Remembering a Good Man

            Adelaide and I became part of the Dadeville community even before we became fulltime residents. We had built our house on Lake Martin in anticipation of retiring to it, and since we were at the lake most weekends, we ate on Saturday mornings at Bob’s Fine Food, which was sort of like Cheers without the booze. It was where you met people and made friends and caught up with the local goings on. And we began attending church at First United Methodist Church in Dadeville.

            It seemed to me as a newcomer that there were three institutions in particular that gave Dadeville its distinctive personality: Moore’s Hardware, Floyd’s Feed & Seed, and the Piggly Wiggly.

            OF COURSE IT WASN’T the businesses themselves that established their uniqueness; it was their owners, Steve Moore, Fay Floyd, and Laeman Butcher. In every one of those places, you were treated like a neighbor as well as a customer.

            The Piggly Wiggly, or The Pig as we called it, seemed to cater most meetings and events in Dadeville, and I met Laeman when I was the guest speaker at a Kiwanis Club meeting. When I was introduced to him, he was ensuring that the luncheon went smoothly. My first impression was of a smiling, jovial person.

            I began to know him better when we shopped at The Pig and joined First United Methodist Church. To my first impressions, I added another: boundless energy. And later, selflessness.

            Seven or eight years older than I, he seemed to be always on the go, usually on a project to make Dadeville a better place—I can’t think of many civic projects he wasn’t involved in—or to help someone who needed help, whether taking someone groceries or cutting their grass or laying hands on a motorized wheelchair for someone who needed one.

            WE WORKED SIDE by side in the Methodist Men, whose mission is to help people in the local community, on such projects as building wheel chair ramps, repairing really rundown houses and clearing overgrown yards. No matter how hot or dirty the job was, he was always there. For all of the charitable acts that Laeman performed publicly, there were probably as many private acts of charity that he did not call attention to.

            Laeman was a Marine (I don’t think you’re ever a former Marine), and he was passionate about the welfare of all veterans. He helped arrange flights for veterans to see the World War II monument in Washington,D.C., and trips to the Infantry Museum at Fort Benning.

            He was equally passionate about politics, and although his leanings often didn’t jibe with mine, it never stopped us from working together for a worthy cause.

            IN RECENT YEARS he had turned running of The Pig over to his children, although he could still be seen about the store. The change did give him time to find yet another passion: Gardening. He went at it in a big way, and loved to share not only reports on how his garden was doing but the product of the garden as well.

            An icon toppled earlier this year when The Pig closed.

            But a community giant disappeared on Tuesday when Laeman died of a heart attack at 81. I admired and respected him, and I was fortunate to know him for as long as I did.

Bill Brown is a retired newspaper editor whose newspapers won a Pulitzer Prize, National Headliners Award, Edgar Willis Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service and Freedom of Information Awards. He is the author of “Yellow Cat, Hendry & Me: Dispatches From Life’s Front Lines. He can be reached at bill@williamblakebrown.com

My Grandfather and Planting Daylillies

I thought about my grandfather a good deal this morning as Adelaide and I planted the daylillies we’d purchased Wednesday at Blooming Colors in Auburn. It wasn’t that he taught me anything about flower gardening. It was what he taught me about work.

We’ve always liked daylillies, and I’ve rescued more than a few ditch lillies over the years. They’re always interesting colors, and I admire their hardiness. There was a wide variety available at the nursery, and we probably would have gotten more if there’d been a place to plant them.

AS IT WAS, we chose some large ones—I don’t want to wait to see results—which meant they needed to be planted in good size holes. Anyone in National Village who has added to the landscaping that was installed when the house was finished develops an intimate acquaintance with red clay. I was glad that I hadn’t given my post hole diggers away when we moved.

It was digging those holes that had my grandfather standing alongside me. He was a grade school dropout, as so many of his class and generation were, and in his youth he worked on the railroad line that came through, moving dirt for the railway embankment with a slip pulled by a mule. He settled into farming in the days when mules mixed with tractors in doing the farm labor.

He probably stood no more than 5-foot-seven, and he weighed maybe 160 pounds.

He knew how to work. And he taught us—our cousins, my brother and me— how to work.

IT SEEMED AS IF so many of the things we helped him do involved moving dirt, though memory probably exaggerates.  Still, we did spend a lot of time digging post holes and stretching barbed wire, and loading piles of dirt into the bed of the pickup truck to move it to some other place where we would shovel it out of the truck.

We were young and full of vinegar, and we attacked each job as if we were building an earthworks to fend off an impending attack. It was never long before our arms felt as heavy as the dirt we were moving and our spirits were flagging.

His shovel never had as much dirt in it as ours did, and we tossed two shovels for every one of his. For a while. A very short while.

While we were sucking for air with our hands on our knees like tired basketball players at the free throw line, he swung his shovel with a steady rhythm.

He did not have to lecture us. We learned by watching. He didn’t have to lecture us about working until the job was done, either. We knew that if he weren’t going anywhere, we weren’t either. And barring something unforeseen, he wasn’t going anywhere until the job was finished or the day had run out.

THERE WAS A FINE and welcome mist when I first went outside this morning, but it soon disappeared, and it became a day that reminded me of boyhood summers. As I dug the holes for the daylillies, my grandfather didn’t have to remind me that steady was better than rushed, nor that it’s good to finish a job before you put your tools away.

I will say that I was as glad to get finished today as I was long ago.

Bill Brown is a retired newspaper editor whose newspapers won a Pulitzer Prize, National Headliners Award, Edgar Willis Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service and Freedom of Information Awards. He is the author of “Yellow Cat, Hendry & Me: Dispatches From Life’s Front Lines. He can be reached at 

bill@williamblakebrown.com

It's Good Porches That Make Good Neighbors

As we sat on our front porch night last week, visiting with our neighbors as the evening gathered, I reflected on the various homes we have had over the years.

Most of them were typical suburban homes—when you have children, the suburbs have undeniable advantages—and most of them presented a blank face to the street. About the only time spent in the front yard was in mowing the grass or tending flower beds.

OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES centered on a patio or screened porch at the back of the house. With the front drapes drawn, there was little way for a passerby to know whether anyone was home. It probably didn’t matter; most of the passersby on those suburban streets were in automobiles, usually with all of the windows closed.

Many of the houses of our youth, particularly those that were in town, had porches, and there were sidewalks, too, and people often strolled in the evening, stopping to chat with their neighbors or even to sit for a spell.

It was the advent of home air conditioning, I suspect, that rendered the front porch obsolescent, at least in the eyes of architects and developers. Visiting became a planned activity. Rarely did someone show up and ring the doorbell just to visit for a while.

I AM GLAD that our village is different, Every house has a porch, and people use them. The streets are not heavily traveled, and people stroll, some for exercise, some to walk their dogs, and some just to enjoy being out of doors. It invites neighbors to stop and talk for a while or to sit and have refreshments.

The evening was pleasantly cool, and as our visiting was winding down, the whippoorwill began its nightly calling. No one had to climb into an automobile and walk home; home was just a few paces away.

When Robert Frost wrote that “good fences make good neighbors,” he evoked a picture of farm country, where fences are important.

In National Village, I would suggest, it is good porches that make good neighbors.

Bill Brown is a retired newspaper editor whose newspapers won a Pulitzer Prize, National Headliners Award, Edgar Willis Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service and Freedom of Information Awards. He is the author of “Yellow Cat, Hendry & Me: Dispatches From Life’s Front Lines. He can be reached at bill@williamblakebrown.com

Getting Used to Hanging

            I think I wounded the bank teller who was handling the drive-up customers the other day. The bank probably won’t be bothered if I finally decide to change my account.

            Oh, I didn’t scream at the teller; I wasn’t nasty. Not by a long shot. I was just honest.

            It started simply enough. I had an uncomplicated deposit to make, and there wasn’t a single vehicle at any of the drive-up lanes.

            THE FIRST THING I noticed was that there no longer was a drive-up window at the side of the bank building. What had once been a glass window where you could see whether there actually was someone working was now covered over with advertising. So I chose one of the lanes that had a green “open” sign above. A video screen next to the pneumatic tube fixture was showing advertisements. I put my deposit into the tube and sent it merrily on its way. Then I watched some advertisements, and a trivia question, and then some more advertisements.

            At last the screen changed and a face appeared. He would take care of my transaction, he said. The screen reverted to its advertising. I watched and waited. Finally I turned the engine off.

            The screen changed again. This time it was a female face. “How are you today?” she asked breezily.

            “Frustrated,” I told her. “I’ve been waiting for 10 minutes to make a simple deposit.”

            I DON’T THINK that’s what she wanted to hear. “I just got back from lunch, and they’ve been backed up in here,” she said defensively. The screen went blank and my deposit receipt was returned to me.

            Even if she’d stayed on, I doubt I would have told her it’s not my problem that they don’t have enough personnel to handle the customers with some degree of timeliness. It wouldn’t have done any good. (I’ve actually been inside that same bank and had much the same experience. Two tellers working and a couple of customers with large transactions means you’ve got to stand and pat your foot. While one or two people are sitting in glassed in offices trying to avoid making eye contact.

            The bank is actually owned by the same national chain that we banked with before we moved to National Village. But that was only because our hometown bank had been bought by that chain from another chain that had bought from a small chain that had bought it from the local ownership.

            WE STUCK WITH the bank through all those changes because when we went in the bank we knew the people working there and they knew us. We could call the bank on the phone (a local number that rang at the bank, not an 800 number as is the case now), and the person who answered recognized our voices.

            As time wore on, things changed. There were fewer and fewer people in the bank and fewer that we knew. The person had the drive-up window had been moved inside, too.

            We don’t go to the bank very often. Most of our income is direct deposited, and we pay most of our bills on line. On those occasions when we do go, though, it would be really good if the bank had enough employees so that three customers didn’t cause a backup like the interstate in Atlanta at rush hour.

            My wife’s Aunt Carrie used to say you’d get used to hanging if it didn’t kill you. Perhaps we are getting too accustomed to being treated like sheep. Any number of big box stores have multitudes of checkout counters, but only one or two people manning them. You’re encouraged to use self-checkout, but regularly there’s at least one item in your cart that won’t scan, so you have to wait for assistance anyway. In some department stores, finding a sales person to help you is like searching for Atlantis.

          OF COURSE IT'S been eons since there was someone at what we used to call service stations to pump your gas, wash your windshield and check under the hood.

            We seem to have forgotten that at one time the customer was if not king, at least a part of the nobility. Now we seem just to be an inconvenience.

            I’m still thinking about changing banks―if I can find one that still treats customers as if they were important.

Bill Brown is a retired newspaper editor whose newspapers won a Pulitzer Prize, National Headliners Award, Edgar Willis Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service and Freedom of Information Awards. He is the author of “Yellow Cat, Hendry & Me: Dispatches From Life’s Front Lines. He can be reached at 

bill@williamblakebrown.com

            

The Pig Passes

There were three businesses in Dadeville, my former home town, that were such a part of the fabric of the community that they were institutions: Moore’s Hardware, Floyd’s Feed & Seed, and the Piggly Wiggly. (Our bank was in that category, but it has changed hands so many times that it no longer fits.)

Owned by local people whom you saw at church or at ballgames or at civic functions, they gave the community its unique character.

NOW ONE OF them is gone. The Piggly Wiggly closed last week, and even though I now live 30 minutes away, I am saddened by its passing. And the community is diminished. 

The Pig, as we called it, wasn’t large enough to carry everything a fancy recipe might call for—it probably would take four Pigs to make up the floor space of the Kroger in Tiger Town—but it had what you needed on a daily basis.

Men from our church group would stop by the Pig to pick up breakfast to carry to our Wednesday morning meetings. Every morning there was a line of working people at the deli picking up a sausage biscuit or a full breakfast. There was a similar line at lunch time, picking upa Styrofoam containers with a meat and three meal. On Sunday, churchgoers stopped by to pick up lunch on their way home.

ALMOST ANY group planning a fund raiser or other event to benefit the community looked to the Pig to provide the food at a kinfolks price. The Pig catered meals for civic club meetings and provided meals for the school athletic teams.

The Pig’s owners’ participation in civic life was well known.

But Laeman Butcher and his family, who ran the Pig for many years, did much more than that. I do not know how many food baskets Laeman prepared and delivered to needy families at Thanksgiving and Christmas nor how many meals he gave to the hungry. Nor do I know how many times he took people in need to a doctor or the pharmacy, making sure they got what they needed. I don’t know, because Laeman never talked about his private acts of charity; he just did them.

DADEVILLE IS NOT exempt from change. Drive the backgrounds of any state in the union and you will see dead or dying towns with what used to be banks and drug stores and grocery stores turned into title pawn places and tanning salons. On the bypasses of those towns, if they have one, are the chain fast food restaurants and drug stores and auto parts stores. They look just like the ones in the next town.

To be alive and vital, a town must have a heart and a soul. I fear that Dadeville has lost part of its.

Bill Brown is a retired newspaper editor whose newspapers won a Pulitzer Prize, National Headliners Award, Edgar Willis Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service and Freedom of Information Awards. He is the author of “Yellow Cat, Hendry & Me: Dispatches From Life’s Front Lines. He can be reached at 

bill@williamblakebrown.com

Possessions and Liberation and Christmas

MY THOUGHTS THE OTHER DAY turned to my grandparents, and more specifically to my grandparents’ house. It was a farmhouse, wood framed, with a long front hall with the living room, which was seldom used except at Christmas.

There was a fireplace in the hall, with doors to two bedrooms on one side of the hall and one on the other. Two of the bedrooms had fireplaces that fed into the same chimney as the one in the hall. A door at the end of the hall opened to the sleeping porch and a large dining room, also used mainly on holidays or when my grandmother cooked for the farmhands, and a kitchen.

The kitchen, which seemed so large when I was a child, was no larger than the kitchen in our cottage in National Village. It had only a few cabinets, swing out bins for flour and cornmeal, a built-in pie safe, and linoleum counter tops. Yet here my grandmother cooked, often for a multitude, and canned the produce of her garden.

WHAT WAS STRIKING about the house, at least retrospectively, was the paucity of closet space. The house was, of course, built without an architect and perhaps without any drawn up plans, certainly none that my grandmother saw before the house was nearly complete. As children, we were told that Memaw, as we called her, had told my grandfather that one thing she wanted in the new house was closets, something many houses of the era did not have.

We were told she never even looked at the new house until it was finished or nearly finished. Her request for closets either had not gotten communicated or had been ignored. My grandmother was one of the gentlest souls I have ever known, but she was not spineless. She put her foot down, and the carpenters carved out closet space in the nearly completed house. The closets were tiny and the fact that they were added afterwards was obvious.

As it turned out, the closets were more than adequate after their children were grown and gone. My grandmother had maybe two or three Sunday dresses and my grandfather had maybe one suit and a pair of dress shoes.

The closets in our cottage are cavernous compared to the ones in that old house, and still we have clothing packed away in boxes.

WHEN WE DOWNSIZED our space, we did not downsize our possessions proportionately. We are still working through ridding ourselves of possessions we seldom or ever need. And we are trying not to add new stuff. I don’t think we ever felt more liberated than we did when we were younger and living for a short time on a boat with out two young sons. Space on the boat was finite, and if you added something new, it was necessary to get rid of something old. We remembered that lesson for a while after we returned to the “real” world, but gradually the lesson faded.

All of this came to mind was I was driving home from shopping for Christmas presents. Adelaide and I really had no great wishes for things this year, so we decided to buy gifts for the children at the Girls Ranch. Many of our National Village neighbors joined in the effort. Adelaide’s sister had said she has everything she needs, so we’re adding what we would have spent on a present for her to the money for the Girl Ranch residents.

I HAD GOTTEN a copy of the residents’ Christmas Wish Lists, and what struck us and our neighbors was how modest their wishes were. I guess that is what started my train of thought rolling. My grandparents did not feel deprived because their possessions were modest. Living on the boat, we found that there were few things that were truly essential. We are trying to re-learn that lesson, difficult though it may be. Meanwhile, if forgoing adding to our possessions and give a little happiness to some kids who have been dealt a pretty bad hand, it brightens the season for all of us.

Bill Brown is a retired newspaper editor whose newspapers won a Pulitzer Prize, National Headliners Award, Edgar Willis Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service and Freedom of Information Awards. He is the author of “Yellow Cat, Hendry & Me: Dispatches From Life’s Front Lines. He can be reached at bill@williamblakebrown.com

Nostalgia for only 89 bucks

I was thumbing through a catalog the other day, one of those arrives around this time of year from merchandisers who must think we’re rich or heavy into conspicuous consumption. Don’t get me wrong, there was some really nice looking stuff, but not stuff that would keep me any warmer or dryer than items much less expensive. There were some things that might have made me look a little more suave, though my compulsion to be suave is about at its nadir. Warm and dry is good enough, thank you very much.

WHAT STOPPED ME, though, what made my jaw drop, was a Red Ryder BB gun. “Because he’s always wanted one,” the headline said. He’d have to really, really want one for the price tag of $89. That’s not a typo. Eighty-Nine Dollars.

The photo stirred memories of my own Red Ryder BB gun, but not enough to make me want to own another one. My Red Ryder figured in some pleasurable experiences and in some that could have turned out tragic.

IT COST A LOT LESS THAN than $89. In fact it didn’t cost me any cash at all. I simply sold enough flower seeds to my kinfolks to redeem my prize. It arrived in the mail; when our rural mail carrier had a package to deliver, he sat at the mailbox and blew his horn until somebody came out to pick it up. I lurked on my grandmother’s front porch every day until at last my treasure arrived.

No one thought it strange that a boy not yet in the first grade should have a BB gun. For that matter, no one seemed to have any scruples about kids shooting birds, either.

Fortunately for the bird population, that Red Ryder BB turn was about as lethal as a water pistol. Most of the time, anyway. A wave of guilt still washes over me when I recall the one time that it achieved lethality.

IT WAS CHRISTMAS and we had gotten one of those rare snows in North Louisiana that stuck to the ground. I had gotten a buckskin jacket and a coon skin cap for Christmas, and that afternoon I marched through the snow around the house, pretending that I was the great hunter on the prowl for supper.

Sparrows hopped in my footprints, trying to find something to eat in the packed down snow. I turned, aimed and fired.

A sparrow toppled over. I waited for a few seconds for him to pop up and fly, but he just lay there in the track in the snow. I’ve done many things to feel guilty about, but for whatever reason, the death of that sparrow has stuck with me for nearly 70 years.

THAT WAS THE LAST bird —or living thing of any sort—that the Red Ryder killed. It was responsible, though, for my cousin and I setting a the woods on fire and for my cousin scaring the liver out of my mother with a real gun.

But those are tales for another time.

Eight-nine bucks for a Red Ryder? No thanks. The first one created memories enough.

Bill Brown is a retired newspaper editor whose newspapers won a Pulitzer Prize, National Headliners Award, Edgar Willis Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service and Freedom of Information Awards. He is the author of “Yellow Cat, Hendry & Me: Dispatches From Life’s Front Lines. He can be reached at 

bill@williamblakebrown.com