Jodie King – Tuskegee educated cotton mill worker, ship builder, surveyor, bootlegger and gambler

Special to the Journal

Synopsis by Etta Ray Case from an interview with Jodie King in 1979

 

JODIE KING – Mr. Traylor Russell and I talked to Mr. Jodie King in the office of Mr. Russell. Jodie is 82 years of age and was born at Crockett, Texas. We think Jodie has had a very interesting life.

Jodie King’s grandfather was a slave of a Mr. Matlock. He was also Mr. Matlock’s son by his cook. Her name was King thus bringing the King line into the family even though Jodie says he should be a Matlock.

Mr. Matlock had another son whose name was Jodie Matlock. When Jodie Matlock was about 9 or 10, his father was ill with a fever and he told Jodie of his half brother, Dick King (Jodie King’s grandfather). Mr. Matlock told Jodie to hold to Dick.

When Dick King married, Mr. Matlock gave him 6 acres of land, a cow, a mule and built him a log house. Dick King was set free when he was 21.

Now when Jodie Matlock came of age, he willed all of his close kin $1 and sold Dick King (his half brother) 1900 acres of land which is what he had when he died.

Jodie King’s grandfather (Dick King) had 8 children. Six of these children went through college at Prairie View, Texas. Jodie King’s daddy and an uncle were the only ones who didn’t go to college.

Jodie Matlock was close to Dick King until he died. He never married a white woman but lived with his  cook and had two children by her.

Dick King lived to be 102 and he went the six miles to Crockett every Saturday in a little old wagon with two jennies hooked to it until his 99th year. Jodie Matlock had a sign put up at the courthouse which read, “Dick King’s Parking Place”.

In 1912, Jodie King’s grandfather sent him and five of his cousins to the Booker T. Washington School in Tuskegee, Alabama. Booker T. Washington would come to the school four times a year and stay there about 3 weeks giving lectures. Jodie stayed in school until 1914 when times got so hard his papa had to send for him to come home to help on the farm.

While Jodie attended Booker T. Washington School, he learned to survey roads. In the summer when school was out he played professional baseball to earn money to help with his schooling.

 

When Jodie was 17 years old, Mr. Smith whose farm joined Jodie’s granddaddy’s, learned that Jodie knew how to survey roads. He talked Jodie’s granddaddy into letting Jodie come to Mt. Pleasant to work for Smith Brothers who were general contractors all over Texas. Jodie helped survey a lot of the roads out of Mt. Pleasant.

Now Jodie was quite a gambler and he was, coming out of Bully Daingerfields place where he had won some money and Sheriff Will Sanders rode by on his horse. He just looked at him then but the next day Jodie had won some more money and was standing where the First National Bank is now, counting his money, when Will Sanders rode by again. This time he stopped and told Jodie to get out of town before night.

.Will Sanders had a reputation for being quite tough. Jodie says he would rope his prisoner and lead him down to the jailhouse. If the prisoner went along nicely there was no problem but if he caused trouble the sheriff would drag him to the jail and whip him. If he caught several prisoners he would take one down to the jail and come back and get the others one at a time. They didn’t try to run off. They would wait on him. The fine was usually $5.

Anyway, back to Jodie, he knew to leave town before dark. He went back home and helped raise a crop in 1918.

World War I started in 1918 but Jodie didn’t have to go. His grandfather said he needed him on the farm and paid $10 to keep him home.

Smith Brothers then got the contract from Mt. Vernon and Sulphur Springs to build that road. On June 19, 1919, they got Jodie to go to Mt. Vernon to help with the surveying of the road from Mt. Vernon to Sulphur Springs.

When Jodie left Mt. Pleasant in 1917 they were cleaning out cars and hauling the cinders from across the railroad track to where the First National Bank is now. They were filling and leveling that spot then. When he came back in 1919 the Cotton Belt Railroad had built a general office building there.

Jodie married Paul Jackson’s daughter, Beula Jackson, in 1921.

After Jodie married he worked for Jim Herron who was a railroad foreman on the Cotton Belt Railroad. He milked two cows, carried wood for two fire places and fed 500 chickens. He says he also drew corn whiskey. I will go into this a little later. Jim Herron paid Jodie with a railroad check. In other words, Jodie was working for Jim Herron but drawing a railroad check. Jodie said they called these checks dead checks because some of them were made out to dead people. Jim Herron had the railroad send checks, made out to people who were dead, to him and then his wife would cash the checks.

Jodie then gave his job with Jim Herron to his brother and he went to work at the oil mill for $1 a day sewing sacks. He also learned to test protein while working at the oil mill.

When the oil mill sold out he went to work for the P & M Railroad. One day Jodie caught a log ride over to the Texas and Pacific and on the way back to the Cotton Belt station he found a newspaper which had been thrown in the trash. The paper had an advertisement for L. D. Reardon & Company of San Francisco who were ship builders.

They wanted all the help they could get even If the person had only one eye, one leg or one arm. Labor was $1.95 an hour.

 

Jodie packed his clothes in a cotton sack, gave his wife $200 and caught a train out of Mt. Pleasant on a Wednesday and arrived in San Francisco the following Sunday. He gave the newspaper ad to a taxi driver and he took Jodie to L. D. Reardon and Company. They hired him and gave him a book that enabled him to eat and cash money until he got to their No. 3 shipyard in Richmond, Ca. When he got there, the superintendent gave him a card which said he should work every day without a lawful excuse. Jodie started to put this card in his pocket but the superintendent told him to look on the back of it. It was a check for $157.50. Jodie had never had a check like that before in his life.

About three weeks later Jodie signed up to work as a leaderman and received another card just like before but the check was for $210. This was during World War II and was more money than he had ever been paid.

In 1946 Jodie came home and Oscar Lemmon told Jodie of a job with an oil mill in Sweetwater. He and several other men hired on and went to Sweetwater in a cattle truck. He hired in as a sack sewer but when he got there they didn’t need any sack sewers and wanted him to shovel seed. Jodie didn’t go for this and he told them if they didn’t need any sack sewers he was going home. They asked him if he could do anything else and he told them he could test protein. They finally consented for him to test protein at that mill.

 

When Jodie was 61 years old he decided to quit working and come home. He figured he could draw unemployment for one year and then draw social security.

You may think this is the end of the story but Jodie now told us of his gambling and bootlegging days in Mt. Pleasant.

When Jodie worked for Jim Herron. Jim Horron’s wife, Mrs. Mattie and Mrs. Tom Umphlett would go to White Oak and get 5 gallons of whiskey at a time. They would put it in the chicken house and Jodie would draw it up (put it into half gallon jars). He would draw 2 half gallon jars each day – one for the day and one for the night.

Later, Jodie had a reputation as being the bootlegger on the east side of town. When we asked him where he would get his liquor he told us he would go to Paris and locate a man selling corn whiskey. He then would tell him how much he would take every week and he would bring it to him. He got his bonded whiskey at Johnny’s Place at Gladewater. Jodie would buy $500 worth of whiskey and give Johnny $50 to deliver it to Mr. Will Hickman’s place and put it in his barn. Jodie would stay in town and party while this was being delivered. Every morning before Mr. Hickman died he would roll a case of whiskey down by the fence and tell Jodie to come and get his buttermilk.

Jodie sold this whiskey out of his home. He had two railroad ties in his yard and a small tunnel dug under these ties. The grass covered this all up and he tied half pint bottles to a cable and put them down in this small tunnel. He said no one ever found them.

As I mentioned earlier, Jodie was quite a gambler. He really gets a kick out of telling about his hustling (gambling) days. I really enjoyed this because Jodie told us two or three stories about the time he was going to quit gambling but something always came along to change his mind. He says he finally did quit gambling.

Jodie had loaded dice. He would buy regular dice and dress them. I don’t know anything about dice but Jodie had 3 dice which were fixed and this was what he called his 3 dice combination he would put on the other gamblers. He would switch the regular dice for his crooked ones. He said you had to be good to do this without getting caught.

Jodie was going to quit the time his children got hie dice and were playing with them.

One day he was walking over near Sunrise. Brooke Sellers, George Hager, Bill Green and some more men had a big sack spread out under a tree gambling. They wanted Jodie to join them. He said he would have to go take his dress overcoat off first. He did this but at the same time he picked up his dice. When he came back, Odis Taylor whom Jodie helped raise, asked Jodie to give him $1 for his hand and play it. So Jodie did and he began to clean them out. Odis got mad because Jodie had won and slapped him with his hand. Jodie was trying to get his knife but George Hager pushed him down and Odis got away. Jodie says he was going to quit gambling then.

BUT – Jodie got into a game with Tutt, whom Jodie helped raise, and some more men. Jodie won all of the money and was counting it when Tutt asked if he wasn’t going to give him some of it. When Jodie told him he wasn’t Tutt pushed him over an old wood stove. Jodie was going to quit then.

THEN — Abb Turner, who was an undertaker, came and told Jodie they were gambling at his place so Jodie gave Abb his dice and $5 and told him to go on down and start the game and he would be down shortly. Jodie had the trey and Abb had the ace and deuce. When Jodie got there, Abb had not been able to switch the dice so he got up and pretended to borrow some money from Jodie but really gave Jodie the loaded dice. Well Jodie started gambling and soon won quite a bit of money. One of the men smelled a rat and quit the game. A year or two later Jodie was gambling with this same man. The man again said something was wrong. He went into the barber shop for something and while he was gone Jodie went down the hill and hid his dice. When he came back this man wanted to see his dice. Jodie handed him the dice (regular ones) and told him to break them with a brick to see if they were fixed. Jodie said if dice have been tampered with they will break with just a little tap. So this man tried to break those dice but they wouldn’t break. He told Jodie he guessed he had him figured wrong. Later Jodie and this man became friends and Jodie told him about his dice. The man said, he knew something was wrong but he couldn’t figure it out.

Well, we heard about one more dice game and at the end of it he said that was the last time he had ever gambled and he had given all his fixed dice away.

That was the end of our interview with Jodie King.

I wonder if Jodie really did give all those dice away?