“You Catch the Bumblebees and I’ll Catch the Butterflies”
An Interview with my Grandfather
When assigned the task of interviewing a family member, I immediately knew I would ask my grandfather, whom I call Pawpaw. He has the most extensive knowledge on my family ancestry and has lived an incredible life, chasing the American Dream. From a simplistic life to working at the Pentagon, my grandfather pursued his passion for math and science, and reached his greatest ambitions.
The main objectives for the oral history include further knowledge about my ancestry and more information about my grandfather’s rise from lower to middle class. This interview follows the journey of James Cecil Keith and goes into extreme detail about all aspects of education and career, with a side story about the importance of his faith and family.
Me: Hello Pawpaw! Are you ready for the interview now?
Pawpaw: I am ready! What is your first question?
Me: What was your life like as a child, growing up?
Pawpaw: I tell people the earliest memory I have is my mother paddling me out of the Methodist church. So, I was born in Birmingham on September 25, 1944, but we moved when I was about three or four years old to live with my grandmother and an aunt in Larkinsville, which is now part of Scottsboro in Alabama. We moved in what had been the railroad depot, a place where people would go and buy their tickets and catch the train. We were in the old depot masters house, right near the railroad. I remember the trains very much.
Me: How close were you and your sister?
Pawpaw: I have a sister four years older than me, named Marie. She remembers some of Birmingham but I don’t because we moved to Larkinsville while I was very young. When I was four and my sister was eight, she told me to catch the bumblebees and she’ll catch the butterflies. Anyway, I caught a bumblebee and it stung me. I went screaming around the house and she said, “Well I meant for you to use a jar.” Well that was one of the early things I remembered with my sister. We had a good relationship over the years, really. Sometimes I would do what a brother does; well you have a brother so you know how brothers can be. I was a little, bratty kind of brother.
Me: What is one of your earliest memories?
Pawpaw: We lived in Larkinsville. My dad was a carpenter. He fell and broke his leg. While that was going on, and after he recovered somewhat, we went fishing down to a place called a Tally Hole, just about a mile south of where we lived. We walked down the railroad track and went over to it. The neighbor boy, twelve years old, went with us. While we were there I fell in the pool of water, which was quite deep and cold, and the twelve year old rescued me. I nearly drowned. That was one of my early memories. They put my sisters coat on me because it was February and really cold and we had to walk home. After that, mother couldn’t even get me to sit down in a bathtub. Years later I learned to swim in local swimming holes, but never went back to that one. I never gave it a second chance.
Me: Tell me more about the members in your family.
Pawpaw: My mother’s name was Berith Wallace Keith, and she was the oldest child. She spent most of her time in Larkinsville. The time I remember, my grandfather had lived in Lankston, Alabama. He was the commissioner of roads in Jackson County. He was in charge of all the roads. Most of my uncles had learned how to operate heavy equipment. They did things like that. After my dad had broken his leg, my mother went to work because they were getting pretty low on money. About 1949, my grandmother died, and my aunt went to live with her sister. My uncle sold the house, and we had to move to another house. We ended up about a block or so away, in a little house that we lived in all the time, until I graduated from high school. It started with, we had no running water, we had a well on the back porch, and we had an outhouse. We had chickens and a smoke house, the whole barn, which later, those buildings got torn down. Eventually we got running water, before my dad died. But after he died we got an inside toilet. He didn’t really want one too much. But he did have a beautiful garden. He would work in his garden. My mother worked first at Scottsboro High School in the lunchroom, and she later started working at Elmore’s and Lay’s and, eventually, Walmart.
Me: What was school like for you growing up?
Pawpaw: I graduated from Scottsboro High School in 1962. Scottsboro was a good high school. When I started, it was called Jackson County High School. I started there from seventh grade. I’d done the first six in Larkinsville. That last grade there I got pretty far behind, because our teacher at the time told war stories. He was a World War Two vet. When I got to Scottsboro I sort of struggled to get started but I caught up with the class. By the time I graduated I was a silver seal award winner, they called it. They had done away from having a single valedictorian and a single salutatorian. I was in a group of five called co-salutatory. I got a little bit of an academic award there. One of the highlights of high school was our class went to New York in Washington on a class trip. That was quite good.
Me: How did you hear about Berry College and why did you decide to go there?
Pawpaw: I had an uncle, well I take it back. It wasn’t an uncle. First cousin’s husband who was sort of like an uncle. He was old enough to have been an uncle. He tried to talk my sister into going to Berry College. He lived in Atlanta. She didn’t go. She ended up going to Birmingham and working in the library and eventually got married. When I got time to graduate, I really wanted to be a double E, electrical engineer. The space program in Huntsville really affected me, and I’d taken all the math the amount of times I could take it in that high school. But I got to thinking about the story I heard about Berry College. Now I asked my physics teacher. Well she knew about Berry. She wrote them and got me an application even though it was late in the year. It’s not like how you folks have done it now where there are all these tests to take. I did end up taking ACT and SAT. I took two of the tests. I went to Berry that first summer to work.
Me: What was working there like?
Pawpaw: You could go and work, and you made 90 cents an hour. We paid something like three dollars a day for room and board so we cleared about six dollars a day, and I made enough money to start school in the fall. They didn’t really have engineering at Berry, but they had physics and the basic math and chemistry and biology. So I ended up majoring in physics. It was the closest thing to electrical engineering I could find. And that first summer I worked on the forest crew. That was quite interesting. I chopped my leg with an ax one time. I had some interesting things happen.
Me: How did you meet your wife?
Pawpaw: I didn’t have a girlfriend that year. Sallie, your grandmother, was a senior in high school and I was a freshman in college so that didn’t work. You can figure that out. Later, your grandmother came when I was a sophomore. I was sitting outside the dining hall, and I saw your grandmother come where her mother, her daddy, her cousins, her aunts, and her grandmother. The aunt and your grandmother’s mother, Grandmother Moore, graduated from Berry. They were there when Martha Berry was there. That was interesting, but I didn’t get to meet Sallie until later. Our first date was September 24, 1963. I remember that date because it was one day before my birthday. And then, in 1965, we got married in Collins, Georgia. Berry would’ve been a beautiful place to have gotten married but her mother and daddy of course sponsored the wedding and had given us a car and essentially helped us get our first home, which was a mobile home. We ended up living in Rome, Georgia, on Dean’s Street. And we were still students at Berry. I graduated in June, and your grandmother still had some courses to take. She had taken some over the summer so she graduated not with her original class but in my class in the winter graduation of 1966. She is called a 1966 grad. She did her practice teaching in Calhoun, Georgia. I moved to Dalton, Georgia and taught algebra in the high school. Later, when Sallie finished her practice teaching in Calhoun, she got a job at Dalton and taught there. While in Dalton I was a baseball coach.
Me: Did you play any sports growing up?
Pawpaw: I’d been a pitcher at Berry my first year. I walked on the baseball team and pitched my first season I was there, 1962–1963. It was really the spring of ’63. I walked on the basketball team. I played on the freshman basketball team but I only played for one year. With all the science and the math and all that, I just didn’t have the time to do it. When I went to Dalton, I coached baseball at Dalton and taught.
Me: What came after teaching in Dalton?
Pawpaw: Next year we moved back to Rome. I got an offer that just about doubled my salary. We moved back to Rome, and I taught at Coosa Valley Tech, which is Northwestern Technical College now. It was a good school. We did that and after about a year I really wanted to work in the space program which had been a goal of mine. I had some offers but I was under contract to teach so I couldn’t take any of the jobs at Huntsville. I contacted people over here and got a job with the US Army as a mechanical engineer in 1968. We moved to Huntsville and we sold our little trailer we were living in and rented a house in North Huntsville. That is where your mother was born. Your grandmother taught. I worked with US Army metrology and collaboration center as a mechanical engineer, then a physicist and an operations research analyst later. I worked with them until 1985 from ’68. And your Uncle Ryan was born in there in ’71. You know a lot about your uncle so I won’t talk a lot about your mother and your uncle, but they were a wonderful blessing of course, for us. We reached a point where it was hard to get babysitters in those days. There weren’t organizations like your mother works for now [working with two year olds at a daycare]. We hired a lady to come stay at the house and it cost a whole lot. Your grandmother decided to quit teaching and stay home and raise the family, which she did, and that worked out real well over the years. In 1985, I changed jobs. I made a pretty big move in my job. I moved in what is now the Space and Missile Defense Command. It had a little different name then, but it was involved in building missile defense for the nation. So I went to work on a different part of town over on Wind Drive. In ’87-’88, I got an offer to go work in Washington D.C. at the pentagon. The man I worked for then, Trent Kendall, is now the undersecretary of defense, one level below the top person in defense. I worked with him.
Me: What is the religious/spiritual side of your life like?
Pawpaw: I ended up telling you that my mother paddled me out of church, well, I’ve been in the Methodist church there, and I became a Christian when I was a preteen. They never did baptize me though. They sprinkled but for some reason or another I never got baptized. I led the music there. My sister played the piano and I led the singing for several years. Then I got to Berry. They read the write-up I sent. I got asked to be the virger of the church, Mount Berry Church. You took care of the church a bit and came out on Sunday to light the candles. Sort of like an episcopal church where we had candles we lit. We had to take three courses of religion. Your grandmother was a Baptist. Later we visited some Baptist churches. Her daddy, your great granddaddy, was a preacher. Anyway, we visited the Baptist churches. We had a man come to our trailer in Rome. He invited us to Vans Valley Baptist Church. We started going there and that was where I was baptized. This is after we got out of Berry, and I was teaching in Rome. We moved to Huntsville and got involved in several churches here. For years we went to Whitesburg Baptist Church. It is a big church here and we went from ’68-’75. Then we moved to First Baptist Church where we are still at. Over time, in 1991, I became a deacon in that church and your grandmother became a church clerk, which she still is now. I’ve been a deacon since 1991, but you have to rotate off every third year. It’s a three year term, then you are off a year, and then you can be elected again. Our church life is important to us and always has been. Several years ago, about ’98, I became a Gideon and your grandmother became an auxiliary in the Gideon organization. That has been a very import role for us. I was chancellor of our Huntsville South Chapter for three years, and now I am vice president of the organization.
Me: What was a big milestone in your life?
Pawpaw: I retired from the army in 2001. In fact, I had bad health and didn’t know what the problem was so I retired. I had thirty two years’ service then with the army, but I found out six months after retiring that I needed open heart surgery. I had four bypasses done and they all turned out fine. And now, like today, I had to get a heart test. I’ve got one tomorrow where they are going to look at my graphs that are now fifteen years old. Y’all were little. You came over. I don’t image you remember that, but you did come to my room. You were very small. Josh probably remembers it. Anyway, let’s see. That was sort of the milestone, going through that.
Me: What interests have you pursued since retirement?
Pawpaw: On retirement, we got into a lot of things, like genealogy. We got involved with Scottish things. We made four trips to Scotland. It’s been quite interesting. I was president of the Clan Keith Society for three years and we’ve been doing the newsletter for eleven. And you get copies of that. We’ve been involved in a lot of volunteer things like church work and Gideon’s and I’ve also been an Optimist for several years. You know there is an organization called the Optimist Club. I’ve been in it longer than I’ve been a Gideon actually. I was president of the new Optimist Club for two years, and I was lieutenant governor of the district chair over several clubs for one term. We got grand-kids and when Josh was born, it was thrilling. We were there. When you and Jennifer were born that was a thrilling time. Your grandmother came and stayed with y’all, I think six weeks, when you were little. Actually, I had a trip over there when you were first born. I spent a week as a student at Georgia Tech, eight hours a day, studying simulations. One of my, I’d guess you’d say career things I did that had some uniqueness to it, I was in missile defense when Ronald Reagan was president.
Me: What was that like, working with simulations?
Pawpaw: You get a concept of defending against the Soviet Union and anybody else for missiles. We developed a huge simulation that had never been done before at the time that simulated architecture. I was in charge of the ground base part of that in Huntsville here for a while, this means anything launched from the ground. This is like a ground base interceptor, we’ve got radars, we’ve got all this equipment. Later the man that was leading that left and he asked me to lead the whole project so I was managing the army, navy, air force, a bunch of contractors. We ran it on the fastest computer in the world at the time out in Colorado Springs. It was a Cray-2 computer. They are a lot faster today. And then later in my career I became director of simulations for the US Army and Space Missile Defense Command and all the battle lab. I ran two supercomputer centers here in Huntsville. I had to do that work and when I retired that’s the job I had. I was called director of simulations.
Me: Did you travel much growing up, and if so, where did you go?
Pawpaw: I didn’t travel much when I was very young. I went to Nashville because I had uncles that owned a business up there. So when I was very young I went to Nashville to the Grand Ole Opry. One of the men there, Little Jimmy Dickens they called him, just passed away. That night they put him in a container of cold water that you put soda in. I went to Florida. The most travel I did in high school, I told you, I went to Washington, New York. That was quite eye opening. That was something your grandmother and I first talked about when we met at Berry, was about our senior trips. She had gone to Washington on her senior trip. Well, I got to work for the army. Working for the school over in Rome, I did go to Cleveland, Ohio, as one of my first early trips but when I went to work for the army I got a good bit of travel. I went to Washington quite a bit on business. I later went to Germany and France, Panama, Japan, South Korea, Hawaii. I was on my study team in the ’80s that went all over the northwest and southwest doing studies. I went to a shipyard in the Washington area. It was 10 trips. There was a time there I was doing way too much travel. I was on the road a lot. Your mother and daddy got to go with us in ’76, and we made a very long trip to Colorado, to San Francisco, down to Los Angeles, and back through Colorado to Huntsville. We did a good bit of travel. I spent a couple weeks in Honolulu, Hawaii. My boss over there owned some local land and he retired and became a tour guide. He gave us a lot of tours while we were in that area. Later we went to Scotland, England, and Wales on our own money. We’d love to go to Ireland.
Me: Did you go on any mission trips?
Pawpaw: Yes, we made five trips to Canada, fishing trips. We went to Toronto a couple of times. We went to Prince Edward Island, Canada, where Anne of Green Gables was born. We went up to Ottawa. We did a trip up there. Then we went out West to Regina, Saskatchewan. Your grandmother went on all of those mission trips. So that was quite exciting for us.
Me: Can you tell me more about the house you have been working on in South Georgia? How is that important to our family?
Pawpaw: In about 2009 we started working on Grandmother Moore’s old house. It would be your great great grandmother. It is your mother’s great grandmother’s place, so it’d be your great great. Her name was originally Mae Powell Moore. She was married to James Moore but he died. He got injured after they had seven kids; he got injured in a logging accident. He passed away. She raised the kids in the little house there in Collins. Then, later, about 25 years later, she married a Mr. Beasley. Your grandmother Sallie went to the wedding. So your Gran and Pawpaw have been working on that building since 2009. We pretty well got it now, well, you visited it. We got to where we can go down and not work on it so hard anymore and see cousins.
Me: This is an exciting year for you and Gran! Can you tell me why?
Pawpaw: Right now we are approaching out fiftieth year of marriage. It will be on the ninetieth of December. I am also working on the fiftieth year class reunion of Berry. It will be next May. I’m a co-chairmen to raise funds on a project there at Berry.
Me: What is your favorite memory with your parents?
Pawpaw: My daddy taught me how to use guns and to hunt. I didn’t do any hunting after about age twenty but we’d go and hunt and fish. My dad loved to do that. I guess my favorite times with him were him taking me hunting and fishing. My favorite times with mother probably happened later when we got to travel with her and we went out to Texas to see a lot of the Keith cousins and there was big reunion out there. My sister, my brother-in-law, your Gran and Pawpaw, Grandmother Keith… we all went out there on a trip. That was one of the high points with her because she was in pretty good health then and we enjoyed visiting with the family. That was probably one of the favorite times with her. Of course, we kept her about four or five years. She came to live with us because she has a lot of physical problems.
Me: What is one of your favorite things about Alabama?
Pawpaw: The Alabama football team, I guess. It is where your brother goes, so that is one of them. North Alabama is a beautiful place with rivers and lakes and that is one of my favorite things about Alabama. Alabama has a variety. You can drive to the coast. We’ve got beaches, we’ve got mountains, and we’ve got quite a lot of variety. It’s a beautiful state in a lot of ways.
Me: What was your graduate work like?
Pawpaw: I got a master’s degree from the University of Alabama-Huntsville in 1974. I was a student of the University of Alabama-Huntsville, off-campus when your mother was a baby. I was working on physics and they wanted me to go to Washington DC and get a masters in metrology, measurement science. I got out of the program at UAH and flew down to George Washington University. Then we had a big reduction of course and the money went away, so later, when I went back to UAH, I took courses in administrative science and I got a masters called MAS, masters with administrative sciences. Sort of an MBA, just with a different name. At the time there was another school here, it was a black university that had an MBA, so they didn’t want to support on that. In the years that I graduated they named it UAH, University of Alabama-Huntsville. That was in 1974.
Me: Are there any traditions you can think of that our family has passed down over the years?
Pawpaw: We have a tradition of sharing our Christmas time together. If you look back, a lot of our family photographs are usually at Christmas at our house here or your house for Thanksgiving. I guess those traditions. Before your mother came along, we did this of course with our parents. We had a Christmas over there, so like a lot of families, we met on the holidays. We have a strong religious upbringing as well, like going to church. Your great granddaddy was a preacher and your grandmother grew up going to church. We have had a real strong Christian background thankfully. Your grandmother has a sort of tradition now of having a Moore reunion every year, and we have done that for three years now. Y’all were at the first one of those.
Me: Can you tell me a bit more about your trips up to New Jersey, when I lived there?
Pawpaw: We would see you in New Jersey and go to Macy’s Parade when you were little. You’ve talked about that in what you’ve written. Those were great times for us. It would take half a day to drive there though! We got there one time and had a twenty-four inch snow. I don’t know if you remember that or not. We had a new car, a van, then, and it looked like a big snowball out in your parking lot. You had a basketball goal there and I enjoyed dunking the ball, since I played college basketball.
Me: Can you tell me a little bit more about the Clan Keith Society and your interest in ancestry?
Pawpaw: I took a DNA test. It has been quite interesting. There is a program called family tree DNA where you take two little vials and swab the inside of your cheek and they process it and start telling you, this is called a Y-DNA. This is for men because it traces back to your males ancestors. It tells you who your later family members were. I’ve gotten a bunch of names, mostly from Ireland and Scotland. More from Southern Ireland. Daniel Keith we think was born around 1737 or so. He came over here and got married in 1751 to Elizabeth Liddell, they pronounce it in Scotland “Little”. They moved to South Carolina and later Tennessee and we know where he is buried. It is Winchester, Tennessee, in a grave site by a little church. Going further back than him, it is written down someplace, but I don’t agree anymore with some of what we used to claim. Supposedly Daniel’s dad was Alexander and his mother was Dellie, but that’s all I really know about Alexander. We are trying to use the DNA to solve some of the issues about our ancestors. I’m still learning a lot. I’ve got all these names. People will send me a note and we will try and figure out why there are so many different surnames. The good thing about it is my second cousin Charles lives in Texas. He is about twenty years older than me. I know he is a second cousin. He participated in the test. We were able to use that to verify how accurate the names are. I will have to bring a list over Thanksgiving break to show you. We did have a famous Keith that just died. His name was Bill Keith and he was a great banjo player. They sometimes called him Brad. His full name was William Bradford Keith. He played for Bill Monroe and several bands. He wrote “How to Play Banjo” and was in a special Kin and Keith issue. All of that has been quite interesting to be involved in the society.
Me: Thank you for sharing with me!
Pawpaw: You’re welcome! If you ever need anymore information, just call us, or shoot me an email.
M y grandfather serves as a breath-taking tradition-bearer. He loves to learn more about the family, and when conducting the interview, he made this very apparent by his lengthy answers. Even though this oral history took a while to type, it gave me a chance to find out more than I have ever known before, and better understand all my family has overcome. I think Pawpaw did a great job explaining relationship dynamics from his childhood to present. Even though many families do not talk as much nowadays, the interview shows how my family has stayed very close together. A challenge I faced during the project involved asking questions. My grandfather loves to talk; therefore, I ended up with only a few questions answered, and tremendously long responses. The next oral history interview I conduct, I will make sure to introduce more topics and questions. This project has inspired me to look further into the ways of reaching success. My grandfather started off with very little and has aspired into a well-to-do physicist. He went from catching bumblebees to catching butterflies.
It has also taught me the importance of education and academics for furthering one’s climb to the top. If I were the tradition-bearer, I would make sure to tell stories of my academic achievement like my grandfather did, as well as include exciting stories that may not mean anything to outsiders, but that hold a great deal of joy to my family. Even the random and seemingly mundane tasks could one day could show great insight to history, so I will continue to look at everything with an open eye.
