June 2024
Thank you for the honor of being Member of the Month My name is Jerry Buster, my wife Chrystal and I have been married for 44 years. Growing up in the Mississippi Delta in a small town in the 1950’s was a great experience for me because we were free to play, explore, hunt, fish, trap and just be boys. Everybody knew everybody so you couldn’t get away with anything but also you didn’t have to ask permission to be on anyone’s land. Our town was located in the middle of a triangle made by 2 large Mississippian multi mound sites and another single mound site and all 3 of these were a short bike ride away. One day I showed my grandfather some arrowheads that I found and he said that since I was interested in that kind of things there was a stone frog effigy pipe in his shop that he found while he was waiting on our cleaning lady to get ready one day. Her house was on a small daub covered domicile mound on one of the multi mound sites. That pipe (pictured) kicked me into high gear until I went to college (didn’t graduate). I never could decide what I wanted to do when I grew up so I moved all around the south doing fun jobs like working with the last of the old open cockpit crop dusters and running a grocery/crew boat on the Mississippi River. i met and married Chrystal in 1980 and finally grew up (for the most part). She had never done anything outdoors so I figured that we needed to change that. She started hunting and fishing with me and on the way home from the Ramses the Great exhibit in Memphis we were talking about artifacts and antiquities and I mentioned hunting for arrowheads. I found what was left of my collection in an old 1950’s bank bag (pictured) and showed them to her. She was interested so I took her to a spot that I had had luck on many years before hoping she could find something. She hadn’t walked but a few feet from the truck when she found a beautiful arrow point. It was on then. She wanted to go every spare minute that we had.
The doctors had told her that she could not have any children so we took it at that. But with enough practice you will get good at anything and we practiced. After 9 years we had a son. Just as he was getting interested in looking for Indian artifacts, at the age of 8 he got sick and on his 9th birthday in LeBonheur Hospital in Memphis he quit walking. Our time was spent then with taking him all over the country to doctors trying to get a diagnosis and hopefully a treatment. The doctors at LeBonheur told us finally that we should just accept the fact that he was going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life and get on with our lives. Then we met Pete who owned a gym and he took an interest in Johnny and since physical therapy was not working we let Johnny join the gym. He started making improvements with Pete’s help and a lot of prayers. And when we went back to the doctor Johnny locked his wheelchair down, got up and shakily walked across the office to the doctor who was in tears. He continued getting better but the fact that he had missed his childhood gave us some behavioral problems but nothing serious. Just as we were getting back to normal my wife’s rheumatoid arthritis came on with a vengeance and she developed a heart condition. Couple that with the fact that all the landowners that we knew have retired and people’s attitudes towards people being on their land have change we aren’t really able to get out and look any more.
I love getting on Arrowheads.com and seeing all the great finds that everyone shares here and learning from the wealth of knowledge found here. I tried other message boards but they didn’t work out. Also the talent and generosity shown by the craftsman here blows me away. I’m sorry for being so longwinded so I’ll end here by saying Thank you again.
