Billie Joe Cripps was born on Old Mill Hill Road in his grandfather’s home 77 years ago, but his work took him to many faraway places.

"I was born right here," he said, indicating his home, where he spoke to the Review for this interview. "This was my Grandad’s place. He built this house in the early 1900s. My wife Ann and I bought it after they passed away."

His parents were the late Robert and Ella Stanley Cripps. "Everybody called him Wormy," Cripps informed. "He was a mechanic, he worked on cars. He worked at the Ford place when it was downtown, behind where First Bank is now. The Chevrolet place was across the street. They needed a wrecker, so he built them one. They bought the steel, and he made everything but the cable from scratch. They used that wrecker for a long time. We were both proud of that."

He said baseball was a big part of their lives.

"We played a lot of ball together," Cripps said. "We always had a baseball team. My dad was the manager. There weren’t any baseball teams at school. We had basketball and football, but no baseball. He kept a baseball team going, though. We traveled all over. Gene Windham, Jackie Foutch, Joe Windham, Mike Jennings, Glenn Frazier, Robert Alexander and Toy Jones were all on the team. Glenn’s brother Gary Frazier played until he got sick. He had polio. We played teams from out of town. We went to Altamont, and different places.

"My mom worked at the shirt factory too. When it first came to Smithville it was out in what they called the old cheese plant behind where Food Lion is now. She made forty cents an hour when she started."

While Cripps never actually knew his paternal grandparents, he was very close to his maternal grandparents: Henry and Novella Braswell Stanley. "He was a farmer," Cripps said. "He owned this farm where I live now, on both sides of the road. I loved spending time with them."

Cripps has three children, Bobby, Steven and Joey, and eight grandchildren. "When they all get here it’s a mess, but I wouldn’t have it any other way," he proclaimed.

He met his wife of almost four decades, Ann, at the shirt factory. "We both worked there," he said. "We’ve been married for 36 years."

He said he had a good life as a child in Smithville.

"I had a lot of enjoyable times growing up. The first place I can remember that we lived was in the field where the hospital is now. We lived in a field way back off the road. My dad bought a store out on the highway, and built a house and a garage there, where H&R Block is now. That’s where I was raised. There were very few houses around. It’s right in the middle of town now, but then it seemed way outside of town. I learned to ride a bicycle, and I really enjoyed getting out early in the morning, when the birds were singing. The morning suckles and morning glories, oh, man, you just don’t forget something like that. It was so nice.

"They’d let me ride my bicycle to town and go to the Fox Theatre when I was 12 or 13. Not too often, but every now and then. It was downtown, right on the square. They made a bowling alley out of it later. I bowled a lot there too. I was in a league.

"When I’d leave the movie it was getting late. I’d come to the top of the hill leaving town, and the street lights were far between. There used to be an ice plant there at the bridge on Main Street. They had ice that was frozen in the ground, and this big hook would pick it up. They would chip off whatever you wanted. There was a hardware store there too.

"Man it was dark down in there, and I was pedaling. I was going so fast you couldn’t see my feet. I’d pedal like crazy until I got up that hill.

"One day I was riding up that hill and Carmen Patterson came over the other side and we hit head on. I saw him a couple of years ago, it had probably been 50 years since I had seen him, and the first thing he said was "you remember that bicycle wreck?"

"That was before the highway came through. As a matter of fact, we had a baseball field where Tractor Supply is now. When the highway came through it came right through the middle of it. Messed our ball field up."

Like many kids who lived in town at the time, Cripps spent his entire school career on College Street, attending the elementary school, and then the high school.

"After I went to work, I saved up some money and bought a 56 Chevrolet from Joe Goodwin. He had a used car lot in town. My dad ran a garage, and I found out that Richard Jennings Knew about a motor at a place in Nashville that was built for a guy who never picked it up. He told me about it, and we went and got it and put it in my car. I went drag racing and won quite a few trophies," he noted.

"The Sunrise Grill was our hangout," he shared. "When I Graduated I went to work at the shirt factory in Smithville. It was the only place around here to get a job at the time. I got a job in the shipping department. I worked there for a couple of years, and I was a material handler for a while. One day the plant manager and a mechanic came back and asked me if I wanted to go back in the shop. So I wound up making a mechanic, which was a good thing. I did that until 1969. I made a dollar an hour. Forty dollars a week. Later on I got a job on the weekends at the Esso station on Highway 70. It was located where the car wash is beside Hardees. There was a bait shop there too, and we sold minnows and tackle and things. I worked twelve hours on Saturday, and twelve hours on Sunday. I made ten dollars a day. Twenty dollars for the weekend. That was pretty good money. It was half what I made at the factory all week. I really enjoyed it.

"Then, in 1969 I got an offer for a head mechanic’s job at a factory in east Tennessee," Cripps continued. "I lived in Madisonville, but I worked in Tellico Plains. It was really nice country. The river ran down the mountainside, and it was beautiful. It was a lot like Gatlinburg.

"I worked for Colonial Corporation. They had several factories in Tennessee and Alabama, and some overseas. They opened a factory here, in the building where SW Manufacturing is now, and I came back to help set it up. That was about 1971. A couple of years later I started doing a lot of traveling. I went to help set up equipment in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica and Costa Rica. I would set up equipment and train the operators. I knew how to do the operations, but I couldn’t speak Spanish. I had to have a translator."

Cripps said that some of the overseas trips got a little hairy, but he enjoyed traveling.

"The first time they sent me to the Dominican Republic I got on a plane, and we flew in to Miami," he said. "When we got to the Santo Domingo it was about 8 p.m. I went to get my luggage, and I waited, and I waited, and I waited some more. By about 10:00 they had unloaded all the flights, and the conveyor shut down. Still no luggage. I was just standing there not knowing what to do, and I didn’t speak the language, when these two men came out. All I could make out of what they were saying was "police."

"They took me back in this room and searched me. The boy that was supposed to pick me up was from there, and he was trying to get in, I could see him through the glass doors. They finally let him in, and he told them I was there on business, to work in the free zone, and they eventually let us go. Then we had a flat tire on the way to the factory, and by the time we got that fixed it was almost time to go to work in the morning. I got my luggage about three days later. It wasn’t a good start, but it got better.

"I went to Haiti some, but I spent less time there than I did at any of the other locations outside the country, and that didn’t hurt my feelings a whole lot. Haiti is a really poor country, and it’s dangerous in places.

"I liked Jamaica. The thing about Jamaica was, there were spots that were dangerous, but I could eat their food. I couldn’t eat the food in the Dominican Republic. I had to live on pork and beans and Vienna sausages that I brought with me. They ate chicken and a lot of the same things we eat here, but it had a really strong taste. I could eat a little bit of some things, but I didn’t really like it, and you couldn’t drink the water.

He said Jamaica wasn’t entirely safe either.

"You could drink the water in Jamaica, and I could eat their food. It was pretty good. I did have some pretty rough experiences there, though. We started to catch a plane home one Sunday, and it came a big rain. The streets didn’t drain well, and they filled up with water. We got to a place where the street was flooded, and cars were turning around. We were in an old Volkswagen van, and our driver decided he was going through it. We got out in the water, he was going really slow, and they came running out of the alleys from everywhere. They jerked the tailgate up on the van and started trying to get our luggage out. Of course we were trying to hold onto our stuff. One man was holding a big leather bag, and the strap broke. They got his bag, but the driver finally sped up, and that was the only thing they got.

"One day our pilot got jumped in town, and they hit him across the throat with a machete. It didn’t hurt him too badly, he had a nasty scratch, and it left a big scar on his neck. I was glad he was still able to fly us out of there. We had a couple of factories there, and they had block walls with broken glass on top to keep people out.

"I really liked Costa Rica. It was nice place. Nearly everybody spoke English where I worked, and the people were very nice. I worked on the side of a volcano, and once when I was there it was letting of some kind of fumes that were killing the coffee trees.

"In the Dominican Republic they had field after field of sugar cane, pineapple trees, and banana trees. It was always amazing to me that the banana trees would bear one stalk of bananas and they would cut them down. Then they would come back out and bear another stalk. It was the same way with the pineapple trees. I couldn’t understand how in the world they could grow enough pineapples to make it worth the trouble getting one per tree that way. On the weekend we’d get out in those sugar cane fields, and you could drive and drive and never see anything but sugar cane.

"I traveled all over the south with Colonial, too. I worked for them for 23 years or so, and I traveled for fifteen of those years. Colonial finally just went out of business in 1993 or 1994," Cripps shared.

Cripps is a lifelong Baptist.

"I was raised up in First Baptist Church in Smithville. My dad taught Sunday Scholl there for a long time. I’m still a member there."

Cripps said his best piece of advice is that hard work and faith will get you through.

"I’d just say work hard and serve God. Always work hard in his service and you can’t lose," he concluded.