Bell City"s Herb Hoover

I guess I met Herb when I was about 13 years old. At this young age we lived in the hills west of Bell City on an old hill farm. My cousin Gerald Whittley a neighbor's boys, the Flannigans of which one later became my brother in law would all get togather and usually walk to Bell City. The old Bell City pool hall/cafe is where I met Herbie. Now Herb was a dandy, at this time he had I think 6 kids below the age of 10. Herb had an old 2 ton truck that he would hall grain, move furniture, hall wood and in the summer he would round up a crew of hay haulers. Most days on the hay truck you could make around 10 bucks. Now this was a lot more than you could make chopping cotton or beans for they only paid 5 dollars for 10 hours work.
I remember one time we were in the hay field and a boy by the name of Dale McCulley caught a big black snake after lifting a bale of hay. He was chasing everyone in the hay field with this dam snake. Now Herb didn't think this was funny because he wanted to get the hay hauled, so he got onto Dale/wine his nickname. Now Dale had already been in trouble with the law and wasn't too shook up over Herbs fatherly ways, so he caught Herb not really paying attention and threw the snake in the cab with Herb. Ths caused real havoc because the truck was about half loaded and Herb jumped out of the truck and the truck hit a small ditch and dumped all the hay. This really pissed Herb off and he fired Dale and made him walk back to town. But the next day he was back out on the truck.
Another time we were hauling for the Jennings boys, three batchlors that had cattle and raised hogs. Now around their barn was a lot of wet corn cobs so naturally when we went to the barn to unload, a corn cob fight would start. Well Herb got mad again and started raising hell about this. So one of my classmates at the time Virgil Hampton was on one side of the truck and Herb was on the other. Virgil said watch this, he pitched a good wet and cow manured corn cob up over the load of hay and then yelled for Herb. Now Herb thought Virgil was on the top of the load of hay so he looked up just in time to get the full load of cow manure and vet cob. Now this started a hell of a round and Virgil got fired that day and had to walk back to town but was back out in the hay field the next.
I also remember the summer nights in Bell city. We would all gather down town for a few hours and it would usually end up in a giant water fight. It was always a great time in the early 60's in the old town of Bell City. I went into the Army in 1967 and while I was gone I was told that Herb had got hit in the leg by one of his hogs which caused a bad spot to develop and it turned out to be cancer. He didn't last to long after that. As I stated Herbie was a DANDY.