No Hill Too High for a Stepper

by Mike Mahan

  We thought these kids were rednecks, even those from Pea Ridge. But we were careful not to offend them, as they were tough as nails. They came in with a swagger, determined not take any crap off these stuck-up Montevallo kids. They upset the equilibrium of the social structure we town kids were comfortable with.

  Bill Allen and Ann Cox on the steps of Montevallo High School. Bill was an athletic giant who all the girls looked at and dreamed about.

  I was always curious about Pea Ridge, a place so near, yet so far away. I was fascinated to learn just how close-knit the community was. There was little difference in social class, and the same values seemed to be generally accepted. There were no colored people in Pea Ridge. People there were hard-working, and early on the parents expected the same thing from their children. Social life centered on the churches and to a more limited extent the two stores, both of which had porches on which people would gather to play Rook or just while the time away. The town was so close-knit that at Christmas the whole community had a Christmas program followed by exchanging of gifts. The churches conducted a name-drawing exercise so that everyone in Pea Ridge got a gift from a neighbor.

  While we kids from town thought we could easily outdo the Pea Ridge kids in academic ability and performance, they made up for that with their superior athletic skills. In fact, they dominated the field. Bill Allen, for example, became one of our star baseball players. One year the team actually won a state championship, playing the final game in Birmingham at Lane Park. Everybody was jubilant when Bobby Crowe—a town boy, I happily boasted—emptied the bases with a ball he hit down the middle of the field and into an adjoining lake. The football team was dominated by the guys of Pea Ridge—guys like Chief Lawley, a bruiser I tried to steer clear of.

  But participating in sports took a special effort on the part of the Pea Ridge guys. For the most part, they lacked transportation. A school bus driven by a student named Lacey Herron brought them to school, but it went back out to the Ridge immediately after school. So after practice, the Pea Ridge guys would go down to the corner of Middle Street and either Main or Valley Streets and wait for someone to come by and take them home. If no one came, they were out of luck. But the problem with transportation was a general one. Pea Ridge people—not just students—would congregate at Pinky Lawley’s store or at Peters Store to catch rides into Montevallo, and seldom was there too long a wait until they got one.

  The Pea Ridge guys not only excelled in sports; they poached some of the fine-looking Montevallo girls we thought were in our own preserve. But they were very protective of the Pea Ridge girls and didn’t like it if one of us townies paid too much attention to them. I remember that fistfights occasionally broke out over girls. It was rumored that the girls from Pea Ridge were wilder than the girls from Highland Avenue or Shelby Street, but we had little opportunity to test that theory. You didn’t want to get those Pea Ridge guys riled up.

  The boys from Pea Ridge told us about a game that was popular out there. It was called candy. The party was typically held in someone’s home, and the girls would go into a separate room from the boys. There, they would choose the name of a candy bar—Baby Ruth, Almond Joy, Hershey—and then go back in the room and let the boys choose a candy bar. This was a device for pairing up the sexes, after which the couples would take walks together. The boys tried to fix the game by having an understanding in advance about what candy bar their girl would choose or, on occasion, even go outside to listen at the window outside the room where the girls made their choices. This was Pea Ridge’s version of Spin the Bottle.

  I got the idea that Pea Ridge, on the whole, was pretty puritanical. One could not buy a drop of whiskey or home brew there. The only alcoholic beverage was the scuppernong wine that Mr. Pickett made every year, though it was rumored that many a pint of moonshine, labeled “For medicinal purposes only,” was kept in drawers throughout the community. Teenagers would work up a cough to get a taste of the clear moonshine, flavored with a piece of strong peppermint.

  Montevallo’s Joanna Sharp, Alabama’s Maid of Cotton, surrounded by adoring fans

  One of Mrs. Sharp’s cultural parties at Joanna’s home. Joanna is standing far left. Others in the photograph are Ed Roberts, Joe and Jack McGaughy, Pat Baker, Harry Klotzman, Joy Holcombe, Martha Ann Cox, and Eleanor Mitchell.

  Socially, there was little interaction between town and country, but sometimes friendships were formed between Pea Ridge and Montevallo students. Bill Allen became tight with Bobby Crowe, for example, because of their excelling in sports. The two also spent a lot of time with Agee and Pat Kelly, who lived next door to Bobby. Once when Pat had gotten a motorcycle—the first kid in town to have one—he offered to let Bill ride it. He instructed Bill on the use of the clutch and the accelerator. Unfortunately, he failed to show him where the brake was, a lapse that only occurred to Bill as he was speeding down Shelby Street toward the college. He was able to slow down enough to go safely around the block, and he was moving very slowly when he reentered the Kelly yard. He felt relieved that his friends were not in the yard to observe his running into the brick wall there. Luckily he was going slow enough not to damage the cycle, and his major wound undoubtedly was to his pride.

  The Pea Ridge kids were not included in most of the parties we had in Montevallo, but one day Mrs. C. G. Sharp, wife of the chairman of the biology department, decided to change that. The mother of daughters Susan and Joanna, she often tried to bring culture to the town kids, but she liked a challenge and on one occasion decided to see what she could do with Pea Ridge. She ironed her best lace tablecloths and set out her best dishes and crystal. She made congealed strawberry salad, which she put on clear glass plates. She put out a punch bowl with lime punch and an ice ring. She put some Glenn Miller music on low volume on the record player. Everybody was dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.

  I was given a first-hand account of the event by Bill Allen, one of the Pea Ridge social climbers there that day. When he and his brother Ted and the Lawley boys entered the house, they felt immediately out of place, he said. Instead of the linoleum that covered the floors in his house, he saw nice oriental rugs. Instead of the coleslaw, which was as close as you saw to a salad in his house, he ate congealed salad for the first time. He awkwardly took a cup of punch, immediately realizing there was no way to hold the plate and the cup and consume anything from either one. So he put the cup of punch on a table and noticed that Mrs. Sharp quickly slipped a napkin under it. After the salad, they were asked to eat little Ritz crackers with cheese on them and spiced pecans. This was a far cry from the cornbread and butter beans that was their usual fare. The longer they stood there, Bill said, the more they began to feel like turds in a punch bowl, and he and the others made a hasty departure. They were never asked back. Apparently Mrs. Sharp just gave up on bringing culture to the denizens of Pea Ridge.

  In many ways the most exceptional person who came from Pea Ridge was Donald Dennis. We nicknamed him Stink for obvious reasons. He came to school with a brother who couldn’t keep up academically, but Donald was very smart and a high achiever. He always made higher grades than I did. Immediately after graduating, he went into the military. After a year he returned home on furlough, and I saw him crossing Main Street. Without thinking, I thoughtlessly yelled, “Hey, Stink.” He turned to me, thrust out his hand, and said, “The name is Donald.” I saw then that the nickname had not suited him at all, and I never called him Stink again.

  After Donald got out of the military, he returned to Montevallo, where he attended Alabama College and met Elizabeth Stewart, the top student there. She was a biology major, the daughter of the owner and editor of a newspaper in Marion. After she graduated, they married and moved to Atlanta, where she completed master’s and doctoral degrees. Donald completed college there, and subsequently received a law degree at Emory and practiced law successfully in the Atlanta area. He certainly shot down our notion that the town b
oys could outperform the country boys academically.

  Among the country communities, we thought Spring Creek superior to Pea Ridge. While the people in Pea Ridge and Dogwood had their own elementary schools, people from Spring Creek did not. Perhaps that made them seem more like us than the others. We could date girls from Spring Creek without there being a problem, as was certainly not true of Pea Ridge, and we guys from Shelby Street and Frog Holler thought there were some real lovelies out in that community.

  An exception to most of the country people we knew was the Frank and Sadie Baker family. They were not from Pea Ridge, but owned a dairy farm just north of Montevallo. Tommy Baker, who distinguished himself as an athlete, was about my age, and I loved to go out there to play with him and his brothers. They lived in a comfortable house that impressed many Montevallians. I remember especially their living room, which Mother always said was as fine a Victorian room as you could find anywhere. In the middle of the room was an exquisitely carved round table—a Sheraton table, according to Mother. On it sat an elaborately decorated oil lamp that had been wired for electricity. Next to the table was a carved mahogany chair covered in wine-colored velvet, and other heavy furniture was nicely placed throughout the room. On the floor was a splendid oriental rug with a red design, and I also remember the cut glass vases on the mantel, which Mother said were extremely fine and expensive. I guess you might say that Miss Sadie was the grand dame of Montevallo’s agrarian society. Certainly Mother thought she was.

  In late summer, the Bakers hired a lot of boys from town to come out and help get in the silage, and we older boys on Shelby Street were always included in the group. We welcomed the chance to make some money, but we also liked the challenge of the hard work. Early in the morning we would begin cutting silage and loading it into four-wheeled wagons. It had to be taken to the tall steel and stone silos that sat next to the milking barn, where we shoveled the silage into mechanical lifts that dumped into the silos. By the end of the day we were worn out, and we looked forward to bedding down on the sleeping porch on the second floor of the Baker home. It had lots of windows that could be opened to allow evening breezes to cool the hot bodies of us hard-working boys.

  The Bakers milked two times a day, at four o’clock in the morning and in mid-afternoon. All year long, the two Baker sons, Bobby and Tommy, were up early to help feed and milk the cows. For the afternoon milking, they were usually at school practicing baseball or football. But on weekends there was no getting out of the mid-afternoon milkings. But the Bakers were hardly slave drivers. They wanted their children to enjoy life on the farm, even constructing a tennis court for them. That really impressed me. No one in town had a private tennis court.

  Feeling a part of the Baker family was one of the highlights of my youth. It set for me a model for the good life that I have pursued to the present day.

  Part III

  Businesses on Shelby and

  Main Streets

  14

  Shelby Street Business

  and Medical Center

  When I was growing up, all of the doctors in town either lived or practiced on Shelby Street. Dr. Charles Acker was an old bachelor who had his office upstairs in an old house just down the street from where we lived. People hardly knew what to think of Dr. Acker. There was a bit of whispering speculation about his sexual orientation, and many people disapproved of his heavy drinking. But he was sought after for his medical skills by a wide number of people around Montevallo well into his eighties. He lived near Little Springs with a woman said to be his niece in a family home that was old enough to have witnessed eleven thousand Yankees passing as Wilson’s Raiders were leaving Montevallo for Selma on the morning of March 31, 1865.

  From left: Montevallo’s dapper and newest professional, Dr. Leslie Hubbard; Montevallo’s eligible ladies man, Red Mahan; and Leslie’s brother, Lance Hubbard. The men were first cousins and considered “cocks of the walk” around 1930.

  Dr. Acker’s practice was quite rudimentary. There were two rooms separated by a hall, which served as his waiting room. He employed no receptionist, so people took a seat in the hall on one of the couches and waited for someone to see them. On the right was his examining room, which had a very high ceiling and a bay window in front. Sitting on the examining table, you were able to look at Mrs. Craig’s beautiful home. Across from the examining room was a room with a giant X-ray machine that lurked like a black monster. To the side of it were developing tanks for X-rays.

  If the door to the examining room was open, you could see patients waiting in the hall. Although Dr. Acker had a white folding screen on rollers that could have been positioned to block the view of the hall, he seldom used it. There was a sink in the room for him to wash his hands, and there were white metal cabinets with glass on all sides where he kept cruel-looking instruments all piled on top of each other and in no observable order. He always had with him a small card on which he recorded information about the patients, but his handwriting was so small and illegible you really could not make anything out. He also recorded the cost of the visit, which I think in those days was $1.50.

  There were several other small rooms in the back of the establishment, one of which had a chair I thought looked like a dentist’s chair. On the wall were several graded eye charts. Dr. Acker, I learned, was well-regarded as an eye doctor. He also had a small bathroom, and I remember once having to go in there and pee in a bottle.

  Dr. Acker had a number of black patients, who entered the side door to the building and took seats in a small, cramped waiting room. Dr. Acker always used the colored entrance himself, parking his car in a designated space next to that door.

  No one doubted that Dr. Acker was well versed in the art of medicine. As Mother said many times, “Dr. Acker always kept up.” Well after Dr. Acker’s death, I went to his estate sale and bought his Grey’s Anatomy, published in the late 1860s. I discovered that he had first used this book while a student at the Atlanta School of Medicine. I looked at all the other books offered at the sale that day, and there was no later edition of the work in evidence. I suppose it served him well through the years as he lived a life devoted to his profession.

  Dr. Acker paid little attention to the affairs of town or gown, and other than taking annual vacations by train to various parts of the country and acquiring Native American jewelry, rugs, and wall hangings, he pretty much kept focused on his work.

  I had one memorable visit to Dr. Acker’s office. Dad had put up a zip line between our back porch and the garage, and my friends and I would spend hours riding it, hanging by a broom handle attached to a rope that was tied to a pulley. One day when Harry Klotzman and Joe McGaughy were riding it with me, I took a fateful ride on that zip line. When I got about half way to the garage, the line broke and the heavy pulley came crashing on my head. I was stunned for a minute, but then I could see that I was bleeding profusely.

  There were no adults at home, and Joe asked excitedly, “What should we do?” He looked a little pale from the sight of all the blood. “Get me to Dr. Acker’s,” I said without hesitation, and we set out. We made so much noise climbing the wooden steps leading up to the office that Dr. Acker himself ran out to see about the commotion. When I showed him my wound, he shook his head and laughed a hollow laugh. “Come in here,” he said, taking me to the examining room. “This gentleman’s going to have to be sewed up,” he said. I grimaced in dread.

  Dr. Acker pulled back my hair and put something on the wound that seemed to deaden it, as it immediately felt better. After cleaning it thoroughly, he reached up in a cabinet and pulled out a big curved needle. My heart sank. I sucked in air through my teeth as he pulled off some black shiny thread from a spool and threaded the needle. In a rhythmic way, he sewed up the wound, tying each suture in a knot. This procedure of course was done without gloves on him or Novocain in me. Amazingly, it didn’t hurt that bad. Maybe I was in shock. When he finished, I had six sutur
es. “Another crisis past and gone,” he said, looking up as my mother entered the room.

  Harry had not cared to stay to see the procedure I faced and had run to the shop to tell Mother and Dad what had happened. Mother left a customer under a hair dryer to come to check on me. She thanked Dr. Acker for taking care of me and took me home. But she couldn’t stay, as she had to get back to her customer. I lazed around all afternoon unsupervised, and for once I was not looking for more trouble to get into.

  In great contrast to Dr. Acker was Dr. Leslie Hubbard. After World War II, following his discharge from the Navy, he appeared in Montevallo to become the partner of another of the town’s physicians, Dr. Parnell. I knew Leslie, as he was my cousin, the son of Dad’s sister, my Aunt Lois. Very soon he and Dr. Parnell built a new medical building on Shelby Street next to Pete Givhan’s Coca-Cola building. This new building was even designed by an architect, and it was the latest thing in medical design. There was plenty of parking space, including a space for each of the doctors near the front door.

  Mother and Dad took me to the grand opening, which was attended by many townspeople. As was the case with Dr. Acker, there were two waiting rooms, one for whites and another for colored people, each entered by a separate door. We went into the spacious white waiting room furnished with upholstered leather chairs and nice tables. A receptionist sat behind a big sliding window. We were given punch and cookies, after which we were shown each doctor’s suite of examining rooms as well as the lab room. Everything was sparkling, and we were impressed. It was all totally different from Dr. Acker’s office. I was especially interested in a demonstration of the centrifuge, which they used when they did blood work, and the sterilizer that sent out great clouds of hot steam when it was opened. Everybody seemed impressed with the new technology.