, whose own grandfathers surely did not do those sorts of things, but everyone maintained their composure.
Saford stepped up to a microphone, fiddle in hand. Clayton stood a few steps off to the side, stationed behind his own microphone. Saford did most of the talking, as always.
“Now, here’s a little number Clayton and I had the privilege to record with Roy Hall and His Blue Ridge Entertainers in Atlanta, Georgia … oh, how long ago Clayton? Two or three weeks ago?”
“Yeah, man!”
“Anyway, here it ’tis, called ‘Don’t Let Your Sweet Love Die’!”
They harmonized on the chorus:
Don’t let your sweet love die like flowers in the fall
Don’t take away the smile and leave the tears
My heart believes in you, please say you love me too
Don’t leave me here to face the lonely years
Their sweet love had not died. Those old songs and comedy routines fit Clayton and Saford as comfortably as their matching cowboy shirts. Saford had never stopped performing, so he still remembered the words that Clayton had forgotten. For his part, Clayton followed with the high tenor on the verses he could remember, playing a steady rhythm the whole time.
The Hall Twins and the Westerners played together for about ten years—ten phenomenal, miraculous, gift-from-God years. They performed nearly every weekend at playhouses, church picnics, pinto bean suppers, WPAQ’s Merry-Go-Round—playing for people who remembered the old songs and missed them.
These are the good old boys I knew. The stories of their blue period were just that—stories I would piece together years later, when it would be hard for me to reconcile the young combat soldiers and brawling, angry middle-aged men they had been with the funny, lovable old-timers I knew and loved.
• • •
My family often repeated the tale of how Uncle Saford had saved Papa Clayton’s life by coming home and getting him back out playing music. And it’s true—Clayton’s health improved remarkably once he rejoined his other half. But some of the credit for Clayton’s rebirth needs to be shared with my mother. In 1986, not long after Papa Clayton’s last major surgery, Mom withdrew a wad of money from her bank account and sent Papa and Grandma on a vacation to a place Papa Clayton had always talked about: Hawaii.
He had never forgotten the beaches of Honolulu, where as a much younger man he had swum in the Pacific Ocean, watched the girls dance in their grass skirts, and reveled in the final summer before everything changed. In some ways, Hawaii was the last place where he was truly himself—before the Battle of Leyte, Tabontabon, screaming shells falling on his head, towering escarpments to scale on Okinawa, Japanese soldiers hiding in tank traps. That gilded summer of 1943 in Hawaii was his last taste of paradise before being initiated into hell.
Papa and Grandma spent more than a week in Honolulu. They went with a tour group of other old-timers, including several WWII vets who, like Clayton, had spent many happy hours on the island before they were shipped off to war. They took in a Hawaiian revue of music and dancing, dined at a luau, and were serenaded by Hawaiian actor and singer Al Harrington, who had been on Hawaii Five-O. They joined other combat veterans and their wives and visited the USS Arizona Memorial. Pearl Harbor looked much different than it had in 1943, when the bombed hulks of ships still jammed the harbor. Paradise had returned.
Clayton wore a flowery Hawaiian shirt every day. Mom had bought him a pack of shirts before he and Grandma embarked on their grand getaway, and Grandma bought him a few more at a used-clothing store after they arrived in Honolulu. Just before they returned, Clayton bought a grass-skirted hula doll as a goofy gift for one of his neighbors back home. But on the return flight, he confessed to Elinor. “I don’t want to give my hula girl away!” So he kept it on top of the stereo cabinet in his living room, a grass-skirted memento not only of a perfect vacation but of a time and place long passed.
• • •
He came home reborn.
Which leads to this further debunking of the family myth: Clayton wasn’t the only one whose life was saved by Saford’s return. Clayton saved Saford, too.
Saford’s rebirth was more spiritual than physical. I never knew the man whose personal life had disintegrated so terribly and so sadly in Thomasville. I never saw the guy who had been a poor husband and father. The Saford Hall I knew was happy, funny, and a complete cutup. He even drove a Yugo and was prou
d of it. That Saford was the front man for the Hall Twins and the Westerners.
The Westerners started out with just the twins, their cousin Johnny Vipperman, and a local banjo picker, Bill Smith. One night early in the band’s history, the boys were playing a show at the Fairview Ruritan Club near Galax, when in from the cold walked Bruce Moseley, Saford’s old guitar-picking buddy from Thomasville, the dude with the fancy fingers and goofy jokes. Bruce and his wife, Jean, had been traveling on the Blue Ridge Parkway when they heard a radio commercial for the Hall Twins’ show.
“That’s Saford!” he hollered when he heard the spot.
Bruce had been searching for Saford since he fled Thomasville, but nobody could tell him where the old fiddler lived. After they reconnected with Saford, the Moseleys hightailed it for Virginia every Friday afternoon after work. They spent every weekend in Saford’s trailer, where folks came for the music and for Jean’s fried chicken. The gatherings were almost on a par with Mamo’s weekend parties at Clayton and Elinor’s house.
Those jam sessions in Saford’s cozy trailer birthed the Hall Twins and the Westerners. When it was really packed, the heat was almost unbearable, especially at night, when Saford turned off the air conditioner. There was no place to sit, so Saford played his fiddle while sitting on the commode of the bathroom at the end of the hall.
The “classic” Hall Twins and the Westerners lineup was Clayton, Saford, Bill Smith (banjo), Johnny Vipperman (guitar and vocals), Bruce Moseley (guitar), Jean Moseley (electric bass), and a washboard-playing fellow Saford knew from Thomasville, who claimed his name was Val Jello. In 1992, the Westerners recorded a collection of old Roy Hall songs and Western and gospel numbers that included “Red River Valley,” “Peace in the Valley,” and, of course, “Don’t Let Your Sweet Love Die.” They put it out on cassette tape, titled Then and Now, to sell at their gigs.