Life in Small Town America
Hustle and bustle, watch the clock, Americans has grown to a point where we live by the clock. Life today is too hectic and busy, people crowd into elevators and restaurants hurrying to get to their next appointment. In the 1960’s, as a young boy growing up in middle Georgia, life had a different feel. There were deadlines and appointments to be made, but everyone seemed to travel at a slower pace. The town of Macon and I call it a town, because we had not yet reached the point of being a city as to my thinking. When I think of city, my thoughts go to a larger more metropolitan area with tall buildings and stores that are not readily available in the place you live. A city was a place that you traveled to for a day trip, a special trip like Atlanta.
Growing up we lived in a modest middle class home in the county, not in a rural area where you had to travel for miles to visit your neighbor, but a neighborhood outside the city limits of town. There were four of us boys, along with Mom and Dad, and all of us boys shared a bedroom complete with two sets of bunk beds. Dad worked at the Air Force base as a air conditioning and refrigeration service man in a nearby smaller town and Mom owned a small cosmetic business in Macon. There were not a lot of fast food restaurants, I think McDonald's and Krystal was the two, so eating at one of these was a rare treat. Dad would come home from work and occasionally surprise us by taking us to the drive-in theatre. We usually got to watch the show two times because Dad would fall asleep sometime during the first showing. My Dad usually worked two jobs, getting up at 4am going to Robins, the Air Force base, and coming home around 4pm. He then worked until around 10-11pm, moonlighting as we called it. We had a black lady that kept us, Johnnie Mae, from the time she was in her mid-twenties till we became teenagers because Mom worked all day. Johnnie Mae and her husband had a home across the main highway from the little subdivision we lived in. Robert was older than her and the only recollection I have of him working was that he sold firewood out of his old green Chevrolet truck. All of us boys loved Johnnie Mae. Sometimes during the day, in the summertime, my younger brother Randy and I would walk with her to her house about 3 miles away. Walking across the main road visiting her home was a big treat for a young boy. She had chickens running around in the yard that had no grass, just dirt and the old house was not a model home that you would put on the cover of Southern Living magazine, but going to her house was exciting. I remember Mom telling Johnnie Mae once that she would love to have some fried chicken and Johnnie Mae knew what that meant. What a treat as a young boy, I got to see her take that live chicken, ring its neck, hang it on the clothes line while she plucked the feathers, cut and fry it for dinner, I will never forget the awe of seeing this. Johnnie Mae was like our adopted mother and as I got older, I would look in on her throughout her life, handling small issues that came up because her family lived in other areas of the state. At her funeral, sometime in early 2000 and I was given the opportunity and privilege to say something about her and it was mostly about what a great women she was and how much I loved her.
As time progressed, things got better financially for Mom and Dad and they decided to move to another area and build a home that would accommodate the entire family. A lot in a small neighborhood was found in Jones County and Dad contracted with a man to build their dream home. The nearest school was in Gray, Georgia, a really small town and about a thirteen mile ride on the school bus every day. Coming from a town the size of Macon, even though Macon was not that large, Gray in comparison was tiny. A Tastee Freeze restaurant and a local cafe in the downtown area were basically the eating establishments and they had one convience store, Handy Andy. Gray was a small community where pretty much everyone knew about everyone and what they did each day. The first day of school, I was in the eighth grade and my brother Mickey was in the eleventh, we discovered that before school went into session everyone knew we were the new guys from Macon. Both boys and girls walked by the hall that housed the office to check us out, for different reasons of course, but to find out who we were. The building was not what we were accustomed too, it was much older with hard wood floors, but the school had a personality that you didn't find in schools in bigger cities. There was no cross town rivals when it came to sports, schools played schools in other counties. We had PEP Rallies on Friday before ball games and during hunting season a lot of the boys came to school in their hunting clothes, usually sporting a Bowie knife on their belt and a rifle on the rack in their truck. A railroad track ran through the middle of downtown and there were two branches of the Bank of Gray. We would laugh and call them the North and Southside branch; they were probably about a mile apart. Gray, Georgia was a town that reminded me a lot of Mayberry on the TV show Andy Griffin. There was only one police car and maybe 2-3 officers in the police department. On Friday night if you didn't go to Macon or Milledgeville, you just hung around usually at the Handy Andy on the Main Street, which was located directly across from the high school. Gray has grown somewhat larger today, fast food restaurants, banks, a large Ace Hardware, and a major grocery chain now adorns the horizon as you enter the city limits. Has it lost that small town feel, I hope not, there are not too many small towns that have continued to survive in today's world. Most teenagers can hardly wait to leave small towns to relocate to the metropolitan cities with the night life and large corporations to explore and further their careers. However small towns are special and needed in the fast pace life of today's world.
It's 7:00 and Andy, Barney, Aunt Bea, Opie, and Goober are on TV, I can just smell that fried chicken cooking and I know we will be sitting on the porch real soon listening to Andy play the guitar. Life is good.
Life Happens
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