A Box of Old
Photographs
by Fred Collins
Black-and-white,
out-of-doors snapshots,
grainy, washed out.
Low buildings, low trees,
low objects–
Tractors, combines, trailers,
balers, cars and pickups–
low horizon.
Everything crouching,
as if to hold on in the wind or
to avoid the full stare of the sun.
In posed groups,
Men
square-jawed and squinting,
as if in defiance of toil and time
and immensity,
Resigned in the face of defeat;
Women vague,
Seeming to look at nothing
while seeing everything,
Thinking whatever women think,
destined to years of loneliness;
Small children
bewildered by glint and heat
and dust but already having learned
to stand with their hands at their sides.
Dirt everywhere;
Plowed dirt in fields and
compacted dirt in farmyards.
Coarse weeds,
Along fences and
up against
broken down tractors
and implements.
Cockleburs and gourd vines
Thistles and sunflowers
Here and there,
A throw rug of goatheads
or grassburs.
A world of hot dirt and stickers
and graves.
CHILLICOTHE SATURDAY NIGHT
A Memory by Tom Spears (Class of 1954)
In the mid-1940’s, Chillicothe, on a Saturday night, was a crowded place. All the merchants kept their places of business open late and every farm family from Farmer’s Valley to Odell, Tolbert to King’s High came to town. Most of the town’s people gathered downtown to shop, visit, and tend the stores. Children were everywhere.
With me being a little boy from the farm, it was a wonderful and exciting place. Our family always came to town late on Saturday afternoon because Saturday was a "catch-up" day around the place. Daddy always gave Dorothy, David, and me a quarter each after he parked the car. Joy got a whole lot more, maybe forty or fifty cents, but she was a lot older, and needed to buy stuff.
David and I always went directly to the picture show. We paid our nine-cent admission and bought our nickel popcorn. We went in without regard to when the show started and quietly left when one of us said, "This is where we came in!" When we left the Strand, my Saturday night adventure began.
After the movie, David and I were out on the town. We each had eleven cents that needed to be spent, and there was a bunch of places vying for our money. While this story seems to all take place on this one night, it represents a collection of memories that accumulated over my ninth, tenth, and eleventh years of youth and innocence.
David and I first went to the Coney Island Café. It was just north of Winn’s Variety Store. Daddy was there, and we let him know that we were out of the show and loose on the streets. When we found him there, we could get something to eat without digging into our change. Daddy was sitting on a stool at the counter hoo-rah-ing with Earl McPherson and couple of other men that I knew, but didn’t know the names of. We climbed up on some empty stools just down from Daddy.
I ordered a hamburger and David said he wanted a Coney Island. I knew I should have ordered a Coney Island No matter what David ordered, it always looked so much better than what I got. Sure enough, his dish came with the wiener in that homemade bun, with the chopped onions all over it and a strip of cheese melted down the side of the wiener and chili poured all over the whole thing. Then David squeezed a whole bunch of mustard onto that pile of gastronomical wonderment. Golly, that looked good. My hamburger tasted good. A toasted bun with just the right amount of grease on it, holding a little meat patty, a slice of onion, and some dill pickle slices. I took the pickle slices off and got mustard all over my fingers.
I listened to the men talking about the soldiers coming home from Europe (We were going to go to Oklahoma with Uncle Harvey and Aunt Lena when Rufus got mustered out). When they started talking about how the crops were doing and what the weather looked like, I left the café to make the most of this rare, but weekly, visit to town.
I wandered north on the crowded street, weaving through people either standing talking or going some where, past William’s Dry Goods and Williams Drug on up to Hollis Grocery. Right next to Hollis Grocery was a door that, when ajar, revealed a set of stairs. Above the door, a sign said “Hotel.” I wondered then, and I wonder to this day, who ever stayed in that hotel. Calvin was in their grocery store, sacking some groceries and carrying the sacks out to someone’s car across the street. I waved at him. We would have played, if he hadn’t been busy. There was another door nearby on that side of the street. It also opened onto a staircase. But I knew what was at the top of those stairs. Women went up there to get their hair curled. I had gone up there a long time ago with Mother. Women would let someone roll their hair onto ceramic spools that were connected to electrical wires and plugged in. Then they would sit in a row of chairs under huge shiny metal cones that blew air down on them. I can still smell the pungent odor of singed hair; bleach, a variety of chemicals, and oiled floor sweep.
I went back up the street and into William’s Drug Store.
At the back of the drug store, Mr. Williams had installed a pin ball machine, and a bunch of big boys were back there, as they almost always were, playing pin ball….. and laughing and telling jokes and talking about girls. I enjoyed hanging around back there. Otis King Tooley was shooting the pin ball, and he had a real high score. Everyone was cheering him on. Every once in a while one of the boys would act like they were going to hit the machine and make it “TILT,” and Otis King would lose all of his points. That was fun. Otis Glen Haynes was back in the phone booth talking to some girl. One of the boys yelled to him, “You better watch what you say! You know the operator is listening to every word!” (He used the operator’s name, but I don’t remember it.)
I never did want to play the pin ball, though. It cost a nickel for five balls. Butch Briggs was just a little guy, but he had seen the big boys play-like “TILT” the pin ball machine. When one of us kids was playing, he liked to run up and hit the machine and make it tilt. I thought that was mean, but he was just a little kid.
The big boys were not old enough to play the punch board. I think you had to be twenty-one, or something, real old, to play the punch board. Whenever anyone came into the drug store to play the punch board, everyone would gather around to see if he won. I had gone back up to the front of the store, having decided that a dip of strawberry ice cream was a good way to cut my riches in half. I had gotten to the soda fountain and asked for a nickel strawberry cone, when a man sat on the stool next to me and asked for the punch board. That interrupted the soda jerk’s reach into the freezer container for me. Mr. Williams made a lot more money on the punch board than he did on nickel cones. Several people gathered around us, including some of the big boys from the back, as the man took the peg out of an empty hole and very deliberately punched it into one of the sealed spots. About half of the spots had already been punched. The man studied the board, seeming to want to divine the location of the big prizes. The previous Saturday, someone had actually punched the $25.00 prize, but, as far as anyone knew, most of the other prizes were still unclaimed. Mr. Williams didn’t advertise which prizes had been taken, if he could help it. The man punched five times. He put the card down on the counter, picked up one of the little wads of paper, and, with a twisting motion of his thumb and forefinger, unfolded the paper. He looked at the paper, tucked it into the palm of his hand and picked up another of the wads. Having looked at each of the punched papers, the man put a dollar bill on the counter, put the pieces of papers in his pocket, and, with some of the bystanders encouraging him to try again, left the store. The soda jerk put the punch card behind the counter. Seeing my dime lying there, he asked, “Do you want a double-dip cone?” “Naw,” I said. “Jus’ a nickel cone.” “Strawberry, you said?” “Yeah.” He brought the cone. The ice cream was already beginning to melt a little bit. When I licked the trickle of ice cream, I could smell the mustard from the hamburger on my fingers, so I ate the rest of the treat holding it in my left hand. No need to take any joy from the eating of a strawberry ice cream cone.
I never get a dime cone. With a dime cone you get two dips of ice cream, but only one cone. Those cones are good, too. So when I want a dime’s worth of ice cream, I get two nickel cones. That’s a better deal.
I finished my ice cream and walked south, passing Williams’ Dry Goods. There were two square columns at the entrance of the dry goods store, and each of the four sides of each column was covered with a mirror from knee level up to the top of the column. As I passed Williams’ Dry Goods, It was always a shock to glimpse out of the corner of my eye that little boy that looked like me walking past There was a gum ball machine in the little alcove of the dry goods store, behind the mirrored pillars. I took the penny from my pocket and got a gumball. There was every flavor and every color of gumball in the machine that anyone could want. I loved the red and purple gumballs most. Black ones were o.k. but someone told me they were not real liquorish. The one I liked the least were the white ones. White ones just don’t taste all that good. I’d rather have any other color gumball than the white one.
I put my white gumball in my mouth, chewed through the thin candy crust, and wished I had gotten red instead.
I had a nickel left.
I saw Daddy standing in a group of people, talking. I went up and stood next to him. Sometime, late at night like this, he liked to know where his kids were, so he wouldn’t have to go looking for them when it was time to go home. He talked for a long time, but finally started to walk up the street. We walked for quite a while, past the drug store and Hollis Grocery and on toward the dark end of the street almost to the old, vacant, and, as far as I knew, haunted, bank building. Daddy didn’t usually go that far up the street. I looked up, to ask him where we were going, and it wasn’t Daddy at all! It was Hezzy Webster, going, I guess, back to his black smith shop to get his car. Without him ever acknowledging my presence, and without me saying anything at all, I turned, red faced, and ran back toward the lights and the crowd.
I looked carefully at each of the faces as I went up the street and became convinced that Daddy was not looking for me, wasn’t ready to go home. I went into the variety store. I would get a toy with my remaining largess. The toys were on the isle on the left, about half way back. Even though they called the place a five and dime, there were toys that cost quite a bit more than that. The big sign over the front of the building said, “5 cents, 10 cents, 25 cents, and a Dollar.” And they had some toys that cost a dollar. I picked up an airplane: a large P-38 made out of hard rubber and propellers that actually spun around, if you flicked them just right. It cost fifty cents. I would have to save a bunch of nickels for a long, long time to be able to afford a fine toy like that. Near the P-38, there was a real small B-17, though. Its four propellers didn’t turn, the gun turrets didn’t have muzzles sticking out, and it didn’t have the Army Air Corps star on the wing. But it was a nickel, and it was an airplane. I bought it.
As I left the variety store, broke, but with a treasure, I heard the preaching on the corner in front of the West Texas Utilities building. A bunch of people were standing around on the corner listening to the preacher. I don’t know what church the man was the pastor of. He preached like Brother Welch used to do when we attended the Hard Shell Baptist Church in Odell, like he was mad at everyone, knowing we were all going to hell and needed to repent tonight, just in case the judgment happened before we got to church tomorrow. I had heard him on that corner a bunch of times before, and I hadn’t listened very closely. One thing he said set me to thinking, though. Reading from the bible, he said that if I, or any of the people listening to him that night, committed some particular sin, there’s a good chance that not only would I go to hell, but God would also send my sons and my sons’ sons and then the sons of my grandsons to hell, too, just to show how much he disliked my committing that particular sin! That didn’t seem fair, but I sure didn’t want to commit a sin that would ensure that my sons and my sons’ sons would go to hell without regard to what they believed nor how they lived their lives.
Then I got to thinking. That same scripture would have applied to Daddy….. and his daddy..... and to Granddaddy's daddy. If they happened to have committed some serious sin, I might be going to hell regardless of what I do, what I believe, or how I live my life. Now that was a worrisome thought. I decided that I needed to ask Daddy if he or Granddaddy or Great-granddaddy had ever done anything that might ensure that my eternity was going to be spent in hellfire and damnation. I would just ask him on the way home tonight.
Dorothy found me and said we were going home. I got in the back seat of the Studebaker with Dorothy and David, me in the middle (Joy got to sit in the front, between Daddy and Mother, because she would be needing to learn to drive soon), As soon as we got out of town, I was going to ask Daddy about him or Granddaddy having done any serious sinning, but David put his hand on the seat next to me. I told him to move his hand. He put his hand there again, and I moved his hand. Then he put his hand there again, and I hit him, and he cried, and Daddy said for us to straighten up, and he didn’t want to hear anything from us again. So I was quiet. Then I went to sleep. I never did get around to asking Daddy about serious sinning.