Uncle Dan’s Lessons

by Sid Jordan, Jr.

My Uncle Dan was a boisterous story telling dirt farmer untamed by the conventions of his upright family of a small town “aristocracy” bearing. He left his home in Monticello Georgia when he was 13, happy to get away from the demands of schooling to help his grandfather farm the rich loamy soil of the fall line just south of Macon Ga on old highway 41. He lived up to his Scottish family coat of arms whose motto was Paux au Bellum, “peace or war.”  He lived peacefully with the neighboring farmers and farm hands on his grandfather’s place but his over  the top humor and stories at others expense did not go well with all those he encountered in his escapades to local towns. His closest and most consistent relationship was with the soil that he learned to get the most from as he grew into a successful farmer.

When his father inherited the farm he became the lead farmer as a teen tutored by the experience of being at the mercy of nature and his fellow man. His younger brother Otis joined the Air Force to become a decorated World War II pilot and his three sisters, including my mother Martha, were sent to private schools in Atlanta and Macon.

In 1941, just after our country entered the war, I was dropped off in uncle Dan’s and his new wife Hilda’s keeping in the middle of the night by my mother and sister who went on to live in Macon where my mother found employment as a Rosie Riveter in the war effort at the Naval Armory.

“Sid Junior”, uncle Dan yelled, scooping me up in his arms as I entered the screen door in front of my mother, “We are glad to seen you son”, squeezing me awake after a long sleepy car ride and scraping his whiskers on my cheek.  

I had mixed feelings of being welcomed and frightened in the presence of a place and people I didn’t know.  This farm with a “larger than life” Uncle Dan was to be my home for the coming six indelible years of my youth setting a mental and biological rhythm that I would move to the rest of my life.

The next couple of years I enjoyed the affection of my ruffian uncle Dan who liked to carry me around on his hip and show me the pigs, mules, and cows. My grandmother was especially dismayed when he showed me the process of calves being born in a translucent bag as they freed themselves to stand on their spindly legs.  “Why Dan you know that child is too young to expose to that sort of thing.” My grandmother grumbled.“The sooner the better for him to know where he came from” my uncle cackled with defiant delight. 

“Oh Dan! You ought to be ashamed of yourself; you don’t know what the child needs.” “What’s for supper? Dan nonchalantly asks, ignoring his mother’s imploring. He was definitely his own man at an early age beyond the constraints of further parental lessons.  He was becoming my liberated and wild man of a father figure unaware of his impact on my developing psyche.

At age four he took me dove hunting near the bird’s evening roost by the old ponds in the woods behind the potato-curing barn. After shooting a couple of doves that his pointer bird dog retrieved from the bush he offered me an opportunity to take a shot at the doves with his 32 inch barrel 12 gauge shotgun, getting on his knees and propping it on my shoulder, placing my hands on the stock and trigger.  “There is one, pull the trigger.” with this command I trustingly pull the trigger and the gun discharges and  kicks me on my butt to which Dan replies, “You have to hold on tight with your shoulder or it will bruise you.”  As if I had a clue to what I was doing at age four with a 12-gauge shotgun.  This was the first of many lessons that later taught me that he thought I was a man at age four or five. Further evidence of his grandiosity by proxy was illustrated when I reached the ripe age of five and he asked me to help him unload a trailer of one hundred pound sacks of peas to be sown on a large field.  He placed me on the trailer with the sacks of peas and said that he would drive down the field road and that I was to throw off a sack every fifty feet.  I obediently stood on the trailer as he mounted the tractor pulling the trailer and started down the field road.  I began wrestling with the first one hundred pound sack of peas to make my first drop while taking furtive glances at my uncle as he went merrily along on the tractor gazing off in the distance. Finally after we had gone fifty yards or so he looked back at my puny efforts tugging at the corner of the first sack and exclaims, “Goddamn, Sid Junior can’t you do anything.”  At that he sobers to the reality that his help is not up to the task and does double duty driving the tractor and disgruntingly cursing under his breath while stopping periodically to drop a sack of peas as I sit somewhat pleased on top of the dwindling stack of sacks of peas.  I had come into an understanding of my own limitations long before it dawned on my Uncle Dan.

In these earlier years I had inherited Dan’s verbal reprimands when I didn’t meet his expectations or messed up my pants trying to keep up with him walking across ploughed fields but he would patiently take me home after a swearing spell and clean me up in the tub.  His tone always ended with an affectionate  “June June, you’re my boy”, accompanied by rough housing on the bed or  floor. I felt loved and mostly appreciated being his sidekick and companion in the fields, hunting trips and spontaneous trips to roadside restaurants or cow sales in Macon. I loved the excitement of the cattle auctions followed by the privilege of eating at Len Berg's, a fancy restaurant in Macon with waiters and the special treat of Len Berg's secret recipe salad dressing. I was his sidekick everywhere he went- his “June June”.

There were harsher times when he decided that I was old enough to know better and that I should get a beating like he used to get at the hands of his father “Mr. Big Dan” as the hands referred to him.  He was called “Mr. Little Dan” by the hands. My first beating at his hands was age 6 when I decided to play gas man one  late afternoon, innocently putting the water hose into the under ground gas storage tank.  When I arrived home the next day after school, my aunt Hilda met me at the door looking aghast, saying, “Sid Jr. did you put water in the gas tank last night; Dan is really upset with you if you did.”  About that time I heard him coming in the back door and saying, “Is Sid Jr home?” thinking he had seen the school bus drop me off.  He came in the room and quickly strode over to me without a word grabbing me by my shirt and leading me out the back door into the yard to the gas tank surrounded by the hands who had just come back form the fields with their tractors.  He lifted the top on the underground gas tank and stuck my nose to the opening and said, “Sid Jr, did you put water in this tank?”  To which I replied, “I was being the gas man” to which all the black hands covered their mouths with their hands to keep from laughing out loud.  Dan looked around and everyone sobered up at the “seriousness” of this situation but the crowfeet wrinkles in the faces of the hands didn’t disappear. Dan grunted himself with a half twisted smile on his own face but his words were, “Sid Jr.  every tractor you see here didn’t get out of the yard this morning after filling up with “your gas”, half water, and half gas.  "What do you think of that?”  “That’s too bad” I defensively said.“You damn right it’s too bad and I’m going to beat your butt to give you a  lesson.”  Raising his voice,  “Do you understand that.” “Yes sir”  I said beginning to be frightened and tearing up. I saw the hands begin to knit their brows and turn the corners of their mouths down in sympathy for Sid Jr knowing he was in for a good whooping. Dan didn’t spare any of his strength as he pulled my shorts down and took an army belt with a buckle out and raised bloody whelps on my butt and legs.  These blows seemed like they lasted for an eternity and I was in shock.  Could this be the same man who took me everywhere as his side kick and called me his June June?

The time came when after the war my mother thought it best to move back to the family home in Monticello for Barbara, my sister and I to get a better education at the hands of the same teachers who had taught her and her siblings.  It was sad to leave Dan, Hilda and all the hands I had grown to love, but Dan had asked me to come back every summer to work in the peach shed during harvest time. These were luxurious summers that I ended up living with Dan, Hilda and their two children Dan the III and Edwina while selling peaches by the side of the road.  The sales became so successful that my mother horned in on my roadside business.  My consolation was that I got to drive Uncle Otis’s army jeep and pick peaches for the stand while my mother’s business acumen landed us into a large scale operation shipping peaches from the road side for travelers who couldn’t get enough of those fresh Georgia peaches. In my more reflective college years I began to think about the very large role that Dan had played in my upbringing.  I decided to honor that with a birthday gift for my leap year born uncle that expressed some of this appreciation.   It was a fishing rod and reel with a note that stated my appreciation for his role as a father figure in my life.  He could not identify or empathize with my feelings and it made him extremely uncomfortable.  I changed the subject  asking him about what kind of peach crop he expected this year to which he warmed and said that if their was no late freeze everything looked good.

Years later when my mother called and said she had some tragic news about Dan I tensed and pleaded for her to give me the details.  “He was shot in his home last night by some robber. He was dead when found by his son-in-law. We don’t know anything else, as an investigation is under way."

As the investigation unfolded it was revealed that the foot tracks of three men were found leaving the house through a field on the side of the house to access Gunn road that ran by the side of the house.  Dan had died of a bullet that pierced his aorta rendering him unconscious in seconds.  The shocker was that the powder burns on his clothing indicated that he had been shot at close range with a silencer on the gun as he opened his bedroom door.  Now many wondered,  “who would have put a contract out on Uncle Dan?”

The funeral in Macon gathered hundreds of people who knew Dan; some who loved him and others curious as to how this well known farmer and colorful personality could have come to such an end. He was buried on February 28, 1984, his birthday; a leap year baby and to this day his assailants are unknown.  His mahogany casket was covered with branches of peach blossoms honoring what this farmer did best. At home after the funeral we watched a video of him with his soiled fedora hat and his khaki shirt and pants, teaching his son, Dan Gunn III  how to  prune peach trees. In his inimitable style, grunts and jabs with the pruners and few words as he heaped searing love on his son. 

Posted by Sid Jordan Jr on February 17, 2016

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