Stringbeans Flu Cure & Grandpa's Friendship
by Stan Hitchcock
It’s been raining again in
Tennessee. One of the wettest falls in
memory. As I sit here on the front porch
of our old farm house, watching the
water run down to join our creek on its journey to feed the mighty Cumberland
River, I think of friends, past and present.
Some I miss, some I still enjoy, but, all I appreciate.
I first met Stringbean in
1954 at the Shrine Mosque in Springfield, Missouri on a package show with Carl
Smith and Little Jimmy Dickens. I was
just a 17 year old kid but String was
friendly to everyone, taking time to talk to me backstage, and later, he really
proved his spirit of human kindness when he befriended me on my first guest
appearance on the Grand Ole Opry in 1961.
In later years we worked a lot of shows together, one tour in particular
sticks out in my memory as a special time with String: In 1968 String and I were booked on a tour up
through the Eastern States and he called and asked if I would travel with him,
in his car, and do the driving so his wife Estelle could stay home and tend to
her garden. I gladly agreed, and we left the next day from his farm and headed
East.
Although String never learned
to drive, he always bought a new Cadillac every year for Estelle to drive him
to the Opry and on his numerous tour dates, so I enjoyed the new car as we
started our trip. That is I enjoyed it
up to the time we reached our first town, Salisbury, Maryland, and got ready for our first show. In 1968 the Asian Flu had started in Hong
Kong and traveled to the United States later in the year. This was later in the year and I started
feeling bad, and by that night I had a raging fever and a bad case of this
Asian flu. Well, there wasn’t much to do
but keep going, we had shows to do and I
was the only one who could drive . . . this went on for two days and two more
shows in towns along the East coast. I
was getting dehydrated from not being able to hold anything down, not even
water, and weak from the fever. This
dang scourge from the Orient was about to whip me.
String and I were in the
middle of the West Virginia mountains when we rounded a curve; there sat a flat bed truck full of
watermelons. String held his hand up and said: “Chief, if you’ll pull ‘er over
by that truck full of watermelons, I’ll show you how to get rid of that old
Asian Flu bug.” I pulled over, and String bought the biggest watermelon that
fellow had on the truck. He got me out of the car, sat me up under a shade
tree, cut the melon with his pocket knife and proceeded to stuff every bit of
that watermelon down me . . . I mean I had watermelon coming out my ears, but
by golly, it worked. My fever broke; the liquid from the melon just worked it’s
magic. Two hours later I was feeling like a human being once more. String
claimed it was an old mountain cure-all and I still swear by it today. I’m
thinking ‘bout bottling it, getting a horse and wagon, tune up my old guitar, an old time medicine show going around the
country selling it for flu healer. I
could make a million.
Now that was a friend, taking
care of a friend, and I’ll never forget
old String saving me from that awful flu.
String and Estelle were two of the finest human beings I ever met and I
cherish the memories.
Grandpa Jones was String’s
dearest friend, and in fact, was their neighbor on the farm just up The
Road. Grandpa loved String and Estelle
above everyone other than his own family, and always sorta looked after String. Not only could String not drive a car, he had
other manual skills that eluded him; and Grandpa, knowing this, tried to help
his friend in any way possible. Grandpa
and String loved to hunt together and would go out in the woods every week
during hunting season in the earlier years of their friendship. Grandpa had stopped going on the hunting
trips now that he had gotten older, walking through rough terrain started
bothering his legs, but he carried on a special tradition that he had started
years before: Grandpa knew that even though String could play the fire out of
that banjo and was one of the cleverest men he had ever known . . . he simply
did not have the manual skills to take his guns apart to clean and oil them
after the hunt. Even though he was no longer hunting, Grandpa would come over
to String’s house every week during hunting season, disassemble all String’s
guns, clean, polish and oil them, assemble them back; lovingly maintaining
String’s firearms so they would not rust and deteriorate, all the while
enjoying the storytelling time with String. Grandpa did this for years all for
just one reason. String was his friend, and friends did for friends. How beautiful - a pure friendship. Music makes lifetime friends and these two
men from the mountains are forever in my mind as an example of what true
friendship is.
On Saturday, November 10th, 1973 at 11:00pm, backstage in the
dressing room of the Ryman Auditorium,
Stringbean finished snapping his overalls over his cotton work shirt,
zipped up his clothes bag, full of the famous long shirt, short pants and
porkpiehat that had been his signature stage outfit for so many years; closed
up his old, worn banjo case and stepped out in the hall to gather up his wife,
Estelle. They headed out to the parking
lot behind the Opry to load up and go home. Estelle got behind the wheel of the
new Cadillac that String had recently bought, as he did every year by paying
cash on the barrel head, and assumed her
usual position as pilot
for her man, who could not drive. There was sparse conversation
between the two old friends and lovers, married for so many years. But then,
their understanding
of each other was so strong that words were not always
necessary. It was a fairly short trip out to Goodlettsville where they had
their little farm, and they had made that trip from the Opry House to home so
many times that by now it was just automatic. When they reached the lane that
led up to their rustic, old farm house, String asked Estelle to stop and let
him unload his stuff in front of the house before she went on down to the garage, which was some
ways from the house. String stepped up
on the porch with his arms full of banjo and stage clothes, and pushed open the
door, which they always left unlocked, as did all the farm folks around there.
As String took a couple of steps into the dark house, he put his banjo case on
the floor and was reaching for the light, when a person standing behind the
door put
his gun to the old entertainer’s head and ended his life in a
blinding flash of powder. Estelle, just getting out of the car down by the
barn, heard the shot and started running across the yard in a panic, but she
just wasn’t fast enough to outrun the two men who chased her down, knocked her
to the ground and shot her through the head as she lay there screaming for
String. The two fiendish men; neighbors
to String and Estelle, then entered the
house where String lay dead on the floor next to his old banjo, went through
his overall pockets, ransacked the house and finally left without finding the
money they believed would be hidden there.
David Akeman, Stringbean’s real
life name, didn’t have much faith in banks: a carry over from his raising in
the hills of eastern Kentucky where all the people lost their money in the
banks during the Depression, so he always carried a large roll of bills in his
overall bib pocket. Because of his sweet nature and natural good will, it never
occurred to him that someone would covet his hard earned money, and go to any
extreme to take it from him.
All the more horrible to imagine the next morning, Grandpa had
tried to call String to have breakfast together; troubled because he got no
answer, Grandpa went to the Akeman farm and found his dear friends . . . lying
as the killers had left them.
Grandpa never really got over it, and in fact, left Nashville
for many years to live in Arkansas with his wife Ramona. Some evilness is just too hard to bear.
Well, the rains lettin’ up some and the clouds are thinning
out. Old rainy day memories kinda cause
my eyes to water, it seems like. My
good dog, Buck, sleeps peacefully on the porch boards without a care in the
world. I take another drink of coffee to
wash away the dang lump in my throat but it don’t work very well.
Reckon that’s bout enough memories for one morning.
God Bless Us All.
Stan