Pete Givhan was an excellent landlord, and he and his wife Sassy seemed more like friends than landlords. Although they might have been seen as Highland Avenue aristocrats, there was never any class distinction that I was aware of. Dad really wanted to own his own house, though, and after World War II he bought the bungalow from Pete as well as the house next door. From then on we lived in what was called the Mahan house. Later it would be numbered 159 Shelby Street, but in those days directions were given in a much more personal way. If I told someone how to get to my house, I would say, “Coming south on Main Street, you turn left onto Shelby Street at Rat Scott’s Chevrolet place and Rogan’s Store. Then come on down toward the little red bridge to the third house on the right, just two houses this side of Mr. Robert DeSear’s. And, hey, it’s just antigoglin from the Presbyterian Church.” Antigoglin was our word for catty-cornered or, more precisely, cater-cornered.
Looking southeast from Main Street down Shelby Street. Rogan’s Store was on the left. Mr. Rogan’s truck and Pete Givhan’s Coca-Cola truck are parked nose to nose. The white building behind Rogan’s once housed the town newspaper. Directly across the street sat Mr. Givhan’s Coca-Cola warehouse. Barely visible down the street, on the left, is the white-brick Presbyterian Church.
Our house might have been small and modest, but it was ours and we were proud of it. Except for Mrs. Craig’s huge brick house directly across the street, we thought it the finest on Shelby Street. Next to us was the Bloomer Wilson house. It was older, and its one-by-six pine siding was not painted very well. Its drab brown color was trimmed in peeling and dirty white paint, and it smelled of creosote. Inside, however, Bloomer’s wife, Miss Lucille, kept everything very, very clean. The Hartley house, down the street from us also needed to be painted at times, and the DeSear house was not very attractive either and needed paint badly.
159 Shelby Street, my home and the home of Ethel’s tree, about 1940.
Our house, with eight-inch clapboard siding, had four gables, and each gable had a louvered vent to let the hot air out. No other house on Shelby had them.
Our house had hardwood floors, which Mother kept waxed to a high shine. Twice a year, in the spring and shortly before Christmas, she would have Harry Miller, who worked for Dad in the barbershop, come down and wax the floors. To begin with, he had the difficult task of removing all the old wax with mineral spirits on a rag, working on his knees. After that, he applied Johnson’s Paste Wax to the floor with rags. Then he tied rags to the mop and buffed the floors to a high shine, back and forth, up and down, over and over again. Occasionally, if Ethel planned a big event three or four months later he would give the floors a second waxing— “same song, second verse,” to quote my dad.
There were six rooms in our house—a living room and dining room, which we could close off from the rest of the house, leaving only a kitchen and three bedrooms to heat and for our maid to clean. We had two fireplaces, but we heated with coal stoves. We were especially proud of the shiny black pot-bellied stove with brass trim that sat in the living room, which we used only on Sundays and special days. Daddy would arrange some kindling on the grate and put some coal atop that. Then he would roll up a sheet of newspaper and light it and put it under the starter and coal, and in no time a fire was blazing. The heater had isinglass windows behind which there was a cloudy red glow. When Dad would open the heater to add more coal, a blast of extreme heat could be felt half-way across the room.
In the kitchen there was a coal water heater. This little black monster was hot almost 24/7. The silver gray tank held enough water for cooking, washing, and bathing, and when the heater was fired with Aldrich red-ash coal, it would begin talking to you—clicking, popping, thumping, grinding. It was almost as if it were saying, “Oh, no, you’re going to heat me up again. Don’t I ever get any rest?” Knowing that Dad had started a fire at six o’clock in the morning, I would often run into the kitchen and place my hands on the water heater to see if it was getting about ready for my bath.
Every summer Mother would tell Dad it was time to black the stove. She would not have an ashy-looking stove in her house. After he had applied the special black stove paint and made a fire, there was a caustic smell in the house that faded away after the initial fire. Mother also got the idea of painting the water heater silver, and Dad dutifully got some paint and set to work. He apparently got bad paint, because when the heater got hot, all the paint popped off and Mother’s dream of a gleaming silver water heater had to be put on indefinite hold.
For years my job was to bring in scuttles of coal and to cut splinters from the huge hunks of fat lighter wood in the backyard. Dad would go out into the countryside to get these knots of pine, which were the taproots of the long-leaf pine trees that were so plentiful in our part of the world. The wood was so rich that red and yellow resin oozed from it. Dad’s job was to cut the knots into six to eight inch lengths, and mine was to take my hatchet and split the pine into splinters. On the back porch was a splinter box, and I was told to make sure that it never was empty. At times I felt a little put upon, but I also took some pride in contributing to the operation of the household.
My parents were not stingy when it came to coal, and I really appreciated that when I would occasionally visit neighbors and find their houses chilly. However, the acquisition of coal was a very complex maneuver. First Dad would call Mr. Day, who had a dump truck, to go to the Aldrich, Dogwood, or Boothton mine to get a load of coal for us. The Aldrich red-ash coal was the preferred coal by far, as it would light quick, burn hot, and leave little ash.
Sometimes I was allowed to go with Mr. Day, and I was excited to watch him pull his truck up under an overhead bin and tell the mine worker atop the bin how much coal he wanted—a quarter ton, half ton, full ton, or so-and-so many cubic feet. He also had to tell him the size—stove coal, fireplace coal, or stoker coal. Then the bin operator would pull a lever and the coal would be released, slide down a trough, and pour into the truck bed. Occasionally the size coal we wanted was not available, and we would have to get big black chunks of glistening coal, some of the pieces so large I couldn’t lift them. They would have to be broken up into smaller pieces, using a five or ten pound “blue Monday”—the name my colored friends called a sledgehammer weighing five or ten pounds. It was so called because nobody wanted to start the week wielding such a heavy hammer.
Once Mr. Day’s truck was loaded, he took the coal to my house and dumped it in front of the coal shed. Then Dad would shovel it under the shed to keep it dry. So the process of providing heat with coal was a complex matter, and it was an important part of my childhood routine.
When I was in middle school, natural gas arrived in Montevallo, and I felt liberated. The whole town watched with excitement as the pipe was being laid all around the city. Mother, though, was unhappy, as she feared that the laying of the line might injure the majestic water oak tree that stood in the front yard between the sidewalk and curb. It turned out the tree was safe, as the city took jackhammers and cut the concrete in the street to lay the lines so as not to get in the way of water lines that were buried between the sidewalk and curb.
Ethel’s tree, as my mother’s water oak was known in the neighborhood, was her pride, and she would not have one inch cut from the limbs or let its leaves to be bothered in any way. She had a continuous battle with Mr. Davis and other Alabama Power Company officials as well as with people from the telephone company, and for all her life she came out victorious. But after the house was sold in 2009, Ethel’s tree was finally cut down. It took them over half a century, but the utilities finally won.
About the time we moved up to natural gas from coal, Dad also replaced the old electric stove, a G.E. with four burners and an oven at eye level that stood on four white spindly legs. The new electric stove had a nice big oven and three eyes on the cooking surface, and with drawers, not legs, supporting it. But at that time electrical power was quite unreliable, and when it went out Momma would have to cook simple meals on the little black monster in the kitchen, which we had kept to heat our water.
That little black monster could become dangerously hot. In fact, when I was around five years old, it got so hot that the wall behind it caught on fire. Momma calmly called the volunteer fire department. I was afraid the house would burn down. As several firemen, including Dad, rushed in, I held on to Momma’s coat tails and watched in fear as they doused the flames with a hand-held extinguisher. We had not bought the house at that time, and Pete Givhan had Dad install asbestos board behind the stove and water heater, and I was happy we were then safe from fire. That asbestos board was still in the kitchen at 159 Shelby Street when my daughter Stann moved into the house in 2003.
Mother was proud of every aspect of our house. She bragged, quite naturally, about the oak floors in the front of the house and the pine ones in the back. She was also fond of saying our front porch, paved with red ten-inch tiles, was much preferable to the wooden porches of most of our neighbors. You couldn’t scratch it, and you didn’t have to paint it. Her pride in the home was confirmed when my Dad’s sister, Aunt Kate, who lived out in the country, followed our house-plan when she and her husband built their new house.
Our porch was the gathering place for neighbors like Mrs. Craig, Mildred Doyle, and the Hartleys, and sometimes, to catch the breeze, we would take the glider and chairs out in the yard and sit there. On some nights when we could see a red glow in the sky to the north, Dad would tell us that that was the Tennessee Coal and Iron open-hearth furnaces all the way up in Ensley, which was forty or more miles away. He explained that we could only see it when low clouds hung over the furnaces, reflecting their glow downward.
For many years Mother had open house for the trick-or-treaters on Halloween, and the house would be flooded with kids, some from outlying areas like Pea Ridge and Dogwood. Everybody else gave out candy at the door, but at our house the ghouls and goblins were brought into the dining room, where Mother ladled red fruit punch into paper cups for them and offered them cookies on Halloween napkins. I felt proud that our house was so popular with the kids in the area.
As a boy, I especially loved sitting in the swing on the front porch at night when the wind was blowing and watching the streetlight on Main blow back and forth, first in my line of vision, then out. Hanging in the middle of Main and Shelby on a wire from corner to corner, the streetlight had a shining green reflector, which cast eerie shades on the buildings and pavement. I would count the seconds the light swung out of sight as the wind blew it, and occasionally I would even get the kitchen clock to measure it. I don’t know what value that knowledge had, but as a boy I was constantly gathering information that had little practical value. I began then a lifelong obsession with quantifying, counting, and measuring. Later, along with the white streetlight, a stoplight was installed at the corner of Shelby and Main. It had only two colored lights, red and green—there was no amber in those days—and as it blew in the breeze it was even more eerie than the white streetlight alone.
Daddy kept the yard in first-class condition, and he was extremely pleased when Mrs. Craig across the street complimented him on it. He regularly raked the lawn with a yard broom, which he prized and didn’t like for me to use. That was quite all right with me. In the fall when the leaves fell, he would rake the yard carefully, placing the leaves in a long line next to the curbing. He would light the pile at one end, and the fire would crawl slowly along the street from one end to the other. I would take a stick when the fire would die down and stir around until I made the leaves flare up again. I felt like a magician.
Mother and Dad kept White Leghorn chickens in a pen next to the coal shed in the backyard. There was a running debate in our neighborhood over whether our pale white eggs were as good as the brown ones laid by the Domineckers. I could tell no difference in taste myself, but once a year, when we dyed Easter eggs, I preferred our white eggs. It was a great ritual, and brought out our creative talents. Having boiled a dozen eggs the night before, I would get out five or six coffee cups, fill them almost full of water and add different colors of cake coloring. Then we would drop in the eggs, let them sit for a while, then lift them out with a strainer. Voila: those white Leghorn eggs had become Easter eggs. The neighborhood girls, Martha and Kacky Cox and Laura Ann Hicks, greatly outdid us boys, using wax pencils to draw patterns on the eggs before dying them. We boys settled for solid colors, though occasionally we would dye a two-toned egg.
I never think of Easter eggs without thinking of our dog Tag, a little short-legged mixed breed who found all the eggs we couldn’t, cracked them open, and slurped out the meat. I swear there was a smile on Tag’s face as he pranced around the yard after finding an egg, his tail turned up in a perfect semicircle.
There were five regular occupants in our house: Mother, Dad, Sister, Tootsie, and me. But Momma spent long periods with us, and in the summers my blind Aunt Lucille, who taught at the Talladega School for the Deaf and Blind, would come for extended visits. It became clear to me very early on that Dad and I were outnumbered. We were surrounded by strong, assertive women, and I began my life in a world that would be controlled by a series of petticoat dynasties. But I adored the women in my household and did not find their rule oppressive at all.
Tag was the best dog that ever lived. He tagged behind me wherever I went for over twelve years, and he was welcomed into the homes of all my Frog Holler and Shelby Street friends. Tag was buried in the back yard of our home on Shelby Street.
Many things occurred in my back yard including my sixth birthday party.
It was not to be denied that Mother was the dominant one in our household. She was a quite sincere, devoted Christian, and she tried to make her children follow suit. Every morning she conducted family devotionals taken from the Methodist publication, The Upper Room, but I didn’t cotton to it much. Plus, she made sure we got to Sunday School every week. A teacher in the youth department herself, she had a constant battle with me over preparing my Sunday School lesson every week. She did not want me to embarrass her by being unprepared when I went to Mrs. Kelly’s class. The truth was that I could not stand the lessons. I had liked Sunday School as long as we were coloring and drawing pictures, but when it came to memorizing Bible verses and studying the Sunday School lesson book, I quickly lost interest. On many occasions I conveniently “lost” my lesson book. But Mother would make sure I got another, and the battle over preparing my lessons would begin again.
When I was bad, it was Mother who outlined what punishment I would receive. A proponent of progressive education, she was not much for corporal punishment. Occasionally, though, she might cut a little switch from the privet hedge and half-heartedly go through the motions of switching me. But her usual choice of punishment was to make me sit in the bathroom with no form of entertainment. I found that very oppressive, until I discovered that I could keep a rope under the claw foot bathtub and use it for an escape out the window. All I had to do was tie the rope to one leg of the tub, step up onto the commode seat, and lift myself onto the lower window sash. From there it was an easy drop by rope to the yard.
I can’t deny that I was always a free spirit. I just didn’t have the constitutional makeup to stay where I was supposed to be. “Mike, I’m telling you, stay in the backyard or you’re going to be in trouble,” Mama would say to me, but in no time I was down at the creek or over at the Presbyterian churchyard. Anywhere but where I was supposed to be.
If my infraction was bad enough, then Mother would turn me over to Dad. “You are going to have to take Mike to the coalhouse, Red.” If she said “Red,” it wasn’t too bad, but if she said “Stanley,” then I could be assured it was “Katie bar the door” for me. She would say to Dad, “He sassed me three times this afternoon, Stanley, and after I explicitly told him he could not go down to the creek he went anyway.” It seemed to me that Dad looked rather forlorn as he motioned for me to follow him. It was like he too was being punished. As we approached the open doorway of the dirty coalhouse, he would remove his leather belt, and when we entered the dark, dusty room I would brace myself. The truth was that Dad never hit very hard, but still I would always dance the coal room shuffle as he administered the whipping. As the licks became weaker and weaker, he would warn me that I would get more where that came from if I didn’t mend my ways. “Do what your mother says,” he would always say. “She’s the boss.”
Mother, Dad, and me in the early spring about 1941. Mother had the kudzu vine behind us planted to block her view of the two-story Hartley house next door.
When I had been particularly bad, Dad would go in the house and come out to the coalhouse with his razor strop, which was four inches wide and thirty inches long. The strop was double, with a thin white leather one used for fine sharpening and a rough dark leather one used for the rougher work. It was the fine side that hit you, followed immediately by the popping of the rough piece. “Flap, clap,” it sang out. Dad assumed somehow that this was worse than the belt, but, though it made a great racket, it really hurt much less.
I remember feeling the true blaze of Dad’s anger only once, and that hurt me to the quick. This time he didn’t need to take off his belt. He wounded me with his words. I was about twelve and had gotten quite interested in mechanical things, spending a lot of time in the garage working on my bicycle. When I got tools from Dad’s toolbox, I was careful to put them back, but one day I figured out that it would be much better if his tools were arranged in a more orderly fashion. I found some old black paint and a brush and painted an outline for all of his tools on the wall, taking special pleasure when I drew in places for his prized box-end wrenches—all in graduated order. When I finished hammering in the nails the tools would hang on and putting the tools in their proper places, I stood back and proudly observed my handiwork. Dad was going to love this. I ran in the house and got Mother, who said she was extremely impressed with what a good job I had done. Then I sat on the porch awaiting Dad, who always worked an hour or two longer than Mother.
“Come see, come see,” I yelled as he approached the house. I motioned for him to follow me to the garage. I approached the workbench with great pride and a sense of accomplishment. “Ta da,” I said dramatically, motioning to the display of tools.
Dad did not smile. As he surveyed the tools, a sour look came over his face, and when he finally said something, he spoke through his teeth: “This is the biggest bunch of shit I’ve ever seen.”
I was crushed. I was heartbroken. I felt tears coming to my eyes. I watched as he yanked the tools from the wall and threw them back in the toolbox. “From now on, you can just leave my tools alone,” he said loudly. With those words, he stomped out of the garage, not waiting for a response.
That was probably just as well, as my hurt was fast turning to anger. Even if he didn’t like the job I had done, he didn’t have to act like a fool. I sat on the floor of the garage for a while and cried, and I couldn’t help thinking how much I hated that man. But if I have a virtue, it may be that I do not hold grudges. I just get on to something else. But for the moment I felt an intense resentment the likes of which I had never known.
I suppose Mother and Dad got along as well or better than most married couples. They were partners at work and partners at home. Whiskey was about the only thing I remember ever coming between them. Dad liked a drink, especially on Saturday nights. It would usually begin when Hoot Lucas drove up in front of the shop in his dump truck a little before closing time every Saturday. He was invariably the last customer of the day, getting a shave every week and a haircut every other week. At six foot two, Hoot cut an imposing figure. His black hair, which he liberally applied pink hair tonic to, glistened. His white shirt and dark overalls, bought across the street at Mr. Sam Klotzman’s store, were very clean and nicely pressed.
Hoot always wanted his black brogans with their brass eyes and shiny laces spit shined, and when I was there I would spend at least ten minutes on each shoe. When I finished, he would fish a nickel tip out of his pocket and hand it to me with a nod. The ten cents for the shine was added by Dad to the price of the shave, which was six bits.
Hoot always carried a paper sack which he would hand to Dad when he entered the shop. I learned quickly that it held a pint of clear liquid moonshine. When Dad finished shaving Hoot, he would pick up the paper sack and disappear through the swinging saloon doors of the beauty shop. I knew he would walk through Mother’s empty beauty shop and go into the back room where the toilet was. When he returned, I could always smell the moonshine. Afterwards, he and Hoot would joke around a little. Then, when Hoot drove off, we’d lock up the shop and walk home.
Mother could smell the moonshine too, and, as a teetotaler, she couldn’t help but complain. Sometimes he would ignore her, but more often Dad would get mad and leave the house, with Mother calling out behind him, “Go on and get loaded. See if I care.” But she did care.
The Man: Stanley M. Mahan Senior, my dad. There never was a hill too high for this stepper. Circa 1920.
Dad would sometimes go off with his drinking buddies—P. C. Wilson, Mr. Cunningham, Mr. DeSear, and Bloomer Wilson. Often they would go to Mr. Reggie Lawley’s house for a drink. Other times, since Dad had no car, someone would pick him up to go out to Randolph to buy more moonshine or illegal labeled whiskey from Burley Jackson. Burley had a garage where he worked on cars, but he also had a room in the back where he conducted his more lucrative business. There he kept pints of bootleg moonshine, and he would also sell you a shot of whiskey for two bits. Everybody drank from the same little glass, and no one ever knew of the glass being washed.
Where Dad went after he left Burley’s place was anyone’s guess. He liked to party and have a good time, and once he got that on his mind, there was no stopping him. I found myself quite sympathetic with Mother when she and Dad argued, because I had been taught at Sunday School that drinking whiskey was a sin and that it could break up a home. I certainly didn’t want it to break our family apart.
The real truth was that this wasn’t going to break up our home. I knew that intuitively. Dad would always come home, and as far as I could see there were no major repercussions. Mother would say how crazy it was that he would pay Burley Jackson two bits for a shot when that was all he got for a haircut. She thought it was a terrible use of his hard-earned money. But Dad paid little attention and sometimes walked out of the room singing, “Shave and a haircut, two bits, I’ve got a gal with two tits.” Mother would just shake her head.
I realize how much I am my parents’ son. Like my mother, in my profession of dentistry I often think of expenditures in terms of how many crowns or implants I will have to do to pay for the item. And, like Dad, I have a real attraction to a woman’s first measurement.
For whatever small failures Dad had, he was in so many ways a model father, looking out for his family and treating Mother with respect. He just had to adjust to the efforts to domesticate him, a man who had lived a free life until he was over thirty years old.