When my wife Linda and I celebrated our thirty-ninth anniversary in 2001, I rented a room for the night in the tower of the McKibbon House Bed and Breakfast in Montevallo, Alabama. It somehow seemed appropriate to spend an amorous night there, as it was in that very room that I was conceived during the fall of 1933. My parents, Red and Ethel Mahan, had an apartment in this rambling two-story high Victorian house on the corner of Boundary and Shelby Streets, living there with Tootsie and Sister, Ethel’s teen-aged daughters by a previous marriage. My mother was about forty-three—eight years older than Red—when she became pregnant, and as her pregnancy advanced he was quite solicitous of her, becoming increasingly fretful that bearing a child at her age could present dangerous problems. He decided to take what was an unusual step in those days: to send her to Birmingham where she could get the best possible care. There she stayed with members of her family for a few weeks, finally entering the South Highland Infirmary for the delivery.
The McKibbon House, where it all started. Since its construction in 1900, this grand Victorian structure has functioned first as a private residence, then as four apartments, back to a home, and now as the McKibbon House Bed and Breakfast Inn.
June 29, 1934, was a dark, threatening day. There was a churning and rumbling in the west as Ethel entered the hospital, and the sky got darker and darker as her labor progressed. High winds began to blow, harder and harder, and in time it became obvious that a cyclone—the then common name for a tornado—was coming. As Ethel was wheeled into the delivery room, lightning flashed and thunder cracked, wind rattled the window frames, and heavy rains pelted against the panes. Then, just as I was being delivered, it happened: a cyclone hit South Highland Infirmary with force. When I was finally taken to the nursery, a janitor was still sweeping up broken glass from blown-out nursery windows and workers were tacking up a tarpaulin to keep the rain out.
So I was told in family lore.
I was of course blissfully unaware of all this, lying snug in my bunting, but everyone in Montevallo knew the story soon: Stanley Michael Mahan Jr. had been born in a whirlwind. Later on, some of my friends would say that I have lived in a whirlwind ever since, and I’m bound to say that they have a point.
The Great Depression was ravaging the nation at the time of my birth. Because times were so hard, my father had been forced to sell his Ford coupe. When my mother and I were released from South Highland, he got Mr. Robert Holcombe, who ran the local Independent Grocers Association (IGA) store, to bring us back to Montevallo in his large black sedan. Our route to Montevallo was south on Highway 31 to Calera and west on Highway 25 to Montevallo. Although the road from Alabaster to Montevallo was more direct, it was not paved, and we, like most people, shunned it. Mother thought I needed a soft, smooth ride on a paved road since I had arrived in a cyclone.
In Montevallo, Mr. Holcombe turned off Highway 25 at Shelby Street, crossed over the railroad track, went past the cotton gin and ice plant, crossed the little red bridge over Shoal Creek, came up out of Frog Holler, and proceeded up Shelby Street past the Presbyterian Church on the right, turning to the left into the driveway of what would be my home until I went off to college. Daddy had rented this brand-new small white bungalow from Mr. Pete Givhan, landlord for several families on Shelby Street.
By all reports, my parents were doting, and I came to love them very much. My father, a barber by trade, had brilliant red hair, thereby gaining his nickname. I always associated him with rhythm. He walked in a loose, rhythmic way, and he stropped his razor and clicked his scissors in a rhythmic pattern. A compulsive key and coin rattler, he could never sit still. Every time he made the walk between the shop and our house, which was two blocks down Shelby Street, he invariably took two steps between the marked sections of the concrete sidewalk, always in exactly the same tempo.
My father, Stanley “Red” Mahan, making music and trying to make time with an unknown Brierfield beauty under the watchful eyes of her father.
If anyone ever relished life more than Red Mahan, I don’t know it. School was a drag, he thought, so he stopped going after the ninth grade. There were many pleasant activities he would much rather give his time to, and in many ways his ending of his formal education was only the beginning of his real passion to learn.
As a young boy Red developed a great love of music, and when he was a teenager he took up the mandolin and guitar. Before he married, he played off and on with several bands in Montevallo or Bibb County. Many years later, one of his fellow musicians, banjo player Cody Battle, lived near me in Brierfield. By then he was pretty much a hopeless drunk, but he remembered fondly the fun they had playing for both square dancing and round dancing. At some point Dad bought Battle’s banjo for me. Dad also developed quite a reputation for his square dance calling and continued to call throughout his life.
Red Mahan courting on the Thomas Mill bridge in Bibb County.
Once Dad told me that it was a wonder his Martin guitar had survived those years, as once when the guitar was new a fight had broken out and he had been forced to crown one of the combatants with it. Luckily, his brother-in-law, Jim Splawn, a noted carpenter, glued and screwed it back together, and he played that guitar when Dad was courting Ethel, he played it with his buddies after work in his barbershop, he played it at church. He even played that Martin guitar when courting his second wife, Miss Opal, whom he married when he was eighty years old.
In addition to Cody Battle’s banjo, I still have Dad’s Martin guitar, which I still play on occasion. To hold both these instruments in my hands is thrilling to me, as it puts me in touch with the musical traditions that inspired in me my great love of music.
Growing into manhood, Dad became a champion dancer, equally at home with a buck and wing, which was a complicated fast dance, or with a waltz. He entered dancing contests throughout central Alabama and became well known as a high-spirited young man. Some called him a confirmed bachelor; others called him a rounder. He chased women shamelessly, and he was seldom refused. Women and music went together for him, and many photographs were taken of him playing the mandolin with an adoring beauty by his side.
Besides women, Red loved the trains of his day, the ones propelled by steam engines. On numerous occasions he was heard to say, “If it don’t have iron wheels and blow smoke, it ain’t worth a damn.” His brother-in-law Vernon Hubbard, his brother Allen, and his sister Lois were all telegraphers for the railroad, and that was what he aspired to. But since no telegrapher job was available, at the age of seventeen he took a job as a brakeman for the GM&O Railroad, working the Selma to Meridian, Mississippi, line.
Red quickly grew weary of his job as a brakeman, which kept him away from home most of the time. Living in dusty boarding houses in Meridian became too much for him, and he decided to quit the railroad. The Wilton Barbershop was across the tracks from the train depot in Wilton, two miles southwest of Montevallo, and when he was home he would go in and watch the barbers, learning to cut hair by observation. He asked for a job, and he was lucky enough to get it. The location of the shop made it accessible to railroad personnel, locals, and travelers. Dad told me that he could do a haircut in the time it took the engineer to load the tender with water and coal and for the conductor to board the new passengers.
It was the Roaring Twenties when Dad got into the barbering business. At that time, girls were all getting feather bobs in barbershops, and Dad always had an eye out for opportunity. He determined that he should relocate to Montevallo, where there were numerous female students at Alabama College, a women’s liberal arts school, who might use his services, tonsorial or otherwise. In 1923, he bought a small barbershop on Main Street from Mr. R. A. Tatum, who had cut hair there for many years. Dad cleverly advertised his new business in the newspaper as “Red’s Bobher Shop,” and business was quite good, both male and female.
Following in the footsteps of his older sister Lois and brothers Cary, Jesse, and Allen, Dad got on with the railroad. He is standing on the right side of the cowcatcher with unidentified co-workers on a Georgia, Mobile, and Ohio steam engine.
In time, Red decided what he really needed was a beauty parlor in the back of his shop. The only problem was that there was not an available beautician in Montevallo to work for him. So he went to the Magic City Beauty School in Birmingham to inquire about a graduate to hire, and there he found a divorcee named Mary Ethel Wood. The next week he drove up to get her in his coupe, taking along one of his girlfriends. Poor Ethel had to ride back to Montevallo in the rumble seat of his two-door, five-window coupe with all her luggage crammed around her, but she didn’t complain. She had two teen-aged daughters to support.
Red had a room in the McKibbon House, and he managed to get quarters for Ethel and the girls there, too. Ethel was a real looker with a wonderful smile, excellent anatomy, and a great personality, and before long Red came to look on Ethel as more than an employee. Soon their working relationship became a love affair, and within a year the two were married. Red embraced Tootsie and Sister, who were teenagers, as his own daughters, though he never officially adopted them. They called him Daddy Red, and he grew to love them and happily supported them.
Tired of life on the railroad, Dad first started cutting hair in a shop in Wilton.
My mother, Ethel. Beautiful, talented, caring, and always ready to help, she is standing by her post-World War II General Electric stove in our home on Shelby Street.
I was well into my teens when I discovered they were not my real sisters. One day when Gene Baldwin, an older neighbor who lived two houses up the street, and I were walking down by the creek behind our houses, somehow I made him mad, and he blurted out that Red was not Sister and Tootsie’s father. I was thunderstruck. I accused him of making it up and started running toward my house, tears streaming down my face. I found my maternal grandmother, whom we called Momma, sitting in her bedroom sewing, and I told her what Gene had told me. She took me into her arms and held me and patted my back, then told me to sit down on her bed. “Honey, I’ve been expecting this for some time. It was inevitable that you would find out so I guess I’m as good as anyone to explain it to you.” She told me that Mother had been married to a Mr. Peters, but that he was not a good husband. He was a bad drinker, and when he was drunk he was unkind to both Mother and the girls. She supported Mother totally in her decision to divorce him. Then when Mother married Red and I came along, it just didn’t seem worth it to bring the matter up.
That didn’t make sense to me. Why couldn’t they tell me? All the times I had seen Dad hug the girls and tell them he loved them became sour memories. He told me the same thing, but I was his and the girls were not, and he acted like he loved them as much as me. Plus, as a teenaged boy, it seemed to me that a father should love his son more than his daughters anyway. Luckily, this line of thinking didn’t continue long, but I did resent the fact that Sister and Tootsie still went to see Mr. Peters and even considered him their father, even though he did not contribute a nickel to their support. What surprised me most was that Mother didn’t seem to object at all to their having a relationship with their father. I couldn’t hold anything against my mother for very long, though, and any uncertainty about Sister and Tootsie was forgotten.
If Red was in perpetual motion, my mother Ethel was as steady as the North Star. Although she had only a high school education, she held herself high. She had beautiful manners, and she knew how things were to be done properly. Despite the stereotype of the beauty shop as a mecca for gossip, Ethel did not engage in it. She heard a great deal, no doubt, but she didn’t repeat it. Before long she had amassed a clientele of teachers from Alabama College as well as prominent business ladies in town and the surrounding communities. Everyone thought of hers as a high-class operation, despite the fact that the beauty parlor was located in the rear of the “bobher” shop, separated by only a half wall with a swinging saloon door. Her customers did not even seem to mind having to pass by a group of barbershop patrons sitting on a wooden bench against the left wall, some of whom were not subtle in giving Mother’s clients the once-over.
As a small boy, I would sit and watch my mother at her daily routine of applying cold cream to her beautiful skin, and when she finished cleaning her face and applying makeup, I thought she looked like an angel. She never washed her face with soap and water, as she thought that in time it would leave her skin dry and hard.
Mother usually worked in a white uniform, but when she would go to the regular Wednesday afternoon teas at Reynolds Hall, the most beautiful building on the campus of Alabama College, she would change out of her uniform and into her very best clothes. I was especially proud of her then. In her white cotton gloves, she held her own quite well among the faculty members, who were the chief guests at these events. Mother took great pride in being asked to “pour” at these Wednesday afternoon teas, especially when she was matched with Dr. Josephine Eddy, the imposing head of the home economics department. Only a little less special was being selected to pour with the librarian, Miss Abi Russell, or Dr. Katherine Vickery, prominent member of the psychology department. At the weekly teas, the college’s gleaming sterling silver tea service, flanked by silver candleholders, was placed on a white linen tablecloth alongside a colorful flower arrangement, usually gathered from Flower Hill, the home of the college’s president. The group took their tea in delicate pink Wedgwood cups and ate their cakes from Wedgwood plates depicting campus buildings. Mother was in heaven at these events. Just to think that a high school graduate was a valued member of such a sophisticated and classy event.
Like Red, Ethel was a good dancer, but she lacked his enthusiasm. Often at events they attended he would wind up dancing more with Tootsie and Sister than with her. As she aged, Ethel developed arthritis and had to give up dancing. She also developed some anatomical changes that probably didn’t please Dad. He always liked shapely women, and his eyes were always open to the comeliness of the female anatomy. So his dance partners became his beautiful daughters, especially Sister.
Red and Ethel would work in the same shop on Main Street for thirty plus years. In the back she would be curling hair; in the front he would be snipping away, and the testosterone and the progesterone seemed to find a nice balance in the barber and beauty sections. But I quickly observed that the tone of the barbershop changed radically when Mother left. There seemed to be an unwritten law that the male customers would not use profanity or vulgarity while the beauty parlor was operating, but when the coast was clear the talk turned almost immediately to more manly stories of wine, women, and song.
So these, then, were my parents, Red and Ethel, who conceived me on Shelby Street and brought me to my home on Shelby Street. This street became the hub of my universe, a magical place that I felt extremely lucky to inhabit. There might have been more fashionable addresses in Montevallo, but I was well-pleased to live at 159 Shelby Street.