worked days at one of the grocery stores in the county seat. The Entrekins, I noticed, ate better than the rest of us. While my family’s diet consisted mostly of what we grew from our garden or raised in our chicken coops, the Entrekins always had such delights as store-bought sandwich meat and boxed doughnuts, the sort with the sweet, white powder around them.
The standing contention was that because Miss Willie was employed at the grocery store, she was given discounts on such elaborate foodstuffs others in the community would have found terribly wasteful to purchase.
Whatever, as much as I enjoyed the company of my friend Bobby Entrekin, it may have been the lure of the delights of his family refrigerator and his father that were the most binding seal on our friendship.
Bobby’s father was unlike any man I had ever met before. He had a deep, forceful voice. His knowledge of sport was unparalleled in the community. He had once been an outstanding amateur baseball player, and on autumn Saturdays, Bobby and I would join him at radioside to listen to Southeastern Conference college football games — as comforting and delicious an exercise as I have ever known. My own father, having split for parts unknown, had shared Mr. Bob’s affinity for sports and other such manly interests, and Mr. Bob stood in for him nicely.
Mr. Bob also had more dimension to him than any other man I had known. He had educated himself. He had traveled a bit. He sent off for classical records, and when I spent the weekends with Bobby, his father would awaken us on Sunday mornings for church with those foreign sounds.
As Beethoven roared through the little Entrekin house out on Bexton Road, he would say to us, “Boys, that is what you call good music.” How uncharacteristic of the time and place from which I sprung, but how pleasant the memory.
Bobby was a con man from his earliest days. He slicked classmates out of their lunch desserts, and by schoolday’s end, he usually had increased his marble holdings considerably.
Only once did he put an unpleasant shuck on me. Mr. Bob had driven us into Newnan, where the nearest picture show was located. The Alamo Theatre sat on Newnan’s court square, across the street from the side entrance to the county courthouse. Admission to the movie was a dime. There were soft drinks for a nickel and small bags of popcorn for the same price.
As we walked toward the Alamo, we came upon a bus parked on the court square.
“Boys,” said a man sitting outside the bus, “come on inside and see the world’s fattest woman.”
“How fat is she?” Bobby asked.
“Find out for yourself for only fifteen cents, kid,” said the man.
Bobby started inside while I did some quick arithmetic. I had twenty cents. That was a dime for admission to the picture show and a dime for a soft drink and popcorn. If I paid fifteen cents to see the fat lady, I couldn’t get in to see the movie.
I mentioned this bit of financial difficulty to Bobby.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll loan you enough to get into the show.”
We each dropped fifteen cents into the man’s cigar box of coins and stepped inside the bus.
The smell got us first. A hog would have buried its snout in the mud to have escaped it. Then we saw the fat lady. She was enormous. She dripped fat. She was laid out on a divan, attempting to fan away the heat and the stench. We both ran out of the bus toward the movie house.
When we arrived at the ticket window, I reminded Bobby of his offer to stake me to a ticket.
“I was only kidding,” he said, as he pranced into the theater. I sat on the curb and cried. Later, when I told his father what Bobby had done, Mr. Bob played a symphony upon his son’s rear and allowed me to watch. I took shameful pleasure in the sweet revenge.
Charles Moore. His mother called him “Cholly,” and he eventually achieved some renown in high school when The Beatles hit in 1964 because Charles, even with his short hair, was a dead-ringer for a seventeen-year-old Paul McCartney. Charles was never able to make any money off this resemblance — that was before the imitation craze, e.g., the Elvis impersonators after his death and the three or four thousand young black kids currently doing Michael Jackson — but he obviously took a great deal of pleasure from standing in the middle of a group of giggling girls who were saying things like, “Oh, Charles, you look just like Paul.”
What I remember Charles for most, however, is the fight we had in the seventh grade over a baseball score. I was a fierce and loyal Dodger fan. Charles held the same allegiance to the Milwaukee Braves.
I arrived at school one morning with a score from the evening before, Dodgers over the Braves. I had heard it on the radio.
“The Dodgers beat the Braves last night,” I boasted to Charles.
“No they didn’t,” he said.
“I heard it on the radio,” I continued.
“I don’t care what you heard,” he said. “The Braves won.”
The principal had to pull us apart.
When I went home that afternoon, I called Mr. Bob Entrekin, who subscribed to the afternoon paper with the complete scores, and asked him to verify the fact that the Dodgers had, indeed, defeated the Braves so I could call Charles Moore and instruct him to kiss my tail.
The Braves had won, said Mr. Bob. I feigned a sore throat and didn’t go to school the next two days.
Danny Thompson. We were best friends before high school. Danny was the best athlete in our class. At the countywide field day competition, he ran fourth in the potato race. A potato race works — or worked, since I doubt potato racing has lingered with everybody throwing those silly frisbees today — this way:
There were four cans (the kind that large quantities of mustard and canned peaches came in) spaced at intervals of ten yards. The boy running first can dashed the first ten yards, picked the potato out of the can, and raced back and handed it to the boy running second can.
He then dropped the potato into the team can at the starting line and hurried to the second can twenty yards away. The team that got all four potatoes in its can first won the medals.
Danny ran fourth can because he was the fastest boy in our class. We probably would have won the county potato race, had I not stumbled and dropped my potato as I tried to depart from the second can.
Danny was also rather possessive about his belongings. He received a new football for Christmas one year. It was a Sammy Baugh model, and it had white stripes around each end. We were perhaps ten when Danny got the football.
We gathered for a game of touch a few days after Christmas, but Danny didn’t bring his new football.
“I’m saving it,” he explained.
When I would visit Danny, he would pull his new football out of his closet and allow me to hold it. He would never take it outside, however.
“I’m saving it,” he would say again. That was nearly thirty years ago. We never did get to play with Danny’s football.
One morning in the fifth grade, I looked over at Danny and his face was in his hands. He was crying. I had never seen Danny cry before. The teacher whispered something to him and then
