What the Bandstand Saw
I walked down Main Street a few days ago, forced myself to pass by the great smells coming from the restaurants and sat on the steps of the Bandstand for a while. It is a time machine, you know. I have seen so many photographs over the years, I can almost lose myself in the old images.
I can see the red, white and blue bunting hung to greet the Fort Mill National Guard as they returned from the Mexican border and again in 1917 when so many brave boys marched off to World War I. It is not hard to imagine the mixed feelings when they came home, fewer in number and weary from the battlefields of Belgium after the Great War to End All Wars.
From the bandstand, I envision the days when wagons pulled by mules ambled their way up the hill carrying cloth and farm equipment, furniture and dry goods from the freight station to stores on Main Street. There were many stores over the years, from the early Mills & Young Dry Goods and Harris Furniture to later additions like the Dime Store and the Men’s Shop.
Saturday used to be shopping day for families when both parents worked in the mill or in stores or as laborers or domestics. A Saturday trip to town was an event even for those who lived as close as the mill villages or down Tom Hall or in Maybe Hollow. Some families would walk to town with the children pulling a wagon to help carry the groceries on the the trip back home.
I picture the men stopping to sit here on the bandstand for a few minutes to wipe the sweat off their foreheads with a bandanna and to roll a cigarette or bite a hunk off a plug of chewing tobacco. Events of the day and opinions about life were shared along with countless stories…some of them true and some maybe flavored a bit in the re-telling. There were stories about old Coon Harris trying to fly on homemade wings from behind Main Street, and Tom Hall winning the Medal of Honor after capturing all those German soldiers during World War I and about J. B. Mills predicting the number of snows by adding up the foggy days in the fall. Everybody had heard all the stories before but the joy was in the telling and the fellowship.
The women, often with two or three kids in tow, would shake their heads and continue up the hill to buy groceries or shoes for the kids or clothes for themselves and their husbands. The Bandstand was, by tradition, men only and many of the wives were probably glad of it. The old Pyramid grocery or the newer A & P beside the Bandstand were places to buy fresh sausage or ground beef along with slab bacon. There was chicken too, for those who didn’t have a backyard full of laying hens. On the shelves were staples like flour and lard and sugar and canned goods to get through the winter. In the summer, everybody’s home garden produced an abundance of corn and tomatoes and cucumbers and if you didn’t grow them, a neighbor would leave a paper sack full of vegetables on the porch. Sometimes you didn’t even know who had left them.
In the early days, one grocer or another might load the slab of bacon, sacks of flour and cornmeal on the wagon with a paper bag of beans and the blue and white can of Snowdrift shortening and deliver them down the hill and down White Street toward the lower mill village on Jackson or Morgan Street. Kids would jump in the back of the delivery wagon for a free ride home.
Older folks would stay in town and visit with each other. There were household goods to look at and clothes in store windows and friends to sit and smoke with before making the walk back home. Smoking was more than a bad habit…it was a social convention, an excuse to sit and talk and relax from a week of shift work in the mill, or wearying farm labor, or long days sawing lumber for the growing town.
There was, even in the hardest days of depression and war, time to chat with friends and window shop. On Saturdays, mothers were glad for a little time out from the kids and willing to send them to the line outside the Center Theater on Main or the Majestic Theater, just down Confederate Street on the left. The twenty-five or fifty cents for admission and a few sweets, was money well spent both for overworked parents and the kids.
Inside the theater there was darkness and cool air and there were cartoons, two or three starring Bugs Bunny or Yosemite Sam or Heckle & Jeckle. After the cartoons warmed up the sugar-charged kids, there were the short features. Most of those were newsreels or serialized stories starring movie cowboys like Lash LaRue or Red Rider or Rin Tin Tin, the Wonder Dog and his companion Rusty. By the time the main attraction, Tarzan or Sherlock Holmes appeared, there was a frenzy of thrown Goobers and Juju beans and a floor covered with spilled Coca-Cola and wax from Nik-L-Nips.
Times change and so did the view from the Bandstand. Cars replaced wagons and the sons and grandsons of the early bandstand sitters took their place. Teenagers with souped-up cars and loud music bought ice cream sodas for bobby-sockser girlfriends and for a short time danced at a teen soda shop in Robert Bradford’s store. The old guys kept watch from the bandstand by day, but the night belonged to the Rexawl Pool Room across main Street. In shirt sleeves or t-shirts, some of the town’s young men stood outside between pool games smoking and joking and staring down passers-by. Inside the Rexawl they would shoot a game of eight ball or rotation, setting their beer cans on the edge of the table long enough to make the next shot.
Main Street was still a place to be in the sixties and seventies with six and sometimes seven clothing stores, two drug stores, the dime store and the Easy Pay hardware store. Barber shops were busy giving the boys crew cuts favored by their war veteran fathers and giving the men neat business cuts, but when the Beatles inspired boys to let their hair grow long, barbers fell on hard times.
And then, in the eighties, with the introduction of malls and their big box stores, Main Street dried up like the main streets of many small towns. Over half of the store fronts sat empty with an occasional small business making its run for a few years and then shutting its doors in disappointment. Not until more than a decade into the new millennium did things start to pick up again. The first couple of restaurants paved the way and soon new businesses flourished on Main Street.
Fort Mill has grown into something the old timers on the Bandstand could never have imagined. Houses rise out of the ground in a matter of days and new restaurants open their doors so fast that the most serious food lover cannot keep up.
In the middle of it all sits this little wooden bandstand. It is the mute reminder of who we were, of a small community where every face was familiar and changes were slow to come.
Once again Main Street is the place to be. Families and friends crowd the sidewalks and spill over into the park. Lots of food and laughter and liquid good cheer fill the once empty spaces with new life.
On my way to the Farmer’s Market this morning, I noticed two young women sitting on the benches in the Bandstand talking and laughing. It doesn’t matter if they understood its history or knew the old stories. They understand the purpose of the Bandstand and what it was always meant to be. It is an island of refuge, a place to sit in the shade, share a few precious minutes with a friend and let the world go on its busy way.