THE EARLY YEARS

The earliest memories of my life are when I was living at Lawrence Street. The most pleasurable memory was my toy duck. It was a train of ducks with the mother on the front and three baby ducks following her. It quacked when I pulled it. I had few store-bought toys; just boxes and sticks to play with were my toys.

Lawrence Street was a dirt road running north and south about six blocks from the elementary school. It wasn't paved until the late 60's. There, I was living with my grandmother, my brother, and my baby sister, Luann. I moved out of this house several times but I always seemed to come back. Grandma would have lots of visitors from her job or her other friends and I would be asked to stay in the back yard or on the back porch. On one occasion, there was a man who said that he was my grandfather, Frank Scarber. He showed me a magic trick with a silver dollar. He made it disappear in his hand and reappear in my ear. I was amazed. He gave me this silver dollar and told me to keep it as a remembrance. My grandmother took it from me the next day and I never saw it again.

One early memory was the iceman bringing a block of ice to the house. At this time, our icebox kept things cold with blocks of ice. The first electric refrigerator that Grandma had in the house was a real convenience. Grandma would listen to the radio when she was home. There was no TV in the house until we came back for Christmas in 1963.

Once, I was looking at a road map and deciding where I wanted to go. I could not read at the time but I was marking the map up pretty well. I had a sharp pencil and decided that this one area was where I wanted to be. I took the pencil and jabbed it through the map and right into my right shin. I still have the mark today.

I had a most painful moment in that house. I had learned to go to the bathroom by myself and was pretty proud of my new zipper pants. As you might well imagine, when I zipped my boyhood into my pants, I got pretty upset (and embarrassed. But that came later.). Grandma heard me scream and came running into the bathroom expecting to see me covered in blood. She just pulled the zipper down and told me that next time I ought to be more careful. She then told everybody in town about the incident (that's where the embarrassment comes in).

Grandma worked at the shoe factory in Gainesville. I think she put soles on the shoes. I got to visit the factory on several occasions and all of the women there were really nice to me. I wanted to work there when I grew up but it was hard to get a job there because of the unions and seniority. The smell of the factory was overwhelmingly leather. There were pallets of leather everywhere and all of the sewing machines were noisy. I would play with all of the rejected shoes and wondered why there were so many of them. That may have been my first interest in business because I kept asking Grandma why they weren't selling those shoes. There were no shoes for kids as this factory (at least this section) only worked with women's shoes.

The shoe factory was close to the Coca-Cola bottling plant and I got to visit that every once in a while. I was fascinated with the mechanization in that plant. I was amazed at the speed of the conveyor belts and how the tops got put on the bottles. I kept asking the foreman how the machine knew how much Coke to put into the bottles and why it didn't fizz out. At this time, all of the Coke bottles had an imprint on the bottle with the city where they were first filled. I was always looking at the bottom to see where it came from and was overjoyed whenever I found a bottle that had Gainesville on it.

The house I lived in is burned into my memory. As far as I know, it was built in the 1930's (and torn down in 1971) and Grandma had lived in it since 1939. Grandma's bedroom was an addition built onto the house in the 1950's. The back room was another addition put on in the 50's. The front room led to both Grandma's bedroom and the middle room. The next room was the kitchen that exited to the back room. Butch and I slept in the middle room. When Butch moved back in to finish high school, he moved into the back room that was really a porch with screen wire and plastic sheets keeping the weather out. The house was not well insulated and was always cold in the winter. We had several electric heaters scattered throughout but, since they cost so much to operate, they were rarely turned on.

The backyard had a chinaberry tree and Grandma's garden. She grew tomatoes and green beans in that garden. All around her house were flowers of all sorts but the canons the most popular and memorable. There was a peach tree on the north side of the house that I always wanted to plunder. One time I ate too many of the green peaches and got fairly sick. The chinaberry tree made zillions of these little berries about the size of a grape that we used as ammunition. Our chinaberry fights were fun because they never hurt when they hit you and you never ran out of ammunition. Anytime any of my cousins visited, we would have these fights. Of course, Grandma didn't like us to have these fights because, "You're going to put someone's eye out!" and because she didn't want a hundred chinaberry trees growing in her backyard.

The front yard of the house was my favorite playground. There were two large oak trees next to the street that straddled the walk from the front porch to the sidewalk. On the north was a fence and on the south was an open field (until Warren built his house). There were dozens of doodlebugs and one or two ant piles. The doodlebugs were the most fun because I would catch an ant and rip a couple of legs off and drop it into the funnel. I always wondered how such a soft bug like the doodlebug could attack and kill an ant with its exoskeleton.

This is the house that I had chicken pox and pneumonia in. Selma Smith (she was the wonderful lady that lived across the street) was so nice and visited me every day that I was sick. Although I was too young to remember it, I almost died of pneumonia in 1957.

Grandma raised chickens and rabbits. We would go collect the chicken eggs every day. We had mostly brown eggs and when we cooked them, you could see the fertilized ovum in the yolk. The bantam rooster was a real territory hog. He chased me when I got near any of his hens and I was terrified of him. One day, Grandma finally told me that he was bluffing and I should stay my ground. Well, I did and that little rooster attacked me with his spurs. Of course, it didn't hurt me but I continued to give him a wide berth (up until we ate him, of course). The rabbits were for eating but I didn't know that for a long time. I made one of them my pet and when he disappeared, I was heart-broken. Of course, we had rabbit that night for supper but I didn't put two and two together.

The old lady that lived next door was fairly rich and did not like kids or chickens. She would call Grandma on the telephone (her number was Howard 5-4083) and complain about one thing or another. I never did like her because she wouldn't let me have any of the plums from the trees growing in her yard. There was a grocer not too far away who was kind and told funny stories every time I visited. He was the first one to tell me Yankee jokes (a Yankee asked if he had any "pee-cans" and he said that he had some "piss-bottles"). His store was small and crowded and he would occasionally give me a piece of rock candy when I went in. He had an old time pickle barrel in the store that was always full of pickles.

Elm Creek was within easy walking distance for a five-year-old boy and I spent many hours at the creek pretending to catch large fish when in fact there were only perch in the stream. I would use a cane pole to go fishing using worms or grubs for bait. My little red and white bobber would jitter and move across the surface of the water and I would get excited. Many times, I jerked the pole too hard and lost the fish. But here is where my first perch was caught. I would bring my catch to Grandma and she would tell me how fine a fish it was. None of them were worth keeping but no one could convince me that they were too small. There was a walk bridge over the creek that I was forbidden to cross. Of course, I did cross it just to see what was on the other side. I found nothing but some trees and an old dumping area.

At this age, I looked up to my brother and wanted to go every place he went. Butch never wanted me along with him because I was so small but one day he was forced to let me go along. He and L.V. put me on a cart and let me go from the top of a railroad embankment. I went down the slope quickly and could not stop. I only stopped when I hit the railroad tracks at the bottom of the hill. I was a lot more scared than hurt but I did get a couple of bruises and scrapes. Butch got a spanking that day. Grandma's favorite form of punishment was the hairbrush. She would use it to spank us on our bottoms and that day Butch got it good.

Grandma insisted that I attend Sunday school at the Baptist church. Here, I would be with other kids my own age and with a teacher who smoked too much. I did not like the services because I was made to sit very still and be very quiet. Only Grandma and I ever went. One day I got up from the pew in the middle of the service and went to the preacher. He stopped his sermon and asked what I wanted. I guess I replied in a loud voice because everyone, except Grandma, laughed. I told him I had to go pee.

Around 1960, my uncle Warren and his wife, Jane, built a house next door. They had a wonderful house and when Jana and Dirisha were born, I had some cousins to play with. One day, a neighbor's dog and Warren's dog got into a fight. This was during the Christmas holidays because Uncle Ferrell, Aunt Gracie and their kids, Yvonne and Judy were there. I tried to break up the dogfight and was bitten on my left arm. I thought I was going to die of rabies because Butch kept saying that they probably had the disease. The small puncture was insignificant but only Yvonne had any sympathy for me. One of Warren's friends came down from Oklahoma and brought their son. He had bleach white hair and was a jerk. He beat me up and when I told grandma, he denied everything and lied that I hit him and then ran away and fell down.

Uncle Warren had a garden behind his house. He was growing Jalapeno peppers and okra. One day after we had been fishing at the lake, he was drinking beer and eating the peppers. I was being my normal obnoxious self, asking for some peppers. He finally agreed and gave me one telling me that I had to eat the entire thing. After the first bite, I definitely decided I did not desire to have any more. But Warren made me finish it. He did let me have some beer to cool down my mouth. Grandma gave him a dressing down after I went into the house to get something else to drink.