Porter Coats was a tough old bird. If Josie hadn't been tought like, she couldn't have made it with him. Porter got the idea that his son Lawrence was the only guy who could run that big old tractor used with the thrasher machine and he always wanted him there every summer to put in the wheat. Well, Lawrence had different jobs, he would work until payday and there was never anything in the house to eat. It's a wonder my two boys had any brains at all the way it was when I carried them. It sure told on my health too. When Larry was about 1 year old, we were there with them and Porter had been out celebrating with his cronies and Josie couldn't get him out of bed. She kept after him, told him, he could stay out all night drinking, he could get up and milk the cows, etc., and she set the mattress on fire!! It was smoking and he had to get out of bed and help her get the mattress out of the house. That's one I never forgot. Even Lawrence got a kick out of that one. Lawrence and Porter got along better then. Lawrence always had his hand out. I was scared to death of Porter, probably because I was pregnant. When I got there and got off the train about 5 p.m., was a table with kids all around it, he was sitting at one end and they set me down at the end, everybody was trying to wait on me and pass the food and he told me to reach for anything I wanted as long as I kept one foot on the floor. I never forgot that. That kind of broke the ice, but I was scared of him. He was a wooly looking bugger. Lawrence never said he was scared of him, but he told me about the time he put him in the spring wagon to deliver booze all over the community. And this one fellow ask him why if he could make the stuff, he couldn't deliver it himself. Porter was making the stuff in a still down on the Arkansas river, that's when Lawrence first started telling me about it. Porter and old Dean Miller were two of the biggest boot leggers in Kansas at one time. Lawrence never said bad things about his dad. I look back now, maybe it was fear that made him talk softly about him. I ask him if he wasn't scared out there, scared the law would come along and shoot you, thinking it was your dad? I heard that Porter said to somebody in Raymond "at least my kids eat", when talking about bootlegging.