by Ron Allen
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Dirty sidewalks. Families living from paycheck to paycheck. Ragamuffins. Catawba tree cigars. Neighborhood stores, selling groceries on credit, with delivery boys on bicycles. Streetcar rides. Saturday morning cowboy movies at the Joy Theater. Freshly baked bread at the Merita and their half-priced cakes and bread, advertised as day-old but really weeks-old, sold from the little store in the alley behind the bakery. Drunks staggering in and out of the Blue Goose Tavern. Drug stores on opposite corners. Cas Walker's, the White Store, Kay's Ice Cream, Mynders School, the North Central playground, tag football games in the street and real football games at Brookside field. Summer nights, swinging lazily on the front porch swing, then later sweating in bed while trying to sleep in the stifling heat. The ice man. The coal man. The milk man.
this was Happy Holler ... this was Daryl's world.
CHAPTER ONE
Daryl was born in a small frame house on Bernard Street in North Knoxville. the street had once been called Munson Street. The General Hospital was on Cleveland Place, across the street and up the hill from his house. The pungent odor of ether that permeated the entire area surrounding the hospital both day and night was often sickening, and when the wind was right (or wrong), the stench could sometimes almost put you to your knees if you lived on Bernard Street, or anywhere else in the surrounding neighborhood.
It was a lower middle class neighborhood. The soldiers cemetery was just a short distance west of Daryl's house, on Tyson Street. Central Avenue was just a few houses to the east. The cemetery, officially known as the National Soldiers Cemetery, was a place where neighborhood kids would sometimes run and play on hot summer days. On patriotic occasions and holidays, like Armistice Day and Independence Day, Daryl and his family watched and listened as uniformed military bands performed at the outdoor bandstand in the middle of the cemetery. That bandstand was removed from the cemetery long ago, and in recent times the caretaker's two story brick residence, at the corner of Bernard and Tyson, was torn down. In the late 1930's and early 1940's Daryl didn't even realize that the continuation of the cemetery to the northeast was actually a separate cemetery, originally the Gray Cemetery later called the Old Gray when a new cemetery out west of town was called the New Gray. Bt the two cemeteries continued as one as far as Daryl knew, and he had always thought the rock wall that separated the two was just one of the cemetery's many marble or stone structures. At the opposite end of Bernard, up at the corner of Central, neighborhood kids would stand and anxiously await the long line of elephants, clowns, circus animals and performers each year, as the circus parade made its way out to the North Central circus grounds, between Central and the railroad tracks, past Grasshopper City.
Daryl had a only few scattered recollections about his life before he was six or seven years old. Those sojourns into the cemetery and the excitement of watching the circus parades were among his few remembrances of those early days on Barnard Street. He remembered that one time he fell from his tricycle and chipped off his two front teeth on the concrete steps in front of his house. He also vividly recalled the time his grandmother was washing clothes in the old ringer washer on the back porch and had walked into the kitchen briefly while Daryl was standing on a chair to watch the washing activities. Daryl had shoved his hand into the wringers, with the washer running full blast, and the wringers pulled in his arm, obviously thinking it was simply another shirt or a pair of pants. He was four years old at the time, but for some reason he realized that something was obviously amiss, and besides screaming to the high heavens he also had managed to attempt to pull his arm out of the ringers, bending his arm at the elbow and causing the wringers to grind the flesh on his arm. Mama quickly rushed in and turned the machine off. When she released the ringers and pulled out his arm, it resembled something not dissimilar from ground hamburger at the bend of his right arm. She had quickly called the family doctor, the same doctor who had delivered Daryl when he was born in that house on Bernard Street. That circumstance of birth was not unusual for families of little means in Knoxville in those days, despite the fact that you could throw a rock from their front porch and hit the General Hospital. When the doctor arrived he offered his opinion that had Daryl not attempted to pull the arm from the machine, bending it at the elbow, the machine likely would have removed part of that appendage from his body. The only other thing Daryl really remembered from that episode in later years was that the good doctor gave him a couple of pieces of candy after he treated and bandaged the wound. The result of that episode was a large ugly scar that remained with Daryl throughout his life, although, not unlike his brain, it seemed that the scar had shrunken somewhat over the years.
CHAPTER TWO
Daryl entered the first grade at the Mynders School, on Pearl Place. His first grade teacher was Miss Riggs. Before he completed the first year, his family had moved from Bernard to Anderson Avenue, about four blocks to the north, in a two story frame dwelling which was a much larger house and a step up from their earlier abode. It was about that time that Daryl first remembered anything about his stepfather, Odie, his mother's second husband. Until then, since he had been old enough to remember much of anything, Daryl had no father at home, but for whatever reasons at that early age he didn't think it was anything unusual. His mother and father had divorced before he was born, but Daryl, his sister, and his mother lived with his grandparents, and his uncle Luke, Daryl's mother's brother. The fact that there were two men in the household rendered it a normal family as far as Daryl was concerned. Anyway, his mother had married Odie about the time they moved to Anderson. In any case it had been a wise move to the larger house on Anderson, since the quarters at the little house on Bernard had become overcrowded.
They only lived on Anderson for a couple of years when they moved again, a block to the north, up on Oklahoma Avenue. Unknown to Daryl at that time, Oklahoma had originally been called Brookside Street. Both of those houses were large two story frame houses, much larger than the one they had lived in on Bernard Street. Daryl's family didn't own either of those houses, paying monthly rent, as was the case for the majority of neighborhood families. Daryl's bedroom in those houses was always the smallest one, and both on Anderson and Oklahoma his bedroom was upstairs. The disadvantage to the two story houses was that in the summertime, when it sometimes was still ninety degrees or warmer at ten o'clock at night, with no air stirring anywhere, he would lie naked on his bed and have trouble trying to go to sleep on top of the sheets that were soaked with the sweat that had rolled from his body. They did have one big fan, but it was downstairs near the kitchen, and all it really did anyway was stir around the hot stale air during the summer.
His sister, Jean, was two years older than Daryl. When they were young that meant that she often was attending the same school as Daryl and she had the responsibility of walking with Daryl to and from school in the early grades. But she resented that task, and one time she decided to rebel, at Daryl's expense, with the assistance of one of her friends, a red-headed girl named Alice. One cold winter morning when Daryl was in the second grade they were walking up Stewart Street to Mynders school. They stopped off at a small grocery store located on the east side of the street, in the dip between Baxter and Pearl Place. It was also the home of the store owner, who operated the little store in the front room of his house. The girls wanted to buy a candy bar. As usual, both of them had money. When they left the store they proceeded with their devious scheme and pushed Daryl into a small semi-frozen pond that was located in the yard just in front of the store, below the level of the sidewalk. Daryl's feet went through the thin top layer of ice and into the freezing water. It wasn't very deep, but Daryl's feet and lower legs were soaked and he was freezing. Both girls admonished him for his clumsiness as they halfheartedly helped him from the icy water. They continued the remaining half block walk to school, and the girls marched Daryl directly to the Principal's office. His insistence that he had been tossed into that frozen hell-hole by these two girls fell on deaf ears, particularly since both his sister and her companion denied the facts, claiming instead that he had for some inexplicable reason simply jumped into that frozen cesspool on his own, for no damned good reason. Daryl was sent home from school, where he changed into dry clothes. Then his mother escorted him back to school and had a conversation with his teacher and the principal, both of whom confirmed the dastardly lie Daryl had manufactured about his supposed innocent sister and her devious friend. That afternoon, Odie was waiting for Daryl, and promptly took him up to his bedroom, made him stand and hold the bedpost, took off his belt, and busted Daryl's rear end. It was clearly explained that the punishment was for "telling that lie" by claiming that those girls had shoved his butt into the pool. Daryl was mad and bitter about the whole thing for weeks afterwards. He thought if there was some kind of a lesson he was supposed to learn from that experience it sure as hell had escaped him.
When Daryl was in the third grade, a girl named Brenda was in his class. She lived in a shotgun house on Bernard, less than a block from the house where he had lived on for the first six years of his life. One day after school she told Daryl she was having a party the following Saturday morning and that he was invited. Daryl was too young or too stupid to think it through, because she lived in a very small house, and like most of his friends and classmates, her family was living in relatively poor circumstances, and it was unlikely that her parents would to be giving this little urchin a party of any kind. Unaware, Daryl told his mother he wanted to go to the party that Saturday morning. With her usual and sometimes overbearing parental concern, particularly about people she knew nothing about other than where they lived, she told him that she would prefer that he didn't go, and even promised that if he wouldn't she would take him down to Happy Holler on Saturday morning and buy him a milk shake at Kay's. Kay's had a pretty good milk shake, and Daryl was tempted. But he was determined to go to that party, and his mother finally gave way to his pleas and agreed that he could go to the party. Saturday morning arrived and Daryl started out on the several block walk to Brenda's's house. He arrived and knocked on the front door and the girl's mother finally came to the door and said Brenda was out in the back yard. The back yard bordered an alley that paralleled Bernard. Daryl walked around the house to find Brenda and her two younger brothers playing around in the back yard dirt. Daryl halfheartedly joined in, but tried as best he could to keep his short pants and his white shirt clean as best he could. After a while, Daryl was beginning to wonder when the party was going to get started. Nobody else had yet shown up at the house, where he assumed the refreshments would soon be served, so he finally asked her about it. She deflected his question by suggesting maybe they should go into the kitchen and look things over. They climbed the wooden stairs that led up to the back porch and walked into the kitchen. Her mother was fooling around at the sink. Brenda, the party girl, walked over to the stove, where a pot was boiling, looked inside, and suggested that maybe they could eat some of those green beans when they were done. Daryl hated green beans. "She calls this a party ? " he thought to himself, as they walked onto the porch, down the stairs, and into the back yard. Without making any excuse, but anxious to get out of there someway, Daryl soon slowly drifted toward the alley and quickly escaped down to Bernard and towards Central. On the way back home he kept having a mental picture of that chocolate milk shake he had let slip through his fingers, for what turned out to be the unappealing opportunity to eat some damned green beans!
Another girl, named Ellen, had a crush on Daryl when they were in the fourth grade. For some reason, he didn't think much of her, although she was probably as good looking than the little blond girl named Betty that he'd had his eye on. Ellen sat to the left and just behind Daryl in class, and one day she passed him a small folded piece of paper. He took the note, and as he opened it he discovered that the forbidden word ,"F---" was written on the paper. He quickly folded the paper and tried to put it in his pocket, but his teacher simultaneously yelled out his name and asked what he was passing around the class. Daryl stammered and stuttered as the teacher quickly walked toward him. Frozen in terror, he tried somehow get rid of the evidence. But it was too late, and she snatched the paper from his hand. One glance at the contents and she immediately grabbed Daryl by the ear and hauled him out the door and down the stairs to the Principal's office. The Principal, a woman named Miss Brown, quickly telephoned Daryl's mother, and pretty soon she arrived at the school. The three of them had a heart to heart conference with Daryl, all about the "good" things in life, and why children should avoid these terrible ugly things, else they would surely be eventually be punished with eternal damnation. It also turned out that those ugly things could hurt you, because Odie again beat Daryl's butt that night, when Daryl's mother told him about the terrible note he had passed around the classroom. Daryl had already figured out long before then that he was capable of getting into trouble by essentially doing nothing. He avoided Ellen after that episode, being afraid to even look in her direction, for fear that he might have go through anything like that day's experience again.
CHAPTER THREE
Daryl had a teacher in the fifth grade at Mynders who was a holy terror. Her name was McKamey . She was both good and bad. Good, because as Daryl later looked back he realized that she was probably the best and most demanding teacher he ever had, because she not only taught you what to do, she showed you. They still taught penmanship in those days, and she would stand at the blackboard and carefully and methodically write those cursive letters with chalk on the blackboard in as fine a hand as Daryl had ever seen. For that matter she saw to it that students paid attention during class, didn't waste time, and woe to those who didn't at least try to do their lessons. That of course meant that in Daryl's eyes she was bad, because she would accept no B. S. about anything from students. Everybody quickly learned that lesson in her classes. The first time Daryl wised off at her she called him to the front of the class and reached into her desk drawer and yanked out a paddle that looked two feet long, in addition to the fact that holes were bored into it. She turned him around, grabbed his belt and pulled it up to tighten his knickers, then whacked him hard on the butt two or three times with that thing. It hurt like hell, and Daryl had quickly learned to keep on the old gal's good side if at all possible. Sometimes, if it suited her fancy, she would administer other punishments. One of her favorites was requiring the boy or girl she was disciplining to stand in front of the classroom, with their arm outstretched and their palm held skyward, holding a large book on that hand for several minutes. It sounded harmless enough, but Daryl and the other kids quickly discovered that after three or four minutes or so you experienced agonizing pain in your arm when you were unfortunately required to carry out that task, just another of McKamey's numerous punishments from the Devil.
After Daryl's family had moved up on Oklahoma Avenue, a boy named Luther moved into the neighborhood, on Anderson Street. He was a farm boy from out in the country, and always wore overalls to school and some of the more mischievous boys in school started calling him "country hick." Among one who was the loudest was Marvin, who also lived down on Anderson. After about a week or so of receiving those taunts, one day after school -- near the corner of Anderson and Cornelia -- Luther decided he'd had enough, so he jumped on Marvin, right in Marvin's front yard. They rolled back and forth beating the hell out of each other for a couple of minutes before Marvin's mother came out onto the front porch and demanded they stop the fighting, but of course they ignored her and continued the fight. She walked back into the house and soon reappeared with one of those huge round tubs full of wash water, although it was hard to imagine how she managed to carry the thing with all that water. She poured the water directly on top of Marvin and Luther, who were still scuffling on the ground, which pretty well stopped the fight, since their mouths and noses were filled with the soapy water, and they were busily trying to find some way to breath again. She hopped down and grabbed Marvin by the arm, hoisted him onto the porch, yelled to Luther to go home, and whisked Marvin inside the house. The fight was over, and Daryl didn't ever hear anybody calling Luther a "country hick" again after that episode.
Daryl didn't really know that much about his Father, John. When he was a youngster his Father usually gave him and his sister Jean some Christmas presents, but Daryl really didn't know that much about him, because most years he would only see his Father maybe one or two other times during the year. One thing he did remember was the story his Father had told when Daryl was visiting his other grandmother -- his father's mother, whose name was Helen, and who lived in the old house in North Knoxville, where his father had been raised. Daryl was about ten years old when he heard the story from John, who talking about his earlier years, when he had lived in that same house, which was located next door to John's father's house - Daryl's grandfather's. John's father, Daryl's grandfather, had died in 1942, and Daryl didn't remember him at all. When he was growing up, John had obviously spent a lot of time at that old homestead, as it was next door to the frame house John's father had built on the rear portion of the same property, behind the original dwelling. Daryl was intrigued as he listened to stories about the boarders who had roomed at his father's grandparent's house years ago. It seemed that most of the borders were interns from the General Hospital, located just up the street. They usually had two or three of those young men living at the house, paying room and board. All of the meals were served at a large dining room table, complete with fine china and silverware, and often the interns were full of mischief, playing subtle tricks on each other. Like the time when one of them lifted the lid from his desert plate to discover a human thumb instead of the expected dessert, sneaked beneath the lid by one of his fellow roomers. More bizarre was the fact that down in the dirt basement of that house those interns, who apparently had ample access to cadavers from the hospital, were not adverse to practicing their trade, using various actual body parts they had sneaked down there from the hospital. That circumstance had created a neighborhood sensation years later, when a plumber, who had been hired to do some work in the basement, uncovered human bones and quickly called the police. What appeared to be the entire Knoxville Police force swooped down on the house. Digging with shovels, they uncovered a wide variety of human bones. Daryl's father said it took a lot of explaining to finally convince the police where those bones actually came from.
One year Mama -- Daryl's grandmother -- took Daryl on the trip with her when she attended one of the annual conventions of the BRT Women's Auxiliary. It was a club of the wives of men who worked at the Southern Railway, the "Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen". They had a convention somewhere each year, and that year it was in Savannah, Georgia. Daryl had no idea why Mama decided to take him with her that year, and it was the only time she ever did. When those convention people gathered at the beach in Savannah at dinnertime on the first night, some huge metal pots were steaming and Daryl was curious to know what they held. The pots were full of shrimp. At home, Daryl had never eaten shrimp, and he didn't even know what shrimp was. His usual fare consisted of the standard daily North Knoxville food, such as pinto beans and cornbread, fried chicken, fried pork chops, fried steak - or about anything else that was fried. Whether they didn't know any better, or whether it was the way they did it in those days Daryl didn't know, but he was amazed to watch the men and women stick those things in their mouths, shells and all, and crunch down on them, although eventually discarding the pieces of shell. At least that was the way Mama and those standing with her were eating them. That prospect kept him away from shrimp then and for a long time afterwards. Maybe some people did devour shrimp in the manner used by those people that day in Savannah, but Daryl never again seen any evidence of it. In later years, once he had discovered the various alternative methods of eating them, sans crunching down on the shells, he found shrimp to be a tasty and pleasing alternative to the usual fare he'd grown up eating at home in North Knoxville.
When Daryl was still in school at Mynders, a new girl moved into his neighborhood. She was in Daryl's classroom at Mynders. She lived on Anderson Street, next to the Nazarene Church. Daryl thought surely she must have been an Indian, or certainly had an ample supply of such genes in her ancestry, with high cheek bones and dark black hair. Daryl thought she was pretty, and she was one of his first "crushes". Her name was Juanita, but she spelled it " Wanetah ". After a few months, she moved away, and he never saw her again. Many years later, Daryl accidentally ran across her senior picture in a high school annual from one of the schools in Knoxville, the same year he had graduated from another school in the city. He thought she seemed attractive enough in that picture, but for some reason she was not as pretty as his memory had always convinced him she had been when they were in grammar school. A lot of things Daryl remembered as a youngster as being prettier or bigger or better or nicer seemed to have undergone marked changes in later years.
CHAPTER FOUR
When World War Two ended, church bells rang for a long time all over Knoxville. Daryl was eleven years old then, and for some reason all the excitement in his neighborhood seemed to make him feel uneasy. Since he had the nine cents to go to the movie, he decided to walk down to Happy Holler and go to the Joy, just to get away from all the noise. He got to the theater, bought his ticket, walked through the red curtain, and groped his way in the darkness to find a seat. Once his eyes became accustomed to the light, he could see that there were only a dozen or so people in the theater. It made little difference to Daryl what movie was playing, because he felt more comfortable being there, away from the outside noise and hubbub. But he had barely gotten settled in his seat when suddenly the screen went blank and the house lights came on. Old R. C. stuck his head through the curtain at the top of the left aisle. "Come on out", he screamed, "we're closing for the day ... the War's over!" Hell, Daryl already knew the war was over. That's why he had come down there, to get away from all the excitement. He scurried up the aisle and went to the box office, only to discover that it had already been vacated and realized that there was no way he was going to get a refund for the ticket he had just bought five minutes earlier. As he left the theater he heard the piercing sound of church bells that were still ringing all over town. Walking back up Oklahoma Avenue he thought he would remember that if he was ever asked "what were you doing the day the war ended", his answer would be that he had been getting screwed out of nine cents.
Bob was a couple of years younger than Daryl. He lived on Bernard Street, a couple of doors from the house Daryl had once lived in. Later, after Daryl moved to Anderson, then to Oklahoma, then finally to Lincoln Park, he would still saw Bob sometimes, since his dad also worked for the railroad, and he would come with his folks to the picnics held out at Chilhowee Park by the railroad employees. Bob's dad was named Fred, and he was at least seven feet tall - the tallest man Daryl had ever seen except maybe at Freak Show at a Carnival or at the Fair. Fred could be ornery when he wanted to, and few men messed with the giant of a man. One time Daryl took a ride with Bob and his dad downtown. Different from most families Daryl knew, Bob's dad actually had a car, a 1938 Ford, and he was driving it that day. Of course, with his size, he had to push the driver's seat all the way back, and he still had to scrunch down, with his knees almost to his chest level. Fred was a notoriously slow driver, and that day as usual he was methodically puttering down Gay Street. A man in a car behind them was obviously exasperated with Fred's creeping pace, and kept blowing his horn, but Fred paid no attention and slowly continued to creep along. Finally, they came to a place where the driver could ease around them, and as the driver came alongside Fred's car he stopped, honked his horn, yelled some cuss words in Fred's direction, got out of his car, and hurriedly came around walked towards the front of Fred's car. Fred said nothing, but just slowly shook his head, turned off the ignition, opened the door, and slowly exited from the car. The other driver, unaware that his anticipated adversary was hardly the size of a normal man, was obviously astonished as Fred unwound and finally stood at full length facing him. The man muttered something Daryl couldn't understand, ran around and jumped back in his car, and sped away down Gay Street with nary another word, obviously realizing hat he had lost the desire to challenge this slow driver. It was probably to his advantage that he did so, because Odie had once told Daryl a story about one night in Happy Holler, at the Blue Goose, when some guy had smarted off at Fred, whereupon Fred, with only his open hand, knocked the man about ten feet into a wall, and out cold in the process. Fred opened the door to the '38 Ford, squeezed himself back into the driver's seat, and proceeded slowly down Gay Street. Nobody else challenged his snail's pace that day.
Daryl never forget another experience he had one time when he was with Bob. It was in the fall, when the women's BRT Auxiliary had their annual picnic out at Chilhowee Park. All of the families of the Southern Railway employees came to the picnic, including Bob and his parents. Everybody brought food, and Daryl got his fill of fried chicken and other goodies. But somebody always brought that gadawful cold maccaroni, something that Daryl always avoided like the plague and he could never figure out how anybody could eat that stuff. After they had eaten, Daryl and Bob walked through the tunnel under Magnolia and into the amusement park . They decided to ride the Ferris Wheel. Bob was always something of an antsy boy and never could stay still, so when they got aboard the Ferris Wheel he was already rocking the seat. Daryl told him to stop shaking the damned thing, but Bob paid him no heed and continued the rocking. The Ferris Wheel operators would always be sure that the first time you got aboard that they would stop your seat right at the very top when they let the next passengers onboard. Sure enough, they were stopped at the top, and there was Bob rocking that seat back and forth as hard as he could. Daryl almost panicked, shouting at Bob to stop the foolishness, but immediately it was too late, because Bob had rocked the seat so violently that the thing turned completely upside down. It stayed there, with both of them with their arms hanging downward, held only by the crossbar across their laps. They were screaming to high heavens, but with the nearby calliope sounding at full blast and other noises and music blaring, the Ferris Wheel operator didn't hear them. Or at least if he did he paid no attention, because he started the thing up again and they were headed downward, still hanging in their upside down position. By then, the operator had turned his attention to some nearby female and was talking to her and wasn't even looking at the Ferris Wheel. The thing got to the bottom, their arms scraped the walkway on the way back around, and suddenly the seat up righted itself as they started their ascent again. Daryl had thought he was going to die then and there, because he was sure that one bar wasn't going to hold them in the seat, but somehow it had stayed put. He told Bob if he rocked that damned seat again he would kill him when they got off the Ferris Wheel. They were both shaky and still scared when the operator, who obviously never once had a clue what had happened, finally let them off. The didn't talk much as they walked back through the tunnel to the picnic grounds. Neither of them ever told their parents what had happened that day.
Bob's family later moved out on Churchwell, in the Oakwood area, and one day Daryl's mother sent him to their house to pick up something -- Daryl didn't remember what -- but he stayed a while and played in the yard with Bob. Then Bob revealed that he had some of those big firecrackers, not those small ones but those about two inches long and red, that made a helluva noise when they went off. Bob pulled two or three out of a drawer in their kitchen. His mother had gone to the grocery store for a few minutes and they were alone in the house. Bob suggested that they light those babies and toss them into the front yard to explode. He gave Daryl the honor of lighting the first one. Daryl held the firecracker in his left hand and lit the fuse, then grabbed the screen door with his other hand, but the damned thing was stuck and wouldn't open. He stood there and struggled with the door as the fast burning fuse rapidly was reaching its end. He managed somehow to push the door open and tossed the firecracker through the air towards the sidewalk, watching as it explode loudly only a couple of feet after it left his hand. He'd been really scared he was going to lose some of a hand, but hadn't even considered dropping the damned thing on the floor, probably thinking he would be in real trouble if that floor was damaged with the firecracker. Daryl had finally figured out that being abound Bob was like having a curse on your hear, and something bad was always waiting to happen when you were around him. Daryl figured right then that the less he saw of this kid in the future the better off he would be, and most of the time he managed to avoid getting together with Bob again.
The earlier experience with Bob notwithstanding, Daryl still liked to go out to Chilhowee Park. By the time he was old enough to go to the park the roller coaster was already gone, but he still always thought the park was a fun place. They still had the big Ferris Wheel, swings, dodge-ems, and several other rides, plus a group of those little stands where they took your money as you attempted to win a prize by playing games that were impossible to win. One time, Daryl spent about a half dollar, a nickel at a time, shooting corks from a rifle, trying to knock over a fifteen cent pack of cigarettes. The cork would only move the pack about a half inch at a time, on a shelf that was about six or eight inches wide. It took him that much money to finally maneuver the cigarettes to the back of the shelf, but just before the pack was positioned to tumble off the shelf the sharp-eyed attendant quickly moved that pack back to the front of the shelf again. Daryl watched for a while as others were also wasting their money in the same ill-fated attempt, and he soon realized that the attendant's primary jobs were to collect money and also to be sure those cigarettes never were shot off the back of the shelf. The way Daryl figured it, those characters probably saw to it that nobody ever won a pack of cigarettes at that booth. He spent one afternoon observing the similar devious maneuvers at other booths, and decided it was best to save his money. He never again attempted to win anything at any of those booths. Hell, even when somebody actually occasionally won something, instead of giving them one of those nice small electrical appliances or large teddy bears or other things that were prominently hanging all over the booths, they instead would reach down under the counter and give the "winner" some little previously unseen plastic or cardboard trinket that probably cost less than a penny. What he couldn't figure out in later years was why so many people, including adults, continued to fork over their money at those no-win booths, both at the year-round booths at Chilhowee Park and at the annual Fair, held during the fall each year at the park, when there were many additional similar shady places in operation.
Jack got a barrel somewhere, like he said he would. He rolled it down along Radar Place, between Anderson and Oklahoma. Radar was really just a narrow alley, although in the 300 block, between Harvey and Cornelia, there were five small shotgun houses located on the north side of the unpaved alley. In one of those houses lived a family named Butler, and their son would sit out on their front porch picking on a guitar. His name was Carl Butler, and in later years he made something of a name for himself in the country music field. Jack stood the barrel upright in the weeds behind his house on Oklahoma Avenue. It was one of those big metal drums everybody used for a trash can and the thing weighed a ton even when it was empty. They sure as hell couldn't carry it any distance but they could roll it along its bottom edge. They were going to look for empty 'dope' bottles and roll them down to Cas Walkers' in the Holler. Daryl figured Jack stole the thing from behind somebody's house, but he didn't ask. They stood the barrel up on its edge and started rolling it down the alley. Pickings were slim at the first few houses, but by the time they got past Cornelia they struck it rich and found at least a dozen RC bottles in one trash can. "Wonder why they don't take these things back and get their deposits" said Jack. "Just lazy bastards, I guess .. or they got enough money they don't worry about it" Daryl offered, but wondering if that could really be true in his neighborhood. They found a few bottles loose along the alley. Behind old Mrs. Turner's house they dug out some Orange Crush and Coke bottles and four decks of cards, still in the packs. Daryl said "Let's get on away from here before old Charles sees us and comes out here.." Nobody knew how old Charles was, but they figured he was probably at least twenty. He lived with his mother in that big two story white house that faced Anderson, a few doors from the Nazarene church. Charles was weird. If he had a father, nobody had ever seen him. Sometimes Charles would show up wanting to play with them, just like he was their age, and they knew something was wrong with him but they weren't sure just what. But he sure did act strange sometimes and Daryl always felt uneasy about even being around the nutball, particularly ever since that day Charles had decided to take a piss in the broad daylight one day, right in the middle of the alley. Seemed like nobody in the neighborhood wanted to be around crazy old Charles, and they sure as hell weren't about to let him join in their treasure hunt that day, so they quickly moved on down the alley. They eventually had plenty of success digging old bottles out of garbage cans, and by the time they got down to Alexander Street, near the back of the Merita Bakery, the barrel was almost full of Coke, Pepsi, Nehi, Grapette and other bottles. They hurried along, rolling the barrel down the street and around the corner onto Anderson and down towards Central. Cas Walker's store then was on the corner opposite Weeks Drug Store. They wanted to get the money in time to get to the Saturday afternoon cowboy movie at the Joy Theater. The clerk at the store looked down at the barrel and picked up three or four bottles. Without counting them he took a puff from the cigar stub in the corner of his mouth and said "give you sixty cents for all of 'em". They accepted the offer without hesitation. Even as hot and sweaty as it had been rolling that barrel, they figured it was easy money for picking up somebody's trash.
R. C. was hanging around the lobby at the Joy, as usual, carefully eyeballing everyone to be sure they weren't already twelve years old, which would have required an "adult" ticket that cost a quarter instead of the nine cent ticket for children. R. C. was the manager at the Joy. He was rather pudgy, and nearly bald. They bought their tickets and each got a nickel bag of popcorn and headed down the left aisle trying to find a seat in the darkness of the theater. Halfway down the aisle, R. C. damned near ran over them as he came running towards the back door. "Come here, you little sons of a bitches" he screamed as he stuck his head through the door that led to the outside from the side of the screen at the back of the theater. Kids were always trying to sneak in through that back door. Sometimes they made it, but usually R. C. caught them. He was mumbling something about the door lock as he shuffled back up the aisle. They liked to sit close to the screen but the only seats they could find were about halfway down the left side. They found themselves sitting directly behind a woman, with a little girl standing in the seat beside her and a smaller she was holding up in her arms. Jack got the seat right behind the standing girl and he could barely see the screen. Daryl couldn't see much either, because the older girl was standing on the seat instead of sitting down. Daryl kicked some empty popcorn bags and sticky candy wrappers from under his feet, but quickly drug them back when he discovered that his shoes were sticking to the floor on lord only knew what that somebody had spilled on the floor. The little girl persisted in staring at Daryl and watching him eat his popcorn, instead of watching the movie. Her mother finally noticed the kid, but instead of telling her to sit down she looked Daryl squarely in the eye and said to the kid "honey, don't bother that boy - he's not going to give you any of his popcorn". Of course, she was right.
The afternoon sun was blinding when they exited the Joy. They walked down Central to the corner of Anderson while their eyes got accustomed to the daylight. The light was red and a KTL bus was picking up passengers. Daryl looked up Central to the right towards Baxter and no cars were in sight. "To hell with the light" he thought, and quickly ran in front of the bus towards Weeks Drug Store. Just as he cleared the edge of the bus at full steam he felt a simultaneous swift breeze and a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach he hadn't experienced before. He stopped on a dime in the middle of the street and quickly looked up Central, seeing the car that has just zipped up the street when passing the bus. Sweat broke out as he realized what had just happened. It was a split happenstance of blind luck that had kept him from being splattered all over Central, because the car had been coming past the bus at a pretty fast clip, and if Daryl's foolish run had been an eyelash earlier he would have been directly in front of the car instead of into the rush of air it had left behind a split second later. The light had already turned green but he didn't even know it or bother to look up as he halfway staggered on across the street. In his lifetime it was to be the only real brush with death he could remember, but for years afterwards he would break out in a cold sweat every time he couldn't keep that experience from resurfacing in his memory.
They walked into the drug store and started looking over the comic books. The pharmacist yelled over to Daryl, "Your films are back". Earlier that month Daryl had managed to sneak into the stadium at U. T., onto the hillside beneath the scoreboard at Shields Watkins, taking a route through the basement of the Alumni Memorial Gym building, then working his way into a seat in the east stands, to watch the Vols football game against Ole Miss. He took his Kodak 8 mm movie camera and had taken a couple of rolls of film of the game, and he'd left them at Weeks to be sent off and be developed. He was surprised they were already developed, since it usually took at least two weeks. Daryl walked over to the counter and out of the blue, the clerk said "those looked pretty good - you got some good plays at the game." Daryl said something like "really", or some other dumb thing, but he wondered if these people who were sending your movies to Kodak to get them developed were always in the habit of sticking the films in their own projector and seeing what you'd put on film. It didn't seem right to him, and although he naturally would never have such an opportunity he wished that he could somehow find a way to make a movie of a naked woman, so he could give the clerk a real eyeful, and find out if he would also think that film was 'pretty good'.
They walked back up Oklahoma to Daryl's house. Daryl got out his 8 mm movie projector, threaded the film and closed the window shade. It was soon obvious that the drug store clerk was either blind or didn't know a good film from a bad one. Both of movies were pretty crappy. Some idiot sitting right in front of Daryl at the game had bounced up and down like a yo-yo, and much of the time Daryl had better shots of the back of his head and his flailing arms than the game itself. But it turned out that when the old fart finally got too drunk to stand up it hadn't made much difference anyway, because the viewfinder on that old cheap Kodak movie camera was out of whack, and most of the plays he'd shot had cut off most of the players, the film mostly showing a lot of legs and shoes and the playing field, but not much else. A few years later, by the time Daryl had bought a decent movie camera, they wouldn't let you take a camera into the stadium at U. T. any more.
CHAPTER FIVE
All the kids in the neighborhood smoked at one time or another. Daryl decided it must be the thing to do but he wasn't ready to do it the way some of those kids down on Anderson did. They never bought cigarettes. Instead, they "shot ducks",meaning that they would walk along the sidewalk curb and look for cigarettes that had been smoked and tossed away, light up what was left with the cigarette with one of those stick matches they always carried, squeeze the thing between their thumb and forefinger, and take two or three draws on what was left. A few of the boys rolled their own. Daryl's uncle Luke had one of those Prince Albert cigarette making machines, plus the tobacco and cigarette papers. Daryl sneaked into Luke's room one afternoon to try his luck. They were really bad attempts, because even though he had watched Luke and others perform this art, placing the paper into the machine, pouring in just the right amount of tobacco, and carefully turning the crank forward and back, carefully removing the cigarette and wetting the seam with a swipe of your tongue, it looked a lot easier than it was. Daryl's were either too fat or too thin or the damned paper always got torn. He finally gave up and went outside and walked up to Jack's house. He and Jack went across the street and picked up a couple of likely looking candidates from under an old catalpa tree and lit up and smoked the Indian Tree cigars. The things smelled like crap and tasted the same way. They figured they needed a new approach. Daryl came up with one. It would take a small bit of change, which they seldom had, and in the end it turned out to be a bad idea anyway.
The scarcity of money reminded Daryl of the time Jack, Bill and Daryl had gone down to the Joy Theater one Saturday afternoon, when Bill had a couple of dollars. Bill's folks usually gave him money for doing things around the house and most times he always had more money than Daryl and Jack ever had combined. Entering the theater, Bill bought five ice cream sandwiches. FIVE of the damned things - just to show off, Daryl figured. When the got to their seats that day Bill started eating those ice cream sandwiches. He went through three of them quickly, never offering Daryl or Jack anything, although he knew good and well they both had done well to come up with the nine cents to get into the stupid movie in the first place and didn't have any more money. As Jack opened the fourth ice cream he broke off a small corner, looked at Daryl and said "want a bite ?" Daryl told him to just keep it -- or put it where the sun didn't shine. But that had been a year ago, and they hadn't had any big falling out, but Daryl always figured after that episode that Bill could sometimes be a real cheapskate.
"You got any money " asked Daryl. "A little" replied Jack. "Let's go down to Wright's and buy some cigarettes ... I've got a nickel", Daryl suggested. Jack thought the idea was OK so they cut through his back yard and through the alley down to Anderson. Like all the neighborhood grocery stores, Wright's store always had a pack or two of cigarettes opened, selling individual cigarettes for a penny each. An entire pack of cigarettes cost fifteen cents, so the stores made an extra nickel every time they got rid of a pack a cigarettes that way. Any kid could buy cigarettes in those days if they had the money. Most parents frowned on their kids smoking, and usually there would be hell to pay if you were caught in the act, but the only often-heard taboo against smoking was the stern warning that if youngsters dared to smoke the evil practice would likely "stunt their growth". They usually bought two or three cigarettes, depending on how many pennies they happened to have that day. But Jack was going to throw in a dime with Daryl's nickel and they were getting a whole pack. Neither one had really smoked that much before, but more seemed better they figured. "Pack a' Luckies" said Daryl, dropping the fifteen cents on the counter. "You boys buyin' a whole pack today?" said the old man with the thick glasses, quickly adding "Well, you came on the right day boys ... I've got a helluva bargain for you today. A whole pack of cigarettes for a dime!" "What kind of cigarettes" said Jack, in a suspicious voice. "Why, these right here" he said as he reached on the back shelf and tossed out a pack of something called Rameses on the counter. "You see, they won't let us keep cigarettes on our shelves too long these days, and nobody's bought these yet, so I'm going to have to sell them at my cost." They both looked at each other, obviously with some sense of misgivings about the proposition, and afraid of making a mistake by not just buying the Luckies. But this way they would each have the same investment of five cents each, and the temptation to save a nickel was too much of a bargain to resist. Anyway, they figured cigarettes were cigarettes. If nothing else that day, they learned a lesson about such questionable bargains. They went up the alley to the old garage behind Jack's house. Jack's folks didn't use it for anything, and they sure as hell didn't have a car to park in it.
Nobody had a car, except old Mr Kyker who lived on the corner of Oklahoma and Cornelia, up the street from Daryl, and of course old man Marsh, the preacher down at the Nazarene Church, who lived on the opposite corner. Otherwise, few in that neighborhood had a car. Most didn't need one, which was a convenient circumstance since nobody could have afforded to buy the gasoline even if they'd had a car. Everybody walked to get wherever they wanted to go, and if they had to go a considerable distance a streetcar token that cost a nickel would take you just about anywhere in town. Once, coming from seeing a movie at the Strand downtown, Daryl had ridden the Lincoln Park streetcar all the way through Lincoln Park and around the big house on Chickamauga and then back to Happy Hollow, so he figured you could do that anytime. Another time he caught it when it was heading in the other direction - the Number One, to Burlington - just to ride out there and see the park. That was a week or so before the Fair was going to open. He didn't have any money to go into the park and ride anything. He had found the token on Central in front of Cas Walker's, and not having anything else to do, he used the token for the ride out to Chilhowee Park. The streetcar route from Happy Holler was out Central, then onto Broadway to Henley, along Main past the car barn to Gay, back down Gay to Magnolia, then out to the park. It was a pretty good distance out there. That day, at the end of the line, the driver stopped the streetcar. Daryl was the only one left on the thing. "All out .. Burlington" the drive shouted. "I'm goin' to ride back to Happy Holler" said Daryl. "Not unless you've got another token" said the driver. "That token is just good for one way. You need another one for the ride back". Daryl didn't have any money or another token. They hadn't made him pay again that time he went out to Lincoln Park and back, but having no choice he reluctantly got off the streetcar. He watched as it headed back towards downtown and started walking. it took a while to make it all the way back home, going out Magnolia to Winona, then north to Washington Avenue, out to Sixth Avenue, up Glenwood past Broadway, and then the three additional blocks down Oklahoma to his house. It was dark and they had already had dinner and he got his butt whipped for being so late and not telling anybody where he was going. He decided that he wouldn't tell the family or anybody else that had been trapped in Burlington because that damned streetcar driver made him get off out there in the middle of nowhere.
Jack opened the Rameses. The cigarettes were about as firm as the boards on the old garage they were leaning against. "Gawamighty - that old Bastard's screwed us good ... I bet he's had these things on that shelf down there for ten years" he said. Daryl took one out of the opened pack. "Damn, this thing IS as hard as a brick" he said, gazing at what felt like a paper covered stick in his hand...." well, we'll have to smoke the damned things, cause he sure as hell ain't gonna take 'em back". They each put a cigarette in their mouth and lit them from a one of the stick matches Jack had gone up and got from the big box of Diamonds in his kitchen. "You ever smoke a Home Run?" said Daryl ..."this thing is stronger than a damned Black Hawk cigar". Jack coughed. "DAMN - that's a strong sonunufabitch ... I thought them Indian tree cigars was strong, but these thinga are gonna kill us". They had spent their money and they were stubborn and determined, so they spent the next hour or so smoking the whole pack. Their parents sure didn't know they were smoking these days, and if they found out they'd both get their butts whipped. So they had to smoke all of the things. They could have just thrown them away, of course, and later they both wished they had. They were literally green around the gills when the pack was empty. That night, Jack was as sick as a dog, and later he discovered that Jack had suffered the same fate. The crazy thing was that Daryl continued to smoke in the following years, despite the experience of his deathly sickness that day in the alley between Anderson and Oklahoma. On the other hand, he always carefully avoided buying any more of those Rameses cigarettes.
During the cold winter months Daryl always hoped for snow. If the snow was deep enough it meant school would be closed, and it also meant he could head over to Harvey Hill. They would close off Harvey because of the steep grade down the hill north from Oak Hill, and that was the time Daryl and his friends always looked forward to. It was far and away better than anything he ever experienced at any of those midway rides out at Chilhowee Park. When streets were packed with snow and ice, both Harvey and the adjoining side streets were closed off, so there was no danger from what few cars might otherwise have been traveling those streets. On those snowy days, Harvey Hill belonged to the neighborhood kids. Daryl would lie on his belly on his sled and push off onto Harvey from Oak Hill and take the rapid long and daring ride down the hill, and when he made it the bottom, at Warren, he had gathered so much momentum that he would continue the slide past Quincy, Caldwell, and almost to Springfield, just a block short of the dead end at Morelia, before he finally would come to a stop. Daryl and the other kids thought nothing of those long walks carrying their sleds to get all the way back up to the top of the hill, just anticipating another long ride down Harvey Hill, until they were finally exhausted.
Everybody listened to the radio. WNOX had the Mid-Day Merry Go Round at noon, with Lowell Blanchard, Hot Shot Elmer, and many of those local country musicians. It was before the days of television, and every day or night something was on the radio that the somebody -- and sometimes seemingly everybody -- listened to. Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, the Lone Ranger, Baby Snooks, Manhattan Merry-Go Round, Light's Out, The FBI, and on and on. On Saturday mornings, Daryl and Jean would sit in their living room, on the scratchy old mohair couch, listening to radio programs like Let's Pretend, Jack Armstrong the All American Boy, and the Quiz Kids.
Daryl had heard about television but it was something as far away from Knoxville as the ocean. Nobody had a TV, at least no family that he knew. And even if they'd had one there were no television stations in town. So it was a novelty that created excitement among the boys in the neighborhood when old Henry, who repaired radios in the basement of his house down near the corner of Anderson and Harvey, put a huge antenna on top of his house. He said he was going to repair old television sets and sell them. Somebody told Dewey about it and he told Alvin and he told Bill and he told Daryl one day when he was playing softball with a bunch of neighborhood boys down at the field near the corner of Cornelia, between Anderson and the alley that was called Rader Place.
Henry lived alone in that an old house that was painted a sickly green color. Some folks thought he might be half nuts. But anyway the kids would go down there and talk to him sometimes, and Daryl didn't think he acted nuts, except he looked kinda funny with his black horn-rimmed glasses and his hair parted in the middle. So that day they ran down there before they went home from school. Henry's shop in the basement had three windows down there were closed most of the time, but the windows were open today. They peered into a window. "Henry - you down there?" "Hey boys - what's up". Henry said as he wiped his glasses on the sleeve of his flannel shirt "You gonna be working on Televisions now", said Jack, "Bill told us that's what you've got that big aral on the roof for". "Yeah, I know a fella up in Kentucky and he's been gettin' used sets from his brother in Chicago. I got three from him last week. I'm still learnin' about 'em but I got one workin' pretty good. Come on down here and I'll show it to you". They scurried down the old wooden stairs and pushed open the half-sized door and went in the basement. The light down there came from three old hanging electrical cords with hundred watt bulbs, hanging from the rafters, and you had a hard time seeing anything, particularly coming in from the bright sunlight. But they saw the flickering screen of the black and white television sitting on the corner of the bench. "Let me fool around with this thing a minute ... that antenna up on the roof was the biggest one I could get but it works pretty good sometime. About all I can usually get is that station out of Atlanta, but it comes in better at night. Ever once in a while I can pick up the Asheville station. " He fiddled with the knobs and scooted the set around a couple of times. The sound was OK but there wasn't much picture on the thing except a bunch of snow and what looked like a man sitting at a desk. "Well you all can come back down here tonight if you wanna' see it working. It's be a lot better tonight" said Henry, still moving the set around and playing with the antenna wire. "No, don't come tonight, I ain't gonna be here. I tell you what, you all come back Friday night. They're gonna have that Joe Louis fight on, and I'm sure you boys would rather watch that". "Yeah, we'll sure and come back over here Friday night", said Daryl.
They probably talked about the fight a dozen times before Friday. Joe Louis was going to fight Jersey Joe Walcott for the second time. Old Joe had given the Brown Bomber fits in their first fight and lots of people thought he had won, but they gave the decision to Louis. They had seen the films of the fight at the Bijou downtown, and Walcott had bobbed and weaved and sometimes made Louis look silly for most of the fight. The rematch ought to be a doozy and they were going to get to see it on Henry's television set! On Friday night Jack came by Daryl's house about eight. "Let's go down to the Holler ... the fight don't start 'til nine" he said as the screen door behind Daryl. They walked down Anderson. As usual, the aroma of bread baking at the Merita filled the air as they turned down toward Anderson Street. Bob Underwood was sitting out on his porch with his Dad. "Where you all goin', to the movies ? ", he asked. "Naw, we're just walking down to Weeks' " said Daryl, not wanting anybody else to know that they were going to see the fight on Henry's television. Hell, if they told everybody about it there wouldn't be room for them to see it. They turned the corner onto Anderson and got about halfway down the block when the door banged open across the street at the Blue Goose. "And stay out of here, you goddamnedsonofabitch" screamed the short stout man with red hair, wearing a pair of dirty overall pants and a tee shirt. "If we see your ass in here again I'm gonna' beat the shit out ofyou", he yelled as he walked back inside the beer joint. The old bald-headed man staggered to his feet and shuffled a few feet up the sidewalk then turned up the alley next to McFarland s grocery store. "Wonder what the he did" asked Daryl. "He's so damn drunk he probably don't even know", suggested Jack. The Blue Goose was not a place you wanted to be anywhere near and they had both learned long ago to walk on the opposite side of the street, particularly at nighttime.
They passed My Barber Shop and the beauty shop went into the side entrance at Weeks Drug Store. They each got a Coke and sat at one of the round tables drinking them. Jack pulled out another nickel and bought the latest issue of Batman. He had a big collection of funny books at home. Bob wandered in and acted like he didn't even know them. He went to the back counter and talked to Doc Weeks. Doc reached back behind the counter and handed Bob a pack of rubbers and took his money. Bob was just a couple of years older than them but he sure as hell acted a lot older. They figured he had another "date" with that redheaded girl in the neighborhood. Lucky SOB. They were still sitting sipping on their Cokes when Daryl looked up at the big clock on the wall behind the fountain. "Shit - it's after nine - we're gonna miss some of that fight" he said. Jack grabbed the Batman and they shot out the side door. It was four blocks up to Henry's. They walked fast for a few paces. "We'd better run or we're gonna miss the whole thing" said Jack, so they started to run. They ran all the past Stewart and Cornelia, and on to Henry's house. They crossed Anderson and quickly stooped down to look into the basement window. They could see the TV screen, but it was just a big blur of snow. They yelled for Henry but he didn't answer. They walked toward the front door and heard Henry yell. He was on a ladder coming down from the roof. "Tryin' to adjust that antenna" he said. "Can't seem to get a damned thing now". He shuffled back into the basement and started fiddling with the knobs on the set, then some wires, then some other things. "Shit", he yelled. "Got a real good picture about an hour ago and now I can't get anything". The boys anxiously waited, but there was still nothing to see. After what seemed to be forever the sound finally started to come in. The first thing they heard was the voice of the referee. "Eight ... Nine ... Ten". Then, as if by magic, the picture suddenly appeared, as clear as a crystal. There was the referee holding up Louis' arm. Joe had knocked Walcott out in the eleventh round and they hadn't seen one damned second of the fight. They left without saying anything to Henry. "Bull Shit", said Jack. " Television is just a bunch of bull shit". Daryl didn't even see another television set again in Knoxville until his family was living out in Lincoln Park, when they got an old used Dumont television set around 1951. Even then, there still were no stations in town, and all they could sometimes see with the an old one channel antenna on the roof were enticing occasional glimpses of programs from the stations in Atlanta and Asheville, and occasionally some inexplicable reception from stations located hundreds of miles away, including Havana, Cuba, Manitoba, Canada, and Midland - Odessa, Texas.
Daryl usually got his haircut at Archie's Barber Shop. There was another barber shop straight across Anderson Street, called My Barber Shop, but Daryl was in the habit of getting his hair cut by Archie. Old Archie was a funny character. Later his son, little Archie, went into barbering at the Happy Holler shop, then after old Archie was no longer in the business the son opened another barber shop several blocks away, out on Central. Old Archie usually cut Daryl's hair, but on a particular day there were four or five people sitting in the shop waiting for a haircut. That was before the son went to work there, but Archie had just hired a young barber for his second chair because he couldn't handle all the business. Daryl sat in the chair reading a comic book for a few minutes, then Archie yelled "Daryl, it's probably going to be an hour or so before I can get to you. Why don't you let my new man cut your hair today? This is George, and he does a real good job". Reluctant, but not wanting to wait an hour, Daryl put down the comic book and slowly walked to the adjoining barber chair. George put the white barber cloth across Daryl and tied it at the back of Daryl's neck. "You want a burr", he asked. Most the boys wore a flat top in those days, and Daryl was no exception, and he carefully told the new man he wanted a flattop, not a burr, which to him meant a veritable scalping. "O. K.", said the new barber, who quickly began attacking Daryl's hair with his electric clippers. Within what seemed to be an unusually short period of time, the barber was finished. He brushed the loose hairs from the back of Daryl's neck and tossed on some talcum powder. He walked around to the front of Daryl and turned the barber chair 180 degrees, so Daryl was facing the mirror. Daryl was appalled with what he saw. He had been butchered and quickly realized that he damn near had no hair left at all on his head. All he wanted to do was pay his quarter and get out of there and hope that his hair would grow back into something that looked halfway normal as soon as possible. But before he was allowed to escape, the new barber looked over at Archie, pointed to Daryl's head, and uttered a tell-tale statement ; "Well, how's that for my first try, Archie ?" As he was hurrying back home, hoping nobody he knew would see him, Daryl vowed that he would sit in that damned barber shop all day the next time if it was necessary, just to avoid that new so-called barber. He wondered about his own stupidity in letting this make believe barber use his head for a practice dummy.
Buddy was not big at all. In fact, he was pretty small. But he was wiry, had a bad temper, and thought of himself as a fighter. He would fight just about anybody at the drop of a hat, and he seemingly often looked for such frays. He usually managed to hold his own in most such scuffles. He managed to get into a fight with Bill every other week. They would start arguing about something on the way home from school and it would escalate until Bill would take off his glasses, put down his books and assume the pose, and they would go at it again. He'd hit Buddy and Buddy would hit him, and it would usually last for about five minutes until they were finally just standing there circling each other, both inevitably with a bloody nose. Then they would decide the fight was over and continue on home, each with scratches and bruises. and occasionally a black eye, but with neither one ever really declared the winner. Daryl had only gotten into it once with Buddy, but it had turned into a wrestling match and really hadn't amounted to that much. One time, Buddy - who really hadn't previously strayed down in the section west of Central - came to Brookside field and wanted to play ball. They already pretty much had a team, and for a while he was just sort of an extra, but somebody didn't show up one day so he got to play. A blond-headed boy with the nickname of Bootlegger was a member of Daryl's team. Daryl was never sure if he really got that name from being involved in such activities, because he was only the age of the other boys on the team, but the rumor was that he was a sometimes runner for one of the area's well known bootleggers. Bootlegger could be as mean as a rattlesnake, and few of the area boys ever crossed him. Buddy didn't understand that these boys down in that section were different, meaner, and tougher than most of those boys he had been fighting on a weekly basis. He made the mistake of making a smart-ass remark to Bootlegger. Bootlegger just looked at him and told him to shut his mouth or he would shut it for him. Which was of course just what Buddy thought he wanted, and he immediately accepted the challenge. Bootlegger almost looked resigned as he sized up Buddy. "OK, you little son of a bitch', he said, and before you could blink he planted a thunderous right to Buddy's jaw. Buddy hit the ground like a rock. He was dazed, but his instincts caused him to attempt to stand up. "Now, you'd better stay down, you little bastard, or I'll put your ass down there again and hurt you bad the next time" said Bootlegger, in what Daryl thought was a charitable gesture. Buddy had obviously quickly learned his lesson and stayed on the ground until Bootlegger spit on the ground beside him and slowly walked away. Buddy had come to the wrong side of the tracks and messed with the wrong boy. To Daryl's knowledge, Buddy stayed away from Bootleggerthereafter and they never fought again. Daryl figured Buddy had obviously learned his lesson.
Daryl and Jack were beginning the walk home from Christenberry, up the hill on Harvey Street. Sure enough, there was the boy they had nicknamed "Speedy". He wore overalls and his name was Jimmy. He lived in an apartment house up on Oklahoma. Every day, no matter what time they got out of school, he was already halfway up that long incline towards Oak Hill. They wondered how he always managed to get out before everybody else, and they sure as hell wondered how he could walk so fast, because by the time they ever got to the top of that hill he was nowhere in sight. That morning they had decided to try and solve the mystery once school was out. So they started running as fast as they could up that hill, old Speedy was already out of sight before they were halfway up the hill. Daryl was halfway laughing as they ran, thinking how damned silly this whole thing seemed, but they really wanted to catch another view of the boy with rocket speed this time. They were winded when they reached Oak Hill. They stopped and stared in the distance to see that old Jimmy - still seemingly only walking at that same quick pace, but still simply walking - had somehow not already made it down to the base of the hill at Woodland Street, the little SOB was already half the way up the next block towards Scott Street. They looked at each other in disbelief. Speedy, they figured, obviously must have wings. They started walking slowly down the hill and decided never again to worry about whatever mysterious secret of rapid foot transport he was using.
They cut down across Woodland Street and stopped in the little grocery store called Woodland Cash Grocery. Any more they stopped in there lots of time just to hear the old proprietor complain about something. He was as bald as a pool ball and had a round circular bump right in the middle of his forehead. Daryl had long since nicknamed him "Knotty Bald". They never made any attempt to give any of these neighborhood store owners a bad time, but it was obvious that old man had been having trouble with neighborhood kids, because as soon as you walked into the place he would watch you like a hawk. Daryl looked over the moon pies and banana flips, trying to decide which one he wanted to buy. Old Knotty yelled "OK boys, don't be punching holes in the cakes!" Such a thought having been nowhere in his mind, Daryl said "I'm just looking - I haven't touched anything ". The old man still sternly warned, "Wellllll .... just don't be punching holes in the cakes!" They walked out without buying anything and damn near rolled on the sidewalk with laughter. "What the hell is wrong with that old sonofabitch" said Jack, "all we were doing was just standing there". Daryl offered the opinion that the old man was not only half crazy but was also stupid, because he was just giving the idea for more mischief to neighborhood kids who came into the place, even though it was apparent that some of the local ragamuffins had obviously had already been committing such pranks.
CHAPTER SIX
Market Street was a dirty and stinking place. The Market House covered the whole block between Union and Wall, with narrow Market street on each side, where farmers lined the street, selling their fruits and vegetables. Daryl had been up there a few times but this was the first time he had been there without his mother or grandmother or stepfather. The Market House itself was filled with meat markets, eating places, flower shops and lots of other businesses, lining both sides of the building. Daryl never liked to stay in there very long and he couldn't understand how the people who worked there managed to stand the place all day long. To him, the Market House smelled like a cross between a funeral parlor - since the odor of those flowers was just like what he had smelled at funeral homes - and the Tennessee River, because of the stench from the fish markets. Daryl's cousin from Briceville, named Daniel, had come to Knoxville to stay with his family for the weekend. Daniel was a couple of years older than Daryl. On Saturday morning they had walked downtown from the Holler, up Broadway from Central past the Courtesy Drug Store, then down to Gay Street and across the viaduct. They had stopped at the Arcade on Gay Street and played some of the games and then walked on up to the Market House. Daryl didn't know how or where he got it, but Daniel had money and was paying for everything and Daryl never spent a cent of the fifty cents his mother had given him that morning. They went into the Market House to get something to eat. They sat down on stools at Williams Sandwich Shop. The stench from the City Fish Market across the aisle was not very appealing to Daryl and it kinda made him lose his appetite. But he was hungry. Daniel ordered a plate lunch and Daryl got a hamburger. The plate lunch looked pretty good but while Daryl thought the hamburger was OK he thought it tasted a little different and he wondered what kind of meat it was. It was World War Two and meat was hard to come by and he figured he might have been eating most anything. They finished lunch and walked to the south end and out onto Union Avenue.
The Roxy was on the north side of Union between Market Street and Walnut. Daryl had heard boys in the neighborhood talk about, it but this was the first time he'd had a chance to get in there. Daniel was far from an angel, so he'd told Daryl's mother they were going to the Strand that day. Fat chance. A couple of cowboy movies were playing, but they both knew sure as hell that they were really going in there to see that live stage show. Daniel bought the adult tickets and they walked right in with no questions from the ticket taker about the fact that Daryl supposedly was not old enough to be allowed inside the Roxy. Daryl was surprised that he could get in so easily. He was less surprised when his eyes got adjusted to the dark and he saw how many other young boys were already in there. They got in at the tail end of one of the movies and then sat through the next one, something with Charles Starrett. Then the theater darkened. The lights lit up the red curtain and the piano and drums started banging out the loud music. Daryl hadn't seen anything like it before, anywhere, and the whole atmosphere made him tingle. First, there was a chorus line of scantily clad girls. They were hardly American beauties. A couple of them didn't look too bad, another was a bit on the plump side, and one looked like she must have been a prize fighter before she got this gig, because when she turned sideways her profile revealed a nose that almost was no nose at all, virtually flattened to her face. The chorus line did some dancing, suggestive bumping, and some pretty bad singing. Then the star attraction, "Webfoot" Watts, made his appearance. Throughout the rest of the performance he was the most visible presence on stage, sometimes accompanied by other comic cronies, sometimes with the girls of the chorus, sometimes alone. But he was obviously the "star" of the show. The skits were as raunchy as the jokes Daryl often heard from the boys in his neighborhood. He was surprised that they could get away with the language and some of those jokes. In one routine, one of the girls came on stage twisting around, with a basket in her hand, reaching up in the air for imaginary somethings. Webfoot wandered onto the stage and asked what she was doing. "Catching butterflies", she said. "What for?" "I'm going to take them into town and trade them in for butter"she replied, leaving the stage. Another girl came on stage, doing the same thing. "What are you looking for", Webfoot asked again. "I'm picking apple blossoms, so I can take them into town and trade them in for apples" she said. Webfoot had a puzzled look, then suddenly started stomping around the stage, slamming down those two foot long shoes he wore. The girl asked "Now what are YOU doing"? "Hell", says Webfoot. "I'm lookin' for cockroaches". Blackout. Daryl had no idea at the time that he was actually seeing were old-time off-color routines that had been around in theaters throughout the country for many years before Webfoot Watts ever hit the Roxy stage. But Daryl surely enjoyed the show, and he remembered his first trip to the Roxy long afterwards.
They left before the second movie started, walked back from the Roxy, went down along Gay Street, and turned down Vine towards Central. There were a hodgepodge of businesses on Central, including grocery stores, shoe shops, barber shops, pool halls, cafes, used clothing stores, and all kinds of places. It was a seedy street, and Daryl thought even Happy Holler was a cleaner place than here, since he was familiar with that territory and felt more at ease back there than he did down on Central between Vine and Jackson. They crossed the railroad tracks and walked up past Magnolia and Fifth Avene. Knoxville High School was on the right. The Trojans generally had one of the best football teams around, but a few years later Kingsport came to town and Daryl had gone to that game to watch the Indians stomp KHS all over the field, 40 to 7. They got home just in time for dinner. Daniel's uncle picked him up and took him back home to Briceville late Sunday afternoon. He and his family soon moved to Michigan. Daryl didn't see him again for another forty years, when Daniel had come home to attend his mother's funeral, in what had been Coal Creek, then long since called Lake City.
Daryl was sometimes confused in later years when he would sometimes hear people talking about having seen a performer named "Cotton" Watts at the Roxy Theater. He has long assumed that somehow the comic he had seen used different names at different times, but later he was told that indeed there had been a completely different performer at the Roxy a few years earlier, apparently a relative of the latterday "Webfoot" Watts.
Mama's cooking might not have been the healthiest in town but Daryl would stack it up against any he'd eaten anywhere. She'd fry chicken or steak after tossing a big chunk of lard in the skillet and dousing the meat in flour. Maybe it was the lard, or possibly the coal stove, but whatever it was it was the best Daryl ever tasted. She always made biscuits, and often had green beans, cooked with fatback. Sometimes she would fix what she called fried corn, cut from the cob and fried in grease made from fried salt bacon. She fried the salt bacon well done and Daryl damned near liked it as well as the corn. Whatever it was, in later years Daryl never again found meals that tasted the same or as good as those he'd enjoyed as a youngster.
Daryl always liked that fried chicken, but not the preliminary preparations that took place before it made to the skillet. Mama would buy a couple of live chickens down at Cas Walkers, bring them home, take them into back yard, grab them by the neck, and wring them into a fast twisting motion until their heads snapped off. After the headless chickens ran aimlessly through the yard and finally quickened, she would take them to the kitchen. Daryl figured if that procedure was cruel to the chickens, what followed was cruel to him - or at least to his nostrils. She had always prepared in advance a large pot of boiling water, into which she dropped the chickens. That was to make it easier to pluck their feathers, but it likewise created an unbearable stench for a while in the kitchen and adjoining rooms in the house.
Mama was Daryl's grandmother. They lived with her from the time he was born until they moved to Lincoln Park. Papa was his granddad, but Daryl only remembered him after he'd had a stroke and would playfully run around the house somewhat like a child, playing hide and seek with Daryl, when Daryl was very young. Papa had another stroke and died in 1943. That day Mama ran onto the front porch and screamed for several minutes throughout the neighborhood when he died. They had Papa's casket at their house and people were in and out and talking all the time and the whole thing was upsetting to Daryl. He even talked his mother into letting him go to the movie down at the Joy after they buried Papa.
Daryl's mother's brother - his uncle Luke - was in the army, stationed in North Africa. He was an MP. He didn't get to come home for Papa's funeral and didn't get back until the war was over. When he had been drafted in 1941 he had sold his old Motel T Ford for twenty-five dollars. He had only one girlfriend that Daryl could ever remember. Her name was Lucille. She was supposed to wait for him while he was overseas, but like lots of other American girls in those times, the wait was too long, and she had married someone else during the war. But by the time Luke got back in 1945 she was divorced, and they started seeing each other again and they soon got married. Daryl never did know what happened, but they were only married for a couple of weeks when Lucille left and was never heard from again. It wasn't too long afterwards that Luke turned into a dedicated drunk and lost his job with the railroad. Having seen similar situations in other neighborhood households then and in later years, Daryl eventually came up with the theory that every family in the country had at least one uncle - either a real uncle, or some relative who was commonly known as "uncle" - who was an alcoholic. In later years, he asked that question to many different people, and the answers seemed to confirm his theory, as without exception everyone he ever asked admitted that indeed they'd had an uncle who was an alcoholic. Daryl sometimes thought maybe they should clarify the dictionary definition of "alcoholic" with a notation that said "synonym for Uncle".
Luke had been injured as a young man when he fell out of the stadium out at Caswell Park at a Smokies' baseball game, which event his mother - Daryl's grandmother, Mama - always claimed was the beginning of his plunge into alcoholism. But that had been before the war, and Daryl couldn't figure how he could have been in the army for more than four years during World War Two as an alcoholic. But once Lucille left, Luke quickly took the downward path and seemed to drink more and more, particularly after losing his job. He would often stagger home late at night. One night he came in about eleven o'clock on shaky legs, and even though he was in bad shape he decided he had to have another few drinks before giving up for the night. It was a Friday night and Daryl had been to the movies down at the Joy and hadn't yet gone to bed. Luke was cursing and fuming about needing a bottle of whiskey and Mama was trying to convince him to go to bed. Luke staggered towards the front door, thinking he would walk somewhere to get another drink. But he fell down on the porch and couldn't even make it to the front steps. He half crawled back into the hallway and just sat on the floor with a dazed look on his face, mumbling something nobody could understand. Finally, he pulled himself up and sat down on the hall tree seat, next to the telephone. "Hell.." he slurred ".. Ol Butter'll bring me some whiskey .." ."Butter" was apparently the nickname of one of the area bootleggers, although the name Daryl had usually had heard Luke mention was "Rooster". Luke staggered to the telephone, picked up the receiver, and started dialing. He was almost too far gone to hold the phone, let alone see the numbers to know which ones to dial. But he slowly persisted and somehow managed to dial the full five numbers - - which of course were the wrong ones. He mumbled something to whoever answered and hung up the phone. Then he just sat there for two or three minutes and stared into space. Daryl thought he had gone to sleep sitting there, when suddenly he straightened up and said "ALRIGHT, BY GOD". It was as if some great revelation had come to him. He picked up the telephone again and dialed "zero", somehow realizing that the operator might give him - or maybe even dial - the phone number he couldn't remember. But his brief recollection of that fact did little to clarify his mind. Before that conversation was over, Daryl was rolling on the floor with laughter and even Mama had cracked a smile.
" ... hello ... lizzen, operator ... I need ... uh ... "
Pause
"... operator, I need to get the ... uh ... you know .. I need ... uh ..."
Pause
" ... oh, shit. ... lizzen, operator, I need the phone number for .... uh ... waitamninute now ... it's .... uh .... hiz name is ... he lives over there at ... ah, what the hell iz his name .... uh ... it's uh ... well, he's .. uh ... his name is .... oh hell, operator, you know his name ... they call him 'Old Butter' ..."
Pause
" ... hello .... hello ... "
Pause
" ... hello ..... hello - - - well, the damn operator's hung up on me !! .."
Luke put his head between his hands and his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. Daryl laughed his way upstairs to his bedroom and jumped into bed. He figured Luke had eventually passed out because he didn't hear anything else from him that night.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A family named Brown lived next door. Daryl reckoned that old Mrs. Brown's husband must be dead. At least he'd never seen or heard of him, and he really never thought to ask anybody. She had a son and a daughter living with her, although both of them looked almost as old as their mother. The daughter was a big woman and neither she or her mother were particularly pleasant. Neither was that son, whose name was George. But at least the daughter had a job somewhere, because every morning she left the house all dressed up and Daryl had seen her catching the KTL streetcar in the Holler one morning, headed downtown. But if George worked, or for that matter did anything at all nobody knew what it was. They had a back porch and his bedroom was at the rear of the house. He would sometimes be on the porch looking down at the alley. Most of the time he had a can of beer in his hand as he sat on the glider. That was probably what he did best of all - drink beer. A time or two he had yelled threatening remarks at some of the local kids, including Daryl, and nobody in the neighborhood particularly cared for him. Odie likewise didn't care much for that family, particularly grouchy old George. Daryl figured that Odie might find a reason to go over there sometime and beat the shit out of him - which Daryl knew his stepfather was capable of doing if he had the notion. He never did, but one day he got even with the old fart for his smartass attitude towards the neighborhood kids. Odie had bought the family a dog. She was a big red chow and they named her Woolfie. Woolfie took right to Daryl and his sister Jean, and she was a great guard dog, protecting them from anybody who even acted like they were coming anywhere near the house uninvited. They were sometimes worried that Woolfie might bite somebody - or worse - so they kept her inside most of the time, and walked her on a chain when she was outside. Not too long after Woolfie became a part of the family the little black and white dog that old man Brown owned started wandering into Daryl's back yard and using it for its personal bathroom. Soon the dog got braver and started using the area near Daryl's front porch as his private privy. Odie saw the little cur making his mess one day and yelled him back into his yard, cussin' the dog and the Browns, and already laying his plans. That night, when it was completely dark, he told Daryl to watch him have a little fun. He turned out the lights in the living room. Then he carefully opened the front door, but left the screen door closed and latched. He took a couple of chairs from the kitchen and sat inside the screen door with Daryl and called for Woolfie. Woolfie came trotting in from the back bedroom where he liked to sleep on an old pillow in the corner of the room. Odie rubbed her head and told her to sit. Woolfie plopped down, wagging her tail and enjoying the petting. "We'll just sit here for a few minutes" he told Daryl. Sure enough, in a few minutes the Brown's dog came wandering through the hedges towards their front sidewalk. Odie waited a few seconds then slowly stood up and unlatched the screen door. He threw open the door and shouted "sic' him Woolfie", and the red chow stormed onto the porch, down the steps, and straight towards the black and white. The cur flew through the hedge like he was shot through a cannon. Woolfie jumped the hedge, hot on his tail, and turned down towards the alley at full speed right behind the dog. Daryl didn't see the Brown's dog again for at least a couple of weeks. In fact, he seldom ever saw the dog again. When he did, the dog was chained to the Brown's porch and never did leave his own yard again. He sure as hell didn't come in their yard any more. Daryl was to discover several times again that his stepfather was capable of similar actions when he thought they were warranted, and that he also had what some folks thought was a weird sense of humor. Daryl also thought so sometimes, but he always enjoyed that episode and some of the other antics Odie pulled over the years.
Daryl sat on the front porch with his feet dangling, eating a bologna sandwich. The ice truck rolled up the street and stopped halfway between their house and the Carmen's house. He chomped down the last corner of the sandwich and watched as the ice man looked at the porch signs. Their sign was not hung out because they had gotten fifty pounds of ice yesterday. He couldn't see the sign on the house next door because of the big tree that blocked his view but it must have been hanging there, because the ice man threw the burlap over his shoulder, drove his ice pick into the huge square block of ice on the truck, and chizzled out what looked like a fifty pound block. He hoisted it onto his shoulder and carried the ice towards the Carmen's front porch. Flay ran across their front yard and sat down on the porch beside Daryl. "You think he'll raise hell today?' he asked. "Yeah, he'll probably chase us off the truck before it's gone a half a block" said Daryl. The ice man returned to the truck and threw the canvas onto the back and climbed back into the cab. They were already halfway to the sidewalk and when he started the truck they ran and jumped up on the rear gate, gathering slithers of ice and sucking on them. If he saw them he didn't say anything this time. The both jumped off at the corner of Cornelia, but Daryl lost his balance and while he was half running and half stumbling to keep from falling down in the street he stumped his big toe. "Goddam .. sonofabitch ... shit ... hellfire and damnation" he screamed as he ran around in a circle. Everybody went barefoot in the summertime and so did Daryl. He didn't know why, but he managed to do that same thing at least a couple of times every summer. The pain was finally beginning to go away. He looked at the toe. It was pretty banged up but not too bad and it was just bleeding a little. "I'm going back down to the house and put something on this toe ... just wait here on the corner for me, I'll be back in a minute" he yelled to Flay, hopping back down Oklahoma towards his house. After only three or four steps he yelled "SHITFIRE!" as he stumbled just after going from the grass to the sidewalk, now jumping around in a larger and faster circle than the one he had made just a minute before. Sure enough, he'd done it again - stumped the same big toe before he could even get back to his house. He made a half dozen circular runs before the pain started going away this time. He hopped towards his front porch and set his right heel on the first step. The whole end of his big toe now torn away, the raw meat dangling at the end of his big toe, and the thing was bleeding all over the place. It wasn't the first or last time he would pull this dumb-ass trick and he wondered if something must be wrong with somebody who was so clumsy that they could rip up the same big toe like that in the same place in less than a couple of minutes. After going inside the house, he hobbled back up to the corner of Cornelia, having smeared Mercurochrome on his big toe and covered it with a bandage he'd made out of the tin of gauze and roll of adhesive tape from the cabinet in the bathroom upstairs - - which was the only bathroom they had in that old two story house. "Messed up my big toe real good this time" said Daryl. "I do that all the time" said Flay, " did you put iodine on it?" " No, that stuff burns like hell" said Daryl, "I used Mercurochrome".
They walked slowly up towards Cornelia. Doug was cutting the grass in his yard, pushing the rusty old lawnmower along the patch of ground between the sidewalk and the street. "Hey you little farts, where you goin'?" Doug was several years older than either of them, and a lot bigger. They really didn't know him very well. He was already in high school. They had moved into green frame house next to the alley a few months ago. "You want to see something you've never seen before" he said. "Like what" said Daryl. "Like somethin' you've never seen before, that's all", said Doug.. "Well, show us then", answered Daryl. "No, I ain't gonna show you, I'm going to bet you ... each one of you, a quarter. You got a quarter?" "What for" said Flay. Doug quickly answered, "I'll bet you that I've got four tits ... you wanna bet?" "Bull shit" said Daryl, "nobody's got four tits ... anyway, we ain't gonna bet you any money to find out . . Let's go, Flay". The both shuffled up the sidewalk. Doug called to them, "OK - a quarter for both of you. I'll bet you just one quarter". They stopped and looked at each other. This was the silliest thing he'd ever thought about doing. "You think he's telling the truth?" Daryl asked Flay. "Hell no, I think he's just a big blowhard. I've got some money. I'll put fifteen cents in if you've got a dime, and we'll just make us a little money". They turned and walked back up the sidewalk. Daryl handed Flay the dime and Flay added his fifteen cents and held it in his palm in front of Doug. "OK. Here's our quarter. Let's see your money, cause we want to be sure you've got the money too ". "I don't need to show you no damned money" said Doug, reaching down and yanking his shirt out of his pants and pulling it up to his shoulders. "Read 'em and weep ". They looked, and then looked at each other, and then looked again. Sure enough, he was telling the truth. There they were, each one about four or five inches below the ones that were supposed to be there, a second pair of nipples. Flay handed Doug the money. "I've made a lot of quarters on these babies" Doug said, pointing with his index fingers to his extraordinary second pair, as he pulled down his shirt. He laughed as he took the mower handle and started mowing the grass again. "He's a damned freak" said Daryl, as they walked up towards Scott Street.
One day Daryl and Bill were kicking a football in the middle of the street on Oklahoma. After a while, they stopped and sat down on the curb. Bill suddenly asked Daryl if he had ever heard of something called " Doctor Pecker ". "Hell, I've heard of a Doctor Pepper, but not Doctor Pecker", said Daryl, "What is it ?" "I still don't know", said Bill, " but yesterday I was down at McFarland's grocery store with Mama. When we were getting ready to leave she remembered that Daddy told her to get some drinks and she got tongue-twisted and told that old man down there that she needed to get some Doctor Peckers. There was another man in there, and him and that old man who runs the place started laughing like hell. I never heard of a Doctor Pecker, so I figured that it must be something nasty or dirty, but I can't figure out what." Daryl didn't say anything, but he really wondered why in the world Bill didn't think the word "pecker" had obviously been the reason for the laughter.
Mynders only had five grades, so Daryl had to change schools and go to Brownlow in the sixth grade. The time seemed to pass rapidly that year and for some reason Daryl didn't have a lot of memories about his time at that school. He did remember that they played battleball in the gym at Brownlow. He hadn't played that game at Mynders, the primary reason being that Mynders didn't have a gymnasium. It was when he was at Brownlow when Daryl had joined the Gray-Y Club, which was a club for young boys, sponsored by the YMCA. The membership was very cheap - maybe a quarter for the year - and it enabled kids to use the facilities of the downtown YMCA on certain days, including the gymnasium, and the downstairs swimming pool. That was the only swimming pool Daryl ever saw where kids were required to swim completely naked. Daryl never really knew why they had such a rule and it always seemed silly to him.
Their sports teams at Brookside was made up of boys from both sides of Happy Holler, although. Glen and Daryl were about the only ones from the east side of Central. Most everybody else lived west of Central and nearer Brookside field. Cock-Eye was their manager. He coached their football team in the fall and winter and the baseball and softball teams in warm weather. He got his name honestly, because even when he was looking straight at you he always looked like he was really looking anywhere but at you, with each of his eyes heading off in different directions. He lived with his parents and a sister on Hinton Street. He was supposed to be a house painter, but he spent most of his time either playing on organized local men's baseball teams from the area or coaching the Happy Holler boys' teams, and sports seemed to be just about his only interest. Cock-Eye was involved early on in a local organization that held monthly meetings that had to do with local sports. A couple of times some of the boys on the team went with him to those meetings. For one of those meetings, at the S & W cafeteria downtown, he had arranged to borrow a 16 mm movie projector somewhere, managed to borrow the original film of one of the Vols football games from the university's's athletic department, and showed that film at S & W Cafeteria downtown. Then and in later years, Daryl really never understood why U. T. would have let somebody borrow their only film of the team's football games and he wondered if sometimes people ever borrowed those films and never returned them to the school.
Cock-Eye would get in touch with other coaches around town to arrange games. Sometimes they played at Brookside. Sometimes they went to the other team's field. They played all over town - the Moses School field, Smithwood, Lonsdale, South Knoxville, Alexander Park - wherever local boys had a team. There weren't any organized leagues for kids their age so they played whoever and wherever they could. In football, most of the boys wore jeans and jerseys, although a few of them did have shoulder pads, and some even had helmets. Daryl once read in a local newspaper that there was a youth football team somewhere in west Knoxville, and the paper claimed that they were the local Champions. The boys on Cock-Eye's team figured that either they played among themselves, or against teams from out of town somewhere, because they never played Daryl's team, or any of the other teams around town that his team from Brookside played. The newspaper also ran pictures of that team, and they actually had uniforms. Cock-Eye told them the so-called "Champion" team though they were too good to play teams from Happy Holler or Lonsdale or Fountain City, because all of those aggregations were teams with a majority of the players who didn't even have equipment, let alone uniforms. Cock-Eye also said the truth was that the uniformed team from that more affluent section of town. Daryl figured that team was afraid to play the Happy Holler team anyway, and wished that somehow his team had a chance to play that team. But that team never played any other teams in town as far as Daryl knew, and hr never figured out what made them the "Champions" of Knoxville.
For one of their football games at Brookside, when they played Lonsdale, old Cock-Eye got an old unemployed fellow from the neighborhood to referee that day's game. The old boy was obviously caught up in his official capacity, and continued to call an inordinate number of penalties. About the fifth time he dropped a flag, Daryl asked what the penalty was for, and the 'referee' loudly announced "your right end was offside-erds". It was at that game when Daryl first proudly wore his new helmet. He had bought it downtown, from the old Bowers store on Market Square. It was the Hutch brand, a company that made lots of youngster's football gear in those times. Unfortunately, the helmet turned out to be nothing but a glorified piece of heavy cardboard. That message came across loud and clear during that game, when Lonsdale's quarterback dropped back to throw a pass and Daryl managed to get a clear shot at him from his linebacker position. Just as he released the ball, Daryl plowed headfirst into his mid-section, confident that he could now do so, since he was well protected with his new Hutch helmet. As they both crashed to the ground, Daryl saw more stars than he'd ever seen in the skies on the clearest night.. It all but knocked him cold. Daryl slowly rolled over and after a while managed to finally halfway get his balance. He stood up on shaky legs and tried to clear his head. That new helmet was on the ground in front of him and he quickly discovered why his head was still aching. The helmet was no longer circular or oblong. It was mashed completely flat at the top, now being rendered about five inches shorter than it had been before the collision. He knocked the hard but now weakened cardboard with his fist, back into some semblance of the shape of a helmet. He had quickly learned his lesson, and never again tackled anybody head-first when he was wearing that damnable old Hutch helmet.
Once they were playing a baseball game against the team from McAnally Flats, down at the Brookside field. They won the game, and Daryl thought Bootlegger's catch in the last inning to save the game was better than anything he had ever seen out at the Smokies games. The last batter had lofted a long fly ball to left field and Bootlegger ran hard to his left, but misjudged the direction of the ball - or maybe the ball started curving towards the left foul line. Whatever happened, he realized his mistake almost too late, coming to a screeching halt. But his feet couldn't keep track and they started sliding from beneath him. As he was sliding toward the ground he reached as far backwards as he could and caught the ball in his bare right hand just before it hit the ground. It was THE catch !
After that game, Cock Eye called them together and told them that he had arranged for them to play a game the next night in south Knoxville. Under the lights! They had never played a game at night. But their excitement quickly faded as Cock-Eye told them the game would be against Cas Walker's girl's team, AND that he had agreed as a joke to have Daryl's team wear skirts ! Cas' team was a bunch of grown women who played in a local league. They were damned good and usually convincingly beat every team they played. Daryl had seen them play one time and he had been impressed that women could play that well. They couldn't figure out how old Cock-Eye had managed to arrange this thing, but if they were going to play a night game they would play anybody - even if they had to wear silly skirts..
Just before the game, Cock-Eye told Daryl he was going to get to pitch against the women.. Daryl pitched sometimes, but he was not their best pitcher. Bootlegger was - by far. He figured Cock-Eye didn't want to make the women look too bad so he was holding back his best pitcher. Daryl had a good fast ball, and he could also throw a good knuckle ball, but the team's catcher, Bud, told him not to throw the damned thing because neither Daryl or Bud or anybody else knew where the thing was going. One time he had thrown it and it started out rising then suddenly took a nose dive under Bud's glove and bounced up and caught him right in the nuts. So Daryl seldom used that pitch anymore. Anyway, Daryl's real problem was lack of control. There was a pretty good crowd at the game on the night of the game and they weren't used to many folks watching their games, so Daryl was a bit nervous. As he warmed up he didn't throw anything but a windmill fastball, and that night he thought would be getting the ball over the plate. Then the first batter stepped up and his first pitch sailed way over the batter's head and halfway up into the backstop. He got the next one right down the middle for a strike and he thought if he could throw them all like that one - and that fast - these gals were not going to hit him tonight. They didn't, but that was the last strike Daryl threw. The next three pitches hit the dirt and he had walked the lead-off batter. Daryl then managed to throw eight more consecutive balls, walking the next two batters and loading the bases. Their cleanup hitter was a short, stout and squatty woman with short hair. She gave Daryl a mean look as she stepped into the box. Daryl wound up with the double windmill and heaved the softball with all his might. Daryl argued with the umpire that the old gal had turned into the plate, but the umpire gave her first base anyway, when that fastball caught her right in the middle of her big fat ass. As the runner from third crossed home plate Cock-Eye trotted out to the mound. "That's about enough of that, - we don't want you to kill one of 'em " he said, taking the ball from Daryl. "You switch with Bootlegger and take first base - he's gonna pitch the rest of the way." It obviously didn't matter that night whether Daryl or Bootlegger - or even Bob Feller ( if they'd had him ) was pitching for the Brookside team. The women beat the living hell out of them. Old Cas Walker's girls had been so good that it didn't seem to matter to Daryl nearly as much as he had thought it would when he got back home that night. That Cas Walker girls team had turned the boys from Happy Holler every way but loose, beating the dickens out of the once-proud team, and providing them with a sound lesson ... that a talented woman's softball team could outplay a team made up of a bunch of young boys. Daryl replayed the game in his head when he was in bed that night. Just before passing out for the night he laughed out loud, remembering how he had hit the stumpy fat woman in the butt with that wild pitch.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Daryl's family was moving from Happy Holler to Lincoln Park. As long as Daryl could remember they had lived with his grandmother. First in the little frame house over on Bernard Street, then down on Anderson, when he was in Mynders School, and then on Oklahoma, when he was in the sixth grade at Brownlow, and since he had been at Christenberry. He was now in the ninth grade, so he already knew many of the kids who lived in Lincoln Park and the surrounding area, so it wasn't like he was entering an entirely new environment. Anyway, it turned out that he would often spend half the time staying at his grandmother's house on Oklahoma that year, so he really didn't lose touch with his Happy Holler associates for another year or so.
Daryl's parents had bought a house in Lincoln park. It was a new house, a small five room dwelling. Of course, Luke would continue living with Mama, and although nobody really told Daryl, he thought maybe they were moving out there as much to get away from Luke as much as any other reason. Luke was getting drunk two or three times a week since he had lost his job, and when he was drunk he was belligerent and loud, and that often one drove Odie nuts. But Daryl's mother still always felt some kind of responsibility for Luke because he was her only brother, and as it later turned out, this move was only going to give her a reprise of a few years from that responsibility of taking care of Luke. Years later, after Jean and Daryl were grown, married, and had moved away, Mama had died and Luke had nowhere to go. Odie had also died, so Luke ended up living with Daryl's mother again. But that was to be years later. For then, Daryl was leaving Happy Holler and moving to Lincoln Park.
He had already been in Christenberry for more than two years when they moved to Lincoln Park.. He was like a lot of boys he knew at school, not giving much of a damn about anything that had to do with studying, and his report cards were beginning to show it. He hated algebra most of all, didn't think he could understand it, and really never tried to find out whether he could or not. So when he got another "F" on his report card - - which he really expected - - his teacher kept him after school one day and had a long talk with him, trying to convince him that he could do much better if he would take the time to study. When she asked him about things at home he told her a fabricated story about his difficult home life, living with a stepfather. He had no idea why he came up with that tale, but he probably was just looking for any excuse for his laziness. Hearing his sad tale, for the first time he'd ever seen such a thing from her she suddenly showed an attitude of caring and sympathy. Unfortunately, in a couple of weeks, Daryl's mother attended the PTA meeting at school and talked to the same teacher, who confided her concern about Daryl's supposed difficult home life with his stepfather. Naturally, Daryl's mother told her that Odie was a good father to Daryl, thereby spoiling Daryl's brief period of sympathy from his teacher. Discovering that Daryl's story was pure fabrication, the teacher pretty much made his life miserable for the rest of that school year. If that wasn't enough, Daryl also got grounded for a while, causing him to give a bit more thought about manufacturing such fantasies in the future.
One time "Jump Ball" Jones , the phys ed teacher at Christenberry, was out of school for a few days. Daryl never knew why he was away but he sure remembered who his brief replacement was, at least part of that time. It was a woman who was the roughest he had ever encountered, even worse than old Miss McKamey back at Mynders. McKamey had been a stern disciplinarian, who took no nonsense from any of her students, but otherwise she had been like most other woman Daryl had known. This phys ed teacher was a female like he had never seen. Her name was Mahew. She always wore pants, at a time when virtually no women wore pants. Her hair was cut short like a man's. She chain-smoked cigarettes. Not just cigarettes, but Home Run cigarettes, which were so strong smoking one of them was like inhaling a Black Hawk cigar, or worse. Nobody in their right mind smoked them, particularly once they had tried one of them and encountered the coughs and wheezes and attempts to catch your breath after two or three puffs. But there she was, seemingly lighting up three or four of those things every hour. Not to mention that she knew every cuss word Daryl had ever heard, plus some that were new to him, and she used them with astounding regularity and reckless abandon. It was a shocking circumstance to a student in junior high school who had never heard any school teacher use a single such word, let alone a female who could rattle off a decent majority of the most popular cuss words in two or three quick sentences. If that wasn't enough, she was prone to stay uncomfortably close to the boy's locker room after gym class. At least a couple of times, using the excuse that boys were taking too much times in the shower, she simply walked directly into the shower and let out a few cuss words until all the remaining totally naked boys had scurried out of there. Daryl and just about everybody else was relieved when Jones returned to Christenberry and the smoking-cursing female moved on to another school.
The diminutive music teacher at Christenberry married the preacher from a local Methodist Church. Daryl was a Baptist, or at least he went to the Baptist Church. So he took personal offense when this new husband of this teacher of the music classes spoke at the school's assembly and closed with the opinion that if anybody was not a Methodist he was headed straight to Hell. Daryl failed to see the humor, although that was what the preacher was apparently attempting. Anyway, it stuck in Daryl's mine, and he was suspicious of Methodists for a long time afterwards.
Leroy lived on Wray Street, a block or so from where Cock Eye lived. He was a strange bird, and always wore overalls to school at Christenberry. He was in Daryl's grade, but the only class they had together was gym class. When school started that fall the gym class spent most of their time outside. About half of the class time was not really organized and the boys just played in groups, kicking and passing footballs, racing, and other activities. One day the phys ed teacher, "Jump Ball" Jones, had the class choose up sides to play a softball game, mainly because he wanted to get an idea who he might want to get to play for the school team the coming spring. Daryl and some of his friends called Jones "Jump Ball" because he was a referee at the Saturday morning basketball league at the school, and you soon got the impression that every time you blinked your eyes he was screaming "Jump Ball!". Anyway, that day they chose up sides and old weird Leroy was on Daryl's team. Leroy always wore overalls, and most of them were obviously old and were quickly wearing out, being ragged at the pant bottoms and elsewhere. But nobody realized what poor shape the pair of overalls he was wearing that day were in until he drew a walk and trotted down to first base. As soon as he stepped on the base damn near everybody realized that he wasn't wearing underwear and that his penis was hanging out from a big hole in the front of the overalls. For reasons nobody could understand, he apparently didn't even realize it, and it got even funnier because nobody told him about it. He walked around that way for several minutes until it was time for everybody to head back into school for their next class. When the boys were running back towards the school building, Leroy was right there in front of the pack, still exposed, and running at full speed right past the girls in the girl's gym class, who were also outside, some who were laughing and some who were staring in disbelief at the unexpected sight. Daryl expected to hear that one of the girls had reported him to a teacher or to the Principal, but he never heard another thing about it. Poor old Leroy, who lived in Happy Holler, moved with his family to another section of town a month or so later and Daryl never saw him again. Daryl always wondered if Leroy's parents ever afforded to buy him some underwear, or maybe even some new overalls, or at least to patch the ones he wore that day.
Daryl's mother and Odie had some friends, a couple who lived out if Oak Ridge. They had two children, a bit younger than Daryl and Jean, named Tommy and Betsy. In one of those "arranged" friendships by his parents, with kids neither Daryl or his sister really knew very well, Daryl's family would sometimes go with that family to various places. Once they went up to Big Ridge Park with them, and another time they even went on their summer vacation to Jacksonville, Florida together with that family. They had a car and Daryl's family didn't, and all eight of them somehow piled into that car for the journey of more than five hundred miles from Knoxville to Florida. Daryl didn't think much about the crowded quarters on the trip to and from Jacksonville, but since it was Florida and the ocean he made the most of the trip.
Daryl vividly remembered the time he and Jean had gone to Oak Ridge and spent a couple of days with the same family. They got along well enough with those kids, but it was just another planned trip for them, arranged by their parents, and they never again had much of a relationship with those kids and they rarely saw them again other than when their family would make an occasional visit to Knoxville. Daryl knew nothing about Oak Ridge and was surprised to see that the whole place was like a carefully guarded fortress, completely fenced, with military police all over the place, and where entrance was possible only through closely guarded gates, where everybody's identification was carefully checked. No outsider got into Oak Ridge without an authorized pass. There were also large billboards all over the place, cautioning everybody about secrecy, like the one picturing a man with his index finger held at his tightened lips, with the glaring words "A Slip of the Lip could Sink a Ship". Daryl knew World War Two was raging, but he really didn't know what that meant. Of course, after the war he discovered that Oak Ridge was what likely one of the best ever kept secrets history, and that those billboards had primarily been designed for the workers in the plants at Oak Ridge. Some years later, Daryl marveled that apparently nobody had leaked anything significant about the work and development of the atomic bomb, even though it also seemed likely that the large majority of the workers themselves out there probably didn't have a clue about what was actually going on. In the end, Daryl remembered only a couple of specific things about that trip to Oak Ridge. One was when they had Span for dinner one night. Daryl had never eaten Span in his life, and didn't particularly like the looks of it, but he reluctantly ate it. He was never sure if it was the Span or something else he ate that night, but something made him violently ill, and he was up as sick as a dog for most of the night. When that episode finally subsided, just to be on the safe side, he vowed never again in his life to eat Span, and he kept that vow. The other thing he remember was actually triggered by a delayed reaction that came some while later. The kids were playing out in the woods that adjoined their small government-built house in Oak Ridge and Daryl got thirsty. What looked to be a nice clear stream was at the edge of the woods and Daryl stooped down and took a long drink from the water. Tommy came over just as he was finishing said they had been told not to drink from that stream, but offered nothing more, and of course Daryl had already had his fill from the condemned stream. Later, when the war ended and the news about the bomb and the activities at Oak Ridge had been revealed, one day it occurred to Daryl that the water he drank from that stream in Oak Ridge might have been poisoned from such activities, and he was actually convinced for a month or two that he was surely going to develop some kind of a delayed reaction and die from drinking the water from that stream. Of course, even today news occasionally is released about Oak Ridge workers who have become ill from some type of exposure at their jobs. A recurring joke - or maybe a fear - is still heard around here sometimes, that when night falls in Oak Ridge, the area streams - - and sometimes maybe even some of the residents of the city themselves - - tend to glow in the dark.
CHAPTER NINE
By the time he was in the eighth grade Daryl was really beginning to pay attention to girls, and only his shyness kept him from trying date at least a dozen different ones. By the time the ninth grade rolled around, his shyness had dissipated and he had already pursued several of them. That the girls thought him to be decent looking was in fact a curse, because he did not know how to handle the situation. When Daryl suddenly discovered there was something both different and appealing about the opposite sex, one would think that lack of a mode of personal transportation might have been something of a handicap, but it wasn't. When he had a date, he would walk to the girl's house and pick her up and they would go to a movie down at the Broadway Theater, or to Sharp's Drug Store at the corner of Broadway and Edgewood, or go to a ball game. Sometimes he'd take a date to a movie downtown, in which case they would ride the bus downtown and back. That's what virtually everybody did in those days. And he did have a lot of dates in those years. He first dated Virginia, a pretty blond, for a few months. Then when they broke up he promptly dated another, then another, and then another of the girls at Christenberry. Once he had a few dates with a pretty brunette eighth grader. He'd usually take her to the Broadway Theater, and they would spend most of the movie smooching in the back row. On one of those dates a group of the ninth grade girls at Christenberry were in the theater and paid particular attention to Daryl's antics in the back row. The next night he got a telephone call and - without any spoken words - the callers, obviously that same group of girls who had been at the Broadway the previous night, including a couple of girls he had dated, broke into a chorus of a popular song at the time, "You Call Everybody Darling". Then they promptly hung up. Obviously, that unsolicited telephone serenade was intended to let Daryl know that he shouldn't be "playing the field" with such abandon. But Daryl never really got the message. He continued to be infatuated with girls when he was in the ninth grade, once dating a seventh grader for a few weeks, then later that same year having a brief fling with a good looking girl who was a Senior at Central High School. He continued that trend into high school for a while. He didn't know what he was looking for, but he was having fun in the process.
Many of the railroad men who worked for the Southern Railway were into outdoor activities. Hunting, fishing, and those kinds of things. Daryl never cared much for them. One summer when he was visiting relatives out in Coal Creek, Nell and Fred. Nell's brother was named Claude. Claude was Daryl's mother's uncle, but he was called Uncle Claude by Daryl and his sister Jean, and by just about everybody else in the family. Being an "Uncle", it naturally followed that Claude sometimes went on drinking binges. But on that day he was sober. Daryl always thought their house was in the strangest location he'd ever seen, since the front porch of the house faced a very small stream and just a few feet beyond that stream was an abrupt hill, the top of which was higher than the rooftop of the house. Atop that hill were railroad tracks, and trains would pass the house during the day, and also during the night, shaking the house so violently that Daryl wondered how it stayed in one piece. On that particular visit, Claude took Daryl to hunt squirrels. They took an old 22 rifle up into the woods that sat far above the railroad tracks that bordered their house in Lake City. They were in those woods a long time, but the didn't see or make any attempt to shoot any squirrels that day. They ended up putting matchsticks in a tree stumps and trying to light them by shooting the heads off the matches.
One time Odie had taken Daryl fishing, but after a while of sitting on the river bank with no success trying to catch fish, Daryl got bored and eventually decided to pass the time by skipping rocks off the surface of the river. Odie told him if there had been any fish out there in the water he sure as hell had scared them all away with those antics. Daryl never went fishing or hunting again. He never really figured he had lost much of anything in the process, since to him fishing and hunting were the most boring pastimes imaginable.
But Odie did like to fish and hunt. Several of the Southern Railway workers went on trips into the Tellico area on wild bear and boar hunts every year. Odie always went with them but he never had brought home anything. Then one fall everybody apparently had good luck, somebody getting a bear and Odie had managed somehow to kill a wild boar. The men apparently had cut the things up and shared them among themselves. So here comes Odie home late one night with three big sacks. One had the some of the meat from the boar he had shot. Another had some bear meat. The next day, Daryl's mother - at Odie's insistence - cooked the meat he'd brought home. The boar meat didn't taste that bad to Daryl, but it was greasy as hell. The bear meat was so stringy and tough Daryl almost got sick just trying to eat the stuff. But it sure wasn't as bad as the time Odie had come home from one of those hunts and brought home a delicacy that Daryl absolutely refused to eat. Odie called them Rocky Mountain oysters, but when Odie told Daryl what they actually were quickly Daryl decided to pass them up at dinnertime that night, when his mother had fried them, at Odie's insistence.
But on that day it was what was in that third bag that was Odie's jewel. He'd brought the boar's head home with him. It was an ugly thing, with huge fangs, and its eyes were still open. Odie probably came up with his idea before he had actually ever killed a boar, just in case he ever got lucky and bagged one. It was Saturday night when he had come home with the bags, and the garbage pick-up truck wouldn't come until Monday. Odie put the boar's head in another big bag and stuck on some old rotten wood back in the corner of the dirt basement. He was working the Southern's seven to eleven shift, so he got home from work about midnight Sunday night. Daryl was already asleep because he had to go to school the next morning. He was surprised when Odie woke him up before daylight. Odie had already set the trap, and he wanted Daryl to enjoy the scene at this crazy scheme he had dreamed up. Daryl's bedroom was the smallest room in the house, a little room that had been added to the back of the house, about eight feet or so wide and barely long enough to accommodate the twin bed Daryl slept on. That addition was elevated from the ground about twelve feet, and four small windows across the back of the room faced the back yard and provided a good view of the alley behind the house. They usually picked up the garbage about six-thirty on Monday mornings. Odie didn't say much, other than to tell Daryl to keep quiet, then stationed himself next to Daryl's bed, where he could look out towards the alley, and told Daryl just watch and wait. In a few minutes they heard the roar of the garbage truck coming up the alley. The driver always slowly drove the truck up the alley, while two workers - one on each side of the truck - removed the lids and lifted and dumped those huge oil drum cans filled with garbage into the truck. The truck made it to the back of Daryl's house and one of the workers lifted the lid from the garbage can. He screamed like he had been shot. The other worker ran around from the other side of the truck, and the driver quickly jumped down and ran over to see what the hell was going on. They all looked down into the can, backed away, then looked again. Then they all looked up towards Daryl's house, screaming and sounding like they could kill somebody. After the workers dumped the contents of the can on into the truck all three were still cussing like the dickens as the truck slowly moved on up the alley. Odie had put that boar's head face up in the top of the garbage can and covered it with the lid. He was still laughing when Daryl left the house for school a while later. Daryl figured Odie was lucky that one of them hadn't had a heart attack - or worse, maybe taken a gun out of that truck and come up to the house and taken a shot at him.
CHAPTER TEN
The Knoxville Smokies baseball team played in the Tri-State League. Besides the Smokies, the teams in the League were Spartanburg, Anderson, Charlotte, Rock Hill, Asheville, Fayetteville and Reidsville. Kids in Knoxville got to see the Smokies by buying a membership in a boys organization called the Knothole Gang. It cost twenty-five cents, and with a membership you could attend games for a small admission, and sometimes free. Daryl and several of his buddies from the neighborhood had memberships and would go to games out at Caswell Park, where the baseball stadium was called Smithson Stadium. One year, the Boston Red Sox came through town after spring training and played an exhibition game at the stadium. Daryl got to see that game. Ted Williams played but he only was in the game for two or three innings. He flied out to right field in his only time at bat, but Daryl always remembered having seen the Splendid Splinter in person.
The park was east of the railroad tracks and west of Winona field and Evans Collins field. Sometimes, the neighborhood boys would stand in the area between the tracks and the stadium when the Smokies were playing a game, trying to grab a foul ball. It wasn't easy to do, because men were hired to stand outside the stadium and retrieve those baseballs. Daryl's friends devised a plan to overcome that obstacle. A couple of the boys would stand outside the stadium, waiting to try and catch a foul ball that sailed in their direction following the crack of a bat. If they were lucky enough to get to the ball first, they would catch it or quickly pick it up and then throw the ball to a waiting companion, who in turn would throw the ball to another boy who was stationed on the railroad tracks. That boy would hightail it down the tracks towards Washington Avenue as fast as he could run with the baseball in hand. In the meantime, the others would take off in different directions, because those ball retrievers were mean SOB's, and they would not only demand that you give them any ball you got outside the stadium, they would chase you down if you didn't turn it over to them. None of the boys Daryl knew ever got caught by any of the hired help, but Daryl was so naive that he feared if they had gotten caught taking one of those baseballs they probably were going to be put in jail.
One of the funniest episodes Daryl ever saw was one night when the Smokies were playing Rock Hill. The Smokies' center fielder was a Cuban named Chino Bernel. The left fielder was an old country boy who chewed tobacco, named Howie Marsh. It was rumored that the two did no get along very well. That night they got into an argument in the outfield during the game. Daryl was in the left field bleachers and could hear them yelling at each other, Bernel yelling much of his tirade in Spanish, and Marsh cussing like a sailor. Screaming, then both threw down their gloves and ran straight for each other. Both were swinging wildly and you could hardly tell who was hitting who, but soon they were rolling around the left field grass in a wrestling match. The umpires and their team mates ran out and finally separated them. What the argument was about Daryl never found out, but it was the only time he had ever seen members of the same team fighting during the middle of a game.
Daryl's grandfather, his grandmother Helen's husband, had died in the early 1940's. Some time after the end of the war a man was renting an upstairs room at her house. His name was Nig. He was a refined old gentleman, with carefully groomed grey hair. He walked with a cane, the result of childhood battle with polio, and had heavy metal braces on one leg. For a couple of years or so, after church on Sunday, Daryl would sometimes go over to his grandmother's house and eat lunch with her and Nig. On those days he would stay much of the afternoon, listening to radio programs or playing gin rummy with Nig. His grandmother lived next door to old man McFarland, who was then about sixty-five years old, and was married to a woman who was at least thirty years younger. Her name was Trula. Old Nig was a confirmed drinker, not that he ever got drunk when Daryl was around, but he always would have a couple of nips when Daryl was there. He drank something called Echo Springs, and would go to the kitchen, fix his drink at the kitchen sink while looking out the window that faced the back of the next door house where old Mac and Trula lived, and begin singing "My Truly, Truly Fair", which was a song made popular by recording artist Guy Mitchell. He would wink at Daryl as he returned to the living room couch, still singing, and then make some comment about that good looking Trula next door, which would make Daryl's grandmother furious. Daryl would laugh at and with old Nig. He was a funny and congenial old man, and he treated Daryl as an equal instead of as a young boy, which was why Daryl liked him so well. Daryl was too young then to realize that when Helen would get mad at Nig, which she often did, it was in fact evidence of her jealousy and not merely the fact that she hated both old man Mac and Trula. It was years afterwards when Daryl had graduated from his youthful ignorance and realized that the reason his father had always seemed to have a general dislike for old Nig. Likely it was because a man would rarely be simply renting a room, as the only other occupant in a woman's house, unless there was a likelihood that some hanky-panky was likewise going on.
Jim McFarland , usually known simply as "Mac", had moved to Knoxville from North Carolina back in the 1930's. He owned and operated a grocery store near Happy Holler, on Anderson street. After Daryl's paternal grandfather Bob had died, Bob's sister Louise was living alone in the large house in north Knoxville, next door to Daryl's grandparent's house. Laura was a spinster, and from what Daryl had been told, she had never had any meaningful relationships with men. She did continue to keep borders at the old homestead, and old man Mac was one of them. The old devil was wily and clever, and he began to make a play for her, such as leaving a few dollars under his plate after dinner, and other tactics designed to get near Laura - and nearer to the money and property that had been left to her by Daryl's grandfather. Apparently Laura had never received such attention from any man, and she was flattered and literally swept off her feet. When old Mac proposed to her, she quickly accepted. But, unknown to anyone else at the time the old man had devised a clever plan. He somehow manipulated Laura into signing an agreement before the marriage. The agreement designated that when whichever party died first the survivor would receive all assets of the deceased person. The problem was that it was already well known by everyone that Laura had been diagnosed with cancer, and within a few months of the marriage she died. When it was discovered that Mac had the signed agreement in hand, giving him the house, the contents, and all of Laura's money, Daryl's grandfather was furious, and he was urged by the family to contest the agreement in court. But, the way Daryl heard it, he had always been disappointed that his mother had left most of the money to his sister Laura, apparently because she trusted Laura more than she trusted Bob, believed that she would more carefully protect the funds, and that she would make sure her brother Bob was taken care of at the proper time. But old man Mac had changed all that, and Daryl's grandfather had just shrugged his shoulders and refused to contest the agreement. He let old Mac take the house and the money, which was said to have been a considerable sum for those times. That naturally also explained why Daryl's grandmother virtually hated old Mac, in addition to the fact that he was about as mean an old curmudgeon as anyone ever encountered.
Mac later remarried the previously mentioned Trula, a woman who was half his age. Often thereafter he told neighbors that he had no love for wife number two, and had only married her because he needed a housekeeper. Many years later, Daryl's mother had seen old Mac on the bus one afternoon. He was about ninety years old by then. She said she had politely inquired about the condition of his wife, who had recently broken her arm in an accident. She said Mac promptly replied "well, she's OK I guess, but it was a shame it wasn't her damned neck that got broken. ". If wife number two had married Mac for money, Daryl figured that she probably had earned what she eventually got, because he was ninety-five years old when he finally passed on. Although she was still relatively young compared to Mac, the poor woman had to put up with the obnoxious old fart for more than thirty years, although when she originally married him she probably had believed that he was so old that he wouldn't last very long. For years, the word in the neighborhood was that every time old Mac had a birthday he would boast to anyone who would listen that he had "fooled the old witch for another year!"
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Soon, nothing was like it had been before. Many of Daryl's old stomping grounds had drastically changed or had even disappeared from the scene. Within ten years after the end of World War Two, virtually all the neighborhood movie theaters in Knoxville had closed, including the Joy in Happy Holler, after it had briefly been renamed the Center. A couple of theaters had already been closed -- the Palace, in 1948, and the Capitol, in 1950. In the fifties, others neighborhood theaters closed in rapid succession, including the Broadway, the Capitol, the Dawn, the Lee, and the State. Even downtown, the Strand and the venerable old Roxy, where they had already stopped showing the live stage shows, had closed. Even the city's oldest theater, downtown's Lyric Theater, was torn down in 1956. The North Central Avenue Park at the corner of Baxter had been closed in 1948 and became the parking lot for a new Sears and Roebuck store that took up the whole block between Pearl Place and Baxter. Buses had replaced streetcars in the late forties. Even his first grammar school, Mynders, had been closed, and that building had been demolished to make room for another parking lot for that new Sears store. In 1951, Knoxville High School closed and was replaced with three new high schools -- Fulton, West and East. The old Smithson Stadium at Caswell Park had been torn down. They built another stadium at the same site, but neither the stadium nor the Smokies themselves ever seemed quite the same again. The Sixth Avenue swimming pool had also been closed. Yes, things were different.
Daryl's had grown up in the last of America's simple generations. It had been a time when imaginations were still being used, such as conjuring up mental images to match those radio programs, a time when you actually ate at the dinner table with your family, when you walked to get to most places instead of driving an automobile a distance of a few blocks, when you sat on the front porch just rocking on the swing for no good reason, and when you actually had family conversations. Yet to come were television, computers, stadiums that held a hundred thousand people, the Beatles, Elvis, Rock and Roll, cell phones, actually paying a dollar for a small bottle of water, the undecipherable rant of rap and hip hop, men's basketball teams wearing uniforms with pants that looked like women's bloomers, and the myriad of other things that later became commonplace.
Daryl couldn't really explain it but sometimes he actually missed Happy Holler, Lincoln Park, Oakwood, and other places in town. He remembered the neighborhood grocery stores and the drug stores and the theaters and the weird variety of people. He closed his eyes and thought for a brief moment he detected the aroma of a loaf of freshly baked bread from the old Merita Bakery. Then he opened his eyes and realized it was only a brief imaginary remembrance of days that were gone forever.
But he thought - - in a lot of ways - - those had been memorable days.