Summerville SC

Different Sides of the Same Coin

/ wlm3 / 4 Comments

Warren Moise and I experienced similar childhoods in that we grew up as White males in relatively small South Carolina towns in the Fifties and Sixties, both graduating from high schools that were integrated in the 1970-1971 school year.

Here’s a quote from the back cover of Warren’s excellent historical memoir The Class of ’71.[1]

When the Class of ’71 began first grade as young children in 1959, they lived in a totally segregated society. Except for some few prior student transfers and with limited other exceptions, the Black and White members of the Class of ’71 had never met, played music together, gone to church with one another, eaten food at the same lunch counters, or swum together in the same pools. All of that would change on the first day of their senior year. 

In Summerville, South Carolina, where I lived, even physicians’ waiting rooms were segregated into White and Black sections. In fact, Bryan’s, the Black owned barbershop that I patronized, only cut White people’s hair.  John F. Kennedy, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy were assassinated within five years of one another when we were students. A cultural revolution was underway. 

Again, to quote Warren:

Soul music, oxford shirts, and oxblood Wejuns penny loafers were disappearing from the streets of Gamecock City[2]every day, It was as if the 1960s were burning rubber in a Chevelle V-8 Super Sport on Highway 15 South leaving town toward Paxville. At the same moment, the 1970s were rollin’ into town on Highway 15 North inside a Volkswagen van painted with slogans of peace, love, and daisies.

Warren and I met our freshman year in Thornwell dorm the fall of 1971 at the University of South Carolina and became fast friends, deciding to room together in Tenement Nine on the Horseshoe the next year, which we did until Warren left college to pursue a musical career.[3]

Warren and I circa 1972

We also shared houses when Warren returned to USC to earn his undergraduate degree in history in 1974 -1976. Unfortunately, we more or less lost contact after school. Oddly enough, fortyish years later we both ended up writing books about being in high school the same year. My novel Today, Oh Boy takes place during the course of one day, October 12, 1970, a month or two after Warren began his senior year at Edmunds high school.[4]

So, The Class of ’71 and Today, Oh Boy cover some of the same terrain, small towns transitioning from the Old to New South, the tumultuous raging of hormones, adolescent crushes, physical violence engendered by culture clashes. 

In my not-all-that-humble opinion, they offer interesting perspectives from non-fictive and fictive landscapes in that pivotal school year that ended the Sixties and ushered in the Seventies.

We better stop
Hey, what’s that sound?
Everybody look, what’s going down?

from “For What It’s Worth,” lyrics by Stephen Stills

[1] I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a historical memoir. The Class of ’71 contains multitudes – it’s a history of Sumter County, a coming-of-age story, a judicial and political chronicle of desegregation, a sociological review of the cultural changes of the late Sixties, a profile of serial killer Pee Wee Gaskins. In short, it’s difficult to succinctly classify. Here’s some more expansive. You can purchase the book HERE.  It’s a great read propelled by well-crafted prose. 

[2] I.e., Sumter, South Carolina.

[3] You can read the horror story of the roommate who replaced him HERE BTW, Warren’s musical career was successful. He’s a member of the Beach Music Hall of Fame, though he abandoned life on the road for a career in law.

[4] Actually, I decided to delay Summerville’s integration until the next year, which we novelists have the freedom to do. You can purchase Today, Oh Boy HERE.

Work Stoppage (Or the Wages of Sloth)

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment
from the Smithsonian Art Museum

In the summer of 1972, I went to work for Flack Jones Lumber because it was one of three establishments in Summerville that hired longhairs. To say I was an unskilled laborer would be an understatement. Driving a nail, much less running a power saw, transcended my meager talents, so I ended up bouncing around the lumberyard on a truck driven by a Black man who went by the name of Hambone.  We performed odd jobs like moving stacks of boards and shoveling sawdust. Hambone, who had crinkly cottony hair beneath his green hardhat, was a man of few words, but I do remember his making this pronouncement one blistering June afternoon: “When I was young, I couldn’t wait to knock off work so I could go fishin’. Now I can’t wait to knock off so I can get me a drink of liquor.”

Surprisingly, my White coworkers were cordial, given that the early Seventies were fraught with clashes between blue collar laborers and longhairs, especially in the Deep South. Once a fellow who looked Scots-Irish asked if I thought a man’s hair could grow as long as a woman’s.

My hair was red, so I stood out like a sore thumb WC Fields’ nose. 

“I reckon so,” I said.

I recall one particularly irksome task. Armed with a shovel blade, I crawled beneath a power saw and filled a plastic bucket with sawdust and then crawled out to dump the sawdust in a designated pile, and then crawled back under to repeat this labor until all the sawdust had been removed. Shortly thereafter, I decided Flack Jones wasn’t for me, though the hours were all right, Monday through Friday from 7 to 4.

I heard that Red and White, which also hired longhairs, had an opening, so I applied and was hired, joining my friends Joey Brown, David Kaczor, and Jim Collins bagging groceries, though actually Joey and David had worked their way up to stocking shelves. 

On my very first day, I got yelled at by the owner’s son for overloading a bag with canned goods, and twelve hours later, when tasked with mopping the floor, the owner’s son chided me for my poor technique and demonstrated how to move the mop head in circles. So, of course, I followed his lead, only to be confronted by the produce man John Henry who told me I was doing it all wrong and modeled for me an alternate technique. moving the mop in S-like patterns. As I’d move up and down the aisles mopping, I’d keep a look out for my two instructors and switch back and forth depending on who was passing my way, though I preferred John Henry’s method.

“Now, that’s more like it,” one or the other would say.

Working at Red and White was less grueling than working at Flack Jones, but the hours sucked – two twelve hour shifts on Fridays and Saturdays and every other Sunday with afternoon shifts on the other weekdays with Mondays and Wednesdays off.

So, I quit to take a pay cut to work at Carolina Home Furnishers, the third place that hired longhairs, where I mostly sat in a recliner and watched daytime TV with my boss Weeza, a benevolent overseer who called me “darling” and sent me to the liquor store around the corner in the afternoons.

It seems that she and Hambone were on the same page.

Yes, I was lazy that summer, not to mention vain, and unaccustomed to working, but my leisure days were over. At USC, I worked at Capstone cafeteria after classes on weekdays and on Saturday mornings and bused tables at the revolving restaurant Top of Carolina during Sunday Brunch. The pay was $1.15 an hour, but I got one free meal. After I graduated and entered grad school, I stopped working at the cafeteria to tend bar at the Golden Spur but continued to bus tables on Sundays until I dropped out to seek my fortune in the Lowcountry.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Summerville’s Tastee-Freez: Be There or Be Square

/ wlm3 / 4 Comments
Tastee-Freez back in the day

I suspect that most small North American towns in the latter half of the previous century featured a commercial spot where teenagers gathered to be seen, to strut, to make asses of themselves, a spot like Mel’s Drive-In in American Graffiti. 

At these gathering places cars and trucks crammed with hormonally imbalanced funseekers cruised the parking lots looking for love, or in the case of my hometown, Summerville, South Carolina, if you couldn’t “be with the one you loved,” you could start a fist fight “with the one you were with.” 

In Summerville, Tastee Freez was the place.  There we gathered after football games or dances to keep the night alive. At Tastee Freez, I ordered my first cup of black coffee as an antidote for the two beers I had forced down like castor oil in those early days of intoxication. At Tastee Freez, I witnessed an acquaintance break his hand punching a brick wall after receiving his draft notice. At Tastee Freez, I received an apology from Bobby Bosheen[1] for punching me at the Curve-Inn Pool the previous weekend. 

“Sorry Bubba,” he said, “beer and liquor just don’t mix.”

With its circular driveway that allowed vehicles to “round, round, get around,” Tastee Freez was the place to check out the scene and to be seen. The bigger and louder the engine the better – 440 magnum bush cam, 4-on-the-floor, Hedman Headers, dual exhaust, and all that jargony jazz. 

Before the OPEC embargo, gas cost as little as 35 cents a gallon, about the same as a can of PBR, the brew of choice in Flowertown circa 1969. Commercial radio stations were more likely to play oldies like “Stand by Me” than Hendrix, though “Crosstown Traffic” would have been somewhat apropos – though, come to think of it, much more so now. 

On a Friday or Saturday night, my parents might let me borrow our 1964 Ford Falcon station wagon, a white four-cylinder bland-mo-bile with 3-on-the-steering-column. After my friend Gordon Wilson plowed into a runaway mule from Middleton Gardens and totaled the Falcon, my father in an act of spontaneous irrationality replaced it with a Triumph Spitfire two-seater, a convertible, which jacked-up my cool quotient a couple of notches as I orbited the Freez with the top down.

Little did we know that Summerville would soon explode, not from napalm or an ICBM, but from a population influx. As Springsteen put it, “there’s just different people coming down here now, and they see things in different ways.” Even though “everything we’ve known [wasn’t] [completely] swept away,” crosstown traffic does makes it hard “to get to the other side of town.”

Inching along the Berlin G Meyers Parkway ain’t exactly my cup of tea. Folly Beach, where I now live, is supposed to be overrun with people, but Summerville isn’t.  But, hey, c’est la vie; you can’t blame folks for wanting to live in a beautiful place.

what an exquisite photograph by Anthony Proveaux

[1] A nom de guerre 

The Tale of Two First Grades

/ wlm3 / 2 Comments

Being shy and having been sequestered for three months by rheumatic fever, for me at first public school proved challenging. We lived on Laurel Street back then, across from the playground, and during my convalescence, I was confined to a wheelchair. If being in a wheelchair wasn’t bad enough, I also suffered the affliction of being red-headed, so in a town of only three-thousand or so residents, even children I didn’t know would approach me, once I was ambulatory again, and say, “Hey, aren’t you the crippled kid who was in the wheelchair?”

After my recovery, I attended Miss Marion’s kindergarten, whose students were all middle-class and, of course, white. I don’t remember anyone ever even misbehaving, though once when we were told to stay off the swings because of a previous rain storm, Bert Pearce fell backwards out of one and landed butt-first in a puddle of water. He had to spend an hour or so in the bathroom in his underwear while Miss Marion dried his pants, a fate to me that made confinement to a wheelchair seem like a ride in Flash Gordon’s rocket ship in comparison.[1]

In fact, the only negative experience I remember from kindergarten is pouring Coca-Cola in my Davy Crockett thermos, only to discover at lunch time that carbonation – or something having to do with the Coke – had broken the glass inlay of the thermos.[2]  

This is the one I owned.

I entered Summerville Elementary in the fall of 1960, and my mother accompanied me to class on the first day where we met Mrs. Wiggins and the rest of my classmates, who were more economically diverse than my kindergarten peers.[3] I remember one boy whose single mother didn’t have a car and walked with him to school and back the first couple of days. They lived literally on the other side of the tracks, so it was quite a trek. My mother, a kind soul, somehow got wind ­­– perhaps we passed them on the way to school – and started offering them transportation until the school bus situation was straightened out. I recall that his smallpox vaccination had gone spectacularly wrong – he suffered an enlarged stomach-turning eruption on his arm. I also remember they had a handmade sign in their dirt yard advertising fish bait worms for sale. 

I may have the world’s worst sense of direction.[4] On the second day of school, I got lost among the swirling hordes of screechers and stood in line on the steps of the wrong entrance. Once I entered the hallway and couldn’t find my class, I was terrified, as if l’d entered a Twilight Zone episode. I don’t exactly remember how it got straightened out, but it did, but afterwards I emerged with a palpable dislike for school. I much preferred my shared bedroom at home to the light green concrete walls of Miss Wiggins’ classroom with our bubble-headed self-portraits displayed on bulletin boards. The boy who rode to school with us had scribbled slashes of purple crayon for his self-portrait, but it was displayed with all the rest with his name printed under it.

As it happened, in December, our family, which then only consisted of my younger brother David, my parents, and me, moved to Aurora, Colorado, where my father attended some sort of training program associated with his civil service job. We moved into a tiny three-room apartment in an establishment called The Big Bear Motel, located on Colfax, a busy four-lane highway. Although the school was only four or so blocks away, I would have had to cross on foot those lanes of heavy traffic headed to Lowry Air Force base, so Mama drove me to school in the mornings and picked me up in the afternoons.

My brother David (on the right) and I at the Big Bear Motel
The Big Bear, now known as the Aurora Motel

Unlike Summerville Elementary, Aurora’s primary school, Crawford Elementary, employed two first grade teachers per class.  I remember on my first day being introduced to the students and placed into one of the reading groups that sat in a circle and read out loud while the other teacher drilled the rest of the students in some other activity. They had divided the class into three reading groups based on skills and named them after birds – the Eagles, the Blue Birds, and the Crows.[5]  Perhaps because of my scruffy appearance (the only pair of shoes I owned were cowboy boots), my Southern accent, and that South Carolina ranked somewhere like 48th state-wise in education, they assigned me to the Crows. However, once it was my turn to read and I could fluidly decode the “oh-oh-ohs” and “look-look-looks” of the text, they immediately promoted me to the Eagles.

I loved living in Colorado in the winter with its mountains and snow. Unlike in Summerville, we ventured on family outings most weekends, visiting Buffalo Bill’s grave on top of Lookout Mountain and the mining town of Central City where we saw Face on the Barroom Floor, a painting rendered on the floor of the Teller House Bar. As the story goes, the artist, Hendron Davis, had been fired by the Central City Opera Association in 1936. He wanted to leave his mark on the town and asked permission of the bar owner to paint the portrait portrayed in the poem. They refused, but aided by an employee, he sneaked in after midnight and painted a woman’s face on the wooden floor of the saloon.

Another drink, and with chalk in hand, the vagabond began,

To sketch a face that well might buy the soul of any man.

Then, as he placed another lock upon that shapely head,

With a fearful shriek, he leaped and fell across the picture — dead!

The Face on the Barroom Floor

But I digress. School for me in Aurora was great, both socially and academically. I gained a great deal of confidence and was eager to return to Summerville, now considering myself, if not a man of the world, a first-grader of the world.

Only a couple of weeks remained in the school year when we made it back to Summerville, and Mrs. Muckenfuss, the principal, explained to my mother it didn’t make much sense for me to return to class, but my mother insisted, and I did, very full of myself until I realized that I was the only one who couldn’t do long addition. I had no idea what carrying numbers to the next column was all about. Summerville Elementary was more advanced than Aurora Elementary! 

No doubt the excellence of Summerville’s public schools has played an important role in its exponential growth. Now according to Wikipedia, Summerville is the seventh largest city of South Carolin (though, after reading a couple of articles on my hometown and one article on one of its famous citizens, I wouldn’t bet my mortgage on it). At any rate, I’m thankful for the education I got at Summerville Elementary, for teachers like Mrs. Wiggins, Mrs. Jordon, Mrs. Montz, Miss McCue, and Mrs. Altman. 

[1] By the way, the spacecraft spewed fiery combustion in the void of outer space. 

[2] The Moore and Blanton families’ addiction to Coca-Cola is legendary. In her adulthood, my Aunt Virginia lugged a 2-liter bottle with her everywhere. 

[3] Back then, there were no public kindergartens, so we who had attended private kindergartens enjoyed a great academic advantage because we already knew our ABCs and could perform single digit arithmetic.

[4] After my niece’s Hanahan High graduation ceremony held at the North Charleston Coliseum, it literally took me over an hour to find my car, and I was able to do only because the parking lot was virtually empty when I ran across it.

[5] Actually, I don’t remember what birds designated what level of accomplishment. 

Sometimes the Twain Do Meet

/ wlm3 / 15 Comments

Dorchester County Hospital Summerville, SC

Dorchester County Hospital Summerville, SC 1950s

In the first decade of my life, the 1950s, my mother worked as a practical nurse at Dorchester County Hospital in Summerville, South Carolina. Unfortunately, I got to spend more time at the hospital than I would have liked because I contracted rheumatic fever in 1956, which would result in a two-week stay in a ward at the hospital and two months in bed at home after that.

I was only five at the time, so my memory of the ward is hazy. I remember getting EKGs and Reverend Storm, the Baptist preacher, coming and extolling everyone on the ward to bow their heads and pray for me, which I found embarrassing, and I also remember some of my mother’s friends and my grandmother’s friends coming to visit the hospital.

hospital-ward-1950s-cropped

One of these was Vivian Mallard, a good friend of my grandmother’s. I remember her playing a simple board game called Davy Jones Locker with me as I lay in the hospital bed. If erect posture is a sign of moral uprightness, Vivian was a paragon of virtue. She was a short, trim woman with curly gray hair and glasses, a no-nonsense lady who walked as if she were balancing an etiquette book on her head. After my recovery, when my grandmother kept my brother and me while Mama was nursing, I spent many a boring hour on Vivian Mallard’s porch or in her immaculately trimmed yard while “Mama Blanton,” as we called my grandmother, and Vivian exchanged gossip about the ins and outs and comings and goings of Summerville’s citizenry.

Another of Mama Blanton’s good friends was Miriam Etheridge, who with her husband ran a grocery store attached to their house just down the street from Alston High School, the African American School in those days of segregation. This was a “colored neighborhood,” as we put it back then, so the clientele of the store was almost exclusively African American.  Because of segregation, my only exposure to Black children was at the store. I remember the girls having elaborate, complicated hairdos featuring multiple parts and ponytail like projections. I actually had a crush on one of the Black girls, a tall, pretty light-skinned girl, but even back then I knew better than admit to something like that.[1]

Perhaps, it was at Mrs. Etheridge’s store that I first encountered Harold, a mysterious black man whom people claimed “was not right in the head.”  In addition to mental illness, Harold suffered from a strange, plum-sized, sac-like growth dangling from his ear that my mother called a “wen.” Scouring google for an approximation, the closest image I could come up with is the one below, which isn’t nearly big enough. Why no charitable entity sought to have it removed seems strange. But back then even doctors’ offices were segregated with separate black and white waiting rooms. Perhaps pro bono operations weren’t a thing.

cystAt any rate, among the rumors about Harold was that he had been on a path to becoming a physician but had some sort of mental breakdown in medical school. Whatever the case, Harold’s status in his adulthood was that of a vagrant. Riding my bicycle through the park, one time I saw him passed lying among azalea bushes with a jug next to him.

Another time, in those days before people locked their cars, Harold crawled into the back seat of Vivian Mallard’s Oldsmobile and fell asleep. It’s not clear if he had done so the night before or in the morning when Vivian decided to go grocery shopping.  It wasn’t until she arrived at the Piggly Wiggly parking lot and got out of her car that she discovered Harold curled up unconscious in the back. I suspect that she screamed, but I don’t know for sure. And I also don’t know if Harold was arrested or whatever ultimately became of him. Sometimes cases like his were sent up to the State Mental Hospital on Bull Street in Columbia, an institution featuring the same dark brown bricks that gave Dorchester County Hospital such an uninviting vibe. If he had been sent to Columbia, maybe they would have removed the wen, but at that point, it wouldn’t have done him much good.

maxresdefault-1

The now abandoned State Mental Hospital on Bull Street

[1] She actually appears in a short story I wrote, which you can access here.

Update: Please note in the comments that Harold indeed eventually had the wen removed.

Tales from Old Summerville

/ wlm3 / 6 Comments

carolina inn

Old Carolina Inn, the first building in Summerville to have an elevator

Before the fast food franchises, before the Wal-Marts, before the sprawl, my hometown Summerville, SC, was a lovely, quiet village nestled in a pine forest 25 miles northwest of Charleston.  Settled just after the Revolutionary War and originally known as Pineland Village, the community in those days offered a haven for plantation owners seeking seasonal escape from malaria-bearing mosquitoes.

Eventually, Pineland Village became known as Summerville, and people started settling there year round. In 1847, Summerville officially became a municipality, and that very year the town council passed one of the first conservation laws in the nation, a statue forbidding cutting down trees of a certain circumference without permission.

Town-Hall-3

Town Hall back in the day

This passion for conservation and appreciation for the beauty of nature resulted in the planting of hundreds of azaleas, camellias, and gardenias throughout the town, both in its municipal parks and in the yards of the old clapboard whitewashed Victorian houses.  In the springtime, what is now called “the Old Village” or “the Historic District” has to rank as one of the most beautiful towns in the nation.  It claims as its official motto “Flowertown in the Pines.”

IMG_1211

St Paul’s Episcopal Church (photo credit Fleming Moore)

In 1950, the year my mother graduated from Summerville High School, the population stood at 3,312; in 1970, the year I began my senior year there, the population had barely grown to 3,839.  However, it almost doubled between 1970 and 1980 and grew a startling 247% to 22,519 from 1980 to 1990.  Since then, the population has doubled yet again, and according to a 2019 estimate, now 52,549 people call Summerville home.  When I go there nowadays, have lunch out or hit a bar, I recognize virtually no one.

However, in the old days, being a native and growing up “Flowertown” meant that everyone knew everyone else, which was a real disadvantage if you were a redhead like me.

“Did you recognize any of the boys?”

“No, but one of them was redheaded.”

“I bet it was Rusty Moore.  I’ll call his mother.”

Everyone in town knew everyone else, but outside of the town limits, there were a number of smaller unincorporated communities like Knightsville, which had its own elementary school, the Boone Hill community, Stallsville, New Hope, etc.  By junior high, children from these communities had matriculated in Summerville schools.  Unfortunately, a few of these rural children were dirt poor.  I remember shoeless White children hopping on the bus on the first day of school. We’re talking about the days of segregation when only a few handpicked African Americans had been integrated into our classes, and they were from downtown and academically talented.  Because academically, we were “tracked,” I rarely interacted with any of the disadvantaged kids from the rural areas, although I became good friends with several prosperous college prep kids from Knightsville.

However, when PE started in the 7th grade, I not only interacted with some of the disadvantaged rural kids, but I also showered with them, and since several had failed a year or two, some sported five o’clock shadows rather than peach fuzz.  PE  is where I first met Bobby Bosheen, the antagonist (and protagonist) of this piece.

My attempts to google Bobby Bosheen have turned up zilch.  I heard somewhere decades ago that he had been chained to a tree and bullwhipped and lost an eye.  Another rumor had him throwing a Hanahan boy off the Folly Pier and killing him in a tribal fight between rival high schools.  Although I doubt that either rumor is true, I don’t doubt that Bobby is no longer among the quick.  To say that he had anger issues is to say that Kanye West has ego issues.  Adjectives like volcanic and nuclear come to mind.  I would like to think that Bobby overcame his rage, that he turned out okay because deep down inside I don’t think he was a bad person.  He had this haunted look about him that suggested his childhood hadn’t taken place on Sunnybrook Farm.

For some odd reason, one Saturday, I let my friend, the late Gordon Wilson, talk me in going to Boone Hill Methodist Church to engage in unsupervised tackle football with the natives of that region.  Bobby was among the crew and had a jolly time swinging elbows, crushing ball carriers, and piling on.  Even though I enjoyed the game about as much as I would a root canal, I think my participation reaped the benefit of Bobby’s vaguely recognizing me and therefore not targeting me as an adversary.  True, he did punch me once as I was sitting in a car at the Curve-Inn Pool, but he was rip-roaring drunk and started fights that night with numerous revelers, including Kenny Reese, a popular basketball player.  The very next week I saw Bobby at Tastee Freeze, and Gordon asked him why he had punched me, and Bobby actually apologized, lamenting, “Whiskey and beer don’t mix.”

tastee freeze

The Old Tastee-Freeze

What really solidified my self-identification as a coward was Bobby’s girlfriend, a large, stringy haired bruiser with discolored teeth and the calves of a linebacker.  Unlike, Bobby, she hated me, hated me viscerally on sight. This was in ’70 or ’71, and I had started to grow my hair long and dress like Neil Young.  She used to position herself outside the entrance of the back of the main building and threaten me.  “I can’t wait to cut your ass, you red-headed bitch,” she said one day with arms crossed blocking the entrance.

red neck gal

I suspected she could have, given that she outweighed me and I hadn’t been in a real fight since the fourth grade, so I turned tail and found another entryway.  Whenever I saw her, I avoided her.  She scared the shit out of me.

The last time I heard something concrete about Bobby was in ’75 when I was bumming a ride back to college with one of my mother’s colleagues, a teacher at Newington Elementary School.  As we passed Morris Knight’s, a beer joint, the husband of the teacher, a non-Summerville native, mentioned that he had made the mistake of going in there one time to shoot pool and had been assaulted and actually beaten with pool cues.  He told me that he had pressed charges against the assailant, who was convicted, but that he couldn’t remember his name, that is was something funny sounding.

“Bobby Bosheen,” I suggested.

“Yes, that’s it!  Bobby Bosheen!”

Of course, Bobby’s anger had to come from somewhere.  I suspect at home he was no stranger to corporal punishment.  Perhaps, like Pee Wee Gaskins, he had been strung upside down naked and beaten with a two-by-four.  If he had been born to one of the families living on Carolina Avenue in a Victorian house with a spacious porch beneath moss draped live oaks among the azaleas, I suspect he and the rest of the world would have gotten along much better.

sville house

Hillary, Barry, and Me

/ wlm3 / 1 Comment

1101630614_400Like Hillary Clinton, I, too, worked for Barry Goldwater in the ’64 election, although I was only 12. Growing up in Summerville, South Carolina, I had inherited this tiny hamlet’s folkways, which is just another way of saying I was a racist, although a relatively benign one. In Summerville, not only could you encounter a “whites only” sign above the laundromat, but also patients in doctors’ offices were segregated into separate waiting areas, like dogs and cats waiting to see a vet.

My parents did not hate black folk – we were taught not to use the n-word and loved our “maid” Alice like an aunt – but my folks deemed “colored people,” as they called them, inherently inferior.[1] Obviously, given that he had voted against the Civil Rights Bill, Barry Goldwater was their man, so our 1964 Ford Falcon station wagon sported an Au(H20) bumper sticker because we wanted “a choice not an echo” and “in our hearts” we knew “he was right.”

The fledging Dorchester County Republican Party had rented the defunct movie theater as Goldwater headquarters where they distributed buttons and bumper stickers, and on a couple of Saturdays played the old Fay Wray King Kong movie for an admission fee of ten cents. Among other nominal duties, my job at the theater was to climb a ladder and position letters on the marquee outside. This theater didn’t have a balcony, and even if it did, I doubt if black children would have wanted to donate their pennies to the Goldwater cause. Once, when I took a short cut through one of their communities on my bike (which also sported a Goldwater sticker), I was pelted with rocks, a valuable lesson that freedom of speech can be dangerous.

Well, obviously, Goldwater lost, and I was heartbroken, but attitudes were slowly changing in Summerville. For one thing, the public basketball courts became integrated, even before the school became fully so. I played three-on-three half-court b-ball there after school and on Saturdays. The black kids had different rules – you didn’t take the ball back past the foul line if you got a defensive rebound – but we all got along well, and I got to be friends with these boys before they became my classmates when Summerville’s black and white schools finally merged in 1969. I remember passing a bottle of Boone’s Farm to my pal Mookie at my friend Adam’s one night as we took turns taking swigs. This action would have enraged my father if he could have seen it, even though he was Alice’s children’s Santa Claus, even when we couldn’t afford it.

And so, like Hillary, I switched political sides, I started cancelling my father’s vote out — my very first one cast for McGovern — and politics became a topic best not broached at the dinner table, along with race, and a host of other potentially explosive issues.

It’s hard to believe it’s been fifty years, and although things are much better now, obviously, white supremacy is still alive in darkened, un-Christian anti-intellectual cesspools, and I suspect I won’t see that change in my lifetime. But things do change; people do change sides. It will be interesting to see how many South Carolinians do in this election – if not completely change sides, go for the libertarian candidate.

[1] Alice, for example, called me “Mr. Rusty.”

You can't see it, but there's a Goldwater sticker on the back bumper

You can’t see it, but there’s a Goldwater sticker on the back bumper

[What in Those Days Were Called] Village Idiots

/ wlm3 / 4 Comments

I’ve come to distrust memories, which, if you want to get technical, are basically chemical/electric configurations warehoused somewhere, somehow in the brain. Over the course of my six decades, I have not always consumed the recommended daily allowance of vitamins.* I also plead guilty to attempting to blunt the pain of my existence by drinking more than the recommended daily allowance of malted beverages — a combination of behaviors that I suspect over the course of a lifetime might fray synapses, make brain chemicals go bad — might muddy memory, desire, dream, daydream.

*My mistyping of vitamins was auto-corrected to “citizens.”

For example, it seems that every time I tell a story, my wife Judy has a different, more prosaic memory of the events, like the tattoo on the palm of the hand of the panhandler not actually being on the palm of his hand but on his wrist.

When I’m telling the story, I’m sure I’m right — can see the swastika clearly slashing across the wrinkles of his palm — but I’ve been proven wrong so many times I’ve lost virtually all confidence in my recollection of events.

Today!This lack of confidence in the reality of my memories is more pronounced the further back I go. For example, did I dream this up, or was there in my hometown of Summerville, SC a [what in those days was called] colored man who travelled the streets in a mule-pulled buggy equipped with automobile tires? In my mind’s eye he’s wearing a slouching felt hat. But who knows? Maybe I’m confusing him with the image of Mississippi John Hurt on the album cover.

Then there was a [what in those days was called] retarded man whom everyone called Pepsi Cola, because he’d come up to you — in this case me, an 8-year-old — and ask you to buy him a Pepsi Cola. I think even though he was a grown man, he lived with his mother, so he didn’t roam around the town but might accompany her to the Piggly Wiggly where he’d wander off. You could tell he wasn’t “right” by his head bobbing and slurry annunciation and the repetitive, obsessive poverty of his diction.

But the absolute king of the Summerville town [what in those days were called] idiots was a man whose Christian and surname I’m not going to repeat for his family’s sake but whom everyone called Beakie.

Although he seemed much younger than my mother, she told me that they rode the same school bus and that he would try to impress the girls by sticking pencils so deep into his gums that they would embed and stick out.

In my junior high days, Beakie rode a bicycle back and forth along the sidewalks of Summerville, and he wore national guard fatigues — or was it that he only wore a national guard hat, the kind that Fidel Castro wore back in the day?

Anyway, what earned Beakie his notoriety was that he would trade firecrackers to naive newcomers to town for a pair of their underwear and a photograph of them. He would say, “I’ll give you 50 pack of firecracker for your drawers.” If successful in the transaction, he would tie the underwear (always tightie whities) behind his bike, place the photograph of the victim in the underwear, and pedal his bicycle all over town.

There was a band in town who actually played a version of “For Your Love” with these lyrics:

For your drawers, for your drawers,
I’ll give you 50 pack . . .

It sounds impossible, doesn’t it? Is my memory of Beakie coasting by on his bicycle dragging drawers and a polaroid of some sucker a legitimate memory or concoction?

Frankly, I have no idea.