Elmer Lloyd Rhoades was a quiet man, shy, hard-working and honest. He was born in Plummerville, Arkansas in 1911, second son of five boys to a poor sharecropper. He was picking cotton by the age of five, filling a sack three times his size that he pulled behind him. He achieved a third grade education and was probably lucky to get that much. His father died when he was five, leaving his Mother with four boys and pregnant with a fifth! Those must have been hard years. Daddy never talked much about them, but once he told me that there were times when all they had to eat were peanut shells...
      When his mother remarried, the family moved to Oklahoma and eked out a living until the dust bowl years, when they lost everything — what little that must have been. By then Daddy was grown and had discovered that he could fix automobiles. He was better off now, and when his family joined that great migration to California that John Steinbeck described so graphically in The Grapes of Wrath, Lloyd stayed in Clarendon, Texas. It was lucky for him that he did, because when his family got to California, they were no better off than they had been in Oklahoma...
      Daddy was never afraid of hard work, and that philosophy sustained him through the years. By the time I was born, we were fairly well off. Daddy owned a radiator shop and was quite successful. I never knew the poverty he had endured, and he was never one to say, "When I was a boy..."
      Daddy had lost all his teeth early in life. This was probably due to malnutrition he had suffered as a young child. In the evenings sometimes he would push his false teeth in and out of his mouth, much to the amusement of his grandchildren. "Push your teeth out, Grandpa," they would encourage. He would act like he didn’t know what they were talking about, teasing them until their imploring voices reached a fever pitch. Then he would push his lower plate out and they would all screech with delight.
      The funniest thing that ever happened to Daddy involved those magical teeth. He loved fishing, and he often loaded a small boat into the bed of the pick-up and disappeared for a Saturday. Upon his return from one of these trips, he came into the house and opened his hand to present my Mother with his lower dental plate — broken into about 8 pieces. "My Lord, Lloyd, what happened?" she exclaimed.
      In his quiet, deadpan way, he said, "Well, it’s like this..."
      Janice and I stifled laughter as Daddy explained. As it turned out, he often took the plate out when it bothered him. This day, after fishing, he had loaded the boat into the truck, gotten in and put his teeth in his lap. He hadn’t gone far when he felt like the boat wasn’t secure, so he stopped and got out — forgetting the teeth. Once the boat was secure, he got back into the cab and started to roll away when he realized his teeth were not in his mouth. Too late...he had already driven over them.