Friday’s feature mentioning the tall tale tellers that inhabited the front porch of Penn’s Store in Gravel Switch, Kentucky, apparently piqued the interest of many of our readers. While some of you looked back at your own childhood, others wanted to know just what constituted a tall tale in Kentucky in the 1950s.
Tall tales have a long history in Kentucky. In fact, our oral tradition has been one of the things that residents, past and present, worried about slipping away as the “tale tellers” died out.
The concern was so real in the early 1970s that I was enlisted to wander the “hills and hollers” with a reel-to-reel tape recorder with the goal of coercing as many story tellers as possible to repeat their tales “on the record.”
Our sales pitch was simple: we wanted to preserve the “oral traditions of Kentucky.”
It was an early lesson in salesmanship as some of the older storytellers predated telephones, electricity and paved highways. They weren’t the list bit impressed with “newfangled toys” like our Nagra reel-to-reels.
But we persisted.
Some stories I recall vividly. Others not so much. That’s because in 1972 there were still areas in Eastern Kentucky where old english terms were spoken and understood.
I didn’t grow up with those regional dialects and unfamiliar words. But I nodded and kept recording.
Hopefully, somewhere in the state archives, there are digital copies of the hundreds of reels of tales told by long-departed tellers. Otherwise, those stories really have been lost.
The stories from the porch at Penn’s Store were considerably more straightforward. They seldom involved “hants” (ghosts) or other denizens of the night that regularly inhabited the dreams of young boys. Most involved two things we all enjoyed: hunting or fishing.
One afternoon, I was listening as one of the frequent “loafers” was telling Mr. Hack Penn about his “collecting some fish” for a church cookout.
“Collecting” fish immediately caught my attention. In my youth boys who knew “alternative” methods for catching messes of fish were the envy of their friends.
Most “collection” methods involved questionable if not downright illegal tools.
We knew how to use crank telephones to generate current (“ringing up fish”), mix cube root into the water and temporarily deplete the oxygen; even the completely illegal, but totally fun, method of using easily procured explosives (dynamite was still sold in hardware stores) to bring the big fish to the surface. Even the M-80 firecracker from my era was pretty potent - although timing the fuse was pretty risky.
Imagine my surprise when this storyteller rolled up his sleeve and showed us a badly scratched up arm.“Mr. Hack,” he said, “this here arm’s the onliest thing I needed to catch the biggest catfish ever pulled from the Rolling Fork River.”
That was some brag.
The Rolling Fork was a solid fishery for everything from red-eared sunfish to buffalo (carp) of prodigious size. Catfish caught there could routinely go 20-25 pounds.
A big catfish could really be something.
“That so,” Mr. Penn asked, “just how big was this whopper?”
We all grinned, because we knew Mr. Penn’s choice of whopper carried a dual meaning.
“He was a big one,” was the animated response, “bigger, lots bigger than any I’ve ever seen pulled from this river.”
That got all our attention.
At the time, the largest one pulled from the Rolling Fork had weighed nearly 75 points.
Anything larger than that would be a bigger deal than a massive rattlesnake a group of sawyers had caught logging just a few days before. The snake was so big that it coiled nearly two times around a 10-gallon washtub.
“My catfish would have eaten that rattler like a night crawler,” he laughed, “I mean to tell you, he was big.”
Again, the fascinated audience asked, “so, how big was he? What did he weigh?”
“I didn’t weigh him,” he explained, “too big. But it took nearly five minutes for the river to fill the hole I pulled him out of. And that’s the truth.”
To me, that’s still the essence of a tall tale from my childhood.
Today, I’m off to Columbus, Ohio for the NASGW Show. And as always, we’ll keep you posted.
— Jim Shepherd