Chapter One
Voyage To A World That Is No More
© 2005 Jack Ragsdale
Introduction and Notice
In 1930 John Paul Ragsdale was the Mechanical Inspector of the Atlanta, Birmingham and Coast Railroad. He had labored from earliest childhood on farm and in railroad shop. In contrast, his lethargic, youngest son Jackson, sixteen, was the darling of his mother and two older sisters. He had never shown the slightest interest in earning his way. This generational contradiction posed a dilemma that drove Mr. Ragsdale to seek counsel from his lifelong friend, Charles Cosgrove, superintendent of that railroad installation. As it turned out, Mr. Cosgrove had just such a lazy, good-for-nothing son the same age.
The principal freight of the summer season was watermelons out of South Georgia-- shipped to the North. Nestled neatly in straw to protect them on that long journey, millions of those juicy fruits made their way north every summer. The freight cars, returned to the South, were befouled with putrefying wet straw from broken and rotting melons. Cleaning those cars was the summer job those two exasperated fathers decided on for their callow, unfledged sons. The pay: $1 per day.
Bellwood Railroad Marshalling Yard.
Summer 1930
For several weeks in the summers of 1930 and 1931, Charlie Cosgrove, Jr. and I cleaned freight cars. The job was to dump all that filth out the door on to the ground of the railroad yard. It was not uncommon that excrement from “passengers” was also found amid the befouled straw. We had little enthusiasm for the work and spent time talking. Oftimes we listened to a lithe young black “man of the world” twenty-three years old, tell us of his sexual exploits in a place in Atlanta called the “Blue Heaven.” Two sixteen-year-olds listened slack-jawed and goggle-eyed to his stories.
It was at the worst of the 1929-1940 depression. Thousands roamed the country seeking work of any kind. We had a mile long freight train that made up every day and pulled out about 3 o’clock. Two hours earlier, a small army gathered in the yard ready to board the outgoing freight train. Many cars had their doors open and with a little help anyone could hop in. I don’t remember Negroes being among those “passengers” I do remember whites—men, women, and children—mothers, often with babies in their arms. They numbered up to a hundred any day and as far as I know, no one chased them or in any way objected. The railroad had no police force on duty there. That was my inauguration into the American workforce.
As I imagine all of us do, I sometimes consider what might have happened that night in April, 1913 had my father not been amorous; if he might have been too tired; if my mother might have been angry and in a mood of refusal. What if the sperm had gone astray or the egg had not come down on time? A simple NO would have put a stop to all and there would have been no Jackson. Fortunately for me, nothing negative happened that night and the delicate thread of my life held firm. I was born at 51 Hendrix Avenue in Atlanta in the wee morning hours on January 2, 1914.
“My pregnancy” was my mother’s fifth. A boy-child preceding me in 1912 had lived only six months. I have read two letters my mother wrote at that time and know the distress she suffered at her loss of that child.
Victorian women, (my mother having been Edwardian in that sense) produced prodigious numbers of babies, but in 1913, Ida Coggins Ragsdale, thirty-five, with three healthy children, must have had thoughts that she had done her duty to motherhood. However, we are creatures of our hormones and for whatever reason, I slipped in under the barrier and was conceived on that chilly April night.
Having barely escaped the ban on the production of little ones, I cannot claim noble birth as did Carlyle, the Scottish historian. He concocted an ingenious story of having been found on his parents’ doorstep in a basket lined with rich silk. My father was from Anglo-Saxon stock and had only the most basic education in a lowly country school of Coweta County. He and his brothers knew from stories told by their father that they hailed from a large family emigrating from Virginia, determined to settle in Texas. He was born in 1876, near Turin, Georgia, on a worn out farm that had been a part of a plantation.
Built on that meager morsel, one of the thousands of projects I have started and soon let die was the following:
"How the Ragsdales Came To Be In Georgia"
A la Gone With The Wind, I dreamt up a fantasy of a wealthy family (the Carberrys) living on a five thousand acre plantation thirty-five miles south of Atlanta in a magnificent edifice they called Sundown. Their hundreds of slaves lived in misery in huts while the Carberry’s lives were filled with cotillian balls and other happy frivolities until in the fall of 1864, having burned Atlanta, General Sherman began his notorious March southward to the Sea.
When his soldiers arrived at Sundown, they asked in dulcet tones for the Carberry’s silver service and other items of precious metal. The family pleaded poverty. Actually, they had concealed those valuables among the humble possessions of their trusted black house servants. They mistakenly felt the soldiers would be satisfied with the family’s livestock and fine hams in the smokehouse.
The hated Yankee search party tore the house apart but found no silver and no gold. With their supply wagons groaning under the burden of edibles and having no time to dawdle in negotiations, they set fire to the house and continued their march to the sea.
It was on a forty-acre parcel of Sundown land, that Willy Ragsdale, my grandfather, settled when he had to drop out of the caravan headed for Texas and prosperity.
When my father’s two older brothers married and left the farm, it was no longer a viable property for the family. My Aunt Ethel, petite dynamo and eldest sister of my 15 year-old father, rescued the family by immigrating the thirty-five miles to Atlanta. She went to work in Chamberlain, Johnson and Dubose, a department store and married a Mr. Beach who was a diabetic horse-car driver. Soon afterwards, Mrs. Beach brought my grandmother and her two young siblings--my father and Aunt Virginia, to live in the biggest railroad terminal in the South. I once counted nine railroads in Atlanta.
The earliest stories of family I can remember are those my sisters told me of Mr. Beach’s funeral. Louise and Lunette remembered him fondly for he had given them candy. When he died, those two little girls were profoundly impressed by the splendor of his funeral and the number of horse-drawn carriages my aunt hired for the cortege. That was among the stories they told me when I was five and six years old.
Aunt Ethel was a charmer and after decent respect for social mores, she married a Mr. Tom Peak. Her politically oriented Tom, was an avid follower of another Tom—Tom Watson, a fascinating walk-on, walk-off character on the national political scene—utterly unknown today. Watson’s faded picture hung over my Uncle Tom’s mantelpiece until the day he died.
When I came along in 1914, my father was long established as a machinist and I, like most children of that time, was born at home, in the back bedroom on the unfashionable south side of Atlanta. As the youngest child in a family that kept few records or diaries, there are matters about which I am curious, but have no way of ever ascertaining the truth. I believe my Aunt Ethel, a socializing, church-going lady with a wide circle of friends, brought my mother and father together. In the late 1890s, four Coggins sisters from Bellton, Georgia, somehow made their way to Atlanta after a falling out with their father and stepmother. I have a feeling the stepmother felt the four stepsisters were overshadowing her two daughters. The tale I put together from childhood memories is that since the girls did not get on with their stepmother who had raised them, their father would give them the Bellton residence, or alternatively some money support. Seeing little opportunity in that tiny country town, they opted for the money and opportunities of the big city. The probable date of their arrival in Atlanta is 1897. In the next three years two of them married drummers and two railroad men.
Grandfather Newt Coggins must have been a testy old feller for he had previously broken with his only surviving son, who it was my pleasure to meet briefly in 1920 on my sixth birthday.
Farm boys of my father’s generation dreamed of working on the railroad. With one brother already employed on the Central of Georgia Railroad in Macon, my father followed that route as a raw helper in an Atlanta shop. When I was a boy he still had the books he used to raise himself up in his profession. One such I remember dealt with the workings of the Westinghouse Air Brake system, a great innovation over the hand braking system in use in Civil War times.
My father also had an interest in the Spanish-American War. As a child, I used to take out an enormous, heavy picture book about that war. My frequent perusal of it contributed to its destruction, for its size and weight could not sustain even careful usage by a child. I cannot recall its editorial direction, but I am certain it was in the style of the crudest propaganda, propounding the nobility and justness of that folly of Theodore Roosevelt, compounded with the self-serving complicity of Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Happily, my father avoided service in that fiasco, which killed five thousand American servicemen and untold numbers of Filipinos—two hundred thousand or more. The “permanent prosperity” the “China trade” it was sure to bring our country, never materialized. It was the fun war (John Hay called it “a splendid little war”) on which Roosevelt rode to glory and an unfitting position in company with Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln in the Black Hills of Dakota. I chose Hay’s cynical remark as the title of a history I wrote in the 1980s: America’s Splendid Little Wars.
I well remember the parlor of our house at number 51 Hendrix Avenue: gaslights, bedrooms on each side of the hall and a kitchen with the sink near the back door. A sink? Why such a sliver of memory? At three or four years old, my ten year-old-brother and I were playing war with two other boys in the backyard. Our ammunition—rocks--our protection—two wooden doors that opened outward from underneath the house. As I exposed myself to make an attack, I caught a rock just above my left eye. The young miscreants who bloodied my head ran away to protect their claim of innocence. It was a female Samaritan neighbor, I was told, who picked me up and held me, bloody and screaming, under the running cold water of that kitchen sink. I survived the ordeal and retain the scar as proof.
Very early in my young life there was an omen of trouble. My mother’s recovery from my birth was marked by the onset of rheumatoid arthritis and when I was a year or two old, it was decided that she should go to Hot Springs, Arkansas to take the baths. Water cures were the cure-all then—good for everything. Her chronic disease was little understood and the benefit from treatment—if any—was brief, and slow inevitable painful decline followed for fifteen years.
That happened during the first Woodrow Wilson administration when, in June, 1914, when I was just six months old, World War I broke out in Europe. While the causes of wars are many and complex, World War I's immediate cause was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. In spite of President Wilson’s explicit promise to keep the country out of that bitter struggle, within three years we were drawn into what had become a horrible stalemate. There have been few years since that we have been at peace.
In 1919, after the war, I remember my father taking my brother Paul and me to an army surplus sale at Candler warehouse. He bought some canned corned beef and two or three lead-heavy woolen blankets. The name Candler was then very famous in Atlanta, for Mr. Asa G. Candler had bought out and developed Coca Cola—another name some may recognize. Besides the Candler Warehouse in Atlanta, there was the Candler Building, the Candler this and the Candler that. At one time, they even owned a cemetery.
I have another vague memory of that time: all of us except my father became sick with the Spanish influenza. I remember him standing over us apparently ready to leave for work and another time when we kids were with my father in the street inspecting the eight-passenger Studebaker touring car he had bought—surely his first automobile. It had isinglass curtains to keep out the rain and two pull down jump seats in the back.
Our house had a rather large back yard with a huge cage in which someone had once kept pigeons. At that time, it seems I was in love with little Jereene Adamson who lived across the street. Once when I refused to come home, Lunette, my redheaded sister, ten years older than I, came and dragged me out from under a bed where I was hiding. Two other incidents occurred in that era must be mentioned. Once a donkey or small horse grew weary of pulling his cart, as was his duty, and lay down in the alley that ran behind our house. The driver beat him unmercifully but he refused to stand. If there is a God, that animal is in heaven enjoying ease and kind treatment. I never saw such an example of animal cruelty since and hope I never shall again.
My last recollection of that house is also unpleasant. I was lying on a pallet of quilts and blankets on a table. My parents, ill-at-ease, were discussing me with Dr. Cochran our family physician--not the doctor who brought me into the world; that was Dr. Dawson who had an office on Peters Street. In the last years of my brother’s life we often had long telephone conversations and I once brought up that incident which I never understood. My brother Paul, a sophisticated ten-year-old at the time (seven uyears older than I) had caught an inkling of what was up. He went into hiding. I was about to undergo the barbarous rite of circumcision which is partly based on a very strange phenomenon: Little children do not feel pain! There is a possibility that children do not know this. Perhaps, someone should tell them. I, at least had anesthesia--dangerous chloroform.
In the late fall of 1919 we moved to College Park, a leafy suburban town some eight miles south of Atlanta. As I figure it, Tara, Scarlett O’Hara’s fabled home was no more than four or five miles distant. The town, entirely residential, was a pleasant place with streets one way named after colleges and the cross streets after our presidents. The town’s chosen name no doubt came from the fact that it housed two schools: Cox College, a failing private school for young ladies and the Georgia Military Academy which drew students from around America and from our Latin neighbors to the south.
Our house was new, built by Mr. Warbucks, our next-door neighbor and the owner of a local lumberyard. Papa signed a sheaf of notes and at intervals, he dropped by Mr. Warbucks’ office to redeem them by ones or twos. He brought them home to destroy them ritually in the presence of his family.
It was an era that did not feel the acute pressure of population. In our block on our side of the street there were only three houses. The Stevens’ house sat on the corner, but their lot covered half the block. Our house sat on seventy-five feet and the Warbucks’ lot was about one hundred feet.
Our lot ran through to the next street, Columbia Avenue. The first year we lived there my father had a regular farm. On the Stevens’ side we had two wild persimmon trees. At some distance from the house we had two peach trees and three apple trees—one a Yates and another a Horse apple. Beyond that papa planted potatoes, sugar cane and okra, among many other things. The land was rich and the garden flourished. So did the insects—I well remember picking Colorado potato beetles which infested those plants. Apparently the work was too much for my father, who worked seven days a week. I don’t believe he ever had another garden, though I did, with very modest success. I remember growing okra, which I love. That was before it became $2.00 a pound--Yikes! In San Francisco where I live now, that heat-loving plant is impossible to grow.
Our neighbors were the Striplings, who had three children near my age, the Warbucks who had two and the Joyners, who had a diabetic boy my age. Mr. Stripling was a pleasant man who had a prosthetic leg which caused him to limp badly. Their credit must not have been good for they had a meter on their gas stove that accepted coins and allowed the use of just that amount of cooking gas. Mr. Stripling was employed by Dr. Howard, a bachelor medico, who tooled around town in an air-cooled Franklin automobile.
I was enrolled in the Virginia Avenue School in January, 1920 when I became six. I remember only one child there, a handsome, dark-skinned Eskimo boy!! Imagine, in 1920, an Eskimo boy in Georgia. I have no inkling of his name nor did we never become friends. My sister Louise also enrolled me in the “Sunbeam Band.” Unfortunately, I can recall the name of none of those children, except that of the girl, at whose house we met—Alberta. Her house was yellow-painted and faced the Cox College campus.
It was about this time that I became engrossed with the question of the root cause of babies. Something led me into thinking the answer to the mystery was in a small metal canister, which enclosed, I thought, certain magic ingredients. About that time I also became acquainted with the word “incubus” and felt certain I would have the answer if I could just understand the meaning of that strange word.
Continuing my rugged pursuit of Truth through Experience, I was soon reined in by the restraints of civilization. Shortly after our move to College Park, I became acquainted with John and Jane, twins living in the next block—all of us six years old. We clicked immediately and visited often—I at their house and they at mine. Since the neighborhood was extremely tranquil, our parents’ permission to visit was not required. If we were wanted and didn’t answer to call, we were immediately sought at one house or the other, each scarcely more than a few dozen steps between. Both our family’s yards were large, with fruit trees, garage, sheds and we ranged over the entire area with our games. That spring and summer we were together every day—some times eating lunch at one house or the other, occasionally picnicking with lemonade and fried potatoes.
Without taking any hint from the season of birds’ mating, or the pollination of nearby peach trees, our interests soon turned to our bodies and we started a game of “show” which can only be described as satisfying our curiosity in a non-sexual way. Together, we urinated ritualistically, innocently indulged in touching and looking without any notion of progression to sexual activity. We had not the slightest idea of the reason why we were different, in spite of our intense interest of the oddity of our diversity. We undoubtedly had an understanding that these pleasures were “naughty” and “prohibited” for they were never indulged in openly. They were our secret. However on some occasion, we were observed for I was given hints that I promptly ignored. (Somewhere there is a rule that unwelcome advice must be quickly passed over).
Those innocent but culturally inappropriate activities reached a crescendo when three cousins of the twins arrived from Americus, Georgia for a visit. Whether it was their indifference to our neighbors who were strangers to them or something more sensible, we became disinclined to hide our pleasure. On one occasion, I became aware of a neighbor observing us at our risqué game with what might be called excessive interest. It was not that her hair stood on end, but the intensity of her gaze caught my attention when she so concentrated on the play of half a dozen children from across the street.
She undoubtedly alerted our parents, for my next memory is of my mother’s deftness in rebuking me. She was discreet, literally dancing a ballet around the subject. She tried to be severe. I suppose there are few mothers who do not have to deal with such a problem at one time or another. They would likely sympathize with the mother whose boy masturbated in his living room in the presence of company. I have read of such a case.
My best friend, Randolph Surles lived nearby on Princeton Avenue. We played baseball, joked, shot his bb gun and occasionally wrestled. His father owned a machine that ran electric current through you if you held the metal irons as someone turned the handle. Not long before that time electricity was thought to be beneficial to one’s health if administered than way. We just thought it mysterious and fun. Mr. Surles, unlike my reserved father, was a big joker. Once when I was having lunch with them at their kitchen table, Mr. Surles told a funny when I had a mouthful of buttermilk. I was embarrassed at the mess I caused but the family was unfazed—just amused and the incident was made light of. Mrs. Surles was deaf and minimal conversation with her went on at high decibel. I remember her as always smiling and agreeable. My friend Randy was her youngest son. His brother Eugene was my brother’s best pal.
Some time before the Jack Dempsey-Gene Tunney fight in September, 1926, a boy we called Yankee Eldridge came from up north and moved in next door to Randolph. The night of the fight we three lay on the rug in front of the Eldridge’s console radio set and listened to it blow by blow.
Randolph and I went to the Temple Avenue grammar school but were in different classes. The school consisted of a two-story brick building and a house across the street with three or four classrooms and large schoolyard. Once we were called to hear an Indian chief give a talk. As a joke he told us how foolish the English language was in saying such a thing as “put the light out” when you didn’t intend to “put it outside.”
I have few, but graphic, recollections of that brick building. On one occasion I had some chore that caused me to linger after classes. The teacher and one other boy also remained. The tension in the room was brittle and I was anxious to get out. As I finished and gathered up my things to leave, the black janitor appeared with a large bundle of heavy switches—bigger than any switches I had imagined. The boy was awaiting a thrashing. I was afraid and hastened to distant myself from the place. On another occasion I could hear the hiss of the switch as it flew through the air and struck a boy. The sounds were so unpleasant I fled the scene shivering at the kid’s distress. Randolph and I once discussed the case of a boy whose parents protested his thrashing but other details of that case escape me.
In a class in the converted house across the street, our reward for good work was having stories read aloud to us. While I do not remember ever reading to the class, I remember comparing my own reading talents to those of the girls’ and thought myself far inferior. Hazel Bazemore was in that class, as was Katherine Johnson, the town barber’s daughter. Katherine was the very best of all the readers in my estimation and very pretty.
I was once punished and sent to stand by the door in the hall. It was shortly after lunch and the women who prepared and sold food were finishing up and leaving. One lady passed by and crammed my hands full of lovely potato chips, lightening my punishment.
In early summer of 1920 work started on paving our street. A contingent of forty or fifty black convicts with picks and shovels, worked in solid rows, chanting their way down Harvard Avenue, preparing for the rock and asphalt to follow. As the rows of black men the width of the roadway struck the hardened earth in unison with their picks, a chorus of deep male voices thundered a dramatic crescendo of sound, HER-RUMPH! … HER-RUMPH! … HER-RUMPH!
Some of the men had chains locked around both ankles; others had a loose chain several feet long attached to one leg. For comfort they wrapped the chain around their leg and tied it to avoid the awkwardness of dragging it.
Tobacco-chewing white guards with well-oiled rifles idled under old oaks fifteen to twenty yards from the nearest convict. Water-boy trustee convicts kept busy in the mid-summer heat. Everybody drank from the same dipper. Six years old, I was fascinated by the excitement of the chanting and the riotous clatter. I played and watched all the goings-on at close range without any objection either from the guards or my mother. No one shooed me away. It was a sight that only death will erase from my mind. Not that it was rare. Fulton County convicts worked on the roads and could be seen on the farms that grew the crops that fed them. After the Civil War, I learned, convicts had been rented out to work in mines and other industries. One can imagine the dreadful abuses that system spawned and which eventually brought about its end.
When sidewalks were installed, all of the kids bought skates and Mrs. Stevens, whose new sidewalk covered half of the block, informed us that we were not to use hers since skates damaged the surface. They were from Virginia and pronounced “about” “aboot” and used the term “darkie” which I had never before heard. Mr. Stevens was stone deaf. He had a hearing aid but never wore it because, he said the noise of the streetcar four blocks away, and barely audible to us, annoyed him. Once in the early darkness, riding my bicycle on the sidewalk, I ran into him from the rear and gave him a terrible shock. I recovered and quickly disappeared without apology. What will I do when I meet this man in hereafter and he demands justice?
There was a mystery woman in the Stevens house. For some years they had a bed-ridden relative living with them—she was never seen outside. One day without signs of good byes or happy separation, she brought her bags out to a car and was driven away. The abruptness of her departure almost ninety years ago still intrigues me.
A half century later, when I studied the life of Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, I wondered if the mystery woman could have experienced something like what befell the great religious leader.
In her early adulthood Mary Baker was an invalid. A Mr. Glover fell in love with her and they married. It is said that he took her in his arms from her bed to her wedding ceremony downstairs. Soon afterwards, they left New Hampshire for Carolina where he had business. There she had every prospect of a life full of happiness and love. In no time Mary’s handsome husband came down with yellow fever and died, leaving his young wife pregnant and destitute seven hundred miles from home. It fell to the Masons to rescue Mrs. Glover but the tragedy she suffered had sapped her vitality and returned her to her previous bedridden state and her eventual rejection of their child.
In 1920, just after Christmas, my mother’s brother arrived from Colorado where he was deputy sheriff. He had come to Atlanta to pick up two prisoners and was using the occasion to visit his sisters. On my sixth birthday his visit was celebrated with a dinner attended by many people. At some point it was thought my proper bedtime and amid many tears, I was shunted off to a cold bedroom. But not before this visiting uncle from the West took up a collection for me. He contributed a five-dollar bill. Imagine FIVE DOLLARS—in 2004 money, easily worth $100. I was rich. Little wonder that I honor him to this day. On the train ride back to the West he caught cold, which became pneumonia. In a matter of days my benefactor was dead.
I can’t say that I was much aware of politics or the presidency in my tender years. The First World War was going on full blast in 1916 and Wilson was reelected on his promise to keep us out of the war. However, we became committed due to propaganda, U-Boat sinkings of passenger ships with heavy loss of life and the huge loans given to Great Britain by the House of J. P. Morgan. It was thought that a German victory would render those loans worthless.
In the presidential election of 1920, Warren G. Harding ran against James M. Cox, a former governor of Ohio. Unlike other Ohioans who had sought and won the White House—Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, McKinley and Taft, Mr. Cox was a Democrat. On the ticket with him was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, destined to be a popular president twelve years later. As it had done so often in the past, the American electorate voted overwhelmingly for the fumbling maladroit. It is a weakness of our electorate. If Ghengis Khan should run for president of the United States against Attila the Hun, our error prone electorate would demand that both those vile men be elected to share the presidency. Harding’s major claim to fame lay in his coinage of the word “normalcy.”
Mister Harding was an accident already happened. His forte was poker playing with cronies. He selected a cabinet of the soon-to-be-convicted. It might have been supposed that no cabinet worse than that of Grant could be assembled. Not so. Harding succeeded. The American people elected him by a landslide.
That disaster can only be compared to the 1972 contest between Richard Nixon and George McGovern. From his long record in politics we knew Nixon very, very well—a serious neurotic* (Dr. David Abrahamsen found him psychotic), the darling of far-right rich men. He was a dress uniform warrior who never saw action except in newsreels. McGovern’s record was the opposite: honest, able, active military service. Quite naturally, we chose the psychopath over the honorable man.
During those years Randolph Surles and I attended Sunday School together. My mother always gave me a dime for the plate—today’s equivalent of $2 to $3. We were encouraged to join the church and were baptized in the Southern Baptist rite. However, I, and I believe Randolph, were put off by the affected pietism and manner of unctuous self-satisfaction in which some churchgoers carried themselves, making God their servant though they pretended the contrary.
As well as I can remember, a short time after we moved to College Park, we received a call early one morning before my father started for work. My maternal grandfather, who I had seen only once before, was dying. It was decided that we should hasten to his bedside. There we were, six o’clock in the morning, tooling along at a good clip toward the city, my father and mother in the front seat of our open Maxwell touring car, I alone in the back. You are correct if you imagine that such a ride was breezy. Before long a motorcycle cop was on our tail. What reasons or excuses my father gave are lost to me, but we had to accompany the cop to the store-front city hall where my father had to pay a fine-- $2, $5 or $10? I don’t know. We returned home and the old gentleman passed away without our presence. His funeral was held in an old white-painted church in Bellton, my mother’s hometown, sixty miles north of Atlanta. We drove up there in the dead of winter.
My grandfather had once owned a successful business in Bellton with a family of eight children. After my grandmother died, he remarried and had two daughters. There must have been some epidemic about 1884—perhaps typhoid—that carried off my grandmother and three of her young sons. They were buried in that same churchyard.
As a girl, my mother played the pedal-pumped organ in the church. We once had a picture of Newt Coggins’ four young daughters standing together on the veranda of the upper story, my mother proudly holding her guitar that in my childhood stood in a corner of our living room.
Some time previous to our humiliating episode with the motorcycle policeman, a large number of our families had gathered around grandpa’s hospital bed. I have no idea what the occasion was but my mother was distressed that her sister had set her young son on the bed with instructions to ask grandpa for his watch.
In 1920 my life was a paradise. From that date on I have firm memories. I always had a dog and cat. Fruit trees in summer supplied me with peaches, apples, and in the fall, more wild persimmons than I could eat. In wild places around the neighborhood grew delicious wild plums, although the spines on the bushy trees could give you a wound to remember. Chickens were fun too. When we had a broody hen, my sister Lunette and I would set her with ten or twelve eggs, each marked with pencil to make it easy to identify an egg some other hen might add to her clutch. Talk about anticipation. Some hens would allow you to satisfy your curiosity by checking the eggs. Others might give you a painful peck. After twenty-one days there would be stirring inside the eggs. There would be the sounds of movement and even a cheep from inside the shell. Eventually pecking with a special tooth conveniently provided to escape using . What a wonderful experience for a child! When all the eggs were hatched, the mother hen would call the chicks off the nest and teach them how to find food. Do they grow fast! It’s an experience every child should have.
Dogs and cats having their young is also a remarkable experience for children, involving them in a moral obligation to care for them and control their numbers. For parents all of those occasions offer opportunities to teach children the sanctity of all life. Of course if you are raising your children to be fodder for the war machine….
My mother’s rheumatoid arthritis was very much on our minds. She was sometimes bedridden and at other times, able to be up and around dealing with household matters, but walking always as a cripple. Her fingers were almost at a forty-five degree angle to her hands. Even so, she played the piano occasionally at my insistence. The joints of her feet and knees were also enlarged and painful. She took aspirin and later empirin compound for relief—such as it gave. Perhaps she should have been given opiates. Since the onset of the disease in 1914, she had had many treatments: gold salts, baths, teeth extraction, enemas, poultices with heat and others. Some people recommended religion, but she told me she just couldn’t believe that simple faith could heal. I never saw any sign of superstition in her. Desperate, she must have been torn between magic and science, with science getting the better in the game. Alas, science then was inadequate to her needs. Her condition confused and confounded her. Pitifully, she told me once that she wondered what she might have done to deserve that fate. She agonized, yes, but I never saw her cry.
On a visit to a chiropractor in Atlanta when I was very young, she and I walked the four blocks to catch the streetcar. She was not able to mount the steps, so the conductor came down and helped her on. I can’t remember what treatment the practitioner gave her but I believe she came away considering him a quack. She never returned.
Home-bound ordinarily, she used that rare opportunity to take in a nearby movie at the Alpha Theater. Her bratty child companion, however, allowed her no minute of peace, so she abruptly ended that singular opportunity for entertainment, and returned to dull routine at home.
The Alpha Theater in Atlanta in the 1920s was intermediate to the nickel theaters of the 1900-10 era, and the elaborately decorated Moorish style movie houses of the 1920s like the Howard or Fox in Atlanta. The Alpha was itself “bare bones’ but the seats were comfortable and there was live piano music attuned to the activity on the screen. The many Loew’s Theaters in Moorish style scattered all around New York seemed brand new to me in the 1930s but could have been built in the 20s.
Sometime in the 1920’s a College Park lady doing anti-cigarette work was also pushing the benefits of milk treated with Lactobacillus bulgaricus. She had the cultures and practiced her art on her hearth behind her stove. Whether we paid for them or they were given, I do not know, but I was at her place a number of times to pick up a glass quart milk bottle of her nostrum, from which my mother made our own yogurt-like concoction. As I recall, it was something between yogurt and buttermilk, both of which I liked. What I knew, overheard or misunderstood concerning her “scientific” anti-cigarette work was that she soaked cigarettes in water, then gave the water to mice—which killed them. That did not deter Randolph and me from smoking rabbit tobacco rolled in newspaper (on more than one occasion we used toilet paper) and even smoking Chesterfields once when we got our hands on a pack of ten. Even then, cool as they were, cigarettes were called “coffin nails.”
I had three mothers. From the time I was born, my sisters cared for me. By the time I was six, they, eighteen and sixteen, had involuntarily bonded to me with a force as strong as life—and of course I to them. Not that my mother’s love and care were less, but, living in constant pain, she lacked physical stamina to do her full duty as mistress and mother. It is a well-known phenomenon that a girl on whom the care of a younger sibling devolved is never relieved of her role as second mother. That is especially true when the younger sibling is a boy. The girl may have hated the obligation placed upon her, and may have complained bitterly against it, but as it grew in her craw it became bittersweet and irremovable from her being. It is a classic case of ambivalence—love and hate intermixed. In the case of a brother, that does not happen. Leaving a boy in charge of a next younger male sibling is an invitation to calamity—if not murder.
I have reason to believe that my Aunt Ethel had a similar relationship with my father. She was some years older and rough farm work, while prohibited to girls, fell heavily on farm women. My grandmother was a widow with three young children. She never applied that “no work in the field” to herself. Caring for younger children, however, definitely fell to the oldest girl. As soon as she could, Ethel broke away and fled to Atlanta but did not forget her family. Not long afterwards she brought them to the big city. When I was growing up, she worked at the Chamberlain, Johnson, DuBose Department store and always wore a veil and those gloves that reach above the elbows. If she had carried a million dollars in Georgia Power Company bonds in her purse, she could not have been more elegant. She was a delicate lady.
I suspect it was in the summer of 1921 when mama, papa and all four children piled in the car and we drove to the Terminal Railroad Station. It was a reward arranged entirely without my knowledge: my three older siblings were going away on a holiday to St. Simons Island off the coast of Georgia. I didn’t take being left out agreeably. When we left them on the platform and got back in that huge open Studebaker (or Maxwell?) touring car… it was one of the lowest points of my life. My consolation now is that I know my parents were sad for me. They were grave as I cried, and they didn’t talk—they in the front seat and I alone in the back.
The trip undoubtedly was a well-deserved recompense. Just imagine giving nearly grown children a reward for being good and reliable, and just to be sure they had a good time, sending their bratty little brother along with them. In that particular case justice prevailed. I stayed home. I got over it, and had my own reward in the many souvenirs they brought home.
Apparently the many tears I shed, laid a guilt trip on my parents for a few years later, they sent my brother and me on that same trip.
My older sister, Louise, was serious—even severe, but ever tolerant with me. The younger one, Lunette was devilish, a teaser who baited and taunted me, exploiting my infantile gullibility for the pure sport of it. Once she frightened me with tales of the world coming to a fiery end. Did they boss me around? If they did it was a very agreeable bossing. They bought me Easter Eggs and hid them. Did they punish me? Not that I can remember, and my memory in that respect is pretty darn good.
It’s not the same with a brother. I remember once when I was under judgment in a conference of three, held in our kitchen: my mother, my brother—fourteen or fifteen and I—seven or eight. In his eyes I had committed some major offense and he was presenting a very strong case against me to my mother. No public prosecutor ever pushed harder for conviction. My mother got an earful of the trifling value of her dear pet. She, on the other hand, was the kind of judge you pray for when you stand before the bar of justice. She counseled patience and tolerance for this innocent child who meant no evil—all the while trying to smooth the ruffled feathers of her next oldest. The resentment at losing the position of precious youngest child is hard to give up to a worthless tadpole of a brother, but it is as natural as the sunrise. Yesterday’s displaced darling never gets over his loss of that precious position. My punishment turned out to be a mild scolding. Like every criminal, I have long forgotten my crime.
I loved my sisters equally but they had little patience for each other. They were as different as day and night. A brunette with dark chestnut hair, after our mother, Louise was serious and exact. When she went to business school she never missed a class. Her Greg shorthand was as fast as the wind and perfect. She prided herself on her beautiful nails. It was before red, purple and chartreuse. Hers were natural and in good taste.
Lunette was a fiery redhead, after our father, with a matching short fuse. She never let school interfere with her social life. Later she had a decent job with average pay but regularly borrowed fifty dollars from a loan company so she could splurge, paying it back three or four dollars a week. $50 dollars then was the equivalent of a $1000 now. I never understood her reasoning, but it was her pleasure.
The girls, only two years apart, never actually fought, but were never at ease with each other, although they were the favored in the family. Their room was the front room. Their furniture was stylish—bow-end bed with a three mirrored vanity and stool. The furniture in the boys’ room was a pick-me-up of odds and ends with a giant storage trunk and an outdated sewing machine standing in the corner. By today’s standards the rooms were enormous with double windows and tiny closets compared to today’s walk-in monsters. My father’s favorite clock stood on the left end of the fireplace mantle in our room. It sat there because it would not run in the center. Further to the edge, lay my father’s six-shooter revolver, which to my recollection was never touched by my brother or me.
That house might have been called “the house of many doors.” Every room had two doors and the bathroom had three. My parents slept in the back bedroom, which was really what was then called a “sleeping porch.” It was a leftover from days when tuberculosis was known as “the white plague” and sleeping in the fresh air was the only cure. With its many windows, sleeping in that room in winter was the equivalent of sleeping in an icebox. Quilts of that era were painfully heavy. One of the greatest luxuries of the present is the insulated, featherweight coverlet.
Those were my halcyon days. School was fun. The world was new. Sloshing through puddles was the only way to walk. I remember one wet day when three or four of us trekked to school together—all about seven years old. I had a brand-new yellow slicker raincoat and hat to match. Was I proud! The wonder is that we arrived at school before noon. The route was an unpaved street over a wooden bridge under which flowed a very modest stream. Beside the bridge there was a tiny pond in which a water moccasin swam, looking for tadpoles or an unsuspecting frog. Everyone in the South knew that critter to be highly poisonous and was to be avoided at all costs.
Another time, for some reason, I was calling on the Warbucks one sunny morning. I was headed for the back door approaching from the side street—one of those named after presidents—probably Monroe (there were no street signs), five blocks from Main Street. In the sandy driveway a snake was giving birth. The tiny baby snakes scarcely bigger than earthworms wiggled their way out of the mother and slithered into the nearby grass to seek the natural protection their mother could no longer afford them.
Usually our family had supper with six people sitting down together. I loved my mother’s and my sisters’ cooking. “Gourmet” didn’t enter into it. We ate fried or baked chicken, home grown or bought live in the market—killed and cleaned to our order, hacked round steak, pork chops or fried oysters with ample helpings of vegetables that I continue to love, but without the chunk of fatback thrown in to season string beans or cabbage. I’ve been converted to olive oil. No one in our family ever ate the fatback, but when my Aunt Dora visited us, she ate some and it turned my stomach. I hated greasy things then as I do now. Our fatback went out to the chickens with the other scraps from the table. My absolute favorite food was tomatoes, which then were not available in winter. I made up for that loss in summer when they were fifty cents a basket of ten or fifteen pounds. Mornings in summer, a wagon often appeared at our door offering wonderful produce growing in the field just hours before. One such wagon was manned by two couples who seemed to me extraordinarily proper and educated. Could they have been some sort of pre-hippie commune? They were wonderfully attentive. My mother would hobble out to their wagon and select beautiful vegetables still wet with dew.
I never heard a word spoken between my mother and father about money nor complaint about not having enough though they surely knew the limits. Papa could be critical with the girls and tough with my brother and me, but with my mother he was considerate—even humble. It’s only after so many years that I understand how much he loved her—worshiped her.
I am embarrassed to tell of a very private occasion. I was once in bed with my parents. Before I went to sleep, my father began to plead: “Why,” he said to my mother, “why have you brought the boy to bed with us?” I cringed and tried not to breathe. His voice was pitiful. I can feel his pain even now, and wonder why. Was it to obviate sexual advance? My father’s life was hard, and since he loved my mother so much, one of the few pleasures he enjoyed, were those private moments he spent, holding her hand before sleep came.
Those seemingly insignificant incidents between my father and me were at work forming our future relationship. When I think back, I seek some humor between us without success. It must have been that he worked seven days—that his “work ethic” which had allowed him to “get ahead” held him so tightly in it clutches. Furthermore he had no intimate friends. The manager of the shop and yard where he worked was his close friend of many years, yet he never visited us nor did we visit them. The only social intercourse we ever had with his family, was the eerie visit he, my mother and I paid one night to the funeral home where his daughter lay. I remember the gloomy blackness of the night and the lugubrious shaded lights of the funeral home. It might have been the setting for a Poe drama.
A really big deal for me was the occasional Saturday when I would pay my 7¢ fare and ride the street car to Atlanta to meet Louise. She first worked for Goldsmith Brothers—the local dealer for Hudson cars—famous for their Hudson Super Six. Later she worked for the Buick factory office in their elegant showroom on Spring Street. She was secretary to a Mr. MacDonald whom she very much admired. Saturdays she got off at noon. I would meet her at Kress’s on Whitehall Street where we would buy candy, then walk to the Howard Theatre on Peachtree to see a stage show, travelogue, newsreel, comedy and movie. We referred to that as the “picture show.” Later I saw Maurice Chevalier’s first movie there—probably after the theater’s name had been changed to “Paramount.” What a charmer that guy was! Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise, birds in the trees…. Someone told me he replaced Al Jolson. Not so, Jolson had a voice like a crow.
In the spring I couldn’t wait to shed my shoes, but I had to go over the back yard to look for shards of glass and nails to present to my father before permission was granted. In summer when I was going to Atlanta, my mother demanded that I wash my feet before I put on shoes and socks. In turn I demanded to know WHY? Her answer was that I might get run over and have to be taken to the hospital. For the last eighty years, when I think of that, I conjure up a vision of myself being wheeled into the emergency room at Grady Hospital only to be met at the door by a white-coated authoritarian doctor whose function it is to inspect the feet of insolent undeserving boys trying to gain entry to save their lives. Boys with dirty feet must invariably be rejected and unceremoniously dumped back on to the street.
I remember that streetcar ride from Rich’s (the grandest of all Atlanta’s department stores) to College Park as quite an exciting experience in itself. On a straightaway the car picked up speed and swayed from side to side so that I wondered why it did not jump the tracks. Saturdays they pulled a trailer to accommodate the mob trying to get home with their packages. I was long gone from there when they pulled the streetcars off that route and replaced them with poison puffing buses. An evil combo of big businesses bought up transit lines all over the country and replaced them with inefficient air-polluting, traffic-clogging busses. It’s an example of efficiency in reverse. General Motors and General Electric don’t always do what’s good for America.
By the time I was nine or ten, the other children were working—the girls in offices and Paul, to the distress of my mother, selling papers in the street. More than anything else, I think he did it because of the charm of having one of those automatic change-makers that he hung on his belt. In his eyes, it made him into a businessman. When he was sixteen, my Aunt Dora who worked at J. M. High’s Department store in the Drapery Department, got him a job there and he loved it. All three children gave Mama some money each week, but Paul was different. He was a social hound and had most if not all of his few dollars back before the end of the week. Furthermore, every other night, he had the car out, burning up gas for which my father probably paid twenty cents a gallon or less. One morning, Papa headed out for work and ran out of gas. Worst of all, it was before the gas station opened. That night he was steaming and gave Paul, Junior a long lecture. The contrite son hung his head low but when papa turned to go my brother asked for and got the keys which were handed over without a word though I can imagine what my father felt inside.
Now and then Paul, Junior would throw a dance at home. The furniture would be pushed back to the wall, the rug rolled up and the floor sprinkled with wax. Our huge punchbowl would be set out on the dining room table. While I believe the fruity beverage would be spiked, there was no drunkenness. The crowd was loud but just happily enthusiastic. My sisters were the hosts and also had friends present. During those parties my parents disappeared.
Paul had a serious girlfriend when he was still very young. She was
pretty, gay, smiling. In the summer of 1925 when Paul was eighteen, she came down with typhoid fever. Weeks before, her younger brother had contracted infantile paralysis. Their poor mother had her two children both critically ill. Sadly, the girl died.
It was not uncommon in the 1920s and 30s to see young people who had suffered devastating effects from polio. The victim might have one leg shorter than the other. It was not uncommon to see someone with an ungainly built-up shoe to compensate for that loss of growth. Some years later, the iron lung was invented to rescue those whose lungs were affected.
In 1920, my mother had three sisters living and one brother; my grandfather called the girls: Adie, Idie, Dorie, and Corie. I knew my aunts very well. Two were refined and warm as was my mother, but one had a coarse streak that turned me and my sisters against her. She was the aunt charged with my care when my mother went away to Hot Springs in my first or second year. I have clear recollections of Lunette’s severe criticism of both my aunt and her husband about their treatment of her and me during that time. She was eleven or twelve then and unforgiving for the wrongs committed against her and me in my mother’s absence. That aunt hated my father and though I never remember any criticism of her by him, his silent demeanor in that regard must have made its point with me. When I was fifteen years old and my mother lay dying, my aunt berated my father to me in a most cruel and abusive manner. That was seventy-four years ago and I have yet to forgive her for that shocking crudity.
To continue click Chapter Two under Previous Posts.
© 2005 Jack Ragsdale
Introduction and Notice
In 1930 John Paul Ragsdale was the Mechanical Inspector of the Atlanta, Birmingham and Coast Railroad. He had labored from earliest childhood on farm and in railroad shop. In contrast, his lethargic, youngest son Jackson, sixteen, was the darling of his mother and two older sisters. He had never shown the slightest interest in earning his way. This generational contradiction posed a dilemma that drove Mr. Ragsdale to seek counsel from his lifelong friend, Charles Cosgrove, superintendent of that railroad installation. As it turned out, Mr. Cosgrove had just such a lazy, good-for-nothing son the same age.
The principal freight of the summer season was watermelons out of South Georgia-- shipped to the North. Nestled neatly in straw to protect them on that long journey, millions of those juicy fruits made their way north every summer. The freight cars, returned to the South, were befouled with putrefying wet straw from broken and rotting melons. Cleaning those cars was the summer job those two exasperated fathers decided on for their callow, unfledged sons. The pay: $1 per day.
Bellwood Railroad Marshalling Yard.
Summer 1930
For several weeks in the summers of 1930 and 1931, Charlie Cosgrove, Jr. and I cleaned freight cars. The job was to dump all that filth out the door on to the ground of the railroad yard. It was not uncommon that excrement from “passengers” was also found amid the befouled straw. We had little enthusiasm for the work and spent time talking. Oftimes we listened to a lithe young black “man of the world” twenty-three years old, tell us of his sexual exploits in a place in Atlanta called the “Blue Heaven.” Two sixteen-year-olds listened slack-jawed and goggle-eyed to his stories.
It was at the worst of the 1929-1940 depression. Thousands roamed the country seeking work of any kind. We had a mile long freight train that made up every day and pulled out about 3 o’clock. Two hours earlier, a small army gathered in the yard ready to board the outgoing freight train. Many cars had their doors open and with a little help anyone could hop in. I don’t remember Negroes being among those “passengers” I do remember whites—men, women, and children—mothers, often with babies in their arms. They numbered up to a hundred any day and as far as I know, no one chased them or in any way objected. The railroad had no police force on duty there. That was my inauguration into the American workforce.
As I imagine all of us do, I sometimes consider what might have happened that night in April, 1913 had my father not been amorous; if he might have been too tired; if my mother might have been angry and in a mood of refusal. What if the sperm had gone astray or the egg had not come down on time? A simple NO would have put a stop to all and there would have been no Jackson. Fortunately for me, nothing negative happened that night and the delicate thread of my life held firm. I was born at 51 Hendrix Avenue in Atlanta in the wee morning hours on January 2, 1914.
“My pregnancy” was my mother’s fifth. A boy-child preceding me in 1912 had lived only six months. I have read two letters my mother wrote at that time and know the distress she suffered at her loss of that child.
Victorian women, (my mother having been Edwardian in that sense) produced prodigious numbers of babies, but in 1913, Ida Coggins Ragsdale, thirty-five, with three healthy children, must have had thoughts that she had done her duty to motherhood. However, we are creatures of our hormones and for whatever reason, I slipped in under the barrier and was conceived on that chilly April night.
Having barely escaped the ban on the production of little ones, I cannot claim noble birth as did Carlyle, the Scottish historian. He concocted an ingenious story of having been found on his parents’ doorstep in a basket lined with rich silk. My father was from Anglo-Saxon stock and had only the most basic education in a lowly country school of Coweta County. He and his brothers knew from stories told by their father that they hailed from a large family emigrating from Virginia, determined to settle in Texas. He was born in 1876, near Turin, Georgia, on a worn out farm that had been a part of a plantation.
Built on that meager morsel, one of the thousands of projects I have started and soon let die was the following:
"How the Ragsdales Came To Be In Georgia"
A la Gone With The Wind, I dreamt up a fantasy of a wealthy family (the Carberrys) living on a five thousand acre plantation thirty-five miles south of Atlanta in a magnificent edifice they called Sundown. Their hundreds of slaves lived in misery in huts while the Carberry’s lives were filled with cotillian balls and other happy frivolities until in the fall of 1864, having burned Atlanta, General Sherman began his notorious March southward to the Sea.
When his soldiers arrived at Sundown, they asked in dulcet tones for the Carberry’s silver service and other items of precious metal. The family pleaded poverty. Actually, they had concealed those valuables among the humble possessions of their trusted black house servants. They mistakenly felt the soldiers would be satisfied with the family’s livestock and fine hams in the smokehouse.
The hated Yankee search party tore the house apart but found no silver and no gold. With their supply wagons groaning under the burden of edibles and having no time to dawdle in negotiations, they set fire to the house and continued their march to the sea.
It was on a forty-acre parcel of Sundown land, that Willy Ragsdale, my grandfather, settled when he had to drop out of the caravan headed for Texas and prosperity.
When my father’s two older brothers married and left the farm, it was no longer a viable property for the family. My Aunt Ethel, petite dynamo and eldest sister of my 15 year-old father, rescued the family by immigrating the thirty-five miles to Atlanta. She went to work in Chamberlain, Johnson and Dubose, a department store and married a Mr. Beach who was a diabetic horse-car driver. Soon afterwards, Mrs. Beach brought my grandmother and her two young siblings--my father and Aunt Virginia, to live in the biggest railroad terminal in the South. I once counted nine railroads in Atlanta.
The earliest stories of family I can remember are those my sisters told me of Mr. Beach’s funeral. Louise and Lunette remembered him fondly for he had given them candy. When he died, those two little girls were profoundly impressed by the splendor of his funeral and the number of horse-drawn carriages my aunt hired for the cortege. That was among the stories they told me when I was five and six years old.
Aunt Ethel was a charmer and after decent respect for social mores, she married a Mr. Tom Peak. Her politically oriented Tom, was an avid follower of another Tom—Tom Watson, a fascinating walk-on, walk-off character on the national political scene—utterly unknown today. Watson’s faded picture hung over my Uncle Tom’s mantelpiece until the day he died.
When I came along in 1914, my father was long established as a machinist and I, like most children of that time, was born at home, in the back bedroom on the unfashionable south side of Atlanta. As the youngest child in a family that kept few records or diaries, there are matters about which I am curious, but have no way of ever ascertaining the truth. I believe my Aunt Ethel, a socializing, church-going lady with a wide circle of friends, brought my mother and father together. In the late 1890s, four Coggins sisters from Bellton, Georgia, somehow made their way to Atlanta after a falling out with their father and stepmother. I have a feeling the stepmother felt the four stepsisters were overshadowing her two daughters. The tale I put together from childhood memories is that since the girls did not get on with their stepmother who had raised them, their father would give them the Bellton residence, or alternatively some money support. Seeing little opportunity in that tiny country town, they opted for the money and opportunities of the big city. The probable date of their arrival in Atlanta is 1897. In the next three years two of them married drummers and two railroad men.
Grandfather Newt Coggins must have been a testy old feller for he had previously broken with his only surviving son, who it was my pleasure to meet briefly in 1920 on my sixth birthday.
Farm boys of my father’s generation dreamed of working on the railroad. With one brother already employed on the Central of Georgia Railroad in Macon, my father followed that route as a raw helper in an Atlanta shop. When I was a boy he still had the books he used to raise himself up in his profession. One such I remember dealt with the workings of the Westinghouse Air Brake system, a great innovation over the hand braking system in use in Civil War times.
My father also had an interest in the Spanish-American War. As a child, I used to take out an enormous, heavy picture book about that war. My frequent perusal of it contributed to its destruction, for its size and weight could not sustain even careful usage by a child. I cannot recall its editorial direction, but I am certain it was in the style of the crudest propaganda, propounding the nobility and justness of that folly of Theodore Roosevelt, compounded with the self-serving complicity of Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Happily, my father avoided service in that fiasco, which killed five thousand American servicemen and untold numbers of Filipinos—two hundred thousand or more. The “permanent prosperity” the “China trade” it was sure to bring our country, never materialized. It was the fun war (John Hay called it “a splendid little war”) on which Roosevelt rode to glory and an unfitting position in company with Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln in the Black Hills of Dakota. I chose Hay’s cynical remark as the title of a history I wrote in the 1980s: America’s Splendid Little Wars.
I well remember the parlor of our house at number 51 Hendrix Avenue: gaslights, bedrooms on each side of the hall and a kitchen with the sink near the back door. A sink? Why such a sliver of memory? At three or four years old, my ten year-old-brother and I were playing war with two other boys in the backyard. Our ammunition—rocks--our protection—two wooden doors that opened outward from underneath the house. As I exposed myself to make an attack, I caught a rock just above my left eye. The young miscreants who bloodied my head ran away to protect their claim of innocence. It was a female Samaritan neighbor, I was told, who picked me up and held me, bloody and screaming, under the running cold water of that kitchen sink. I survived the ordeal and retain the scar as proof.
Very early in my young life there was an omen of trouble. My mother’s recovery from my birth was marked by the onset of rheumatoid arthritis and when I was a year or two old, it was decided that she should go to Hot Springs, Arkansas to take the baths. Water cures were the cure-all then—good for everything. Her chronic disease was little understood and the benefit from treatment—if any—was brief, and slow inevitable painful decline followed for fifteen years.
That happened during the first Woodrow Wilson administration when, in June, 1914, when I was just six months old, World War I broke out in Europe. While the causes of wars are many and complex, World War I's immediate cause was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. In spite of President Wilson’s explicit promise to keep the country out of that bitter struggle, within three years we were drawn into what had become a horrible stalemate. There have been few years since that we have been at peace.
In 1919, after the war, I remember my father taking my brother Paul and me to an army surplus sale at Candler warehouse. He bought some canned corned beef and two or three lead-heavy woolen blankets. The name Candler was then very famous in Atlanta, for Mr. Asa G. Candler had bought out and developed Coca Cola—another name some may recognize. Besides the Candler Warehouse in Atlanta, there was the Candler Building, the Candler this and the Candler that. At one time, they even owned a cemetery.
I have another vague memory of that time: all of us except my father became sick with the Spanish influenza. I remember him standing over us apparently ready to leave for work and another time when we kids were with my father in the street inspecting the eight-passenger Studebaker touring car he had bought—surely his first automobile. It had isinglass curtains to keep out the rain and two pull down jump seats in the back.
Our house had a rather large back yard with a huge cage in which someone had once kept pigeons. At that time, it seems I was in love with little Jereene Adamson who lived across the street. Once when I refused to come home, Lunette, my redheaded sister, ten years older than I, came and dragged me out from under a bed where I was hiding. Two other incidents occurred in that era must be mentioned. Once a donkey or small horse grew weary of pulling his cart, as was his duty, and lay down in the alley that ran behind our house. The driver beat him unmercifully but he refused to stand. If there is a God, that animal is in heaven enjoying ease and kind treatment. I never saw such an example of animal cruelty since and hope I never shall again.
My last recollection of that house is also unpleasant. I was lying on a pallet of quilts and blankets on a table. My parents, ill-at-ease, were discussing me with Dr. Cochran our family physician--not the doctor who brought me into the world; that was Dr. Dawson who had an office on Peters Street. In the last years of my brother’s life we often had long telephone conversations and I once brought up that incident which I never understood. My brother Paul, a sophisticated ten-year-old at the time (seven uyears older than I) had caught an inkling of what was up. He went into hiding. I was about to undergo the barbarous rite of circumcision which is partly based on a very strange phenomenon: Little children do not feel pain! There is a possibility that children do not know this. Perhaps, someone should tell them. I, at least had anesthesia--dangerous chloroform.
In the late fall of 1919 we moved to College Park, a leafy suburban town some eight miles south of Atlanta. As I figure it, Tara, Scarlett O’Hara’s fabled home was no more than four or five miles distant. The town, entirely residential, was a pleasant place with streets one way named after colleges and the cross streets after our presidents. The town’s chosen name no doubt came from the fact that it housed two schools: Cox College, a failing private school for young ladies and the Georgia Military Academy which drew students from around America and from our Latin neighbors to the south.
Our house was new, built by Mr. Warbucks, our next-door neighbor and the owner of a local lumberyard. Papa signed a sheaf of notes and at intervals, he dropped by Mr. Warbucks’ office to redeem them by ones or twos. He brought them home to destroy them ritually in the presence of his family.
It was an era that did not feel the acute pressure of population. In our block on our side of the street there were only three houses. The Stevens’ house sat on the corner, but their lot covered half the block. Our house sat on seventy-five feet and the Warbucks’ lot was about one hundred feet.
Our lot ran through to the next street, Columbia Avenue. The first year we lived there my father had a regular farm. On the Stevens’ side we had two wild persimmon trees. At some distance from the house we had two peach trees and three apple trees—one a Yates and another a Horse apple. Beyond that papa planted potatoes, sugar cane and okra, among many other things. The land was rich and the garden flourished. So did the insects—I well remember picking Colorado potato beetles which infested those plants. Apparently the work was too much for my father, who worked seven days a week. I don’t believe he ever had another garden, though I did, with very modest success. I remember growing okra, which I love. That was before it became $2.00 a pound--Yikes! In San Francisco where I live now, that heat-loving plant is impossible to grow.
Our neighbors were the Striplings, who had three children near my age, the Warbucks who had two and the Joyners, who had a diabetic boy my age. Mr. Stripling was a pleasant man who had a prosthetic leg which caused him to limp badly. Their credit must not have been good for they had a meter on their gas stove that accepted coins and allowed the use of just that amount of cooking gas. Mr. Stripling was employed by Dr. Howard, a bachelor medico, who tooled around town in an air-cooled Franklin automobile.
I was enrolled in the Virginia Avenue School in January, 1920 when I became six. I remember only one child there, a handsome, dark-skinned Eskimo boy!! Imagine, in 1920, an Eskimo boy in Georgia. I have no inkling of his name nor did we never become friends. My sister Louise also enrolled me in the “Sunbeam Band.” Unfortunately, I can recall the name of none of those children, except that of the girl, at whose house we met—Alberta. Her house was yellow-painted and faced the Cox College campus.
It was about this time that I became engrossed with the question of the root cause of babies. Something led me into thinking the answer to the mystery was in a small metal canister, which enclosed, I thought, certain magic ingredients. About that time I also became acquainted with the word “incubus” and felt certain I would have the answer if I could just understand the meaning of that strange word.
Continuing my rugged pursuit of Truth through Experience, I was soon reined in by the restraints of civilization. Shortly after our move to College Park, I became acquainted with John and Jane, twins living in the next block—all of us six years old. We clicked immediately and visited often—I at their house and they at mine. Since the neighborhood was extremely tranquil, our parents’ permission to visit was not required. If we were wanted and didn’t answer to call, we were immediately sought at one house or the other, each scarcely more than a few dozen steps between. Both our family’s yards were large, with fruit trees, garage, sheds and we ranged over the entire area with our games. That spring and summer we were together every day—some times eating lunch at one house or the other, occasionally picnicking with lemonade and fried potatoes.
Without taking any hint from the season of birds’ mating, or the pollination of nearby peach trees, our interests soon turned to our bodies and we started a game of “show” which can only be described as satisfying our curiosity in a non-sexual way. Together, we urinated ritualistically, innocently indulged in touching and looking without any notion of progression to sexual activity. We had not the slightest idea of the reason why we were different, in spite of our intense interest of the oddity of our diversity. We undoubtedly had an understanding that these pleasures were “naughty” and “prohibited” for they were never indulged in openly. They were our secret. However on some occasion, we were observed for I was given hints that I promptly ignored. (Somewhere there is a rule that unwelcome advice must be quickly passed over).
Those innocent but culturally inappropriate activities reached a crescendo when three cousins of the twins arrived from Americus, Georgia for a visit. Whether it was their indifference to our neighbors who were strangers to them or something more sensible, we became disinclined to hide our pleasure. On one occasion, I became aware of a neighbor observing us at our risqué game with what might be called excessive interest. It was not that her hair stood on end, but the intensity of her gaze caught my attention when she so concentrated on the play of half a dozen children from across the street.
She undoubtedly alerted our parents, for my next memory is of my mother’s deftness in rebuking me. She was discreet, literally dancing a ballet around the subject. She tried to be severe. I suppose there are few mothers who do not have to deal with such a problem at one time or another. They would likely sympathize with the mother whose boy masturbated in his living room in the presence of company. I have read of such a case.
My best friend, Randolph Surles lived nearby on Princeton Avenue. We played baseball, joked, shot his bb gun and occasionally wrestled. His father owned a machine that ran electric current through you if you held the metal irons as someone turned the handle. Not long before that time electricity was thought to be beneficial to one’s health if administered than way. We just thought it mysterious and fun. Mr. Surles, unlike my reserved father, was a big joker. Once when I was having lunch with them at their kitchen table, Mr. Surles told a funny when I had a mouthful of buttermilk. I was embarrassed at the mess I caused but the family was unfazed—just amused and the incident was made light of. Mrs. Surles was deaf and minimal conversation with her went on at high decibel. I remember her as always smiling and agreeable. My friend Randy was her youngest son. His brother Eugene was my brother’s best pal.
Some time before the Jack Dempsey-Gene Tunney fight in September, 1926, a boy we called Yankee Eldridge came from up north and moved in next door to Randolph. The night of the fight we three lay on the rug in front of the Eldridge’s console radio set and listened to it blow by blow.
Randolph and I went to the Temple Avenue grammar school but were in different classes. The school consisted of a two-story brick building and a house across the street with three or four classrooms and large schoolyard. Once we were called to hear an Indian chief give a talk. As a joke he told us how foolish the English language was in saying such a thing as “put the light out” when you didn’t intend to “put it outside.”
I have few, but graphic, recollections of that brick building. On one occasion I had some chore that caused me to linger after classes. The teacher and one other boy also remained. The tension in the room was brittle and I was anxious to get out. As I finished and gathered up my things to leave, the black janitor appeared with a large bundle of heavy switches—bigger than any switches I had imagined. The boy was awaiting a thrashing. I was afraid and hastened to distant myself from the place. On another occasion I could hear the hiss of the switch as it flew through the air and struck a boy. The sounds were so unpleasant I fled the scene shivering at the kid’s distress. Randolph and I once discussed the case of a boy whose parents protested his thrashing but other details of that case escape me.
In a class in the converted house across the street, our reward for good work was having stories read aloud to us. While I do not remember ever reading to the class, I remember comparing my own reading talents to those of the girls’ and thought myself far inferior. Hazel Bazemore was in that class, as was Katherine Johnson, the town barber’s daughter. Katherine was the very best of all the readers in my estimation and very pretty.
I was once punished and sent to stand by the door in the hall. It was shortly after lunch and the women who prepared and sold food were finishing up and leaving. One lady passed by and crammed my hands full of lovely potato chips, lightening my punishment.
In early summer of 1920 work started on paving our street. A contingent of forty or fifty black convicts with picks and shovels, worked in solid rows, chanting their way down Harvard Avenue, preparing for the rock and asphalt to follow. As the rows of black men the width of the roadway struck the hardened earth in unison with their picks, a chorus of deep male voices thundered a dramatic crescendo of sound, HER-RUMPH! … HER-RUMPH! … HER-RUMPH!
Some of the men had chains locked around both ankles; others had a loose chain several feet long attached to one leg. For comfort they wrapped the chain around their leg and tied it to avoid the awkwardness of dragging it.
Tobacco-chewing white guards with well-oiled rifles idled under old oaks fifteen to twenty yards from the nearest convict. Water-boy trustee convicts kept busy in the mid-summer heat. Everybody drank from the same dipper. Six years old, I was fascinated by the excitement of the chanting and the riotous clatter. I played and watched all the goings-on at close range without any objection either from the guards or my mother. No one shooed me away. It was a sight that only death will erase from my mind. Not that it was rare. Fulton County convicts worked on the roads and could be seen on the farms that grew the crops that fed them. After the Civil War, I learned, convicts had been rented out to work in mines and other industries. One can imagine the dreadful abuses that system spawned and which eventually brought about its end.
When sidewalks were installed, all of the kids bought skates and Mrs. Stevens, whose new sidewalk covered half of the block, informed us that we were not to use hers since skates damaged the surface. They were from Virginia and pronounced “about” “aboot” and used the term “darkie” which I had never before heard. Mr. Stevens was stone deaf. He had a hearing aid but never wore it because, he said the noise of the streetcar four blocks away, and barely audible to us, annoyed him. Once in the early darkness, riding my bicycle on the sidewalk, I ran into him from the rear and gave him a terrible shock. I recovered and quickly disappeared without apology. What will I do when I meet this man in hereafter and he demands justice?
There was a mystery woman in the Stevens house. For some years they had a bed-ridden relative living with them—she was never seen outside. One day without signs of good byes or happy separation, she brought her bags out to a car and was driven away. The abruptness of her departure almost ninety years ago still intrigues me.
A half century later, when I studied the life of Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, I wondered if the mystery woman could have experienced something like what befell the great religious leader.
In her early adulthood Mary Baker was an invalid. A Mr. Glover fell in love with her and they married. It is said that he took her in his arms from her bed to her wedding ceremony downstairs. Soon afterwards, they left New Hampshire for Carolina where he had business. There she had every prospect of a life full of happiness and love. In no time Mary’s handsome husband came down with yellow fever and died, leaving his young wife pregnant and destitute seven hundred miles from home. It fell to the Masons to rescue Mrs. Glover but the tragedy she suffered had sapped her vitality and returned her to her previous bedridden state and her eventual rejection of their child.
In 1920, just after Christmas, my mother’s brother arrived from Colorado where he was deputy sheriff. He had come to Atlanta to pick up two prisoners and was using the occasion to visit his sisters. On my sixth birthday his visit was celebrated with a dinner attended by many people. At some point it was thought my proper bedtime and amid many tears, I was shunted off to a cold bedroom. But not before this visiting uncle from the West took up a collection for me. He contributed a five-dollar bill. Imagine FIVE DOLLARS—in 2004 money, easily worth $100. I was rich. Little wonder that I honor him to this day. On the train ride back to the West he caught cold, which became pneumonia. In a matter of days my benefactor was dead.
I can’t say that I was much aware of politics or the presidency in my tender years. The First World War was going on full blast in 1916 and Wilson was reelected on his promise to keep us out of the war. However, we became committed due to propaganda, U-Boat sinkings of passenger ships with heavy loss of life and the huge loans given to Great Britain by the House of J. P. Morgan. It was thought that a German victory would render those loans worthless.
In the presidential election of 1920, Warren G. Harding ran against James M. Cox, a former governor of Ohio. Unlike other Ohioans who had sought and won the White House—Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, McKinley and Taft, Mr. Cox was a Democrat. On the ticket with him was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, destined to be a popular president twelve years later. As it had done so often in the past, the American electorate voted overwhelmingly for the fumbling maladroit. It is a weakness of our electorate. If Ghengis Khan should run for president of the United States against Attila the Hun, our error prone electorate would demand that both those vile men be elected to share the presidency. Harding’s major claim to fame lay in his coinage of the word “normalcy.”
Mister Harding was an accident already happened. His forte was poker playing with cronies. He selected a cabinet of the soon-to-be-convicted. It might have been supposed that no cabinet worse than that of Grant could be assembled. Not so. Harding succeeded. The American people elected him by a landslide.
That disaster can only be compared to the 1972 contest between Richard Nixon and George McGovern. From his long record in politics we knew Nixon very, very well—a serious neurotic* (Dr. David Abrahamsen found him psychotic), the darling of far-right rich men. He was a dress uniform warrior who never saw action except in newsreels. McGovern’s record was the opposite: honest, able, active military service. Quite naturally, we chose the psychopath over the honorable man.
During those years Randolph Surles and I attended Sunday School together. My mother always gave me a dime for the plate—today’s equivalent of $2 to $3. We were encouraged to join the church and were baptized in the Southern Baptist rite. However, I, and I believe Randolph, were put off by the affected pietism and manner of unctuous self-satisfaction in which some churchgoers carried themselves, making God their servant though they pretended the contrary.
As well as I can remember, a short time after we moved to College Park, we received a call early one morning before my father started for work. My maternal grandfather, who I had seen only once before, was dying. It was decided that we should hasten to his bedside. There we were, six o’clock in the morning, tooling along at a good clip toward the city, my father and mother in the front seat of our open Maxwell touring car, I alone in the back. You are correct if you imagine that such a ride was breezy. Before long a motorcycle cop was on our tail. What reasons or excuses my father gave are lost to me, but we had to accompany the cop to the store-front city hall where my father had to pay a fine-- $2, $5 or $10? I don’t know. We returned home and the old gentleman passed away without our presence. His funeral was held in an old white-painted church in Bellton, my mother’s hometown, sixty miles north of Atlanta. We drove up there in the dead of winter.
My grandfather had once owned a successful business in Bellton with a family of eight children. After my grandmother died, he remarried and had two daughters. There must have been some epidemic about 1884—perhaps typhoid—that carried off my grandmother and three of her young sons. They were buried in that same churchyard.
As a girl, my mother played the pedal-pumped organ in the church. We once had a picture of Newt Coggins’ four young daughters standing together on the veranda of the upper story, my mother proudly holding her guitar that in my childhood stood in a corner of our living room.
Some time previous to our humiliating episode with the motorcycle policeman, a large number of our families had gathered around grandpa’s hospital bed. I have no idea what the occasion was but my mother was distressed that her sister had set her young son on the bed with instructions to ask grandpa for his watch.
In 1920 my life was a paradise. From that date on I have firm memories. I always had a dog and cat. Fruit trees in summer supplied me with peaches, apples, and in the fall, more wild persimmons than I could eat. In wild places around the neighborhood grew delicious wild plums, although the spines on the bushy trees could give you a wound to remember. Chickens were fun too. When we had a broody hen, my sister Lunette and I would set her with ten or twelve eggs, each marked with pencil to make it easy to identify an egg some other hen might add to her clutch. Talk about anticipation. Some hens would allow you to satisfy your curiosity by checking the eggs. Others might give you a painful peck. After twenty-one days there would be stirring inside the eggs. There would be the sounds of movement and even a cheep from inside the shell. Eventually pecking with a special tooth conveniently provided to escape using . What a wonderful experience for a child! When all the eggs were hatched, the mother hen would call the chicks off the nest and teach them how to find food. Do they grow fast! It’s an experience every child should have.
Dogs and cats having their young is also a remarkable experience for children, involving them in a moral obligation to care for them and control their numbers. For parents all of those occasions offer opportunities to teach children the sanctity of all life. Of course if you are raising your children to be fodder for the war machine….
My mother’s rheumatoid arthritis was very much on our minds. She was sometimes bedridden and at other times, able to be up and around dealing with household matters, but walking always as a cripple. Her fingers were almost at a forty-five degree angle to her hands. Even so, she played the piano occasionally at my insistence. The joints of her feet and knees were also enlarged and painful. She took aspirin and later empirin compound for relief—such as it gave. Perhaps she should have been given opiates. Since the onset of the disease in 1914, she had had many treatments: gold salts, baths, teeth extraction, enemas, poultices with heat and others. Some people recommended religion, but she told me she just couldn’t believe that simple faith could heal. I never saw any sign of superstition in her. Desperate, she must have been torn between magic and science, with science getting the better in the game. Alas, science then was inadequate to her needs. Her condition confused and confounded her. Pitifully, she told me once that she wondered what she might have done to deserve that fate. She agonized, yes, but I never saw her cry.
On a visit to a chiropractor in Atlanta when I was very young, she and I walked the four blocks to catch the streetcar. She was not able to mount the steps, so the conductor came down and helped her on. I can’t remember what treatment the practitioner gave her but I believe she came away considering him a quack. She never returned.
Home-bound ordinarily, she used that rare opportunity to take in a nearby movie at the Alpha Theater. Her bratty child companion, however, allowed her no minute of peace, so she abruptly ended that singular opportunity for entertainment, and returned to dull routine at home.
The Alpha Theater in Atlanta in the 1920s was intermediate to the nickel theaters of the 1900-10 era, and the elaborately decorated Moorish style movie houses of the 1920s like the Howard or Fox in Atlanta. The Alpha was itself “bare bones’ but the seats were comfortable and there was live piano music attuned to the activity on the screen. The many Loew’s Theaters in Moorish style scattered all around New York seemed brand new to me in the 1930s but could have been built in the 20s.
Sometime in the 1920’s a College Park lady doing anti-cigarette work was also pushing the benefits of milk treated with Lactobacillus bulgaricus. She had the cultures and practiced her art on her hearth behind her stove. Whether we paid for them or they were given, I do not know, but I was at her place a number of times to pick up a glass quart milk bottle of her nostrum, from which my mother made our own yogurt-like concoction. As I recall, it was something between yogurt and buttermilk, both of which I liked. What I knew, overheard or misunderstood concerning her “scientific” anti-cigarette work was that she soaked cigarettes in water, then gave the water to mice—which killed them. That did not deter Randolph and me from smoking rabbit tobacco rolled in newspaper (on more than one occasion we used toilet paper) and even smoking Chesterfields once when we got our hands on a pack of ten. Even then, cool as they were, cigarettes were called “coffin nails.”
I had three mothers. From the time I was born, my sisters cared for me. By the time I was six, they, eighteen and sixteen, had involuntarily bonded to me with a force as strong as life—and of course I to them. Not that my mother’s love and care were less, but, living in constant pain, she lacked physical stamina to do her full duty as mistress and mother. It is a well-known phenomenon that a girl on whom the care of a younger sibling devolved is never relieved of her role as second mother. That is especially true when the younger sibling is a boy. The girl may have hated the obligation placed upon her, and may have complained bitterly against it, but as it grew in her craw it became bittersweet and irremovable from her being. It is a classic case of ambivalence—love and hate intermixed. In the case of a brother, that does not happen. Leaving a boy in charge of a next younger male sibling is an invitation to calamity—if not murder.
I have reason to believe that my Aunt Ethel had a similar relationship with my father. She was some years older and rough farm work, while prohibited to girls, fell heavily on farm women. My grandmother was a widow with three young children. She never applied that “no work in the field” to herself. Caring for younger children, however, definitely fell to the oldest girl. As soon as she could, Ethel broke away and fled to Atlanta but did not forget her family. Not long afterwards she brought them to the big city. When I was growing up, she worked at the Chamberlain, Johnson, DuBose Department store and always wore a veil and those gloves that reach above the elbows. If she had carried a million dollars in Georgia Power Company bonds in her purse, she could not have been more elegant. She was a delicate lady.
I suspect it was in the summer of 1921 when mama, papa and all four children piled in the car and we drove to the Terminal Railroad Station. It was a reward arranged entirely without my knowledge: my three older siblings were going away on a holiday to St. Simons Island off the coast of Georgia. I didn’t take being left out agreeably. When we left them on the platform and got back in that huge open Studebaker (or Maxwell?) touring car… it was one of the lowest points of my life. My consolation now is that I know my parents were sad for me. They were grave as I cried, and they didn’t talk—they in the front seat and I alone in the back.
The trip undoubtedly was a well-deserved recompense. Just imagine giving nearly grown children a reward for being good and reliable, and just to be sure they had a good time, sending their bratty little brother along with them. In that particular case justice prevailed. I stayed home. I got over it, and had my own reward in the many souvenirs they brought home.
Apparently the many tears I shed, laid a guilt trip on my parents for a few years later, they sent my brother and me on that same trip.
My older sister, Louise, was serious—even severe, but ever tolerant with me. The younger one, Lunette was devilish, a teaser who baited and taunted me, exploiting my infantile gullibility for the pure sport of it. Once she frightened me with tales of the world coming to a fiery end. Did they boss me around? If they did it was a very agreeable bossing. They bought me Easter Eggs and hid them. Did they punish me? Not that I can remember, and my memory in that respect is pretty darn good.
It’s not the same with a brother. I remember once when I was under judgment in a conference of three, held in our kitchen: my mother, my brother—fourteen or fifteen and I—seven or eight. In his eyes I had committed some major offense and he was presenting a very strong case against me to my mother. No public prosecutor ever pushed harder for conviction. My mother got an earful of the trifling value of her dear pet. She, on the other hand, was the kind of judge you pray for when you stand before the bar of justice. She counseled patience and tolerance for this innocent child who meant no evil—all the while trying to smooth the ruffled feathers of her next oldest. The resentment at losing the position of precious youngest child is hard to give up to a worthless tadpole of a brother, but it is as natural as the sunrise. Yesterday’s displaced darling never gets over his loss of that precious position. My punishment turned out to be a mild scolding. Like every criminal, I have long forgotten my crime.
I loved my sisters equally but they had little patience for each other. They were as different as day and night. A brunette with dark chestnut hair, after our mother, Louise was serious and exact. When she went to business school she never missed a class. Her Greg shorthand was as fast as the wind and perfect. She prided herself on her beautiful nails. It was before red, purple and chartreuse. Hers were natural and in good taste.
Lunette was a fiery redhead, after our father, with a matching short fuse. She never let school interfere with her social life. Later she had a decent job with average pay but regularly borrowed fifty dollars from a loan company so she could splurge, paying it back three or four dollars a week. $50 dollars then was the equivalent of a $1000 now. I never understood her reasoning, but it was her pleasure.
The girls, only two years apart, never actually fought, but were never at ease with each other, although they were the favored in the family. Their room was the front room. Their furniture was stylish—bow-end bed with a three mirrored vanity and stool. The furniture in the boys’ room was a pick-me-up of odds and ends with a giant storage trunk and an outdated sewing machine standing in the corner. By today’s standards the rooms were enormous with double windows and tiny closets compared to today’s walk-in monsters. My father’s favorite clock stood on the left end of the fireplace mantle in our room. It sat there because it would not run in the center. Further to the edge, lay my father’s six-shooter revolver, which to my recollection was never touched by my brother or me.
That house might have been called “the house of many doors.” Every room had two doors and the bathroom had three. My parents slept in the back bedroom, which was really what was then called a “sleeping porch.” It was a leftover from days when tuberculosis was known as “the white plague” and sleeping in the fresh air was the only cure. With its many windows, sleeping in that room in winter was the equivalent of sleeping in an icebox. Quilts of that era were painfully heavy. One of the greatest luxuries of the present is the insulated, featherweight coverlet.
Those were my halcyon days. School was fun. The world was new. Sloshing through puddles was the only way to walk. I remember one wet day when three or four of us trekked to school together—all about seven years old. I had a brand-new yellow slicker raincoat and hat to match. Was I proud! The wonder is that we arrived at school before noon. The route was an unpaved street over a wooden bridge under which flowed a very modest stream. Beside the bridge there was a tiny pond in which a water moccasin swam, looking for tadpoles or an unsuspecting frog. Everyone in the South knew that critter to be highly poisonous and was to be avoided at all costs.
Another time, for some reason, I was calling on the Warbucks one sunny morning. I was headed for the back door approaching from the side street—one of those named after presidents—probably Monroe (there were no street signs), five blocks from Main Street. In the sandy driveway a snake was giving birth. The tiny baby snakes scarcely bigger than earthworms wiggled their way out of the mother and slithered into the nearby grass to seek the natural protection their mother could no longer afford them.
Usually our family had supper with six people sitting down together. I loved my mother’s and my sisters’ cooking. “Gourmet” didn’t enter into it. We ate fried or baked chicken, home grown or bought live in the market—killed and cleaned to our order, hacked round steak, pork chops or fried oysters with ample helpings of vegetables that I continue to love, but without the chunk of fatback thrown in to season string beans or cabbage. I’ve been converted to olive oil. No one in our family ever ate the fatback, but when my Aunt Dora visited us, she ate some and it turned my stomach. I hated greasy things then as I do now. Our fatback went out to the chickens with the other scraps from the table. My absolute favorite food was tomatoes, which then were not available in winter. I made up for that loss in summer when they were fifty cents a basket of ten or fifteen pounds. Mornings in summer, a wagon often appeared at our door offering wonderful produce growing in the field just hours before. One such wagon was manned by two couples who seemed to me extraordinarily proper and educated. Could they have been some sort of pre-hippie commune? They were wonderfully attentive. My mother would hobble out to their wagon and select beautiful vegetables still wet with dew.
I never heard a word spoken between my mother and father about money nor complaint about not having enough though they surely knew the limits. Papa could be critical with the girls and tough with my brother and me, but with my mother he was considerate—even humble. It’s only after so many years that I understand how much he loved her—worshiped her.
I am embarrassed to tell of a very private occasion. I was once in bed with my parents. Before I went to sleep, my father began to plead: “Why,” he said to my mother, “why have you brought the boy to bed with us?” I cringed and tried not to breathe. His voice was pitiful. I can feel his pain even now, and wonder why. Was it to obviate sexual advance? My father’s life was hard, and since he loved my mother so much, one of the few pleasures he enjoyed, were those private moments he spent, holding her hand before sleep came.
Those seemingly insignificant incidents between my father and me were at work forming our future relationship. When I think back, I seek some humor between us without success. It must have been that he worked seven days—that his “work ethic” which had allowed him to “get ahead” held him so tightly in it clutches. Furthermore he had no intimate friends. The manager of the shop and yard where he worked was his close friend of many years, yet he never visited us nor did we visit them. The only social intercourse we ever had with his family, was the eerie visit he, my mother and I paid one night to the funeral home where his daughter lay. I remember the gloomy blackness of the night and the lugubrious shaded lights of the funeral home. It might have been the setting for a Poe drama.
A really big deal for me was the occasional Saturday when I would pay my 7¢ fare and ride the street car to Atlanta to meet Louise. She first worked for Goldsmith Brothers—the local dealer for Hudson cars—famous for their Hudson Super Six. Later she worked for the Buick factory office in their elegant showroom on Spring Street. She was secretary to a Mr. MacDonald whom she very much admired. Saturdays she got off at noon. I would meet her at Kress’s on Whitehall Street where we would buy candy, then walk to the Howard Theatre on Peachtree to see a stage show, travelogue, newsreel, comedy and movie. We referred to that as the “picture show.” Later I saw Maurice Chevalier’s first movie there—probably after the theater’s name had been changed to “Paramount.” What a charmer that guy was! Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise, birds in the trees…. Someone told me he replaced Al Jolson. Not so, Jolson had a voice like a crow.
In the spring I couldn’t wait to shed my shoes, but I had to go over the back yard to look for shards of glass and nails to present to my father before permission was granted. In summer when I was going to Atlanta, my mother demanded that I wash my feet before I put on shoes and socks. In turn I demanded to know WHY? Her answer was that I might get run over and have to be taken to the hospital. For the last eighty years, when I think of that, I conjure up a vision of myself being wheeled into the emergency room at Grady Hospital only to be met at the door by a white-coated authoritarian doctor whose function it is to inspect the feet of insolent undeserving boys trying to gain entry to save their lives. Boys with dirty feet must invariably be rejected and unceremoniously dumped back on to the street.
I remember that streetcar ride from Rich’s (the grandest of all Atlanta’s department stores) to College Park as quite an exciting experience in itself. On a straightaway the car picked up speed and swayed from side to side so that I wondered why it did not jump the tracks. Saturdays they pulled a trailer to accommodate the mob trying to get home with their packages. I was long gone from there when they pulled the streetcars off that route and replaced them with poison puffing buses. An evil combo of big businesses bought up transit lines all over the country and replaced them with inefficient air-polluting, traffic-clogging busses. It’s an example of efficiency in reverse. General Motors and General Electric don’t always do what’s good for America.
By the time I was nine or ten, the other children were working—the girls in offices and Paul, to the distress of my mother, selling papers in the street. More than anything else, I think he did it because of the charm of having one of those automatic change-makers that he hung on his belt. In his eyes, it made him into a businessman. When he was sixteen, my Aunt Dora who worked at J. M. High’s Department store in the Drapery Department, got him a job there and he loved it. All three children gave Mama some money each week, but Paul was different. He was a social hound and had most if not all of his few dollars back before the end of the week. Furthermore, every other night, he had the car out, burning up gas for which my father probably paid twenty cents a gallon or less. One morning, Papa headed out for work and ran out of gas. Worst of all, it was before the gas station opened. That night he was steaming and gave Paul, Junior a long lecture. The contrite son hung his head low but when papa turned to go my brother asked for and got the keys which were handed over without a word though I can imagine what my father felt inside.
Now and then Paul, Junior would throw a dance at home. The furniture would be pushed back to the wall, the rug rolled up and the floor sprinkled with wax. Our huge punchbowl would be set out on the dining room table. While I believe the fruity beverage would be spiked, there was no drunkenness. The crowd was loud but just happily enthusiastic. My sisters were the hosts and also had friends present. During those parties my parents disappeared.
Paul had a serious girlfriend when he was still very young. She was
pretty, gay, smiling. In the summer of 1925 when Paul was eighteen, she came down with typhoid fever. Weeks before, her younger brother had contracted infantile paralysis. Their poor mother had her two children both critically ill. Sadly, the girl died.
It was not uncommon in the 1920s and 30s to see young people who had suffered devastating effects from polio. The victim might have one leg shorter than the other. It was not uncommon to see someone with an ungainly built-up shoe to compensate for that loss of growth. Some years later, the iron lung was invented to rescue those whose lungs were affected.
In 1920, my mother had three sisters living and one brother; my grandfather called the girls: Adie, Idie, Dorie, and Corie. I knew my aunts very well. Two were refined and warm as was my mother, but one had a coarse streak that turned me and my sisters against her. She was the aunt charged with my care when my mother went away to Hot Springs in my first or second year. I have clear recollections of Lunette’s severe criticism of both my aunt and her husband about their treatment of her and me during that time. She was eleven or twelve then and unforgiving for the wrongs committed against her and me in my mother’s absence. That aunt hated my father and though I never remember any criticism of her by him, his silent demeanor in that regard must have made its point with me. When I was fifteen years old and my mother lay dying, my aunt berated my father to me in a most cruel and abusive manner. That was seventy-four years ago and I have yet to forgive her for that shocking crudity.
To continue click Chapter Two under Previous Posts.
posted by Jack Ragsdale @ 9:44 PM
1 Comments:
At 5/26/2006 10:29 AM,
Anonymous said…
An interesting tale, Sir. But what have you been up to between the time you were 25 and now?
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