The Journey

I received an email the other day that discussed a young man asking an elderly person questions about what life was like a generation or so ago. Were I to have been interviewed by this young man, this would have been my responses.

1. What was your favorite fast food when you were growing up?
Except for the time I was an undergraduate college student I have lived in Maynardville, and every house I have ever lived in or owned was within no more than a 10-mile radius (and that’s probably stretching it). There was not one single fast food restaurant in Maynardville when I was a kid. The only times I got to eat fast food was when I was visiting relatives in Knoxville. While my dad was in the hospital when I was a teenager, I used to stay with my Aunt Vallie on Saturday nights. I would go to church with Vallie and Uncle Pers (pronounced “purse,” short for his middle name Percy) on Sundays. They took me to McDonald’s on Broadway after church every Sunday. Uncle Pers would buy me a Big Mac, medium fry, medium coke, and a chocolate sundae.

2. If you didn’t have fast food, what did you eat?
I was raised in what was considered by my Knoxville relatives as “the country”, but I was not raised on a working farm. I was raised in the City of Maynardville. All our food was store bought, except what Mother and Dad raised in the garden. Nothing except the mail was delivered to our part of “the country.” I was never a breakfast eater, but Dad had homemade biscuits, eggs and gravy every morning. I was usually at school for lunch. Maynardville Elementary didn’t start serving pizza until the mid-1970s. I wouldn’t eat it for a few years because it looked like a bunch of leftovers slapped on some kind of hard crust. Dad had a garden, and Mother did lots of canning. I was a picky eater, so I didn’t eat a lot of what she canned. I never liked tomatoes, except in vegetable soup (which we often had for supper in the winter). My parents never made me eat anything I didn’t want, but it was strongly encouraged that everything on the plate was eaten, as it was a sin to waste food. On days when there was no school, dinner (what we called lunch at home) was usually some kind of snack. It might be the leftover biscuits from breakfast with some kind of red Kool-Aid. It might also be saltine crackers, also with red Kool-Aid. It might occasionally be a sandwich of luncheon meat. Sometimes it was potato chips. I liked dill pickles and processed cheese. Sometimes we would get what was called “government cheese” through “commodities”—that was the best cheese imaginable. Lunch for me every Sunday was a fried egg sandwich with red Kool-Aid. For supper, every Monday my mother would cook a pot of soup beans. She cooked enough to last her, Dad and me until Friday. On Tuesday you added salt; on Wednesday you added salt and pepper, on Thursday you added more salt and pepper, and hopefully by Friday they were all eaten. We also had store bought milk, cornbread, sliced onions, and potatoes (either fried or stewed) every day during the week. It was a treat in spring to have “killed lettuce”. This was lettuce with pieces of onion and onion blade with hot, melted Clover Leaf brand lard poured over it to wilt, or “kill,” the lettuce. In the spring we sometimes had fresh garden peas, and the summer saw lots of homegrown okra and corn on the cob. Occasionally we would have a good fried chicken or meatloaf. Spaghetti was a rare treat, and the sauce was store bought, with no meat, unless it was a can of Chef Boyardee. Dessert was not a standard part of the meal, but Little Debbie cakes were an occasional treat. Sometimes in the fall Mother would bake pumpkin pies. At Christmas, she always baked a stack cake. I never cared for stack cake then—it’s a taste I developed later in life. Almost always Mother, Dad and me were at home for supper. Snacks at any other time of the day might be eaten anywhere in the house, but we always ate actual cooked meals at the kitchen table.
At this point when in the reminiscing, the young man in the email was laughing hysterically, according to the elderly person he was interviewing. I wonder how hard that youngster would have laughed at my answers to the following questions?

3. Did your parents own their own house?
My father never lived in a house he owned. He never lived in a house that had an indoor bathroom. Our outhouse was about 50 feet down a path from the back porch. Our bathroom was a wash basin in the kitchen for “sponge” baths, or a “number two washtub” for a deeper scrub. All baths, sponge or washtub, were taken in the kitchen. My first college roommate practically begged to come home with me one weekend. I knew he was not accustomed to the kind of house in which I lived. It was winter, the house was cold, and he struggled Friday night with the outhouse and the Warm Morning stove. (The next night he went and stayed at Mark Gilbert’s house.) I did not live in a house with an inside bathroom until my mother and I moved when I was 19 to a house on the north side of Maynardville Ridge the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at Lincoln Memorial University.

4. What kind of clothes did you wear?

A lot of my clothes were “hand me downs.” There’s a country song that says, “I was country, when country wasn’t cool.” I was polyester, when polyester wasn’t cool. Some of my clothes were Christmas gifts from my half brothers and sisters. Every year at the start of school, I got a couple pair of jeans and a couple of shirts that Mother would buy at the Dollar Store. It was not fashionable in those days to shop at the Dollar Store. Sometimes I would grow so much during the year that my britches would be too short by the end of school. I wore my clothes until they would no longer fit or until they “wore out.” I went to church with Ann Richardson, and she bought me the suit and shoes I wore at my high school graduation. Dad always wore overalls and either a straw (summer) or felt (winter) hat. Mother always wore dresses (polyester was her friend, as well as mine) until I was in the upper grades of elementary school, then she started wearing polyester pants and blouses. I thought it was absolutely scandalous when my mother started wearing britches! It took me a long time to get used to that.

5. What did you do for entertainment?
Altogether, on both sides of the family, I had 10 half brothers and sisters. My youngest half-sister is 22 years older than me, so I was raised pretty much like an only child. There wasn’t really anywhere to go, or anything to do, and Dad was not the type to let me go visit other people’s houses or have other kids over. I never saw a movie in a theater until I was 10 years old, when my sister-in-law took me and some other kids to see The Apple Dumpling Gang. It was a long time until I saw the next movie in a theater. I never learned to ride a bicycle. I have to have at least three wheels on whatever I ride to keep my balance. My entertainment was watching television, playing with imaginary playmates (usually when playing school), and reading.

6. Did you do any traveling?
My brother J. C. took me to New Orleans on vacation the summer I turned 10. I remember walking down Bourbon Street. That’s where I ate the best grilled cheese sandwich of my life. My niece Rose Marie peeked through the doors of a saloon. She tried to get me to come look at the naked woman dancing on a table. I would not hear of doing such a horrible thing! (Oh, the missed opportunities of life!!!) The summer I turned 10 I stayed a few weeks with my brother Fred and his family in Cincinnati. Other than those two trips, I never set foot outside the state of Tennessee until the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at Lincoln Memorial University.

7. How did you get to school?
I rode the school bus to school the entire twelve years I was a student in Union County, including the two weeks I was a Headstart student. I was a good student and loved school. I never made any grade less than a “C,” though I could have tried harder, except perhaps in P.E. P.E. was my least favorite part of school, though I liked teacher Carolyn Murr. She can testify that I was probably the most uncoordinated student she ever had. I couldn’t kick, run, catch, bat or jump rope well at all. Sometimes when we played kickball she’d let me referee first base, but somebody always got mad at me, especially when it was the boys against the girls. I did enjoy square dancing in the winter months when it was too cold to go out on the playground.

8. Did you have any jobs when you were a kid?
I worked for Horace Maynard High School typing teacher Ada Mae Houston through a vocational program for a couple of hours a day for at least a year while I was in high school. I worked on the Summer Youth Employment Program for four of five years. Former Union County Board of Education member Esco Vaughn managed that program. I worked as maintenance/custodian for two of those summers at the Union County Office on Aging, which was directed by the late Dottie D. Ousley, a wonderful woman. Our crew painted that facility on the inside both of those years. I also worked part of those years for Esco Vaughn in his office at the old Horace Maynard High School. I used the money I made from those summers to buy my books for college, every one of which I still have on my bookshelves. When I was an undergraduate college student, I worked one quarter for the Public Relations department. Most of those years I was typist for biology professor Dr. Louis Lutz. I worked as a tutor in the college’s academic support center for a time.

9. What did your father do for a living?
My father was 51 when I was born. The kids at school thought I must be adopted because my dad was so old. Dad worked odd jobs most of his life. He worked for a time in maintenance for the Union County Schools, but became disabled when he suffered a stroke. Judge Von Richardson let him work at the Union County Courthouse for a couple of weeks so he could get in enough hours to draw his Social Security. Dad was a gardener for most of my childhood. I was raised on welfare, but thankfully I was blessed that it was a bridge for me, not a parking lot. My family was poor, but not as poor as we could have been. I don’t remember not having a television, though it was black and white until I was almost a teenager. It didn’t matter that the stations went off the air around midnight, as Dad always insisted that everybody in the house be in bed at 9 p.m. We also always had a phone in the house, a black rotary dial model mounted to the living room wall. It was never a party line.

I suppose a lot of young people would laugh to hear these things about my childhood and youth. I’m sure they wouldn’t be impressed, just as many of my friends and acquaintances were not impressed even when we were all adolescents. I ask you, how many of the people my age who were raised in Union County could wash clothes on a Maytag wringer washer? By golly, I still could, if I had one.

Times for me were good and simple then. Though there were plenty of things to worry about, I was mostly oblivious to them. My mother kept everything together and brought me through. I never had to worry as long as she was around.

Some might have found a childhood like mine a difficult, uncomfortable existence, but I never enjoyed a sunset more than I did watching it from the front porch or my west-facing bedroom window in that wonderful old rental house, wondering where I would find myself and what I would be doing 20 years later. Where would I live? Who would love me? Would I marry and have kids?

The dreams of yesterday have become the realities of today. As the old gospel songs say, “I don’t regret a mile. I wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now.”

Answer to Question of the Week #47
What was wrong with the comedian’s roof joke? (Answer: It was over everyone’s head.)

Question of the Week #48
What was wrong with the anatomy book Herschel purchased in the college bookstore? (See next week’s article in historicunioncounty.com for the answer.)