Remember When: It’s all fun and games…and snakes

By Guest Columnist Mary Jane Boutwell

It is amazing how folks sitting around visiting can stir up old memories. If kids today did half of the things talked about recently, the parents would be arrested and charged with contributing to life threatening activities. 

In the group was one of many men I know and have known that know what it takes “to get the ox out of the ditch.” 

Working as a logger when a teenager, his told him to cut down Sassafras. It had a swollen center that was hollow. It was large enough to have a saw log above and below the hollow part. 

When he started to cut, rattlesnakes came slithering out. There were multiple snakes with a number of rattles on each one. 

Also, someone told of a gentleman that could and did many skilled tasks. (He quit repairing his cars after he replaced his model T Ford.) He got mad at a rattlesnake. 

While hoeing cotton, he noticed the plant moving with no one close and no breeze to cause the movement. 

One of the boys started screaming, “Snake! Snake!” The man began to pick at the snake with the hoe causing it to strike, finally striking at the moving hoe, it struck itself. That killed the snake. It had 29 rattles and a button. 

I learned during this tale that a rattle usually equaled two years and a button was one year. Whatever the actual years were, it was old and big. 

The 5ft 8in man put the snake over in the crook in the hoe, the hoe handle over his shoulder and carried it home with both the head and the tail dragging the ground. 

After cutting the head off, his wife made him bury it three feet deep according to his carpenter tools. Then he stretched the snake’s body across the road in front of his house. People driving over it, put their brakes on and backed up several times doing this to catch the body under the tire with the brakes on to kill this monster snake. Fun and games until one driver realized where all this was. He got out of his truck and chewed the snake killer out. 

Not really, but what an April Fool’s prank.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Mary Jane Boutwell is a passionate historian and is thrilled to share stories about “way back when.”