Feathers

Contents

Acknowledgments

Forward

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

FOR MY FRIENDS

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the friends and family who graciously cajoled me to write the story of my life.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to Wikipedia encyclopedia for permission to use Dates, Places, Names, and excerpts under the Creative Commons Attributions Share Alike – License 3.0, and the GNU Free Documentation License to authenticate the Autobiography of Jim Feazell.

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, and every day, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those other things, are his history. His acts and his words are merely the visible, thin crust of his world, with its scattered snow summits and its vacant wastes of water-and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! A mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden—it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written. Every day would make a whole book of eighty thousand words—three hundred and sixty-five books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

—Mark Twain—

Forward

Friday, April 1, 2011—I turned eighty-two last November. I’ve traveled a long and exciting road. I have soared with eagles. In the pages of this book are some feathers I found.

As a prelude to my autobiography, I must inform you of the imperativeness to use the help of Wikipedia to keep the movies, television shows, and other events on which I worked in a chronological order, and to establish the filming and release dates of the varied productions.

I was born in West Monroe, Louisiana on Thanksgiving 1928, and named James Lloyd. As with all southerners I was called by my middle name. My elder brother, by a year and a half, was named after our Dad, and called Fred Jr., or Bubba. Bubba always called me the family turkey, because of being born on Thanksgiving, although my birthday only came on Thanksgiving a few times, due to the changes of the holiday as made by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I was later to find out that I was named Lloyd after the name on a hub-cap from the elegant baby carriage that was bought for Bubba, and handed down to me. I was destined to answer to the name of Lloyd, which I thoroughly detested, until I left home and became Jim.

During my adolescent and adult life I have lived with the hypothesis that a man should make and control his own destiny. Although I was raised, and am still Baptist, I do not believe that all men are created equal. I have lived an honest and clean life. I am a conservative Independent that has in the past few years become very discontented with our elected government officials. If it be mandatory that one must have a favorite President, then mine, hands down, would be Ronald Reagan. You might say that I’m just a good ole’ Southern rebel, that likes country, blue-grass, and folk music, ranging from Hank Williams, to Gordon Lightfoot, to Dwight Yoakam. In my twilight years, I live a happy complacent life with my loving wife, in Monticello, Arkansas.

During my career as an actor, a western stuntman, a filmmaker, a singer- song writer, a screenplay writer, a producer/director, and recently an eleven and one-half (yes, I count half’s now) year Wal-Mart customer relations representative, I continue to make new friends, and have in the past met innumerable celebrities from the motion picture, television, and recording industries. Some have remained close friends.

I have been graced beyond measure with a loving wife and children, and know of no one who has had more or better friends. Throughout this book, I will give you an insight into the personality of perhaps one or two of your favorite actors or entertainers.

As time worn clichés go, every son’s father has said to him, If you can’t say something good about someone, don’t say anything at all. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but cliché or not, I have always tried to live by my father’s teaching. Therefore, there will be a few people mentioned in this book that I will not expound on.

There will be times I shall elaborate on the lives of other people, or on the plot of a film. Bear in mind that it will be done purposely to express my personal mind- set and/or impression of persons or circumstances, as an autobiography should not only be about what a person has done, but also about his discernment of it.

I have been hesitant to write an autobiography for fear of it sounding egotistical, as most autobiographies tend to do. When one writes of their own life there is a natural tendency to embellish it. Therefore in writing the story of my life, I will also portray the side of illogical reasoning,

So—good, bad, or indifferent—here it is.

Chapter 1

My journey, as everyone’s, began as a tot. Some of what I write concerning my very early childhood comes from hearsay. Some, back to the age of three and a half, I can remember, although sometime I don’t remember what happened yesterday. No it’s not Alzheimer’s, it’s only a vitamin deficiency. I can vividly remember incidents of my early childhood, and like most kids I was bad.

Maybe worse than most. I remember I was about 4 or 5 when I was found, with an extra pair of pants and a couple of biscuits in a sack, on top of the railroad dump sitting on the train track. It was rumored that I said I was going to catch the train and be gone. It was also said that I removed the large cap from the gasoline storage tank at the corner store and lay in the gravel smelling the gasoline fumes until I passed out. The man at the store had to pick me up and take me home, more than once. Then there was the time I sat on the passenger side of the delivery truck, on the running board, and held on to the hood latch. The truck went under the viaduct, down through town, and stopped at a red light. A man ran out into the street yelling at the colored (black) delivery man, about him having a child on his running board.

I remember how I truly loved butter. I mean real butter, not oleomargarine. When mama didn’t hide it from me in the ice-box, I was out the back door with it before anyone could catch me, and under the house before the screen door slammed. Neighbors would get on their knees and peer under the house trying to coax me out. Not a chance, not before I finished eating my butter. I can remember moving some boards over in the dampness under the house and picking up half a tomato can of ball-bugs (roly-polys) a bug that balls up when touched, similar to a b-b-shot. I took the ball-bugs into the house, pulled down the bed sheet that covered my sick Dad and poured them on him before running out of the house. I didn’t know he was sick, I thought he just didn’t want to get up and play with me. Also, I remember breaking a complete set of china that mama won at the Saturday matinee at the theater. Every time a piece was left on the table I would grab it, run out the screen door and sling it out into the back yard. There was soon nothing left of her dishes.

Maybe these things were not really considered bad, but more just mischievous. Or perhaps I was jealous of mama winning something instead of me—who knows? Bad was when I was four and held my kitten down in the washtub on the back porch, that mama caught the rainwater in to wash her hair. I held the kitten down to observe the fascination of the bubbles. They finally quit coming up. I was a little older when I made some mud cookies, put sugar on them, sun baked them on the sidewalk, and then shared them with my younger cousin. Before mama, and my aunt Evelyn relished in the enforcement of my disciplinary action, I remember my Dad telling mama I had rather him eat dirt than to smoke.

Recounting the facts of my very early memory, I can vividly remember my mama standing over the crib of my six-week old baby brother, crying and screaming. He had succumbed during the night to bronchitis congestion. I was no more than three and a half. I can also remember her rowing me and my older brother around the house in a paddle boat during the next flood after the great flood of 1927. It came in 1932. I was four years old.

By the time I began school we had moved across the river to Monroe, with another brother Ray and a sister Ruby Anne. I attended Barksdale Faulk grade school, and Ouachita Parish High School. Throughout the entire first grade my teacher, every time I said something, had to bring Bubba in from the second grade to decipher my enunciation. Bubba was the only living being that could understand me. I marveled at the nonsensicalness of the human race—except for Bubba, hell—he understood me perfectly.

At age nine, or there about, I seemed to be somewhat mentally deficient in the category of religion. My father took me to town one Saturday morning to buy me a new pair of Tom McCann shoes, (leather of course), in those days people didn’t wear canvas and rubber footwear. In fact, my father would not go out of the house without his (always brown) shoes shined, and his tie and hat on. He always strived to teach me the attributive qualities of being nicely dressed and having a pleasing personality. Anyway, to the point of my deficiency, my father met a friend of his on the street that so happened to be a Baptist preacher. He introduced us, and as the man shook my hand, and told me what a handsome lad I was, he asked me if I was a Christian. My precipitous answer was No Sir—I’m a Baptist.

Dad spent half the night schooling me on Christianity and the various persuasions and/or denominations thereof.

I was sixteen when I lied about my age and enlisted in the Navy. A bunch of us was on the bus about to leave to go to boot camp and my Dad, who had gotten wind of it, came on the bus and took me off, giving the enlistment officer a good southern what for. During that time I was lead singer in a bluegrass band in our hometown of Monroe, Louisiana. We had a six-thirty a.m. radio show. Try getting psyched up to sing that early in the morning after riding bucking broncos on the local rodeo circuit at night.

The band was invited to the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport to open for Hank Williams. I sang three Bill Monroe songs right before Hank Williams came on. I had heard his records on the radio but to hear him in person in that big auditorium was entirely different. He absolutely mesmerized the audience. I thanked God I was on before him. I certainly could never have followed him. And then after the show, he had the graciousness to tell me that I did a good job. Another feather I kept. I had, by the way, previously met Bill Monroe. Our band leader was a prodigy of his, and he called me one day to come to his house to meet him. I had to sing for him. He told me when I got up to Nashville to look him up. I never made it.

My third meaningful feather had come during the 1940 Christmas holidays. I had just turned twelve years old. I didn’t know the greatness of the man until sometime after the meeting. General Claire Chennault was visiting his mother between Rayville and Delhi, Louisiana. He was down from Washington, D.C. for two days. His mother and my grandmother were good friends. I was visiting my grandmother in Rayville when his mother called her to come to her home and meet her son. My grandmother took me with her in a taxi-cab and told the driver to come back in about three hours. I will always remember that house. It was a big white house built high above the ground and had a wide porch that ran all the way around it.

Anyway, we and some of his relations had dinner, and as it was like a summer day as it always seemed to be in north Louisiana around Christmas. The General, a brother of his, and I went out to the pond behind the house. I dug some worms while they fixed our poles and we caught about ten or twelve small perch. The