by Mike Mahan
In my day, we had much tamer activities. Jeter’s Bottom was the perfect place to fly kites, and Gene Baldwin, Joel Russell, Charles Cox, and Bobby Crowe could be counted on to take advantage of the strong March winds. Most of our kites were pretty sorry, but Bobby made kites that were wonderfully constructed from light, strong sticks he gathered in the winter. When he could get it, he used Bell Telephone wire to tie the sticks together, constructing his frame. While others used newspaper to cover the frames, Bobby went to Brown Grocery Store and got heavy brown paper they used for wrapping meat. This made a far more substantial kite. While we usually used flour paste, he would go to Mrs. Hicks’s Five and Dime store and buy a bottle of mucilage, with its red rubber angled snoot, to glue the paper to the frame. I loved to watch Bobby at work, and I especially loved the pungent smell of the mucilage, which was almost as penetrating as the airplane glue I sometimes used.
Kite flying contest on the Alabama College soccer field, now the location of Peck Hall. I’m standing far left next to my buddy, Agee Kelly. Others in the photograph include Murphy and Charles McGehee, Pat Kelly, and James Earl Davis.Ç
Once Bobby had covered the frame, he would get himself a big spool of strong string and carefully tie one end to the bridle in the center of the cross on the kite. When through, he would attach a colorful tail, and he was then ready to go. We would all cheer as he made his launch, and we were ecstatic as the kite rose on the air currents. Occasionally, one of our kites would go so high that it would drift out of sight. Once we even staked a kite to the ground and found it still aloft when we returned the next day.
Frog Holler was, then, a perfect playground for Montevallo people over the years. It was also the home of some very interesting families.
The Jeters
Probably the most important family in Frog Holler was named Jeter. They owned half the land down there. Old Mr. Ashley Jeter ran Jeter’s Mercantile on Main Street, a diversified business housing a funeral home, a general supply, a grocery store, an ambulance service, and I don’t know what else. He had three sons: Ashley (Snooks), Milton (Sonny), and Pressley (Pep).
The City of Montevallo decided that the two funeral parlors on Main Street, Rogan’s and Jeter’s, had to be moved off Main Street. Mr. Rogan just closed his funeral business, but Old Man Jeter turned one of the front rooms of his home on the corner of Vine and Boundary into the remaining white funeral parlor in Montevallo.
I remember one thing especially about Old Man Jeter’s house. In those days houses sat up off the ground on brick or stone pillars, and people stored things under the house. Old Mr. Jeter had some real good stuff up under his house, and I never tired of looking at it. There was all sorts of funeral paraphernalia, and I was especially interested in the wagon wheels, bridles, and dusty horse collars, their leather cracked like dried clay. It all looked very much like the gear I saw in the Westerns at the picture show every Saturday.
A block down the street from Old Mr. Jeter’s house was that of his son, who was called Mr. Sonny by my friends and me. I was at this place often, as Sonny’s son Milton was my close friend. They had a great yard for playing football, and ten or twelve of us would congregate there regularly to play. Finally Mr. Sonny evicted us. He said that we were stomping on his grass and tearing up his yard. We then moved up to the college campus near King Cemetery, where the Highland Avenue boys joined us in our touch football games. This place was better than the Jeter yard. The grass was neatly mowed, and the stone fence around the King family graves blocked the winter winds. Plus there were no cement sidewalks interrupting the playing field, as there were at the Sonny Jeter house. That was significant because sometimes our touch games went beyond mere touch, and several times I had been slammed down on the sidewalk that bisected the playing field.
Milton was known as Weed. There was just one year separating him and me, and we remained close until he died. Milton got his nickname some time after World War II when his father decided he needed to work in the summer. He bought him a rotary lawn mower powered by a gas engine. In no time, Weed himself was not only mowing, but he contracted out mowing jobs to other boys in town. He began to make more money than any of us boys—I was still shining shoes at the barbershop and Joe worked at the bus station—and we were all envious. Mowing was not what Weed would have chosen to do, though, as he hated getting dirty, complaining regularly that he had grass stains on his clothes. Thus, I nicknamed him Grass Stain, but that was soon replaced by Weed after he found he was allergic to some kind of weed in somebody’s yard. He sneezed for hours, and all of us laughed and chose the new name, which stuck.
Weed was the first of our group to get a brand new bicycle after the war. It was a Schwinn with a little generator attached to the front tire that made its headlight burn. Milton was very creative and a sort of dreamer. The bicycle had a little tank that ran from the seat to the handlebars, in imitation of a motorcycle, and Weed told us he would put gas in it when he could find a motor off an old discarded washing machine to convert the bike into a motorcycle. He never succeeded with his plan, but it was certainly a good story to tell all the Frog Holler and Shelby Street friends.
Milton’s mother, Miss Elizabeth, put up with a lot when the neighborhood boys descended on her house to play ball, to read Weed’s great collection of comic books, or to play with his Lionel train, an impressive system that we would set up in the living room when it was raining or cold outside. Miss Elizabeth graciously gave us Coca-Colas, and on some Saturdays she would give us sweet rolls. If I were there at mealtime, she would invite me to eat with them.
Miss Elizabeth was one of the Frog Holler ladies involved in education. She was principal of Dogwood Elementary School, while her sister-in-law Doris was a teacher at Montevallo Elementary School and later its principal. Mr. Sonny’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Phillips, who lived just up the street from Weed, was principal of Marvel Elementary School. Others from Frog Holler who worked in education were Todd Jeter, secretary for the dean at Alabama College, and Prude Fancher’s mother, who taught at Montevallo High School.
The Mulkey house loomed over Mulkey’s Bottom and a cute little Laura Ann Hicks.
Snooks Jeter, the oldest of Old Man Jeter’s sons, built his house in Frog Holler next to what is now known as Orr Park. In this house he and his wife Todd raised three kids, Ashley, Sarah, and Beth. The kids were younger than me, but I knew them well. Sarah and Beth kept a horse in what was called Mulkey’s Bottom, down near the creek, and they rode often. I never liked horses myself, as I found them rather uncontrollable. I wanted my transportation to have brakes and a steering wheel.
Mulkey’s Bottom was an exciting place for us neighborhood boys for another reason. Every year after Mr. Walker Mulkey plowed the bottomland and after the first rains came and washed the dirt away, we would go down there and find arrowheads and shards of Indian pottery just sitting on top of the turned earth. No digging at all. It occurred to me one day how smart the Indians were to choose the beautiful flat land near Shoal Creek to build their village, and I would try to imagine what their everyday life was in that place I myself thought exceedingly fine.
Mulkey’s Bottom flooded almost every year, and the waters came up almost to downtown, often flooding Island Street for several blocks. This phenomenon still occurs every few years at Orr Park, which is where the old Mulkey Bottom was. When the floods came, we didn’t have much time to enjoy the resulting lake, as the waters always receded in five or six hours. We would wade in it or occasionally swim in it, and once Joe McGaughy and I took his boat and rode all over Mulkey’s Bottom.
My close Frog Holler friend, Ashley “Hen House” Jeter.
Ashley Jeter was my close friend, and we spent a lot of time together in Frog Holler. I loved to create nicknames for my friends, and I gave Ashley the name, Hen House. A man named Chicken Brown kept a large number of Dominecker chickens just above Mulkey’s Bottom and sold eggs in town. We loved to look at these
chickens, which had fine black and white speckled feathers, but Mr. Brown was cantankerous and chased us off any time he saw us near his place or his birds. Of course, his demeanor did nothing but challenge us to test just how sharp-eyed he could be. We discovered he was good. One day Ashley slipped into Chicken Brown’s chicken house and was caught stealing eggs. Thus Ashley’s nickname.
The other Jeter family member I knew was Pep. He lived with his wife Doris, a rather severe woman who ruled the elementary school like a tyrant. Pep and Miss Doris’s house was on Boundary Street just behind Milton’s house. Boundary was the conduit that led to Big Springs, and Pep tried his best to control the access. He got particularly upset when people made too much noise down there, and he would holler at them to pipe down. Pep was a big drinker, which we thought made him even more cantankerous. We kids didn’t care much for Pep. In fact, we were scared of him and stayed out of his way. Even his nephew Weed disliked him, often feeling threatened by him.
The Fanchers
The other family of distinction in Frog Holler was that of Prude Fancher, whom we all regarded as a brain. He was two years older than I was, and I admired him very much. His father had passed (as we always said of someone who had died), and his mother taught at the elementary school. It seemed there was always expendable cash in the Fancher household. Prude had fine things. Like Weed Jeter, he had a Lionel train with elaborate tracks and numerous cars he liked to show off to the neighborhood boys. He also had a fabulous collection of comic books, which he would allow us to read.
The Fancher house had some features that amazed me. They had the only carport in our part of town. I thought it was something that they could pull their car up to the right side of the front door when it was raining, get out, go up the stairs, and never get wet. You could drive right through the carport to the garage out back. The Fanchers were also the first people I knew who had forced-air heat in their home. There was a coal furnace in the basement, but there was a fan to blow the heat up though the floor throughout the house. I wanted heat like that in our house.
The Clarks
In 1947—early in our high school days—Joe and Mack Clark came to Frog Holler from Dry Valley, which was out in the country. Their dad was in the taxi business and was also the policeman for Alabama College. They built the first new house in Frog Holler since the war, and, as the first house we had seen constructed from concrete blocks with marble facing, it was a wonder. To the side of the house was Mrs. Clark’s beauty shop. The Clark boys brought a horse named Bink with them, and he was kept in Jeter’s Bottom. Many people thought the Clark horse a nuisance, including some of us kids who used Jeter’s Bottom, which was across Middle Street from Milton’s house, for football, kite flying, and swimming.
The Frog Holler cowboy, Joe Clark.
Joe was younger than me, and Mack was even younger. For that reason he seldom wanted to play with us. And Joe seemed only interested in four-legged animals. He was absolutely crazy about Bink, but we thought he was an over-weight, run-down pony.
Wherever Joe and Bink went, you would find Tony, their dog. While we didn’t care for Bink, we all liked Tony. One day Tony was hit by a car and had his front leg broken. All the grown-ups said that he would have to be put down, and we boys were terribly upset by their decision. About that time Doc Phillips showed up. Doc was not a doctor of any kind—not even a vet—but he acted as if he were. He asked Joe if he had a cigar box and some black tape, and Joe rushed off to get it. Then Doc Phillips took out his pocket knife and proceeded to cut the box into small strips, fashioning it into a splint for Tony’s leg. He put the splint on and wrapped it with the tape. One month later, Tony was as good as ever.
A few years later Joe’s Dad moved the family to Florida, but it was not long before they returned to Montevallo, where they opened an eating establishment named Joe’s Place out on Highway 25. There you could get the best barbecue and hamburgers served anywhere.
We Shelby Street residents felt close to our Frog Holler neighbors, and we loved going into their neighborhood. In thinking back, I believe that what Frog Holler represented for all of us boys from Shelby Street was freedom. You could do things there you couldn’t do at home, and we greatly enjoyed being free of parental control. Plus the idea that cockfighting and boxing had taken place down there excited us.
But in a small town we never could quite escape parental control. Once when I was a senior in high school, a number of us boys began going down by Shoal Creek and engaging in fierce slingshot battles. We’d use rocks mainly, though sometimes metal objects like steel nuts. It wasn’t fun to get hit, as I was a number of times. Usually it stung a bit, and occasionally you’d get a bruise. To lessen the impact of the rocks or the steel nuts or balls, we all wore thick long-sleeved denim jackets and heavy long corduroy pants. But one day Bill Kirby climbed a tree and several of us fired on him, causing him to fall out of the tree with a loud thud. He lay there on the ground like he was dead. Most of the boys fled the scene, though Joe McGaughy and I went over and stood over him until he slowly came to. Bill’s breath was labored, and he gasped out that he was all right, just a tad stunned. It was no big deal, he said, but Joe and I remained by his side as he checked out his limbs and found them working properly. Then I looked up and here came Dad barreling down toward the scene of the crime. The word had gotten to him that a boy had broken his neck falling out of the tree. He was relieved to find otherwise, but he was badly pissed off with me. “Come on,” he said angrily. “You’re not too big to whip.” And I found that I wasn’t. Back home, he took off his belt and gave me several licks. The truth is that I knew I deserved them. But that didn’t stop me getting into slingshot wars. I just refrained from shooting someone sitting in a tree.
11
Highland Avenue
It was generally accepted that Highland Avenue was the elite address in Montevallo. College people lived there; prosperous businessmen lived there. The houses and lawns were well-maintained. As much as I loved Shelby Street, I found myself occasionally envying the people on Highland Avenue.
Pete and Sassy Givhan with daughter Gene during her wedding to Bob Lightfoot.
The house on Highland that I knew best was that of Ed Givhan, the son of our former landlord, Pete Givhan. In our many adventures, Ed tended to be the leader and I the follower. He seemed a natural-born teacher. Although the Givhans were higher economically and educationally than my family was, they never seemed to make any class distinction that I could see. I always felt welcome in their home. This was a house in which the life of the mind was treasured, where culture was valued, and I was tremendously affected by the time I spent there. For the most part, my home was not intellectually stimulating. My parents seemed to lack the keen understanding of political and cultural issues that the Givhans had, and I sometimes felt a void when I returned to Shelby Street, feeling I had made a clear step down. My parents cut and washed people’s hair, and at times this seemed faintly low-classed as a profession.
Ed Givhan was always a leader and even commanded his own Highland Avenue militia. The troops, left to right, were his sister, Gene, Forrest Brown, and brother, Peter Givhan.
Although I always put up a good front, I have to admit that while I was growing up I always thought of myself as second-string. I had some evidence to prove it. I played second trumpet. I was the water boy for the football team. Even though I organized the Montevallo Brass Band, I never played first trumpet. Ed, however, was definitely first-string, excelling at anything he undertook. He was a great reader, and in music and academics he was top-notch. I can’t say he excelled in sports, though he did go out for football two years. The other players used to say that Givhan hid behind the huddle. But at least he participated. I never even went out for football.
Gorgeous Joy Holcombe topped the homecoming parade float in 1952 on Main Street. Others in the court included Mignon Dailey, Clara Young, Annette McBurnett, Emily Vest, and Evelyn Anderso
n. The Baptist Church and Plaza Grill are in the background.
Strutting their stuff, Lois Hoffman and Clara Young.
Vicious Tiger’s head majorette, Eleanor Mitchell, could certainly twirl a baton and spin the heads of teenage boys.
Highland Avenue contributed greatly to the female beauty of Montevallo. Shelby Street of course had lots of attractive girls, but Highland Avenue had us beat, I thought. Joy Holcombe, the daughter of the Mr. Holcombe who drove me home from the hospital when I was born, was a real beauty. We first met at Miss Bickham’s nursery school at Alabama College, and we have remained friends ever since. Joy played in the Montevallo High School band, directed by Victor Talmadge Young (called Vicious Tiger by the students), and she was also one of our majorettes. The gorgeous Eleanor Mitchell was another majorette. Other beauties on Highland Avenue included Marsha Trumbauer, whose father—affectionately called Trummie—was head of the theater department at Alabama College, and Lois Hoffman, daughter of one of Montevallo’s two Jewish families.
Marsha and Joy’s mothers would have parties and invite local boys, both from the town and from out in the country. I reckon they wanted to provide a little culture for guys like me, Weed, Joe McGaughy, and the Pea Ridge boys. I was somewhat chagrined that the Highland Street girls seemed to be more attracted to the Pea Ridge boys than to those of us from town. They seemed to regard us as mere friends, but they were attracted in some other way to the country guys. You could see it in the girls’ eyes.
