It was years ago when my grandfather caught a big fish right here in Harper Lake. Grandpa and his friend Millwood Tucker was up early that morning and went down to the lake which was right behind grandpa's house. He built that house back in eighteen hundred something when he come here from up north. He took a job with the Illinois Central Railroad as a call boy. A call boy, who was usually a boy, would get on his bicycle and ride over to an engineer's house when he was due to go out on a run. There wasn't a lot of telephones back then, doncha know. Grandpa went on to be what they call a fireman, who shoveled coal into the furnace to run a train. Eventually, he became an engineer, who is the fellow who drives the train. Yep, grandpa started out as a call boy.
Millwood and was down at the lake getting their boat ready to go out and catch some supper. Millwood. Millwood Tucker. He was from over around Natchez on the Mississippi River somewheres, so you can just guess he was expert at all kinds of fishing. And he and my grandpa took that boat right out in the middle of the water. Now, the town of Harper runs all around the lake now, but back then there wasn't too many people living in Harper. But most was real characters. We still got a bunch of characters in Harper. But not as many as they got in that town in the next county. The one that used to have a railroad shops. Once I heard a fellow say that all that town needed to qualify as an asylum was to have a ten foot wall built around it. I disagree. I think the wall should be at least twenty feet.
Tomorrow, I'll try to get back to that catfish.
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