Jim Tracy

BILL RATLIFF:  Just wanted to give an introduction first and let people know that this is being recorded on the 26^th of June, 1983, here in Annandale, Virginia. 

And, I’m Bill Ratliff and I’m gonna be interviewing you and Ives Welch is on the camera here.

The reunion is next weekend, so that’s why y’all are up here; we wanted to get a recording of you and Mom and get some of your memories, you know, to uh, for us to keep and cherish over the years. 

Glad you’re willing to do this. 

JIM TRACY:  Becky once told one of her high school professors that she had an uncle in War World I and, of course, she laughed her to scorn, but it was true. 

I started my life before the first World War, May the 6^th, 1913.  The Democrats had won one of the first elections that they had ever won and so I had a hard time coming by my name.  At home, no one seemed willing to name me. 

And at Christmas time, after I’d been born in May, our school teacher, to play a little joke on her boyfriend who was named John Everett Tole, put a little sack of candy on the Christmas tree to J. Everett Tracy. 

And so, I got the name Everett, the initial J., and after my sisters had tried to name me several things, like Fletcher and uh, John, and so on. 

But, later on when I got to be about 12 years old, my father said, “It’s time you had a first name. You can pick one out.” And so, I picked Jim, for my uncle James Bobblet, who had killed a bobcat with a stick.  And I thought he was quite a hero. 

So, it got to be James Everett Tracy. 

BILL RATLIFF:  So, you chose your own first name?

JIM TRACY:  Yes. Then, later on I got ready to go to Cuba and I learned that the name on my birth certificate was Woodrow.  And no one would take claim for having named me that.

My father had been dead by then, but I can see him smiling with that peculiar smile of his and saying, “Well, I guess we’ll just have to name this one Woodrow.” ‘Cause Woodrow had just been elected president of the United States. 

So, that’s how I got the name and I had to have it legally changed then so that it would fit my driver’s license and my credit cards, and my social security. 

So, for years I went with J. Everett Tracy and then the war came along and they insisted that I use a middle initial on a front name, that was World War II. 

I think I was born in one of the most auspicious times that the world has ever had because I’ve had the pleasure of walking behind a team of oxen driving a fast pair of horses, driving a tractor, and riding in an airplane.  And if they’d make it possible, I’d be glad to go on a shuttle. 

And truly I think more advancement in the last 20 years than in all the years before that.

I don’t know what you kids are up for, but it ought to be an interesting life there too, but you’ll have missed a lot because you didn’t see the old, as it was.

BILL RATLIFF:  What do you remember of life growing up with your brothers and sisters on the farm?

JIM TRACY:  Not much.  I was sent to school at the age of 4 because mother didn’t want my sister to walk that three-quarters of a mile through the woods to school all by herself, so I was sent to school to just eat her lunch.  And I started off there and consequently, I was able to graduate from high school at the age of 16. 

BILL RATLIFF:  Did you enjoy school?

JIM TRACY:  Very much. I started out in a one-room schoolhouse, eight grades in one room, and the interesting thing was to sit and watch young people ahead of you and learn what they had said and answered to the questions that came up, and consequently, I was able to get through the first eight grades without reading very much. 

I had an unfortunate experience in grade school; my sister was made the teacher my eighth year.  We had a rule at home that if we got a whipping at school, we got a whipping at home. And seldom a day went by that I didn’t get a whipping in school, and then I got one at home. And because she thought that if she could make an example of me the rest of the big boys would be good. 

And so, came January I had special incentive to take all of the examinations instead of just the part that were allotted to us, and as soon as I took them, I quit school, ‘cause I figured that if I passed them fine, if I didn’t pass them, I’d have to go back to school the next year, but they couldn’t know anything about it until after they found out whether I passed or not. And I passed. 

But by 8^th grade, I quit school in January and didn’t go back until the next fall when I started high school. 

BILL RATLIFF:  With another teacher.

JIM TRACY:  With four more teachers. 

BILL RATLIFF:  How was high school than?

JIM TRACY:  High school was out from the wrong side of the tracks. Starting out with being puny and little, kids in town picked on me and run me out of town every night for a while, until I caught one of them alone. (laughs)  Then, we didn’t have any more trouble. (laughs)

BILL RATLIFF:  No more trouble. (laughs)

JIM TRACY: No more trouble. As long as they caught me in a gang, they were all right, but I got one of them alone and then there wasn’t any more trouble, so they gave me the name Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty or give me death.” (laughs)

BILL RATLIFF: Did you have to work a lot on the farm while you were going to school?

JIM TRACY: Yes, my freshman year was pretty skimpy.  In the winter time, my brother-in-law died out in Washington State and father and mother went out to help my sister gather up the loose ends and move her family back to Nebraska. 

And they left me there, of course, well taken care of, I had two brothers that lived just to the half and three-quarters of a mile from the home place and my sister was supposed to be home every weekend looking after me; the sister that was teaching school. 

But I had the responsibility of the farm to get the oats ground plowed, and milk the cattle, milk the cows night and morning. Take care of the horses. 

And get the corn ground ready and get the corn planted. And, of course, that happened to be the winter that passes were all blocked until late May. Folks didn’t get back to almost the 1^st of June. 

BILL RATLIFF:  So, when did they leave?

JIM TRACY:  They left in February.

BILL RATLIFF:  Five months or something.

JIM TRACY:  And that’s why I never was afraid when the kids got to be 12 years to let them have a little responsibility if they wanted it. 

BILL RATLIFF:  If you didn’t do it, it didn’t get done. 

JIM TRACY:  If I didn’t do it, it didn’t get done.

BILL RATLIFF:  You became an adult.

JIM TRACY:  No, not really. I didn’t become an adult until I got to be about 35 years old.

BILL RATLIFF:  (laughs) Okay.  Were you involved in many activities in high school or did farm work keep you?

JIM TRACY:  Baseball was the only thing my father would allow me to play because he had been a semi-pro baseball player and so he would allow me to play baseball.  But as far as any other activities in school, no, except that I did belong to the debating team and was a state parliamentarian for two years in the elocution team. 

Then I went to… I got ready to graduate from high school, but I hadn’t gone to school enough days to graduate, so I had to do a little law research and I found out that if you lived over three miles from school that was okay if you could pass the courses. 

And I finally got a signed diploma from my high school.  The next fall, my father sent me to AG College.  I went to a lake in Nebraska about 60 miles away and stayed with some other boys from York County, go to school down there, and I played on the basketball team. 

BILL RATLIFF:  Basketball? Oh.

JIM TRACY:  I had played basketball my senior year in high school, but I had to sneak away to do that, and finally, my dad caught me at it and he watched one game and he got so thrilled by it, he went to all the games after that. (laughing)

Incidentally, my high school was… I learned something in high school, I learned that I had to read on my own because no one was there to tell me what the answers would be.  And furthermore, then that the first assignment I took a book home, my father said, “Nope, none of that. You go to school to learn; you come home to work.  And if you can’t get your school in school hours than you’ll just have to quit school. 

So, I went back and I learned to take that one hour of study hall and divide it up into portions and study and consequently ever since then, I’ve been able to concentrate and shut everything else out. 

A couple of times, I’ve got me in pretty serious trouble in high school. (laughing). One time the coach left the study hall and when he came back, I was the only one studying, so I was the one who had made all the ruckus (laughing); He nearly took my head off. 

BILL RATLIFF:  Well, you learned to use your time well that way.

JIM TRACY:  Learned to get it.  Yeah. Well, what was it like going to college then being away from home and…?  That seemed to be a snap, there was no trouble to that at all; all you had to do was read the assignments and go to class and listen to the lecture, and answer a few questions.

BILL RATLIFF:  Did have all that farm work to do?

JIM TRACY:  No farm work to do. That part was hard. I got three jobs while I was doing that because I was so bored hanging around with the other fellas and not doing anything. 

BILL RATLIFF:  Had any of your brothers or sisters gone to college, Jim, or were you the first?

JIM TRACY:  No, I was not the first to go to college. All of them had gone; both the boys had gone to AG College and my sister had gone to nursing school and teacher college; normal college.  But none of them have degrees except myself. 

BILL RATLIFF:  An education was important than in the family?

JIM TRACY:  Education was important, yes.

BILL RATLIFF:  And how long did you stay at AG College? 

JIM TRACY:  Just one term.

BILL RATLIFF:  What did you do then?

JIM TRACY:  Went back to the farm, went to work.

BILL RATLIFF:  What made you decide to just stay one term?

JIM TRACY: I really can’t tell you that, Bill, it’s vague.  I know I was terrible homesick the last two weeks and I was glad to get home.  Glad to get back to my trap line and the things that I could do there.   We had a blacksmith shop and at home and I was so proud of that blacksmith shop.  I could make almost anything I wanted to down there.  I sharpened plow shears for the neighbors.

BILL RATLIFF: So, you missed all that when you were away?

JIM TRACY:  missed all that.  You know, I guess that was the reason I got good grades in AG school is because my blacksmithing, I had no trouble with; my woodworking, I had no trouble with; my drafting, I had no trouble with; my English was very good because I had a sister who was always nitpicking me. (laughs)

BILL RATLIFF:  You were in debating society too.

JIM TRACY:  I was in debating society. 

BILL RATLIFF:  So, how long did you stay back home then, Jim?

JIM TRACY:  That summer, I didn’t want to farm; I knew that.  That was another reason, I didn’t want to farm, I wanted to be a Latin teacher.  I wanted to teach Latin in high school. 

And so, the next summer I took my farm money and went down and made a deal with the dean of the college, York College, that I could work there on the lawns and tennis courts and earn enough money to pay my tuition and books and go to summer school. 

Which my father didn’t like very much, but I did it. 

BILL RATLIFF:  So, you had Latin in high school and really enjoyed it?

JIM TRACY:  Yes, my Latin in high school I passed on one condition my first year. I asked the principal if I could have one of the old Latin books and I tore the backend out of it and I stuck it in my pocket and every chance I got when I was working in the field, every time it was time to rest the team, I’d start studying it. 

BILL RATLIFF:  So, the second year, it came easy.  So, you went then to a school that summer and stayed at that college?

JIM TRACY:  No, it didn’t work out that way.  I went to summer school… no, I didn’t go to summer school that first summer; I stayed home the first summer and I had a little sun stroke. 

I had two before that and I had my third one that summer.   Then, I decided that I was going to go to summer school, pass my normal requirements and teach school.That required two years of college, for a normal certificate?  It didn’t require that much credit, it just required that you passed the exams.  You could teach school as soon as you got out of the 8^th grade in Nebraska in those days.

BILL RATLIFF:  As long as you could pass the examinations normal.  So, did you pass those then?

JIM TRACY:  I finally passed them, yes.  During the summer that I went to summer school full-time.  Then, my father talked me into coming home.  He said, “I’m getting old, I can’t work like I used to. You’re young and strong, you come home and be my hands and legs and do the work, and I’ll do the thinking and we’ll go partnership.” 

So, he sat there on Friday night and worked out he details; I wasn’t too much interested but I listened and I agreed.  The next day at noon, I blew my hand off. 

BILL RATLIFF:  Hm, how did that happen?

JIM TRACY:  The dynamite cap had been left in a charge of dynamite that the road crew had used to blow the trees out of the road ditch.

I had a great row of cottonwood trees and they were blowing those stumps out and they left dynamite cap and I picked it up. It was an electric cap, I picked it up and got it up to my face and it blew up. 

BILL RATLIFF:  Did they take you to the hospital?

JIM TRACY:  Yes, they took me to the hospital; it was 10 miles to the hospital, they took me to the hospital.  To tell you the difference between hospitals then and hospitals now, we had a bill of something over a thousand dollars for taking care of that thing and my father said, “I’ll give you $150, you take it or you get nothing.” They took it.   (laughing)

BILL RATLIFF:  A thousand dollars back then, that was a fortune.

JIM TRACY:  Yeah, it was an awful lot of money, but the two doctors who worked on me were well-known for things like that; My brother had a pair of twins born and the doctor didn’t even get there in time. Instead of charging them for one delivery charge, they charged him for two. (laughing)

BILL RATLIFF:  So, doctors haven’t changed a whole lot. (laughing). But, did that affect your farming then, with your dad?

JIM TRACY:  Well, someone got to him and told him that maybe I better go to school and learn a different trade. 

And, so he brought me as a gift, the second day I was in the hospital, the first day after I had been operated on after they had sewn this back together, he came in and gave me a receipt for my tuition to school that fall at the college and had made arrangements with a cousin of his… or a cousin of my mother’s rather, to live with her while I went to school. 

So, they started me off that fall in college.

BILL RATLIFF:  What was the name of that one?

JIM TRACY:  York College, mm-hm.  And I went there one semester.   My father died on Thanksgiving… or the day after Thanksgiving that same year.   And I was foolish enough to think that I had to be the man of the house, come home and take care of my mother and my two sisters and my sister’s family of four. (laughs). So, I did come back and farm.

BILL RATLIFF:  It’s almost like you wonder if he knew he was going to die or something or… when he was talking with you about taking over the farm and he was getting old. 

JIM TRACY:  Yeah, well he finally didn’t have good health.   I had a strange feeling myself when I got to be the same age that he was when he died that I probably would too.   And I very nearly did.   He was 63, my grandfather was 64, and I just figured well, if I get past 63, my dad was a better man than I was by far, I had no right to live. (laughing)

BILL RATLIFF:  So, how was life back when you came back home then?

JIM TRACY:  Life was pretty good.   I knew most of the things to do; I did them.   The days were long with lots of work. 

Where our crops burned up and there wasn’t anything, I knew how to scrape and get hay for the cattle that we had left and knew how to get the milk and get it to town. I could scratch that 120 acres as hard as I could to feed the cattle so that we could get enough cream to buy the feed to feed the chickens, so the eggs could buy our groceries. (laughing)

I thought it was awfully fortunate that my father had passed away because in the aftermath of the stock market crash, everything went to pieces out there, and we sold his purebred short-horn cattle for $10 a head; Registered cattle. 

BILL RATLIFF:  Mm-hm.   Now, we were talking, Jim, about you were back home and helping at the farm there. So, how long did you stay there back on the farm? 

JIM TRACY:  I stayed back until the fall after I was 20 years old.   When I was 20 years old, I broke my leg. I broke my leg just about corn harvest time and spend 5 weeks flat on my back and then couldn’t get anybody to pick corn, so I put a pair of heavy boots on and went to pick the corn myself, and then shortly after that, my mother sold my horse that I had grown up with, and without saying anything to me about it, and I got mad and I left home. 

And I spent a summer just working here and there for food and clothes.  That was back in the heart of the depression when we weren’t raising any crops either, so wasn’t any great hardship on anybody to have me gone except I was one less mouth to feed. 

And then that fall my sister asked me to go to Washington with her and I spent a year up in Washington State working in the orchards. 

BILL RATLIFF:  Didn’t work out there, then? 

JIM TRACY:  I came back to Nebraska and the next spring got married, got a job in Lincoln, Nebraska, and when harvest time came along, my brother had bought one of those new-fangled things they called a combine and he wanted me to come run it for him. 

I came and ran the combine through the harvest time and plowed for him, then my brother-in-law decided that he wanted to sell out and go to Oregon, and I took my wages and bought him out, and spent about four years on the farm. 

And thought that I had a call to the ministry and sold that out, started going to school again to study for the ministry. 

BILL RATLIFF:  We haven’t talked about religion any, Jim.  Uh, can you kind of tell me how that developed over the years for you?

JIM TRACY:  On my 14^th birthday, I went to a revival meeting in our little church and I learned that the lord loved me as unlovely as I was and it broke my heart and I gave my heart to Christ.

Though I’ve left him lots of times, he never left me. 

I grow once in a while, have a good experience once in a while, and once in a while I backslide, but uh…

BILL RATLIFF:  How about your call? How did that come to you, Jim?

JIM TRACY:  It was a strange call. (clears throat)  We just had a minister that was an insurance salesman and he’d preach for an hour and a half on the petty pleasures that didn’t amount to anything and leave the weightier things go and I got the feeling that that was all the minister the country folks seemed to be able to get was the ministry of people who’ve talked about when they were pastor of first church in Des Moines, Iowa or else talked about how they were struggling to become students and get through college. 

I decided that they deserved better than that; I was going to find out for myself what it was that Jesus said to his disciples, what the call was, and bring it to the people that lived in the country. 

That was what I felt was my calling; to be a rural pastor. 

BILL RATLIFF:  And you were married at that point?

JIM TRACY:  I was married when I answered the call.

BILL RATLIFF:  Yeah, tell me about your dating and how you met your first wife, Jim.

JIM TRACY:  Well, dating was kind of funny because I had a sister nine years older than I was who was unmarried, she had lots of girlfriends and I used to go along to chaperone the crowd and I usually was paired off with one of those older girls, and that is my sister could get the car providing she had me along. 

BILL RATLIFF:  You were a part of the package. (laughing)

JIM TRACY: I was part of the package.  So, from the time I was about 12 years old, I was going on dates with her.

BILL RATLIFF:  Any serious dating before you met your wife?

JIM TRACY: I did have some serious dating, yeah.  Our Sunday school superintendent came to me and told me his girl was running with a wild bunch and he’d sure appreciate it if I’d date her and help her get straightened out; I did my best. 

But it was the spring before I had my hand blown off, she got pregnant by someone else and she got married, so I had three pretty interesting things happen my 18^th year; I lost my hand, my girlfriend married somebody else, the girl that I knew, just knew, that I’d marry some day and I wasn’t ready for marriage or anything like that, but I knew that someday we’d be married and uh…

But I wasn’t too much interested in going with the girls.  My father had so engrained into me that dating was in preparation for getting married that I wasn’t much interested in just dating for just dating sake.