Mary Jane (Wheat) Plemons
I've told this story many times, but here goes one more time. I grew up in Mabank, Texas, just as Tom B. did. He was a little older than I, but I knew him, his parents, his sister, his aunt and uncle, all. We bought our groceries and dry goods from the store his parents and uncle and aunt owned, and where Tom B. worked at times, and later, when my parents opened a grocery and market across the street, we were friendly rivals, often borrowing items from each other when a customer wanted something one of us was out of. His mother was my Sunday School teacher when I was a little girl and told us about when his dad was a POW in World War II.
However, my story concerns a summer in the 1950's, when my daddy was still a full-time farmer and was doing hay baling for the public. He had built a skid to pull behind his square-bale baler, and Tom B. rode the skid and stacked the bales as they came out of the baler. Every so often, Daddy would stop and they would slide the stacks of bales off, and the haul truck picked them up and took them to the barn. One day, in a big hay meadow, Daddy unknowingly ran the baler over a bumble bee nest in the ground, and about the time the skid ran over it, bees boiled out. Daddy said he looked back just in time to see Tom B., running at full speed, over the hill, as he jumped in a tank!