When you leave California and return to Arkansas in the spring time, you immediately notice how red the earth is and how green the grass and trees are, and you breathe the scent of pine. And being of a certain age, you will talk with family and friends about everyone's present state of well-being. And then you talk about snakes and most especially copperheads who like to cozy up to folks and their warm houses. If you are near water, you would probably rather discuss cottonmouths. If you are trying to gather pokeweed to make poke salad in the wild countryside, watch out for rattlers and chiggers. And if you are west of Hot Springs twenty-five miles or so in either Glenwood or Amity or Hopper or other small towns in the vicinity, Buster Hollifield will probably be mentioned. Buster was a man who gambled on the possibilities of life — and he won.
The first time I remember hearing about something Buster had said occurred around 1950 in Wiese's Valley Inn where the Buckhorn Saloon is now located in Boonville. Weise's was a good restaurant and bar. The bar was separated from the restaurant by a wooden wall. On one memorable day, a large group of Anderson Valley men had gathered to talk and drink coffee and have something to eat when Buster walked into the restaurant to get some coffee. One of the men said, “Hey, Buster, we're getting about ready to throw you and all them other Arkies out of this valley.”
Though Buster was a tall, slim man, he always put in five or six spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee without it showing. He carefully put the sugar into his coffee, stirring it before he took a sip and said, “Y’all old boys waited too long. There's too much of us now. We're stayin’.”
The story of Buster's answer to the Valley men bounced around the redwoods, in the hills, and the houses of the ranchers in the Valley, and into the shacks surrounding the timber mills where the Arkies lived. The statement was made without bluster or anger, but with the complete confidence that the words were true and final. The people from Arkansas heard this story and smiled fondly because the implication behind the words was that our sore muscles and roughened hands and hard work had coherence. The story lessened our fatigue. We had found a beautiful place to stay.
To the Valley ranchers as well, the words had positive value. Because Buster hadn't spoken with any rancor or defensive bitterness tensions that may have existed dissipated.
The right words spoken by the right man in the right way to intelligent men made it clear that we all loved the Valley and whatever our differences might be they would be resolved right here. We would co-exist until we were one.
Buster and Ruby Hollifield were married in Arkansas in 1940. Ruby was in her mid-twenties and Buster was in his late twenties. Ruby was a school teacher and Buster was unemployed. Buster had gotten Ruby's attention in 1939 by being the first man to throw a baseball completely over the Hopper School and the Hopper School playground. When Ruby began to admonish Buster to be more careful about where he threw his baseball, she got Buster's famous charm and his big smile in return. And in a year, they were married.
Ruby, talking with me recently in her beautiful ranch home located in Clark County, Arkansas, in the green country between Amity and Glenwood how it was in 1940. “1 was a school teacher and I was practical. Buster was an optimist and a visionary, but he was also unemployed and worse than broke; he was in debt.” Ruby said, “I asked him, 'Buster how could you get in debt while you're unemployed? How could you get a loan?' Buster told me, 'Well, I know how to talk. And that's how I got that fur coat and diamond ring you're wearing now’.”
“So,” Ruby said, “I told Buster we can do what you want to do and go where you want to go, but I 'm going to handle the money. And he agreed.”
“Buster got a job driving truck and made $60 per month, and I was a little mad about that because I was teaching school for only $50 per month. I gave Buster money for his cigarettes and that was all the money I gave him until we paid off his debt and got a car because he wanted to go to California.
“So we went to Modesto, California. There were Okie villages and Arkie villages in Modesto in 1941. The Okie villages were houses made of cardboard. I told Buster that I wasn’t going to live in one of those villages. And, we didn't. We lived in Modesto from 1941 until 1946.
“Buster worked some picking fruit but mostly in the warehouses. I tried warehouse work with the fruit two times, and I quit both times. The first time they told me to move some boxes on to the palettes faster. I thought I'm stiff and sore and I'm a school teacher. The next time someone told me to do it faster. I said, 'Why should I? I'm working by time not by the box.' And I walked away from that job. The next time I tried warehouse work, I was supposed to put a peach on to this steel thing just right and then turn a handle. And again, they told me to do it faster. I told that person, 'I'm paid by time not by the peach,' and I walked away from that job too. The foreman said, Please come back. You're doing OK.' I said, ‘No thank you.' “
“But, I was still handling the money. We spent only enough to live so we were able to save money even then. Buster had started working for Sears Roebuck in Modesto, and we finally saved enough money for Buster to buy a bob-tailed truck. He was working for himself now and in his first week, he made $1300 hauling peaches. Boy, we thought we had it made. But that first week was the best week we ever had in Modesto. But, still, by 1940's standards, we were doing good, and I was still saving every cent I could save.”
I asked Ruby if she ran into very much prejudice about being from Arkansas and living in California in those days.
“Sometimes,” she said. “A little bit. Someone might say, ‘Well, hello little Miss Arkie.' But, it didn't bother me none. I always acted like I considered it a compliment. But, now Buster, if anybody said anything to him putting Arkansas in a negative light, he would get riled up quick and he would get loud and active. But people left him alone. I remember one time we were at some outdoor activity — a fair, or something — and when we got back to our car, our license plate had been mashed in and Buster got mad, real mad. I tried to calm him down by saying, 'It's just some drunk that backed into you.' Buster said, ‘Ain’t no paint there. Those are boot marks. And they weren't so drunk that they couldn't read that those plates are Arkansas license plates.' He looked all over that crowd for whoever smashed that license plate, but no one would own up to doing it.”
“But, one day in Modesto, Clark and Pauline Golden came driving in from Arkansas and asked us to come with them and go to Anderson Valley in Mendocino County and build and start up a saw mill. Clark Golden's father John Golden was the president of the Bank of Glenwood in Arkansas, and, I imagine he told Clark about the opportunity there and if he could get Buster as a partner, they would make a successful operation there.”
So, in 1947, Buster and Ruby Hollifield came to Anderson Valley with their daughters Olivia (born in 1941) and Betty (born in 1945, I think). Clark and Pauline Golden came to Anderson Valley in 1947 with their son Charles. Charles was a couple of years older than Olivia. Together, the two families formed a partnership and purchased land from the Clows and constructed a lumber mill across the street from Jack's Valley Store. Jack and Kay Clow gave them water until they could dig a well. The mill was a success and Buster and Clark remained partners from 1947 to 1951.
But, in 1951, Buster wanted to strike out on his own and sold his share of the partnership to Clark, and he started his own mill only about a quarter of a mile east of Clark Golden's mill. Buster's mill was another success and lasted until about 1960.
Buster arrived in the Valley in 1947 at age 34 about three years older than Ruby. He was tall and very slender, a striking figure who preferred suede coats, Pendleton shirts, slacks, dress boots, and a fedora cocked at a rakish angle atop the entire presentation. He drove big brand-new cars and bought an airplane that he quickly learned to fly in and out of Boonville, taking off and landing in the field where the air strip is now just west of the high school. If the mood hit him, he would kiss his wife and his girls good-bye and head non-stop for Arkansas in his new Cadillac or Chrysler, amusing his working mill crew after he came back about how many hours it took him to get to Arkansas. (I think his best time was 36 to 38 hours.)
A pet deer at his home at Hollifield Lumber Company in Philo grew into a mean buck with a big rack of horns that became something of a local legend. That buck loved Buster, but no one else. He finally presented the ornery critter to the San Francisco Zoo. He also had some geese that got to where they would peck anybody that wasn't careful. In 1975, 1 went back to Arkansas on a visit and enjoyed seeing Buster and Ruby at the home Ruby still lives in. Back then, Buster kept some wolves up there patrolling his house and ranch.
Buster told me then the one deal that had put him over the top and allowed him to relax financially in California was when he took Wayne (or Doug) McGimpsey up in his plane, and they flew over a huge stand of timber, millions of board feet, and McGimpsey estimated for him how many board feet could be taken from that stand of timber. And Buster said, “I took his word for it because McGimpsey had an uncanny ability to estimate how much footage was in miles of timber. So, I outbid everybody else and got the timber rights and McGimpsey had estimated the footage to within about 20,000 board feet.”
“I left California when the challenge was gone,” Buster told me. “But Ruby and I loved that Valley and lots of the people there. Ruby hated to leave her sister (Wilma Brink) and her church.”
Never idle, Buster started catfish farming in Arkansas. He dug some big ponds and filled them with water and catfish and he would feed them until they were big and then sell them for food. But Weyerhaeuser, I believe it was, flew over the property next to his and sprayed chemicals into the forest. The spray drifted with a change in the wind currents over his catfish ponds and landed on the ponds and killed all of his catfish. Buster told me that everyone back here says you can’t win a court fight with a big company in Arkansas. “But, I said maybe no one with a good case has tried, and, I have pictures of the plane dropping the chemicals. I got pictures of the chemicals on the ponds. I have jars of the poison pond water and I have dead catfish in the freezer. I have the evidence.”
I heard later that Buster lost his case in court. I saw him in Arkansas years later and I asked him, “What happened in court regarding the dead catfish case?”
Buster said, “What happened in court was what everybody said would happen. You can't win a court case against a big company in Arkansas.”
He wasn't bitter, though. And he wasn't sad. Buster said, “You just move on. Never get down because it's hard to get back up.”
Buster died three years ago when he was 83 years old. Ruby is 83 years old now, but except for a hearing aid, she is still very healthy and very sharp. I told Ruby about McGimpsey's estimating the footage in that huge stand of timber. She said, “Buster could do it too. I was the bookkeeper and the accountant at the mill. And I kept a careful tally of everything. But, just occasionally if I made an error, Buster would catch it in an instant. He could just watch the trucks coming in with timber or see the timber in big piles and he would know how much footage there was coming in and how much was going out. I couldn't understand how anyone could do that, but, he was right every time. So, I didn't argue with him. I just rechecked my figures to find an error.”
In 1953, Buster began his business relationship with the Argonaut Insurance Company in San Francisco. George Smith was his agent and the Supervising Engineer in charge of safety was Nelson Nissan. The deal with Argonaut essentially was that Argonaut wanted Buster to run a safe lumber mill, to conduct safety sessions with the men, to avoid injury. And, of course, Buster didn't want any injuries either so he complied with all of their safety requests. Buster's mill had a great safety record and as a reward Argonaut gave him shares of stock at the end of each working year.
Ruby said recently that, “Buster was so good at so many things. But, he sure wasn't a farmer. We've got tractors and equipment all over this ranch and none of it ever paid off in farming. Buster bought a bunch of acres in Arizona near Safford with artesian springs on it that he thought highly of and we still have land around Clear Lake. I thought we might have to start selling some of those things after Buster died to stay afloat. We had that old box full of stocks from Argonaut, but I thought they were worthless. Still, I thought maybe I should have Betty look at them before I got rid of them.”
Betty is a psychologist in New York City with a very successful practice and a thriving son. Olivia (called Peeney in Arkansas) is a marvelous artist who takes care of her mother and has a successful daughter, Tanya, who is also an artist and a legal secretary.
Ruby recalls the Argonaut revelations. “Betty came down here from New York to check out the stocks. And we were really surprised because Betty said those stocks were worth more than what we had made in the lumber business in California in our entire lifetime. Because of a good safety record, Argonaut had put us in on the ground floor of all kinds of technical stocks that had divided and split and multiplied over the years.”
I could hardly help noticing that Ruby and Olivia had a beautiful bunch of friendly but hard to place dogs running around the ranch. I asked about Buster's old wolves, and Olivia told me that Buster had “bred the wolves with chows and that's what we got.”
Olivia mentioned that her daughter Tanya Hollifield had an exhibit of small clay sculptures at the Blue Moon Art Gallery at Spencer Square in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
My sister Dana and her husband Jonathan and their daughter Noel from Guerneville had flown to Dallas, Texas, with me and together we had rented a van to travel another four hours on to Glenwood, Arkansas to make the house more safe for my very independent 82-year-old mother. We put up guard rails and banisters and outside lights and pruned the trees and mowed the lawn.
Then we went hunting for pokeweed to make poke sallet.
Pokeweed is a type of green weed that glows lime-green and grows wild. The stuff is poison, so you have to boil it in water and drain the water at least one time. If you put the blades of green onions with it and put some bacon drippings over it when it’s finished cooking and serve it up with corn bread and buttermilk, you will enjoy the best greens in the world.
Paul McGrew, the farmer whose land we were hunting pokeweed on, told us that Buster Hollifield was the guy who started taking the pokeweed stems, peeling them, cutting them okra-style, and cooking them in a good batter, and then eating them that way — you'll never eat any other kind of greens again, just poke salad. (Olivia said that the poke “sallet” spelling instead of salad was “just red-necked showing off.”)
As Paul McGrew calmly reminisced about Buster Hollifield, my sister had jumped high and away from a snake, landed in a bush, and got bitten by ticks. We were definitely back in “the old country,” as Arkansas is known among the many residents of Anderson Valley who began life there.
We all went to Hot Springs to eat at the wonderful buffet bargain at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Hot Springs and to see Tanya's sculpture. Spencer Square is the art center of the famous (and to some, infamous) Hot Springs.
The gallery's managers were obviously proud of their talented sculptress. I loved Tanya's sculpture of a man playing jazz on a horn, but suddenly I found myself looking at the sculpture of what to me looked like Buster Hollifield. The piece was titled, “A Simple Man” depicting a man wearing a farmer's cap and overalls. So, this was the Arkansas Buster not the sartorially vivid California Buster. The Arkansas Buster was an amazingly accurate likeness.
I phoned Olivia about the piece. “It resembles Buster. But it's not Buster,” she said.
I phoned Tanya when I got home and asked the artist herself about her sculpture. “It wasn't meant to be Grandpa Buster when I started it, but I know it looks just like him. I guess I knew him so well he influenced the way my fingers worked. But it would be ironic to call Grandpa a simple man.”
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