Ross County OhArchives Biographies.....Cokonougher, Howard (Bill) William August 14, 1922 - December 5, 1984
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
Ralph W. Cokonougher rcokon@hotmail.com February 6, 2006, 4:00 pm

Author: Ralph Cokonougher

          “Bill” Howard W. Cokonougher, As I Remember Him
                             By
                     Ralph W. Cokonougher
                        Copyright 2006

       Howard William Cokonougher was born on a long, hot summer day on the 
14th of August 1922.  His parents lived in a small log cabin on his 
grandmother's  farm, in Buckskin Township of Ross County, Ohio.  Howard's 
family promptly nicknamed him "Bill", a name by which he was called the rest 
of his life.  Bill was my father.  
     Bill was the third of five children to be born to Amelia Irene (Miller) 
Cokonougher and John Henry Cokonougher.  Amelia was an orphan whose parents 
had died when she was only eight years old.  None of her grandparents or other 
relatives could afford to raise her, so, in accordance with the custom of the 
time, she was placed with strangers to earn her keep.  She was made into a 
house servant.  Several years after she was orphaned, Amelia eventually came 
to work in the South Salem, Ohio, home of Mary (Wisecup) Cokonougher, her 
future mother-in-law.  
     John Cokonougher and Amelia met while Amelia was working in Mary's home.  
John was a farmer, and the son of a long line of farmers.  John helped his 
mother keep the home farm operational, but he also hired out as a farmhand. 
John and Amelia soon decided to get married.  Shortly thereafter, they made a 
trip to the Methodist parsonage in Chillicothe, Ohio, where they were joined 
together in a short ceremony.  John was 33 years old at the time, and Amelia 
was only 16.  They then moved to the old log cabin on the Cokonougher farm, 
where, like most farm families, they worked hard to scratch a meager living 
out of the soil.  
     By the time Bill came along in 1922, Amelia had already given birth to 
his two older brothers: Cecil Lloyd Cokonougher, on 19 April 1917, and John 
Henry Cokonougher Jr., on 29 June 1919.  Bill was followed by a younger 
brother, Herbert Miller Cokonougher, on 25 April 1924, and by his only sister, 
Geraldine June Cokonougher, on 24 November 1933.
     Childhood for Bill was similar to that of the other country youth growing 
up around him. Money was scarce and times were hard.  His family was close in 
both feelings and distance, and each family member helped and depended upon 
the other. His entire childhood was spent on the same farm where he was born. 
     Everyday chores included gardening, getting firewood, raising crops and 
animals, butchering, storing food, hunting, fishing, and shooting the hundreds 
of nuisance squirrels that threatened every year to eat up his fathers corn 
crop. 
     Bill learned to work hard, to depend upon his own efforts, to never 
accept charity, and to persevere no matter what.  He learned that his word was 
his bond, that a job worth doing is worth doing right, and that when you work 
for a man you give him your best. He learned that a person can accomplish just 
about anything he needs to do, just as long as he is willing to put out the 
necessary effort to reach his goal, and to keep trying until he gets it done.  
He learned that mistakes are just a necessary part of the learning process.  
Most of all, Bill learned to be practical and realistic.  He learned that a 
person has to survive no matter what, and if that means breaking your personal 
code of ethics in extenuating circumstances, then that’s just the way it has 
to be.    
     Bill learned to stand up for himself when he was very young.  The 
following story,  passed down in the family, illustrates this point.  When he 
was still a toddler, Bill was bitten by the family dog.  He had played too 
rough with the dog, making the dog angry, and the dog had bitten him.  Instead 
of crying and running to Mommie as toddlers are prone to do when injured, Bill 
instead grabbed the dog by the ear and leg, and bit back as hard as he could.  
The dog yelped in pain and took off at a run.  It never bit Bill ever again 
after that.  From that point on, Bill and the dog both had a cautious regard 
for each other, and they lived together under a well-understood truce.  
     When Bill became a little older, he went to Buckskin Valley School in 
nearby South Salem, Ohio.  Back then, an occasional fight was a normal part of 
every schoolboy's life.   Bill managed to get into his share of fights.  
Shortly after getting into his very first fight, Bill sheepishly came home, 
expecting to be punished by his father for fighting in school.  Instead, his 
father asked him if he had finished the fight.  Bill replied in the 
affirmative.  His father then stated, "Well, that's all I want to know.  I 
won't punish you for fighting, and I don't care if you win or lose, but, by 
God, if you ever get into a fight, you'd better finish what you start, or 
you'll have me to deal with when you get home!"  And as far as I know, Bill 
always did finish whatever he started.
     Bill and his father did eventually get into a disagreement over school.  
Bill received average grades, but he hated going to school.  He was anxious to 
grow up, to be an adult, and to be out on his own.  When he turned 18, just as 
he was about to begin his senior year of high school, he decided to quit 
school and never return.  The school bus came, but Bill never got on 
it.         
     Bill’s father immediately noticed that Bill wasn't going to school.  He 
sternly asked him, 
     "Why aren't you in school Bill?  You're supposed to be in school."  
     At five feet, 8 inches tall, Bill looked up at his 5 feet, 11 inch 
father, tightened his jaw firmly, and replied, 
     "I ain't going back to school.  I'm quitting!"  
     His father raised his voice, looked Bill directly into the eyes, and 
replied back,  
     "No, you're not!  I won't allow it!  You're going back to school, and 
you're going to finish your education.  And that's all there is to it!"  
     Bill's face grew red, and his stubborn, immovable German ancestry showed 
when he defiantly blurted out,  
     "No!  I'm not!  I'm eighteen now.  I'm legally an adult, and I don't have 
to go back to school if I don't want to.  I'm not going to go back!"
     Bill's father considered his options.  He could talk until he was blue in 
the face, trying to convince Bill of the true value of education, but he 
wasn't likely to get very far.  Cokonougher heads are traditionally harder 
than rock, and once a Cokonougher makes up his or her mind, nothing can change 
it. He could also try physical force to get Bill to finish high school, but 
more than likely, that would just cause Bill to leave home instead of going 
back to school.    No, it looked like he was stalemated.  He knew that there 
always came a time when a father had to let his children make their own 
decisions, even when he thought they were making the wrong decision.  This 
looked like one of those times.   
     Bill's father showed his practicality when he reluctantly advised Bill,  
     "Well, I guess you're eighteen now.  You're making the wrong decision, 
but I guess there's nothing I can do about it.  You're old enough that you'll 
be making your own decisions from now on."  Then he then turned and walked 
away, and went back to work.       
     Bill never attended school again.  From that point on, he wouldn’t even 
set foot inside the schoolhouse.  Even after he had children of his own, he 
wouldn’t go inside the school to attend their school programs and events.  
Instead, he drove them to the schoolhouse and waited in the car until the 
event was over, while he depended on our mother to represent both him and 
her.    
     Bill's family attended the Methodist church in South Salem.  An uncle and 
aunt were officers in the church for many years.  Bill was taken into the 
church when he was a youth, but somehow, for him, religion just 
didn't "take".  He accepted preachers and the church when it came to things 
like weddings and funerals, but he never had much use for them otherwise. He 
broke the Third Commandment constantly, using the name of the Lord in 
expletives that were a constant part of his everyday speech until the day he 
died.   All his close friends cussed, and so did he.  Bill recognized the 
existence of God, but saw no reason to take any special note of it.  Life was 
hard, and he did what he had to do to get by.  For him, living was a matter of 
course, not a matter of religion 
     The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on 7 Dec 1941, and the very next day, 
the United States declared war. The nation mobilized and began drafting young 
men to fight in World War II.  Bill was drafted and entered the U.S. Army on 6 
Nov. 1942.  After basic training, he was sent overseas to fight in the Pacific 
as part of Troop E of the Eighth Calvary Regiment of the First Calvary 
Division.   Bill marched over island after island in the Pacific Ocean, 
fighting hand-to-hand with the Japanese every step of the way.  Before the war 
ended, he had fought in the Bismarck Archipelago, on New Guinea, and in 
various Philippine islands, including Leyte and Luzon, where he was in the 
spearhead of the Allied invasion force.  When the war ended, he was among the 
occupation troops of the First Calvary Division when they entered Tokyo, 
Japan.  
     Bill earned several awards and metals for his service on the 
battlefield.  They included the Purple Heart, the Asiatic Pacific Theater 
Ribbon with 4 bronze stars, the Philippines Liberation Ribbon with 2 bronze 
stars, the Bronze Arrowhead, and the Good Conduct Ribbon.  The award that he 
was happiest about was the Honorable Discharge that he received on 19 Oct. 
1945.  He was happy about it because the discharge confirmed that he was still 
alive.  He could hardly believe that he had made it through the war and 
lived!  Of the 118 original men in Bill's troop to go overseas, only 18 came 
back home alive and still in one piece.  All of the rest had either been 
killed, or crippled for life.  
     As it was, Bill was wounded and almost killed during one of his battles.  
His unit was advancing under particularly heavy enemy fire when Bill took 
temporary cover behind an American tank.  It was hit by enemy fire, and blew 
up in his face.  A piece of shrapnel hit him in the head, and he fell to the 
ground.  Luckily, the wound was not fatal, and in a few days, Bill was back on 
his feet, fighting on the front lines again. The field surgeon didn't even 
take the shrapnel out of his head before sending him back to fight.  When Bill 
died in 1984, he still had a piece of the original shrapnel in his head.  He 
carried it with him to his grave.
      Fighting conditions on the front line were not only dangerous; they were 
also hard, and unsanitary, requiring much sacrifice and a strong stomach.  One 
time, while pressing forward against the enemy, Bill's troop came across a 
stream of cool, clear water.  Since their canteens were empty, and since the 
weather was hot, they were thirsty.  Each troop member drank copiously from 
the stream and filled their canteens.  Afterwards, they proceeded forward in a 
direction that took them upstream.  Rounding a small bend, they saw a dead 
Japanese soldier, lying smack dab in the middle of a spring that gave birth to 
the same stream from which they had just drank.  The soldier had obviously 
been dead for quite some time, because his body had ripened and bloated.  The 
men immediately began to gag and puke.  They all hurriedly emptied their 
recently filled canteens, all of them except Bill, that is.  He told the rest 
that he didn't know where, when, or even if, he might get more water, so he 
was keeping the water he had, and he wasn't going to waste it by pouring it 
out.  Besides, he told them, he had already put chorine tablets in his water 
to purify it.
     While engaged in another assault in the mountains of the Philippines, 
Bill's troop was ordered to carry half rations.  Each man was to pool and 
share his ration with another, in order to make the march go faster.  At one 
supper meal, Bill and another soldier pooled their rations to make soup.  The 
other soldier happened to notice that a bush of spicy hot peppers was growing 
nearby.  Hoping to make the food too spicy for Bill to eat, and thus to keep 
all the food for himself, he broke up some of the hot peppers and sneaked them 
into the soup.  The trick backfired.  
     The soldier took a bite of his soup, gasped, and set down his dish.  He 
exclaimed,     
     "Boy, that's hot!" and then he walked away.  Bill, on the other hand, sat 
there and ate, and ate, and then ate some more, tears coming out of his eyes, 
until both portions were gone. When he had finished, he rubbed his tummy and 
said, 
     "Umm boy!  That was good!"  
     Bill later recalled to his family that the soup had been too spicy for 
him too.  However, he wasn't about to let the other soldier get the upper hand 
on him.  He said that he would have eaten that meal even if it had choked 
him.   Nobody was going to cheat him and get away with it!      
     The war in the Pacific ended when America dropped the atom bomb on 
Japan.  The world was stunned!  Over a half a century later, it is now 2006, 
and people still debate the morality and the  appropriateness of the action. 
Bill, however, had no such qualms.  He was grateful for the bomb!  He told his 
friends and his children many times that he and his fellow soldiers dreaded 
the upcoming invasion of the Japanese homeland.  They knew that the Japanese 
were going to react just as Americans would if their homeland had been 
invaded.  They expected the Japanese to fight like cornered animals.  Bill and 
the other soldiers who had managed to survive so far, against all odds, felt 
that they would very likely never survive the invasion of Japan.  The 
casualties, both American and Japanese, were sure to be enormous! When the 
atom bombs fell, Bill and his fellow soldiers breathed a sigh of relief. They 
felt as if they had been personally snatched from the jaws of death.  As Bill 
later so passionately put it, "It was either them or us.  That bomb saved my 
life and the lives of thousands of other soldiers, not to mention all the 
Japanese that were going to fight us.  It was a good thing, and anyone who 
says different can just go to hell!"             
       There is an ironic footnote to Bill Cokonougher's military history.  
Bill fought the Japanese when the Japanese were trying to conquer our country. 
He had killed Japanese.  The Japanese had tried to kill him, and had, in fact, 
killed many of his friends.  That was war, and that was life.  Time passed.  
The future came.  Eventually, I, Bill's firstborn son, enlisted in the U.S. 
Air Force.  I was assigned overseas to Japan.  As I left to go to my first 
assignment, my father told me in his plain, matter-of-fact language, "Now 
don't you come back here with any Japanese wife.  I fought them Japanese, and 
I don't want you bringing any damn Japanese woman back here with you.  You 
remember that!"  
       Yet, three years later, I did marry a Japanese girl.  When I was 
discharged, the Air Force gave me no choice but to send her and our newborn 
daughter home ahead of me.  Bill put aside his previous statement, met her at 
the airport, and he and my mother welcomed her as a daughter.  He didn't treat 
her any differently than he would have if she had born in the United States.  
     Bill had plenty of faults.  He had his share of prejudices, but he was 
also a realist.  He was a practical man.  With my wife and child, the Japanese 
had been made part of his family.  Japanese blood mixed with his, inside the 
veins of his grandchild.  It was no longer practical for him to view the 
Japanese as he had in the past, and, he didn't.  One day, during the nineteen-
seventies, Bill told me, 
     "Those protesters" (sic, of the Viet Nam war) "say 'make love not war.'  
I went to Japan to make war.  I guess you must have went over there to make 
love.  I suppose that's all right.  Things change."  
     That was the viewpoint of a practical man.
     When Bill died, his Purple Heart from World War II was pinned to his 
chest, for all to see.  It was taken off before he was buried, and, at his 
previous request, given to me, his eldest son.  I still have it, as well as 
all of his medals.  When I die, hopefully Bill's medals will pass on to one of 
my children, or one of my grandchildren.
     Shortly after the war, Bill began to hang out, play cards, and go 
drinking with some of the other men in the area.  Leslie and Floyd Hester were 
two such men.  Leslie and Floyd had a brother named Harold Hester.  Harold, 
and his wife Nora, had a daughter named Viola Mae Hester.  There was six years 
difference between Bill and Viola, but Bill grew to like her. They had both 
attended the same school, so they had known each other since they were kids.  
     One day, Viola was told to pick blackberries for the family meal.  She 
was busily doing just that, in her bare feet, by the edge of the road, when 
Bill came driving by in his car.  Bill stopped to talk to Viola, and offered 
her a ride back to her house.  She accepted the ride, but didn't go all the 
way back home with him.  She got out just short of the house because her 
parents were very controlling and they would have punished her if they had 
seen her with Bill.  Just before Viola left the car, Bill asked her for a 
date.  Viola replied that she wanted to accept his invitation, but she didn't 
have even one pair of shoes to wear, and she wasn't going out in public unless 
she had shoes.  Bill must have wanted that first date pretty bad, because he 
offered to buy her a new pair of shoes if she would go out with him.  
     That night, Viola borrowed a pair of her sister's shoes and sneaked out 
of the house to meet Bill for their first date.  Her sister's shoes were two 
sizes too big, but they served their purpose.  Viola wore them to the shoe 
store where Bill promptly bought her a brand new pair of shoes.  When the date 
ended later in the evening, and Viola arrived back home, she found herself 
locked out of her house.  Her parents wanted to make sure that she couldn't 
get back in without waking them up first.  Knowing she would be punished, she 
sneaked back into the house by climbing into a window.  Even so, the next 
morning she had a lot of explaining to do, and she received a severe beating.
     Three months after their first date, Viola once again donned the pair of 
shoes that Bill had bought for her, and she and Bill ran off and eloped to 
Maysville, Kentucky.  They were married as soon as they arrived. Viola's 
father chased after them, determined to stop the marriage, but he was too 
slow.  By the time he gave up the chase, they were already married.
     Two years later, Bill and Viola had their first child, a son, … me, Ralph 
William Cokonougher.   In the next few years, three more children came along.  
They were Judy Louise Cokonougher, Shirley Ann Cokonougher, and Clifford 
Eugene Cokonougher.    
     Bill came from a long line of farmers.  He was a farmer too, and I don't 
think he ever thought about being anything else.  Sure, he tried other jobs, 
and other professions, including railroad worker, carpentry, and silo 
construction worker, but he always came back to farming.  Farming allowed him 
to work outdoors and to be flexible if he wanted to do something else for a 
couple of days.  Bill liked farming.  He always wanted to own his own farm, 
but never was able to obtain one. Instead, he was a much sought after 
farmhand.  I never heard any of his employers criticize the quality of his 
work, but I have heard many of them complement it.     
     Some of the farmers that Bill worked for were Clarence Spooler of Lower 
Twin Road, Herman Olaker, Jim Free, and Ed Wisecup of South Salem, Clarence 
Drummond of Turkey Ridge Rd., C.A. Kenworthy and Paul Lucas of Greenfield, and 
Bryan Wisecup, his brother Cecil, his father John, and the Morgans, all of 
Wisecup Hill.
     Many farmers, at the time when Bill grew up, were still in transition 
from horse-drawn equipment to machine-drawn equipment.  As a consequence, Bill 
learned to care for horses and to farm with them.  He plowed, planted, and 
harvested with horses.  He also shocked corn by hand, and harvested wheat with 
steam threshers.  When tractors and new machinery came along, he learned to 
use and care for them too.  A farmer had to constantly learn new things and 
adapt to new conditions, and Bill kept up with it all.  He was out in the 
fields from sunup to sundown, plowing and planting, cultivating, and 
harvesting, and driving and guiding all the machinery amidst the dirt and the 
dust.         
	Bill didn't make very much money as a farmhand.  I remember him 
receiving wages of $.75 to $1.50 per hour, or $25.00 to $30.00 a week when I 
was a child growing up. Factory hands made twice that much, but Bill refused 
to work in a factory.  
     Once in a while, Bill took a job as a carpenter's helper.  I think he 
liked carpentry almost as much as he did farming, and carpentry paid more, but 
the carpentry profession was less flexible when it came to taking unplanned 
days off.  He had pretty good carpenter skills himself, as evidenced by the 
four homes that he built throughout his life for his family and himself.  He 
built a log house on Porter Hollow Rd., two wood frame homes on Edgington Road 
and McDonald Hill Road, and a one-room shanty on Rapid Forge Road.  He built 
the shanty during a time when he was supposed to be on bed rest from a recent 
severe heart attack.  He lived in the shanty for ten years until his death in 
1984.  
     The houses that Bill built, or rented for us throughout the years, for 
the most part, had no indoor plumbing or running water.  We used the outhouse 
outside and heated our bath water on the ever-present wood-burning stove.  We 
lived without electricity until the mid-1950s.    
     As a father and provider, Bill was as self-reliant as possible, and tried 
to teach us to be the same. We raised as much of our own food as we could.  We 
had a big garden and Mom canned as much as possible for us to eat when winter 
came.  Bill kept a root cellar and put as many vegetables into it as he 
could.  We usually raised a cow or a pig over the summer and butchered it in 
the fall so that we had meat over the winter.  Bill supplemented whenever he 
could by fishing and hunting.  
     One year Bill raised a goat.  The goat got loose and climbed on top of 
Bill's only car.  The car had a cloth top.  Down went the goat's four sharp 
hoofs through the car roof, making four fairly large holes.  The goat became 
frightened and tried to pull loose, jumping around and trying to get back onto 
solid footing.  By the time it did, the roof was shredded and no more.  
Shortly thereafter, Bill made sure that the goat was no more either.
     For the most part, times were hard for Bill, and us.  Money was always 
short.  I remember one winter when my father Bill couldn't get work for 
several weeks.  The garden had been poor the preceding summer, and we hadn't 
been able to raise anything to butcher, so our food supply was low and there 
was no money to buy more.  Luckily, we had neighbors who worked on an egg 
farm.  They kindly let us have all of the cracked eggs that we wanted, because 
the state wouldn’t allow them to sell them.  We had eggs for breakfast.  We 
had eggs for lunch.  And we had eggs for supper.  We had eggs over and over 
again, until Dad was finally able to find work.   I got so sick of eggs that, 
even now, I can hardly ever eat one without remembering that winter.          
    When there was no money for school lunches, we carried our lunch.    My 
sandwiches were usually made from a slice of leftover, home-cooked meat and 2 
slices of Mom’s homemade bread.  One winter when we didn't even have that, so 
I took salad dressing sandwiches.  I could have had peanut butter sandwiches 
like my siblings, but I didn't like peanut butter.  
    Sometimes, there was no money to buy gasoline for the car.  My father Bill 
must have complained about the lack of gasoline one time too many, back when 
my siblings and I were still at a pre-school age, because we tried to help him 
out.  We found a bucket, filled it with water, and poured it into his gas 
tank. We were proud of ourselves for helping our Dad.  We couldn't understand 
why he should have to pay the store to pump liquid into his gas tank when he 
already had all he needed at home. When Dad found out about what we had done, 
he wasn't quite as happy as we had hoped.  We got our little butts burned good 
for that one.  
       Like most families, we didn't have health insurance.  If one of us got 
sick, we tried to take care of it at home, or just wait it out.  We only went 
to the doctor for serious problems.  The dentist was the same.  We only went 
to the dentist when a tooth became bad enough that it had to be pulled.
        I remember one summer, when I was about 12 or 13, my father Bill came 
down with a very high fever and extreme pain in the glands of his throat.  For 
three days, he burned up, alternately chilled, and sweated with fever.  He 
also howled in pain, cussed, and walked the floor because he was unable to 
rest.  My mother and he theorized that he was having a reoccurrence of malaria 
from his days as a World War II soldier in the Philippine Islands.  Finally, 
one Sunday night, just when he felt that he couldn't stand the suffering 
anymore, the pain and fever reached a pinnacle and then suddenly subsided.  He 
was able to rest.  However, by then, both he and my mother had decided that he 
was going to die if he didn't see a doctor, so when he woke up on Monday 
morning, they headed straight for the nearest doctor's office.  The doctor 
examined him carefully, and looked long and hard into his throat.  Then the 
doctor looked him straight into the eye, and said to him, 
     "You damn fool!  You don't have malaria!  You have tonsillitis!  Your 
tonsils burst last night, and anyone else would have died!  If you had come to 
me sooner, I could have cut them out and saved you all that suffering.  The 
way it is now, all the hard part is over.  You don't need me anymore, and I 
think you'll be fine.  All you need now is some anti-biotics."
     The doctor was right.  Bill healed fast, and he never had a problem with 
his tonsils again.
     Bill had restless feet.  He couldn't stay in one place very long.  We 
moved our home about 2 dozen times by the time I was 18 years old.  Yet, in 
all the times he changed houses, Bill never moved more than 20 miles away from 
his parent's farm.  The majority of his moves were back and forth between two 
particular houses: his father-in-law's house on Turkey Ridge Road, and his 
great-grandparent's house on Lower Twin Road.  When Bill moved, he used his 
car to transport all his possessions and furniture.  Everything was tied on 
the top and sides of his car, no matter how heavy or awkward.         
     Bill, my father, had a tender side, but you didn't get to see it very 
often.  Any kissing and hugging of my mother was always done out-of-sight, and 
in private (except when he was drunk, and then he didn't care who saw him).  I 
don't ever remember my siblings and me getting any hugs and kisses from my 
father, although I am sure that we must have when we were very small.  My 
mother says that shortly after I was born, my father would proudly pick me up 
each morning before he went to work, hold me, and show me the clock on the 
wall.  This ritual eventually had to stop though, because I got so used to 
waking up early in the morning that I would cry non-stop on the weekends, when 
my father wanted to sleep in, until he finally got up and took me to listen to 
the clock.  
	In the spring of 1963, Bill's 62 year old mother died of a heart 
attack.  Later that same year, Bill's 80 year old father lay in bed, sick and 
in pain, dying of lung cancer.  He was too sick to eat.  All kinds of food 
were offered to him but he refused to eat.  The family didn't know what to 
do.   Finally, in desperation, Bill grabbed his shotgun and headed to the 
woods.  Even though it wasn't hunting season, he killed a gray squirrel and 
took it home to make squirrel broth for his dying father.  The old man did, 
for the first time in many days, sip some of the squirrel broth and gain back 
a little bit of his strength.  One wonders if he ate the squirrel broth 
because it was the only thing that tasted good to him, or if he ate it just to 
please the son who cared enough to go the extra distance for him.  Eventually, 
the cancer took too much of his strength away, and on the 12th of September 
1963, Bill's father died too.
	Bill's brother, Cecil, bought the family farm, and then, three years 
later, he too died.  Bill realized that he should, in partnership with his 
sister, Geraldine, take a turn at owning the family farm.  A problem arose 
when the two siblings' older brother, John, refused to agree to let them buy 
the farm at its appraisal price.  Due to John’s lack of co-operation, Bill and 
Geraldine had to take their chances and try to buy the farm at public 
auction.  They hoped to have a good chance though, of getting the farm at the 
sale, because, in those days, friends and neighbors wouldn't bid against an 
heir wanting to buy his own family home.   Unfortunately though, for Bill and 
Geraldine, a money-hungry timber man had recently moved to the area.  He had 
no such respect for local custom, and he saw a chance to make a killing on the 
timber that Bill's father had lovingly let grow for over 35 years.  He outbid 
Bill and Geraldine, cut the timber, and sold the timber for more money than he 
had paid for the farm.  Then he resold what was left of the farm for slightly 
more than the purchase price.         
     After the farm sold, Bill fretted and worried about how he had lost the 
family farm.  He knew that no matter how high he would have bid on the farm, 
the timber cutter would have outbid him anyway, but he still blamed himself 
for losing the family farm that he had held so dear.   Bill lost many a 
night’s sleep worrying about what he should have, or could have done, on the 
day of the auction.  
     One night, after tossing and turning in a fretful slumber, Bill awoke to 
find his dead brother, Cecil, sitting on the foot of his bed.  Bill was never 
sure afterwards whether he was half-dreaming or whether he was having a 
ghostly vision, but nevertheless, there his brother sat.  Cecil began to 
speak.  
     "Stop worrying about that farm", he said, "and get on with your life.  It 
ain't nothing but a pile of rocks anyhow."  
     Cecil's visit made Bill feel better.  He never did feel good about losing 
his family's farm, but he finally reached a point where he could accept what 
had happened, and where he could stop worrying himself sick.
     All of us have both a good side and a dark side.  Bill, my father, was no 
exception.  Like most of us, sometimes his good side was stronger, and 
sometimes his dark side was stronger.  
     Usually, Bill's dark side was at its strongest when he was drinking 
alcohol.  He drank it a lot, and he drank it often. Because he drank so much, 
many of my strongest memories of him are intimately tied to his drinking.  By 
today's standards, he would be considered alcohol-dependent, an alcoholic.  
     Like his father before him, and his father's father before him, Bill was 
a binge drinker.  He could go several days, or sometimes several weeks, 
without drinking, and then he would take a drink and continue drinking for 
days at a time, until he either got too sick and tired to continue, or until 
he and his drinking buddies ran out of money to buy more.  As my father aged, 
his drinking binges increased in frequency, until, finally, he was drunk 
almost every weekend.   Some of his regular drinking buddies were Oscar and Ed 
Beechler, "Liz" Storts, his brother Herb, my mother's uncles, Leslie and Floyd 
Hester, and our neighbors, Homer, Hollie, "Toots", and "Junior" Knapp.  My 
siblings and I spent many of  the days and nights of our youth playing with 
the Knapp kids at their house because our fathers were drinking and 
socializing.  
     Bill's brother, Herb, was one of his favorite-drinking buddies.  Herb was 
even more alcohol dependent than my father, and eventually died of a heart 
attack due to alcoholism, and related health issues, at age 43.  Herb and Bill 
would pool their money to share a long drinking binge.  They also knew where 
to get the cheapest booze in the country.  In the winter they would go to 
Ralph Kerr's "Mile High Fruit Farm" and buy jugs of hard cider from him.  
Ralph's cider was especially good because it was drawn from the bottom of the 
barrel, where all the alcohol was.  Ralph didn't heat his storeroom, so as the 
winter cold chilled the liquid in the barrel, the water component would change 
into ice crystals and float to the top, leaving concentrated alcohol at the 
bottom.  Ralph made hard cider all year round, but Herb and Bill always 
rejoiced that they got a better deal in the winter.  They felt that they 
always got more for their money then.  And, they did! 
     Whenever Herb and Bill drank together, they got along wonderfully for a 
while.  Then, as they gradually consumed more and more alcohol, they began to 
disagree.  Eventually, one of them would take a swing at the other, and they 
would end up in a knockdown and drag-em-out fight that would leave windows and 
furniture broken to pieces and both of them beaten to a pulp.  They would end 
up so angry with each other that they would swear to never have anything to do 
with each other ever again.  Then, in a week or two, they would get back 
together to do the same thing all over again.    
     Oftentimes, violence at home accompanies alcoholism.  Our home was no 
different.  My father Bill would start a drinking binge, and Mom would 
resentfully let him know that she disapproved.  Then as he drank more, he 
would begin to tap into the grocery and bill money to buy more alcohol and 
cigarettes.  Mom's objections would get louder and louder, and more and more 
resentful and frustrated, and Dad would reply in an equally loud and abusive 
tone.  Finally the arguments would dissolve into violence with Dad hitting and 
slapping Mom in a vain attempt to make her shut up.  Often too, when he had a 
bad hangover, or felt ashamed of what he had done when drunk, he would just 
hit her.      
     Occasionally, when I was a child, Bill obtained his liquor from an old 
woman named Liz Storts.  Liz made extra potent home brew and homemade wine.  
The alcohol content in her products was so strong that Bill's behavior under 
its influence became even more erratic, unpredictable, and violent.   After 
one particularly violent drunken spell and hangover, Mom decided she had had 
enough.  She told my father, Bill, that she was leaving him, and taking her 
four kids with her.   She dressed us in our hats and coats, and started 
walking off the property with us.  We got about half way to the main road, 
when suddenly my father appeared behind us.  He was holding a loaded shotgun, 
and it was pointed at us.  "You leave me", he stated determinedly, "and I'll 
kill you all right here and now!  Now get back to the house!"  
     Mom looked into dad's eyes.  She knew he was half-crazy from the alcohol, 
and she knew from experience that he was not one to try a bluff, no matter 
what the consequences may be.  She believed that he would kill us all, just as 
he said he would, and so did I.  Mom turned around and we went back to the 
house with Dad.  
     After Bill sobered up a little bit more, he and mom talked.  He agreed to 
stop drinking Liz Storts' homemade brews, and Mom decided to stay with him.  
He did keep his word to stop drinking brews made by Liz, but he continued to 
drink "store-bought" liquor whenever the urge hit him.
     Like most alcoholics, Bill drank and drove.  He was arrested more than 
once for "driving-under-the-influence", but he didn’t always go to jail.  I 
remember one time when he was stopped by the police in a routine traffic check 
while he was so drunk that he could barely stay awake. He was bobbing and 
weaving all over the road.  Mom and all four of us kids were in the car with 
him.  He was headed into the town of Greenfield, Ohio to buy more alcohol.  
The Greenfield police stopped him right in the middle of the bridge over Paint 
Creek at the edge of town.  One of the officers who stopped him was a cousin 
of my father's who had been drinking with him a couple of times himself, a few 
years before.  
     "Please get out of the car, sir", the police said.  "Have you been 
drinking?"  
     My father, of course, denied everything.  
     "Come over here, and walk the white line for us", they ordered.  
     My father laughed.  
     "Walk the line", he blared out!  "I was a soldier, by God!  I can walk 
any Goddamned line you put in front of me!  Just watch this!"  
     And then, he stumbled over to the line, pulled himself upright, and began 
to walk straight as an arrow down the middle of the road.   He never missed a 
beat, and his feet never left the line.  When he was told he had gone far 
enough, he pivoted and did it all over again!  The police couldn't believe 
it!  Here was a man who was so obviously stone drunk that he could barely 
stand up, yet he had passed the required test.  My mother couldn't believe it 
either, even though she had seen it with her own eyes.  
     Finally, after discussing the situation among themselves, and maybe with 
a little convincing from my father's cousin, one of the officers told my 
father,     
     "Get your ass back in the car and take your wife and kids home!  And 
don't let us see you around here again tonight."
     My father may have been drunk, but he wasn't stupid.  He had pulled off a 
good one and he knew it, but he did as he was told.  He got back into the car, 
turned it around, and bobbed and weaved back down the highway until we reached 
home.  For the life of me, I don't know how he stayed awake behind the wheel 
that night, and I don't know how he managed to get us all home without 
crashing and killing us all, but he did.  And not only did he do it that 
night, but he also did it on many other similarly scary nights also.  
     I have come to the conclusion that one of the many reasons Bill stuck 
with farm work, instead of other jobs, was not just that he liked it, but also 
because it fit in better with his drinking.  Most jobs give you your paycheck 
on a Friday and expect you to be back at work bright and early on Monday 
morning.  However, if you are still drinking on Monday morning, or sicker than 
a dog from a bad hangover, you just can't do that.  Good farmhands were in 
short supply and worked cheap, so farmers either had to put up with such 
behavior, or just not get their work done.  Bill always did good work, and he 
was always willing to work long hours to make up for his Monday "sick spells", 
so his employers generally tolerated his unpredictability.  
     Occasionally, though, Bill would stay off work for an extended drinking 
spell when his employer really needed him.  At these times, he would be so 
ashamed of himself that he wouldn't go back to work at all.  If his employer 
didn't first come to his house and ask him to come back, which they often did, 
he would go looking for another job, rather than have to face the employer 
again.       
    Let my father Bill's drinking be a warning to his descendants.  Let them 
know ... You have the gene for alcoholism within you.  It may be dominant, or 
it may be recessive, but either way, you have it.  It is up to you to see that 
it doesn't take control of you.  Alcoholism can ruin your life.  It can take a 
life that is going somewhere, and make that life go nowhere.  It can take your 
wife, your kids, your job, and everything else that you love, away from you.  
It can make you hate yourself, and, even worse, can make you ashamed of 
yourself.  It can make you, and everyone around you, miserable.  If you don't 
drink, don't start, because once you do, you may not be able to stop.
	Heart disease ran in Bill's family.  It mostly came from his mother's 
side of the family.  His mother died of heart disease when she was 62 years 
old.  Bill's brother, Herbert, died of a heart attack, complicated by 
alcoholism, at age 43.  His brother Cecil died of an aortic aneurysm at age 
48.  John, Bill's other brother, had a fatal heart attack at age 49, but was 
resuscitated, and after bypass surgery, lived to be 71.  Geraldine, Bill's 
only sister, died of a sudden heart attack at age 62.
            Bill had a heart attack too, in September of 1971 at age 49.  He 
drove himself 10 miles to the Greenfield Municipal Hospital, where he was 
admitted.  Tests showed that he had also had a previous heart attack sometime 
in the past but had never known.   The 1971 heart attack destroyed most of his 
heart.  Doctors and his family predicted that he would not survive very long.  
I was overseas in the U.S. Air Force at the time, and I was sent home on 
emergency leave to say a last goodbye.  But still, against all odds, Bill 
survived.  He lived to go home, and then he lived to survive another heart 
attack, as well as to live 13 more years.  Even so, the heart attack ended 
Bill's working ability. He retired on social security disability and a 
Veteran’s Administration pension.
	Every tragedy has a funny story hidden somewhere inside, and Bill's 
heart attack was no different.  As I said before, Bill had no money.  He 
worried more about how he was going to pay his hospital bill than about 
whether he was going to die.  One way Bill knew he could save money was to get 
himself transferred out of the Greenfield Hospital into the Veteran's 
Administration Hospital at Chillicothe.  As a World War II veteran, he was 
entitled to free hospital care at any VA hospital.  Many requests were made, 
but days passed and no transfer occurred.  Finally, Bill told his doctor that 
if he didn't get transferred immediately, he was going to climb out the 
hospital window, go home, and take care of himself.  The doctor knew that Bill 
meant it too.  Bill had his transfer before the end of the day.
	When Bill was wheeled into his room at the VA Hospital, he felt quite 
proud of himself for having successfully pressured his doctor to transfer him 
to the cheaper hospital.  But as Bill looked around at his new surroundings, 
he found that things weren't quite the way as he had supposed they would be.  
To his great chagrin, he found that he had been placed in a wing that had bars 
on the windows and doors.  The other patients quite obviously had mental 
problems, and, to top it all off, he had been placed on a suicide watch, under 
constant surveillance.  It was like being in jail!  Bill was really puzzled by 
this strange turn of events.  How had he ended up in such a strange part of 
the hospital?
	Several days passed, and Bill grew increasingly frustrated and 
claustrophobic.  Finally the day arrived when he was discharged and sent home 
with instructions to check in with his family doctor.  The first thing Bill 
asked his doctor was, 
     "Why did you send me to the psychiatric wing in the VA Hospital?  I 
wasn't suicidal and I wasn't crazy.  I should have been in the regular part of 
the hospital, not the 'nuthouse'!"  
     The doctor smiled and then laughed.  
     "I know it," he said, "but you brought it on yourself.  You wouldn't wait 
to get transferred, and they didn't have any beds open except in the 
psychiatric ward, so I had to tell them you were suicidal to get you in.  You 
provided the reason yourself when you said you were going out the window to go 
home.  Think about it.  Climbing out the window in your condition would have 
killed you.  Only a crazy or suicidal man would have made that threat.  I just 
did what I had to do to get you what you wanted."
	Bill had to chuckle.  He didn't enjoy being in the psych ward, but he 
knew that the best laid plans can backfire on you sometimes, and he knew that 
this time he had been gotten good.  Whenever he told people after that about 
his heart attack, he always told them about how he ended up in 
the "nuthouse".  Then he enjoyed a good laugh on himself.
	One day, on 5 December 1984, when he was 62 years old, Bill laid down 
to sleep.  He never woke up.  He had had his last and final heart attack.  He 
was dead.  Bill's youngest son, Clifford, discovered the body and notified the 
rest of the family.  
     Common wisdom says that just as more babies enter this world during times 
of approaching storms, more people also leave it during the same kind of 
weather.  In Bill's case, common wisdom proved to be correct.  The barometer 
dropped and there was a massive snowstorm the evening he died.  All highways 
were almost impassible due to blowing and drifting snow.  It took the 
undertaker over two hours to drive the ten miles to Bill's house to pick up 
the body.  My mother and I arrived at the house just in time to see him carry 
the body outside, to the hearse.  To get there, we had been detoured from one 
impassible road to another, as some higher power seemed to guide our travel to 
make sure we finally arrived safely at our destination.   
     Funeral arrangements were handled by the Murray Funeral Home in 
Greenfield, Ohio, with burial and military honors in the South Salem, Ohio 
Cemetery.  
     Just before the funeral director closed the casket forever, I took one 
last look at my father's body.  Bill and I had spent 36 years together as 
father and son.  We had loved each other, and, at times, we had disliked each 
other.  We had been proud of each other, and sometimes we had disappointed 
each other, but we had always lived a full and worthwhile life together.  He 
had taught me to work hard, to persevere, and to be tough.  He showed me that 
the only people who can't do anything are the ones who don't try.  Part of 
what I had become was due to him.  I felt sure that we had both adequately 
served our purpose for being together.  
     Let me add one last footnote.  For many years now, I've had the ability 
to remember bits and pieces of what seem to be past lives.  I remembered that 
this life isn't the first lifetime that my father Bill and I have shared 
together. We lived together once before when we were slaves and stonecutters 
in ancient Egypt.  Bill was both my work foreman and my teacher while we 
worked in the stone quarries of that ancient land.  I also remember another 
life when Bill and I were brothers.  In that life we spent many hours together 
on horseback riding together in the forests and plains of old Europe.  
     When I said goodbye to Bill the day he was buried, I knew it was only a 
temporary goodbye.  A person's life doesn't end with death. It only changes 
form.  Chances are, I'll be seeing Bill again, in another life.  It's exciting 
to wonder who and what we'll be then.  



Additional Comments:
      (I grant the USGenWeb/OHGenWeb/OH-Footsteps Archives permission to store 
permanently for free viewing access the following copyrighted article “Bill 
Howard W. Cokonougher, As I Knew Him”. All other rights, including 
distribution rights, reproduction rights, and representation rights are 
reserved by the copyright owner. Ralph W. Cokonougher, copyright owner. )


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