Things I Remember

Things I remember

by Tom Woodard

I was born in late 1948, the year the Chicago Tribune trumpeted Dewey's defeat of Truman in the Presidential election. It was also the year Ford first came out with the F-1 pickup truck (they didn't add the two zeros until a few years later, to make it the F-100). Naturally, I don't remember those events, or my birth, but I do remember a lot of things that have long since gone from the American scene, even in the rural South where I was raised.

I remember when small parcel freight was still delivered primarily by railroad, rather than UPS or such. I remember country folks cooking on wood stoves and washing clothes by boiling them in a three-legged cast iron pot, over a hot fire, and then scrubbing them over the rough surface of a washboard before running them through a hand-cranked wringer. I remember first frost and hog killing time, and how a whole family would pitch in to save and utilize just about every inch of that hog, including the process of "beating out" the chittlins. I remember that when the meat was cut up into pieces it was salted down in a salt box, to preserve it for future use over the course of the winter. I remember that same hog, in life, being "slopped" with table scraps and whatever else folks thought he might eat, such as corn shucks, pea hulls, rotten apples, etc.

I remember people taking a bath in a galvanized wash tub, with water heated over that same wood stove. I remember houses without plumbing, and with water drawn from an open well in a bucket raised by means of a hand-cranked windlass. I also remember that those houses had a little building somewhere out back called an outhouse, which was the primitive equivilent of the modern toilet. I remember that many houses that did have any running water a'tall had one spigot standing in the yard, usually not too far from the kitchen door, and none inside the house.

I remember watching chickens being killed by hanging them by the neck from a noose and then swiftly decapitating them by the sideways slash of a butcher knife, whereupon the chickens, in a state of excitement just before the blade struck, would hit the ground running, sans head, until they fell over from loss of blood. I recall watching the black lady who was killing those chickens chase one that had a particularly long run, through a sagebrush patch. I remember, like it was only yesterday, that all I could see was her big rump as she ran, bent over, after that chicken! Who could ever forget such a sight?

I remember the days when one did not address a black adult as "Mr", "Mrs", or "Miss", but simply by their first name, regardless of how much older than you they were, and I recall seeing black men, hat in hand, make little bows to white men and women who were much younger than they were, and answer those young whites by saying "Yass'm", "No'mm", "Yassuh" and "Nawsuh". I remember their young folks going to their school, and us going to ours - all public schools, of course. I remember doctor's offices and restaurants with black entrances around back, and I remember commercial establishments that blacks dared not even attempt to enter. I remember being confused when I heard white people call a black man "Uncle", thinking surely they weren't related to him.

I recall that at gas stations (we called them "filling stations" back then) there were three restrooms, marked "Men", "Women", and "Colored". And back then, when you pulled into the station, you didn't even have to get out of the car. An attendant would come out, ask how much gas you wanted, start the pump, open the hood, check the battery, the radiator and the oil, wash the windshield and check the tires, all for free! All you had to do was pay for the gas.

I remember seeing a big Ku Klux Klan rally in Reform, Alabama, with a huge cross burning in the center of the assemblage. My Dad took us children by there to see the face of bigotry and hate, and told us that's just what we were witnessing. I could tell, even at that young age, that he had no use for them. I also recall him admonishing us children "We don't use that word" (referring to what is now called the "n" word), and saying that the proper pronunciation was "ne-gro". I recall a young, high school age black girl who was ironing for my mother, and who was obviously caught up in the drama of the then budding civil rights movement, tell me "My Mama says a nigger is a sorry, no-count person, no matter what color they are." This last memory has stuck in my mind all these years like a dagger.

I remember when a lot of men, white and black, considered themselves pretty much dressed up when they wore a white dress shirt under their overalls, and have seen this attire accompanied by a suit coat or sport coat. I remember when there was no air conditioning, and when virtually no one in rural Pickens County had a telephone. The only phones in our area were at my grandfather's house and at the office at his sawmill. If there was an emergency, folks would go to his house or office to call whoever needed calling. The telephone at his house was one of those old wall-mounted oak hand-crank phones. Then, when we did get phones, I remember we were on a "party line" with a bunch of other families, and you could pick up the phone and hear two other folks talking. Then, the polite thing to do was hang up, but folks, especially the local gossips, didn't always do that! So you had to be careful what you said over the phone!

I remember when Coca Colas went from five cents to six cents and hearing all the uproar over it from grown folks (which was nothing like the uproar, a few years later, when they went from six cents to a dime!). I remember that a candy bar back then was five cents, and they came out with a HUGE Baby Ruth that was a quarter. I mean is was big! I remember when we could go to the movie at the theatre in Reform for a dime, and popcorn was five cents. I remember when they would have a double feature, and for the price of one movie, you got a cartoon and two movies! They did this at the big theatres, like the Bama, in Tuscaloosa, too.

I remember when, if you went in the grocery store and bought chicken, you bought a whole chicken - cutting it up was your job, not the grocer's or butcher's. And I remember that, back then, folks cut up a chicken in such a way that there was a piece of chicken called the "pully bone", which we kids fought over. I remember when gas was thirty-two cents a gallon, and when the the big companies conducted "gas wars" against the little independent stations, to try to put them out of business, it would go down to sixteen cents a gallon. I remember pulling into a Gulf station once and putting a quarter's worth of gas in my tank, because I only had a quarter!

I remember when every little cross roads had a country store or two, and loving to go in those little old-time stores to get a pint of chocolate milk and a pack of Golden Flake peanut butter crackers, or a soft drink and a snack. I remember when people would buy a Coke and a pack of salted peanuts, and then pour the peanuts into the Coke bottle and drink/eat them together.

I still recall that a Coca Cola tasted better in those old returnable six ounce bottles. I remember trying to drink one of those without stopping and having Coke come out your nose! I remember the utter shock to my system the first time I took a big swig of Buffalo Rock ginger ale (if you can find one, try it and see for yourself). I remember that Southern decorum dictated that if you ate a Moon Pie you MUST drink an RC (Royal Crown Cola) with it, and not a Coke or Pepsi. I remember when you could get a Nehi soda (that's what they called soft drinks back then in the South) not only in grape and orange, but also in peach and strawberry!

I remember when lots of folks still didn't have an automobile in the family, and folks giving them rides into town. Back then, no one worried about falling prey to criminal conduct if they offered a ride. We picked up black and white alike, because it was the neighborly thing to do. Seems to me they all sat in the back seat, regardless of color. I believe this was because even the white folks who were catching a ride were poor, and did not consider themselves our equals - tho we were by no means "well to do". I also remember when cars had neither air conditioners nor seatbelts, and when Ford first came out with seatbelts and a padded dashboard. I remember when, other than the major highways, all the roads in our County were what we called dirt roads, which were actually gravel roads. Then Big Jim Folsom, as Governor, paved a lot of these roads, calling them "Farm to Market" roads. I remember wooden bridges on these old dirt roads that were so narrow that, as one drove across them, you couldn't see either side of the bridge out the side windows of the car! If cars approached from each end of the bridge, one would have to yield to the other, let them come all the way across, and then proceed across themselves!

I remember when children only got presents at Christmas and on their birthdays, and poor children often got none at all. And even children who got presents on these special occasions didn't get near as many as children do now. I remember my Mom taking toys we had outgrown and giving them to poor families in our area. I also remember that we had a lot of fun making our own play things. A large cardboard box and a kitchen knife soon produced a house, with doors and windows, and a yard rake could partition leaves and straw into rooms of an outdoor "house". We made a sapling lean-to with nothing but a hatchet, and a piece of rope was good for a variety of activities, including not only jump rope but also tying one another into a chair to see if we could get loose.

I remember the steam whistle from the sawmill my grandfather owned, which we could hear clearly from over a quarter-mile away, and I remember that if it blew in the middle of the night it meant the mill had caught fire. My Dad worked at the mill when I was small, and I recall one mill fire, when my Dad jumped up and hurried to the mill, dressed only in his underwear, moccasins, and old flannel bathrobe. With that highly flammable bathrobe on, he ran into the burning mill and down the iron steps into the basement floor to open the steam valves and keep the boilers from exploding. That was my Dad, for sure!

I remember when children came to school in the Fall - school didn't start then 'til after Labor Day - barefooted, and only wore shoes in cold weather, shedding them again in Spring when it warmed up again. I remember the children of farmers missing school for days on end at harvest time, because they were in the fields picking cotton or gathering dried corn. I remember our school bus breaking down once and the kids getting off and playing. Buses broke down a lot more back then than they do now, partially because they were kept in service a lot longer. Painfully I recall one of the playing boys cutting his bare foot horribly on a broken Coke bottle. I remember they wrapped his foot in a burlap sack to try to stop the bleeding. It was right at the end of our driveway! I remember when the blackboards at school were real slate, and I remember "eraser duty", which we all hoped to be called upon for, so that we could take the erasers out to the back wall of the brick schoolhouse and beat the erasers against the bricks to rid them of excess chalk dust! Back then, teachers actually had students do "chores" like dusting erasers and emptying trash cans - there was no political correctness then!

I remember when small dairies (milking houses) dotted the countryside, and I recall the big steel milk cans being set at the end of our drive, from one of those little dairies up the dirt road next to our house, so that the milk truck could pick them up every morning. Those old cans are now collector's items, but then they were essential in getting the milk to market! You can still see a few of those old dairies out in the country, usually in the middle of a pasture and almost always in a state of ruin. I also remember when many people still plowed their fields with mules, with a single mule usually pulling the plow, and the farmer or his son behind holding the stocks and hollering orders (gee, haw, giddup, and whoa) to the mule.

And mules were also used in the logging woods, to pull felled trees to the log truck for loading. Two-man cross cut saws were also still in use, tho a few chain saws were beginning to be seen among them. And back then the trees we see on log trucks nowadays were pushed out of the way by a bulldozier so the loggers could get to the "real trees", big old short-leaf monsters that had seeded naturally and slowly grown for many decades, with tight, dense growth rings that made the wood of a much higher quality than we see today.

I remember watching those mules working in the woods on a freezing cold winter day, with steam rising off their backs into the crisp, clear air. Lord, it was a beautiful sight! And there was no clear cutting back then, so that within a few years of a woods being logged it was hard to even tell the loggers had been there. Only the huge stumps and their rotting tree tops lying here and there attested to the fact. And at the mill, I remember watching the old steam carriage going back and forth, with it's operator sitting precariously atop one end of it, pulling a log through that big ol' circle saw and slicing off one board at at time. That was another thing of beauty, tho quite fearsome to a little boy!

I remember riding down to McShan with my grandfather to get the mail, in his black '56 Ford, and I remember that he always kept a cigar box (he smoked cigars regularly) full of pennies beside him on the seat, which he would give to any child or children he came upon, so that they could go to the store and purchase a piece of candy or bubblegum (yes, you could buy candy and bubblegum for a penny!). And I remember eating ice cream at his house after Sunday dinner (the Noon meal). Back then they only sold three flavors in the grocery stores - vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry - and it always disappointed me when all he had was strawberry, because that was the one flavor I really didn't care for. Naturally, it seemed that he had strawberry far more often than chocolate or vanilla!

I also remember that divorce was almost unheard of, and if someone got a divorce they were ashamed of it, and sometimes looked down upon and shunned. And back then almost all families, whether white or black, were two parent families - unless one of the parents had died or been killed in an accident. Mental illness, sadly, was also a cause for shame back then, and if you had someone in the family who was mentally ill you didn't speak of it outside the family. And I remember when I would overhear my parents sharing news that someone they knew had been diagnosed with cancer, and how very solemn and sad they were at such times, because in those days if someone got cancer it was a death sentence. There was no effective treatment, and it wouldn't be long - maybe weeks, maybe months -before I would hear my parents talking about that person having passed away.

Back then, hardly anyone in rural Alabama knew anything about illicit drugs, and the only "drug of choice" was alcohol. Just about everybody, it seemed to me, drank back then, and most folks drank whiskey rather than beer. Of course, being in the heart of the Bible Belt, a lot of people hid their liquor and their drinking from their neighbors, and dutifully cried out "Amen" when the preacher decried the evils of John Barleycorn on Sunday morning! Even so, a drunkard in the family was another source of shame, and the existence of his or her condition tended to be swept under the rug, along with the divorces and the mental illnesses in the family. A man was expected to be able to "hold his liquor" and his inability to do so was viewed as a sign of weakness.

People then were much poorer, economically, than we are today, but despite their prejudices and superstitions, I believe they, on the whole, had a better heart than folks do today. They worked hard, helped their neighbors, took care of their children and the elderly, paid their bills, went to Church every Sunday, respected and supported their children's teachers (and expected those teachers to tan their youngun's hides if they misbehaved in school) and their government - local, State and Federal. They were honest and law-abiding, and they expected nothing they did not earn by their own sweat and toil. Nobody whined about being a victim, or about their rights being violated. They took responsibility for their own actions, and spoke their minds about the issues of the day. Like I said, there was no namby-pamby "political correctness" back then, and a child would never have gotten in trouble, much less expelled, for bringing a water pistol or a pocket knife to school! Folks back then used common sense - a far too rare commodity these days!

I am glad I was privileged to grow up in the era that I did, and in the place that I did, and I worry about my grandchildren having to face the crazy, insane world in which they will have to navigate their way to adulthood. Times were harder back then in a sense, but I think they were easier to grow up in, back when children were allowed to be children for awhile, instead of over-scheduled miniature adults. How, when and where we grow up helps to shape us and our lives, and I'm thankful for the shaping influences of my childhood.

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