Today, September 30, 2007,I received a piece from a friend that described how different things were in the past, when things were simpler. Being nearly 73, and beginning to long for times that I remember to be better, I wrote these rememberences in reply. I get these blank stares from my children and grandchildren when I describe how things were, as if what I am telling is a fantasy. We have become shrinkwrapped.
Friends and Kin
My daddy got me a bb gun when I was eight, and a single shot 410 shotgun when I was 12. I could shoot a sparrow in the eye at fifty feet with my bb gun. I learned to drive when I was thirteen, and when I was fifteen he trusted a friend and I to take the new Studebaker pickup on a week's trip through Mississippi to the coast and back through New Orleans, visiting family. He spanked me once for stealing and once for lying, and I never forgot that. I was about seven and I stole a little boy's wooded pistol. I lied about it, saying he gave it to me. Daddy sat on the toilet and laid me across his knees and taking a big hairbrush said, "this is for stealing", and he beat my butt till it was raw. He stood me back up and looked me dead in the eye and said, "now this is for lying", and put me back across his knees and whacked me good. It served me well the rest of my life. Mama whipped me regularly for little things by making me go cut a long switch and bring it to her. She would give it to me around the legs, making me dance as the slender switch wrapped round and round, creating long red marks.
And we never thought about locking our doors. I don't remember even having a key. The law was my daddy and my teachers. We had no law in our little town. Didn't need any. There was a Parish Sheriff, but he and his few deputies were in Arcadia, some forty miles away. There was no TV, and they would listen to Dagwood and Blondie, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Great Gildersleeve, on the radio. We made our own ice cream with a hand turned churn and during the summer I was made to help shell peas and butterbeans and peel peaches for preserving. We had no frozen foods or TV dinners. Our freezer consisted of a tiny compartment in the refrigerator with two aluminum ice trays and it would regularly frost up and look like a snowball requiring defrosting about once every couple of weeks. The only movie was ten miles distant in Ringgold, consisting of a small screen of black and white cowboy movies of Lash Larue, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, and Gone with the Wind. We found things to do, smoked corn silks in rolled up newspaper--tried chewing tobacco and snuff, stole watermelons and sugarcane, and had no fear for there was nothing to fear. This is from a country boy's viewpoint, for I am sure the people had a tough time of it. there was no welfare and there was much poverty.
Daddy had a country store. His daddy, Dr. Chester Sledge, a dentist,
bought the building and the stock from someone who went out of business.
Daddy was kicked out of Normal, Northwestern College in Natchitoches,
for gambling, when he was fifteen years old. He graduated from high
school when he was fourteen and a young fourteen at that. He was onliy
interested in hunting and fishing. Granddaddy put daddy in the store and
had his dental office in the back corner of the store. Daddy ran the
store until 1960. I was born in 1935, and the high school was only a
five minute walk from the store. I worked in the store after school and
on saturdays, and by the time I was fourteen I was delivering groceries
out into the country for customers who brought their lists of stuff
they wanted. They would hand the list to me and I would "fill it"
and then charge the purchase to their account. It was only in the late
forties that we got ice cream and a refrigerated box that would keep
things cool. The big store was not air conditioned and consisted of a
huge wooden box like building with no windows except open doors in the
front and back. there was one huge fan on a stand that roared all summer
moving the hot air about. In the winter there was a big wood stove
sitting in a big sand box. The stove would get so hot sometimes it would
be cherry red, and men would sit around it chewing tobacco and they
would spit on the stove and it would sizzle. That is the way it was
everywhere. It got so hot that the big hoop of cheese would sweat and
sink down in the middle. I could cut a measure of cheese or dry salt
meat so that when they wanted a quarter pound it weighed precisely that
on the scales.
Grandaddy pulled teeth and made dentures, seldom doing fillings. He died
in 1946. The room was ten by twelve, if that, and the chair was right
in the middle facing two long windows that came down to the floor. He
kept those windows open most of the year unless it was too cold. From
the outside, the windows were about shoulder high, and men would stand
there with their elbows on the window sill talking to granddaddy as he
pulled teeth. As he pulled a tooth, he would wrestle the bloody rooted
molar from the patient's mouth and sometimes without turning, flip the
tooth flying from the forcep through the window behind him to land on
the ground. The men standing there would lean back so the tooth would
find safe passage in its trajectory between them. On occasion, the
tooth would not make it through the window, but would hit the glass or
the frame, and fall to the linoleum floor. Later in the day he would
take a bucket of water and a broom and sweep them out of the back door.
There were two or three feet of teeth in the ground back there, like
gravel. Grandaddy usually held an unlighted cigar in the corner of his
mouth as he worked, and this would require that he spit from time to
time and he would turn and spit out of the window. He would talk as he
pulled teeth, or made impressions to send off for dentures, and would
tell stories of hunting and fishing---he never cussed, but he would
quote people who cussed.
This was not meant to be an autobiography. It was intended to show how things have changed from the simple to the complex and not in a good way. People were poor, but nearly every one in my part of the world was poor, relying on poor hill farms or working at the sawmill to support their families. WWII exposed those country people to the outside world, and when they returned they were different, with a different outlook, and that was the end of the simple life. It wasn't simple for those who had to work so hard without medical or dental care, who had no running water or indoor plumbing, who had maybe a couple of pair of pants and one coat. No it wasn't simple to them, for they worked all the time just to stay alive, and they had no hired help to keep up the house or the place. One made it on his own, or didn't survive. But they survived, for that is just the way things were. There were rugged individualists, whom would be alienated from today's bizarre scene. They would look at most of today's citizens as if they were sissies. I grew up and through college without air conditioning, feeling a bit uncomfortable to exit the Gordon theatre a bit chilled into the summer's swelter. There were only a few places that were air conditioned, and our homes were not until later in the fifties when we all had noisy window units. I think air conditioning was our downfall.
September 30, 2007
http://www.eminders.com/dentists
Posted by: Dentists | October 08, 2007 at 06:48 AM