Daddy Fox and Devil's Elbow

Daddy Fox - 1962

The call came at about midnight.  I was still awake because it was Friday night and I knew that Dad would be in my room soon enough.  It was his habit to start drinking as soon as he got home from work. Scotch was the drink and he could well afford it as he held a high office in state government and made excellent money for the time. I would go to bed about 11:00 and pretend to be asleep, dreading the bedroom door opening and my dad shaking me to wake up. He would turn back toward the living room knowing that I would follow and take my place in the overstuffed chair next to the couch.  I was expected to just listen to his drunken rambling, nod my head and not comment…and then the phone rang. Dad took the call in the kitchen which was right off the living room.

We lived in a small 3-bedroom brick rambler with one bathroom, a fair sized kitchen, laundry room, and a living room with the typical 60s picture window overlooking our large front yard. A carport and a long driveway completed the picture. Most notably the once white curtains and walls were now a sickly yellow from the multiple packs of cigarettes my parents smoked each day.

But I digress as the phone call was still a mystery and I listened intently to my Dad’s part of the conversation. He hung up the phone and seeming to sober up a bit as he stuck his head back into the living room.

“That was Daddy Fox on the phone. He’s been in a car accident and is not hurt but Roxie is missing and the Sheriff is out looking for her.”

Now, to be clear Roxie Burchett was Daddy Fox's "common law" wife. In Kentucky if you lived with a woman for more than 7 years she was legally declared your wife. She worshipped Daddy Fox and proved to be a wonderful grandmother to me. My "real" grandmother, Mama Fox, had died when I was about 6.

From what I could gather Daddy Fox had just pitched Miz Burchett over a cliff and was calling from a bar in a nearby town off Route 41. We lived in Frankfort, Kentucky and Daddy Fox and Miz Burchett lived in Guthrie, Kentucky, about 200 miles away.  This was in the 60s, before the big interstates crisscrossed the South, and the typical route from Daddy Fox’s house to ours was on rural highways through small towns where bright neon signs advertised vacancies in the hotels, and road food was still great. 

On our family trips to Guthrie we always stopped at the Wigwam, a huge white stucco wigwam surrounded by smaller white teepees that served as motel rooms. The big wigwam was the restaurant and was warm and inviting with wonderful smells of hamburgers and French fries. You could rent a teepee from a small office in the back. As you walked in the front doors you immediately looked for vacant seats around a huge circular counter. In the middle were all the cooktops, fryers, and food prep tables. On the circular walls of the wigwam were Indian artifacts including colorful headdresses, bows, arrows, leather outfits, moccasins, spears and pictures and paintings of the old west. This place was magical to a child and I loved that we stopped there on the way to Daddy Fox's house. I always got a cheeseburger, fries, and a vanilla coke. It was heaven!

To get to us in Frankfort Daddy Fox had to negotiate several roads that curved through the mountains of Kentucky and the most treacherous was Devil’s Elbow.  So named because as you climbed higher and higher and your ears started to pop, baby curves led to daddy curves ending in the Mother of all curves, Devil’s Elbow.  With high cliff walls on one side and a steep drop-off protected by puny guard rails on the other, you took this curve very slowly in daylight and not at all at night if you did not have to be on the road.  The drop-off was not sheer but rolled down a steep embankment to a creek bed several hundred feet below.  Trees lined the hillside and any car or truck that was unlucky enough to run off the road would usually stop up against a tree not too far from the roadbed.

On this night Daddy Fox had called my Dad earlier in the evening and proclaimed, “I’m coming to visit and bringing Roxie.” This was typical behavior for my grandfather as he never did anything with a lot of planning. 

A railroad man in his youth he had discovered that bootlegging held more promise than losing body parts to train couplings.  He started small, running liquor from wet counties to dry counties in Southern Kentucky.  But soon he enlisted the help of his two sons and the business grew.  Over time it was clear that Daddy Fox had to find more legitimate ways to earn a living, so he started buying gas stations with small motels off to one side.  As his little kingdom grew, he became very well known in and around Guthrie, making more money and more friends, while staying true to a rather simple life.  Other than a new Cadillac each year he did not live extravagantly or spend money to show off. 

At 6’4” with broad shoulders and huge arms my grandfather did not have to say a word to make heads turn when he walked into a room. I remember a great shock of gray hair and a booming laugh and rough whiskers when he would pick me up and give me a big hug on visits to Frankfort. Even when I was a teenager and went to work for him in the summer, he would still give me a big hug. And so on this night it was not unusual to hear that Daddy Fox was coming to town with Roxie Burchett in tow, driving a big caddy with fifth of Heaven Hill liquor under the front driver’s seat and his arm around his honey sitting in the middle. He liked her next to him and of course no seat belts.

My grandfather was inappropriate, rude, loud, sexist, and loved to tell jokes and stories that would shock. It was his huge personality and his love of life that made him who he was, and he never apologized for it. He was my grandfather and I loved him dearly.

Miz Burchett could have been on a poster for your typical grandmother. At a little over 5 feet tall she was a very plump woman who probably tipped the scales as well over 250 pounds.  When she laughed she jiggled all over and I remember trying my best to make her laugh all the time.  She had very large breasts held in place by a magnificent bra that I would catch a glimpse of in the laundry basket on washdays.  I marveled at what was stored in that bra when Miz Burchett sat down on the couch to smoke and watch tv.  Out came cigarettes and a lighter and if I asked for money a small change purse was stored there too. 

A fantastic cook, Miz Burchett would get up at 5 am each morning and cook a huge Southern breakfast, complete with eggs, bacon, grits, biscuits and plenty of white bacon gravy with lots of black pepper.  Her dinners were just as grand with lots of fresh vegetables in the summer and a ham or turkey or fried chicken.  Daddy Fox loved to eat but mostly he loved to eat Roxie’s food and he always finished off each dinner with a dessert of white bread and “sweet” milk.  Regular milk was called sweet as opposed to buttermilk. He would dip the bread in the milk and eat it without his dentures. Strange but it must have felt good to lose the teeth and gum the soggy bread.

After the call my Dad walked down the short hallway and called to my mother, “Virginia, come here, Daddy has run off the road and Roxie is missing.”  My Dad was pretty shaken up and my mom started making coffee.

They found Miz Burchett about 3:30 in the morning. Daddy Fox was able to show the Sheriff the damaged guard rail and the search party went straight down the hill and found her up against a tree about a third of the way down the hillside.  From the skid marks and metal and glass on the road they determined that Daddy Fox must have been going way too fast for Devil’s Elbow and struck the guard rail on the right side of the road. He jerked the steering wheel to the left and careened to the other side of the road hitting the cliff face. When he jerked the wheel to the left this forced Miz Burchett to fly across the big Cadillac seat and hit the passenger side door. It seems the impact with the guard rail had damaged the whole side of the car including the door that Miz Burchett hit with her substantial weight. The door burst open and Miz Burchett flew over the guardrail and down the hillside, apparently missing most of the trees along the way.

Did she survive?

Yes, she was bruised from head to toe and did not cook those lovely breakfasts for sometime. But she outlived Daddy Fox.