n, after whom Bean Station, Tennessee is or is not named--according to whether or not you go by his version or the county records office's--was possessed of three outstanding characteristics: an incurable case of the tinkers, an astounding capacity for certain medicinal brews produced far back in the hills, and a mania for "firsts"--it did not much matter whether the first in question was "first Bean Station resident to win the Nobel Prize" or "first man hanged for horse theft in fifty years".  These three facets of Frank Beans's personality, aided by circumstance and abetted by a motorcycle, conspired to create an incident of such magnitude that it still lurks like a sneaking suspicion in the collective psyche of the older residents of the Eastern Tennessee Mountains. It all started with a motorcycle...

The current century was then in its infancy, Uncle Frank was in his prime, and the world had just been saved for Democracy.  Men and material were trickling back from the trenches of France, and a little both dribbled as far up the hollars as Bean Station.  Among these was a man who had been Frank Bean's rival since both were in diapers, and this man arrived covered with glory, medals and the shine of survival.  He rode in on a battered but still functional two-wheeler of a marque and displacement which varied with the later telling of the tale, but which all reports agreed was of "furrin" extraction and bore military markings.

The returned hero promptly became the focus of the attentions of every female in the county, not excepting girls in pigtails or the "Widder" Clayton, who was well past maturity and somewhat into decline.  Great Uncle Frank suddenly found himself among the also-rans, and was not happy with that position.  He retired to a spot on the back side of Clinch Mountain and took thought of the situation, consoling himself with considerable amounts of medicinal brew.  What, he asked himself, outranks a returning war hero?  Somewhere into the fourth or fifth gallon of medicine, he found the answer...

On a ridge overlooking the hamlet of Bean Station there was then--and still may be--a prosperous dairy farm run by a lady of Dutch ancestry.  Uncle Frank appeared at her door one evening and did not leave until well after midnight.  I hasten to add that contemporary accounts have the two sitting visibly at the kitchen table the whole time, talking intensely.

The following day, Frank approached the war hero and exchanged with him a horse-choke roll of greenbacks in return for the title to and physical possession of the motorcycle.  Disdaining instruction--there were several young ladies present--he mounted the machine and rode off erratically but with dignity.  Straight up to the dairy and into the barn.

Over the next two weeks, the kerosene lanterns burned far into the night out in the barn, and noises as of something of something being constructed or demolished poured forth.  All attempts at spying by the local urchin was met with oaths and hurled cowpies by Uncle Frank, and with worried shrugs of incomprehension by the Dutch lady.  The word went around town that the good woman had in fact, no more idea of what Frank was up to than the rest of the townspeople.  Bean Station being a staunchly Fundamentalist community, rumors of ungodliness circulated and an attempt was made to cause either the Reverend or the Sheriff to investigate.  The reverend was down with the gout and refused to attempt the hill, and the sheriff pointed out--rightly--that Uncle Frank had not thus far broken any laws, and he went back to polishing his pearl-handled six-shooter and reading his copy of Old West Tales.  He was waiting for the Indians to rise again.  Granted, the only Indians around were old Charlie Blackhand and his wife, Weena, both in their sixties, but you never knew.

What Great Uncle Frank was up to was putting wings on the motorcycle.  While communing with his thoughts back at the still, he had leafed through a 1917 issue of the National Geographic (they had no Sears Catalogue out there) and had come across an illustrated story on the darling young man of the Lafayette Escadrille, beside whom motorcycle infantrymen paled to insignificance.  He had forthwith decided to (a) liberate the only available two-wheeler, thus depriving the enemy of a mainstay, and (b) turn it into something patently more astounding.  It did not bother Uncle Frank that he had never seen an airplane, let alone flown one.

Working with canvas and baling wire and horsehide glue, with corncrib lath and whitewash and galvanized nails, going by a number of illustrations torn from the pages of magazines, he attached a double set of wings and an awkward but correctly-proportioned empennage to the motorcycle.  He was not an unintelligent man, and was gifted with cunning born of seeing himself displaced, so his machine was as good as jackleg science and careful thought could make it.  He had an instinctive grasp of aerodynamics and was pretty sure that the motorcycle would not only provide sufficient ground speed to get him airborne, but enough stability to allow him to sail gloriously off the hill and over the awed heads of the young ladies gathered below.  To make sure that he was noticed, he strung a couple of "whoopers", small wooden boards with holes in them, tied taunt on two lines--between the wings.  These devices, swung energetically by small boys, were guaranteed to curdle milk in a churn and/or give ladies the vapors.  Great Uncle Frank felt that with the speed his creation would attain, they would at least raise the dead.

Frank chose a Saturday morning to reveal his "aero-cycle" as he had privately dubbed it.  This because Saturday was market day.  Everybody in the county would be in Bean Station to trade and swap lies, both elevated to art forms among the mountain folk.

Accordingly, he spent Friday night in the barn, sleeping in fitful spirits between feverish bouts of polishing and adjusting.  He had not been able to locate the requisite hip-length leather coat which all self-respecting daredevils of the air wore in the National Geographic, nor a helmet.  He made do with a voluminous yellow pig-slopping coat and a tin milking bucket he had painstakingly whacked into a semblance of head-shape with the butt end of a hoe handle.  Lacking goggles but mindful of the image he must create, he ringed his eyes with lamp-black--at five hundred feet altitude, who could tell it was not really goggles.

Somewhere around four-thirty, the Dutch lady began herding her heifers down the hill toward town, mindful of selling her charges' product on a milk-it-yourself basis.  In the barn, Great Uncle Frank waited, knowing that it would take her fifteen minutes to get the cows to town, and that the sun would just then be rising behind the barn, and that the girls would all be up and about their business of giggling and looking pretty.

At five-'til-five, he cranked up the bike and opened the big barn doors.

The folks in the town heard the noise, of course, and looked up in time to see the doors of the barn swinging slowly and majestically open.  Grey fumes drifted out.  the whole populace stopped and stared.  There was a mighty revving of an engine.

Great Uncle Frank's aero-cycle shot out of the barn like an drunken albatross, wobbling precariously and skittering back and forth through the cow muck.  The wings shook and flapped dangerously.  Wires popped, struts splintered.  Frank looked, as it was later told,
"like a big yeller chicken caught up in a runaway hay bailer."

But to everyone's amazement--probably including Frank's--the contraption got airborne.  It cleared the front fence by a good inch and a half, scraped over the tops of the mimosa bushes, and descended on  the now-terrified townspeople in a cloud of smoke, a high scream of freewheeling engine, and a piercing undulation of captive whoopers.

The herd of cows stampeded down the street.

In the jail--well, it was actually the back bedroom of his house--the sheriff woke to all this noise and arose with a clatter.  He grabbed his Texas hat and his six-shooter, shouting "Injuns".

In his bedroom--well, not actually HIS bed--the war hero woke to old nightmares, grabbed the nearest weapon (a long-handled bed-warmer, I think) and thundered out the bedroom door, shouting "The Huns".  As he had not gotten his braces buttoned, his pants went half-mast at the top of the stairs, causing him to tumble all the way down and out the front door into the yard, where he lay senseless and bleeding with a laceration of the scalp.

Frank and the aero-cycle made a starboard turn just over the firehouse--a turn generated more by Frank's being frozen to the handlebars in terror than by astute piloting--and came lurching down Main Street at about nine feet altitude, passing directly over the thundering herd of swollen-uddered bovines.

The sheriff ran out into the street, saw the wounded war hero, heard the Indian war cry of the whoopers, and turned bravely to face the risen Cherokee Nation, where he was promptly run over by the cows.  He managed to get off three shots before he went under.  One took the tail off of an unfortunate cow, another passed harmlessly through the cigar of Mr. Abernathy, the pharmacist, and the third one went more or less directly into the air, where it pierced first the seat of the motorcycle, then the seat of the rider, then went about its business for another half a mile.

The war hero came to, saw the sheriff lying trampled in the streets with Mr. Abernathy bending over him holding his(the sheriff's) gun and charged to the sheriff's rescue.  The Dutch lady, hustling down the street after her disappearing revenue, saw him (the war hero) brandishing the bed-warmer at Mr. Abernathy, discerned the sheriff on his back on the street, and assumed that he(the war hero) had gone berserk and was killing everyone in town.  With no thought for her own safety, the Dutch lady plowed the war hero under with a 200 pound flying tackle.

At the end of Main Street was (A) an intersection with a short road which led to and from U. S. Highway 11, half a mile distant, [b] a two-story frame house still under construction and [c] the town sludge pool, then open for drainage and beautification.  The cesspool was behind and slightly to the right of the house and the intersection.

At the intersection was a family of pioneer tourists in a brand new Hupmobile [some accounts make it a Studebaker].  The paterfamilias was peering vainly at a hand-drawn road map supplied to him back in Knoxville and trying to locate the cutoff to Ashville, gateway to the Smokey Mountains.  "Well," he is reported to have said, "I can't figure this out.  This looks like a nice little place. I'll ask one of the locals for directions."

As he stepped out of the car, the herd of cows hit the intersection, turned right, and stampeded over and around him.  Uncle Frank roared out from between the bank and the grange building, bounced off the hood of the Hupmobile, and sailed into the two-story house, where the "aero" portion of his creation became indistinguishable from the studs and window frame of the building. The "cycle" portion, with Frank still riveted to it in sheer horror, went out through what was to have been an upstairs bedroom's wall and nosedived into the pool of oozing goo out back.

The ensuing half-hour has been lost in the tracks of time and conflicting memory. When the story got to me, carried by my great-half-nephew-in-law, there were so many versions that you'd think it had all been made up out of whole cloth.

There is a consensus on the following points...

The sheriff got a broken collarbone, his picture in the paper down at Rogersville, and sued by Mr. Abernathy for one Corona cigar, which he [Mr. Abernathy} eventually collected.  It is often said that Mr. Abernathy got feeble-minded in later years and wandered.

The cows got as far as Turkey Creek, where several of them were rustled by a passing band of Democrats.

The war hero took some time recovering from the Dutch lady's flying tackle and eventually married her, much to the disappointment of the local belles and the improvement of his stature at the bank.

The house got rebuilt and the cesspool got beautified. It is today, a thing of charm.  The house, that is.

Bean Station got famous in a regional sort-of-way, and attempted to cash in on the ever-increasing flow of motor tourists by re-enacting the drama each April 19th for several years.  Having difficulties in locating a pilot who would fly a winged motorcycle through a house and into a cesspool, the townsfolk ignored that portion of the story and concentrated on the stampede and rustling of the cows for which Mr. and Mrs. War Hero charged a hefty rental.  The festival died out, I'm told,
when a neighboring community had a genuine bank robbery and shootout, and created their own re-enactment, drawing the tourist trade in their direction,

And Great Uncle Frank got clean away, motorcycle and all.  He managed to get the still-running machine out of the wallow with much grunting and shoving, and went up the road in a hail of curses and flying bullets, his pierced posterior high in the air.  My in-laws are all vague on his subsequent life, but I have it in good authority that there were rumors as late as 1947 and as far away as Oklahoma of a strange figure in a yellow coat, riding the midnight highways standing on the pegs of an ancient two-wheeler.

While I cannot personally vouch for this tale, I have no reason to doubt its veracity.  I did, after all, have it from my great-half-nephew-in-law, Benedict Arnold Bean.