Slap’er Down Agin Paw
by Joel Hendon(756)
Remembering 1948 is not too easy for most of you. I was eighteen that year and I can recall it quite well. Arthur Godfrey had a weekly program on radio with singers who sang the current hit songs and others also. He also became one of the first such shows on television. It was one of the more entertaining shows of radio days. Arthur enjoyed a good laugh and was quite an entertainer himself. He had a very distinctive speech, with a sound somewhat like a nasal effect, except on him it sounded quite well and set him apart from most other people. In fact, it was said at one time if there were some national emergency which required it, they would use him to announce the problems and consequential instructions for the people because they could know by his voice that it was him and not someone trying to pull a scam.
He, played a ukulele and enjoyed singing amusing songs even though he did not profess to be a professional such as those who sang on his show. One which he loved best was “She’s too fat for me” which can be found on you tube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT22n6x7J0g
But, perhaps his choice was the rather hilarious “Slap’er down agin Paw” which had a considerable run in popularity. Following is a copy of the first verse and the chorus lyrics. There is also a blog site which has an MP3 version you can download. http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2009/06/remember-the-good-ol-days.html
As I said earlier, I was eighteen, and counting, at the time this song was first introduced. I also lived in the hill country where this type of thing might have actually happened. I never knew of such but I did witness some things which would be considered pretty weird. Times were beginning to improve after the great depression and World War II had ended, but prior to that many people were pitifully lacking in the bare necessities.
I recall one unusually pitiable family. The head of the household was reportedly disabled although I, as a young boy, could not see any obvious reason that he would be. They had five sons and a daughter, although the three oldest boys were not living at home at this time, and in fact, one was killed in Germany during the war. They received welfare assistance from the state, which could not have been much.
The woman made a round through the sprawling neighborhood about once each week to see if anyone had any food to spare, to help them out. We were not wealthy but we usually had a little of something my mother would give her.
The two youngest boys and the girl, attended the two room country school where I did. They had to walk approximately two miles since they lived off the main road near the base of a large mountain. The road to their home was a narrow dirt road where places were pure red clay and very messy when it rained. All of the children in those early years went barefoot during the summer months and only donned their shoes when the weather began to turn cold. These three children showed up one crisp morning with new shoes and they were very excited about it so they showed them to everyone. But, a couple of days later, it came a good rain overnight, and was still quite cool, yet these children came barefoot. When they were asked why they didn’t wear the new shoes, they replied in unison, that they did not want to “mess them up”.
As a few years passed, when the girl reached perhaps sixteen or seventeen years of age, a car passed our house with a young man driving and there she sat beside him wearing his wrist watch on her right wrist. We never saw her again. I found out later from one of her brothers that she had married a man from a town some 25 miles away. The family was in no way, hateful or violent and I don’t know why I even think as I do, but each time I hear the “Slap’er down agin Paw” song, I remember seeing the girl passing our house in a nice car (not many boys had a car at that time) with a smile on her face and waving at us with a man’s watch on her wrist.
One last item about this family. For those who may not be that familiar with chickens, many rural people in those days kept them for meat and eggs. And they ran free because they can almost make their own way on green stuff as well as insects and berries. Roosters are sometimes aggressive and occasionally one will be so bold as to attack a human, fly up and spike him with their sharp talons.
One of the smaller boys was once telling of their rooster which decided to challenge their father, and flogged him. The boy then added, “Papa whupped him with a sack!” Somehow that struck me as being extremely funny at the time. I suppose though, if that was the only thing handy, it was better than nothing. It turns out that the “sack” was a burlap bag which is fairly heavy material and if rolled into a roll, I suppose it would serve quite well as a defensive weapon if you didn’t want to injure or kill the rooster.
Article submitted Tuesday, August 25, 2009 & read 223 times.
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