No Hill Too High for a Stepper

by Mike Mahan

  People like Donald Dennis from Pea Ridge greatly developed their sense of self-worth due to Mr. Moon’s encouragement. One trip to the state fair with Mr. Moon and his fellow future farmers did not end so well for Donald. Things started off okay, as he won a number of dishes by throwing dimes into them. But when Mr. Moon drove up into Donald’s yard when he took him home, Donald dropped and broke every last one of his dishes.

  Mr. Moon was always pressing us young men into service for the school. Late one afternoon he had a number of us trying to improve the football field, which was more hard-packed clay than sod. He had re-seeded the field, but nothing was growing much as it was so in need of water. The hose we had would not reach far enough, and he asked if anyone from town had a hose at home he could go get. Ed said yes, and Mr. Moon said, “Can you drive, Ed?”

  Mr. “Moon” Thornton, the legendary teacher of agriculture, loved and respected by generations of Montevallo students, seen here in his beloved shop instructing two aspiring mechanics.

  Ed quickly answered yes, but he failed to tell Mr. Moon that he had only driven his father’s Chrysler a few times or that the car had an automatic transmission. “Go on and take my car,” Mr. Moon said. I volunteered to go with Ed, and Mr. Moon said okay.

  Mr. Moon’s car was a four-door 1940 Chevrolet with the gearshift on the floor. But Ed and I were undaunted by the challenge. After all, Mr. Moon had always drilled in to us, “Don’t say you can’t do something. Before you say that, go and try it.” So we went. Ed took his place in the driver’s seat. I knew the gear patterns, and I knew when to press the clutch. Ed engaged the clutch, and pushed the starter button. We were in business. I put the car into low, and told him to let off on the clutch and give it some gas. We jerked forward, but the car didn’t stall, which pleased us, as we imagined that Mr. Moon was monitoring our takeoff. “Clutch,” I said to Ed, shifting up into second as smooth as you please, and by the time I gave the command for third gear we were moving along quite smoothly. We drove up to Ed’s house, got the hose, and returned to school without a hitch. “We are one hell of a team,” Ed said as we got out of the car, and I couldn’t help smiling in agreement. Ed got the Givhan water hose from the trunk and proudly handed it over to Mr. Moon. He and I felt like something that day, having driven the car of our teacher. We didn’t even care it had taken two of us to do it. As my dad would say, “There ain’t no hill too high for a stepper,” and Ed and I were true steppers that day.

  We liked Mr. Moon so much that Joe McGaughy, Weed, Ed, our new friend Bill Kirby, and I all signed up for Agriculture the following fall. We were Future Farmers of America, but none of us had any idea of having a career in agriculture. Mr. Moon told us that didn’t matter, that what FFA could teach us would be valuable the rest of our lives no matter what path we took. But we did have to have some sort of farm project. Joe and Dudley Pendleton chose to raise a steer, Ed did a work project with his Dad, and I chose to go into the worm farming business. My partner in that enterprise was Bill Kirby, who appeared in Montevallo the same year Mr. Moon did.

  After his father died, Bill moved here from Selma with his mother and his younger brother John. Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Kirby, now having to support the family on her own, enrolled in Alabama College to earn teacher certification. The Kirbys lived in a house on Valley Street between Shelby and Middle Streets across from Frost Lumber Company. The two-story house was unpainted with a long concrete walk to the front steps. Neither the house nor the grounds had been taken care of very well, but Bill’s mother made it into a comfortable place to live. There were beautiful large oak trees in the front yard, and there was a fine porch from which Bill and John could keep up with all the goings-on on Valley Street.

  Bill was my age and in my grade. We quickly became the best of friends, although our life styles greatly differed. I was a musician and a poor athlete. Having been governed pretty much by the female dynasty on Shelby Street, I was non-aggressive and pretty much afraid of physical contact. Bill was completely opposite. In fact, he loved combat. He was not much for academics, keeping his performance just above the failure line.

  My close friend Bill Kirby, known far and wide for his prowess socially, romantically and athletically. In 1964, he was a bartender and bouncer in a Key West, Florida restaurant.

  Bill pushed his behavior to the precipice, barely avoiding the unethical, the dishonest, or—occasionally—the illegal, but the coaches, Mr. Moon, and all the teachers saw in Bill all the qualities needed to do anything or be anyone he wanted to be. He was as dear, true, and honest a friend as anyone ever had. I always knew that if I had ever needed physical protection or security Bill would be there. Through our FFA activities and our membership at the Methodist church, we became lifelong friends, and when Mr. Moon said that we had to have a project in our Ag class, we naturally decided to work together.

  My dad had for years wanted to have a basement under our house, so he made a business deal with Bill and me to dig a basement, and in return we could use it for our worm business. For our labor he would also pay us ten cents per wheelbarrow of dirt we dug, hauled from under the house, and dumped down a bank in the backyard. Bill and I agreed to his terms, and we formed our partnership for this FFA project. Dad bought a new wheelbarrow, two round-pointed shovels, a pick, and a mattock. K & M Worm Business was launched. We would split the income 50/50 from the dirt removal and eventually from the sale of the worms.

  In late spring, we began digging each day after band and football practice. We also dug on Saturdays and whenever there was spare time. It was hard work bending over under the floor using the pick without hitting the floor joists, then shoveling the dirt into the wheelbarrow and pushing it up a 2x12 walkboard through a large hole dad had knocked in the brick foundation walls. We soon worked out a system, one of us digging with the pick and mattock and the other filling the wheelbarrow with the dirt. This allowed the picker to rest before the loaded wheelbarrow was pushed from under the house. As you went up the ramp, you had to duck your head to clear the foundation, then roll the wheelbarrow over to the bank and dump the dirt, then back to the basement. We would do this over and over again. Each time the cash register would ring up $.10.

  Studying redworm farming in a book from the college library, we found out that we needed to get some old bathtubs and fill them with a mixture of rotten sawdust and dirt, placing a breeding stock of worms in the mixture. Of course, worms had to be fed, and we used uneaten table scraps, some corn meal, and old milk, which we read was good for worm breeding. We hoped to have our worm business started in early fall and begin selling worms after Christmas. Once we had demonstrated that we could complete the project, we would become full-fledged members of the FFA.

  By Christmas we had worms and began to sell some out of the first bathtub. We put 50 or 100 worms in a round ice-cream paper carton we got from Wilson Drug Store. I think the price was $1 per 100-worm carton, but the wholesale price was $.25 a box. Our wholesale customers were Western Auto, the Shell service station, and the grocery store across the street next to the colored funeral home. We also made direct sales from my house and some we even sold in Dad’s barbershop. K & M was a successful business, and our friendship became more entrenched and mature. The K & M worm business only lasted part of the ninth, all of the tenth, and a little of the eleventh grades. Both Bill and I grew a bit weary of the project, and our interests began to diverge, making our friendship less intense.

  While Bill and I raised our worms, Joe McGaughy and Dudley Pendleton raised their steers. Mr. Moon had told them that they would be expected to show and sell at the State Fair in Birmingham late in the fall. Joe and Dudley had no idea how to get the cows to Birmingham, but, in his usual way, Mr. Moon said, “No problem.” He soon found a trailer that would hold two cows, but it was in terrible condition. It had maypop tires, and the tailgate had to be wired shut with haywire. Mr. Moon had a trailer hitch on the rear bumper of his 1940 Chevrolet, and he off
ered to drive us to Birmingham.

  Once the steers were loaded, Mr. Moon—along with Dudley, Joe, Ed, Harry, and me—headed up the dirt road to Alabaster and Siluria, where we got on Highway 31, at that time the busiest highway in Alabama. We crossed Shades Mountain in Birmingham and drove past the famous statue of Vulcan atop Red Mountain, then began driving down to Five Points South. It was on that stretch that one of the maypop tires blew out. The two heavy show steers began to move right and left as the trailer zigged and zagged down Highway 31. Mr. Moon’s Chevrolet was not made to pull such heavy loads with good tires, and with this flat tire the load began to shift, threatening to tip over. Mr. Moon looked rather grim as he tried to steer the car down the road, and we guys looked just as grim. We could hear the steers bellowing loudly.

  Finally, Mr. Moon brought the Chevrolet to a stop. We all piled out of the car to size up the situation. We discovered that we were not out of the traffic, and we motioned the traffic around us as Mr. Moon maneuvered the trailer off the highway. He got out and told Dudley to get his jack out of the trunk. Then he looked a little pale. It was at that point he remembered that he did not have a spare.

  “We got to get that tire off and take it to that filling station back up the hill,” he said.

  We placed the jack under the trailer, but it was incapable of lifting the trailer and its heavy load. There was nothing to do but undo the baling wire and unload the steers. We tied one to the trailer and the other to a utility pole. Traffic was creeping by us. A few cars tooted their horns at us, and one man rolled down his window and howled in laughter. Joe shot him a bird, but Mr. Moon said not to let on no matter what they did. Luckily, with the steers on the ground, the jack was up to the task and we got the maypop off, rolling it up the road past Vulcan to the Pure Oil filling station.

  Once the tire was repaired and back on the trailer, we were ready to reload the steers and head for the fairgrounds. But the steers had another idea. They elected to pull their ropes loose from the trailer and the light pole. Off down the hill they tore, with all of us in hot pursuit. They ended up next to Brother Bryan’s statue right in the middle of the roundabout at Five Points South. Brother Bryan was kneeling in prayer, and perhaps it was his intercession that stopped the steers, who stood quite still next to his statue. We were able to take control again.

  Mr. Moon slowly drove the trailer into Five Points South. All he could do was shake his head as we reloaded the steers. Everything was pretty quiet as we made our way to the fairgrounds. We were happy to get the two beasts out of that trailer and lock them into the wooden stalls, where they would remain until they were shown and ultimately sold. The sooner those steers became hamburgers, the happier we would be. I couldn’t help but feel lucky that I had chosen worms for my own FFA project.

  Joe McGaughy and Dudley Pendleton with the famous escapee steers posing at the Birmingham Fairgrounds ready for the next day’s scales and sales. Mr. Moon Thornton and his young son Danny are on the far right. Jack McGaughy, Harry Klotzman, and I are bringing up the rear.

  In addition to our regular teachers, we had a steady stream of practice teachers from Alabama College beginning in elementary school and extending through high school. We guys loved having these beauties from the Angel Farm in our classrooms, and when we were old enough to cruise the campus we used to see them regularly and engage them in conversation, flirting shamelessly. In our classrooms they were primly dressed, but on campus they seemed much more sexy, with their shorts or slacks. We even went to the campus Tea House, where we would dance with them to music from a big jukebox in the corner. Everything was fine until Mr. Adams, the campus security officer, would come by. He was under orders to expel non-college students from the Tea House, and, although he personally did not mind us being there, he was committed to fulfilling his responsibilities. He would escort us out the front door, and we would go sit in our car until we could see him returning to his office under West Main Dormitory, a place we called the cave. Then we would reenter the Tea House through the back door and resume our socializing with the college girls.

  Joyce Moncrief, the practice teacher who captured my affection, posing here at Big Springs. I thought she was the epitome of grace, beauty, and intellect.

  Only by the grace of God, the successful culmination of my high school career. Back row, left to right, Harry Klotzman, Joe McGaughy, and Kenneth “Hanky-Pooh” Rochester. Front row, me and Ed Givhan.

  It was not unheard of for a college girl to go out with a high school boy. In my junior year, I became infatuated with my student teacher, Miss Joyce Moncrief. When prom time came, I asked her to be my date. She said she would have to think about it, and I felt encouraged by that, expecting that she would have turned me down flat. I went off and bragged to my friends, and the story was soon all over the school. The principal, Mr. Hurt, called me in and told me that under no circumstances could I take a practice teacher to the prom. Plus, Joyce herself, who was nearing graduation from college, had second thoughts. She did continue to take walks with me by the creek, to pose for pictures, to dance with me on occasion at the Tea House, and to go over to Calera to Pearl’s for a burger and a shake. Several times on our way back to campus we would turn off Highway 25, proceed up the dirt road to the monument located in what was said to be the center of Alabama. There, in the moonlight, pulse racing, I would imagine smooching with her. That would have to be enough.

  19

  Music

  I guess I was destined to be a music lover, given how crazy my parents and my Aunt Lucille were about it. And, like my parents and Aunt Lucille, I loved a wide variety of music, playing classical, country, folk, gospel, rhythm and blues, and jazz during my early years. If anybody had been there to teach me bossa nova and rap, I’d probably have played that, too. There was always music in my house, and from the time I was in elementary school Mother made sure that I attended every concert that came to Alabama College. She also made sure that I got music lessons.

  Every Saturday morning for a few years, from the time I was in the fifth grade, I would ride my bike, at Mother’s insistence, over to Nabors Street to take music lessons from Mrs. Ziolkowski. I remember that their brick ranch-style home looked pretty ordinary, but inside it was a very different matter. It had what I took to be a very distinct European flavor. There was a heavy black grand piano in the living room, with tables covered with sheet music. Mr. Z, whose pipe tobacco could be smelled immediately when you entered the house, was a beloved member of the music department at Alabama College. An acclaimed Chopin expert, he had studied with the famous pianist Jan Paderewski. But it was Mrs. Z I took piano lessons from.

  Mrs. Z was a wonderful teacher, always understanding and patient. How she could put up with students like me, I cannot imagine. I practiced very little, and I lacked good brain to eye to hand coordination, but she never showed that she was anxious or disturbed. Before I began my lesson, Mrs. Z would adjust the bench and ask me to practice scales. When I was sufficiently warmed up, I would take my music book from a small newspaper delivery bag Dad had given me. I tried, but I just wasn’t very good. The pinnacle of my piano career came at an annual recital when I played “The Marine Hymn” with both hands, using the forte pedal with great aplomb. Mother and Dad seemed proud that night, but I certainly knew by then that the piano was not for me.

  I much preferred the violin, and I began taking lessons at the same time with Claire Ordway, whom everybody I knew called Chicken behind her back. Chicken was an immense woman. She came straight down—no boobs or butt. That was convenient, for as I came into puberty I had no distractions from my lessons.

  Chicken was a classic case of someone who couldn’t play worth a damn but could teach music extremely well. Although she taught in the music department, she was not of Mr. Z’s caliber. When Chicken played, the strings would often go cluck cluck, and that is where she got her nickname. She always played flat, and her vibrato was a howling, yelping soun
d. But when she taught, everything changed. I was rapt. And on occasion she would open a case and show me a rare violin she kept wrapped in red velvet. She even let me hold it on occasion. Later when I married Linda, a violinist who herself valued fine violins, I appreciated Claire Ordway even more, realizing better what a superb teacher she had been.

  “Chicken” Claire Ordway conducting on the stage of Palmer Hall. I am one of the two male musicians in the photograph. In the rear center is Ed Roberts.

  Chicken encouraged me to play second violin in the college orchestra from the time I was twelve, and when I was a junior in high school she got me to enter a statewide violin contest playing “The Blue Danube Waltz.” I practiced like everything, and I reckon you could say I was almost cocky when I played for the judges. That self-confidence paid off, as I took first prize. When I returned to school the next day, we had an assembly and I played the piece for the entire school, getting a standing ovation. As I surveyed the student body clapping enthusiastically, I couldn’t help thinking, “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

  The truth was, however, that for the most part I was a little self conscious about playing violin. None of my friends did. I carried my violin in my bike basket, and when I had American Legion baseball practice I’d hide the violin in the juniper hedge next to the Presbyterian house on Valley Street, two blocks from the ball field. It always seemed to be wiser to head off ribbing than to suffer it.