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| Lesley Riddle photo by Mike Seeger |
There are about eight billion people in the world today. In all time, perhaps one hundred ten billion have lived on this planet. There are a minuscule few who escape anonymity.
Sometimes, though, we can build a
memory of one of these disregarded. We can recover fragments of documents,
recount the words of friends, review the historical landscape for a dent, for an
impression of an almost forgotten one.
Lesley Riddle was born on June 13, 1905 in
Burnsville, North Carolina to Hattie Griffith and Edward Riddle. Three years later his mother, along with Lesley and his little brother Grady, moved
in with her father, a farmer. There were eleven people
in that household.
It is uncertain whether his father, Edward, died or left. The 1910 census lists Hattie as a widow. Census reports can be unreliable, though. She might have felt it prudent to be checked off on the form as widowed rather than divorced (the choices were limited: Single, Married, Widowed, Divorced).
On Christmas Eve, 1924, a newspaper report mentions an Edward Riddle who was partying in a house behind the Clinchfield Cement Plant in Kingsport, Tennessee. The Kingsport Times reported a shooting: “Oscar Wortham (colored) was shot and instantly killed about 11 o’clock Christmas Eve while he and others were gambling.” Ed Riddle was one of the gamblers and, with a Tom Riddle, declared that the murdered man “did not have any sort of weapon about his body. They further testified that on leaving the body and returning in about 15 minutes, they found a gun in (the murdered man’s) hands.”
It is possible, and reasonable, that
Lesley’s father had a job at that same Clinchfield Cement Plant, and that’s who Lesley
was visiting when he lost his right leg.
We don’t know much about this, but during a
visit to the plant Lesley Riddle tripped and an auger so damaged his leg that
it had to be amputated at the knee. During recovery, he focused on playing his
guitar.
Not long afterwards, maybe two or three
years, he lost two fingers of his right hand. He was nineteen. According to the Kingsport Times, Lesley got
into an argument with his step-grandfather which carried on for hours, starting
on the morning of July 4, 1924. Had they started drinking early to celebrate
Independence Day? Lesley, sporting a 32-caliber Colt automatic, was shooting at
his step-father. Lesley got four shots off inside the house (piercing the front
door) and the argument continued outside where Lesley shot three more bullets.
His step-grandfather then grabbed his double-barrel shotgun and fired a shot to
Riddle’s right hand that blew away his pistol. The Kingsport Times reported, “One
finger was torn entirely off by the shot, and it was found necessary to
amputate another finger at the hospital where he was taken directly after the
shooting affray. ...”
And still he played his guitar, developing a picking style that suited the remaining fingers of his right hand. In 1928 he was playing music with friends in Kingsport, North Carolina when A.P. Carter walked through the door.
More about Riddle and the Carters next time.
