More Infamous Kin

My aunt received a copy of this newspaper clipping about our great-grandfather, “Smokey Bill” Smith, from his niece who still lives in Harrisburg, near Harco. I am delighted that the local newspaper thought this item amusing enough to reprint it in a “75 Years Ago…” column! I wonder if they knew his relatives would see it, or if they just thought a chicken thief named “Smokey Bill” was too funny to be someone’s ancestor. Then again, it’s a pretty small town, and maybe the newspaper staff know my family all too well.

James William “Will” Webster Smith, aka “Smokey Bill,” was born Sept 10, 1890 in Providence, Webster county, Kentucky. He married Verla Leona Doss and had 9 children, 7 of whom lived to adulthood, including my grandmother, Mary Mildred Smith. His youngest daughter Barbara is the only one living currently. The family lived in Harco and several other coal towns in Saline county Illinois and Clay county Kentucky. Smokey Bill died in Harrisburg, Illinois in June 1970.

Below is a picture of great-Grandpa Smith (right) and a man identified on the back as Clarence Johnson. The photo postcard was probably taken between 1910 and 1920.

I always thought that, while handsome, Smokey Bill looked like a troublemaker or black sheep of some type in this photo — but I imagined it to be the slightly more glamorous life of a Shawneetown gangster, ladies man, gambler, or since he was born in the hills of Kentucky, maybe a moonshiner. But apparently his was the ignominious career of Chicken Thief. Below is some more detail from my aunt about her grandfather:

“[Cousin] Johnny confirmed that Grandpa Smith was an accomplished chicken thief. In fact, she said that Grandpa and a sister of Grandma’s (don’t know which one – must have occurred in Kentucky where the sisters lived) could go into a chicken house and steal chickens without any of them making a peep. I asked Bob about this and he told me there is a real knack to stealthily grabbing a chicken and putting it down into a bag without making it or the others erupt in loud clucks and squawks.

“By the way, in November of 1934 Grandpa was 44 – old enough to know better. But the thirties were tough times. Aunt Barbara was only two years old, Betty, five, Mildred, seven, Todge, nine, Toots, fourteen, Lou, seventeen, and J. G, twenty-one. I’ll bet J.G. was away in the Army. I have a feeling there are a lot of things about Smokey Bill we’ll never know. Cool things, like this .”

I absolutely love my family!

Tags: chickens, family, harco, legend, southern illinois

The story of Rufus Reuben Tucker

Rufus Reuben Tucker, originally uploaded by Hawk3ye.

One night enjoying some brandy and babbling with my friends Tom & Kathy a long-forgotten family story popped into my head. Although it had always been there and to my mind was just as well-worn as most of my tales, apparently it was new to Tom & Kathy, and when I repeated it later, to Jim as well. So sit right back and you’ll hear the tale:

Rufus Reuben Tucker was one of those “no-good” relations that family has little nice to say about later (many apologies to cousins Judy & Bill Tucker & families). He was married to my grandpa’s much-loved sister Petrona, who died too young of breast cancer in the late sixties or early seventies. [Update Per AP: She had breast cancer at one time, but died of heart disease in 1975.] They had a bitter divorce and she destroyed most photos of him, so the one shown here is a rare specimen from the family archives.

The story I remember has to do with the famous 1938 radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.” You may have heard that the broadcast was mistaken for breaking news by American listeners and created a panic, although Wikipedia says this is largely a myth:

The War of the Worlds was an episode of the American radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween episode of the series on October 30, 1938 and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. Directed and narrated by Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds.

The first two thirds of the 60-minute broadcast was presented as a series of simulated news bulletins, which suggested to many listeners that an actual Martian invasion was in progress. Compounding the issue was the fact that the Mercury Theatre on the Air was a ’sustaining show’ (i.e., it ran without commercial breaks), thus adding to the dramatic effect. Although there were sensationalist accounts in the press about a supposed panic, careful research has shown that while thousands were frightened, there is no evidence that people fled their homes or otherwise took action.[citation needed] The news-bulletin format was decried as cruelly deceptive by some newspapers and public figures, leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast, but the episode launched Orson Welles to fame.

According to family lore, Rufus Reuben Tucker, then employed as much of my mom’s family was in the coal mines of Southern Illinois, was caught up in the (perhaps mythical) wave of panic. He grabbed up a coffee can containing his all of his young family’s savings, left wife and children behind, and hid down in the mine to escape the Martians.

The practicality of this move aside (do extra-terrestrials accept US currency?), you can imagine that forever after Reuben would have been known as 1) an ass, 2) a fool who believed the “War of the Worlds” broadcast was real, 3) a coward who immediately abandoned his wife & kids in the face of alien invasion, without seeing one flying saucer or little green man.

Flush with recent praise for this gem of a tale, I asked my Uknavage family if they remembered any more details. And none of them knew what I was talking about! What? Did I make it up? Did I overhear it sometime at a family gathering when neither of my aunts, my uncle, or my sister were present? It seems unlikely but possible.

We do have some video archives from the late 1980s of my grandpa & his aunt Susie — a couple of hours of old family stories in fact. So I have some research to do to find the source of this story, where Reuben & Petrona lived in 1938, what mine that might have been, how widespread the radio broadcast was in Southern Illinois, etc. Another fun mystery to be solved.

Tags: family, legend, southern illinois, war of the worlds