Thanks to Pencil Stubs for helping me share a bit about my grandfather, a man who has largely been forgotten in this world but who was so much more that most people realized at the time. He was named for a popular Mississippi Governor, James Kellum Vardeman.

Consider the time he lived and something I didn't put into the story was that when my mother was a little girl a logging truck side swiped him against the side of the road and broke his legs in many places. He spent almost a whole year in a body cast and was extremely handicapped afterwards. His legs were never straight but he worked and farmed. Perhaps that and his horrible smoking habit of at least two packs of unfiltered Camels a day since he had been 11, caused his early death at age 59. Life was so different when he was young. He was a trained welder during the war because he couldn't fight because of the accident. He built ships in the the Gulf Shipyards. It is the only time he wasn't a farmer.