When I was growing up, there was a clear distinction between town and country. We in town felt superior to the country kids, who lived in Dogwood, Boothton, Marvel, and other self-contained communities that had sprung up as mining towns in the early twentieth century. They all were largely supported by the coal companies that provided housing, community centers, schools, and commissaries for their workers and their families. Pea Ridge, a small mining community a few miles from Montevallo, was different. Pea Ridge families, for the most part, owned their own homes, and among the community’s residents were families like the Picketts and Lawleys—the FFPR’s or the First Families of Pea Ridge, as they were called. It sort of seemed to be accepted wisdom that Pea Ridge was as far above the other mining communities as Highland Avenue was above Shelby Street or Frog Holler.
Since the first grade, I had been attending school with country kids from such places as Dry Valley, Spring Creek, and Moore’s Crossroads, and we had thought little of it. But they were not mining communities. Until the mining kids began attending Montevallo High School in the seventh grade, we had little chance to know them. I had, of course, seen the mining people when they came to Montevallo on Saturdays to shop at the stores lining Main Street. Some of them even came to the Strand for the Saturday afternoon features. I had seen some of these kids in Dad’s barbershop. But I really didn’t know them.
We thought these kids were rednecks, even those from Pea Ridge. But we were careful not to offend them, as they were tough as nails. They came in with a swagger, determined not take any crap off these stuck-up Montevallo kids. They upset the equilibrium of the social structure we town kids were comfortable with.
Bill Allen and Ann Cox on the steps of Montevallo High School. Bill was an athletic giant who all the girls looked at and dreamed about.
I was always curious about Pea Ridge, a place so near, yet so far away. I was fascinated to learn just how close-knit the community was. There was little difference in social class, and the same values seemed to be generally accepted. There were no colored people in Pea Ridge. People there were hard-working, and early on the parents expected the same thing from their children. Social life centered on the churches and to a more limited extent the two stores, both of which had porches on which people would gather to play Rook or just while the time away. The town was so close-knit that at Christmas the whole community had a Christmas program followed by exchanging of gifts. The churches conducted a name-drawing exercise so that everyone in Pea Ridge got a gift from a neighbor.
While we kids from town thought we could easily outdo the Pea Ridge kids in academic ability and performance, they made up for that with their superior athletic skills. In fact, they dominated the field. Bill Allen, for example, became one of our star baseball players. One year the team actually won a state championship, playing the final game in Birmingham at Lane Park. Everybody was jubilant when Bobby Crowe—a town boy, I happily boasted—emptied the bases with a ball he hit down the middle of the field and into an adjoining lake. The football team was dominated by the guys of Pea Ridge—guys like Chief Lawley, a bruiser I tried to steer clear of.
But participating in sports took a special effort on the part of the Pea Ridge guys. For the most part, they lacked transportation. A school bus driven by a student named Lacey Herron brought them to school, but it went back out to the Ridge immediately after school. So after practice, the Pea Ridge guys would go down to the corner of Middle Street and either Main or Valley Streets and wait for someone to come by and take them home. If no one came, they were out of luck. But the problem with transportation was a general one. Pea Ridge people—not just students—would congregate at Pinky Lawley’s store or at Peters Store to catch rides into Montevallo, and seldom was there too long a wait until they got one.
The Pea Ridge guys not only excelled in sports; they poached some of the fine-looking Montevallo girls we thought were in our own preserve. But they were very protective of the Pea Ridge girls and didn’t like it if one of us townies paid too much attention to them. I remember that fistfights occasionally broke out over girls. It was rumored that the girls from Pea Ridge were wilder than the girls from Highland Avenue or Shelby Street, but we had little opportunity to test that theory. You didn’t want to get those Pea Ridge guys riled up.
The boys from Pea Ridge told us about a game that was popular out there. It was called candy. The party was typically held in someone’s home, and the girls would go into a separate room from the boys. There, they would choose the name of a candy bar—Baby Ruth, Almond Joy, Hershey—and then go back in the room and let the boys choose a candy bar. This was a device for pairing up the sexes, after which the couples would take walks together. The boys tried to fix the game by having an understanding in advance about what candy bar their girl would choose or, on occasion, even go outside to listen at the window outside the room where the girls made their choices. This was Pea Ridge’s version of Spin the Bottle.
I got the idea that Pea Ridge, on the whole, was pretty puritanical. One could not buy a drop of whiskey or home brew there. The only alcoholic beverage was the scuppernong wine that Mr. Pickett made every year, though it was rumored that many a pint of moonshine, labeled “For medicinal purposes only,” was kept in drawers throughout the community. Teenagers would work up a cough to get a taste of the clear moonshine, flavored with a piece of strong peppermint.
Montevallo’s Joanna Sharp, Alabama’s Maid of Cotton, surrounded by adoring fans
One of Mrs. Sharp’s cultural parties at Joanna’s home. Joanna is standing far left. Others in the photograph are Ed Roberts, Joe and Jack McGaughy, Pat Baker, Harry Klotzman, Joy Holcombe, Martha Ann Cox, and Eleanor Mitchell.
Socially, there was little interaction between town and country, but sometimes friendships were formed between Pea Ridge and Montevallo students. Bill Allen became tight with Bobby Crowe, for example, because of their excelling in sports. The two also spent a lot of time with Agee and Pat Kelly, who lived next door to Bobby. Once when Pat had gotten a motorcycle—the first kid in town to have one—he offered to let Bill ride it. He instructed Bill on the use of the clutch and the accelerator. Unfortunately, he failed to show him where the brake was, a lapse that only occurred to Bill as he was speeding down Shelby Street toward the college. He was able to slow down enough to go safely around the block, and he was moving very slowly when he reentered the Kelly yard. He felt relieved that his friends were not in the yard to observe his running into the brick wall there. Luckily he was going slow enough not to damage the cycle, and his major wound undoubtedly was to his pride.
The Pea Ridge kids were not included in most of the parties we had in Montevallo, but one day Mrs. C. G. Sharp, wife of the chairman of the biology department, decided to change that. The mother of daughters Susan and Joanna, she often tried to bring culture to the town kids, but she liked a challenge and on one occasion decided to see what she could do with Pea Ridge. She ironed her best lace tablecloths and set out her best dishes and crystal. She made congealed strawberry salad, which she put on clear glass plates. She put out a punch bowl with lime punch and an ice ring. She put some Glenn Miller music on low volume on the record player. Everybody was dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.
I was given a first-hand account of the event by Bill Allen, one of the Pea Ridge social climbers there that day. When he and his brother Ted and the Lawley boys entered the house, they felt immediately out of place, he said. Instead of the linoleum that covered the floors in his house, he saw nice oriental rugs. Instead of the coleslaw, which was as close as you saw to a salad in his house, he ate congealed salad for the first time. He awkwardly took a cup of punch, immediately realizing there was no way to hold the plate and the cup and consume anything from either one. So he put the cup of punch on a table and noticed that Mrs. Sharp quickly slipped a napkin under it. After the salad, they were asked to eat little Ritz crackers with cheese on them and spiced pecans. This was a far cry from the cornbread and butter beans that was their usual fare. The longer they stood there, Bill said, the more they began to feel like turds in a punch bowl, and he and the others made a hasty departure. They were never asked back. Apparently Mrs. Sharp just gave up on bringing culture to the denizens of Pea Ridge.
In many ways the most exceptional person who came from Pea Ridge was Donald Dennis. We nicknamed him Stink for obvious reasons. He came to school with a brother who couldn’t keep up academically, but Donald was very smart and a high achiever. He always made higher grades than I did. Immediately after graduating, he went into the military. After a year he returned home on furlough, and I saw him crossing Main Street. Without thinking, I thoughtlessly yelled, “Hey, Stink.” He turned to me, thrust out his hand, and said, “The name is Donald.” I saw then that the nickname had not suited him at all, and I never called him Stink again.
After Donald got out of the military, he returned to Montevallo, where he attended Alabama College and met Elizabeth Stewart, the top student there. She was a biology major, the daughter of the owner and editor of a newspaper in Marion. After she graduated, they married and moved to Atlanta, where she completed master’s and doctoral degrees. Donald completed college there, and subsequently received a law degree at Emory and practiced law successfully in the Atlanta area. He certainly shot down our notion that the town boys could outperform the country boys academically.
Among the country communities, we thought Spring Creek superior to Pea Ridge. While the people in Pea Ridge and Dogwood had their own elementary schools, people from Spring Creek did not. Perhaps that made them seem more like us than the others. We could date girls from Spring Creek without there being a problem, as was certainly not true of Pea Ridge, and we guys from Shelby Street and Frog Holler thought there were some real lovelies out in that community.
An exception to most of the country people we knew was the Frank and Sadie Baker family. They were not from Pea Ridge, but owned a dairy farm just north of Montevallo. Tommy Baker, who distinguished himself as an athlete, was about my age, and I loved to go out there to play with him and his brothers. They lived in a comfortable house that impressed many Montevallians. I remember especially their living room, which Mother always said was as fine a Victorian room as you could find anywhere. In the middle of the room was an exquisitely carved round table—a Sheraton table, according to Mother. On it sat an elaborately decorated oil lamp that had been wired for electricity. Next to the table was a carved mahogany chair covered in wine-colored velvet, and other heavy furniture was nicely placed throughout the room. On the floor was a splendid oriental rug with a red design, and I also remember the cut glass vases on the mantel, which Mother said were extremely fine and expensive. I guess you might say that Miss Sadie was the grand dame of Montevallo’s agrarian society. Certainly Mother thought she was.
In late summer, the Bakers hired a lot of boys from town to come out and help get in the silage, and we older boys on Shelby Street were always included in the group. We welcomed the chance to make some money, but we also liked the challenge of the hard work. Early in the morning we would begin cutting silage and loading it into four-wheeled wagons. It had to be taken to the tall steel and stone silos that sat next to the milking barn, where we shoveled the silage into mechanical lifts that dumped into the silos. By the end of the day we were worn out, and we looked forward to bedding down on the sleeping porch on the second floor of the Baker home. It had lots of windows that could be opened to allow evening breezes to cool the hot bodies of us hard-working boys.
The Bakers milked two times a day, at four o’clock in the morning and in mid-afternoon. All year long, the two Baker sons, Bobby and Tommy, were up early to help feed and milk the cows. For the afternoon milking, they were usually at school practicing baseball or football. But on weekends there was no getting out of the mid-afternoon milkings. But the Bakers were hardly slave drivers. They wanted their children to enjoy life on the farm, even constructing a tennis court for them. That really impressed me. No one in town had a private tennis court.
Feeling a part of the Baker family was one of the highlights of my youth. It set for me a model for the good life that I have pursued to the present day.