John Walter Shannon was known to me as Uncle John, a man with a good sense of humor and he seemed to enjoy joking with us when we were young and visiting his small 22 acre farm outside of Memphis on Egypt Central Road in the late 40's and into the 50's.

I was privileged to work for him as a helper in the late 40's when a hailstorm produced hail large enough to damage roofs all over the area. He and his son Frank did home construction and repairs under the company name, J.W Shannon & Sons contractors. I worked for him as a "grunt" carrying shingles up to the rooftops and cleaning up debris then when I got older he allowed me to help with house construction as a helper.

We cut a lot of lumber with a handsaw in those days since most of his work was in the county, building new homes and there was no electric power at many of those worksites. Almost everything was done by hand including drilling large holes in sills and plates for pipes to pass through them.

As the years passed and Frank drifted off to other pursuits and the homebuilding trade became much too difficult for Uncle john to work it with only helpers. He changed his line of work to Plumbing and heating. In the late 50's my brother, Walter, and I both worked for him for two or three years.

Uncle John and Frank also were aviators. Uncle John had known Charles Lindbergh in those early flying days. He and Frank both had their commercial pilots licenses and were flight instructors at a small airfield on Winchester Road called "Winchester Flying Service". The field was long ago deserted and homes built in it's place.

When I was growing up, I would usually spend part of the summer months staying at Uncle John and Aunt Doris' house. It was a small home that John and Frank had built years earlier. It was covered with roofing shingles that gave the appearance of being bricks. One summer while I was there, Aunt Sissy, (Ophelia Shannon) and her boyfriend were flying a small plane and "buzzing" the farm. They decided to land in a large pasture across the road from Uncle John's house.

Unfortunately, they failed to see a barbed wire fence that stretched across the field so when they approached the end of the field and landed, it was too late to avoid one of the posts. It punched a hole in the wingtip which was covered with canvas. I remember their consternation and worry over the problem.

Frank loved building model airplanes and had a good selection of them. As a result of his model building hobby, he had a case of model air plane cement, something very much like fingernail polish. He brought it from the house, and with a piece of cotton cloth, they proceded to patch the hole. When it dried he used model airplane paint of the same yellow as that with which the airplane was painted.

This was a rented airplane and was not supposed to have landed anywhere but at a regular airport. The repair and paint color match was good enough that the damage wasn't noticed upon their return to the private airfield, though later it was found and they had some explanations to make.

One other event on the farm was when one of their friends crashed a plane in the trees at the back of John's farm. He got a little too low and clipped a branch on a tree sending the plane spinning through the limbs. It completely demolished the airplane but the pilot only had a broken nose. He was so very fortunate not to have been killed.

As Uncle John got older he stopped flying and when I once asked him about it, he said that he had seen too many of his close friends either get injured or killed by flying in small planes. He said if one flew long enough it would get him, so he stopped before it happened to him too. It made sense to me....

When I'd spend the summer months on his farm, we would plough not just his fields but those of others who paid him to do it. First he had a pair of mules that would work hard and one would "almost let me ride him." I say almost because he was so smart that he would wait till I started to throw a leg over his back before he would sidestep and let me fall. On rare occasions when I climbed on the fence and got on him before he could move away, he would head for a tree limb or the barn door to scrape me off. He was mean and smart.

Finally Uncle John was able to get an Allis Chalmers tractor that was painted orange. It was in good shape and he did a tremendous amount of farm work with it. He let me do some plowing and some "middle bustin" as he called it. I learned, almost the hard way, that when a bush hog was hooked to the tractor you had to stop long before getting to the end of a row. Those older model bush hogs had gears that made the blades spin to cut the grass but there was no clutch to release them when you wanted to stop so they continued to turn and the gears they used transferred power back to the tractor and would make it keep going. You could not stop it until the bush hog cutting blades stopped turning. Many fences have been "run through" for that very reason.

Uncle John was too safety conscious to let me do any real serious bush hog work in a small field. I could only do it in large fields where I never got close to the end or a stopping place near a fence or building.

One year he wanted to go down to the local dairy and see a man about a plowing job or a hay mowing and baling job. We arrived in time to see one of the cows kick a bucket over, spilling milk on the concrete floor. It was a nasty floor but one of the men that was milking them took a dirty looking rag and sopped up the milk, squeezing it out of the rag and back into the bucket. I swore off milk then and there. I couldn't drink milk for several years without getting a mental picture of that. Uncle John laughed at me and told me it would be pasteurized and clean. Maybe so but I didn't want any of it.

Uncle John would do things for my Mother like building her some sewing cabinets to place each side of her sewing machine for putting her sewing supplies in them. He fussed for two weeks about having to do that job, but he wasn't serious, he really enjoyed that kind of work and he knew Dad had no time for it. Uncle John also built Dad's printing shop, a concrete block one on Brentwood Circle. The shop still stands there today though the business, Highland Heights Printing Company, was closed over 30 years ago.

Uncle John always smoked roll your own cigarettes. He used 'Old North State tobacco. I remember seeing his matches in his hatband (he always wore a beat up old felt hat). I think it was the same one throughout the many years I knew him. When he'd be working and sweating, the matches would get wet and he'd place them in the sun on top of a fence post to let them dry so he could light up. I tried rolling those cigarettes and found that if I didn't twist the ends just right, the tobacco would fall right out of them . It wasn't crimp cut long pieces like cigarette tobacco of today, but was leaf flakes that looked as if they had dried and been walked over before being packaged. Very dry and loose flaky leaves. Strong to smoke. On his farm is where I smoked my first piece of grapevine and that was some pungent smelling and headache creating stuff.

I used to go fishing in his little stock pond at the back of the farm. It seems that the next door neighbor was a snooty type person and Uncle John and the man didn't get along. The man put a fence in the water between his big lake and the small part that lapped over to Uncle John's land that was used for Uncle John's cows and mules. After years of being underwater, the fence had rotted away but it wasn't visible I kept catching some pretty nice sized fish and Uncle John wanted to know where I got them. He thought I was kidding him when I told him I got them out of his pond. It couldn't have been more than a foot and a half deep at any point in it.

He was finally convinced when he followed me one day without my knowledge and watched me catch some fish. He asked me to be sure and not let the people on the farm next door see me catching them or they would put more wire up. He and I made that our little secret and we had many good fish dinners with Aunt Doris's wonderful tasting biscuits we called "ship sinkers." They were big and heavy but had the best flavor of any I have ever eaten. Aunt Doris worked hard most of her life and never complained about anything.

Uncle John had an old stake bed International Harvester truck that he used and he would pick my brother, Walter and me up at 4:30 or 5 am. We'd spend the day working wherever the job was. The last job I did with him was in Bartlett, TN.

I remember once we had to run in new gas pipes to an old house on Manassas Street, in Memphis, TN. Where we were working, the black woman that lived there kept a large number of big dogs under her house. We had to crawl under it, after she had the dogs put away, and we got so many fleas and flea bites Uncle John was ready to stop working.

Afterwards, we went to a place on Chelsea Avenue to eat chili for lunch. Uncle John kept moving and shaking around under the table, I asked him what he was doing and he said he was trying to shake fleas off because he didn't like the owner of the place where we were eating. Cracked me up. He was funny that way.

Once, he had me get out from under a house, go get a 20 foot section of pipe with threads on the ends and bring it back to him under the house. I did as was told and he waited until I was within five feet of him and he said, "BOY! Why are you bringing me that end of the pipe? I want the end with the threads on it. Turn it around. I started working my way back out from under the house to turn it around when I realized the threads were the same on each end of the pipe. I looked at him and he was laughing so hard he had tears in his eyes. Then I couldn't help but laugh too.

He was constantly doing those things and it was difficult to know if he was serious or kidding when he started in on me.