by Mike Mahan
Mr. Dyer cared little for what his neighbors thought. In many ways, he exemplified a quote from Benjamin Franklin that I came to adopt as my own motto. I first encountered it when, as a fifth or sixth grader, I was taken by Dad to a hot dog stand out in Wilton. On the walls there were blue signs with sayings written in glitter. One read, “To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, and be nothing.” I asked Dad what it meant, and when he explained it to me I was quite impressed with the idea. Mr. Dyer and I had more in common than might have been seen at first blush. It gives me great pleasure to own the Dyer property today and to have the opportunity to clean it up and create a park on the site.
The Carpenters
Old Man Carpenter, as we called him, and his sons Brewer and Bill lived in three side-by-side houses down the street from us. They especially did not care for Mr. Dyer and his projects. They were terribly upset when Mr. Dyer tried to get the city to declare that the driveway between Old Man Carpenter’s house and the Bridges’ house next door was a public street. Mr. Dyer wanted to use the driveway for easier access to his mill. The Carpenters were not about to let this happen, convincing the City Council, on which Dad was then serving, that the driveway was actually a driveway, not a public street.
I never liked the Carpenters very much. Of all our neighbors, they were the least neighborly. Old Man Carpenter lived with his nice, soft-spoken wife, and an unmarried daughter, Madge, in the house nearest us. On Middle Street behind Wilson Drug Company, his sons had a garage that was made from tin and had a dirt floor, and in part of that building Old Man Carpenter ran his shoe repair shop, a place heavy with the smell of neatsfoot oil and leather. He stood behind an L-shaped counter operating a giant, noisy machine that had multiple wheels running on a long shaft, powered by an electric motor. This machine would grind leather off your shoes, polish the leather, put color on it, stain it, and repolish it. He also worked at a big sewing machine that would sew the soles back on your shoes. And there were metal shoe forms on which he would place shoes and drive nails into the soles and heels. Old Man Carpenter’s work fascinated me and my friends, but we didn’t get to see much of it, as he did not like to be watched. We were scared to get too close to him because he would tell us to get the hell out of there.
Carpenter Brothers Garage between Middle and Valley streets. Through the left door was old Mr. Carpenter’s shoe repair shop. The large opening to the right was the entrance to Brewer and Bill Carpenter’s auto repair shop.
Madge was not very nice, either. She worked as a dental hygienist at Dr. Orr’s office, which was just above Rogan’s Store at the corner of Shelby and Main streets. She didn’t have a husband, which could have had something to do with her personality. There was, however, a lot of talk about her and her boyfriends. Even as a child, I would hear gossip, but I understood little of it. What I did understand was that she would almost kill me every time I had to get my teeth cleaned. She stood there grimly doing her work, never offering a word of comfort. But we certainly heard from her when we skated down the hill toward her house. “Cut that racket out,” she would yell at us through an open window or from the front porch swing where she often sat. When I played at the Bridges’s house, which was next door to Madge’s house, we were always admonished by Mrs. Bridges to keep our voices down. But it was impossible to keep quiet while we were skating down Shelby Street toward the little red bridge.
I once had the chance to deal Madge some misery, though it did not turn out as well as I had hoped. It was the summer when I was twelve, and Joe McGaughy and I were playing down next to Mr. Dyer’s millrace when suddenly Joe grabbed my arm and motioned over to a large flat rock. I gasped at what I saw: sunning itself was the biggest snake I had ever seen. It was easily as big around as my arm and well over a yard long. “What kind is it?” Joe whispered.
“I haven’t got any idea,” I said. “It’s not a rattlesnake though cause it doesn’t have any rattles. Let’s look for something to kill it with.”
Joe eased up toward the snake just a bit. “It isn’t poisonous because its head isn’t a triangle. All poisonous snakes have a head shaped like a triangle.”
“Except for the coral snake,” I said, remembering my science class.
We saw some scrap lumber next to a barn Mr. Dyer kept his cows in, and we each armed ourselves with a length of two by four. We advanced like two warriors and made our attack. The snake, sluggish in the warm sun, never knew what hit him, but, taking no chances, we repeatedly struck him. We dragged his mangled body up to the house to show it off, but nobody was there but Carrie Boo. She hollered and said for us to get that thing away from her.
Later we showed it to Dad and Bloomer Wilson when they came home for lunch, and they told us it was a chicken snake. “Y’all go throw that thing in the creek,” Dad said, but Joe and I decided we hadn’t yet gotten all the mileage we could out of that snake.
“Let’s scare somebody with it,” Joe said. “It worked with Carrie Boo.”
And then we began our plan. We would tie a rope around the snake and hang it vertically in a long narrow hole in the water oak tree in the front yard. Then we’d train the rope out across a limb that came near our front porch. When we saw someone coming we would pull the rope and let the snake fall down toward the sidewalk, landing at their feet.
Once everything was set, we took our seats in the swing and waited for our first victims. In a short while, we could see a black woman and a child coming up the street headed to town. Just as they neared us, with perfect choreography, we yanked the rope. Neither the woman nor the boy seemed at all alarmed, but just walked around it. The woman cast a disgusted look in our direction and said, “What y’all little white boys think y’all trying to do?” The words little and trying cut us to the quick, but we decided to try again, despite our disappointment with our first effort. We stuck the snake back in the hole, went back to the swing, and waited.
That was when Madge Carpenter headed our way, going back to work at Dr. Orr’s office after her lunch hour. Standing around five foot seven and weighing in at more than two hundred pounds, she was a blaze of white—white uniform, white wedge-heeled shoes, and white stockings. She walked slowly but deliberately—like a man, I thought. On her face was her usual glumness. A better victim could not be found.
At just the right time we yanked the rope, and when the snake brushed her shoulder she let out a scream louder than I had ever heard. “Lord God, Jesus,” she hollered, and Joe and I got to laughing. By then she had seen the rope and had spotted the two of us.
“You wait til I tell y’all’s daddies,” she screamed. “Then you’ll be laughing on the other side of your damn faces.” With that she stalked off toward Main Street. I knew she would not stop until she got to Dad’s barbershop.
In a matter of minutes here came Dad, and I could see by the scowl on his face that he was not happy. “Get in the coalhouse, Mike, and you get on home, Joe. Your mama can take care of you.” As I headed to the coalhouse with Dad just behind me, I could tell he was removing his belt. The whipping wasn’t so bad. I figured it was probably worth it to scare the hell out of Madge, but it galled me that she might think she was the one who won.
Madge’s brother, Brewer Carpenter, lived with his wife and son, Brewer Jr., in a little creosote house between his father and his brother Bill. Both Brewer and Bill had reputations for being excellent mechanics, and they were also known for their automobiles, which they would trade in almost every year. While Brewer chose a practical Dodge or Plymouth, Bill chose a flashy Chrysler. Once he got one with special fender, hood, and roof design to make it aerodynamically superior. He told everybody, “Now that’s the way all cars will be shaped in the future.” Dad said he hoped not, as he thought it was the ugliest car he had ever seen. But I thought it was cool having a car of the future on our street. Highland Avenue didn’t have one.
Brewer Carpenter inside the auto shop he shared with his brother B
ill.
The Carpenters didn’t like dogs to wander onto their property, and when I got Tag, Mother would always tell me to keep him off their place. They also did not like it at all when the boys in the neighborhood would come onto their property to fish along their bank. There was a gum tree on their property next to the creek, and it was reputed to be next to the best bream bed on the creek. We couldn’t resist it, despite the fact that we knew that one of the Carpenters would come and run us off. But we fixed them. Mr. Dyer lent us a little skiff, and we went up and anchored next to the tree and fished and fished. The Carpenters told us to leave, but we didn’t budge. The Carpenters did not own the creek, and we knew our rights.
Later we got more revenge. Joe McGaughy’s father, Mr. Luther, helped Joe and Jack build a plywood speedboat. I thought it was a beauty, about eight feet long and four feet wide with a beautifully curved bow. It would hold two people, but it was better and faster when you drove it alone, sitting in the middle, where you could operate the five-horsepower engine mounted to the stern. At full throttle it would fly, coming up out of the water on a plane. We’d fly upstream to the viaduct and back down to the dam, making sliding turns at high speed. The Carpenters would come out and shake their fists at us and yell. The sound of that big engine happily drowned them out.
We drove that boat for a couple of summers and we had great plans to improve it by adding a windshield or a steering wheel, or—most importantly—a larger motor. But it didn’t happen, as Mr. Luther’s health worsened and all our plans had to be scrapped. Besides, one afternoon Dad came to watch this speeding monster, and whoever was at the helm turned sharply only a few feet before the dam. Dad became very disturbed and told Mother, and I was grounded from being a passenger or driving the boat ever again.
There were bigger boats without motors on Shoal Creek, but we dreamed of having faster boats with outboard motors. Joe and Jack’s plywood boat, built from a plan in Popular Mechanics, remained firmly in our memory. It topped out at only twenty miles per hour, but, above that dam, Mr. Luther’s little boat surely still holds the speed record.
10
Frog Holler
Down at the bottom of Shelby Street next to Shoal Creek was a place we called Frog Hollow, pronounced “Frog Holler” by the older boys in the neighborhood—Charles Cox, Brewer Carpenter, and Bill Hartley. I never knew for sure where the name came from, but in the spring when we were sitting in our backyard we could hear a chorus of bull frogs croaking down by the creek.
Shoal Creek ran right through Frog Holler, and on the town side of the creek, at a place called Big Springs, stood Alabama College’s water treatment plant. This site was so interesting that the elementary school did a field trip there every year. But I felt like I was lucky because I could go there any time and climb up the exterior stairs and observe the operation. Mr. O. B. Cooper, whose voice was as loud as a foghorn, was in charge of this operation that pumped water from the spring on the other side of the creek and filtered it through sand. Then the water was stored in an open-air pool, so the sun could also help purify it. After that, it was put in a storage tank, where chlorine was added. When you crossed the viaduct in a car and looked over at the treatment plant, you could see an open square concrete tank, filled with the bluest water that you had ever seen. In the summertime with the sun on it, it sparkled brightly.
When the water was purified, Mr. Cooper or one of his men would enter the pump room and start the big pump that loudly pumped the clear blue water from the clean-water side of the filter plant all the way to the college, where it was stored in a big concrete water tank on the end of the east wing of Main dorm. To this day, that tank, painted a dirty gray, is the symbol of the University of Montevallo. With its narrow vertical windows circling in an upward direction, the tower looked to me like the tower of a European castle. I was able to go into it from time to time, and I remember well its distinct echo and the sound of cool water dripping all around you.
Alabama College’s concrete water tower. Water was pumped from Big Springs into the famous tower.
At the Big Springs community watering hole, Montevallo’s source of wonder and pride.
At Big Springs in front of the log WPA Boy Scout Hut with my Easter bunny.
The City of Montevallo had its own water treatment plant, but it was not thought to be nearly as efficient and interesting as the one operated by the college nor did it produce as good water. One often saw citizens of the town with buckets dipping the clear water out of a concrete springhouse to take home with them. Young boys could often be seen lying on their stomachs and lowering their heads to the water and lapping it like a dog. I myself did that many a time.
On the other side of the water treatment plant stood the Boy Scout Hut, built by the Works Progress Administration. A bridge had crossed the creek to it, but it was so badly damaged in a flood that it couldn’t be used any longer. Dad went with some other men to the Alabama Power Company and asked for help in creating a new bridge. Instead, the company installed two cables, the lower for walking on and the upper for holding oneself upright. That worked amazingly well, until someone started horsing around when several boys crossed the cable together. Or when Pep Jeter Jr.—a local sadist—would jump up and down on the cable to try to throw us off. If we managed to get across, we knew he would be waiting for us when we came back across the cable, and sometimes we avoided him by going up to the Cunningham house, walking down Spring Creek Road to Middle Street, and crossing the viaduct to get back home.
Big Springs was a great place to fish and to swim. The part of the creek where the water rippled across the pipe running to the treatment plant was thought to be a choice place to fish, and we would sit on the concrete steps at the plant and cast our bait as near as possible to the pipe. If we were lucky, we could pull out a bass or a bream.
The City Council, which Dad was serving on, decided that the town needed a good swimming hole. Big Springs was the natural choice. The older swimming hole, where Dad had taught me to swim, was called John Dock—because we were told a black man named John Dock had drowned in that spot trying to ford the creek. It was deep and murky, and we would sneak off up there to swim. But John Dock became officially off limits when, in the summer of 1944, Wheeler Foshee and a cousin from Centreville drowned there. Wheeler’s sister Ruby ran to town for help, but it was too late when the men got there.
Dad was the first recreational director for the city, overseeing the preparation of the new swimming hole at Big Springs. He built a concrete wall on both banks, with iron ladders going down into the pool. Local boys dammed the creek with rocks just below the pool to make the water deeper. We thought it was a first-class swimming hole. Later, a diving board was even added. Gene Baldwin was the champion diver at Big Springs, and he loved to show off his flips and jackknives to any and all.
The City took great pride in this new swimming hole, and once a year, just before swimming season, numerous townspeople showed up to clean the hole. I never missed being there, and my favorite thing to do was jump in the creek barefooted and walk around and feel any trash and rocks that might interfere with swimming. Then I would go underwater and pull out the offending matter. Rocks were added to the dam to make it higher and the pool deeper. As a reward for our work, we got a free piece of watermelon that had been cooled in the springhouse. Sometimes the dining room at Alabama College provided us with their famous homemade ice cream.
Of course, in this era of Jim Crow segregation, Big Springs was limited to whites, and Dad floated the idea, and the city fathers agreed, to fix up Little Springs at the end of Main Street for the blacks. After all, Little Springs was just behind the AME Zion Church, so it seemed natural to make it the black swimming hole. Dad built cement walls on each side of this hole just as he had at Big Springs. I had no desire to swim with blacks, but I recognized something good and fair in my father when he insisted on remembering that black kids deserved a nice place to swim, too
. The colored swimming hole did not have a diving board or a concrete diving platform, but it had a large rope hanging from a big limb sticking out over the water. We Shelby Street boys were quite drawn to this awesome attraction, and occasionally we would slip off and swing on the wonderful rope, sometimes with black boys we knew.
Both Big Springs and Little Springs had a special attraction, which all of us enjoyed immensely. On occasion, it was necessary to drain part of the water from the water storage tanks into the creek, causing a great stream of water to spew out of the pipe at very high pressure. If you got under the downpour, you would be pushed around by the fast-moving water, and we all counted that great fun.
The Big Springs “white folks” swimming hole with the diving board built by my dad and Milton Jeter’s dad, Mr. Sonny.
Other activities drew us to the Frog Holler area. The Shelby Street boys loved to play in Jeter’s Bottom, which was at the end of Middle Street. It had served in earlier days as the site for horse races, and there had been boxing matches for local boys arranged by Joe Doyle. Also staged there were Battle Royals, in which a number of young black men were put in a ring and would slug it out while white men stood around them throwing money into the ring. The last black boy standing took home the money. In addition, after 1929 Walter McConaghy put on cock fights in Frog Holler. He was said to have been a rounder who had learned the ins and outs of cock fighting from his father. I thought it a shame that these fights had ceased by the time I would have been able to see them.
