Dead End Street

Trying to pinpoint a year in my life is like locating your upper floor hotel room from the parking lot. And if by chance, I should be on the wrong side of the building, I hope someone lets me know.

Somewhere in the early to mid-nineteen sixties, I lived near the end of North College Street in Marion, at number 502.  College Street was a no outlet street, terminating at creek’s edge, three houses down. In those days, a “no outlet” street was unheard of, as they were commonly called Dead End streets. Ours had a big white wooden sign with black letters spelling, “DEAD END”, right there at the end of the pavement, so that there would be no doubt, exactly where you were. An eight or nine year old might read into this, “BEYOND HERE, THERE BE DRAGONS”, and in our minds, there probably were.

The last house on our side of the street was home to Johnny. He was almost a full year older than me. Plus or minus a year usually makes a big difference when you’re a kid, but if it did, I didn’t notice it at the time. He was already building plastic models; one in particular was an Army tank of some sort with several machine guns mounted on top. I really thought this was cool.

The sidewalk in front of Johnny’s house ended like the street: abruptly, dropping off into the corner of the yard before leveling off in their driveway. This was the perfect launching site for many a red wagon juggernaut and later, a ramp for our bicycles.

I remember once seeing a multicolored string lying on the ground after our wagon made a pass. I went back to pick it up but it decided to slither across the yard.  After much commotion, Johnny’s Dad, a tall thin man, came out and dispatched the snake with a hoe. We were always on the lookout after that. Snakes were probably common around the creek side, but us being the terrors of the neighborhood, they were probably more afraid of us than we were of them, so we didn’t see very many.

There was a street light situated right over the dead end sign, drawing night bugs and of course, bats. On summer nights, when we were allowed to play outside after dark, we would throw small rocks up in the air and watch the bats chase them. This was also the place to hone ones skills with a slingshot, culminating in lots of pock marks in the sign from BBs and small stones.

If you gathered two or three boys together, chances are, one of them had firecrackers in his pocket and they were crying out to be lit. We blew up everything: toy soldiers, stick huts, crawdad holes, you name it, and when we ran out of things on the ground, we looked to the skies.

With some regularity, the “Air Force” as we called them, passed overhead in C-119, Flying Boxcars. We knew they were Air Force, because they were the ones with the airplanes, right?

Anyway, we would find an old pipe, or in one occasion, an old Pogo stick with the handle gone, and stick it in the ground, lined up with the flight path of the oncoming planes. We placed a firecracker in the top end of the tube and hooked the fuse over the edge. Once the fuse was lit, and the hook burned away, it fell down the pipe and went off. The U.S. would boast the world’s largest Air Force, but when I was a kid, we shot a whole lot of them down.

We learned a lot about science, you know, why things do what they do. We discovered that, if your firecracker failed to go off, all was not lost. We broke the firecracker in half, and lit the exposed powder. This would provide a show of sparks and if you still wanted to get the bang, you stomped it while it was spewing. This was hard on my old tennis shoes.

We knew that Mom’s Strike-Anywhere kitchen stick matches fit nicely in the end of our BB guns and when fired at the sidewalk, would pop and ignite into flames.

Caps were a great invention. They were not only a fun supplement for your cap gun; they were also a singular source of amusement in themselves. These could be set off, one at a time, or even a whole roll under the impact of a good claw hammer. This was amazingly loud for a roll of caps.

We played Army a lot, hiding in the weeds or bushes along the creek, ready to shoot or be shot, and then argue as to who shot who first. We were into camouflage long before it was a fashion statement, with weeds sticking out of our plastic helmets and sometimes our clothes. I think we could have had as much fun with simply a game of hide-and-seek, as the hideout was the biggest part of it all. But, we were too big for that, we thought, so our toy guns and garb made all the difference.

But, life was not all about pyrotechnics and such.

There were also baseball cards. It was a proud display to have your cards lined up on the sidewalk, set up your “Dream Team”, or trade for someone else’s. Names were everything. Names like Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle or Yogi Berra just sounded like great players, even if they hadn’t been. So many future valuable cards were lost in the spokes of our bicycles, not to mention, many of Mom’s clothes pins.

The Ben Franklin store, on Main Street, offered a kid everything he needed to survive in the world. They carried all of the fodder needed to cultivate the imagination. The people who worked there knew this, as they watched kids very closely.

There, I was introduced to the world of wind-up balsa airplanes, making a dead end street a fine runway for our rubber band squadron. The flights were short and often ended disastrously, but every once in a while, one unlikely take-off would catch the breeze and soar on a seemingly endless flight, only to turn and make a perfect landing right in front of me.

I still live for those moments.

A Fish Story

Waving a fly swatter about, with a cigarette dancing on her lip, Hazel waded into another tale. She was more likely to conjure up the memoirs of witches or the details of some local haunting than to just tell what happened last week. Many a tale was told to make me walk faster at night past a rustle in a cornfield or a shadow by an old house. Of course, I knew the stories were subject to some exaggeration, but I never let that slow me down.
In 1975 she was an older lady, but by no means elderly, drawing upon her days as a young girl in the late 1930’s. The conversation had apparently wandered close to one of her favorite fields of memory, and she was ready to jump the fence.
In 1937 the Ohio River left it’s banks and went window-shopping on Broadway in downtown Paducah. The Cumberland was not to be outdone. Homes and farms all along the river were swallowed up in a cold swirling ruin. High water in the bottomland was slow to go down, but eventually the floodwaters receded, and when they did, a legend rose out of the water.
A local farmer noticed that in one of many low spots where the waters had pooled, what appeared to be the roof of a brown bus was beginning to emerge. It was not uncommon to find all manner of debris washed up after a flood but this bus had a two-foot long fin sticking out of it. The farmer and his neighbor made attempts to row out to the object but were turned back as it began to churn the waters.
As the water slowly dropped, it revealed a creature some forty feet long and about eight feet across, easily the biggest catfish anyone had ever seen. It had eyes as big as a softball and black as the night. The mouth was wide enough to swallow a man and was the marvel of young boys who prodded with sticks only to see it bite them off. On one occasion a man standing by its tail was knocked flat when the fish flinched.
Word travels fast in small towns and before long people were coming from miles around to see the spectacle. The farmer, being unable thus far to work the field, found himself busy entertaining and visiting with the many onlookers. He erected long tables for the food that many of his neighbors were bringing. He basked in his newfound notoriety. People joked with him saying,” You ought to sell tickets!“ But he refused saying that he rarely had visitors and was content to enjoy it.
Eventually word reached an eastern city from which two men came offering to purchase the fish for a large sum of money. Again he refused.
As the days passed the fish slowly died, as did the novelty along with it. Soon all the visitors were gone and it was nearing time to break the field for planting. But now he had a problem. In as much as a small dead fish has a big odor, a huge dead fish is absolutely intolerable, and his neighbors let him know it. The two men from the big city were no longer interested in the purchase and furthermore refused the fish as a gift.
In the end, the farmer and his unfortunate sons had to saw up the carcass and haul the fish off in chunks.
I must have been grinning in obvious disbelief when Hazel leaned back and said.” It’s the truth!” She pointed her finger at my nose and frowned. “If you don’t believe me you can go ask…” and reeled off several names of people I knew. I think she and I both knew I wasn’t going to ask any of them to bear witness to any such fish story.
So I took it for what it was: A tall tale conjured up in the warmth of a potbelly stove. I enjoyed the yarn as well as her corn dodgers and apple turnovers.
Years later, I relayed the story to another more elderly lady, and noticed that she kept nodding as if to verify the “facts” as I told them. When I finished, she sipped her coffee and smiled knowingly.
“Well, I never did get to go see it”, she said, as she pushed up her glasses. “But I know several who did. They say it was quite a sight.”

At Granny's

My thoughts travel back to the late 1950’s to the little
town of Tolu, Kentucky, where my Granny, Lil Morris lived.
We were all much younger then and times were so much
simpler. Entertainment was the real world and there was
plenty of it to go around. Life in a very small town can be
dull for visiting Grandchildren, but Sunday afternoon at
Granny’s had its little rewards.
One coveted chore was collecting eggs from the hen house.
Being “first” meant a lot in those days as we raced out the
back door with a tattered basket lined with cloth. At our
young age there was something magic about finding eggs in
an otherwise empty hollow of straw.
Now, a sitting hen was a different story. Looking into the
cold emotionless eyes of a chicken, I was convinced that any
thoughts it might have about me would be pure evil. I
always passed this one by. But my older brother, Jerry
always seemed to get there first, braving dirt daubers and
cobwebs. Then right about the time that I entered the
doorway, feeling relatively safe, he would spook the hen off
the nest and I had to run for my life! It’s no wonder the
door stayed in disrepair.
Adjacent to the hen house was Granny’s washhouse.
Although she had a new washing machine in the basement,
she could still be seen running clothes through the old
wringer. The washhouse air was thick with the smell of lye
soap and mothballs. Anyone stepping onto the old porch
was sure to hear small critters inside scurrying to their
dark hideouts. Granny was always good to us, and we loved
her, but I sometimes felt, as a five-year-old might, that this
was the place where spells were cast, and I would not
venture there alone.
Granny saved everything from used Christmas wrapping paper
to rain. Granny’s back porch and cistern top were covered
with a wide array of metal pans, tubs and buckets. During a
slow steady shower, the sound of a marimba band could be
heard through the open windows of Granny’s kitchen.
When we washed up for dinner, likely as not, we used a
white enameled wash pan full of rainwater.

Sunday dinner at Granny’s would meet you at the front
door with the smell of cream style corn, chicken and
dumplings, and homemade apple pie with it’s dough lattice
sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. Being a large family
we gathered chairs from throughout the house and
squeezed in around the table. The youngest one would
usually sit on a yellow metal stepstool that was Granny’s
helper, as she wasn’t very tall. At one time or another, each
of us kids had eaten from the pewter infant’s plate that my
Dad used as a child. Granny rarely cooked a large amount
of any one dish, but rather a wide variety in many small
dishes, and always lemonade or Iced tea.
Houses in the area all seemed to be linked by a maze of
deeply worn footpaths. These were the products of careful
treading as the older residents were often seen breaking
stride to keep a footfall within the bare spots.
The path leading to the post office, which was also a private
residence, meandered onto a rolling walkway of old red bricks
trimmed with moss which were cool under little bare feet. As
children we sometimes spent a week at a time with Granny and would
delight in sending a letter home, although Marion was less than
twenty miles away. Often Granny would get a letter from
an acquaintance, exchanging a recipe, a comment on the
weather or a recitation of how a stranger was somehow a
distant relative.
The old store in the two-story brick building was a favorite
of mine. It seemed more like a gathering place than a
business. My Dad would buy us an Orange Crush or a
Grape Nehi from the slide top drink box. Licorice and hard
candy were kept in glass vending jars along an
age-darkened counter. I enjoyed cavorting with the locals,
sitting on wooden pop crates stood on end. But you had
to watch your step lest you stepped where someone spat.
Summer nights always came with the dove’s song, as a thin veil
of fog would creep into nearby fields. There, an old tractor might
putter home along a fencerow amongst freshly baled hay,
leaving lightning bugs to keep an all night vigil. One could
hear a back porch conversation somewhere near bouts in
soft voices that chimed in the evening calm. An old
speckled hound, seen briefly in patches of moonlight
through great oaks, slowly would make his way to some
familiar porch.
At Granny’s, bedtime came early. I would lay awake
watching the curtain sheers perform their slow dance on
night breezes. Tucked deep into the feather bed, I slept to
the cadence of the old cuckoo clock in the living room, and
the occasional tap of night bugs on the window screen.
These are the times that are tucked away in the fruit jars of
my memories, like preserves of the moments, to taste again
and remember.

Hoboes and White Laundry

In my preschool years of the late fifties, my family lived in a large stucco house beside the National Guard Armory in Marion, Kentucky. The street in front of our house passed the armory and came to a dead end at the foot of a railroad loading ramp.
The ramp looked to have been used years earlier when Marion was shipping spar by rail. I remember how the roadway sparkled with blue and purple. I picked up many a flashy piece believing that I had surely found a priceless jewel. I would drop them into my pocket with whatever other collectables I might be carrying, only to be lost somewhere in the laundry. I suppose that such foolishness was typical of that age, for if Mama ever found any of my lost treasures, she never let on.
A Train whistle from a mile away would bring my older brother Jerry, and I running to watch the train from the ramp. There were two sets of tracks then with at least one sidetrack under the ramp. Jerry would sometimes creep down to the sidetrack and lay a stick or a penny on the sidetrack rail. I was always relieved to see the train coming on one of the other rails for I was sure Jerry would derail the train. But the engineers never saw our sabotage and always waved as did the brakemen in the caboose, and that was a delight for this five-year-old.
Mama would always warn us to “watch for hoboes” who might be camped under or near the ramp. To me, a hobo was a cigar smoking, coal dust covered troll who would demand payment from two brothers caught standing on his ramp.
I never saw a hobo but I saw a lot of tired old men in bib overalls sometimes carrying lunch buckets. I saw sad looking men walking the ties with their coat thrown over their shoulder, not waving or even looking up. I remember older boys with fishing poles hiking to some hidden pond. They would all melt into the distant rail mirage as Mama called us home.
Like the last echoes of the steam age, a few coal-fired locomotives would pass, hissing and roaring like Mama’s pressure cooker gone mad. The noise made it seem like they were going faster than the newer trains.
With a large wicker basket and an apron pouch full of clothespins, Mama would fill the clothesline with white sheets and cloth diapers. I remember playing under billowing sheets trying to keep in the shade with my ‘57 Mercury peddle car, as the black smoke from a locomotive drifted overhead.
“I don’t know why I bother”, Mama would say, “Between the trains and you kids, I might as well not wash clothes at all.” Relatively clean diesel engines were a Godsend, but for Mama there would always be kids. Only six years later Mama passed away leaving six children, the youngest being only four months old.
These days have long gone and life is less of a wonder now, but on some days when the wind is right and a whistle sounds in the distance, I can still reach into the pockets of my memories and pull out a glittering piece of spar that Mama saved for me.