When I came across Jack Waters and Tellico Plains Mountain Press on the web, it brought back a hollow Sweet Gum tree full of honey-sweet memories of Tellico and my teen years in the Watering Trough community just outside Chattanooga.

Down below our little two acre homestead was Sterchi's pasture. Sterchi's Dairy kept a large herd of milk cows there. They kept a family on the payroll to milk the cows and maintain the property and in the late forties, Rev. Hubert Burnum moved down from Tellico into the humble frame house Sterchi provided.

I was a wild and headstrong boy. At 16 I had been permanently expelled from high school but my dad had managed to get me in another school system. To clip my wings and stop a budding romance that worried my parents, they sold the old Nash car I had been driving to court her.

One day I was sitting in the Burnum yard whining to Virginia and Charlie, the two Burnum kids nearest my age, while Hubert worked on his old Olds 88 in the driveway. I had no idea he was listening until he came over and said, "So you're grounded? Tell you what I'll do, son. You go to church with us and every time you go, you can borrow this old 88 and go see that pretty little girl."

Suddenly, I became the most reformed and religious kid you ever laid eyes on. Hubert and wife Jean went to church twice on Sunday and every Wednesday for prayer meeting. On the off nights I'd fly up Highway 58 in that Olds to see my sweet thing.

Things were completely to my liking for a while. I had powerful wheels and a pretty thing with half inch dimples in her cheeks and the sweetest kiss in three counties.. Within a short time I had a dozen "nights with the 88" built up from my church attendance with Brother Hubert and Jonah (his affectionate term for his wife, Jean). To keep my number of Olds 88 nights built up, I would urge Brother Hubert to go to revivals and he was willing so long as I'd take my guitar and sing with Jonah.

Shortly Jonah and I added Rocky Mull, a super tenor, and I switched off on mandolin. So we had a wonderful little bluegrass gospel trio. We played revivals all over southeast Tennessee and northwest Georgia. I'll never forget the night we came to Tellico and sang for a revival at what Brother Hubert called "an old foot-washing missionary Baptist church."

Cotton Galyon was my mandolin hero. He played with Carl Story and the Rambling Mountaineers and I had copped a few of his licks. Another group played and their mandolin player had copped a few more than me. So we had Sunday afternoon dinner with them and we sat for hours showing each other what we knew on the mandolin. I never saw him again and I've always regretted that I didn't get his address and stay in touch. Here I am now remembering that as one of the highlights of my first visit to Tellico and I don't even know his name.

Part of my religious feelings come from nature Ð mountains, brooks, lakes, birds and all God's little scampering critters. The time I was in Tellico singing for that revival was pure heaven. Could there be a prettier place on

God's green Earth?

Then like a bolt of lightning, my world fell all around me. My girlfriend's father decided he didn't want me around and banned me from seeing her. He was serious enough about it to convince me, talking along the lines of doing me bodily harm.

Upset over the situation, I took to drinking a lot of beer and running with some girls whose parents didn't seem to care where they went or what they did. It might sound like I had it made but there was one large complication:

I had grown to really love Brother Hubert. He had been so good to me, and when I drank beer in his car, or tried to carry on with one of those girls, my conscience would drive me half nuts.

On nights when we didn't go to church, he often ask me to read the Bible to him. He was a barely literate man but if you read something to him, he could

remember it better than I could. While I read, he would walk the floor and praise the Lord every time I came to something he really liked. I can see him now, wiping his nose with that handkerchief and saying, "Oh thank you Jesus!" Sometimes he'd ask me to read the same passage over and over and each time he'd holler a little louder. I loved to do that for him because it made him shine like an angel and got him ready for his next sermon.

More and more, I stayed home reading the Bible to Hubert as we talked into the night around a Warm Morning Heater. One night he said, "Son, you don't know how lucky you are to be able to read and write. I never had that opportunity because my family had to use me working on the old farm at Tellico and the other places we lived." I said, "Well, Brother Hubert, it doesn't matter whether you can read or not. I will read the Bible to you anytime you want me to." Sometime he'd give me a big bear hug and cry so hard it shook my body.

Brother Hubert and Jonah moved to Columbus, Ohio where he took a maintenance job in a state mental hospital. I went off to college and became a teacher and when I got a chance to go to Columbus for a big teacher's meeting, I jumped at it. Every night I was there we either went to church or sat up into the wee hours talking. He had developed a heart problem and I could see him weakening.

He was dead and buried before anyone told me he was gone. I wish I could have been at his funeral to say a few words. I wasn't so I'll say those words now in the hopes that someone around Tellico knew him and will know what a good and godly person influence he was in my life.

Brother Hubert, you made me realize what a gift it is to be able to read and play a guitar. You made me feel useful. You gave me a purpose for living. You trusted me and that's why I couldn't let you down. Every time I tell some hurting person about the love of God, it's you touching them through the words of that wild and crazy boy who used to read the Bible to you some nights til it was time to go milk the cows. God in heaven knows I love you, man, so since you're there, go ask Him.

Written By: Dalton Roberts
DownhomeP@aol.com