MEMORIES: James Allan DeMoss, 1995 Submitted by: Maria Troutman On Sept. 12, 1995 at approximately 9pm, I (Maria) was talking to my mother and father, gathering their childhood stories from them for my daughter Laken. Laken had a school project of gathering childhood memories of at least a half page for school. These stories tend to be a bit special to me because 3 of the stories I had never heard before, and only hours later the next day, Daddy was dead from a massive heart attack. If only we could turn back time and make him go to the hospital to have something done, but those are only Ifs, possible nothing could have been done to prevent his death. It was just his time, as young as he was. His stories as he told me over the phone... "My name is James Allan DeMoss, I am Laken Troutman's Grandaddy Jim. I spent about the first 8-10 years of my life in Madisonville, KY, then we moved to Sturgis, KY where my dad built a house. Back in Madisonville, I used to roller skate a lot down a hilly street called Park Avenue. One day we decided to build a go cart. Nothing was bolted together, it was just nailed here and there to hold it together. My roller skates slid apart and they were used on the bottom of our go cart as the wheels. We spent all day long riding that go cart down the hill then hauling it back up to the top to do it all over again. We did that almost all day long, until.. the city police pulled me over and told me to get that contraption off of the street before I got ran over. Another time I used some 2 X 6's to make a "boat", using a canvas tarpaulin to make it waterproof. I got my "boat" built and put it in a ditch, climbed aboard, and off I went floating down that ditch. But I ran into some rocks, my boat got stuck and I could not get it unlodged, so I had to leave my boat stuck in the ditch. I later found out that my ditch was actually a drainage area for stuff such as dishwater from the local businesses. We used to go to an old junkyard and get broken safety glass that was square shaped. We called these square pieces of broken safety glass our "diamonds". Behind the junkyard was a pond. We would get the old gas tanks off of the cars, make a raft using the gas tanks as floats for the raft, then we would float out in the pond. Mom never found out about that one! One day I was at my Grandma's (Nannie Myrtle Lyle Eldridge) and I wanted to go to the ballpark. Well it had started to rain and I didn't want to get wet going to the ballpark so I borrowed an umbrella. Off I went, with an umbrella in one hand while riding my bike. Well the wind caught the umbrellas as I was going down the hill and turned it inside out, umbrella wasn't of much use and I got soaked. When I was about 7 years old, me and some friends, Danny & Johnny, decided to dig a swimming pool in the very back of our yard. We got our "pool" dug out and filled it up with a garden house. It was awfully muddy in that pool but we swam in it until we got caught. Once we got caught, our fun was over and we had to fill the pool back in and then be hosed off with the garden hose." (Personal note- I've heard stories about his fast driving, my mothers swears when they were dating and he was showing off he turned a corner on two wheels in a car due to the speed he was driving. Then his mother, My Granny and his Aunt, his mother's sister, have told how he always took things apart to see how it would work, or how he didn't have to do anything but dirt would find him) James DeMoss was born March 1946 in Madisonville, Ky, but did most of his growing up in Union County, KY. His memories are from Hopkins Co, KY. Maria DeMoss Troutman-daughter of James DeMoss ========================================================================= USGENWEB NOTICE: In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, data may be freely used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material. These electronic pages cannot be reproduced in any format for profit or other presentation. Commercial entities must ask for and receive permission from submittor before downloading.