Cec got crosswise with the phone company. He didn’t like the way they did what they wanted, when they wanted. The phones never worked right. The phones hummed, crackled or didn’t work at all.

When he couldn’t get any satisfaction out of them on an issue it made him mad. So he went up the highway, I think by the Bowles Place where the big phone cable came out of the ground and went overhead where it had been to rocky to trench. He took a hypodermic needle (probably the one he shot my toes up with to cut out my ingrown toenails) and injected some kind of corrosive acid in the cable. If know him, he poked that cable several times.

It played all kinds of Ole Billy Hell with that cable and the phones all the way down through Smithwick. They messed with it for months trying to isolate the problem. I think they finally had to cutout and splice a long section of cable in to get rid of the problem.

“By Gawd, I taught em a lesson”. He swore up and down that once they fixed the problem with that cable, that they took better care of the Smithwick customers after that.

He kind of prided himself on being a crusader.