Walking Through the Old Stories

I believe I have taken you with me on walks on Main Street in the fifties and sixties when clothing stores, big and small, lined the streets, when Frosty Witherspoon and Ivan Chase and Bill Stroup and George Ackerman were hands-on with their businesses and just glad you came in to buy Red Camel overalls or the perfect dress for eighth grade graduation or just a pair of white cotton socks. We have walked by Kimbrells Furniture Store where first Eb Kimbrell and then Bill Kimbrell (only distantly related) would advance credit to young couples just starting a household and keep those folks coming back to buy bunk beds for a growing family.

We have looked in on some of the barbershops where Mr. Howie or Smoke Rogers or Mr. Caskey held court and men talked politics while waiting for an open chair. There was the smell of hair tonic mixed with cigarette smoke and sometimes things got quiet when a young mother sat teary-eyed and out of place when her three-year-old son got his first haircut. 

Looking down the street, like two gunslingers facing each other from different sides were the drug stores. Rogers Drug, owned by Tommy Rogers, was more traditional, maybe just a little old-fashioned with marble countertops and a couple of tables at the back where local businessmen planned the town’s future over a Coke and a pack of Nabs. Martin Drug, across the street was more modern with brightly-lit aisles and walls of cosmetics. Bill Martin kept things up to date and appealed to the younger crowd. There was music and even a soda fountain with a paper-capped teen boy making Cherry Coke floats and outrageous banana splits.

Not by choice but by necessity, I tagged along when Mom bought groceries for the week. By the mid-fifties, the old-style grocery store was being replaced by the new chain stores. The Pyramid grocery, with its slapping screen door and the mingled smells of fresh cut meat and local vegetables was doomed when the new A & P opened its glass doors on Main Street next to the park. Mr. Puckett managed the A & P for years and brought the town into a new era of bright lights, great variety, chrome buggies and easy check-out. Culp Brothers, on the corner of White and Spratt Streets and Luke’s Red & White on Tom Hall Street managed to last longer but eventually fell to the prices and convenience chain stores could offer.

We have also stuck our heads in at the Easy Pay store where Dick Adkins and Sara Blair sold bicycle accessories, baseballs, gloves, and bats. I realize now that there were things for grown-ups too, like tires and stuff.

You and I have paid our money and walked down the stairs to the candy counter in the Center Theater. Mr. Patterson would often run the Coke fountain and sell the Sugar Babies, Goobers and Raisinets along with the buttered popcorn. Chocolate bars were subject to melting so we chose the boxes of individual candies that could also be used as projectiles to harass friends and enemies alike. We’ve watched cowboys, monsters and aliens and closed our eyes when there was kissing on screen. We had our eyes opened later. Kissing, we found, wasn’t so bad.

 Leaving Main Street, we spent time in the old bowling alley playing bumper pool and listening to the early sounds of the Drifters or Dion and the Belmonts and taken a dip in the swimming pool at the bottom of the hill to cool off from the August heat.

We have reminisced about the days some of us spent at Fort Mill Elementary School, later Carothers, climbing monkey bars or drinking milk from cartons in the cafeteria underneath the classrooms. I have confessed to a couple of meetings with Mr. Reynold’s paddle at Central School, later A. O. Jones Middle School and dragged you along as we walked single-file around the inside of the building for recess on rainy days.

We have sat in on high school classes where Mrs. Culp struggled to teach me anything dealing with math and Mr. Jewett lit the fires that, now that I think about it, resulted in me sitting here telling you these stories and where Mrs. Harkey taught us biology and tried to keep us from turning on the gas ports for the Bunsen burners. I have asked you to accompany me to the Junior-Senior Prom where we felt grown up and ridiculous at the same time in our formal clothes. We have sung Beatles songs at the Junior Follies and roamed the open halls at the old Fort Mill High School before it fell to the housing boom of the 2020’s.

In October we dressed up as old-time pirates and ghosts and witches and carried bags of candy from house to house hoping for a Butterfinger or Baby Ruth and created more mischief than we dare admit to.

You have spent Thanksgiving at our table where family and friends, in-laws and outlaws piled food on plates and thanked God for the ability to overeat. You have walked alongside Dad and me through a cold December afternoon on the Spratt Farm to pick and cut just the right Christmas tree. I have invited you to watch as Mom would drape the tree in tinsel and to help Connie and me hang the fragile glass ornaments. I have even let you look in on Christmas morning to help open presents and to sit down at a breakfast of homemade biscuits and Mom’s Depression gravy.

I always feel like you are with me when I tell these stories. Many of you have been part of my growing up and many more of you have come along at later stages of my life. There are two parts to any podcast or blog. As a writer, I hope my stories resonate with similar events you had while growing up. For you to listen, even once is a gift for any writer. Every town, every family has stories, some good, some full of difficult days. But the important thing is all of us are here now having come through it all and able to look back on our lives with the filter of maturity. A few of you have taken me to task for seeing the good and ignoring the bad. Guilty as charged. One poet, guilty of the same sin of rosy recollection, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, said it well.

“Laugh and the world laughs with you,

Weep and you weep alone,

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

But has trouble enough of its own.”

So as we enter this season of joy and sadness remembering the good times with family and friends and at the same time missing those who live only in our hearts and memory, let us try to remember that we are family.

I am thankful to you for taking these walks with me. I wish I could sit and talk with you all and let you know how much it means to me that we are passing through this world together.

Have a great Holiday Season and I hope you find much to be grateful for.