J.K. Gourdin III, 1865-1938
Editor’s Note: At the request of his readers and in memory of Warner M. Montgomery, Ph. D, we will continue to publish his Adventure Travel stories for the time being.
J.K. Gourdin IV (my Uncle Jay) dearly loved his father, J.K. Gourdin III, who was always referred to as Mr. JK. In his Memoirs, Uncle Jay told many stories of his father’s escapades in Pineville. Here are a few using the vernacular of the time.
TC and the Preacher. TC Gaillard was a crippled colored man who lived on Mr. JK’s property. He was very intelligent and taught many other colored people to read and write. TC couldn’t do much physical work, but he was a fearless night watchman.
During cotton ginning season, TC arrived at the Gourdin & Gourdin Gin at dark with his shotgun and stayed all night. Nothing was ever lost while TC was on duty.
Once, when Mr. JK noticed someone was stealing corn, he assigned TC to guard his barn. Several days later, TC had his man. He held his shotgun on the thief all night until Mr. JK arrived in the morning.
The thief turned out to be a preacher. Mr. JK gave the preacher the choice of being put in jail or letting him put a chain around his neck. The preacher agreed to give a sermon explaining the chain to his congregation.
Come Sunday, the preacher filed the chain from around his neck before he stood before his flock. TC reported to Mr. JK that it didn’t matter “cause everybody knowed what he done anyway.” It has served its purpose.
Mr. JK and FDR. Uncle Jay recalled that his father was fascinated with radio, a new invention. He loved Lum and Abner and he always listened to FDR’s Fireside Chats, not because he liked the president but because he hated him.
Even though he hated FDR’s alphabet soup programs, Mr. JK dipped his own bread into the soup. He used the WPA to dig ditches on his farmland, and he got his daughter, Mary, (my mother) a job as foreman on a road repair crew. She lasted two days.
The WPA crew built a nice brick, one-hole privy in Mr. JK’s yard for the hired workers. Even with that, Mr. JK always said, “FDR gave people jobs but they were very inefficient. We don’t need socialism.”
Mr. JK became the WPS flour distributor for Pineville. Every month the government would unload a huge stack of 25-pound bags of flour on the sun porch of the Big House for Mr. JK to distribute to every family in the area. Soon the Gourdin yard was full of mule wagons. After they left, there were always lots of bags left that soon filled with weevils. Mr. JK had the WPA privy crew dig a deep hole in the yard and bury the flour bags.
Mr. JK’s fan. Mr. JK was quite an inventor but somehow his inventions never quite worked right. He invented a mule-drawn fertilizer distributor and a hand-operated seed planter, neither of which made the Sears Catalog.
One of his major projects was a fan over the dining room table to fan flies and keep the room cool. Such things could not be bought at stores in those days.
Mr. JK constructed the fan so it was powered by a dog going around in a circle the same way a horse or mule was used to power a sugar cane mill. Once the fan was in place in the ceiling, Mr. JK harnessed his best hound dog to the contraption and ordered him to walk. Old Red immediately lay down and went to sleep.
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