Clyde Spears was a hard man with a mean temper and a harsh tongue. It seemed like there were two distinct camps – those who loved him and those who hated him. There just wasn’t any middle ground. He was my grandfather and I was definitely in the “love him” camp. Hard and harsh as he was with all others, to his grandchildren (I was the oldest grandson) he was the kindest, gentlest, most generous man in the world. He’s going to be behind many of the stories I include here in one way or another, so I thought I’d tell you a bit about him.
Born in 1902, Clyde was hard because he grew up hard. The fourth child of a sharecropping farmers outside of Dublin, GA (Willie and Ella), he knew nothing but hard work and struggle from the day he was born and, honestly, he relished that life. He was a willful, quick tempered and independent child. His schooling ended in the fourth grade when he ran away from home and made his way as a migrant crop picker / worker, child labor laws not yet being an impediment to such things. I heard a story in the family suggesting that unwelcome punishment for not eating his sweet potatoes at supper (being required to also eat the soggy boiled skins) prompted young Clyde to put his dishes on the washboard one evening and walk out the front door into the night not to return for several years. I don’t know if that story is true, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least. That’s exactly the kind of stubborn, impulsive thing that would be exactly in keeping with the man I knew. Whether the sweet potato story is true or not, young Clyde left Dublin, struck out on his own and did not return for quite a while.
He wasn’t someone who you would say generally enjoyed good luck. However, he was very fortunate in that he was too young to be taken away to fight WWI and by the time WWII came around he was too old to be drafted. By the late 1920s he had made his way to Lake County, Florida, and managed to buy some cheap land west of Leesburg by way of tax deeds. The thirty-three acres he cobbled together, as it turned out, bordered a new road that would become State Road 44, a core highway that now bisects the state running east to west from New Smyrna to Crystal River (another stroke of fortune). That’s where he built our family farm, the place where I largely became who I am.
In his travels, Clyde had wandered through Adele, GA, where a young girl ten years his junior caught his eye, Laura Essie Smith. He went back to get her and brought her to Florida. They were married in 1930 in Lake County just shy of her eighteenth birthday. After a miscarriage, their first child, my aunt, was born in 1931. A couple more miscarriages followed before my dad, Jerry Clyde, was born in 1934. Apparently, the difficult pregnancies resolved at that point as my uncle was born just over a year later in 1935.
Clyde’s life was work. If he was awake, he was generally working at something. He was very capable and wasn’t afraid to try anything. If it needed to be built, he built it. If it needed to be fixed, he fixed it. If there was a problem he figured a way around it. At the core, he was a dirt farmer raising the truck crops appropriate to the sandy Florida soil and kept chickens, hogs and other typical farm stock. He quickly began to build a small herd of cattle and eventually became a well-known, respected cattleman running herds across Lake, Sumpter and Marion counties. For a time, he worked as a “woods rider” for a turpentine operation and he periodically managed fruit packing houses in the area. He was never doing just one thing; he always was looking for another way to bring in extra money. He dealt primarily in cash, never credit, and I suspect he didn’t pay nearly all of the taxes the government would have required if they had been able to figure out what he earned.
World War II brought a lot of people and activity to Lake County, FL as a military training hub. Camp Leesburg was an army training facility and later housed German prisoners of war towards the end of the conflict. The camp housed and fed a lot of men and, therefore, created a substantial market for butchered meat and produce locally. Granddaddy used that opportunity to increase the number of hogs they raised. He built a concrete scalding vat and butcher area under an outbuilding beside the main barn and processed pork continuously, both what he could raise and what he could buy from others. Beef and poultry were included, of course, but pigs were the most profitable and manageable, so that’s where he kept his focus. The camp also produced a lot of kitchen waste that had to be hauled away. Since pigs will eat most anything, Granddaddy saw that as a double win. He contracted to haul the kitchen waste away for a fee and then used most of it as free feed (slop) for the pigs that he would eventually sell back to the army. Turns out the soldiers working KP weren’t all that careful about what got thrown away in the kitchen scraps back then. Consequently, a fair portion of the flatware and serving utensils we used at the farm bore a “U.S.” stamp on the handle. A bonus!
I don’t think I’ve ever known someone who was truly perfect and no matter how much I loved him I freely acknowledge my grandfather certainly wasn’t. No need to sugar coat it, Clyde was a racist. He made no secret whatsoever about his feelings regarding what he believed was the appropriate station of black Americans (my term, definitely not his if you know what I mean). That said, he was not one to dress up in sheets, cover his head with a pillow case and join some secret club. I heard him speak of those silly characters in very unflattering terms as well. While he absolutely viewed blacks as a lower class, he wasn’t one to follow a mob or engage in violence against someone who had not first done him or his family harm, regardless of their color. And on many occasions, I witnessed him act with kindness and generosity towards folks of color who desperately needed assistance after some form of tragedy. Nevertheless, he was a fervent segregationist and would never have thought of having a black man sit at his supper table.
While I loved him absolutely, I saw even as a child that granddaddy’s racial animosity was not something rooted in fact or logic and would not be part of my own belief system. I believe his prejudice was ultimately rooted in his economic background and the circumstances of his upbringing. Poor whites and blacks competed for the same jobs in the rural south and racial tension between them was common place. Human nature, for better or worse, is brutally competitive and we seem to always be searching for ways to view ourselves as better than or above someone else; to not be on the bottom rung of the ladder. Despite what the media may seem to imply, racism is not a uniquely southern failing. It runs throughout our society, north, south, east and west, between and among an endless variety of races, religions and life styles. I don’t excuse it or condone it; I just recognize it for what it is.
Back to Clyde.
He endured hardship and overcame tragedies that seem insurmountable to me. Obviously, leaving home and finding work to make his own way in the world after only the fourth grade it amazing in and of itself. But that was just the start.
Grandaddy never had insurance of any kind. It really wasn’t readily available for the most part up though the 1940s and 1950s for rural Americans. So, whatever calamity came had to be faced head on and endured.
In the late 1940s my grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer. That’s a very serious diagnosis today, but eighty years ago it was nearly a death sentence. While radiation therapy was in early use, it was still somewhat crude and chemotherapy was still a decade or more away. She underwent a radical mastectomy. No insurance. Can you imagine? Granddaddy sold what he had to, bartered and established payment schedules to get it all taken care of. Grandma survived without reoccurrence and lived to be eighty-five years old.
Then in the early 1950s my uncle, Claude, just seventeen years old, the youngest of the Spears children, dove off the swimming pool diving board at the University of Florida in his first quarter there, hit another swimmer and broke his own neck, rendering him a “low quadriplegic.” He would never walk or use the fingers on his hands again. Surgeries and nearly two years in a rehabilitation facility followed. The farm had to be “refitted” to accommodate wheel chairs and various kinds of equipment to allow Claude to come home. Again, no insurance. I actually have receipts and invoices in an old steamer trunk (a future installment will cover that artifact of my history) documenting grandma and granddaddy raising ducks and rabbits to barter with doctors and other caregivers to pay the bills. By that time, Clyde had acquired a fair amount of land in the area now consumed by The Villages and had assembled a fair-sized cattle herd. All of that was sold to meet the obligations of Claude’s care.
And none of that kept granddaddy from seeing that my aunt, Etta, was able to complete her degree at Florida State and my dad, Jerry, was able finish his degrees at University of Florida and go on to veterinary school at Auburn. Claude came home and through pure cracker ingenuity means were devised for him getting around the farm, working it and participating in the family’s activities. Granddaddy saw to it he had whatever he needed.
Clyde Spears was a hard man. He grew up hard and he lived hard. He died in 1974 at the age of 72. He was my grandfather and I suspect that as much as I loved him, it was only about half as much as he loved me.