THE TIC TOC CASE

By Professor James Hite
1999

Lovelace is a quite little county seat town, and mid afternoon in mid week is ordinarily a quite time even there.

But there was a Wednesday afternoon, along about the time school was letting out for the day, back in October, 1960, that people still talk about. That was the day Tic Toc Taylor went out of his head and wrecked half the cars in town before having to be fished dripping wet out of Crockett Creek.

It took a while for the whole story of that day to come together. But Powell County has at least one detective in every family who makes it his or her business to learn everything they can about everything interesting that ever happened hereabouts and explain it all to anyone who they can get to listen. No one has to pay them to be nosy. So the Sheriff didn't have to devote scare deputy resources to the case to doing much more than drag Tic Toc, sputtering and slobbering, from the creek and still most everyone reckons the Tic Toc case was, in the end, settled properly and that justice was done.

The people in Lovelace first learned about Tic Toc running wild was when they heard the terrible sounds of metal being scrapped hard against metal coming down Main Street from the direction of the mountain. It was a terrible sound, a banging, smashing, scrapping sound coming down Main Street from the upper end of town. By the time Tic Toc went kreening through the square, bouncing off of cars parked on both sides of the street, people were pouring out of the courthouse trying to see what was going on.

"By God, it is that damn Morelock boy! It's Slick Morelock! I know the truck," somebody yelled.

About then Tic Toc failed to negogiate the corner at the south side of the courthouse square and he ran ran catty-cornered through the old frame building that used to sit there on the corner of Jackson Street where Tom Jones had a barber shop. Glass and boards and splinters flew. Luckily, Tom always shut down on Wednesday afternoon to go fishing. Tic Toc didn't stop. He when right on down the hill, bouncing off of the brand new blue oldsmobile that, too bad for Tic Toc, belonged to Shep Ledbetter, the deputy attonery general for Powell County. Old Shep was a good old boy, but prouder than he had any right to be about that car. And he carried a grudge.

Somebody in the growing crowd on the street wondered out loud where the sheriff was. Yancey Crawford has just been elected high sheriff, but he was out as his mama's place fixing her washing machine. Old Bennie McKay was the deputy on duty. He was overweight and 50 years old, and he was just ponderously crawling into his patrol car to respond to a call that a crazy man in a new blue pickup has passed a stopped school bus when he saw Jack Baines, the Clerk of Court running toward the jail yelling at the top of his lungs and waving his arms. Bennie finally managed to wiggle into the car and turn on the siren , but by that time, Tic Toc was long gone out the south end of town headed down the bluff toward Crockett Creek.

Considering the way he was driving when he came through downtown Lovelace, nobody can see how Tic Toc possibly got through the notorious hairpin turn on the bluff above the creek. "God's work was the only was to explain it" a lot of people said. Somehow Tic Toc navigated the turn, but he missed the turn at the bridge and ran off right into the creek which is, maybe, ten or twelve feet wide and two or three feet deep there at that time of the year.

By the time Bennie got to the creek, Tic Toc had dragged his shoulders to the bank, but most of his body was still underwater. When Bennie managed to crawl out of his car and work himself grunting and sweating down the bank, cars and trucks from town, many of them dented and brusied from Tic Toc's wild ride past the courthouse, were pulling up and car doors slamming.

"It's Tic Toc." the deputy yelled. "God Almighty, its Tic Toc. He's alive!"

"Can't be Tic Toc," somebody protested. "Tic Toc can't drive."

"Yeah," someboy else laughed, guess he just proved it."

Everyone in Lovelace knew Tic Toc. His grandaddy, old Captain George Washington Taylor, had been a famous Union scount during the Civil War and was in Fort Sanders when Longstreet was defeated at Knoxville. The Taylor family was poor and lived way back up against the mountain, but they were respectable people, even if a little strange. Tic Toc was maybe the strangest of a strange clan. He kept himself covered from head-to-toe in Vaseline, and had for years.

"Well, it is Slick Morelock's truck," someone in the crowd kept insisting. "Tic Toc must've stole it."

Another deputy arrived on the scene and helped pull Tic Toc out of the creek and help him hobble to the high ground. He was muddy and wet, but he didn't seem to be badly hurt. Yet he didn't look right either. He was all puffy and red.

"What's wrong with him?" people were asking each other.

The deputies had about decided to call an ambulance and have Tic Toc carried to the little town hospital. But before they could act on that, Shep Ledbetter arrived on the scene, having hitched a ride with someboy. He was red-faced and mad as hell. "Take that old drunk fool straight to jail," he ordered the deputies.

"Ain't anything wrong with him, folks," Shep called out, "except he is drunk as a skunk." ed up in the Powell County jail where he moaned and groaned so much through the night that the sheriff sent for Doc Watkins to come by in the morning.

It was Doc Watkins that had started Tic Toc using the Vaseline. Tic Toc Taylor had a dry skin problem. It was a malady that ran in the Taylor family. His daddy, old man Grant Taylor, would scale up in the winter time like a snake, and people said it was because he'd been bitten by a copperhead when he was a little boy. But the snake bite had nothing to do with it. It was in the genes. At least that is what Doc Watkins told Tic Toc.

"Well, it itches like I don't know what, Doc," Tic Toc complained. "I just got to have some relief someway."

"Now you listen to me, Tic Toc," Doc Watkins said. "You get you some Vaseline. It's the best stuff in the world for dry skin. You get you some and rub a little on your elbows and on your knees every morning when you get up and every night before you do to bed."

Doc was right. Tic Toc started buying Vaseline and applying it like Doc Watkins said, and in just a few days the skin on his elbows and knees got smooth and soft like the skin on a baby. Tic Toc thought it was almost a miracle. He told everybody who would listen what good stuff that Vaseline was.

Everything was fine for maybe a year. Tic Toc would buy a couple a jars of Vaseline a month and apply just a generous dab to his elbows and his knees morning and night like Doc Watkins said to do.

But Tic Toc had wild thoughts. He couldn't help himself. He was an old bachelor, almost fifty, living by himself in a unpainted old house in one of the hollows up on the edge of the mountain above Lovelace, and he'd lay in bed at night and think about what it would be like to get naked and grease himself up all over with Vaseline. Why, Tic Toc thought, it's probably make his whole body nice and soft and smooth just like his elbows and his knees.

One Saturday night in winter, after he'd taken his weekly bath in an old galvinized washing tub, Tic Toc did it. He used up two whole jars of Vaseline that he'd just bought at Oscar Hale's store, and greased his entire body up with the stuff. It was the best feeling he had ever had in his life. He sat before the fireplace and rubbed his hands over his naked body and the stuff got warm and all runny and he just went to sleep right there he felt so relaxed and comfortable.

At first, Tic Toc didn't grease his whole body up except on Saturday nights after his bath. It meant that he had to have four jars of Vaseline a week instead of two and he was buying the stuff on credit, like he bought everything at Oscar Hale's store, because he had no cash money except in the fall when he sold his tobacco crop.

It was expensive, Tic Toc knew. But he figured he could afford a dollar a week. That was what four jars cost back then in the late forties. If he spent a dollar a week for kerosene to light the lamps, bacause the old Taylor house didn't have any electricity, and fifty cents for things like sugar and coffee or other things he really needed, he'd be laying out the grand sum of $2.50. That would come to ten dollars a month, or $120 a year. He could afford that, Tic Toc figured, and still pay the taxes and buy a couple of new pairs of overalls and a pair of shoes and a new shirt of two every year. Man does not live by bread alone, Tic Toc remembered that the old preacher used to say, and he didn't have anybody to leave whatever money he mght accumulate it to. So Tic Toc fingured might as well splurge on Vaseline and get a little satisfaction out of life.

But within a year, Tic Toc had started taking baths every night of the week, then coating his naked body with a fresh balm of Vaseline. He felt sinfully for doing it. He knew it wasn't right for man to indulge in such foolishness. He daddy had brought him up to take a bath once a week on Saturday night, even in the winter time. "We may be pore, " Old Man Taylor would say," but the Taylor's go clean. Ain't no excuseZ for going to bed dirty on Saturday night and no body is going to talk about the Taylor's being filthy like them old ZSweenys back over there on the creek." Still, bathing more than once a week was not something old Grant Taylor would not have approved of. "Pack of fooolishness," he would have said.

Tic Toc knew he was being sucked in. He just couldn't help himself. It was the only real joy he had in life. It cost him fifty cents a night just for Vaseline. Oscar Hale had to start getting the wholesale truck to leave a whole case of it at his store every week just to supply Tic Toc's addiction. By the time Ike was elected President in 1952, Tic Toc was spending more on Vaseline than on everyting else put together that he bought at Hale's store.

Still, Tic Toc might have been able to manage it except for a spell of bad luck. There was a big drought in 1953. The pasture got so short that his milk cow died and he didn't have a calf to sell that year. Worse still, the tobacco never got much taller than a man's waist. After Tic Toc sold the crop that fall and went to settle up his account with Oscar, he was $120 short of being able to pay in full.

"Well, Tic Toc, I hate to do it, " Oscar told him, "but I just can't let you have any more credit until you settle up this account."

Now what am I going to do? Tic Toc thought. He went a whole week without any kerosene for his lamps or any Vaseline, and the skin on his whole body began to crack and scale like the clay in the corn field when there has been no rain for a couple of weeks and the hot sun boils down in July. When he got up in the morning his bed was full of old dried yellow skin. He itched all over, and he begin to peel. He couldn't stand still he was in some much discomfort.

Old Man Grant Taylor, Tic Toc's daddy, had warned him never to mortgage the farm. Tic Toc didn't want to do it. But he didn't see any other choice. He had to have some relief. The day after Christmas, 1953, he walked five miles to Lovelace to the bank and, hat in hand, and asked George Carter, the chief teller, who he needed to talk to about a loan.

"I reckon I need to borrow about ten dollars a week until next year's tobacco crop comes in," Tic Toc explained. "Tobacco crop was short this year, you know. I'm good fer hit. I will put up the farm to stand fer hit." He pulled out a yellowed, wrinkled old deed and handed it to the banker.

The bank loaned Tic Toc the money. Every Saturday he'll walk to Lovelace with his wheelborrow and sign a note for $10 at the bank. And since he was in Lovelace every week anyway he stopped trading with Oscar Hale. He would go by Bailey's Drug Store and get a case of Vaseline and then go by the Texcaco station and fill up his kerosene can. Sometimes he'd spent most of the day sitting around on the benches in front of the courthouse catching up on the latest gossip from the regulars who met there to whittle and chew tobacco. Since the milk cow died, he didn't have any reason to get home early.

The drought that started in 1953 lasted through the growing season of 1954. Tic Toc's crop was no worse than any body else's, except maybe the Ford's who owned all the bottom land down by the big creek and had a kerosene-powered pump in the creek to irrigate their crop. But he owed the bank $520, and he still owed Oscar Hale $120, and when his tobacco was sold, the whole check, after taking out the sale bill, was just $307.28.

"Well, pay us what you can, and we'll carry you another year," George Carter told him at the bank. "A lot of people are in the same shape you're in."

Tic Toc just signed the tobacco check over to the bank. But that still left him in debt. He had a decent tobacco crop in 1955, but by that time, his debt was approaching a thousand dollars. The deeper his debt, the more he craved the soothing balm of the Vaseline, and he was greasing himself up twice a day, in the morning and at night. It took two cases a week to satisfy his habit. He had to roll his loan over one more time.

That's when people had begun to talk about Tic Toc's strange addiction. It was hard not to notice a man that he kept those parts of his body that showed --- his hands and neck and face --- all greased up.

"I want to know what the hell it is he smears on himself," George Carter asked Mae Sims, the bank secretary, one Saturday, after Tic Toc had been in to get his $10 weekly installment. "It looks like some kind of grease!"

"Well, its Vaseline!" Mae said solemnly. That's where he's headed now. Down to Bailey's. He'll get a couple of cases of the stuff and wheelbarrow it home. You know, my mama lives up on the road where he lives. She sees him go by with it. Its pump pitiful, I reckon. He's addicted to it. "

"Addicted to Vaseline?" George asked.

"Yes sir. That's what I hear from Eula Bailey down at the drug store. She says it the most pitiful thing she ever seen."

George Carter just shook his head.

"Lot of people make fun of him, but I reckon he's just pitiful. All them Taylors up there in the holler ain't quite right, you know?" Mae said. "Honest people, though. Work hard and pay their debts."

"Well, he's running up a pretty big debt here now. I'd hate to have to foreclose and take his farm."

"It's pitiful, " Mae said again. But she knew where things were headed.

Tic Toc knew, too. His debts worried him. He decided he'd try to make some money to pay them off by hiring out. Strange as his addiction, he was not a fool. He managed to pick up odds jobs here and there that didn't pay a lot of money but he was able to trade some work for another milk cow from John Ford, and by October, has had accumulated $50 toward the old debt he owned at Hale's store.

It was Tic Toc's honest heart and his earnest desire to pay his debts that put him in the Powell County jail the morning old Doc Whitaker came by.

"Why, my god, I don't see how this man is alive," Doc said after taking a good look at Tic Tok. "He's been stung by something. Bees, hornets? No, from the looks of it, I'd say, yellow jackets. This man has got stings over half his body almost solid."

That Wednesday afternoon in October Tic Toc was feeding his chickens when a pickup truck drove up in his yard. It was Slick Morelock. Slick was half Tic Toc's age and known around the county as a shiftless sort, a moonshiner, and a mean drunk. He wanted to hire Tic Toc to load some corn he had bought off of Fred Baxter. "Pays $25, in cash," Slick said. Tic Toc had figured he couldn't afford to turn down that kind of money.

Slick drove Tic Toc to the Baxter place and backed the truck into the shed along side a log crib. "There's a scoop in the crib," he said. "I'm going up here to see Fred. I'll be back directly. Just load it all up. "

He reached behind the seat and pulled out a quart fruit jar full of clear liquid. White lightning, it was; straight from a run Slick had made at his still the night before. But Tic Toc didn't pay any attention. He was thinking that if he had any luck at all he could settle up with Oscar Hale before the year was out.

What Tic Toc didn't know was that he was being set up. There was a yellow jacket's nest in the corn crib. Fred Baxter had told Slick about it when he bought the corn. Fred was no better than Slick and as they sat and drank some of Slick's white lightning after closing the deal, one of them got the idea that it would be great fun to lock Tic Toc in the crib with those yellow jackets, knowing that when they got angry at their nest being disturbed they would swarm after him.

"All that grease on him, why they'll just sting and sting and sting." Fred laughed.

"With all than damn grease on him, he probably won't even feel'em." Sick laughed. "But it shore will scare his ass."

Tic Toc had loaded maybe 20 bushels of corn into the truck by the time Slick and Fred came staggering to the crib. They stood at the front of the truck, grinning sheepisly, and smoking Camel cigarettes, as Tic Toc sweated shovling corn. He didn't pay them much attention.

Then the yellow jackets began to swarm. At first, Tic Toc couldn't tell where they were coming from. One hit him on the ear and another on the nose. "Gar dern," he yelled. "Something is abitin' me in hyar." More and more began to attack him. There were hundreds of them. Slick and Fred had been right. They hit him and got catch in the Vaseline and stuck, sinking their stingers in him over and over. The pain was unbearable. He threw down the scoop and headed for the door of the crib.

But the door wouldn't open. While he was busy, one of those rascals --- Slick said it was Fred and Fred said it was Slick --- has latched the crib door from the outside. Tic Toc was locked in the corn crib with a whole colony of angry yellow jackets --- hundreds of them stinging him and hissing and buzzing as they tried to escape from the grease that coverd his body.

"Let me out of hyar," Tic Toc screamed. "I'm adyin'. Hellfire, let me out."

But Slick and Fred just backed off to be sure none of the yellow jackets attacked them and fell on the ground laughing. They had drunk the quart fruit jar of licker that Slick had brought with him and their physical coordination was suffering. They were so amused at Tic Toc's predictament they had trouble breathing from laughing so hard. Slick later let it out that Fred had actually peed in his britches.

"You sums-of-bitches," Tic Toc yelled. He could here them laughing and he knew what they had done. "I am goin' to kill you. I am goin' to kill both of you'uns. I mean it, God help me, you sums-of-bitches."

And with a super lunge against the crib door, Tic Toc knowed it from it hinges and grabbed a tow-by-four that was laying on the ground in the crib drive way. Swinging it wildly, and a cloud of yellow jackets still encircling his head, he began to beat and frall at Slick and Fred, wacking Slick across the face and blooding his nose and catching Fred right in the crotch as he scrampled to escape.

"You low-down, sorry, worthless sums-of bitches," Tic Toc yelled as his two tormenters half crawled, half run toward the Baxter house.

"Get a gun," Slick yelled at Fred. "Kill the bastard before he kills us."

Tic Toc was in such agony that he had lost all rational power. All he could think of was getting away from that place. He had only driven an automobile a few times, but he jumped in Slick's new pickup and turned the keys. Away he went throw a rail fence and out into the road. He cut the wheel sharply and headed toward the Baxter house just as Fred was crawling up the front porch step. Tic Toc hit the step and ran over Mamie Baxter's flower bed before getting turned around and head back toward the road.

He didn't have any idea where he was going. He just pushed down on the accelerator as hard as he could and sped down the road. As he approached Lovelace, a school bus was stopped in the road ahead of him discharging the Estepp children. Somehow, Tic Toc managed to swirve and miss the bus, but Jack Hensely, the bus driver was outraged. "It's that Slick Morelock," he said. He ran into Mrs. Estepp's house and telephoned the Sheriff's office. It was his call that had first put Bennie McKay in Bennie's imitiation of a hurry.

So, as the story came together the morning after Tic's Toc's wild ride, it looked like Tic Toc might have some really serious charges pending against him. By that time, Slick and Fred had showed up in town pressing charges against Tic Toc for assualt and battery and and vehicle theft. Then he had passed a stopped school bus and done thousands of dollars' worth of damage to autombiles and buildings. "Just God's work," people said," that nobody had been killed."

Shep Ledbetter was really mad and ready to prosecute Tic Toc as far as the law could be pushed. That Oldsmobile was now wrecked, a total loss, people were telling him, and from the looks of its caved in side, the passender door sitting almost on the driver's seat, he had no doubt they were right. No civilized place could afford to put up with such behavior, Shep decided, even if Tic Toc was a little crazy. "Damned old fool," Shep called Tic Toc.

"This man is in bad shape," Doc Watkins said after examining Tic Toc in the jail. "Now you listen to me, Yancey" he said to the sheriff, "I want him transfered the the hospital right now. You forget about Shep Ledbetter. If this man dies, it ain't Shep, it is you who's going to be reponsible to God Almighty, and if He's too busy to worry about it, you'll be responsible to me"

In the end, Doc picked picked more than a hundred yellow jacket stings from Tic Toc, from his face and his neck, and even from his private parts. He put Tic Toc on some kind of medicine and by the first of the new week, he was well enough to be brought before the bar of justice.

People in Lovelace were almost as mad as Shep Ledbetter. Half the population had suffered serious damage to their cars and trucks and they were wondering who was going to pay to fix all the damage. Shep tried to make some political hay out of their worries, bragging loudly about how he intended to throw the book at that crazy Tic Toc Taylor.He came into the crowded courtroom with his blond hair all slicked down and them horn-rimmed specs down on his nose ready to be the people's champion.

Shug Wilson was the magistrate then and he didn't have the heart to keep Tic Toc locked up in jail.Shug always had pretty good common sense. Shep Lebetter got nasty and Shug threaten to hold him in contempt. But Shug didn't see any choice except to bind Tic Toc over for the next session of criminal court. Tic Toc certainly seemed to have broken the law. Finally, Shug decided to release Tic Toc on his own recognizance. "Tic Toc sure as hell ain't going to run, Shep, and I don't want no more of your mouth."

By the time the next session of the circuit court rolled around,the whole story had been pretty well figured out. As the mean prank that Slick and Fred had played on Tic Toc became generally known, and people found out almost everything that you have been told here, public opinion had turned toward sympathy for Tic Toc. Lyle Galloway, the senior and most respected lawyer in Powell County, volunteered to represent Tic Toc pro bono, and he waved his long boney finger in the faces of Slick Morelock and Fred Baxter in cross examination and forced them to confess to their mischief.

"This man, Tic Toc Taylor --- Tadlock Tayloe Taylor, that's his name in the Bible --- this man, he's the scion of a noble race, a race of heros, ladies and gentlemen of the jury," Lyle Galloway, orated. "Many of you have known him all your life. He's an honest man, a decent man, a humble man and he was the victim of a cruel and mean prank perpetrated upon him by two well-known scoundrels who ought to be shamed faced to show theirselves in this courtroom here today."

It only took about an hour for the jury to come back with a verdict of innocent on all charges except passing a stopped school bus. There were some who wanted to let Tic Tac go on that charge too, but the jury had finally decided they could not, for any reason, excuse endangerment to their kids. Judge Sweatt fined Tic Toc $25, and since Tic Toc didn't have any money, the judge threw a ten dollar bill in his hat, then passed it around the crowded courtroom to collect the money for the fine. When the money was counted, there was more than a hundred dollars in the hat. Tic Toc insisted that what was left over after paying his fine be divided between Doc Watkins and Lyle.

It took many months and a bunch of law suits between insurance companies to finally settle all the damage cases. In the end, Slick Morelock's insurance company was forced to pay up since his policy was on the truck and covered other drivers. They say it cost Slick's insurance company more than $100,000, and that was big money back in 1960.

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Jim Hite is a senior fellow of the Strom Thurmond Institute of Government and Public Affairs at Clemson University where he is alumni professor of agriculture and applied economics.

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