Excerpts from The Life Story of Jeffa P. Hill, Jr. - Junior's First Earthquake

As you know, I'm working on typing my Grandaddy's life story so I can publish it. It's a long process, but I hope to be finished by the end of this year. I intend to find the appropriate places in the story and insert the text of letters that we have found in various boxes that belonged to my grandparents. I hope to collaborate with my cousin, Emily Hill Hanner, who is also a writer, to separate the story into chapters and make it flow. I'm super excited about this project, and I have wanted to start on it for almost 8 years. Now is the time! Carpe diem! 

Since I can't wait to share this story with you, I'm going to put a few excerpts here on my blog as I type the story. You'll be entertained, especially if you knew my Grandaddy! This first excerpt is from near the beginning of "Junior's" story. His family had moved to Pasadena, California when he was five years old and they had been living with Miles and Marie Bell, who Junior's mother had known when she lived in California before. They stayed with the Bells for a couple of months until Junior's Dad found a job selling real estate.

          When Dad got his job, we moved to a house closer to town and school. I started to school in the first grade at Lincoln Grammer School. It was in this house that Mom became very ill with an extremely high temperature. She lost all of her hair due to the illness but recovered after several weeks. I was never told just what it was that she had.

          It was also in this house that we experienced our first earthquake. Dad was on a ladder painting the house next door, I was playing on the front porch and Mom was doing something in the house. Suddenly the tall Royal Palm trees lining both sides of the street started to sway like Hula dancers and the pavement looked like waves on the ocean. The ladder Dad was on swung away from the house and just before it got to the point where Dad would have falledn backward, it tipped the other way and slammed him into the house. The doors in the house were banging shut and Mom thought sure it was me playing pranks again. She knew something was wrong though when she came out on the porch and saw Dad pullig himself off the ground and me hanging on to the porch railing yelling. About that time there was another jolt and the houses shook and the trees thrashed back and forth and then it was all over. Many times after that we experienced earthquakes of various intensities but always with apprehension and fear.