a movie or to get a haircut or to see the little alligator they kept in a drink box at Mr. Lancaster’s service station.
I never did find out how the little alligator got into a drink box at a service station in Newnan, Georgia, but rumor had it that Mr. Lancaster had brought it back from Florida to keep people from breaking into his station after he closed at night. In fact, Mr. Lancaster had a handwritten sign in front of his station that read, “This service station is guarded by my alligator three nights a week. Guess which three nights.”
In such a closed, tightly-knit society, it was impossible not to feel a strong sense of belonging. Even for a newcomer.
When I first moved to Moreland at age seven, I was instantly befriended by the local boys. In those idyllic days, we molded friendships that would last for lifetimes.
There was Danny Thompson, who lived just across the cornfield from me, next door to Little Eddie Estes. Down the road from Danny was where Mike Murphy lived. Clyde and Worm Elrod lived near the Methodist Church. Bobby Entrekin and Dudley Stamps resided in Bexton, which was no town at all but simply a scattering of houses along; a blacktop road a mile or so out of Moreland. There was Anthony Yeager, who lived over near Mr. Ralph Evans’s store, and Charles Moore was just down the road from him.
Clyde Elrod was a couple of years older than his brother Worm, who was my age. Clyde had one ambition in his life, and that was to follow his father’s footsteps into the Navy. Clyde often wore his father’s old Navy clothes and regaled us with his father’s Navy stories. Clyde’s father apparently single-handedly won the battle for U.S. naval supremacy in World War II.
Worm got his name at Boy Scout camp one summer. There is only one thing worse than biting into an apple and finding a worm, and that’s biting into an apple and finding half a worm, which is what happened to Worm Elrod and is how he got his nickname. Clyde and Worm did not get along that well, due to a heated sibling rivalry. Their father often had to separate them from various entanglements, and Worm invariably got the worst of it. Only when Clyde graduated from high school and left to join the Navy was it certain that Worm would live to see adulthood.
Anthony Yeager joined the gang later. He was the first of us to obtain his driver’s license, and his popularity increased immediately. As teen-agers, we roamed in Yeager’s Ford and slipped off for beer and to smoke. Once we went all the way to Fayetteville to the Highway 85 Drive-In and saw our first movie in which women appeared naked from the waist up.
Funny, what the memory recalls. The movie was Bachelor Tom Peeping, and it was billed as a documentary filmed at a nudist camp. At one point, Bachelor Tom was confronted by a huge-breasted woman who was covered only by a large inner tube that appeared to have come from the innards of a large tractor tire. As she lowered the tube, we watched in utter disbelief.
“Nice tubes you have, my dear,” said Bachelor Tom.
Yeager was the first total devotee to country music I ever met, and he is at least partially responsible for my late-blooming interest in that sort of music. Yeager owned an old guitar that he couldn’t play, but he tried anyway, and common were the nights we would find a quiet place in the woods, park his car, and serenade the surrounding critters.
Yeager’s heroes were Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb. His favorite songs were Hank’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” — later butchered by B.J. Thomas — and Ernest’s classic, “I’m Walking the Floor Over You.”
Hank was dead and long gone by then, but one day Yeager heard that Ernest Tubb, accompanied by picker-supreme Billy Byrd, was to perform at the high school auditorium in nearby Griffin. Me and Yeager and Dudley Stamps and Danny Thompson went. It was our first concert. Ernest slayed us, especially Yeager.
“I’m walkin’ the floor over you.
I can’t sleep a wink, that is true.
I’m hopin’ and I’m prayin’
That my heart won’t break in two.
I’m walkin’ the floor over you.”
Whenever Ernest Tubb would call in Billy Byrd for a guitar interlude, he would say, “Awwwwwww, Billy Byrd,” which Yeager thought was a nice touch. For months, Yeager would say “Awwwwwww, Billy Byrd” for no reason whatsoever. Later he began saying, “Put a feather in your butt and pick it out, Billy Byrd,” again for no reason except that it seemed to give him great joy to say it.
Like I said, it’s funny what details the memory recalls.
Dudley Stamps. He was the crazy one. He once drove his father’s truck into White Oak Creek to see if trucks will float. They won’t. There was not a water tower or a forest ranger tower in three counties he hadn’t climbed. When he was old enough to get a driver’s license, his parents bought him a used 1958 Thunderbird with a factory under the hood.
I was riding one night with Dudley when the State Patrol stopped him. His T-bird had been clocked at 110 MPH, according to the patrolman. Dudley was incensed and launched into an argument with the officer. He insisted he was doing at least 125.
Mike Murphy. He had a brother and sister and his father was called “Mr. Red.” Mr. Red Murphy was the postmaster and helped with the Boy Scouts. With the possible exception of the Methodist and Baptist preachers, he was the most respected man in town. Mike had to work more than the rest of us. Mr. Red kept all his children busy tending the family acreage.
“You don’t see Red Murphy’s children out gallivantin’ all over town,” the old men around the stove used to say down at Cureton and Cole’s. “Red keeps ’em in the fields where there ain’t no trouble.”
This was the late 1950s, when “gallivanting” meant doing just about anything that had no practical end to it, such as riding bicycles, roller-skating on the square, and hanging out at the store eating Zagnut candy bars and drinking NuGrapes or what was commonly referred to as “Big Orange bellywashers.” Gallivanting, like most things modern, seems to have grown somewhat sterile and electronic. Today, I suppose when children gallivant it means they hang around in shopping malls, playing video games and eating frozen yogurt.
The day Mr. Red died was an awful day. It was the practice at the Moreland Methodist Church to return to the sanctuary after Sunday School for a quick hymn or two and for announcements by Sunday School Superintendent Fox Covin. Fox would also call on those having birthdays, and the celebrants would stand as we cheered them in song.
That Sunday morning, Fox Covin announced it was Mr. Red’s birthday and asked his daughter to stand for him as we sang. As everyone in church knew, Mr. Red had been hospitalized the day before for what was alleged to be a minor problem.
Soon after we sang to Mr. Red, another member of the family came into the church and whisked the Murphy children away. Something was whispered to Fox Covin, and after the children were safely out of earshot, he told the congregation that Red Murphy was dead.
We cried and then we prayed. Mike was no more than twelve or thirteen at the time. He had to take on a great deal of the responsibility of the farm after that, so his opportunity to gallivant with the rest of us was shortened even further.
“Mike Murphy will grow up to be a fine man,” my mother used to say.
Bobby Entrekin. I loved his father. I had secretly wished there was some way my mother could have married Mr. Bob Entrekin, but there was his wife, Miss Willie, with whom to contend, and a quiet, soft, loving woman she was. I decided to remain content with spending my weekends at the Entrekin
