Our parents made us aware of danger by telling us the consequences of what would happen if we got to close to something that might hurt us. One was that if you got too close to a Snapping Turtle, it would bite you and not turn loose until lightning struck.

That was the case with Cec, when he got in a fight. Ronnie found that out when he embattled Cec and literally pulled his top front two teeth out trying to get his thumb out of his mouth. Dad operated a fishing camp on the family land he had inherited from his father along the banks of Lake Travis just above the “Narrows Bluff”. He employed Jack and Hazel Lackey to live on the premises and collect camp site fees. They in turn had a son named John, who managed to work his way into the picture. John wasn’t the most industrious individual and had a tendency to drink too much. One day Dad drove into the fishing camp to find John beating up his father, a man in his later years that weighed at most 120 lbs. Certainly not being one to hesitate he took up Jack’s position in the fight. My understanding is that there was a lot of rolling around on the ground. Where at some point John’s nose ended up in Cec’s mouth.

Ronnie pulling his top two teeth out while retrieving his thumb, sounds painful enough. Can you imagine the pain involved when John Lackey in order to get his nose back, pulled the bottom two teeth out. The next day they drove over to my house as if nothing had happened. Cec’s bottom two teeth dangling and Johnny’s nose swollen, with huge teeth imprints and the color of a corps after the embalming process.