I was 4 years old and I was playing in a bedroom by myself and Mom was cooking dinner as we called it back then.  I found a box of kitchen matches and I looked at the wallpaper and it was so old it was crumbling up at the end and I took one match out of the box and thought to myself I'll just light this match and put it to the wallpaper and then I will put my hand over it and put it out.  Well, I struck the match and put it to the wallpaper and it just went "whoooom" and before I knew it the whole side of the wall was on fire.  I called my mom kinda low at first and I said  "mom, come here I have set the house on fire" and mom was cooking on an old wood stove and it was smoking anyway so she didn't pay any attention to me.  I said again but this time louder and she still didn't hear so I yelled out loud "Mom, come here, I have set the house on fire!"

My older brother Buddy came into the house about that time and mom told him to go get my daddy who was working in the cotton field with a team of mules.  Meantime, they both were trying to put the fire out in the bedroom.

Well they got the fire out with a lot of effort and about that time my dad came in and mom told him what had just happened and he gave me the only whipping that he ever gave me and it was four licks with his right hand and I just went "whoo" and I remember doing that with ever lick he gave me.  So my mom washed clothes on a washboard and a bar of Lysol soap was laying there and I picked up the soap and took a bite of it and immediately my mouth turned wrong side out and my mom which was pregnant at the time ran to a neighbor's house to get help and they finally got some medicine in my mouth to combat the lye soap in my mouth but my mom lost the baby I guess from running down to our neighbor's house and I guess that all happened because I wanted to be the youngest kid out of seven in our family and by the way I am still the youngest! 

Let's fast forward now to 1957 and my mom was in the hospital at Poplar Bluff, MO and my sister and I were staying my sister and brother-in-law's and it was in the month of October and we were all picking cotton and after work that day my brother-in-law said "Jerry lets go to Campbell and I want to get a pint of whiskey" and he did that and while going home he said to me "have you ever had a drink of whiskey" and I said "no" and he said why don't you take a little drink of it" and handed it to me and I took a little sip of it and handed it back to him and he said "oh no, take a little bit more than that" and handed it back to me and I took a drink and I mean I took a drink and when I handed the bottle back to him his face turned white as a ghost because there might have been a tablespoon left in the bottle and he said to me "Jerry Wayne!"

When we got home my sister had supper fixed and we ate and by that time I was feeling oh so sick.  Now I and that front porch met many times that night and I threw up nearly all that night and my youngest sister said to me "Jerry, you ought to die after drinking that much whiskey" and really I thought I was going to but lived another day to tell another tale. HA