Sweet Potatoes, Look Out Below, and Gregg Street Mishaps
The first house I lived in was one of Fort Mill’s landmark homes, now called the Belk Home. At the time, it was a nice old run-down house that rented rooms for struggling families. Rosa and Henry Prior owned the house and rented rooms to Mom and Dad. The Priors were very kind people. While we lived there, in the late 1940s, Henry, an ironmonger, (I use the term because blacksmith seems to imply horses) built and repaired anything made of metal. This was a time after the shortages of WWII when things were repaired and continued to be used, Henry stayed busy repairing car parts, farm implements and household goods.
Henry worked in a building that stood behind where the Fort Mill Post Office is now and beside the old cannery on Elliott Street. I remember standing by the glow of his forge with its huge, hand-operated bellows and hearing the ringing of hammer upon anvil and wincing at the flying sparks. With the enduring fascination of all things Medieval, I wish more people could have such a visceral experience.
Henry took me under his wing and I often followed him through a collection of broken refrigerators and washing machines to look for a part that he could adapt to make what he needed. One of my favorite memories from that time was standing on the porch with Henry and eating baked sweet potatoes. As they came out of the oven, he would wrap them in newspaper, and cut open the end of the potatoes. We would then drip butter and cinnamon sugar on them and squeeze the orange sweetness like toothpaste into our mouths. Very simple times invoke very simple pleasures. To this day, I feel something comforting about sweet potatoes.
Henry’s wife Rosa worked the check-out line at Luke’s Red & White, a small grocery store at the corner of Banks Street and Tom Hall Street. Years later when we were in high school, my friends and I would stop by Luke’s before school and buy cigarettes and soft drinks. I smoked at the time, but it seems that everyone smoked in the 50’s and 60’s. I would have my friends buy cigarettes for me because I did not want to be a disappointment to Rosa.
I don’t remember what year Dad bought the house on Gregg Street. It was a small; two bedrooms, living room, kitchen and bath. I must have been two or three years old and soon met several friends who would be part of my life for decades. Bill and Irene Davis lived next door and became lifetime friends of my parents. Bill was one of the fortunate few who had been deep shaft coal miners in West Virginia and managed to escape that difficult and deadly life. He got a job with Celanese, a synthetic cloth maker, and moved to the Fort Mill area when they opened a new plant across the Catawba River in Rock Hill. Irene was the secretary at the middle school and later the high school. She was like a second mother and I always felt looked after.
My mother swears it was impossible to wean me from a bottle. She said that she remembers me playing in the yard in blue jeans with a bottle in my back pocket. She gave me the ultimatum that once my final bottle was broken, she would not replace it. When that happened, I went over to the Davis’s and borrowed a bottle from Irene. That might give you some insight into my age as well as my precocious rascality.
Irene and Bill’s son, Michael, was a year younger than me and Billy, his brother, showed up a couple of years after that. My sister Connie completed the families when I was six. While I was in grammar school, the area behind Leroy Street was all woods. Michael and Billy and I cleared out bike trails, created a rustic dirt miniature golf course and built numerous log forts.
Just one wooded lot over from the Davis house was the unpaved end of Pine Street. When the road was cut, a red mud bank about five feet high, was left unplanted. That bank became the “Muddy Hills.” Countless foxholes, and tunnels were started and abandoned in the red clay. My parents always hated to see me come home from the Muddy Hills because I was like the Peanuts character, Pigpen. Dad said he could always pick me out from a distance because I was the one covered in red mud.
Dad was a Lieutenant in the National Guard during our time on Gregg Street and every summer had to spend two weeks in summer camp at Fort Stewart, Georgia. Mother came to dread the time he would go to summer camp because those were the times that I always managed to get hurt. She could count the summer camps by my scars.
The first trip to the doctor was for eight stitches on top of my head. The Davis back stoop had two steps and a concrete landing. Beside the stoop was the door to allow access under the house. The access was about three feet below ground level and had a square brick wall bordering it. This small pit, beside the porch, made the perfect foxhole. One of our favorite pastimes was to jump off the porch into the pit yelling “Geronimo!” or “Look out below!” We didn’t know why we used those terms but I later realized that “Geronimo!” was the jump yell for airborne troops in World War II. Where we picked it up, I don’t know.
Jumping in was great fun until one year when Dad was at camp. For some reason, I either tripped or decided to dive and hit the top of my head on the edge of the low brick wall. By the time Mom and Irene got to me, I was bleeding and had a huge knot on my head. Off to our family doctor, Dr. Shepherd, we went and he put eight stitches in my head. When Dad came home a week later, he looked me over and then inspected the wall.
“You don’t seem to have done any damage,” he said. Everyone thought he was funny except Mom.
The next year’s adventure occurred one day when I was wading barefoot and sailing stick ships in a large mudpuddle on the corner of Springs Street and Oak Street. The lot was often used as a pick-up baseball field and we considered it part of our territory. I stepped on a piece of broken glass under the water and cut two toes pretty badly. Again, off we went to Dr. Shepherd and he stitched me up again. When Dad got home, my foot was in a bandage and he was sympathetic but refrained from any humor.
The third year was the topper. I was behaving myself and sitting on the front porch of the Osborne’s house across the street. Mrs. Osborne brought out glasses of Coca-Cola for her kids, Nita and Bobby and for Michael, Billy and me.
Somehow, from my sitting position, I fell forward and landed on the jagged bottom of the broken glass with my right hand. The pad at the bottom of my index finger was sliced in several places and I severed an artery. Once again, we were off to the doctor. Once again he stitched me up and put a boxing glove-sized bandage on my hand. He told Mom that it was a ragged series of cuts and that I should keep the hand as immobile as possible.
Later that afternoon I was sitting on the Davis front porch with Mom and Irene and the boys. I was behaving myself and just sitting still when the huge boxing glove bandage instantly turned from white to red. Mom put me in the car while Irene called the doctor. He said to take me to emergency room in Rock Hill.
My memory of the York General Hospital emergency room is fuzzy but I distinctly remember the nurse removing the bandage and my hand spraying blood all over her white uniform. They stopped the bleeding and the stiches in my hand looked like a checkerboard. The scar is still visible after 60 plus years.
Thankfully the unlucky streak ended that year and Dad went to many more summer camps without mishap.
We lived by the Davis family until we moved to Leroy Street when I was in the ninth grade. We shared Christmas with the Davises for years even after we were no longer neighbors.
Chipper Heemsoth lived across the street and had the greatest set of baseball cards I ever saw. He was also the one who led me into the world of Scouting. Joe Hinson lived a couple of houses down and was the only kid in town with a pony in the back yard. All of us are friends to this day. That is the way it was when Fort Mill was small and I was very young.