Coxes Army

I left home when I was just a young lad of seventeen. Following a dream, I followed my big brother into the Air Force. I was so excited to get out of the “one horse” town we lived in, that just 12 days after I graduated high school I was in boot camp 1300 miles away. After 45 years of traveling the world’s winding roads I found myself longing to return to my hometown. I have seen about everything I need to see and after a few visits home the old heart string were really pulling me back.

So we moved back. It is no longer a one horse town. The horse died and now it is a nothing town, much like a lot of little towns in America. The one horse was Chatham Manufacture Company, textiles. Since Congress is working as hard as they can to destroy America and since every Congressman is ashamed of being from the most powerful country in the world they are doing everything they can to close down all manufacturing and industrial production in America. They have successfully moved all textiles to third world nations where slave labor can produce them for nothing and ship back to this little town so the folks here can pay outrageous prices for junk. So for Elkin it was textiles. Other towns in NC it was furniture or tobacco but Congress took care of that by moving the furniture it to China and then sued the tobacco companies for producing and selling a legal product. I know, some of you will say that it is the businesses that moved so they could make bigger profits, but that is not the real story. It was and is Congress. They can’t stand for an American company to profit. They are trying, as I write this, to put Wal-Mart out of business. Anyway that is not where I was going with this post.

As I said I was gone 45 years. To add to that, I started working way back in the 7th grade. That’s when my dad sold me to a dairy farmer who worked me all through the summers and even during the school year. Therefore, I was not around the house a lot. If we had much outside family I didn’t get to know them. I knew some of Dad’s brothers, Uncles Elmer, Bob, Wheeler, Sidney and Weldon. None of them came around very often except Uncle Bob. He stayed with us quite a bit. On Mothers side I mostly remember Uncle Claude. He was my favorite. He was a nice guy and I liked him a lot. He and Mom were close and I got to see him his wife Marge and his kids Johnny, Donnie and Janet. I also remember Archie, Jack, Nancy and Mary Francis Gentry. They were, I have recently found out, Aunt Florence’s (Mom’s sister) kids. They spent time at the house and sometime would stay for a week or more at a time.

I guess what I am saying is that I don’t know a lot of the extended family. So Saturday when I found out that one of my first cousins had passed away, I though I would go by the funeral home and pay my respects. Carl Ira Cox was one of Uncle Walter’s 13 children. He was 65, just a couple years older then me. I don’t remember him from our younger days. And I don’t remember any of the other 8 surviving children, Ed, Sam, Roger, Bernice, Analee, Rosa Lee, Mildred and Kathleen. It is really a shame. I was a stranger there among the family. There were over 200 people that passed through while I visited, a lot in the Coxes Army and I only knew three of them. Johnny Cox, Archie and Nancy Gentry.

It’s a damn shame.