Growing up, I was surrounded by a host of interesting people, both young and old, and I was seldom bored. I knew everybody. Because my sisters were so much older, I had no playmates in the house, so Shelby Street provided a number of cohorts. And the adults along Shelby Street became proxy parents.
The Wilsons
Next door to us on Shelby Street lived a childless couple named Bloomer and Lucille Wilson. Mr. Bloomer ran the local drugstore with his brother, the pharmacist, whom we called Dr. Wilson. I don’t think he was a doctor at all, but in those days it was common to address a pharmacist as doctor. Mr. Bloomer was not a pharmacist, but that didn’t keep him from filling prescriptions, though he could usually be found behind the marble counter of the town’s most beautiful soda fountain. We kids would take a seat at one of the eight porcelain stools at the counter. These stools swiveled, and Mr. Bloomer didn’t mind us turning left or right. But turning all the way around was a no-no—Mr. Bloomer would yell, “Boys, don’t be spinning on those stools. If you do it again I’m going to send you over to one of the tables to drink your soda.” There were six or eight round white tables with porcelain tops and twisted iron legs. If they were occupied by college girls, as they often were in the afternoons and on weekends, he would tell us that we would have to take our sodas outside if he caught us spinning.
From behind the counter, Mr. Bloomer or his assistant Miss Ione dispensed Coke floats, cherry Cokes, single or double ice cream cones, and sundaes loaded with nuts and chocolate and whipped cream and with a maraschino cherry on the top. I personally preferred the chocolate sodas, because I liked the fizzing sensation they caused in my mouth.
Bloomer’s wife, whom we called Miss Lucille, worked downtown at Klotzman’s, a department store owned by one of the two Jewish families in town. On weekends she baked oatmeal cookies, and she would often call me into their house and give me a stack. They were the best cookies in the world.
Mr. Bloomer was a big fox hunter. Some Saturdays he would come in from the drugstore and have his supper, and shortly afterwards we could hear him going to his backyard, whistling and calling for the bluetick and redbone hounds penned there. He’d bring them around, and they’d jump into a big box covered with chicken wire in the back seat of his blue four-door Chevy sedan. Then men began to gather in Bloomer’s driveway. I would look out the window and watch them. Often, one would have a bottle of whiskey, which they would pass around. When I was very small I didn’t know it was whiskey, and I thought it must be some sort of medicine you had to take before you could go fox hunting. The men got louder as time passed, laughing raucously and hollering at the dogs. They talked about which ones treed the best and which could run the best. They all seemed to be experts. Daddy never joined them for the fox hunt itself, but he did occasionally partake of their medicine before they departed.
Bloomer and Lucille Wilson rented the house next door.
I had seen a picture of a fox in my reader at school, and I couldn’t really understand why anyone would want to hunt one. It finally dawned on me that I had never seen them bring a fox home, and I came to believe that the fox was more of an excuse for drinking and camaraderie than a real object of their pursuit. On occasion I would be awakened—in fact, everyone in the neighborhood was—when the hunters returned after midnight. The men would be talking even louder than before, and the dogs would be barking loudly. For some reason the dogs did not want to get out of the box, which must have meant for them the end of a spell of freedom they enjoyed after being penned up for days on end, and at that point Mr. Bloomer would take a fan belt from the trunk and begin hitting the dogs. They would moan in pain. Once out of their box, the dogs would often begin fighting, and we would hear Miss Lucille yell at Mr. Bloomer, “Shut those dogs up, Bloomer, or they’ll wake up the whole neighborhood.” Of course, by then they had already awakened the neighborhood. I would hear Mother telling Daddy that Mr. Bloomer should be stopped from such savagery. Daddy didn’t seem to agree, so finally she would open up a window and scream, “Bloomer, you better quit beating those dogs.”
Mr. Bloomer never acknowledged my mother’s complaints nor did he ever change his behavior. The next day in the neighborhood, it was as if nothing had happened.
The girl next door, Beverly, and her father, Joe Doyle. After the war, my dad and mother bought the house the Wilsons had rented and then sold it to Joe and Mildred Doyle. Beverly still owns and lives in the house.
The Hartleys
Our other next-door neighbors were the Hartleys. Mr. Bill Hartley drove the gas truck for Mr. J. A. Brown Sr., and Mrs. Hartley worked for Mr. Ellis Hoffman in his dry goods store. Their son Bill was my close friend, and I spent a lot of time at their house.
The Hartley house was nicely painted and had two floors, and we loved to play on the porch off the second floor. Mother was always afraid that we would fall over the banisters down into the yard, but we never did. On very hot summer days and on rainy days we especially loved to play under the Hartley house, which was built on a sloping lot, and the back of the house was high above the ground so there was lots of room down there. The dirt was always cool and powder dry, and there were thousands of doodlebugs. We’d get a straw off the kitchen broom and push it down in the hole, saying, “Doodlebug, Doodlebug, where have you been?” Sometimes we would tickle those little bugs out of the ground all day long.
Mother and Dad told me that the Hartley house used to sit where Mrs. Craig’s house now was and that it had been jacked up and skidded across the street on logs. This was the first I had heard that you could move a house, and I thought about it a lot. It dawned on me that this move would have presented a special problem, as it would have to be turned all the way around in order to face the street when it was moved.
The house was moved before there were sidewalks on the street, and when the City installed the walks, the Hartley house was about two feet below the sidewalk. When we skated down the sidewalk, we had to be careful in front of the Hartley house, or we could fall down into their front yard.
The greatest thing about the Hartley household was a visitor who came there periodically. He was Mr. Hartley’s oldest son Trab, and we knew that he was famous. He was a professional baseball player, and, though he played semi-professional ball, we all said he was in the major leagues. Once he injured his shoulder and back, and he had to come home to heal up. He spent part of each day under the house hanging from straps, and I’d always have to go over and peek at him when he did that. The truth was that all the boys on Shelby Street idolized him. Sometimes he would play a game with us that he called pepper. He would stand near the garage between our house and the Bloomer Wilsons’, and some of the neighbor boys and I would station ourselves at the end of the driveway near the street. Trab would hit grounders for us to catch, and we loved it. Other times he would pitch with us. Bill had a catcher’s mitt, and when Trab’s ball hit the mitt it sounded like a beaver tail spanking the water. We’d never seen anything like that.
Next door to the Mahan house and behind Laura Ann Hicks in this photograph was the two-story Hartley house.
The Lathams
On our side of the street, two houses toward town from us, lived Mr. Tommy Latham and his wife in a house that had been moved to the lot it sat on and was jacked up like the Hartley house. We called him Mr. Tommy, but for some reason we always called her Mrs. Latham. Mr. Tommy had run his own grocery store, but when I knew him he ran a store up on Main for Mr. Teamon McCully. You knew that Mr. Tommy was in charge because of the giant silver safety pin he wore on his white apron. Under his apron he wore an impeccable shirt and tie and dress slacks. He knew everybody in town, and everybody knew him. In those days, grocery stores delivered, and if he wasn’t too busy Mr. Tommy would deliver your groceries himself. I liked to go to the store, so Momma or Maggie would send me up there two or three times a day to get an item or two.
I was especially fond of Mrs. Latham. I thought she was a grand lady, second on Shelby Street only to Mrs. Craig. She might not have traveled to Europe like Mrs. Craig did, but when she left her house it was a beautiful spectacle. She had a two-toned blue and black 1930 Buick sedan with gorgeous blue velvet upholstery. It had large solid wheels, not spokes like other cars in the neighborhood, and a big chrome gearshift with a shiny black ball on top.
Mrs. Latham was my first employer. Every Saturday I would wash her Buick, whether it had left her garage during the week or not. Both she and Mr. Tommy walked to work, so driving was not an everyday occurrence. She also hired me to pick rocks out between the tire treads because she said that it made the tires last longer and because she didn’t like the click they made when she drove down the concrete streets. She kept a meticulous yard, and she also hired me to rake leaves and to transfer flower bulbs.
Running down beside the Latham house was Island Street, which at the time was unpaved. On the right at the bottom of the hill was a rundown house occupied by a colored man. Most black Montevallians lived across the creek, but people said it was okay for the black man to live on our side of the creek, as his house was down under the hill.
The DeSears
Two houses down, away from Main, one of my best friends, Gene Baldwin, lived in a dirty yellow house with his papaw and mamaw, Mr. and Mrs. Robert DeSear. They, like the Wilsons, lived in a house they rented from Pete Givhan, but their house was far older than either the Wilsons’ or ours. It was not well-kept on the outside, and there was a broken cement wall along the street, which had cracked when the roots of a large chinaberry tree worked havoc with it.
Gene had a bad case of asthma, and it seemed to me that while other kids got presents at Christmas, Gene got asthma. Mother said that the DeSears did not keep their house warm enough, and that is why Gene had asthma.
We were impressed with Mr. DeSear, but he was always a sort of mystery to us. We weren’t afraid of him at all, but he seemed somewhat unapproachable. He sold burial insurance and would leave home early in the morning in his little black car with a rumble seat, working his debit for a company in Birmingham and returning about dark. Mr. DeSear struck a dandy pose. Tall, stately, and gray-haired, he wore gold-rimmed glasses and a flat-brimmed straw hat with a beautiful turquoise band. His black cap-toe shoes were always polished perfectly, and he wore dark blue three-piece suits with a white pin stripe. A rich gold watch chain went from one side of his vest to the other, and he also wore a gold stick-pin in his tie.
Mr. DeSear was a courtly man. He walked along the city sidewalks a great deal, and whenever he met a woman on the sidewalk he would tip his hat to her. When a man asked him how he was doing, he always had the same answer, “Good as they make ’em, don’t give a damn where they come from.” Mother thought he had little to do to use the word damn so casually.
Mr. DeSear owned guns, and Gene and I were fascinated by them. I was not allowed to have a gun, not even a BB gun, and Dad didn’t have a gun because Mother objected to them so strenuously. Mr. DeSear joined the fox hunts, carrying a twelve-gauge shotgun, which was stored in the hall closet. Gene and I would slip in there and handle the gun, both vowing that we would have our own shotguns one day.
Mr. DeSear had a chicken house, and every year he planted a vegetable garden near it. He grew corn twice as tall as I was, and he used brush to prop up his tomatoes and beans to keep them off the ground. When President Roosevelt asked all Americans to plant a Victory garden during the war, Dad complied, thinking it was his patriotic duty to do so. But he never really liked it, and when the war was over there were no more gardens at 159 Shelby Street. In response to the president’s call, Bloomer Wilson said he was as patriotic as the next man, but damned if he was going to plant any vegetable garden.
I had many meals with Gene and his grandparents, and I always went there for breakfast on Saturday mornings. Gene had a breakfast ritual he invariably went through. He would spoon Mamaw’s grits onto his porcelain plate, and put a large pat of butter in the center, stirring them until the butter melted. Then he would take crispy bacon and crumble it over the buttered grits, after which he would smooth the mixture over the entire plate, pick up his fork, and eat the mixture with a look of extreme contentment on his face. At home, I would try to duplicate his ritual, but I never seemed to achieve his level of perfection.
One of my best friends, Gene Baldwin, all dressed up in front of his grandparent’s house.
Gene’s grandparents, Alma and Robert DeSear, in front of their Shelby Street home.
Home from Gordon Military Academy, Gene Baldwin had his picture made with his buddy and neighbor, Ed Bridges.
Gene, stationed in Korea, waiting for a scramble at the alert shack
June McQueen, Gene’s Alabama College girlfriend and later his wife, the girl he “buzzed” while flying his jet down Montevallo’s Main Street in 1952.
Gene, who along the way had gained the nickname General, left Montevallo late in high school because his mother, Ladean, who was in education, was not satisfied with the educational program at Montevallo High School. She sent Gene to Fort Gordon Military Academy in Georgia for his junior and senior years. Afterwards, he returned to Montevallo with his best friend, Herndon Davis, but they decided they wanted more in life and went to Birmingham to join the Navy. At the recruiting office, Herndon immediately signed up, but Gene got cold feet and didn’t sign. Instead, he entered Alabama College in 1950, but he didn’t do very well and after one year joined the U.S. Air Force, becoming a jet pilot. He had always been interested in planes, and this was in many ways a dream come true. He made many flights, but his most memorable one came in 1952.
In May 1952, residents of Montevallo could not have imagined an F-94 jet with afterburners roaring over town at 500 feet, but that is exactly what Gene did. He first buzzed Alabama College, barely missing both the top floor of Main Dormitory, which was called the Buzzard, and the concrete water tower. His “buzz” of the campus frightened some and it impressed some, but the main thing it did was to make the heart of his lover, June, race almost as fast as the plane was traveling. Leaving campus, he buzzed down Shelby Street. He apparently enjoyed it so much that he turned around and buzzed straight down Shelby Street again. After that, he flew off to his squadron in Pensacola, Florida, leaving June and his townsmen behind, but definitely with a good story to tell about the antics of a wild man, Gene Baldwin.
I was at home on Shelby Street when Gene made his first pass, and I heard the deafening noise as the General passed over. I rushed out into the yard to see what in the world was happening, but I knew in my heart that this had to be the work of Gene Baldwin. I watched as the plane made a sharp turn onto Main Street and gave the town one last buzz. The whole incident had not lasted over five minutes, but what a five minutes!
Gene went on to have a distinguished career in the military. He flew combat missions for twenty-five months in Korea. But in our minds, none of that was nearly so fine an achievement as buzzing his hometown.
Hobart Love
Another neighbor who got the attention of the neighborhood kids was Hobart Love. He lived just down the street in an apartment with his wife and two daughters. I occasionally played with one of the daughters on a long upstairs porch on the house. But it was not the house that was really Hobart Love’s domain. He was the mysterious man who sat above the balcony in the Strand Theater in a metal fireproof booth (because early film stock was highly flammable) running the projector. When we went to the picture show, we would always check Hobart out. Occasionally when I’d have to have a bathroom break during the movie, I would see Hobart downstairs talking to the owner of the Strand, Mr. Eddie Watson, or eating popcorn, and I would wonder how the movie could be running without him. Later we discovered he could be downstairs because he knew how long a reel would last. He would just have to be back upstairs to see some little spots appear in the upper right-hand side of the screen. That was Hobart’s sign to switch to another of the three pre-set projectors. My friends and I would watch for those little spots as if they were some vital secret code that we were privy to. Occasionally Hobart would fail to see the spots, and the movie would stop. We kids would whistle and boo and hiss until the movie came back on. Then we would clap loudly.
We especially envied Hobart because he got to see every movie that came to town. We only got to see the westerns on Saturday.
The McGaughys
Down the street from us lived two of my bosom buddies, Jack and Joe McGaughy, and their parents, Mr. Luther and Miss Rebecca. When I think of their house, I think of the terraces out front that Mr. Luther covered with white rocks to keep from having to mow on such a steep grade. Until the end of World War II, Mr. Luther drove various routes for the Alabama Coach Company located on Middle Street and owned by Mr. Wyman Brown. Like Dad, Luther was too old to be drafted, but he carried workers, including Dad, back and forth to work in the government’s gunpowder plant in Childersburg.
Mr. Luther was stricken with rheumatoid arthritis, which affected his hand and foot coordination, making it impossible for him to continue driving. But he continued working for the company, selling tickets in a little room between the white and colored waiting rooms at the bus station downtown. I loved to go down to the station and watch him selling tickets to Pea Ridge, Dogwood, Marvel, and all the little mining towns near Montevallo. You could also buy a ticket from him that would take you to Birmingham, and I was able to do that on several occasions when I would go visit family there.
Finally Mr. Luther’s condition got so bad that he couldn’t work at all. First he became confined to home, and later he was completely bedridden. Luckily, some great news drifted down from Dr. Hubbard’s office: there was a new miracle drug called cortisone, and maybe injections of this miracle drug would get Mr. Luther well. The shots did help enough that he was able to go out onto the porch and could occasionally ride in the car. But his appearance changed. His face got very fat, and he developed a hump on his back. His hair turned a funny color and then fell out, and it wasn’t long after that that he passed away. It was the first death of a friend’s parent that I experienced, and I found it very stressful. Luckily, Miss Rebecca was a strong woman. She continued her job teaching home economics at Montevallo High School, and, with the help of Carrie Boo Deviner from Brierfield, she kept an orderly home.
Mr. Luther’s garden, which he had kept as long as he could, was not abandoned. The boys and Carrie Boo saw to that. Miss Rebecca continued to cook marvelous meals, to which I was often invited. I can still taste the fresh corn on the cob, the sliced tomatoes, the thick slices of onion, the green beans, the cornbread, and the meat—fried chicken, liver, or crisp streak-of-lean.
I shall never forget one event that took place in the barn behind the McGaughy home. Joe and Jack, Dolan Small, other boys, and I loved to take the corncobs and have wars, shooting them with slingshots. A friend named Grady “Beaut” Houlditch, a quiet and serious boy, was playing war with us one day. We had found a sack of lime in the barn, and we would dip the corncobs in the lime so we would have proof if we had made a kill. Jack hit Grady directly in one eye, blinding him in that eye. Amazingly, Grady and his family accepted it as just one of those things that can happen, and there were no repercussions, except that we were forbidden to ever dip the corncobs in lime again.
Grady “Beaut” Houlditch, me, and Harry Klotzman in front of Holcombe’s grocery store and Dr. Mitchell’s dental office.
Carrie Boo was the one who gave the boys their nicknames. Joe, who was my age, was called Hon Darlin’ and his brother Jack, two years older, was called Sugar Babe. The boys in the neighborhood shortened the names to Hon and Shug, and those names stuck. Joe and I started Auburn in 1952, and since we lived in different dorms I didn’t see him for a few days. I hadn’t realized, but we were in the same ROTC class. I entered the huge hall, which had raked seating for several hundred students, and went down front to take a seat. I looked back behind me to see if I recognized anyone and was thrilled to see my buddy Joe there on the back row. I jumped up and without thinking yelled out, “Hon Darlin’!” Joe jumped up and waved back. Silence fell over the room. In those days you could not call your best male friend “Hon Darlin’” without arousing suspicion, and our classmates eyed us warily. I realized what was okay on Shelby Street was another matter in the larger world.
Carrie Boo later came to work for us, becoming an integral part of our family, maybe even more so than Maggie had been. After I married and returned to Montevallo, Carrie became a companion to my daughter Miki, as Maggie had been to me. Carrie Boo stayed with us through marriages, births, and deaths, and, when Mother died, her head rested on Carrie’s shoulder.
Mr. Dyer
We had yet another neighbor who fascinated me and the other kids on Shelby Street, but he was almost universally disliked by the adults. His name was Mr. H. I. E. Dyer. This was the first person I ever encountered with three initials, and I had no idea what the H and I stood for, but the E stood for Edward, and everybody called him Ed Dyer. Before the war, he had lived in what we called the house under the hill, but I wasn’t much aware of him until his return when the war was over. There had once been a gristmill on Shoal Creek, which ran down behind our house, and Mr. Dyer set out to rebuild it. He was a very hard worker, beginning his labors at sunup, and we neighborhood kids watched the project from a distance, much impressed with Mr. Dyer’s energy. Once the mill was finished, he began to raise the dam on the creek to get the water he needed to run the mill. He brought in a lot of workers to drill holes in the dam and install iron bars and then to pour a two-foot layer of concrete across the dam. When he finally opened the floodgates, he drained the creek, exposing the rocks above the dam. For the first time in my memory there were actually shoals in Shoal Creek. He also built a millrace to move the water from above the dam to the gristmill’s turbine.
All over town there was talk about Mr. Dyer’s project, and most didn’t approve. Did he, after all, have the legal right to raise the dam? Would he flood Mulkey’s Bottom? Would Mr. Jeter’s garden plot be affected? Would we be able to have the carnival down by the creek as usual? Despite their fears, people seemed powerless in the face of a determined Mr. Dyer. Everybody just admitted you couldn’t do anything with him. The single exception I know of was the young Catherine Bridges, who lived with her parents in a big white house on Shelby Street just above the dam. I was told that when Mr. Dyer began to bulldoze along the creek toward their property, she placed a chair on their property line and told him that he’d have to run over her to bulldoze her place. For once, Mr. Dyer backed down. He had met his match in young Catherine Bridges.
Mr. Dyer’s infamous Shoal Creek dam.
Mr. Dyer finally got his operation up and running, grinding corn and peanuts to make meal and cow feed. He also had a fantastic corn-shucking machine. He did not have a switch to throw or a button to push to change the speed of the wheel for various operations, but would place an iron bar into the works at the proper location. I loved to hear the growling sound diminish as the water wheel in the pit slowed down and watch the dust-covered belts, each wider than both hands, become visible as the speed slowed down. Then I’d watch the belts move over to other pulleys, which were designed to do another job, slowing down or increasing the speed when the wide belts were moved in one direction or another. I was astounded at Mr. Dyer’s engineering.
I was also fascinated with Mr. Dyer himself, who worked shirtless in most all weather. He was always covered with corn dust from head to belt, the grinding residue hanging from his nostrils, his ears, and his eyebrows. Somebody in the neighborhood nicknamed him the Monster, but I didn’t call him that. As time went on, we were not afraid of him and were often down at his mill site. One day he showed us how to drive a bent nail. Most people straightened bent nails, but Mr. Dyer demonstrated how, if you hit the head of the nail at exactly the right angle and with exactly the right amount of force, the nail would straighten itself. We thought it was pure magic how he could do that.
I caught from Mr. Dyer a lifelong habit—collecting “good stuff.” He had more treasures on his place than anyone I knew, and his stuff was an endless source of pleasure to me. There were stacks of wood and lumber, tools of every sort, and pieces of machinery here and there. Among the various piles roamed his four cows. Dad always said that Mr. Dyer’s stuff was junk, but I knew better. I knew that Mr. Dyer would find a use for it all. Just give him time.
Mr. Dyer cared little for what his neighbors thought. In many ways, he exemplified a quote from Benjamin Franklin that I came to adopt as my own motto. I first encountered it when, as a fifth or sixth grader, I was taken by Dad to a hot dog stand out in Wilton. On the walls there were blue signs with sayings written in glitter. One read, “To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, and be nothing.” I asked Dad what it meant, and when he explained it to me I was quite impressed with the idea. Mr. Dyer and I had more in common than might have been seen at first blush. It gives me great pleasure to own the Dyer property today and to have the opportunity to clean it up and create a park on the site.
The Carpenters
Old Man Carpenter, as we called him, and his sons Brewer and Bill lived in three side-by-side houses down the street from us. They especially did not care for Mr. Dyer and his projects. They were terribly upset when Mr. Dyer tried to get the city to declare that the driveway between Old Man Carpenter’s house and the Bridges’ house next door was a public street. Mr. Dyer wanted to use the driveway for easier access to his mill. The Carpenters were not about to let this happen, convincing the City Council, on which Dad was then serving, that the driveway was actually a driveway, not a public street.
I never liked the Carpenters very much. Of all our neighbors, they were the least neighborly. Old Man Carpenter lived with his nice, soft-spoken wife, and an unmarried daughter, Madge, in the house nearest us. On Middle Street behind Wilson Drug Company, his sons had a garage that was made from tin and had a dirt floor, and in part of that building Old Man Carpenter ran his shoe repair shop, a place heavy with the smell of neatsfoot oil and leather. He stood behind an L-shaped counter operating a giant, noisy machine that had multiple wheels running on a long shaft, powered by an electric motor. This machine would grind leather off your shoes, polish the leather, put color on it, stain it, and repolish it. He also worked at a big sewing machine that would sew the soles back on your shoes. And there were metal shoe forms on which he would place shoes and drive nails into the soles and heels. Old Man Carpenter’s work fascinated me and my friends, but we didn’t get to see much of it, as he did not like to be watched. We were scared to get too close to him because he would tell us to get the hell out of there.
Carpenter Brothers Garage between Middle and Valley streets. Through the left door was old Mr. Carpenter’s shoe repair shop. The large opening to the right was the entrance to Brewer and Bill Carpenter’s auto repair shop.
Madge was not very nice, either. She worked as a dental hygienist at Dr. Orr’s office, which was just above Rogan’s Store at the corner of Shelby and Main streets. She didn’t have a husband, which could have had something to do with her personality. There was, however, a lot of talk about her and her boyfriends. Even as a child, I would hear gossip, but I understood little of it. What I did understand was that she would almost kill me every time I had to get my teeth cleaned. She stood there grimly doing her work, never offering a word of comfort. But we certainly heard from her when we skated down the hill toward her house. “Cut that racket out,” she would yell at us through an open window or from the front porch swing where she often sat. When I played at the Bridges’s house, which was next door to Madge’s house, we were always admonished by Mrs. Bridges to keep our voices down. But it was impossible to keep quiet while we were skating down Shelby Street toward the little red bridge.
I once had the chance to deal Madge some misery, though it did not turn out as well as I had hoped. It was the summer when I was twelve, and Joe McGaughy and I were playing down next to Mr. Dyer’s millrace when suddenly Joe grabbed my arm and motioned over to a large flat rock. I gasped at what I saw: sunning itself was the biggest snake I had ever seen. It was easily as big around as my arm and well over a yard long. “What kind is it?” Joe whispered.
“I haven’t got any idea,” I said. “It’s not a rattlesnake though cause it doesn’t have any rattles. Let’s look for something to kill it with.”
Joe eased up toward the snake just a bit. “It isn’t poisonous because its head isn’t a triangle. All poisonous snakes have a head shaped like a triangle.”
“Except for the coral snake,” I said, remembering my science class.
We saw some scrap lumber next to a barn Mr. Dyer kept his cows in, and we each armed ourselves with a length of two by four. We advanced like two warriors and made our attack. The snake, sluggish in the warm sun, never knew what hit him, but, taking no chances, we repeatedly struck him. We dragged his mangled body up to the house to show it off, but nobody was there but Carrie Boo. She hollered and said for us to get that thing away from her.
Later we showed it to Dad and Bloomer Wilson when they came home for lunch, and they told us it was a chicken snake. “Y’all go throw that thing in the creek,” Dad said, but Joe and I decided we hadn’t yet gotten all the mileage we could out of that snake.
“Let’s scare somebody with it,” Joe said. “It worked with Carrie Boo.”
And then we began our plan. We would tie a rope around the snake and hang it vertically in a long narrow hole in the water oak tree in the front yard. Then we’d train the rope out across a limb that came near our front porch. When we saw someone coming we would pull the rope and let the snake fall down toward the sidewalk, landing at their feet.
Once everything was set, we took our seats in the swing and waited for our first victims. In a short while, we could see a black woman and a child coming up the street headed to town. Just as they neared us, with perfect choreography, we yanked the rope. Neither the woman nor the boy seemed at all alarmed, but just walked around it. The woman cast a disgusted look in our direction and said, “What y’all little white boys think y’all trying to do?” The words little and trying cut us to the quick, but we decided to try again, despite our disappointment with our first effort. We stuck the snake back in the hole, went back to the swing, and waited.
That was when Madge Carpenter headed our way, going back to work at Dr. Orr’s office after her lunch hour. Standing around five foot seven and weighing in at more than two hundred pounds, she was a blaze of white—white uniform, white wedge-heeled shoes, and white stockings. She walked slowly but deliberately—like a man, I thought. On her face was her usual glumness. A better victim could not be found.
At just the right time we yanked the rope, and when the snake brushed her shoulder she let out a scream louder than I had ever heard. “Lord God, Jesus,” she hollered, and Joe and I got to laughing. By then she had seen the rope and had spotted the two of us.
“You wait til I tell y’all’s daddies,” she screamed. “Then you’ll be laughing on the other side of your damn faces.” With that she stalked off toward Main Street. I knew she would not stop until she got to Dad’s barbershop.
In a matter of minutes here came Dad, and I could see by the scowl on his face that he was not happy. “Get in the coalhouse, Mike, and you get on home, Joe. Your mama can take care of you.” As I headed to the coalhouse with Dad just behind me, I could tell he was removing his belt. The whipping wasn’t so bad. I figured it was probably worth it to scare the hell out of Madge, but it galled me that she might think she was the one who won.
Madge’s brother, Brewer Carpenter, lived with his wife and son, Brewer Jr., in a little creosote house between his father and his brother Bill. Both Brewer and Bill had reputations for being excellent mechanics, and they were also known for their automobiles, which they would trade in almost every year. While Brewer chose a practical Dodge or Plymouth, Bill chose a flashy Chrysler. Once he got one with special fender, hood, and roof design to make it aerodynamically superior. He told everybody, “Now that’s the way all cars will be shaped in the future.” Dad said he hoped not, as he thought it was the ugliest car he had ever seen. But I thought it was cool having a car of the future on our street. Highland Avenue didn’t have one.
Brewer Carpenter inside the auto shop he shared with his brother Bill.
The Carpenters didn’t like dogs to wander onto their property, and when I got Tag, Mother would always tell me to keep him off their place. They also did not like it at all when the boys in the neighborhood would come onto their property to fish along their bank. There was a gum tree on their property next to the creek, and it was reputed to be next to the best bream bed on the creek. We couldn’t resist it, despite the fact that we knew that one of the Carpenters would come and run us off. But we fixed them. Mr. Dyer lent us a little skiff, and we went up and anchored next to the tree and fished and fished. The Carpenters told us to leave, but we didn’t budge. The Carpenters did not own the creek, and we knew our rights.
Later we got more revenge. Joe McGaughy’s father, Mr. Luther, helped Joe and Jack build a plywood speedboat. I thought it was a beauty, about eight feet long and four feet wide with a beautifully curved bow. It would hold two people, but it was better and faster when you drove it alone, sitting in the middle, where you could operate the five-horsepower engine mounted to the stern. At full throttle it would fly, coming up out of the water on a plane. We’d fly upstream to the viaduct and back down to the dam, making sliding turns at high speed. The Carpenters would come out and shake their fists at us and yell. The sound of that big engine happily drowned them out.
We drove that boat for a couple of summers and we had great plans to improve it by adding a windshield or a steering wheel, or—most importantly—a larger motor. But it didn’t happen, as Mr. Luther’s health worsened and all our plans had to be scrapped. Besides, one afternoon Dad came to watch this speeding monster, and whoever was at the helm turned sharply only a few feet before the dam. Dad became very disturbed and told Mother, and I was grounded from being a passenger or driving the boat ever again.
There were bigger boats without motors on Shoal Creek, but we dreamed of having faster boats with outboard motors. Joe and Jack’s plywood boat, built from a plan in Popular Mechanics, remained firmly in our memory. It topped out at only twenty miles per hour, but, above that dam, Mr. Luther’s little boat surely still holds the speed record.