June Galford turns 100
Posted: Sun Mar 08, 2009 10:48 am
This is a story from the Pocahontis W.V. Times about a great bearhunter and field trialer named June Galford. He was famouse for his light colored Redbone hounds which won many of a bear field trial in WV in years past. Happy 100 , Mr Galford.
Hundred-year-old June Galford relives his past
June Galford celebrated is 100th birthday February 26 with friends and family at his home in Dunmore. S. Stewart photo
Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
On the day before his 100th birthday, Dunmore resident June Galford entertained guests with stories about his life. The hunting, the logging, the moonshine, nothing was off limits.
Sitting in the parlor of his home, Galford, with assistance from his nurse Juanita Mace, unraveled the tales from his past.
“He was born in this house,” Mace said. “Their house was up on the hill by a pear tree and they brought his mom down on a sled to have him here.”
The house Galford was born in and still lives in today was built by his father, John, over a 10-year span. The house doesn’t have indoor plumbing, only cold water running to the kitchen sink.
Hunting is a subject that really gets Galford going.
“I’ve been a hunter ever since I could walk,” he said. “I’ve hunted everything, but I like to bear hunt more than anything.
Galford would skip school to go hunting with friends.
“I didn’t like to go to school, which was an awful mistake,” he remembered. “There’s a family, the Hoovers, they had a couple hounds and I would go hunting with them. At night, I’d slip off and go down there. There’s a tree down behind the house, I’d shinny up that tree, I wouldn’t let them (my parents) know what time I would come home. They wouldn’t know what time I would come in, I’d just climb up that tree and climb in the window,” he said with a chuckle.
“I was a fox chaser, I loved to fox chase,” he said. “My hounds would run a fox all night and when daylight would come, I’d get my gun and go down and try to kill it. Me and my hounds had a time; from that day on I just kept getting hounds and dogs. I had ten or twelve at one time.”
Galford turned to bear hunting when Arch Galford started having problems with bear killing his sheep.
“I says, ‘Arch, why don’t you give us and these fox hounds a chance at that bear,’ and he said, ‘Holy bullheaded June, I’m afraid your dogs won’t know what to do,’” Galford recalled.
Although Galford never got a chance to try using his fox hounds to save the sheep, he did get bitten by the bear hunting bug.
“From that day on, I started with the fox hounds, running bear. They were better than the bear dogs,” he said.
“I loved to bear hunt. I laid in the middle of the night on the ground in the mountain waiting for my hounds to come in,” Galford continued. “I’d get in place where, they’d ask me if I ever got lost and I’d say no, but the path was in the wrong places a lot of times.”
Galford has killed 40 bears in his lifetime of hunting. At one point, he participated in UKC hunts, with his prize winning dog Bone Crusher.
After passing the sixth grade, Galford decided to quit school.
“I was promoted to the seventh grade, but I never went back,” he said. “I hated awful I did that.”
Galford attended Dunmore Grade School, where the Dunmore Community Building is located. The school had two classrooms. When he quit, Galford entered the workforce by his dad’s side.
“When I quit going to school, I was fifteen. My dad worked away all the time, he worked at camp,” Galford said. “One Saturday evening he came home, the next morning he said, ‘June come over here and sit down, I want to talk to you.’ He says, ‘You go out this weekend and get a hat, you’re going with me next Sunday evening.’
“I finally found me a little old thing, it bent down over your ears, it wasn’t much of a hat, but it was a hat,” he continued. “At the camp over there, Ben Campbell’s lumber company, you just go in and sit on a bench, you don’t ask them for a job. If they want you, they’ll come tell you. Well, I went over there on a Sunday evening with Dad. The next morning, Dad told me, go sit on that bench now. I didn’t know a thing about it. Ben Campbell was the man that ran the camp. He said, ‘Young man, you go with your dad today.’
“My dad was a buck swamper and a road monkey man,” Galford explained. “A buck swamper was the man, he would go up the road, up through the woods and clean the road up so the timber could come through. Then a road monkey, they’d cut little timbers and lay them across the road where there was wet places and the logs would haul better. That was the best job in the woods, but I didn’t like it.”
Galford worked with his dad off and on, taking time off to hunt. He worked for Ben Campbell until 1936.
“In ’36, Glen Galford had a sawmill and a bunch of timber over in Laurel Fork in Virginia and me and Winifred Sheets went cutting logs for him. Worked all summer, I did, cutting logs and Dad wanted me to come home,” Galford explained. “He was no farmer. He wanted to work away all the time, which I don’t blame him, but he said he didn’t like running the farm. He wanted me to come home and run the farm. I didn’t think he was running it right, I was just a young pup, I didn’t have sense, but I said I wasn’t running it unless I had a say on how to run it.
“I told him the first thing I would do is take that plow and put it in the shed and leave it there,” he said. “He asked what I was going to do for farming and I said I will not plow another sod as long as I live. It’ll come to rain and down the hollar it’ll go, it’ll just ‘warsh’ away.
“He said you’ll never make it and I said we’ll all starve together,” he said laughing.
The Galfords did make it and continued to farm the way June chose to farm. At one point, he had a herd of 40 cows, until then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower said all the cows had Bang’s Disease and ordered farmers to have all the cows killed.
“Just thousands and thousands of cows he killed and sold, he was getting the big price and farmers were getting about $30 a head,” Galford remembered. “That proved to be a fraud in the government. Of course, Eisenhower was a good man, but he did a devil of a thing there. I never did get my herd back after that.”
With all the experiences June Galford has had in life, he finds the humor in all of it. Whenever he starts telling stories, knee slapping is sure to follow, along with some hearty chuckles and tears of laughter.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked the gathering at his home.
“I seen one one time. I was coming up the hollar down here and was running around in the middle of the night. I had some shine in me and the stars were shining bright. I see this big white thing in front of me, it looked five or six feet tall. I thought ‘there’s a ghost, it must be the one they were telling me about.’
“I was near a rock pile and couldn’t reach the ground. I was trying to get a rock to hit it but, I couldn’t reach it,” he continued, breaking to have a fit of laughter every few moments. “I raised back up and thought I better be running. I turned around, I ran up to the house. I said there ain’t no ghost and I never will believe in it. I turned right around and walked up there, what do you reckon it was?”
A moment of silence filled the room as everyone pondered what the ghost could have been.
“It was an old white-faced cow, chewing her cud and I thought there was chains and everything around it. When I turned around, my pants legs were wet down to my shoes,” he gasped between loud giggles.
Everyone in the room was doubled over at the thought of mistaking a cow for a ghost.
Mace remembered a tale when Galford asked her to go “coon hunting” with him.
“The dogs treed the coon, but he only had about three or four shells with him and he couldn’t hit the coon,” she said. “He told me to keep the coon up in the tree, keep the dogs on it and he could go back to the house to get some shells. So, I’m standing there. I waited and waited and waited.
“He walked down through the woods and seen a gallon of white lighting that he had hid. He had to drink about half of it before he could come back to me,” she laughed. “By the time he got back, I didn’t know where the coon was, the dogs went over on the other side of the hill; I left to find the dogs and he couldn’t find me. He kept hollering and I was shining my light to show him where I was at, but he couldn’t hear me or see me.”
Galford wasn’t just all about hunting and moonshine though. He also enjoyed going to square dances and platform dances.
“I loved to go to them,” he said. “I stomped around like the rest of them were doing and fall over people. At square dances, you didn’t have to be good dancers.”
Galford remembers the first platform dance he ever attended. He had no idea what was in store for him that night.
“I wasn’t much more than that high,” he said, holding his hand about three feet above the floor. “An old man came down through there with a sack across his back. I didn’t know where he was going or anything, but there was a platform dance. I wondered what that was and my brother didn’t want me to go and I went anyway.
“Well, I went over and seen so much happening, I had to stay and watch them,” he continued with a chuckle. “Everybody was drinking, that man had a two gallon bottle of moonshine in his sack. He was saying, ‘do you want a drink of some strong pop?’ I didn’t know what it was. He would reach in there and pull that stuff out and my gracious sakes alive, I never seen such a mess anywhere.
“That’s the first time I ever seen a woman drunk,” he continued. “There was an old woman, her name was Nanny Williams, playing the fiddle. She was in a corner and I just kept squeezing to get in behind her, to get in there to keep from getting killed. It was dark and I was afraid to come home. I just stayed in the corner until daylight. When daylight come, I never stopped running.
“I said if dances are like that, I’ll never go to another,” he laughed. “I’d never seen such a drunken outfit in my life.”
Looking back on his 100 years in Pocahontas County, June Galford only has one wish.
“I wish I had a lot of those days to go through again,” he said.
Although Galford has slowed down, he is still a large part of the community. In 2005, he was crowned king of Dunmore Daze and followed that with a victorious round of horseshoe pitching the next year.
As he reflects on his life, Galford sees turning 100 as a new beginning.
“After tomorrow, I start back over at one,” he said.
Hundred-year-old June Galford relives his past
June Galford celebrated is 100th birthday February 26 with friends and family at his home in Dunmore. S. Stewart photo
Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
On the day before his 100th birthday, Dunmore resident June Galford entertained guests with stories about his life. The hunting, the logging, the moonshine, nothing was off limits.
Sitting in the parlor of his home, Galford, with assistance from his nurse Juanita Mace, unraveled the tales from his past.
“He was born in this house,” Mace said. “Their house was up on the hill by a pear tree and they brought his mom down on a sled to have him here.”
The house Galford was born in and still lives in today was built by his father, John, over a 10-year span. The house doesn’t have indoor plumbing, only cold water running to the kitchen sink.
Hunting is a subject that really gets Galford going.
“I’ve been a hunter ever since I could walk,” he said. “I’ve hunted everything, but I like to bear hunt more than anything.
Galford would skip school to go hunting with friends.
“I didn’t like to go to school, which was an awful mistake,” he remembered. “There’s a family, the Hoovers, they had a couple hounds and I would go hunting with them. At night, I’d slip off and go down there. There’s a tree down behind the house, I’d shinny up that tree, I wouldn’t let them (my parents) know what time I would come home. They wouldn’t know what time I would come in, I’d just climb up that tree and climb in the window,” he said with a chuckle.
“I was a fox chaser, I loved to fox chase,” he said. “My hounds would run a fox all night and when daylight would come, I’d get my gun and go down and try to kill it. Me and my hounds had a time; from that day on I just kept getting hounds and dogs. I had ten or twelve at one time.”
Galford turned to bear hunting when Arch Galford started having problems with bear killing his sheep.
“I says, ‘Arch, why don’t you give us and these fox hounds a chance at that bear,’ and he said, ‘Holy bullheaded June, I’m afraid your dogs won’t know what to do,’” Galford recalled.
Although Galford never got a chance to try using his fox hounds to save the sheep, he did get bitten by the bear hunting bug.
“From that day on, I started with the fox hounds, running bear. They were better than the bear dogs,” he said.
“I loved to bear hunt. I laid in the middle of the night on the ground in the mountain waiting for my hounds to come in,” Galford continued. “I’d get in place where, they’d ask me if I ever got lost and I’d say no, but the path was in the wrong places a lot of times.”
Galford has killed 40 bears in his lifetime of hunting. At one point, he participated in UKC hunts, with his prize winning dog Bone Crusher.
After passing the sixth grade, Galford decided to quit school.
“I was promoted to the seventh grade, but I never went back,” he said. “I hated awful I did that.”
Galford attended Dunmore Grade School, where the Dunmore Community Building is located. The school had two classrooms. When he quit, Galford entered the workforce by his dad’s side.
“When I quit going to school, I was fifteen. My dad worked away all the time, he worked at camp,” Galford said. “One Saturday evening he came home, the next morning he said, ‘June come over here and sit down, I want to talk to you.’ He says, ‘You go out this weekend and get a hat, you’re going with me next Sunday evening.’
“I finally found me a little old thing, it bent down over your ears, it wasn’t much of a hat, but it was a hat,” he continued. “At the camp over there, Ben Campbell’s lumber company, you just go in and sit on a bench, you don’t ask them for a job. If they want you, they’ll come tell you. Well, I went over there on a Sunday evening with Dad. The next morning, Dad told me, go sit on that bench now. I didn’t know a thing about it. Ben Campbell was the man that ran the camp. He said, ‘Young man, you go with your dad today.’
“My dad was a buck swamper and a road monkey man,” Galford explained. “A buck swamper was the man, he would go up the road, up through the woods and clean the road up so the timber could come through. Then a road monkey, they’d cut little timbers and lay them across the road where there was wet places and the logs would haul better. That was the best job in the woods, but I didn’t like it.”
Galford worked with his dad off and on, taking time off to hunt. He worked for Ben Campbell until 1936.
“In ’36, Glen Galford had a sawmill and a bunch of timber over in Laurel Fork in Virginia and me and Winifred Sheets went cutting logs for him. Worked all summer, I did, cutting logs and Dad wanted me to come home,” Galford explained. “He was no farmer. He wanted to work away all the time, which I don’t blame him, but he said he didn’t like running the farm. He wanted me to come home and run the farm. I didn’t think he was running it right, I was just a young pup, I didn’t have sense, but I said I wasn’t running it unless I had a say on how to run it.
“I told him the first thing I would do is take that plow and put it in the shed and leave it there,” he said. “He asked what I was going to do for farming and I said I will not plow another sod as long as I live. It’ll come to rain and down the hollar it’ll go, it’ll just ‘warsh’ away.
“He said you’ll never make it and I said we’ll all starve together,” he said laughing.
The Galfords did make it and continued to farm the way June chose to farm. At one point, he had a herd of 40 cows, until then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower said all the cows had Bang’s Disease and ordered farmers to have all the cows killed.
“Just thousands and thousands of cows he killed and sold, he was getting the big price and farmers were getting about $30 a head,” Galford remembered. “That proved to be a fraud in the government. Of course, Eisenhower was a good man, but he did a devil of a thing there. I never did get my herd back after that.”
With all the experiences June Galford has had in life, he finds the humor in all of it. Whenever he starts telling stories, knee slapping is sure to follow, along with some hearty chuckles and tears of laughter.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked the gathering at his home.
“I seen one one time. I was coming up the hollar down here and was running around in the middle of the night. I had some shine in me and the stars were shining bright. I see this big white thing in front of me, it looked five or six feet tall. I thought ‘there’s a ghost, it must be the one they were telling me about.’
“I was near a rock pile and couldn’t reach the ground. I was trying to get a rock to hit it but, I couldn’t reach it,” he continued, breaking to have a fit of laughter every few moments. “I raised back up and thought I better be running. I turned around, I ran up to the house. I said there ain’t no ghost and I never will believe in it. I turned right around and walked up there, what do you reckon it was?”
A moment of silence filled the room as everyone pondered what the ghost could have been.
“It was an old white-faced cow, chewing her cud and I thought there was chains and everything around it. When I turned around, my pants legs were wet down to my shoes,” he gasped between loud giggles.
Everyone in the room was doubled over at the thought of mistaking a cow for a ghost.
Mace remembered a tale when Galford asked her to go “coon hunting” with him.
“The dogs treed the coon, but he only had about three or four shells with him and he couldn’t hit the coon,” she said. “He told me to keep the coon up in the tree, keep the dogs on it and he could go back to the house to get some shells. So, I’m standing there. I waited and waited and waited.
“He walked down through the woods and seen a gallon of white lighting that he had hid. He had to drink about half of it before he could come back to me,” she laughed. “By the time he got back, I didn’t know where the coon was, the dogs went over on the other side of the hill; I left to find the dogs and he couldn’t find me. He kept hollering and I was shining my light to show him where I was at, but he couldn’t hear me or see me.”
Galford wasn’t just all about hunting and moonshine though. He also enjoyed going to square dances and platform dances.
“I loved to go to them,” he said. “I stomped around like the rest of them were doing and fall over people. At square dances, you didn’t have to be good dancers.”
Galford remembers the first platform dance he ever attended. He had no idea what was in store for him that night.
“I wasn’t much more than that high,” he said, holding his hand about three feet above the floor. “An old man came down through there with a sack across his back. I didn’t know where he was going or anything, but there was a platform dance. I wondered what that was and my brother didn’t want me to go and I went anyway.
“Well, I went over and seen so much happening, I had to stay and watch them,” he continued with a chuckle. “Everybody was drinking, that man had a two gallon bottle of moonshine in his sack. He was saying, ‘do you want a drink of some strong pop?’ I didn’t know what it was. He would reach in there and pull that stuff out and my gracious sakes alive, I never seen such a mess anywhere.
“That’s the first time I ever seen a woman drunk,” he continued. “There was an old woman, her name was Nanny Williams, playing the fiddle. She was in a corner and I just kept squeezing to get in behind her, to get in there to keep from getting killed. It was dark and I was afraid to come home. I just stayed in the corner until daylight. When daylight come, I never stopped running.
“I said if dances are like that, I’ll never go to another,” he laughed. “I’d never seen such a drunken outfit in my life.”
Looking back on his 100 years in Pocahontas County, June Galford only has one wish.
“I wish I had a lot of those days to go through again,” he said.
Although Galford has slowed down, he is still a large part of the community. In 2005, he was crowned king of Dunmore Daze and followed that with a victorious round of horseshoe pitching the next year.
As he reflects on his life, Galford sees turning 100 as a new beginning.
“After tomorrow, I start back over at one,” he said.
