No Hill Too High for a Stepper

by Mike Mahan

  When Miss Alice had a party in the summer, she used her side porch, and guests stood or they sat on white wicker furniture under the large black ceiling fan, which hummed and rotated slowly, gently circulating the air. Sipping iced tea with sprigs of mint or wedges of lemon, everyone complimented Miss Alice on the beauty of the ferns and cut flowers she had decorated the porch with. Miss Alice would smile modestly, thank them, and say that the flowers came out of her yard—nothing special.

  I liked the big parties, which we never missed, but I most loved the visits my mother and I made to Miss Alice’s. We would be met at the front door by Miss Alice’s black butler, improbably named Buster, who wore a coat and tie in all weather. Buster had been well trained. He would bow just a bit, invite us into the entrance hall, and go off to announce our arrival to Miss Alice. Even as a small boy, I knew I was looking at something classy.

  The house had a soft smell of roses, unlike anything I had ever detected in our house or the houses of others. There were tall empire mirrors with beveled glass, bronze statues of Greek gods and goddesses sitting on marble-topped tables, and oriental rugs in rich red patterns. There was a magnificent elaborate mahogany staircase, and as I eyed the glistening banisters I wished devoutly to slide down them. But that would have to wait for future owners of the house who did not stand so staunchly on decorum.

  Miss Alice would come into the hall, usually wearing black, walking slowly and erectly, holding out a hand first to Mother and then to me. We would be invited into the living room, and she would usually have her maid, wearing a black dress with a full-length starched white apron and white lace-up shoes like nurses wore, bring tea for herself and Mother and lemonade for me. The maid brought everything out on a silver tray, and there was always a little plate of thin teacakes. Mother had instructed me that good manners dictated that I was never to eat more than two. I did what she said, though I could have gladly eaten fifty-two.

  As Mother and Miss Alice talked about gardening and neighbors, I looked around at the brocade curtains with gold threads in them, the end tables made of cherry, the fine milk-glass chandeliers. Two small horsehair sofas faced each other near the fireplace, which was far bigger than our fireplace at home. Mother told me that was because we burned coal and Miss Alice burned wood. Sitting in the fireplace were some strange-looking large brass objects. They looked like large eyes staring out at me, but Mother said they were firedogs, put there to hold the logs in place. Going into this room in particular was, I suppose, the beginning of my love of beautiful things. Mother certainly thought Miss Alice was the arbiter of taste in Montevallo.

  Sometimes Miss Alice would tell us of her travels to Europe. She was one of the two persons in town who regularly traveled abroad, the other being Mrs. Bess Chamberlain of Highland Avenue. Only once was I invited to go upstairs in the Craig House while Miss Alice lived there, and on the landing halfway between upstairs and downstairs she showed us an amazing space she called her trunk room. I was impressed, as we did not have such a room in our house across the street and my mother did not go abroad. She only went up the street to work. “A whole room just to keep trunks in,” I said silently to myself in absolute wonder.

  Her radiators were concealed by ornate metal grilles, and I loved to hear their hissing noises and occasional bumps and clanks. On one of our visits in the winter, Miss Alice needed Buster for something, and she sent me to the dark basement to fetch him. To get there I had to go onto the screened back porch, where the servants took their meals in summer, down the dark green stairs outside, then around the house to the cellar door. It was dark inside, but a naked bulb hung from the ceiling had enough light to reveal Buster over in a corner. He had removed his coat and was shoveling coal into the stoker, a dark green contraption with a motor that moved an auger, which at preset intervals pushed coal into the furnace. We did not have a stoker. We put our coal directly into the stove with a shovel or dumped it directly from the big snoot on one of our coal shuttles. One of my jobs was to take the scuttles, one black and the other silver, to the coal bin, fill it, and bring it back—the black one for the kitchen and the silver one for the living room. Miss Alice’s stoker was a much better way to get coal in the fire, I thought, and I decided that I should advise my father to get us an auger.

  The occasions to see the splendor of the interior of Miss Alice’s house were not all that numerous, but my family could constantly enjoy the beauty of the grounds. We could see her yardman George toiling every day to maintain the splendor—manicuring the lawn, planting and fertilizing flowers, weeding the beds. The most arresting part of Miss Alice’s yard was her rose garden, in a side lawn between the house and the Presbyterian Church. It was surrounded by hedge bushes that George trimmed weekly, and in the summer Miss Alice and her stepmother often sat in this cool, private space. Sometimes I would stand on a concrete wall by the sidewalk and peer into the rose garden, marveling at the color and size of the flowers.

  Miss Alice also had a splendid bed of flowers in the front yard near the screened porch and another between the double walkway that led to her front door. In the summer she filled this bed with pink, white, and dark red petunias, and in the winter she replaced them with pansies, whose happy bright faces gave vivid color when there was little else blooming. There were no plantings next to the house, because, as I later learned, Victorians liked to sit on their porches and look at their flowers and shrubs, and Mrs. Craig was certainly a Victorian lady.

  Behind the rose garden were giant crape myrtle trees as high as a house. They bloomed white, pink, and watermelon in the late summer, and they were spectacular. But the trees had a practical purpose too. They screened the rest of the backyard, where the Craig vegetable garden was planted. Compared to the flower gardens on the place, I suppose Miss Alice thought a vegetable garden unsightly.

  On the left side of the house was a sunken garden with descending concrete steps. Two very large pots of deutzia bushes stood on each side of the steps, and in the sunken garden itself a large translucent amber-colored ball rested on an iron cradle. Looking out the window of Mrs. Craig’s breakfast room, I could see the light shining through the sphere and thought it exceedingly beautiful. Also in the sunken garden was a brass sundial, and I was even more intrigued by it. Finally, when I went to school and learned its function, I would go over and read the dial on occasion.

  The grass was green year-round at the Craig House because Miss Alice had her yardman plant winter rye every fall. No other yard in town could boast a green yard in the winter, not even the houses on Highland Avenue. And there seemed to be something blooming in the yard year-round. Even in the cold of winter, Professor Sargent camellias added color to the place. When the gardenias were blooming in the early summer, we could smell the rich aroma all the way over to our house.

  Next to Mrs. Craig’s house was an edifice whose quality also rose above that of the other buildings on Shelby Street: the Presbyterian Church. The building itself was not particularly imposing. It was smaller than the Methodist Church on Middle Street, to which my family walked every Sunday. It was smaller than the Baptist Church on Main Street, too. When its bells were rung modestly on Sunday morning, I thought they sounded tinny and greatly inferior to those at the Methodist and Baptist churches. But still I thought the place superior. Perhaps it was distinguished by the people who belonged to it. I would see Dr. Harmon, president of Alabama College, getting out of his long black car and entering the church with great dignity, and I loved watching the Presbyterian college girls, dressed in hats and gloves, strolling down the street for services. The leading citizens from Highland Avenue also entered the Presbyterian portals.

  In time, the church seemed to me imbued with mystery, a sacrosanct space I would not think of invading. Churches were never locked in those days, but I could never bring myself to join the older boys from the neighborhood when they would sneak in there. I am not sure what made me scared to go in, but I did imagine that str
ange, arcane rites were celebrated there, rites that made the Methodist services bland and humdrum. My fear of the church’s interior did not extend to the churchyard, however, and I spent many hours with my friends sliding down its terraces in pasteboard boxes.

  One of the things that intrigued me about the Presbyterian Church was that it had buttresses on one side—an architectural wonder I had never seen before. I asked my father why they had buttresses, and he said that the 1939 tornado that blew away the Episcopal Church, which was also on Shelby Street, had damaged the Presbyterian Church, too, but that they were able to prop the brick church up with concrete buttresses. The church, when I first knew it, was already painted white, and Dad said that when the buttresses were installed, it was painted for the first time. Shortly after World War II, my parents bought a set of Compton’s Encyclopedia for me, and it was a source of great information of all kinds. One of the first things I looked up was buttresses, and when I read that Notre Dame in Paris had flying buttresses I wondered if it too had been hit by a cyclone.

  If I were feeling puny on a Sunday morning and stayed home, I was able to listen to the services going on across the street. In the summer, when all the windows were open, I’d position myself at my bedroom window and listen to the sound of the little pump organ wafting across the street and to the joyless, sedate Presbyterian voices singing strange hymns. Even though they had a choir and choir director, I wasn’t altogether impressed. Our Methodist hymns were better, I thought, but we only had a piano. The Baptists had us both beat. They had a pipe organ.

  I was rather frightened to look at Mrs. Straughn, who directed the Presbyterian choir. Her legs were immense, all the way down to her ankles, and as I would watch her waddle by I would almost shiver. Mother said I was not to stare at Mrs. Ina Straughn’s legs, that it wasn’t nice. She had been cursed with elephantiasis, she said, and it didn’t take me long to figure out where the malady got its name. Everyone said that she had a lovely voice and a pretty face.

  The Presbyterian Church and Miss Alice’s house were exceptions on Shelby Street. Except for them, Shelby Street seemed solidly middle-class. Houses were decent, but not fine, and they sat on a very busy street, which was one of the major routes into and out of town. Large dusty coal trucks from the mines came by quite often, their engines making a deafening sound. But little did we mind. We liked our street, a place where some of the most intriguing people in the world resided.

  Original appearance of the Montevallo Presbyterian Church before the cyclone of 1939 took the belfry tower on the roof and necessitated the installation of buttresses.

  Ruins of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church on Shelby Street following the cyclone of 1939. Eventually, the church was rebuilt on Plowman Street.

  9

  Other Shelby Street Neighbors

  Growing up, I was surrounded by a host of interesting people, both young and old, and I was seldom bored. I knew everybody. Because my sisters were so much older, I had no playmates in the house, so Shelby Street provided a number of cohorts. And the adults along Shelby Street became proxy parents.

  The Wilsons

  Next door to us on Shelby Street lived a childless couple named Bloomer and Lucille Wilson. Mr. Bloomer ran the local drugstore with his brother, the pharmacist, whom we called Dr. Wilson. I don’t think he was a doctor at all, but in those days it was common to address a pharmacist as doctor. Mr. Bloomer was not a pharmacist, but that didn’t keep him from filling prescriptions, though he could usually be found behind the marble counter of the town’s most beautiful soda fountain. We kids would take a seat at one of the eight porcelain stools at the counter. These stools swiveled, and Mr. Bloomer didn’t mind us turning left or right. But turning all the way around was a no-no—Mr. Bloomer would yell, “Boys, don’t be spinning on those stools. If you do it again I’m going to send you over to one of the tables to drink your soda.” There were six or eight round white tables with porcelain tops and twisted iron legs. If they were occupied by college girls, as they often were in the afternoons and on weekends, he would tell us that we would have to take our sodas outside if he caught us spinning.

  From behind the counter, Mr. Bloomer or his assistant Miss Ione dispensed Coke floats, cherry Cokes, single or double ice cream cones, and sundaes loaded with nuts and chocolate and whipped cream and with a maraschino cherry on the top. I personally preferred the chocolate sodas, because I liked the fizzing sensation they caused in my mouth.

  Bloomer’s wife, whom we called Miss Lucille, worked downtown at Klotzman’s, a department store owned by one of the two Jewish families in town. On weekends she baked oatmeal cookies, and she would often call me into their house and give me a stack. They were the best cookies in the world.

  Mr. Bloomer was a big fox hunter. Some Saturdays he would come in from the drugstore and have his supper, and shortly afterwards we could hear him going to his backyard, whistling and calling for the bluetick and redbone hounds penned there. He’d bring them around, and they’d jump into a big box covered with chicken wire in the back seat of his blue four-door Chevy sedan. Then men began to gather in Bloomer’s driveway. I would look out the window and watch them. Often, one would have a bottle of whiskey, which they would pass around. When I was very small I didn’t know it was whiskey, and I thought it must be some sort of medicine you had to take before you could go fox hunting. The men got louder as time passed, laughing raucously and hollering at the dogs. They talked about which ones treed the best and which could run the best. They all seemed to be experts. Daddy never joined them for the fox hunt itself, but he did occasionally partake of their medicine before they departed.

  Bloomer and Lucille Wilson rented the house next door.

  I had seen a picture of a fox in my reader at school, and I couldn’t really understand why anyone would want to hunt one. It finally dawned on me that I had never seen them bring a fox home, and I came to believe that the fox was more of an excuse for drinking and camaraderie than a real object of their pursuit. On occasion I would be awakened—in fact, everyone in the neighborhood was—when the hunters returned after midnight. The men would be talking even louder than before, and the dogs would be barking loudly. For some reason the dogs did not want to get out of the box, which must have meant for them the end of a spell of freedom they enjoyed after being penned up for days on end, and at that point Mr. Bloomer would take a fan belt from the trunk and begin hitting the dogs. They would moan in pain. Once out of their box, the dogs would often begin fighting, and we would hear Miss Lucille yell at Mr. Bloomer, “Shut those dogs up, Bloomer, or they’ll wake up the whole neighborhood.” Of course, by then they had already awakened the neighborhood. I would hear Mother telling Daddy that Mr. Bloomer should be stopped from such savagery. Daddy didn’t seem to agree, so finally she would open up a window and scream, “Bloomer, you better quit beating those dogs.”

  Mr. Bloomer never acknowledged my mother’s complaints nor did he ever change his behavior. The next day in the neighborhood, it was as if nothing had happened.

  The girl next door, Beverly, and her father, Joe Doyle. After the war, my dad and mother bought the house the Wilsons had rented and then sold it to Joe and Mildred Doyle. Beverly still owns and lives in the house.

  The Hartleys

  Our other next-door neighbors were the Hartleys. Mr. Bill Hartley drove the gas truck for Mr. J. A. Brown Sr., and Mrs. Hartley worked for Mr. Ellis Hoffman in his dry goods store. Their son Bill was my close friend, and I spent a lot of time at their house.

  The Hartley house was nicely painted and had two floors, and we loved to play on the porch off the second floor. Mother was always afraid that we would fall over the banisters down into the yard, but we never did. On very hot summer days and on rainy days we especially loved to play under the Hartley house, which was built on a sloping lot, and the back of the house was high above the ground so there was lots of room down there. The dirt was always cool and
powder dry, and there were thousands of doodlebugs. We’d get a straw off the kitchen broom and push it down in the hole, saying, “Doodlebug, Doodlebug, where have you been?” Sometimes we would tickle those little bugs out of the ground all day long.

  Mother and Dad told me that the Hartley house used to sit where Mrs. Craig’s house now was and that it had been jacked up and skidded across the street on logs. This was the first I had heard that you could move a house, and I thought about it a lot. It dawned on me that this move would have presented a special problem, as it would have to be turned all the way around in order to face the street when it was moved.

  The house was moved before there were sidewalks on the street, and when the City installed the walks, the Hartley house was about two feet below the sidewalk. When we skated down the sidewalk, we had to be careful in front of the Hartley house, or we could fall down into their front yard.

  The greatest thing about the Hartley household was a visitor who came there periodically. He was Mr. Hartley’s oldest son Trab, and we knew that he was famous. He was a professional baseball player, and, though he played semi-professional ball, we all said he was in the major leagues. Once he injured his shoulder and back, and he had to come home to heal up. He spent part of each day under the house hanging from straps, and I’d always have to go over and peek at him when he did that. The truth was that all the boys on Shelby Street idolized him. Sometimes he would play a game with us that he called pepper. He would stand near the garage between our house and the Bloomer Wilsons’, and some of the neighbor boys and I would station ourselves at the end of the driveway near the street. Trab would hit grounders for us to catch, and we loved it. Other times he would pitch with us. Bill had a catcher’s mitt, and when Trab’s ball hit the mitt it sounded like a beaver tail spanking the water. We’d never seen anything like that.