1946, the son of a soldier who lived through seven years of combat and then drank his way right out of the service, but who still stood and sang the national anthem to the top of his forceful voice at the several hundred ball games we watched together.
Home. It was a broken home. That came when I was six and my mother ran for her parents and took me with her. The four of us lived in my grandparents’ home. We warmed ourselves by kerosene, we ate from a bountiful garden, and our pattern of living was based on two books — the Bible and the Sears Roebuck catalog.
Everything came in black and white.
* * *
Moreland, Georgia, had perhaps three hundred inhabitants when I moved there in 1952. The population is about the same today, and Moreland still doesn’t have a red light.
Some other things have changed, however. There are two tennis courts in Moreland. Back then, we played baseball and dammed creeks, and that was enough. Cureton and Cole’s store, where the old men sat around the stove and spit and imparted wisdom, is boarded shut. I don’t know where the old men in Moreland spit and impart wisdom nowadays.
Perhaps spitting and wisdom-imparting around a stove have gone the way of ice cream cups with pictures of movie stars on the bottom side of the lids. I purchased hundreds of ice cream cups at Cureton and Cole’s, licking the faces of everybody from Andy Devine to Yvonne DeCarlo. I haven’t seen ice cream cups like that in years, but even if they were still around, I wouldn’t buy one; I’d be afraid I might lick away the vanilla on the bottom of my lid only to find John Travolta smiling at me. What a horrid thought.
Those were good and honest people who raised me and taught me. They farmed, they worked in the hosiery mill that sat on the town square, and some went to the county seat six miles away where they welded and trimmed aluminum and sweated hourly-wage sweat — the kind that makes people hard and reserved and resolved there is a better world awaiting in the next life.
We had barbecues and street square dances in Moreland. We had two truckstops that were also beer joints, and the truckers played the pinball machines and the jukeboxes. The local beer drinkers parked their cars out back, presumably out of sight.
The religion in town was either Baptist or Methodist, and it was hardshell and certainly not tolerant of drinking. The church ladies were always gossiping about whose cars had been spotted behind the truckstops.
There was one fellow, however, who didn’t care whether they saw his car or not. Pop Towns worked part-time at the post office, but the highlight of his day took place at the railroad yard. The train didn’t stop in Moreland, so the outgoing mail had to be attached to a hook next to the tracks to be picked off when the train sped past. It was Pop’s job to hang the mail.
Every morning at ten, when the northbound came through, and every evening at six, when the southbound passed, Pop would push his wheelbarrow filled with a sack of mail from the post office down to the tracks. There he would hang the mail, and we’d all stand around and watch as the train roared by. Then Pop would get in his car, drive over to one of the truckstops, park contemptuously out front, and have himself several beers.
One day the ladies of the church came to Pop’s house in an effort to save him from the demon malt. I wasn’t there when it happened, of course, but the word got around that when Pop answered the door for the ladies, he came with a beer in his hand.
Hilda Landon began reciting various scriptures regarding drunkenness. Pop countered by sicking his dog, Norman, on the ladies, and they scattered in various directions.
Pop, they said, laughed at the sight of his dog chasing off the ladies of the church, and once back inside his house, he had himself another beer, secure in the fact that he and Norman would never be bothered by another tolerance committee.
They found Pop dead one morning after he failed to make his appointment with the mail train, and the ladies of the church all said the Lord was getting even with Pop for all his sinful ways.
I sort of doubted that. Pop always had a good joke to tell and always was kind to his dog, and although I was no expert on the scriptures, I was of the belief that a good heart would get you a just reward in the afterlife as quick as anything else.
We also had a town drunk, Curtis “Fruit Jar” Hainey, but the ladies of the church figured he was too far gone to waste their efforts on. Curtis walked funny, like his knees were made of rubber. Somebody said it was because he once drank some rubbing alcohol when the local bootlegger left town for two weeks and Curtis came up dry and desperate. I figured the Lord could have had a little something to do with this one.
Although Moreland was a small town, not unlike so many others across the country in the early 1950s, we still had plenty of scandal, intrigue, and entertainment.
It was whispered, for example, that Runelle Sheets, a high school girl who suddenly went to live with her cousin in Atlanta, actually was pregnant and had gone off to one of those homes.
Nobody ever verified the rumor about Runelle, but they said her daddy refused to speak her name in his house anymore and had threatened to kill a boy who lived over near Raymond. That was enough for a summer’s full of satisfying speculation.
For further entertainment, we had a town idiot, Crazy Melvin, who allegedly was shell-shocked in Korea. Well, sort of. The story went that when Crazy Melvin heard the first shot fired, he began to run and when next seen had taken off his uniform, save his helmet and boots, and was perched in his nakedness in a small tree, refusing to climb down until frostbite threatened his privates.
They sent Crazy Melvin home after that, and following some months in the hospital, the Army decided that Melvin wasn’t about to stop squatting naked in trees, so they released him in the custody of his parents.
Once back in Moreland, however, Crazy Melvin continued to do odd things, such as take off all his clothes, save his brogans and his straw hat. They finally sent Melvin to Atlanta to see a psychiatrist. When he came back, the psychiatrist had cured him of squatting naked in trees. Unfortunately, Melvin had ridden a trolley while in Atlanta and returned home thinking he was one. Every time you were walking to the store or to church and crossed paths with Crazy Melvin, you had to give him a nickel.
“Please step to the rear of the trolley,” he would say, and then he’d make sounds like a trolley bell. The church later got up enough money to buy Melvin one of those coin-holders bus drivers wear, so it was easier for him to make change when you didn’t have a nickel.
* * *
Those were the days, when young boys roamed carefree and confidently around the streets of Moreland — Every-town, USA.
We were Baby Boomers all, born of patriots, honed by the traditional work ethic. That meant you worked your tail off and never quit until the job was done, and you saved every penny you could and never spent money on anything that didn’t have at least some practical value. You kept the Word, never questioned authority, loved your country, did your duty, never forgot where you came from, bathed daily when there was plenty of water in the well, helped your neighbors, and were kind to little children, old people, and dogs. You never bought a car that was any color like red or yellow, stayed at home unless it was absolutely necessary to leave (such as going to church Sunday and for Wednesday night prayer meeting), kept your hair short and your face cleanshaven. You were suspicious of rich people, lawyers, yankee tourists, Catholics and Jehovah’s Witnesses who tried to sell subscriptions to “The Watchtower” door-to-door, anybody who had a job where he had to wear a tie to work, and Republicans.
We were isolated in rural
