My Colorful Uncles ~by Jeff Tryon
B
oth of my parents were born at the tail end of large families, so when I was growing up I had scads of aunts and uncles on both sides. Uncle Bud was the oldest of Mammy’s 12 children, and after her husband, my grandfather, Robert Jordan “Jerd” Arnold died at the age of 56 in 1931, it was Bud that moved the family from northern Alabama to Brown County. You may have been driving down Spearsville road and seen a handmade sign proclaiming
drawings by Joe Lee
that you are passing through “Arnoldville.” This is where all of those Arnolds come from. We speculate that Uncle Bud had an economic survival plan, to move the family north so that all of the older boys could find work in industrial jobs in Indianapolis. But there was no way he was going to get Mammy to move out of “The Holler,” ensconced in the beautiful foothills of the Appalachians and to a big northern city. He must have struck upon Brown County because the hilly terrain somewhat resembled those fondly-remembered mountains of northeastern Alabama. Also, land was dirt cheap. So the older boys worked in factories and workshops in Indianapolis and the unmarried girls and younger children lived in Brown County. Maybe it was a sign of their generation, or a sign of the times, but the women in the family all appear to have been good and sweet and nice on the order of everyday saintliness, but the men were all wheeler-dealers, hellraisers and—well, let’s just say
54 Our Brown County May/June 2021
they were “colorful.” We have an old newspaper clipping describing the escapades and eventual arrest of two of my uncles after they made a wrong turn on to a railroad track, and apparently drove several miles before they discovered their mistake, which is what made the item newsworthy. Alcohol may have been involved. Uncle Bud had a plating shop in Indy, electroplating chrome bumpers and so forth. This was back in the day, a long time before OSHA, the EPA or, really, common sense. At some point Uncle Hugh put the wrong chemical in the vat where the items were dipped, and everybody was lucky to escape the building before the ensuing explosion. I’ll bet there’s a clipping about that one, too. Uncle Will had a framed newspaper clipping on his wall from the front page of the Indianapolis Star. It is a photo of the state capitol dome, showing a man suspended by a rope, sitting on a board, painting the dome with a brush. An inset close-up shows the man, Uncle Will, dangling from the board
