There comes a time when a boy gets his first whiff of girls and gasoline, and that is a mighty powerful combination. When it hit me, I was grossly unprepared for the effect. I had no real systematic understanding of the mechanics and science of sex, though I had heard quite a bit of talk. Dad had never given me the story, though I once heard Mama telling him that he needed to take me aside and instruct me, that I was coming to the age that I needed to know about the birds and bees. I was embarrassed hearing her telling him that, as I knew he was reluctant to approach me. So I remained in abject ignorance on the subject.
Dad did at least advise me about my appearance. When I was in my teens and was getting interested in girls, Dad told me I should start paying more attention to how I looked. He taught me to use Old Spice deodorant and how to shave. He wanted me to use the straight razor, as he did, but sharpening the razor on the leather strop, using the shaving brush and cup to work up the lather, and completing the shave itself was just too much for me, and I was happy when Sister presented me with a Ronson electric razor that her husband Bobby had cast off. On some occasions, however, Dad would shave me in his shop, and I was amazed at how gentle his hand was. Once finished, he would apply a Rose oil aftershave that smelled wonderful, but burned like hell, and I left that shop smelling like a rose garden. No other boy in Montevallo was as lucky as I was, I thought, and I felt ready to go out and slay me a few girls.
The girl across the street, Laura Ann Hicks, whom I silently longed for and whose friendship has lasted to this day. Photograph made in her front yard about 1951 with the Hartley house in the background.
The first girl I really noticed for her beauty and sensuous qualities, Laura Ann Hicks, moved into the Craig House across the street when I was in junior high school. After Mrs. Craig sold the house, the house had gone down, down, down. The spectacular flowerbeds went to weeds, the rose garden was abandoned. There were no more petunias and pansies. Mother had wanted to buy the house, but Dad convinced her that it would be far too expensive to heat. No one else seemed to want such a big house, or, if they did, they couldn’t afford it. And soldiers returning from World War II wanted small ranch houses with picket fences. Then along came Roy and Laura Hicks. Mrs. Hicks, an absolutely beautiful woman, ran the five and dime, and Mr. Hicks was a telegrapher for the railroad. Their daughter’s name was Laura Ann. She was one year younger than me, and I noticed her immediately.
Now when I went to the Craig House, no butler met me at the door, and there was no longer the fine furniture and the nice refreshments. The place was strewn with toys and other clutter, but little did I mind. I could, finally, slide down the banisters to my heart’s content.
Laura Ann was very good looking, and all the boys on Shelby Street fell for her. The boys on other streets fell for her too, but we Shelby Street boys were jealous of our turf and we fully intended to protect our progesterone. Laura Ann became good friends with Martha Ann and Mary Katherine Cox, Jane Russell, and Beverly (Bird Legs) Doyle, who lived next door to me on Shelby Street. We were in our early teens, but already we played games like spin the bottle. And we all hoped it would land on Laura Ann. I was so smitten with her that even though I was a Methodist I joined the Royal Ambassadors at the First Baptist Church, which the Hickses belonged to.
We boys obsessively monitored the growth of breasts on Shelby Street, and Martha Ann Cox took the laurels here. I liked Martha Ann very much. She lived with her aunt, Mrs. Rogan, a powerhouse of a woman who ran a very tight ship, even telling her husband, according to rumor, when he could tend to personal toiletries. She took in Martha Ann, her sister Mary Katherine (whom we called Kacky), and their brother Charles, and she was damned sure that nothing untoward was going to happen to them. I spent a lot of the time on the phone with Martha Ann. Although Mrs. Rogan would make her get off the phone soon after she had answered it, we worked out a deal where I would go out on the porch with my trumpet and give a bugle call signal for Martha Ann to call me. In that way we could talk as long as we wanted because Mrs. Rogan was less likely to be aware of the call.
Martha Ann Cox, queen of Middle Street.
Mary Katherine “Kacky” Cox, Martha Ann’s baby sister and head majorette of Vicious Tiger’s band.
Just off Shelby Street lived a red-headed girl named Dolly Jo with whom the other girls wouldn’t associate. They said she was fast, and we guys thought she was a tease. She lived next door to Joe and Jack McGaughy, and she especially liked to put on a show for them. Her shorts were so tight that her front and back clefts were clearly visible in outline. She was also fond of tying her blouse at her midriff, like Betty Grable, and showing off her navel. She could get us boys panting, but we were hardly more comfortable with her than with the other girls. We were not used to aggressive girls.
When I was in the tenth grade, I fell for a girl out in the Spring Creek community. That area produced some lovely girls. One was Joann “Demps” Butler, who stole the hearts of Dudley Pendleton, Pat Kelly, and Dolan Small, although Demps said she never dated any of them. But the one I fell for was Beverly Taft, a majorette. There was something about that majorette uniform that turned me on. When we traveled to out-of-town football games we would sit together, trying to be discreet with our petting. After all, we didn’t want to be caught by Vicious Tiger or the parent chaperones, who watched us closely and were only too eager to go back and tell what they saw to the members of Beverly’s church, Spring Creek Cumberland Presbyterian.
I didn’t have a car when I was in the tenth grade and had to double-date with Jack “Shug” McGaughy, who had a thing for Ann Ingram and, as a fine athlete with a good academic record, was well-received by Ann’s family. I was neither an athlete nor a scholar, and I do not think that Mr. Everette Taft would have received me like that. Actually, I never ventured past the front porch of her house, and I never got the idea that Beverly wanted me to. Nevertheless, our romance intensified until it sadly flamed out after six months or so.
The double dates were great fun while they lasted, and the four of us would go to eat in Calera or Jemison, always ending the evening at one of our favorite parking places. We did that, of course, to save on gas, which was a serious matter when I was making four or five dollars a week at Western Auto.
Three of the Montevallo Bulldog majorettes, left to right, Beverly Taft, Eleanor Mitchell, and Wanda Faye Richardson.
Later my friend Dudley Pendleton acquired a wonderful Model A two-door coupe with a gear shift on the floor. It also had a twin exhaust system and a muffler we had taken from another car. He let Beverly and me double date with him, the two of us packed into the rumble seat, which suited me just fine. Dudley was especially fond of Pearl’s Restaurant in Calera, and when we went there we would marvel at the waiter who hopped curbs and could take orders from eight or ten cars without writing a thing down.
One night we all were aching for some excitement, so we decided that we would raid a watermelon patch, and we knew just which one to raid. Mr. Sam Knowles had the best patch around, sitting high on a hill above his house near Spring Creek Presbyterian Church.
Dudley’s mufflers on his four-cylinder, split-manifold, twin-exhaust Model-A rumbled loudly as we approached the melon field, but we were not much worried. On our minds was the pint of vodka we would pour into a melon, which after we had plugged it we would take to Big Springs to cool.
Once we got to the patch, we jumped from the car and began thumping melons, listening for the deep thud that meant the melon was good and ripe. We got a little greedy and tossed seven or eight melons in the trunk, even whooping and hollering a little as we got back in the car as Dudley eased off in low gear. As we moved down the bumpy hill, suddenly off in the distance there loomed before us in our car lights the formidable person of Mr. Sam Knowles, who was the big poo-bah on the Board of Elders at Spring Creek Presbyterian. Whatever he said was the law. On this night he was dressed in overalls with no shirt, holding a double-barreled shotgun across his chest. We saw him lift the gun and fire into the air, frightening Dudley so bad that he steered off the path to the left and crashed right into a small pine tree. The tree bent forward, lifting the front end of the Model A in the air, and we sat there with the front tires spinning uselessly. Mr. Sam approached us, gun and a flashlight in hand.
Shining the flashlight into the rumble seat, Mr. Sam first spoke loudly to Beverly. “I can’t believe that a good girl like you would fall in with such sorry thieves as these. What would your parents think?” He indicated that he intended to tell them and to announce it in church the next Sunday. He was even going to ask the minister to take as his text the commandment about stealing.
Then Mr. Sam moved on to Dudley, a sneer coming to his lips. “And just what the dickens did you think you were doing?” Dudley didn’t answer. “Stealing, that’s what. You are no better than a common thief serving time over there in the Columbiana jail. And that’s where you’ll be if I bring charges.”
We all sat there speechless. As Mr. Knowles talked he got more agitated, and suddenly something awful but very funny happened. Mr. Sam’s upper dentures fell out of his mouth, and he quickly dropped to the ground to retrieve the plate. That gave us a chance for escape, and Dudley took it. He put the car in reverse and backed off the pine tree, then shifting into low and tearing away from the crime scene. We drove back into Montevallo, wondering what to do. We drove down to Big Springs, but none of us had an appetite for watermelon, even if it were laced with eighty-proof vodka. We decided that we had no choice but to go back out Spring Creek Road to take Beverly home, and we worried that Mr. Sam might be waiting for us or perhaps Beverly’s parents would be if he had told them about the escapade. We could not believe that everything was quiet and dark in Spring Creek, and we felt extremely lucky. I guess Mr. Sam thought he had taught us a lesson, and he never said a word to any of our parents, although he knew them all.
Dudley Pendleton and his four-cylinder, split manifold, twin-exhaust Model-A, the car that climbed a tree at Spring Creek.
Another girlfriend of mine was the daughter of the minister at the First Methodist Church, where we attended, and I must say that my interest in church increased greatly because of her. Every Sunday, Mother and Dad and I walked down past Rat Scott’s Chevrolet place, by the Fire Department on the left side of Shelby Street, past the building supply and hardware store owned by a sober pair we called Smiley and Giggles Frost, and on past the historic Negro quarters, where the crippled man Charlie, who delivered mail at the college, and the Deviners lived. Then we were at the Methodist Church, where I was greatly influenced by persons like my Sunday School teacher Mrs. Maggie Kelly, the organist Charles Mahaffey, Dean Napier from the college, Charlotte Peterson, the elementary school principal, and Victor Talmadge Young, the band director. But as important as the church was for me for all these reasons, there came about an even more important one. I met my first true love there.
Jane Triplett, the preacher’s daughter and my first true love.
Jane, right, and Frances Klotzman, my buddy Harry’s sister, are fetchingly posed at a Methodist Church swim and picnic outing at Jane’s uncle’s lake property near Sylacauga.
When Reverend Triplett came to us after the war, he brought with him a wife and one daughter. The daughter’s name was Jane, and never had I seen anyone so appealing. She was a stunning redhead, and, as we boys tritely put it, she was built like a brick outhouse. She had the finest butt I had ever seen. One year younger than me, she played the clarinet and the piano. And she was chosen as a majorette. I was not the only one attracted to her, and a guy from Pea Ridge first claimed her. It took a while, but I managed to steal her away.
Jane and I had marvelous times, primarily because Reverend Triplett, whose name was Minor, and his wife Marie were, by the standards of that day, quite permissive. I liked Reverend Triplett immediately. He smoked, and I am sure he took a drink, too. But best of all, he understood young people. The first time Jane and I left on a Saturday night date in Dad’s car, he pulled me aside and delivered Minor’s Rule: “Do not park. Come home. The living room is yours and you’ll not be disturbed. If I have to come into the living room, I’ll give you a signal before entering.”
I thought that was a great thing for a father to say to his daughter’s date. But I must say that we were slightly inhibited in that living room. Because the church was not locked in those days, we took to going into the sanctuary in the afternoons to neck. With light filtering in from the back-lit rose window, we engaged in petting that took us as close to heaven as I had ever been.
I began to hang around the parsonage all the time, and I was invited to go with the family several times to an uncle’s lake house in Sylacauga. I had gotten an Argus C-4 camera with my earnings from my job at Western Auto, and I began to take cheesecake pictures of Jane in her bathing suit or in shorts with bare midriff. Her parents made no objection, though the shots were quite sensual.
I continued to date Jane until after I went to college. But after she spent a year at Alabama College, she transferred to Huntingdon College in Montgomery, and that ended my first great romance.
The Methodist Church played an important role in my maturation. But church was more than that. In fact, I tended to accept without question most of what I was taught there right on up into high school. I did, however, have some nagging questions. Why, I wondered, were the pictures of the Devil so much more detailed than those of Jesus, and why did he look so much more interesting? And how did they know he looked like that? When I looked at depictions of Jesus, I would get to wondering how we knew he was not colored. I even asked Mrs. Kelly about that and she said not to worry, he was from Jerusalem, and there weren’t any colored people over there. So that settled that.
Harder to settle in my mind was the question of how heaven and hell could hold all the succeeding generations. I just couldn’t imagine how there could possibly be room. And what about meeting up with your loved ones after you died? Wasn’t that going to be next to impossible, I asked Mrs. Kelly. She said that through God all things were possible, but I continued to worry about heaven giving out of room.
In the eleventh and twelfth grades, however, Ed Givhan and I began reading philosophy. We were especially enamored of Neitzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, and thereafter we began to question some of the teachings of the church. Heaven and Hell bothered me a great deal, and, with the help of Putnam Porter, I began to believe that heaven was not a physical place but peace of mind after the storms of life. That was a comforting thought to me. He also straightened me out on the Bible not literally being written by God and that it was the result of many writers. In Sunday School we were told God dictated it, but that gave rise to even more questions.
Conversations with Putnam and others moved me to a more liberal interpretation of church doctrine. At my most extreme, I decided that the mystery of the holy trinity was hogwash, and I said so openly. I was chastised by several members of the church, chiefly by my mother. But these theological issues did not weigh nearly so heavily on my mind as did Jane Triplett’s pretty butt and the heated sessions in the First Methodist sanctuary.