We had some black angus cattle, a bull and seven or eight cows, and I remember finding them over by Jim's dairy, all huddled up under a fig tree, so I went back and got a bucket of feed and they followed me back to the barn. One reason I got rid of the black angus bull was that he killed our Irish setter by running past me in the cow lot like an express train and smashed the dog against a big tree trunk. The dog used to run the herd in in the evenings, and the dog had bitten the bulls tail, and the bull was getting even, I guess. All I needed was hay and feed to keep them happy, until the fences could be fixed. Later on, we got rid of the black angus cattle, and bought some white face cows, and a Brahma bull from Fred Stephens. The bull we called Woodie and he was really some animal.
Originally Jim was going to buy the bull from Fred Stephens for $100.00 for the meat market, but we talked him out of it and then we bought him for breeding purposes for the herd. Woodie could jump over a 6 foot fence, and was hard to manage. Fences were no object to this animal. We finally got rid of Woodie and the white faced cattle. We gave Woodie to Fred Stephens who kept him for a while and then sold him and made me a present of $600.00 on the sale. Nice going. Another reason we got rid of the cattle was that they jumped the fences, especially at night, and got in the neighbors garden as well as ours. You just can't imagine how the smell of new ears of sweet corn as well as vegetables can have on these animals. We had the pleasure (doubtful) of having cattle for about five or six years, and kept a deep freezer full of meat on the back porch, most of the time, and the other deep freezer in the garage was kept full of shrimp and fish. It was a yearly event to send one of the cattle to the meat market at Joe Davis's Slaughter House, and have it processed and packaged and distributed, for our use ,and then to John, Jim, Lucius, Darius, and others.



It was about this time that Maries older brother John came from Wichita, Kansas to build a new home just down from where Jim had his dairy. John's son Johnny came in from Virginia, and he and I helped John, as well as others, to build his new house. John and Johnny stayed at our house while his house was being built. After the house was built John's wife, Elizabeth came from Wichita and joined him there. John used one of the big 30,000 gallon pontoons washed in from Hurricane Camille for a septic tank.

In the Fall of each year, all of us helped pick up pecans. John kept the records from the sale of the pecans to buyers, and each of us were paid five to ten cents per pound, for picking them up and putting them in 100 pound sacks. He also kept records of the sale of tree or timber that was sold for making lumber or paper.