MY NANCY HANKS

My Nancy Hanks

If you ask anyone, “Who was Nancy Hanks?” you’re likely to get several answers. Some will tell you that Nancy Hanks was Abraham Lincoln’s mother, and they would be right. Some will tell you Nancy Hanks was a thoroughbred race horse in the 19th century, and they would be right. Some will tell you that Nancy Hanks was the chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts and they would also be correct! But if you’re from the great State of Georgia, and if you are of a certain age group, then “Nancy Hanks” can only mean one thing: a passenger train!

Actually, the train I’m going to tell you about was named for another train, also called “The Nancy Hanks”. That first train was a steam locomotive and I’m not certain where it operated. The second “Nancy Hanks” came into being in 1947 and ran daily, come hell or high water, from Savannah to Atlanta, Georgia and back to Savannah. Yes, every day of the year until 1971 when the Atlanta Terminal Station was demolished and Amtrak was born.

As a child I thought riding on the “Nancy” was the greatest adventure you could take. It left Savannah every morning at 7 am and snaked its way up through the middle of the red-clay state arriving in Atlanta at 1 pm. And it returned to Savannah leaving Atlanta at 6 pm sharp.

I was able to board the Nancy at Tennille at 10 am, just in time for the requisite morning Coca-Cola and pack of peanuts. Of course, you got an 8-oz bottle and you put your peanuts into that bottle and enjoyed the sweet/salty mixture until the train arrived in Macon. Macon was where you got up out of your seat and went to the “Club Car” for lunch. Macon because the train stopped long enough for you to get to lunch without falling over in the aisles.

Lunch on the train was a delight for me, a terror for others. I remember how unique it was because the waiter brought you a sheet of cardboard and a pencil with no erasure (unheard-of for a third grader in the 50’s!). And you filled out your order on the card and the waiter came and picked it up and your lunch was brought to you. I well remember ordering a “Club” sandwich. I thought that was what you were supposed to order in the “Club” car. They always toasted the three slices of bread and cut the sandwich into quarters. They then stuck toothpicks with frou-frou into each quarter to hold the pieces together. All this was wildly exotic to a child who was used to Merita Bread, homemade mayonnaise and sliced tomatoes. That was what I considered a sandwich. Little did I know. Then.

The train always careened around curves going through Barnesville. This created a floor show in the “Club”/”Dining” Car for the waiter did an amazingly combined balancing act and tap dance routine getting the meals to the customers without the food crashing to the floor. Of course, I thought the whole process was highly sophisticated. I didn't know until many years later that the reason the ride was so precarious was because the train cars had not been designed for the tracks on which it had to run.

When my mother and her friends traveled on The Nancy they took with them a folding board on which they played Canasta (or Bolivia) until Macon and lunch. How accommodating was porter to bring them their Cokes so as not to interrupt their card game!

Arriving in Atlanta we usually sped over on foot to Rich’s or by cab to Peachtree Street and Davison’s, then known as Davison-Paxon. Across the street were J. P. Allen’s, Regenstein’s and Leon Froshin’s – elegant dress shops. I usually was left at either Lowe’s Grand, the Paramount or the Roxy; all elegant and huge movie palaces. But we all had to watch our watches for 5 pm to get back to the Nancy for departure home.

And the return trip was equally exciting and fine, only dining was a little more elegant as it was the evening meal. It’s the first time I ever saw a waiter bring a sizzling steak gushing with steam to a table! 

They used to put me alone on the Nancy as a child. I well remember them giving the porter $5 to “watch over” me until someone met me at the Terminal Station in Atlanta. As I grew up, I managed not to have to be watched much. Once, on a birthday trip to see “Holiday On Ice” I was coming home on the Nancy and sitting by an old gentleman. I told him that it was my birthday and showed him the Roy Rogers wallet I had been given by my cousin Charles as a gift. It had a $5 bill inside, too. I so well remember that old man kissed me on the cheek and somehow managed to steal my wallet. Because when I got home, it was gone.

Once when I was at the Fritz Orr Day Camp in Atlanta, staying with my Uncle and Aunt, I literally forgot what my parents looked like and asked to go home on the Nancy and see them. I was put on the train, arrived in Tennille, saw them and got back on the train the next morning at 10 and made it to tennis class by 2. All courtesy of The Nancy.

I have so many memories of the Nancy! My last one was the morning I left home for the last time. I had been ordered out of the house and given a rather large some of money not to return. I didn’t tell my father I was leaving. But I did tell one friend. And she gave me a silver dollar and told me not to spend it unless Bach came back as a pigeon and I didn’t have any money for peanuts! I went straight to Tennille and boarded my beloved train and went straight to Atlanta and got a cab and went straight to the airport and got a jet and went straight to New York City. And I never looked back once. Thank you, Nancy Hanks, for making my dream come true. I miss you, baby.

Oh, Bach never showed up, but I spent the dollar on a subway fare and a hot dog.

C. 2008 Richard C. Wall

THE LONG HALL - The First Grade

The Long Hall

In the 50’s coffee came in one flavor, people came in one color and music came in one beat. And you didn’t know any better. First time I heard “Shake, Rattle and Roll” I thought they were singing “Shake, Marilyn Monroe.” What did I know? Up in Atlanta they had a mega-store, Rich’s Downtown, you could get lost in there and never be seen again unless you happened to pass across the glass bridge which connected the two buildings over Peachtree Street. It’s the connections which shine the light on your journey.

My connection started at home, and I knew the few necessary steps to survive in that mine field. Slam a door and open another one. I am at level two holding Mama’s hand and walking down the long hall and smelling something. Smells take you any place quick. Give me a smell and I’m there. Diesel fumes give me Atlanta, wood fire at sundown and I get Carolina in the hills. I smelled pencil shavings walking down the long hall. Fresh wood being cut up into little tiny pieces. I was a little tiny piece that day, already been cut up, though. That walk was scarier than a sinner’s hell fire . I don’t suppose they ever thought we could have gone around to the back of the building and just walked in and there we’d be. Way too easy. Trauma beats tranquil, in spades.

Then I’m standing in front of a door to a world I never knew. Lots of little tiny pieces in there, already cut up, too. I let go of Mama’s hand but I don’t remember how I got to where I ended up. But I sure got there. Still that smell of wood and shavings. I sat at a big low table for six in the back of the room. The only person I remember is the woman up front. She was not what you’d call Good Morning, Miss Dove, more like Miss Hog in a dress two sizes two small. Emphasize heaving, unused bust. Mean. So mean that when you misbehaved she made you dress up like a girl and stand in front of the room for everybody to laugh at you. I never did misbehave enough to put on that dress and I wanted to. Doris Day knew me even then. But I never got to get up there and show off in the dress. That’s how she dealt with the tiny little boy pieces.

I don’t remember her punishing the little girls. I do remember a pretty little blond girl with a smile that made you need sunglasses on a cloudy day. One day, she wasn’t there. I couldn’t find her. In those days nobody talked about anything so I couldn’t find my friend. I turned to another girl friend to ask but she didn’t know anything either. I always held her suspect anyway. She wasn’t home-town and she wiped her dog’s butt with toilet paper out in the yard every time he pooped. They didn’t stay in town very long either. They picked up their toilet paper and their saxophones and moved straight to Disney World.

It was a year before the girl with the smile came back. She came back with more than she left, crutches and a brace on her leg. Polio. So close to me. Flying around in the air on the backs of flies. But none of them landed on me It didn’t seem to affect her, though, the smile was still there. Sometimes it was forced, but she smiled even if it killed her. At the Pastime Theater, they used to pass the tin cup for polio and Sinatra up on the screen would sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” My friend always had the metal under her arm and on her leg. And she never walked alone.

Across the long hall there was another woman who had a much better deal going on than Miss Hog. This woman was what you would call a battle axe. She was of indeterminate age, a heaving bosom, orthopedic oxfords and little pince-nez glasses down on her nose. I was terrified of her, but I loved her. She made you bring newspaper every day so you’d have a place to take a nap on the floor. After nap time, she’d give you a little orange pail and you’d march outside and get water for her plants. She was standing in the door one afternoon giving some words of wisdom to us while keeping tabs on the Long Hall. She used an improper word to describe a black person and the maid who was sweeping the hall, herself black, said “Miss Ellen, we don’t use that word anymore, we say “Negroes”. With one huge heave of that bosom, Miss Ellen turned to the woman and said, “There is no ROSE to it. Now you get home and wash your Christmas.” Don’t ask me what it meant, I’m just telling the tale. She continued teaching about 20 years past retirement and when they finally shoved her out the door she went home, made Christmas Brandy and called you up out of the blue to tell you your batch was ready and to bring $7 for it. And you never said no to Miss Ellen.

C. 2008 Richard C. Wall

TERRORISM OR A CHILDHOOD SPENT IN FEAR

Think about it. When you’re a small child and bad stuff keeps happening to you, you begin to think that’s the way things are supposed to be. Sort of like you deserve to be treated badly, y’ know? I did.

Take the second grade when I was kept in during recess and grilled incessantly about stealing a piece of chocolate candy off the teacher’s desk.

My theft went like this: I took the little single piece of candy which was wrapped and placed in a jar on teacher’s desk. I was used to this as Mama’s friend Jane always kept candy in a jar for anyone to take. What did I know?

Then she discovered it was missing and that’s when it hit the fan. She made every second grader take out a little piece of paper and write either yes or no depending on your guilt. I wrote yes. And she slowly walked up and down each aisle of the class picking up each piece of paper and reading each one. When she got to mine, you would have thought she had discovered Little Black Sambo in her bedroom. She immediately called “recess” and everyone went outside except the guilty party, me.

She walked around the classroom and kept saying to me, “ I need to hear the words.” I had no damn idea what she was talking about! But she insisted I knew what to say. Don’t forget that at this point I am in the second grade and therefore, age 7. And she is carrying on like Mao-Tse-Tung trying to get a nuclear secret out of a worker in a rice patty.

I didn’t know what she wanted me to say! So I started talking, desperately hoping to hit on the right thing. This was a technique I would learn to perfect and use to my advantage in later years. First I said, “I’m sorry.” And she said, “No.” I went through the entire litany of every apology I could think of. I even said, “I apologize” and that didn’t do any good either. This whole terrorist tactic went on for what seemed like hours but was probably only twenty minutes. I kept ringing my hands because I was in misery because I had figured out that the teacher didn’t like me. This is an idea I carry with me to this very day. If someone is mad at me I think they hate my guts and when they finish raking me over the coals I will never see them again. Of course that isn’t true. Most people don’t carry grudges; notice I said “most people”.

But at that moment during recess I had figured that out. Probably took me forty years to digest that. Still I kept up saying things to the teacher, anything to get through with this terrorist ordeal.

I was in tears and probably had also messed in my pants when I finally hit upon “Please forgive me”. “That’s it”, she said, “that’s what I wanted to hear”. I expected the lights to change, the flag to unfurl up in the front of the classroom and the “Hallelujah Chorus” to come up out of the floor with the heavenly choir. I had already been to a few movies. None of that happened of course.

But I had paid the price. I was shamed into submission to her Christian Dogmation, a word I just made up. I was further terrified that she was going to tell Mama, but she never did.

Who ever heard of a second grader in 1950 saying “forgive me”?

It’s funny how those bitches up there on that long hall changed in the way they treated me in later years. When they realized I had some talent and brains, that I could bring pleasure with my music, they all wanted to be aligned in my cheering section. Talk about confusing, I didn’t know what the hell was going on when they later said, “You were the most this and the best that in my classroom. I knew you would be a success.”

Shit, why couldn’t they have given a kid a little encouragement when he needed it? That probably would have cost too much, huh? Never mind what being under their thumbs for all those years cost me.

Forgive? Yeah, mostly. Forget? Never.

C. 2008 Richard C. Wall

THANK YOU, MISS NELLIE

What can I say about the third grade? Little happened, so there is little to say. Except…..(you knew there was going to be a story, right?)

My teacher was the wonderful Miss Herringdine. She has many places in my memory. Most of all I remember that she taught me cursive writing. We would draw those circles until we were blue in the face and somehow that applied to writing words. Before that, the only word recognition I remember learning was in the dreaded first grade. I can distinctly remember looking at the black board and having the teacher point to the words “Jane” and “dog”. I think I was more afraid of the stick she was pointing with that anything else.

But Miss Herringdine was always sweet to me in the third grade. I just don’t have any bad memories of that time. Maybe I’ve blocked them out. I still see her these days. She left the Baptist Church when she moved to Athens to be near her son, William. She joined the Anglican Catholic Church (there’s another story!). But I am getting ahead of myself.

The Herringdines lived down the street from us, though I never went into their house. Never was invited. I later learned that they had an alcohol problem just as we had and that made me feel somehow closer to them in later times. Funny how shared bad times come up in your memory quicker than the good times. Good times? What are those?

Anyway, years later when I had returned home to direct a musical, I was at the library and there was Miss Herringdine sitting behind a desk just as she had so long ago in the third grade. I was writing something on a piece of paper and the thought suddenly came to me that I was doing what she had taught me to do – write.

So I asked her, “Don’t you think it’s amazing that I’m doing something here that you taught me to many years ago?” And her reply was a droll, “Not especially.” Funny how I was taken aback by that. So I continued by asking a loaded question, “Miss Herringdine, have I changed much since the third grade?” “Not one bit,” she said quickly! and continued, “We always kept a dot by your name, Ricky.” (God how I hated that name! Funny, now I like it.) “A dot?” I asked. “Yes, you were always up to something. And we never let you and Lyn Padgett be in the same classroom, either!”

The Padgetts are another tale I will tell one day, and Lyn was my best friend during those times. She was the girl down the street. She and Ray South. The Padgetts were like the Ewing family on "Dallas", but the Souths were my idea of the perfect 50's family. "Ozzie and Harriet" or "Father Knows Best." I was later proved right in both cases. Lyn and I were considered devious for the things we would think up and then express out loud. I can easily now see why they kept us separated! In the seventh grade Lyn and I campaigned out loud to have the teacher removed or for us to be transferred to the other teacher’s classroom. It didn’t work and only served to make our teacher dissolve in tears. Remember, we were seventh graders and hellions for sure.

I don’t see Lyn much these days but when I do she is still the exact same person she was in 1953. And Miss Herringdine, while slowed by deafness and infirmities, is still the lovely lady I so vividly remember in that third grade. Thank you, Miss Nellie. I love you.

THE FIFTH GRADE SPENT WITH THE THIRD ARMY

The Fifth Grade Spent with the Third Army

I was thrown out of some pretty good prep schools. And I was thrown out of some prep schools and it was pretty good. I also was thrown out of some shit holes in 50's Americana South-style. The first one was laughingly called a Military Academy because they paid some bucks to the Third Army down the street to come around and shake their schlongs on campus a couple of times each year and scare the living gizzards out of little boys whose parents didn't want them at home so they sent them to West Point South Shit. It was always confusing to me because they threatened us with Third Army discipline, but the Commandant of Cadets was a Navy officer and wore a Navy uniform. His dad owned the joint.

I got special attention because I played the piano for the Glee Club and I didn't have to carry a rifle but instead a clarinet. Big deal. I worshipped the Drum Major of the marching band mainly because he reminded me of Mary Grace, my friend who was the drum majorette at home. I guess he was a majorette, too, if you get my drift. That was long before I knew anything about sexuality of any form..

I also took piano lessons and one night was called from a dead sleep to the piano teacher's room. There were two other cadets there and we were all in our jockey shorts and we just sat around and talked. I guess they were trying to start something sexual or discover if I even knew what sex was. I was as green as a fried tomato and did not learn about sex until the next prep school. (There were lots of schools.)

I got out of this Third Army Hell Pit by setting fire to the dorm. I figured if my father wouldn't let me come home as I had begged, I would get kicked out and he would have to let me come home. I was trying to prevent his marriage to that woman and figured if I got home I could do something against it. I set fire to one little curtain in my dorm room. It burned for about 45 seconds but caused all manner of havoc. Older cadets I have never seen came running from floors in the dorm I had never visited. I convinced them the steam radiator had caused the fire. I had a reprieve on the wanting-to-go-home. They all seemed to believe me for several months.

Then one day an older cadet asked me if I had lit the curtain on fire. I trusted him and immediately said that I had done it. I was in Sandersville within 24 hours and my father was married within the week because he needed someone to take care of me. About like I needed a piano lesson at midnight.

It’s odd that children always pay for the parents’ fuck ups - one way or the other. The Sink Drinkers in my case had really been at the sink for about two months when I was presented with the bill for the party. He had also been into morphine with his doctor. They shot up together while they were sink drinking. I was 9 at the time but in full knowledge of what was going on.

The night I got the bill I remember hearing someone crying and someone beating on a door. I got out of bed - they never partied, parted or presented anyone with a bill except in the middle of the night - and there he was banging on the front bedroom door which was locked tight. She was on the other side whimpering. I turned into my bathroom to find a note (the bill) which said that she had thought when they got me "things would be different" but they weren’t, so she was chucking it all and going seaside. Great. Here I am 9 years old and I’ve fucked up their marriage and she’s killing herself and he’s trying to break down a door so he can kill her. I called the doctor, the same one with the morphine. He came and somehow we got the door open. It was light outside by this time and she was fetal in a little ball on the bed shivering and moaning with a complete nervous collapse. I saw him pull a needle out of his bag and I grabbed it and threw it up against the wall. It smashed and left a spot on the wall that stayed there for seven years. No morphine for her that day. Her brother arrived from a nearby town and they carted her there and they shipped me to the Military Academy. So the total bill was I had ruined their marriage, caused him to take morphine and sink drink, given her a nervous collapse and to pay for it I was sent away to the Long Gray Line never more to return.

Odd going to a boarding school in the fifth grade. We had boarders there in the first grade because his dad ran a restaurant and it was “better”. Some bill that kid paid. I was thoroughly indoctrinated into punishment. I figured I deserved to be treated badly, so this was right with the program I was pretty alone in that shit hole but had weekends to look forward to at my uncle’s in Atlanta, or so I thought. The first weekend I went there was a disagreement between him and his son about a TV show. His son locked himself in his room and my uncle, determined the kid wasn’t going to watch a certain TV program and unable to break down the door, went to the basement and pulled the fuse box out of the wall, causing the power to go out for three days. And this was my weekend vacation, but I deserved it, see?

By November my parents came for Thanksgiving and were, apparently, together. I never asked. Christmas was normal and I returned for second semester. It was during second semester that she played a two-piano program with a friend. It had to be postponed because Daddy stabbed her in the eye with a fork during a sink drinking evening.

How do these people do this shit to each other? What motivates them to stay together?

She had no money of her own and she didn’t know anything else but what her life was. He loved her but hated her because she was infertile and I was living proof of that - an adopted kid. Purchased at great price from a young woman in Charleston, South Carolina. Abandoned at birth with papers to prove it. But no longer needed at The Long Gray Line, so I came home for the sixth grade. But the Prep School Agenda didn’t resume until a couple of years later. It would take death to send me back. Later.....

C. 2008 Richard C. Wall

BE QUIET MISS THANG

Growing up in a small town in the South, or anywhere for that matter, ain’t easy. Everybody knows everything about everybody: when you’re drunk or sober, when you’re broke or rich; even when you fart. In fact, they know so much that when you do fart, they can tell you what you’ve been eating at ten paces. No privacy in small town America.

When I returned home from the War With The Army (otherwise known as the fifth grade spent at military school) I began more conflicts than I had ever encountered in my 11 previous years.

My town was a One Town. There was one of everything. One Baptist Church, one Methodist, one Episcopal and so on. Most people went to either the Methodist one or the Baptist one, and they were only a block apart. I was adventurous. Since I had a parent at each church I managed to take in both flavors of Jesus. Sometimes during the same service. I would listen to the music at one and then scramble down the street and catch the choir and the final hymn at the other one, especially if Mama was playing the organ.

And the same process was repeated on Sunday night. I would go to Youth Fellowship at the Methodist Church and then go sit on the front row of the Baptist Church and watch Mama making it with the Hammond organ. Oddly enough, Daddy managed to miss all of this church-going back and forth. He stayed home with Ed Sullivan, Jack Benny and Guy Lombardo.

Returning home after the fifth grade I re-enrolled in both Sunday and Grammar School. I came home from Grammar School on the first day and said, “Mama, Miss Thang is my teacher.” And I came home on Sunday and said, “Mama, Miss Thang is my Sunday School teacher.” Mama gave me one of those and said, “That’s too much Miss Thang.”

Let me tell you about this sixth grade woman. She was what they called a spinster or, as Clare Booth Luce puts it, “What nature abhors, an old maid., a frozen asset” She was stern, strict and hateful, both at Grammar and Sunday events. Miss Thang was that “word that is not used in polite society outside of a kennel.”

She despised me from the moment I walked into her class. Oh I was precocious to the max, probably obnoxious, actually. And I’m sure I gave her nothing but fits at all times. Her idea of punishment for misdeeds was to have you write something thousands of times. My something was always the phrase “be quiet”. And I probably wrote those two words 60,000 times that year.

Everything was regimented in her class right down to where you put your pencil on your desk. And she constantly checked to see that all objects were in their place. She had a grade book where she kept a constant record of every infraction of the rules. Your name was on the left side of the page and there was a box to the right for every day in the school year. She would sit at her desk and look up and down the aisles to see if you of some offense and if you had erred and strayed (like lost sheep) from her norm she would put a black dot by your name. But she would look over the rims of her glasses at you, put the tip of her pencil on her tongue and make certain that you saw she was putting the dot by your name. And that dot was a passport to hell fire.

My particular dot to hell fire came out at Christmas, normally a time of peace and love. Forget it in that young stable. It was the custom in those days for each child to draw a name for a person you would give a gift. These gifts were placed under the tree which stood just inside the door of the room all lit up and festooned for the season.

One day Miss Thang made the announcement that went like this: “If you have presents for someone other than the one whose name you drew, do NOT place those gifts under the tree. Leave them in the back of the room and distribute them privately.” I wasn’t there that day and did not hear the latest rule she had set down.

This also happened to be the year they introduced black Christmas wrapping paper sprinkled with glitter. Being a Queen in Training, I thought this was the hottest thing since the hula hoop and I wrapped all my friends’ presents with this trendy new stuff. And then I came to school the next morning, walked into the class and dropped all my gifts right under the tree where I was not suppose to. I was wildly proud of how they looked and very full of myself.

All morning Miss Thang quietly seethed with rage, a rage I was not aware of until morning recess when we all went out to the baseball park to play games. Arriving at the park she held me back and told me to sit in the bleachers. There she began to lecture me on what I had done wrong by putting those gifts under the tree. Who knew? This is what that woman said to an 11-year-old 6th grader: “Ricky, Jesus drove the money changers out of the temple and I’m going to drive you out of my classroom.” I’m not making this up, you know.

I was dumbfounded and when I got home I told Mama what she had said to me. Mama dropped her Canasta cards and went straight to the school house and the principal’s office. I don’t know what happened, but Miss Thang was at least civil to me from then on. Sorta.

Years later when she was mowing some grass she cut off her big toe. I was delighted. And even later my phone rang and someone said, "Miss Thang" is dead. All I could say was "Good".

It took me years to realize how hateful she had been to me. I have never forgotten nor forgiven. Miss Thang, I guess I’ll meet you in hell.

This story is true in every sense. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

C. 2008 Richard C. Wall

A CHRISTMAS DRINK

A Christmas Drink


Celeste Holm (in All About Eve) said, “Funny, the things you remember and the things you forget.” I’m going to say “Funny the things you remember all of a sudden, that you thought you had forgotten.”

I don’t think much about Christmas so I don’t remember much about it, either. I don’t want to remember the majority of the Christmases I lived through; most them were like ground skirmishes in Korea. Folks drop dead suddenly during this holiday, they get strokes, they fall out with loved ones. It ain’t no day at the beach. Beach? That’s another tale to be told. Sometime. Somewhere.

My Christmases were always washed in bourbon. They turned on the tap and let it flow, usually starting about 5 o’clock in the afternoon. You weren’t considered a drunk if you didn’t drink before 5. Well, they lined up like it was the second coming of Jesus to be ready for that 5 o’clock snort. The other rule was that you weren’t a drunk if you drank with someone else. So there was always a crowd at the tap. They did what we called “sink drinking” and this is how that song goes. First you take a 4-ounce juice glass in your hand, then you turn on the water, you pour bourbon half way up the juice glass and you guzzle that down, and then you put the glass under the water stream, fill it up and drink the water. Then you eat a Saltine cracker. That’s sink drinking. This really has nothing to do with Christmas except it’s how they drank at Christmas and any other day of the year you’d want to consider.

So you get the picture? Sink drinking and present wrapping and tree putting-up and stoking the fire logs and sink drinking and.....and.....and.... Don’t find much room in there for a child, do you? Unless that child is 40 years old by age 8. It got so bad sometimes that the child had to do all the present wrapping, fire stoking and everything except the sink drinking. They always took care of that.

So the child got used to decorating. Mama started out celebrating Christmas in the living room. That means that’s where we had the tree. She also had white carpets in the living room. Never did understand buying white carpets in red-clay country, but there they were. So she devised that she would make carpet covers out of white bed sheets and that would protect the precious alabaster-like wool. This became an ordeal when you had to move pianos, organs, sofas, and...and...and to get the white sheets down, so she finally got the idea of moving the celebration, read tree, to the “back porch”. Now the “back porch” wasn’t actually a porch at all in the strict sense of the word. It was a veranda which came off the kitchen of the house. had a tile floor and was connected at the other end by a wall with a fireplace behind which was the room for the laundry and the maid’s bathroom. The maid wasn’t allowed to use our bathrooms throughout the house. Oh no, she could put her fingers in our food and all over our food while she prepared it, but she couldn’t put her fanny where we put ours. Make any sense? I didn’t think so.

So Daddy enclosed this veranda and it became the back porch. There is no reason for that name, just like there’s not much reason for any of the habits people fall into - like shaving, wrapping, stoking logs or drinking. But it was where we moved the celebration of Christmas, read tree. It allowed for larger trees, which meant more lights, more tinsel, more balls, and more sink drinking and log stoking. But at least we had a ceramic tile floor and no bed sheets. Of course, there was a round chenille rug, but that’s also another story. And I ain’t tellin’ that one.

We started about the beginning of December to wrap presents. This was done in the front hall where Mama set up one of her 40 assorted card tables. She brought out wrapping paper, tape, ribbons and all the paraphernalia that goes along with the Christmas Burden. I was around 8 when she told me she funded this gift-giving with the double allowance Daddy gave her in December. Wow, she got an allowance, too, just like me! She gave presents to the weirdest people and I won’t go into that other than to say there were lots of people on that list who never brought a brass farthing to our back porch, or our front porch either, believe you me. But that’s not the spirit of Christmas, sinking drinking or log stoking, is it?

After all these presents were wrapped they had to be delivered. We didn’t have washing machines then, we had a wash-woman. Julia was her name and she had one of those big personalities I love. Everything about Julia was big, her eyes, her bosom and her heart. I always loved Julia and going to her house to deliver our dirty laundry. We took the clothes in a huge flat basket. Julia boiled our clothes with lye soap in the back yard and believe me that was a wonderful smell when you got it home. No chemical that Proctor and Gamble can ever come up with will compare to Julia’s. That’s why I loved Saturday nights so much. I got to slip into newly “Juliaed” sheets. She, by the way, also washed the sheets we used in the living room at the old Christmas celebration location.

I told you about that huge flat basket because that’s what we put the Christmas presents in to deliver them. The basket fit neatly onto the back seat of Mama’s ‘49 Fleetwood and off she and I would go like some modern-day UPS couple, on our appointed rounds. I might add that Daddy and I used the same basket on Christmas Eve to deliver gallons and gallons or bourbon to everyone he owed a favor to, and there were plenty of favors to be paid. Daddy and I went places I never knew existed delivering that hootch. But neither Mama or Daddy ever took a present to Julia.

Until I woke up one Christmas Eve and looked out the window at them bringing the Lionel train set into the house, I believed in Santa Claus. When I saw the procession headed by Ella Cooley on to the back porch I distinctly remember saying to myself, “Oh, that’s how the stuff gets here.” So much for Christmas fantasy in a young boy’s life. I moved right on to Doris Day and left Santa in the dust..

Christmas morning was spent opening presents and dodging hangovers. Usually, the noon meal was the big one on Christmas, and it was taken with “The Family” from Wrightsville. The Family consisted of one good set of cousins and one bad set. The good set usually didn’t even come for Christmas, but the bad set always seemed to show up. And the bad set had the worst teeth, teeth which were the most prominent feature on their faces. Teeth which I later learned were removable, but teeth which had never any trouble chewing just about everything Mama cooked. Then we had the ordeal of opening family presents and they did it in the most peculiar way. One person at a time opened their presents. You had to sit and wait while this one or that one got their loot and you had oo and ah and (mentally) vomit your displeasure.

This crowd went home around 4 and there was a lull in the Christmas festivities. But, don’t forget, 5 o’clock is only an hour away. Just like death, taxes and Dick Clark, time marches on. And it hopped and skipped right up to 5 when sink drinking started in full force for the Savior’s Birth. Boy, they must really have loved Baby Jesus ‘cause they sure did celebrate. Sometimes they even went to other people’s house to celebrate and they left us kids to ourselves. This was about the time I figured out the kids could have their own celebrations. These started with hamburger parties which graduated into taking the unused family car and driving all around town while the grownups celebrated Baby Jesus. Never mind that none of us had drivers licenses, never mind that nobody cared or even knew we were tearing up and down the streets. We were celebrating Boy Jesus in our own way!

But what I remember most about Christmas is one of Mama’s little treasures. It was a white chapel made of plastic. It had a high steeple and a music box inside. It played ”Silent Night, Holy Night” and she always sat it on a little sewing table beside the fireplace in the living room, even after the celebration moved to the back porch. She placed it down in this angel hair which was to represent snow. And the little chapel had a soft light inside. During all the celebrating, sink drinking, and log stoking, I remember slipping off to the living room and winding up the little chapel, plugging in the light and listening to the sweet music. The thought of it fills me with such warmth and peace. Funny the things you remember and the things you forget. And I haven’t thought about that little chapel thing in 40 years. But I’ve never forgotten the sink drinking.

C. 2008 Richard C. Wall

Happy Valley - I Am Reminded

I Am Reminded

While listening to the BBC broadcast of Choral Evensong, I am reminded of my days at the Patterson School for Boys in Happy Valley, North Carolina. It was a boy’s school run by the Episcopal Diocese of Western North Carolina and also by a headmaster named George Wiese or “Cap’” as he was popularly known. “Cap” because he had been a captain in the Salvation Army Corps, a necessarily protestant organization. Since my days at Patterson I have aligned myself with the Oxford Movement in the Church of England, a return to catholic thought and practices, i.e., what is known as “High Church” or "smells and bells". I am not going to discuss religion here, but rather my days in that beautiful valley so long ago.

Patterson School was nestled at the foot of a small mountain range just across from the Yadkin River, where, incidentally, I encountered my first cottonmouth water moccasin while swimming. It was my last swim in uncharted waters where I could not see the bottom. Patterson was a typical boys’ school in the mid-20th century south. Most boys were there because of some problem at home. They were either delinquents, misfits or idiots. Sometimes all three. I was there to escape an alcoholic father and his cold, mean second wife. And I was glad of the refuge the school provided. Yes, I was “glad when they said unto me, we will go unto prep school.” My translation!

My principal happiness came from the fact that it was a church school. I love church, mostly because that’s where you find pipe organs and music. Usually pipe organs, but sometimes electronic horrors. But most important, I just love church and ritual and the King James English. So the 1926 Book of Common Prayer, originally written in the 16th century by Mr. Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII and later burned as a heretic by Mary I, became my daily friend and ritual at Patterson School.

Our days began at 6am when the electricity was turned on in the dorm. It was turned off every night at 9 to make certain that none of us stayed awake listening to radios or sneaking small lights under the covers of the bed to read. I had a battery-operated radio and spent many a night listening to “Music In The Night” from WCBS-AM in New York: glorious classical music from midnight to dawn every night and sometimes even a complete Broadway show album. I spent much time under the covers and most of my money on batteries.

On rising with the coming of the light, we prepared for the morning rituals. If you had ‘work detail’ as a waiter in the dining room you went out into the cold mountain morning at 6:30 to eat your breakfast and get your tables ready to serve. Many times I walked that path to the dining room and, looking across the valley, would see little streams of smoke rising from the woods. I thought it was poetry seeing such a bucolic wonder amid all that beautiful scenery, and only later realized the smoke was from stills producing demon alcohol! Happy Valley was part of the path of the famous Thunder Road which today is known as NASCAR.

The boys came to breakfast at 7:30. Food was plentiful at Patterson and most of it came from the farm which had originally sported a dairy and employed some students in a work-study environment. In my day we only realized the benefits of the farm and the dairy and did not have to slop the hogs, as it were.

Following breakfast you prepared for classes but not before the entire student body went to Morning Prayer in the Chapel. Here I was elected to play the organ for the service and became fully accustomed to the rituals and practices of the Episcopal Church. Morning Prayer consists of psalms, prayers and holy scripture set aside for each day of the liturgical year. At school we always sang the Canticles for Morning Prayer and some hymns. And I got to play, so I was very happy.

The Prayer Book is so organized that you will read the entire Bible if you follow all the readings for a full year. This Morning Prayer service also served as assembly for the school where Cap Wiese would pontificate any news he had to impart to the student body. The service was conducted by The Rev. Henry D. Moore, a kind and benevolent young priest who was also the supervisor of the junior school dormitory. It was Fr. Moore who prepared me for confirmation into the Church. I had long wanted to become an Episcopalian and was planning to do so with my mother, but she died before we could complete the switch. So I rejoiced in the opportunity to make the transition at Patterson. In later years I thought it odd that the school never contacted my father to ask his permission for this change in my life. But change I did, happily.

All morning was spent in class and noon brought a return to the dining room and lunch. We were joined here by faculty and wives of faculty who, as part of their pay, got to eat the fruit of the fields of Patterson.

After lunch on Wednesday was choir practice. This was conducted by Cap Wiese’s wife, naturally Mrs. Wiese. She was a woman afflicted. Cap often said that she had more wires in her than a radio. She only had one good kidney and it had dropsy. She was regularly taken to Charlotte for kidney treatments. I had a special connection to her because her mother had been the Dean of Women at my mother’s college, Wesleyan Conservatory in Macon. Her name was Lula Comer and I often visited with her up a the Wiese’s house at the top of the hill behind the school. Being up there was like Valhalla and Cap Wiese and his wife were Wotan and Mrs. Fricka Wotan looking down on us mortals below. (Or maybe she was “Erda, The Green-Face Torso”? I borrow from the immortal Anna Russell.)

Mrs. Wiese conducted choir practice and usually played for Sunday services except when the dropsy was on her and I was called into action at a moment’s notice. Jimmy Farnsworth, my friend and tenor and I gave her fits at all times during the choir rehearsals. We were certain that we could do everything better than everyone else, typical for teenagers, and we probably could have, but were rarely given the chance. Later on, we made our chance happen. But that is another tale.

Afternoons were spent in classes followed by sports or activity in your room of your own choosing. I rode a horse up into the mountain twice a week. Yes, there actually was a brood mare large enough to support me and off we would go into the woods and I would sing “Oh, What A Beautiful Morning” at the top of my voice and pretend I was in a production of “Oklahoma!”. Yes, even at that early age I was destined for a life in show business.

After dinner came the hated Study Hall. If you were on Honor Roll you got to study in your room. But the rest of us slobs were corralled into a large classroom and made to study from 7 to 8:30. And you had to study, you couldn’t be caught reading a Tennessee Williams play or a Harold Robbins novel. Somehow I managed both.

It was on the way back to the dorm following study hall that we had Evening Prayer in the Chapel. This time the service was voluntary, but I always went because it was done by candle light and I got to play the organ once again. It is where I learned the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimitis and all the wonderful evening hymns of the church. It is such a pity that both Morning and Evening Prayer are no longer part of the ritual of the Episcopal Church. And that’s yet another story. There is such a beauty in Cramner’s translation of the Nunc Dimitis from St. Luke ii, vs. 29: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word.”

And the most beautiful prayer in the whole of the Prayer Book:

“O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last. Amen.”

That is my memory of Patterson School and my wonderful days in that happy and beautiful valley.

C. 2008 Richard C. Wall