WHAT WAS MY NEIGHBORHOOD LIKE AS A CHILD?
I lived in many neighborhoods growing up so I will describe each separately.
HAMILTON, ALABAMA:
My first memories are of Hamilton, Alabama. This is in northwest Alabama and is and was a small town with close-knit neighbors. We looked out for each other. Although my parents said I lived in several houses before I could recall them beginning at two years old, the first I remember was a rented house at the bottom of a small hill on the outskirts of town.
I don’t think this house had but three rooms. There was a back room where I assume we all slept and a front room with a bed in it which was the room you entered from the front, and a kitchen. I recall a front & back porch. The front porch was off the ground quite a bit and Billy shoved me off that one at some point. I don’t recall the incident so I must not have been injured. Mother said it knocked the breath out of me and I turned blue so I think it scared my parents. We lived there until I was probably almost three, and my main memories are of a snake being in the house and Mother calling one of the Walker boys from across the road to come kill it. It had gotten under the refrigerator and I think he got it outside before he killed it. I got on the foot of the bed and cried that a “goldfish” was going to get me. And.. we had to go across the road to a neighborhood water pipe to draw water there. AND of a tramp passing through and Mother giving him a sandwich off the back porch. There were lots of tramps back in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
We moved from there when I was still two and I’ve told of the move up the hill to a house Daddy had purchased. It was a small four room house with a screened back porch which was HIGH off the ground. Steps from that porch led to the barn and outhouse. Yes, we had no in-door facilities. We did have indoor plumbing to the kitchen. We even had a small coal burning heater that would heat our water for washing dishes. We had a kerosene stove for cooking and a refrigerator. The kitchen held the long, narrow stove, the coal burning heater, a sink and a pie safe. It was full. The dining room held a large wardrobe, the refrigerator, dining table, Mother’s flour/meal box, a table and four chairs. The living room held a large heater (wood-burning), a sofa which folded into a bed, some chairs, (don’t recall what else). The bedroom in which there was a small closet held three beds and a small bookcase. Billy’s bed was a twin with perhaps 12” between it and my parent’s double bed. My bed, the other twin, was foot against foot with my parents' bed. Was it full? You know it was. We were so very happy there. When Daddy had the peddling truck, he built a large storage building there for extra products. While he was working for the bread company and Uncle Victor was peddling for him, I remember having bread there, also.
That community was one that the whole town was one community and everyone in town helped raise every child in town. It truly took a town to raise a child. Of course, it helped that Uncle Victor and Aunt Exar and Uncle Elmer and Aunt Charlie Fay lived in town and Harbor Jean and Jimmy Wayne, offspring of those relatives practically lived with Billy Joe and Janette (me). together. The four of us would roam from one place to another together, the four musketeers. We played in the woods, we played in barns (of course, they were in the yard of one of us). Back then, if you went visiting, you just opened the screen door and called, “Hello” and waited for someone to answer. If they didn’t, you would walk through looking for them. BUT, you NEVER bothered anything in the house. Respect! It was taught in every home. You NEVER showed disrespect to anyone whether it be your parents, a stranger or a friend. AND, I NEVER showed disrespect to Mother without discipline.
Back to Hamilton, I went through fourth grade there. My first and second grade teacher was Mrs. Sartain, third grade (my Daddy’s former teacher) Mrs.Fleeta Loyd, and fourth grade (Mother’s former teacher) Ms. Arnie Robinson. Billy Joe went through sixth grade there. We walked to school as did everyone else. It was a long way from home, probably 5 or less minutes if one had a car, but for short legs, it was a long way. The group grew larger the closer we came to school for everyone on your way joined in so that there was a large number of students by the time you all got to the school. High school kids stopped at the high school and elementary grades went a little bit further to their school. Afterwards, everyone went home or to an aunt’s house. Billy Joe and I went by the Yellow Front Store where our parents worked and either stayed and studied or went home with the particular high school student who was living with us at the time. Back then, high school students from way out in the country roomed with those of us living in town and looked after younger children after school as payment for room and board. Mother lived with a sister for a while in order to go to school when she was in High School. We had several who lived with us off and on. That’s how life was back then.
Daddy went into the army the year I was six. World War II was winding down but it was not known to small towns like Hamilton. Every time the church was open, everyone was there, praying for our soldier boys. There were larger crowds in those years. Mother got letters from Daddy and so did Billy Joe and I. In our letters, we were always admonished to “Be kind to Mother”, “Take care of Mother Dear”, and other such sentiments. Mother went to work for Shotts and Summerford that year. She was a great salesperson. When Daddy finally came home, he couldn’t hug and kiss Mother for me hanging onto him. He was MY Daddy. I guess I was really a big baby.
After that, Daddy was restless. He managed the Yellow Front until he and his first cousin, Hilburn Pollard, bought a store together, Pollard and Davis. It was a feed, seed and grocery store. When it was not prospering, Daddy bought the peddling truck. A big flatbed truck onto which he had a store built. He tried running the truck and working part-time at the store and saw the need to go to work for Hardin Bakery out of Tuscaloosa. He hired Uncle Victor to run the peddling truck, he delivered bread and he sold his half of the store to Hilburn and left the bakery and that was when we left my first ‘neighborhood’. Those are some of my memories of Hamilton, Alabama. Many others flood my mind but this is not to be a book, just a short story and I have several more neighborhoods to write about. So next, you’ll hear of Amory, Mississippi, in Northeast Mississippi.
AMORY, MISSISSIPPI:
We lived in the Bigbee community out from Amory for a few months. That summer (1948) was a fun time. We had no indoor plumbing. We pumped our water from a well on the back porch. The well had to be primed with water from an artesian well with iron water. Not that iron water was required, it was what we had. There were three small ponds in the back yard in which lived many goldfish, one about a foot long and plump. We fed them scraps of bread and they had big appetites. There were two large lakes at the back of the property that were stocked with fish so many neighbors came to fish and swim that summer. Billy Joe and I picked up muscle shells and sometimes there would still be a muscle in the shell. The church we went to Bigbee Baptist was small, the pastor was someone I think my parents knew. His daughter was the church pianist and she was really good. We enjoyed our time there. We lived in that big old barn of a house (we ALL HAD A SEPARATE ROOM). Of course, we were still bus kids to Amory schools and enjoyed the camaraderie of that. When the Bigbee River started rising, we looked for other accommodations. Daddy and Mother had friends in town, the mother-in-law of Mr. Shotts that mother had worked for in Hamilton and her sister. They had divided their large house into two apartments. We had a living room, two bedrooms, kitchen and shared the bathroom. That’s right, we had indoor plumbing - complete - even a bathtub!! The bathtub was in a small room, the commode in another and the sink in the small hallway outside the other two conveniences. We thought we had moved up town. Of course the day after we moved in, the house we had moved from and many surrounding areas were flooded and the roads we had traveled were to be found no more. It was a long time before the county could get into the area to rebuild.
BUT, we were uptown. We shared the telephone with the landlady and that was another luxury we had never had. There was a vacant lot next door and that was the scene of many outdoor games. Boyd and Madie Jones lived across the street with their children. Their daughter was beautiful. She was older than her brother, James, who I played with. He had an electric train set up in an upstairs room. We had never had the luxury of a playroom. I thought they must be awful rich. Mr. Jones owned the Ford dealership in town. Madie had a little bulldog that she was extremely fond of. That dog was king as far as she was concerned. The Jones’ had a maid. I remember they had an ironing machine and the maid would send those clothes through that big thing and they would come out ironed. I was doing the ironing at home and couldn’t imagine doing it like that. I always enjoyed ironing. Onise and Zoie Lee Stevens along with Emily and Kerry were close friends in Amory, also. Onise was Mother’s nephew’s, Hob Sanderson, brother-in-law. Orene was his sister and she and Hob had six boys and one girl, Janie. I try to contact Janie when I can. She never calls me but will talk a bit when I call, informing me of the brothers’ well-being or not. But, back to the Davis’, the Jones’ and the Stevens, that was a trio of friends. We did so much together as a group. The parents would play rummy and the kids would play board games or just visit. If it was early in the day, we might play outside. Emily and I spent nights at each other's home and the fellowship was great. She and I reconnected as adults and her husband notified me when she died. Amelia Peeler and I were also good friends as were Mary Jo Isbell and many others. We walked to the dairy down the street from our house and bought ice cream treats.
While we lived in town, we attended Amory First Baptist where I was active in GAs. That was such a fun time. My leader gave me my first copy of “In His Steps”, a book I have enjoyed through the years. Birthday parties were fun. I went to several and Mother always made sure I had a nice gift for the birthday person.
Mary Jo Isbell’s daddy was a songwriter, Lige Isbell. He wrote songs for quartets. He was quite the piano player. I haven’t seen anything he wrote in many years but he was published in some of the small quartet songbooks of long ago.
Sometimes I would spend the night with Amelia Peeler. Her family would serve wild game. I ate my first squirrel and rabbit there. Another time they had fried oysters. Amelia had the prettiest pageboy hairstyle. It was always immaculate. Oh, how I wanted hair that would look that neat. (I’m still waiting. ha).
My fifth grade teacher was Miss Jane Camp. She had red hair and was such a wonderful teacher. I enjoyed fifth grade. In sixth grade, my teacher was Miss Patteson. She was young and engaged to one of the Pickle boys. That was a prominent family in town, owning several businesses including the local funeral home. Miss Patterson was model-beautiful. Around Thanksgiving that year, her fiance was hunting on the TomBigbee River and drowned. It was many weeks before they found his body. Miss Patterson was devastated.
The other girls vied for who would get to ride in the peddling truck with me on the days I helped Daddy. That was a great year for me. I really liked to go with Daddy and he said I was good help. I remember most one day in the winter before Daddy sold the peddling truck, it was COLD. I mean freezing so cold that the inside of the windshield was freezing and it was my job to scrape ice from in front of Daddy so he could see to drive. The windshield wiper did a fair job outside but inside, I was the windshield wiper.. We had a small kerosene heater bolted to the floor to heat and it was helpful if you were standing right at it but inadequate for the rest of the truck. I remember keeping my coat, cap and gloves on all day. Without the luxury of a defroster as cars today have, the truck was ‘of the times’. Daddy sold the truck after that winter.
Daddy unloaded freight cars for the company Mother was working for at the time. She was a clerk in many locations during my childhood. When his back gave out doing that job (he had had back surgery at 21 and had some difficulty all his life), he and Mother got a job selling waterless cookware. We moved to the county again. This time to Hatley where I was in 7th grade and Billy was in 9th.
HATLEY, MISSISSIPPI - A community still in the Amory vicinity: Daddy had rented a brand new house, three bedrooms, living room, kitchen, breakfast nook and sunroom, all built with lumber salvaged from another building. The rooms were small but it was the first new house I had ever lived in and I enjoyed living there.
Oh, what a wonderful community to be in 7th grade. We walked across the road to draw water from a neighbor’s well for all needs. Billy and I drew three number 3 wash tubs full before catching the school bus on wash day. The bus ran about 7:00 a.m. so we got up early to be ready. We were young and did not mind that! We did have a wringer washer but Mother had to transfer the water from the tub that was over the metal barrel Daddy had rigged up to heat water. It was still hard work for her. She and Daddy sold cookware that year and went to different peoples’ homes at night and cooked a meal of the aluminum alloy “waterless” cookware. Billy, Mother, Daddy and I prepared the vegetables for them to cook at the ‘parties’. Even though I was 12 and Billy was 14, we had a ‘babysitter’, Aunt Lail Mangum, who would spend the night at the house and walk home when she woke up the next morning. It was at least a mile from our house to her’s. I think she was in her 60s and we thought she was ancient. I’m now 84 and I’m probably the age I thought she was. She taught me some recipes and I remember one that was like biscuit dough that she would sugar, cinnamon and roll up, place in an oblong dish and pour milk over and bake. Yum, yum. I can almost taste it just thinking about it. Anyway, back to the neighborhood. Mother had a cousin from her daddy’s side who lived across the road from our landlord, the Cowarts. The cousin had a very old, wind-up victrola that used rolls to play. It was so neat! I would walk to their house and they would play it for me. All we had at the time was a radio. It was wayyyyy before TVs, etc. Ms. Cowart’s sister was another friend who was ‘ancient’ (probably in her 50s or 60s) who would go fishing with me at the Cowart’s fishpond. It was amazing for me to have friends who were that much older than me.
There was a family that lived across the woods from us and one night the mother and her sons and daughter came over and stayed and stayed and stayed. Billy nor I knew what to do so they didn’t go home until it was almost time for our parents to get home. It really upset my folks that the Christian family had stayed so long.
We attended the Hatley Baptist Church while we lived there and one of the deacons always had sticks of chewing gum for everyone, not just children, adults, too. Redman Mitchell's son was mongoloid and in his 30s or older. He was quiet and when we went to their house after church on Sunday night for late supper (which was always breakfast), he was quiet but nice, very well behaved. The Mitchells almost always had country ham, red eye gravy, eggs and hot homemade biscuits (that’s all that was available back then). Another Yum yum.
School was WONDERFUL! There were two classrooms, a cafeteria, library and kitchen. Heat was provided by pot bellied stoves that burned coal. There was no indoor plumbing. We had two privies outback, one for the girls, one for the boys. The boys mostly smoked when they went to the toilet. It looked like the privy was on fire from their smoke.
There was no football at Hatley High School. We had a great basketball and a great baseball team and that part of school was thrilling. If we didn’t ride the bus home, we walked the mile or so home.
That was 1949, 1950. The day after Thanksgiving 1949 we awoke with a scene for a Currier and Ives painting. The following day, we awoke to what looked like a vicious storm had broken down trees and split some into. Ice was everywhere! Our water bucket always had water in it at night since the well was in a neighbor’s yard and during that ice storm, the water in our bucket froze solid. Our sunroom was where our coal burning heater was and Mother hung a quilt over both doors out of the room and except for using the necessary (called a slop jar), we stayed in that room until bedtime. Mother (using the cookware they sold) still cooked good hot meals on the heater. We even had cake baked on top of the stove with the double-frypan. It was rough but I guess we were tough. Mother heated a blanket for each of us kids and as we went to bed, she rolled that blanket to preserve the heat and put it in our beds as we lay down inside the warm blanket. We had good parents.
When school was out, we made yet another move.
TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA
Back to Alabama and into a duplex built of cement blocks. Our wardrobe had to lie on the floor because it would not stand up in the low ceiling. We did have indoor plumbing again. I don’t recall if Billy and I had separate rooms. It was not a very nice neighborhood. Our next door neighbor was a prostitute and kept a quilt over her window for privacy. Mother and Daddy worried about Billy as a 14 year old boy next door to ‘that’. We only lived there that summer. Before school started for the 1950, 1951 fall, Daddy found a larger upstairs apartment downtown Tuscaloosa. They sold my piano before we moved because it would not make the turn in the stairs. We played in a local park with kids we met in school. There is not much I particularly recall about eighth grade. Daddy was sick a lot. He was once again working for Hardin Bakery. Billy was old enough that he had worked in Amory helping with bread delivery and was able to get a similar job after school and on Saturdays. Mother had gone to work in a store and I did what I could with hanging out and bringing in laundry, folding it or ironing. That’s still one of my favorite jobs. My best friend was Martha Evans. They lived in a big house on the street behind us. Her daddy operated a fruit stand next door to our house and Martha and I would go there after school and he would make us grilled cheese. I don’t believe I’ve ever had a better grilled cheese since then. We walked to school together, we played in the parks with others, we were really good friends. One time when Daddy was in the hospital (long after I married), Martha got on the elevator and we actually recognized each other. Oh, what a wonderful short reunion! I think of her and wonder how she is. When school was out that year, YES, we moved again. We moved to:
GORDO , ALABAMA:
We first moved into a large old farmhouse. We went to Gordo First Baptist where Brother Lucas was our pastor. He was a fun preacher with a booming voice. He could be heard outside the church and there was no amplification in our church. Later our pastor was Brother Calvert. He was a good pastor. When we got married, he performed our wedding ceremony.
Our next door neighbors were the Johnsons. They had a son named Johnny, a daughter named Patsy, one year older than me, and a younger sister Kay. Right across the road neighbors were the Powells. Their daughter, Sabra, was a senior that year and her job at the Yellow Front was over so she asked if I would like to apply for it. Of course, I did. Since Daddy had worked for them for 11 years, it seemed a good recommendation. I applied that day, Daddy went with me to the school and Mr. Gibbs, principal, gave me a work permit (I was 14). I started as a cashier that Saturday. I worked there for 3 and 1⁄2 years until the end of first semester senior year. I then worked at Harrison’s store down the street from the Yellow Front. Mother worked next door at Davis and Elmore store and Marvin Elmore was the partner there. He was a double first cousin of Thomas. She worked there from our moving to Gordo until she got on at Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa.
The same day Sabra approached me about a job, Patsy Johnson invited me to join Gordo High School Band. That day when Daddy got home from work, he asked when Gabriel had arrived to play his horn. I was practicing on the back porch. What a fun four years it was to perform with the band. We only missed one football game at that time and I rode with Sabra and her boyfriend to Gorgus. I could read music from piano lessons but had NO idea about band instruments other than a ‘tonette’ that I played in fifth and sixth grade at Amory. I never did learn to play well, but I could carry the tenor saxophone and pretend what I had not memorized. I could not walk and read and remember where I was to be in formation at the same time. I also played snare and bass drums and the cymbals. I was much better at that. We went to Montgomery to march in the inaugural parade when Big Jim Folsom was going in as Alabama’s governor. It was COLD. We all had on layers of clothing and the ones playing horns had to have gloves with the fingers cut off. I was playing cymbals at the parade so I had on full gloves.
So, I’ve told how I met Thomas earlier so I won’t repeat that. Billy played football his Junior and Senior years and Mother provided sandwich makings, cookies and milk for the band and football players who lived out of town (bus kids) and some would come to eat before we went to the games. At first we lived at the house previously written about. My Junior and Senior years, we moved to Don Campbell’s rental house across the road from the school. That was so convenient. Billy had joined the Navy so the two bedroom house was just right for the three of us. My bedroom was on one end of the house and my parents’ was on the other. We had a big yard and Mother and Daddy were especially kind to my friend (and Thomas’ cousin) Fred McAteer. His parents were not together at that time and he spent many hours helping me mow the grass and I would help him study. He was the little brother I didn’t have. After I started dating Thomas, I found out they were related. To me, he had been Granddaddy Claudus’ grandson. Grandaddy Claudus was Daddy’s friend at the time and wanted me to marry one of his grandsons, either Billy or Fred, didn’t matter. He was happy when I married his nephew. What a blessing to have such wonderful friends.
The George Zeanahs lived next door and James, June and Tommy were their children. James was two years younger than me but a good friend. June grew up and married a cousin of Thomas’ and I stay in touch with her and Tommy today. What a wonderful family they were.
My membership stayed at Gordo First Baptist until I joined Center Point Baptist six years later.
I truly enjoyed my time spent in Gordo. Mother and Daddy moved again to George Zeanah’s rental farm house after I got married.
So ends my lengthy summation of the neighborhoods in which I grew up. I truly had a wonderful time.
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