From the Bench
(Ed. Note: This column first appeared in "The
Barrow County News" in May, 2001. It is a bit out of season for October;
however, when you read this, I will be in Chattanooga, sharing memories with
some of those who embarked with me from Red Bank High School that summer of
'48.
There were ninety-six of us, I believe.......a good crew. Most yet survive,
and to them, and to those who have gone on, I dedicate this column. The memories
are good, because you made them so. Thanks.)
REMEMBERING THE SUMMER OF FORTY EIGHT
As the month of May flows toward summer, all across America millions of seventeen- and eighteen-year olds are passing through the first big watershed of their young lives….graduation from high school. Commencement. A new beginning.
For some, it will be only a ripple, soon to be forgotten. But for many more it will be the first of life’s memorable waterfalls, to be stored for the future, and later to be reflected on and savored in quieter moments.
That’s the way it is for me, two and a half generations later. Fifty-three years now. Before even the parents of most of these graduates were born. It is a sobering, almost frightening, thought.
I think about it every year about this time. The years have washed away the rough spots, like water rushing over stones, leaving the rocks and pebbles of the creekbed round and smooth.
But the stones survive. The memories remain. Some are as faint and sweet as the nectar of a honeysuckle blossom in early spring. Others are as bold as a blood-ripe blackberry picked on an early July morning.
They survive. But for how long?
For years, now, my son has badgered me to "write it down". All of it. While the stones still live. A big order. And one that cannot be written down all at once.
But here, son, is one chapter… ….the summer of forty eight. For you and for your sisters, for what it’s worth.
It is one of many symphonies which play within my mind from time to time. I have always wondered if symphonies ever play as beautifully in the concert halls as they did in the hearts and minds of their composers when they were first set to music. Perhaps not. But at least they wrote them down.
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The year was 1948. In May, Citation won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness,
on his way to the Triple Crown and immortality. Near the end of that month,
I completed a long-term dream for my parents…a high school education.
Neither of my parents finished high school. My dad got through the third grade, and mama finished eleven years before going to work in the mill. A high school education was their ultimate dream for their three sons, and now the youngest was finishing that dream. His graduation speech was icing on the cake for them.
And now something beyond that dream was about to happen.
In daddy and mama’s era, a factory job….."public works" they called it….was the ultimate step up the ladder. The rung that was college was invisible, unthinkable.
But several dedicated teachers challenged me to think the unthinkable, envision the invisible. I took tests. I reached for that rung.
When I won a partial scholarship, my parents were beyond joy. College was a first for either side of my family. But where the rest of the money would come from was up to me.
I went to work in a mill. The summer was hot, and the mill was not air-conditioned. But I was lucky. I worked the graveyard shift, from ten at night til six the next morning. "Graveyard" made summer in the mill bearable. And, if memory serves me, it paid five or ten cents more an hour. And I needed every cent.
The memories of that summer are still with me, and they are good. Music is always a tag to hang your memories on. Eddy Arnold, "the Tennessee Plowboy", held sway over country music and blared forth from the beer joint at the end of the line as I waited in the early evening for the bus to the mill. Once in a while, a maverick would slip a nickel into the juke box to listen to Nat King Cole whisper and moan a haunting melody called "Nature Boy".
One of my harshest memories of the mill was the deafening, metallic clack of the jack frames, spinning cotton into thread. Long after I left work, all the way home on the bus, and walking the last three miles from the end of the bus line to the house in the early morning, the clatter of the jack frames continued to ring in my head.
When I got home, it was still cool, and mama had breakfast ready. I was dog tired, and it was a welcome relief. By noon, she would turn on a small oscillating table fan, the kind you found in most houses back then before air-conditioning. I remember the cool sweep it made across me and the gentle whir that helped me sleep on summer afternoons.
By nightfall, the cycle started all over again with the three-mile walk to the busline.
I was a "doffer". Old mill hands know what that is. You worked with a spinner who had four jack frames to run. When one of the frames completed a run, the doffer’s job was to help the spinner get the completed bobbins off and new spools on to get it going again as quickly as possible. The spinner was paid by "piece work." When the frames weren’t running, she wasn’t getting paid, and at the beginning and end of every shift, the meters on the jack frames were read. That determined the spinner’s pay.
I remember, after a few weeks on the job, going to a classroom around midnight to be "taught" how kind and benevolent the company was, how bad unions were, and how lucky I was to have a job. The faces of the millhands, many of whom had spent a lifetime in the mill, left me unconvinced.
I remember, too, an incident when I worked a Saturday in another section, getting overtime that was welcome. A young girl, perhaps my age, pretty without adornment, worked beside me. She went out of her way to assure me that the young man who came by was her brother. I was not interested. I couldn’t be. I needed money for college, and there wasn’t time or money for anything else if I were to escape the life which my parents had endured.
I often wonder what became of that young girl……if she stayed in the mill until her beauty had slipped away. Maybe, like many before her, it was all she knew or hoped for. I will never know.
I don’t even remember her name.
I do not say this to disparage the mill. It provided a job when I needed it most. And even now, when I read of another mill closing, there is a touch of nostalgia for another time.
This may sound like a summer of sadness. It was not. There were times to swim in Chicamauga Lake, to go fishing with my uncle at daybreak on weekends, to sit in the shade and read on Sunday afternoon.
But mostly it was work….with a goal. When you have that, the work is easy.
I left the mill on a Friday in early September. The next week, I started college.
The psychology professor was beginning a study of incoming freshmen. He tested and interviewed each of us. (It was a small college) He planned to interview us again after four years to see what had changed.
I skewed his model. After two years, the scholarship was gone, and the Korean War had started. I enlisted in the Air Force. It would be five more years before I finished college.
But there was one question which the professor asked me in that interview….a question which has always stuck with me.
"What do you think you would like to be?", he asked.
"A writer," I answered.
Life takes some crazy turns. It took fifty years, but maybe….just maybe….I’m getting there.