No Hill Too High for a Stepper

by Mike Mahan

  Now when I went to the Craig House, no butler met me at the door, and there was no longer the fine furniture and the nice refreshments. The place was strewn with toys and other clutter, but little did I mind. I could, finally, slide down the banisters to my heart’s content.

  Laura Ann was very good looking, and all the boys on Shelby Street fell for her. The boys on other streets fell for her too, but we Shelby Street boys were jealous of our turf and we fully intended to protect our progesterone. Laura Ann became good friends with Martha Ann and Mary Katherine Cox, Jane Russell, and Beverly (Bird Legs) Doyle, who lived next door to me on Shelby Street. We were in our early teens, but already we played games like spin the bottle. And we all hoped it would land on Laura Ann. I was so smitten with her that even though I was a Methodist I joined the Royal Ambassadors at the First Baptist Church, which the Hickses belonged to.

  We boys obsessively monitored the growth of breasts on Shelby Street, and Martha Ann Cox took the laurels here. I liked Martha Ann very much. She lived with her aunt, Mrs. Rogan, a powerhouse of a woman who ran a very tight ship, even telling her husband, according to rumor, when he could tend to personal toiletries. She took in Martha Ann, her sister Mary Katherine (whom we called Kacky), and their brother Charles, and she was damned sure that nothing untoward was going to happen to them. I spent a lot of the time on the phone with Martha Ann. Although Mrs. Rogan would make her get off the phone soon after she had answered it, we worked out a deal where I would go out on the porch with my trumpet and give a bugle call signal for Martha Ann to call me. In that way we could talk as long as we wanted because Mrs. Rogan was less likely to be aware of the call.

  Martha Ann Cox, queen of Middle Street.

  Mary Katherine “Kacky” Cox, Martha Ann’s baby sister and head majorette of Vicious Tiger’s band.

  Just off Shelby Street lived a red-headed girl named Dolly Jo with whom the other girls wouldn’t associate. They said she was fast, and we guys thought she was a tease. She lived next door to Joe and Jack McGaughy, and she especially liked to put on a show for them. Her shorts were so tight that her front and back clefts were clearly visible in outline. She was also fond of tying her blouse at her midriff, like Betty Grable, and showing off her navel. She could get us boys panting, but we were hardly more comfortable with her than with the other girls. We were not used to aggressive girls.

  When I was in the tenth grade, I fell for a girl out in the Spring Creek community. That area produced some lovely girls. One was Joann “Demps” Butler, who stole the hearts of Dudley Pendleton, Pat Kelly, and Dolan Small, although Demps said she never dated any of them. But the one I fell for was Beverly Taft, a majorette. There was something about that majorette uniform that turned me on. When we traveled to out-of-town football games we would sit together, trying to be discreet with our petting. After all, we didn’t want to be caught by Vicious Tiger or the parent chaperones, who watched us closely and were only too eager to go back and tell what they saw to the members of Beverly’s church, Spring Creek Cumberland Presbyterian.

  I didn’t have a car when I was in the tenth grade and had to double-date with Jack “Shug” McGaughy, who had a thing for Ann Ingram and, as a fine athlete with a good academic record, was well-received by Ann’s family. I was neither an athlete nor a scholar, and I do not think that Mr. Everette Taft would have received me like that. Actually, I never ventured past the front porch of her house, and I never got the idea that Beverly wanted me to. Nevertheless, our romance intensified until it sadly flamed out after six months or so.

  The double dates were great fun while they lasted, and the four of us would go to eat in Calera or Jemison, always ending the evening at one of our favorite parking places. We did that, of course, to save on gas, which was a serious matter when I was making four or five dollars a week at Western Auto.

  Three of the Montevallo Bulldog majorettes, left to right, Beverly Taft, Eleanor Mitchell, and Wanda Faye Richardson.

  Later my friend Dudley Pendleton acquired a wonderful Model A two-door coupe with a gear shift on the floor. It also had a twin exhaust system and a muffler we had taken from another car. He let Beverly and me double date with him, the two of us packed into the rumble seat, which suited me just fine. Dudley was especially fond of Pearl’s Restaurant in Calera, and when we went there we would marvel at the waiter who hopped curbs and could take orders from eight or ten cars without writing a thing down.

  One night we all were aching for some excitement, so we decided that we would raid a watermelon patch, and we knew just which one to raid. Mr. Sam Knowles had the best patch around, sitting high on a hill above his house near Spring Creek Presbyterian Church.

  Dudley’s mufflers on his four-cylinder, split-manifold, twin-exhaust Model-A rumbled loudly as we approached the melon field, but we were not much worried. On our minds was the pint of vodka we would pour into a melon, which after we had plugged it we would take to Big Springs to cool.

  Once we got to the patch, we jumped from the car and began thumping melons, listening for the deep thud that meant the melon was good and ripe. We got a little greedy and tossed seven or eight melons in the trunk, even whooping and hollering a little as we got back in the car as Dudley eased off in low gear. As we moved down the bumpy hill, suddenly off in the distance there loomed before us in our car lights the formidable person of Mr. Sam Knowles, who was the big poo-bah on the Board of Elders at Spring Creek Presbyterian. Whatever he said was the law. On this night he was dressed in overalls with no shirt, holding a double-barreled shotgun across his chest. We saw him lift the gun and fire into the air, frightening Dudley so bad that he steered off the path to the left and crashed right into a small pine tree. The tree bent forward, lifting the front end of the Model A in the air, and we sat there with the front tires spinning uselessly. Mr. Sam approached us, gun and a flashlight in hand.

  Shining the flashlight into the rumble seat, Mr. Sam first spoke loudly to Beverly. “I can’t believe that a good girl like you would fall in with such sorry thieves as these. What would your parents think?” He indicated that he intended to tell them and to announce it in church the next Sunday. He was even going to ask the minister to take as his text the commandment about stealing.

  Then Mr. Sam moved on to Dudley, a sneer coming to his lips. “And just what the dickens did you think you were doing?” Dudley didn’t answer. “Stealing, that’s what. You are no better than a common thief serving time over there in the Columbiana jail. And that’s where you’ll be if I bring charges.”

  We all sat there speechless. As Mr. Knowles talked he got more agitated, and suddenly something awful but very funny happened. Mr. Sam’s upper dentures fell out of his mouth, and he quickly dropped to the ground to retrieve the plate. That gave us a chance for escape, and Dudley took it. He put the car in reverse and backed off the pine tree, then shifting into low and tearing away from the crime scene. We drove back into Montevallo, wondering what to do. We drove down to Big Springs, but none of us had an appetite for watermelon, even if it were laced with eighty-proof vodka. We decided that we had no choice but to go back out Spring Creek Road to take Beverly home, and we worried that Mr. Sam might be waiting for us or perhaps Beverly’s parents would be if he had told them about the escapade. We could not believe that everything was quiet and dark in Spring Creek, and we felt extremely lucky. I guess Mr. Sam thought he had taught us a lesson, and he never said a word to any of our parents, although he knew them all.

  Dudley Pendleton and his four-cylinder, split manifold, twin-exhaust Model-A, the car that climbed a tree at Spring Creek.

  Another girlfriend of mine was the daughter of the minister at the First Methodist Church, where we attended, and I must say that my interest in church increased greatly because of her. Every Sunday, Mother and Dad and I walked down past Rat Scott’s Chevrolet place, by the Fire Department on the left side of Shelby Street, past the building supply and hardware store owned by a
sober pair we called Smiley and Giggles Frost, and on past the historic Negro quarters, where the crippled man Charlie, who delivered mail at the college, and the Deviners lived. Then we were at the Methodist Church, where I was greatly influenced by persons like my Sunday School teacher Mrs. Maggie Kelly, the organist Charles Mahaffey, Dean Napier from the college, Charlotte Peterson, the elementary school principal, and Victor Talmadge Young, the band director. But as important as the church was for me for all these reasons, there came about an even more important one. I met my first true love there.

  Jane Triplett, the preacher’s daughter and my first true love.

  Jane, right, and Frances Klotzman, my buddy Harry’s sister, are fetchingly posed at a Methodist Church swim and picnic outing at Jane’s uncle’s lake property near Sylacauga.

  When Reverend Triplett came to us after the war, he brought with him a wife and one daughter. The daughter’s name was Jane, and never had I seen anyone so appealing. She was a stunning redhead, and, as we boys tritely put it, she was built like a brick outhouse. She had the finest butt I had ever seen. One year younger than me, she played the clarinet and the piano. And she was chosen as a majorette. I was not the only one attracted to her, and a guy from Pea Ridge first claimed her. It took a while, but I managed to steal her away.

  Jane and I had marvelous times, primarily because Reverend Triplett, whose name was Minor, and his wife Marie were, by the standards of that day, quite permissive. I liked Reverend Triplett immediately. He smoked, and I am sure he took a drink, too. But best of all, he understood young people. The first time Jane and I left on a Saturday night date in Dad’s car, he pulled me aside and delivered Minor’s Rule: “Do not park. Come home. The living room is yours and you’ll not be disturbed. If I have to come into the living room, I’ll give you a signal before entering.”

  I thought that was a great thing for a father to say to his daughter’s date. But I must say that we were slightly inhibited in that living room. Because the church was not locked in those days, we took to going into the sanctuary in the afternoons to neck. With light filtering in from the back-lit rose window, we engaged in petting that took us as close to heaven as I had ever been.

  I began to hang around the parsonage all the time, and I was invited to go with the family several times to an uncle’s lake house in Sylacauga. I had gotten an Argus C-4 camera with my earnings from my job at Western Auto, and I began to take cheesecake pictures of Jane in her bathing suit or in shorts with bare midriff. Her parents made no objection, though the shots were quite sensual.

  I continued to date Jane until after I went to college. But after she spent a year at Alabama College, she transferred to Huntingdon College in Montgomery, and that ended my first great romance.

  The Methodist Church played an important role in my maturation. But church was more than that. In fact, I tended to accept without question most of what I was taught there right on up into high school. I did, however, have some nagging questions. Why, I wondered, were the pictures of the Devil so much more detailed than those of Jesus, and why did he look so much more interesting? And how did they know he looked like that? When I looked at depictions of Jesus, I would get to wondering how we knew he was not colored. I even asked Mrs. Kelly about that and she said not to worry, he was from Jerusalem, and there weren’t any colored people over there. So that settled that.

  Harder to settle in my mind was the question of how heaven and hell could hold all the succeeding generations. I just couldn’t imagine how there could possibly be room. And what about meeting up with your loved ones after you died? Wasn’t that going to be next to impossible, I asked Mrs. Kelly. She said that through God all things were possible, but I continued to worry about heaven giving out of room.

  In the eleventh and twelfth grades, however, Ed Givhan and I began reading philosophy. We were especially enamored of Neitzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, and thereafter we began to question some of the teachings of the church. Heaven and Hell bothered me a great deal, and, with the help of Putnam Porter, I began to believe that heaven was not a physical place but peace of mind after the storms of life. That was a comforting thought to me. He also straightened me out on the Bible not literally being written by God and that it was the result of many writers. In Sunday School we were told God dictated it, but that gave rise to even more questions.

  Conversations with Putnam and others moved me to a more liberal interpretation of church doctrine. At my most extreme, I decided that the mystery of the holy trinity was hogwash, and I said so openly. I was chastised by several members of the church, chiefly by my mother. But these theological issues did not weigh nearly so heavily on my mind as did Jane Triplett’s pretty butt and the heated sessions in the First Methodist sanctuary.

  23

  The Military

  My first encounter with war was World War II, though I was just a boy during it. My patriotism was stoked by the war, and I was proud that Mahans had been involved in earlier wars. According to family records, we had at least one ancestor in the Revolutionary War, John Mahan.

  In the War of 1812, John’s sons—Edward, James, John, and Archimedes—who lived in northeast Tennessee, had three-month deployments to fight in the long-rifle army of Andrew Jackson at Fort Jackson, which was located near Wetumpka. Later, they were in the battle at New Orleans.

  During the Civil War the Mahans were, for the most part, Unionists. They fought against secession, and they fought for reunification after the war. They had forges and blacksmith shops, and, despite their ultimate allegiances, they and their slaves worked in the Brierfield ironworks supporting the Confederacy’s war efforts. But Jesse, my great-grandfather, who was elected to the Alabama Senate in 1868 and 1870, fought hard for the reunification of the Union.

  During World War I, Dad’s brother Cary and his sister Kate served their country in Europe. Cary was drafted and served in France. He earned no medals, he told no stories, but he returned with his life. Kate, who had been trained as a nurse at St. Vincent’s Hospital, enlisted in the Army Nurses’ Corps and served on the front lines in Europe.

  Although I was a young boy, I have some clear memories of World War II. On December 7, 1941, as we were sitting around the dining table having lunch with music playing on the radio in the background, the program was interrupted by a news bulletin. “Be quiet, Mike,” Dad said, “The president is speaking.” That was when we heard about the bombing at Pearl Harbor. I was only seven years old, but I had heard my parents speak of Germany and Hitler, and I knew something really bad had happened. Maggie came running in with wide eyes, and I then was stunned to see tears coming from Dad’s eyes. “We’ll be declaring war soon,” he said. “We just have to, and I guess I’ll have to go.” Draft age ended at thirty-five at that time, but he didn’t think that would last long.

  Dad’s oldest brother, Cary Mahan, served in France during World War I as a railroad engineer and was one of many soldiers gassed by the Germans. After the war, he moved to Fairfield and worked for TCI.

  I did not want my Daddy to go to war. I had seen my Uncle Cary Mahan when we visited him in Fairfield. He had been gassed in World War I, and everybody knew that he had never been the same after that. In his later years, he forsook the active, wild life of the Mahan brothers, got religion, and became an old man. He worked in the railroad yards at TCI, but after work he sat in a chair and did nothing except read. I didn’t want my Dad to turn into an Uncle Cary.

  As Dad had predicted, draft age was bumped up to forty after Pearl Harbor, and it even went higher than that. Dad was drafted, but luckily he was able to do industrial work in support of the war rather than going overseas. Because he had been a railroad man, he was assigned to work on the trains at the powder plant in Childersburg. For four years, he commuted on Wyman Brown’s buses along with many others, but he was always home on the weekends cutting hair. And when his shift permitted, he cut during the week. Mother kept the beauty shop o
pen, and Dad hired a young guy to fill in for him. Working at Childersburg had one big plus. Every week Dad brought home a $25 war bond, which he promptly put in Merchants and Planters Bank. At school, I did my part by purchasing ten-cent red stamps to support the war.

  Dolan Small was small in stature but large in creativity and actions and led the Shelby Street and Frog Holler gang into many adventures.

  I think I felt the effects of the war primarily by having to postpone getting a bicycle and having to do without candy and other sweets. But once during the war I had all the sweets I wanted. Dolan Small came to town during the war when his dad bought the ice plant. And wonder of wonders, though they had lots of money, they decided to live near me in Frog Holler. They could have easily lived on Highland Avenue.

  Dolan was a little guy, but he was a big man in Frog Holler. He had a shiny Western Flyer bicycle, and he always had money in his pocket. He was a high roller. Near the end of the war he appeared at my door with a whole box of Hershey bars. Joe McGaughy and Milton Jeter were with me, and our eyes widened as we looked at the box of candy. We hadn’t seen any Hersheys in months. We carried them over to the Presbyterian Church and, lying on the terrace, we stuffed ourselves—six Hershey bars apiece. I have never felt so affluent in my life, and part of my joy was to know that even the boys on Highland Avenue didn’t have a whole box of Hershey bars.