style="font-size:15px;"> As I said, Uncle Grover couldn’t read. But each day when he and Aunt Jessie left the mill to drive home for lunch, a quarter-mile away, they would stop by the post office, which was next to the knitting mill. There they would stop to pick up their mailed morning edition of the Atlanta Constitution and bring it home with them at lunch. Atlanta was a lot farther from Moreland back then than it is now.
When I was ten, it was at least five thousand miles to Atlanta, because I knew my chances of ever getting there were quite slim. Today, it’s thirty-five minutes by interstate. My grandmother’s yard looks a lot smaller to me when I see it now, too, so you know what time does to a lot of things. Shrinks them.
By the time I was ten, my brain was well on its way to being consumed by baseball. A lot of boys are like that, of course, but I may have gone to extremes heretofore unachieved. I never actually ate a baseball, or any other piece of baseball equipment, but I did sleep with the baseball my grandfather gave me for my birthday, and probably the only reason I didn’t eat it was I knew my grandfather certainly was not a man of means and might have had a difficult time replacing it with any sense of dispatch.
There was a marvelous baseball team in Atlanta when I was ten. They were the Atlanta Crackers. For years, I thought they were named the Crackers because they had to do with, well, crackers.
Later, I would learn that the term came from the fact Georgians were bad to carry around whips in the days of Jim Crow and slavery. And whips go “crack,” and, thus, the name of the ball team. But at ten, in 1956, my world was an almost totally isolated one, and I finally decided the name had something to do with saltines, but I didn’t have time to figure out exactly why or how.
How I came to fall in love with the Atlanta Crackers, I just remembered, should have come earlier, but remember my admissions about stalling.
Remember the part about Uncle Grover getting the twenty-five big ones for diddling with the machine at the knitting mill and how he bought a new Pontiac and took Jessie to the Kentucky Derby?
Well, that’s not all he did. He also bought the first television set in Moreland. When word got out, people came from as far away as Grantville, Luthersville, and Corinth to get a glimpse of Uncle Grover’s and Aunt Jessie’s amazing box. It had about an eight-inch screen, if I recall correctly, and you had to sit real close if you wanted to see any detail, such as whether or not someone on the screen actually had a head. The adults would watch John Cameron Swayze on the national news and Vernon Niles, who claimed to be his second cousin from Corinth, would always say, “If that’s John Cameron’s head, I’ve seen better hair on fatback.”
Even my grandmother became interested in television once she witnessed TV Ranch, a musical show that came on an Atlanta station each day at noon.
TV Ranch featured Boots and Woody Woodall singing country music as well as a comedian named Horsehair Buggfuzz, who probably said a lot of funny things, but I can’t remember any of them.
What my grandmother enjoyed most about TV Ranch was the closing number, which featured Boots and Woody in the day’s “song of inspiration.”
This was your basic hymn, like “Rock of Ages,” “Precious Memories,” “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder (I’ll Be There),” or “Shall We Gather at the River?” But every now and then, they’d sing a comedy-hymn Horsehair Buggfuzz wrote, like “When the Lord Calls Me Home, I Hope Mildred Haines Ain’t on the Party Line, ‘Cause He’ll Never Get Through If She Is.”
The second most endearing thing to me about Uncle Grover and Aunt Jessie’s television was Lucky 11 Theatre, which featured a western movie each afternoon at five.
Johnny Mack Brown would walk into a crowded saloon and say, at the top of his lungs, “I’ll have a milk!” which always seemed to me to be inviting trouble.
In the first place, if it was milk he wanted, why did he go into a saloon? I would spend a great amount of time in saloons later in my life, and I don’t remember anybody ever walking in and ordering a glass of milk, although I did know an old trombone player once who drank scotch and milk. After a few drinks, he’d play air trombone, which I like to think of as spiritual father to the air guitar.
Why didn’t Johnny Mack Brown hit a convenience store if he wanted milk? Oh, there weren’t any convenience stores in the Old West. There were all those cows, though. If Johnny Mack had wanted milk so badly, he could simply have pulled one off of the range somewhere and self-served himself all the milk he wanted.
But no. Johnny Mack Brown had to walk into a crowded saloon where there were always ornery galoots.
As soon as he’d order the milk, the piano player would stop playing, the dance-hall girls would stop dancing, and a cowboy in a black hat at the bar would say, “Give ’im a shot of red-eye, Sam.” (All bartenders in old western movies were named Sam.) “He needs a little hair on his chest.”
Johnny Mack Brown, who had been a famous football player at the University of Alabama, would say something akin to, “If it’s all the same to you, padnuh, I think I’ll just stick to my milk.”
It never was the same to the guy in the black hat, and a fight would always ensue in which thousands of dollars of damage would be done to the saloon. Nobody had insurance back then, either, is my guess.
All western movies also ended with the grandfather of the automobile chase scene. The star, whether he be Johnny Mack Brown, Hoot Gibson, Lash LaRue, the Durango Kid, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Gunther Toody (Forget him. He wasn’t a cowboy. I just tossed him in to see if you were paying attention.), Tom Mix, Bob Steele, Wild Bill Elliott, ad cowboyseam, would chase down the bad guy in the last moments of the movie and jump off his horse, taking the bad guy off his.
They would then tumble down a hill like a couple of tumbling tumbleweeds, and once they had stopped tumbling, would get up and fight. The Johnny Mack Browns would always win.
There was also the question of the six-shooter that would shoot 408 rounds of ammunition without needing to be reloaded, but there weren’t any Siskels and Eberts in those days to point out such obvious flaws in such films, which is what people who think they are better than everybody else call movies.
Okay, so we got through a headless John Cameron Swayze, Horsehair Buggfuzz, and Lucky 11 Theatre. Let us continue. The Atlanta Crackers, powers of the Class AA Southern Association, often had their games broadcast on television from their home field, hallowed be its name, Ponce de Leon Park, which Atlantans pronounced “Pontz dee Lee-ahn,” as in “Pontz dee Lee-ahn Russell,” the singer.
I could sit in my aunt and uncle’s house and watch my beloved Crackers, nearly all of whom I still remember.
There was Bob Montag (known affectionately as “Der Tag”) Corky Valentine, Poochie Hartsfield, Sammy Meeks, Earl Hersh, Ben Downs, Jack Daniel, not to mention Buck Riddle, a great first baseman. I have spent many hours in recent years with Buck, and I beg him for stories of the Southern Association, the games they played, the women they loved, the whiskey they drank, and the trains they rode.
The Southern Association in those days included the Crackers, the Birmingham Barons, the Mobile Bears, the New Orleans Pelicans, the Little Rock Travelers, the Memphis Chicks, the Nashville Vols, and the Chattanooga Lookouts, who were run by a man named Joe Engel who once traded a shortstop for a turkey.
I eventually would make it to Ponce de Leon Park to see the Crackers in person—and to eat a marvelous ice-cream treat they had there known as a vanilla custard—but
