Painted Into a Corner: Workin’ With T. Weller and Uncle Buck

Daddy has been a lifelong carpenter, and I basically grew up in the business, with him dragging me to the jobsites on school vacations and weekends beginning when I was around nine or ten. I started out just picking up scrap lumber and cleaning up around the site, but by age twelve he had me doing “a man’s work” with him. Luckily, he also paid me wages accordingly, so I had plenty of spending money.

Many, many characters worked with Daddy through the years. For a while Daddy worked with a legendary (and infamous) mountain man named Larry Whitmire. Larry was a true character, quick to laugh and one of the best pranksters who ever lived. We deer hunted with Larry and his buddies, and it was definitely an experience. A big guy with a long beard and shoulder length hair, Larry looked the part of a mountain man, and usually kept a Ruger .44 Magnum revolver within reach. I remember him once shooting his television with it due to a poor reception. Of course, he also once used the front bumper winch of his truck to winch the truck up into a tree just to see if it could be done, so the television incident was fairly tame.

Another guy who worked with Daddy and Larry was a character named Rodney Henslee. He looked like a Lynyrd Skynyrd roadie and drove a vomit green AMC Gremlin, but he had a heart of gold, occasionally taking me on motorcycle rides at breakneck speeds on gravel roads on his CB750.

The best character of them all was my Uncle Buck. Yes, I actually had an “Uncle Buck.” He was Daddy’s oldest brother and worked with us off and on for decades. He was a true character. Odd, sometimes too quiet, and prone to drink too much, he was a funny, kindhearted guy who was lots of fun to be around. When I was a kid, we always drove down to his house to visit him and his very patient wife Rose on Christmas Eve. Buck was never dull to work with. During the summers he almost always wore a giant purple straw sombrero. Yes, purple. Being on a job site with him always made the day pass quicker. As a side note, apparently Buck was one hell of a guitar player, playing slide guitar at night in beer joints while he and Daddy worked in Florida. I never knew he had a musical bone in his body until years after he passed away. I would have loved to have heard him play.

When I was eleven or twelve, Daddy did a very extensive remodel job on a house and constructed a boathouse next to Burton Bridge for a fellow named T. Weller Smith. We became great friends with him through the years, later building his new house at Chattahoochee County Club. T. Weller was in a class by himself. He wasn’t just a character, he was a true raconteur. When we first met him, he was running a business called, I believe, National Airmotive, distributing airplane parts. He always told stories of flying planes in Central America running guns back when he was a young man. He spoke of being trapped in a tiny village one night while the army was in a gunfight with the guerrillas. Bullets were flying around him, and the walls in his hotel were paper thin. He decided that the claw foot tub was the safest place to be. He made himself a hot bath, got a bottle of tequila, a Cuban cigar, and waited out the gun battle in the tub. I only assume that his side prevailed. The story might have even been true…

Weller was one of those rare people who simply exuded class and breeding. He had the best Deep South accent I’ve ever heard. I suspect he was obscenely wealthy, but never showed it, let alone flaunted it. He had a beautiful, well-kept Mercedes diesel that had close to a million miles on it. And he had The Mighty Truck. The Mighty was a character in itself. An early 1960s GMC one-ton truck, it had a homemade, cobbled together wooden flatbed, and had once been painted white. By the 1980s, the only remaining paint had been alternately painted with a brush or a spray can. A junkyard would not have accepted that truck. But T. Weller drove it all over the place. One of the funniest visual memories I have is of seeing the duo driving The Mighty through downtown Gainesville. T. Weller was behind the wheel in a custom-tailored business suit, while Buck rode shotgun wearing work clothes and the purple sombrero.

At any rate, whenever we did any jobs with which T. Weller was involved, it was understood that Buck would be there. He and T. Weller became best buddies. Two more opposite people could not have existed. When T. Weller decided to build the new house at the country club, Buck was with us. By then, T. Weller was semi-retired and wanted to help with much of the work himself. Buck and T. Weller on the job site… working… together.  If only reality TV had existed back then. Misadventures abounded. “DO NOT FEED FROM THIS END,” clearly stated the warning label on the wood planer. Nevertheless, the Dynamic Duo tried to feed a short board through the discharge side of the planer several times before reading the blatantly obvious bright red warning. The board would shoot from the planer so hard that it actually dented the wall behind them. Luckily no one was harmed. Towards the end of construction, Daddy heard cries for help from the garage. All T. Weller and Buck were doing was painting the floor. What could go wrong there? Daddy stuck his head inside the door and burst out laughing. They had painted themselves into the corner. Literally. Somehow the home was completed and was beautiful enough to be featured in a magazine. No doubt due to the work of Buck and T. Weller.

Uncle Buck and T. Weller have both been gone for a well over a decade. I smile when I think of them. As I often lament when I write down these rambling reflections, I wish I had spent more time hearing their stories. There had to have been hundreds of them I never got to hear, and things about them I would love to know. A country blues guitarist and a gunrunner. Who would’ve thought it.