My stepmother's brother was born Wiley Buford Buckner, but he did not like the name very much and chose to go by his nickname "Booty". I always referred to him as Uncle Booty, not because he was my step-uncle, but because of that old Kentucky habit of addressing everyone twenty or so years older than yourself by that title.
Uncle Booty was just one of those characters you'll always remember and he was one of the best shots I can remember. I saw him shoot a bullfrog through the head at fifty feet with an old rusty single shot .22 caliber rifle he kept at his house. I was three times as young as he and I could not even see this frog. I always assumed that he had learned his marksmanship while in the military, but he told me he had not. He said he learned his shooting skill from his uncle, Berry Benjamin Buckner, a son of Joel Thomas Buckner and Sarah Craddock.
Berry B. Buckner, like his brother Arthur Wood Buckner, had served in the U.S. Army and as I heard the story, Uncle Berry had fought in the Great War (WWI) in France.
"Uncle Berry was a big boned man," said Alba May Buckner Sanders, his niece, who lives at Bonnieville, Kentucky, "he stood about five feet, eleven inches tall and had black hair. I always remembered it as being white though."
Uncle Berry was an undertaker for the Dixon Funeral Home in Magnolia, Ky., where he spent most of his life and where he and his wife Sarah "Sally" Lamkins are buried.
Uncle Booty, after explaining who had taught him to shoot, started telling me another story that occurred during the same time frame as the shooting instructions. He told me one day while he and Uncle Berry were out hunting for squirrels on the road between Bonnieville and Magnolia, Uncle Berry spotted a flying squirrel.
"I was about 10 years old at the time," Booty said, "and Uncle Berry decided he was going to show me how to catch a flying squirrel. We followed the flying squirrel through the woods for about 15 minutes when we came up on this big beech tree with a hole in the trunk about 20 feet up off of the ground."
"Now you watch, and I'll show you how to get yourself a pet," Uncle Berry said as he started up the trunk.
"I watched that old man climb slowly up the trunk of the tree to the hole and then he stopped. He kept moving his head back and forth -- trying to see I guess. Then I heard the biggest commotion I ever heard coming from as tree in my life, and I could not make out what he was saying.
"All of a sudden like, I could hear limbs begin to split and crack and Uncle Berry was shouting, hollering and carrying on and then leaves started falling out of the tree. Then I could hear a swishing sound and loud pop and crack and that old man came flying out of that tree. There was something dark across his face about the size and shape of a handkerchief. Boy he hit the ground with the awfullest thud I ever heard come out of a man who had fallen like that and still lived. He let out loud U-h-h-h as he hit the dirt," Booty said.
"No sooner had he hit the ground than that little dark thing jumped off his face and ran lickety split back up that tree. It was that flying squirrel you see. It was just a mama trying to protect her young and she grabbed a hold of him. She had scared him so bad when she latched onto his face that he lost his grip when he tried to pull her off. When he fell, many of those big springy limbs on the tree broke his fall.
"I waited for a while, until he came around and could sit up, before I said anything. He was pretty badly shakened and scratched from his fall. Then I looked at him and asked, 'Aren't you going to get me a flying squirrel for a pet?'
"That old man looked me right in the eye and said, 'No, and a boy like you don't need no flying squirrel for a pet no how!'
Doyle Sanders