Words and pictures

Remembering Bill

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 12:57:55 -0400

Comments from Gene Foreman at Bill’s funeral on June 6, 2008. Shared with permission.

It was my privilege to know Bill Stroud as a professional colleague and valued friend for forty-four years.
When we met in 1964, I was the managing editor of the daily newspaper in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and I was eager to hire this freshly minted college graduate. He was intellectually curious and a talented writer. He knew our part of the state, having grown up in McGehee, just down Highway 65 from Pine Bluff. I was impressed with his social conscience: He had been a volunteer in the Freedom Summer campaign in Mississippi that year.
There was another reason for my interest. I knew something about Bill’s family, and I liked what I knew. When I was in high school, I worked on Saturdays at our county-seat daily newspaper. There, my editor was Bill’s older brother, George, whom you’ve just heard from. When I graduated from college, I joined the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock, where George was then a news editor. Three years later, the Gazette hired another Stroud brother. This was Joe, an editorial writer who was destined to become the editor of the Detroit Free Press.
Let me emphasize that Bill was hired at Pine Bluff on his merits as a journalist, not my personal friendship with his family. Never mind that Bill’s hiring gave me the distinction of being the only journalist to have worked with all three of the legendary Stroud brothers.
At Pine Bluff, Bill was an enthusiastic addition to our young staff. For the next three years, he roamed Southeastern Arkansas reporting for our paper. He covered everything from the Tomato Festival at Warren to school desegregation to voting fraud. Three years later, when the Chattanooga Times recruited him away, we were sorry to see him go.
But in our business, you don’t forget talent. So, in 1973, when I became managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, I tracked Bill down and invited him to help rebuild this metropolitan newspaper. The editor, Gene Roberts, and I needed someone to take charge of the copy desk. We wanted a journalist who had high standards, who was a stickler for accuracy and fairness, and who was a leader. Bill was just the person we were looking for.
In time, Bill turned the copy desk over to rising stars like Herb Kestenbaum and Mary Lowe Kennedy. He went on to other editing positions at the Inquirer. In 1976, he was an assistant managing editor when the paper decided to take the plunge into a new era of computers.
At the time, reporters were quite comfortable with writing stories on typewriters. Editing was done in handwriting, and copy editors would start their workday by sharpening a fistful of pencils. We were willing to keep on sending copy to the composing room, where a huge staff of craftsmen called printers would set our words into type.
But the new era was inevitable. And so we needed an editor who would learn computers and stand guard for us, making sure that no aspect of quality journalism would be sacrificed to accommodate the new technology. Gene Roberts knew who that editor would be. He called for Bill Stroud.
That selection mystified one of our colleagues. Henry Holcomb says he went to lunch with Bill and asked him, “Why?” After all, there was nothing in Bill’s background that suggested an affinity for technology. Bill agreed: He had no interest in computers and no clue of any talent in the field. So why did he take the job? Bill’s answer was simple: Gene Roberts asked him.
The selection of Bill Stroud as our chief systems editor was another example of the intuitive genius for which Gene Roberts is well known.
Bill flourished in his new role and was soon recognized in our industry as one of its true digital pioneers. Computer engineers across the country respected him and took guidance from his insights.
Most important, Bill guided our newsroom through a very difficult transition. When the computers went bonkers, as the early system tended to do, it was reassuring to have the unflappable Bill Stroud on the case.
One thing the rest of us learned NOT to do was to ask Bill a question. If we did, we needed to set aside a half hour for a lesson in technology. Bill, we said, we just want to drive the car, we don’t want to be internal combustion engineers.
Bill’s success in technology demonstrated a dimension of his character: selflessness. The rest of us wanted to spend our time practicing the journalism that was our passion as well as our livelihood. Bill shared that passion as much as anybody. By accepting Gene Roberts’ challenge to learn the technology on our behalf, he was being the ultimate team player even as he built a brilliant new career.
When the subject is Bill Stroud, the words that our colleagues use are adjectives like: bright, patient, kind, good-humored, warm, sensitive, generous, caring.
These are the qualities that defined the human being whose exemplary life we celebrate today.

Bill's passing

Mon, 9 Jun 2008 08:43:17 -0400

This is Bill’s daughter-in-law, Chris. I am sorry to report that Bill passed away early Friday morning, June 6, 2008. Family was present with him as he passed.

Bill’s obituary is available online through the Philadelphia Inquirer:
http://www.philly.com/philly/obituaries/20080609_William_H__Stroud__65__electronic-publishing_pioneer.html

Friends may visit at the family residence 6 p.m.-8 p.m. Thursday (June 12, 2008). And 1 p.m.-3 p.m. Friday (June 13, 2008) at the United Methodist Church of Bala Cynwyd, 314 Levering Mill Rd. A funeral will be held at the church at 3 p.m. Friday. Burial is private.
Donations may be made to Fox Chase Cancer Center, 333 Cottman Ave., Philadelphia 19111.
Adding your memories and thoughts on this blog in the comments section will be a comfort to the family.

Bill Stroud’s Health

Thu, 5 Jun 2008 06:23:46 -0400

This is Bill Stroud’s daughter Mary writing. Friday May 23, my father was admitted to the intensive care unit at Roxborough Memorial hospital with, what most likely was complications from his prostate cancer. After being admitted he was placed on a ventilator and was able to respond to family for several days.

On Wednesday May 28 He had another acute medical event and since that time he has not regained consciousness. We consulted with many specialists and they all agree that it is unlikely that he could have any kind of meaningful recovery.

Dad is now off the ventilator, and receiving inpatient hospice care in the hospital. We are visiting with him as much as possible, and last night they let us bring his dog Oliver up to the hospital room. Dad loves his online community and we all wanted to share this with you. We invite you to leave comments about Dad and his life, writings and photographs.

Mary Stroud

Wardrobe Nazis?

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:11:29 -0500

What did we look like in 1959-60, those 70 or so high school seniors who made up the scourge and the worrisome promise of the white people of McGehee, Arkansas?

We exhibited the influences of our idols, the movie and music stars we mimicked endlessly. James Dean and Elvis Presley come to mind. We had sports heroes, too, but had not started to design ourselves after their looks and behavior off the field.

How did a 17-year-old McGehee boy prepare himself for a day at school, a day where classes and athletics would blend with flirting with the girls, horsing around with the boys and continually jockeying for social position?

If our boy was moderately affluent, the wardrobe was simple. White jockey briefs and a pristine white Jockey T shirt, without holes, stains or failing seams. The Jockey shirts were form fitting and the hemmed sleeves cut a neat straight line across the tops of the biceps.

Wolchansky’s, the preferred store on First Street for most clothing, sold Jockey. Munsingwear from Isadore Marcus’s Eagle Store, or Fruit of the Loom from almost any of the cheap stores in town would invite ridicule.

Jeans were Lee Riders, identifiable by a low-rise waist, a snug crotch and a rectangular patch of leather sewn at belt loop level in back with the cursive Lee name branded on. Pant legs would end crisply in a straight line above the shoe tops, usually in a straight hem, although jeans bottoms could be turned inward and tacked unobtrusively to permit letting down later.

Jeans had to be clean, unstained and softly faded, but without holes or patches. Meticulous ironing was almost a must, although some mothers got away with hanging jeans out with the legs pulled over metal stretchers, which made then look almost as if they had been ironed.

Levi’s jeans, the national standard, did not figure in the McGehee boy’s wardrobe, nor did Gant sport shirts, most likely because the leading stores in town did not carry them and most of us did not know about them.

Socks would be white wool Gold Toe stretch from Wolchansky’s and shoes brown were penny loafers, Jarman from Wolchansky’s or Florsheim from Wolfe Brothers.

In mild or hot weather no outer shirt was worn over the standard Jockey T, but when days turned cool the boys donned colorful starched cotton McGregor sport shirts from Wolchansky’s -- dark stripes, small patterns or solids, tailored in the new Ivy League style, with button-down collars that included a superfluous third button in back.

Over this, the ideal outer garment was a current McGehee Senior High School football jacket, red felt with raglan sleeves with knit cuffs. The lining – and senior football jackets had linings – was full and gray and reversible. On the left breast was a white chenille “M”. Small red slash marks satin-stitched on the “M” indicated whether it was a second or third-year letter.

Hair was styled by Rex Denton or one of his colleagues at the Owl Barbershop downtown and for the most part consisted of a perfectly shaped flat-top, cut every two weeks with short sideburns and very little hair left on the sides. Perfect hair, of course, would stand straight up on its own. For those not blessed with perfect hair, there was a pinkish brush-in wax to make the hair stand stiff and straight.

A schoolday variation on this boys’ uniform in 1960 came with the introduction of Ivy League trousers, generally made of polished cotton with a superfluous pair of tabs buckled together just above the butt.

Jeans weren’t appropriate for church or important dates. (Elvis Presley called denims “field clothes.”) Suits or sports coats, white shirts and narrow neckties were the preferred Sunday clothes and I don’t think dressy clothes were subject to the same uniformity as what we wore to school. There was for a time a fad of wearing combinations of pink and charcoal gray, with pink shirts and socks replacing white.

White crew socks were standard, even if we were wearing a suit by Hart Schaffner and Marx or Botany 500. I doubt that I owned a pair of dark socks.

Fads had the effect of putting an enormous burden on poor boys who wanted to be insiders, especially when the fad what expensive. For a while, the casual dress alternative to a letter jackets was natural suede and in suede jackets there was a powerful link between price and appearance. Cheap was worse than naked.

Of course only a handful of boys dressed this way and they could be divided into three subgroups:

1. Leaders of the in crowd, who had the money to buy the clothes AND who could at a whim change fashion by wearing something else.

2. The faithful emulators, who followed like converts to an obscure religion, ever alert to nuance or impending change. A few could afford it, but others were mendicants, working their parents or mowing extra lawns so they could buy the right stuff.

3. The doomed, who tried to follow the leaders but were compelled by poverty, inadequate grasp of the rules or flawed fashion sense to try to be “in” but fail. They tried to emulate the leaders but fell short, thus reinforcing the leaders’ power.

This all sounds incredibly silly, but I can remember a group of boys tackling a fellow student in the schoolyard, holding him down and carefully inventorying his clothing in loud voices, right down to his Fruit of the Looms. I know men in their 60s who are still stung with humiliation when they remember these playground attacks.

This clothes consciousness – dare I call it wardrobe Nazism? – was against a backdrop of wide gaps in family incomes. A few of us – and I reluctantly include myself it this group – were wealthy in relation to most of our friends. Daddy was a vice president of the bank, Mother was a schoolteacher and we owned a good farm. It was hard for me to shake my parents loose from enough money to buy a top-of-the-line suede jacket just because that’s what other boys my age were wearing.

On the other hand, Daddy surprised me with a 1959 baby blue Ford coupe when I was a junior in high school. When I was 12 and wanted a horse he bought me a splendid strawberry roan Tennessee Walker stallion and I remember him walking into Wolfe Brothers with me and buying me two beautiful Hart Schaffner and Marx suits for my college wardrobe.

My classmates in high school included the bank president’s son, the son of a prominent grocer, a doctor’s son and the son of the pastor of First Baptist, the largest church in town. Many of the rest were children of union tradesmen, railroad workers who earned modest but steady incomes with good health care, travel and retirement benefits and small business owners. Then there were children of farmers and farm workers and of people who clerked in retail shops for near the minimum wage.

Almost all of us had jobs, even if they were like mine – doing extra farm work (aside from regular chores) for my Dad for 50 cents an hour.

By national standards, McGehee is a poor town still, with 25 percent of the population living in poverty and a median family income of $22,000 a year. In the 1950s, despite a thriving railroad industry and a strong retail business district, for the average family standards of living, at least regarding food, clothing and health care, were no higher than they are today.

While I and most of the other boys paid close attention to girls and how they looked, I doubt that any of us gave a thought to where they bought their clothes or what brands they wore and many of the girls wore dresses that were sewn at home. My senior year girlfriend, Susie Bulloch, was the daughter of one of the best tailors in town and her clothes were always beautifully made.

Leafing through an old yearbook, I see little evidence of a “uniform” for girls. No girls wore slacks to school, but there are dresses, skirt and sweater sets and simple solid-color sweaters with fancy collars overlapping the rounded necklines. Were the girls paying more attention to what looked good and less to what everybody else was wearing? I don’t know the answer to that, but I know that for girls “hand-made” was good, while for boys “home-made” was a mark of shame, probably carrying over from the harder times when some of our mothers made us shirts from feed and flour sacks.

And a flour-sack shirt was not as bad as it sounds. Millers caught on the facts that country women needed material to make clothes and goods had to be packaged in bags anyway. So why not use attractive print materials to bag flour and animal feed? Mother made me some flour sack shirts when I was in grade school and I was proud to wear them.

Were the girls aware of how fashion -obsessed we boys were? Did they have their own rules and their own styles of fashion combat? Or were we boys really the bitchy ones in those days.

Those who lived on the farm

Wed, 9 Jan 2008 21:48:41 -0500

Chapter 11

Sharecroppers and tenant farmers

On our farm, the last black sharecropper was Lee Rainey, who left for Topeka, Kansas, sometime in the mid-1950s. I can close my eyes and this picture comes to me, as finely detailed as if it were yesterday: A rough, wooden rowboat slides easily free of the slick mud bank, floating heavily on still brown water. At the far end of the boat, a tall, thin black man with hollow cheeks and soft brown eyes sits and rows with a single oar, first on one side then the other. He wears denim bib overalls, a sweat-stained tan work shirt and a short brimmed canvas hat. He is quiet, strong and diligent. Mosquitoes whine and sting. Snake doctors dart about like tiny biplanes, then stop in midair, hover and change direction. The boat, probably green at one time but now a weathered gray, glides under low-hanging limbs of bald cypresses, prehistoric trees. The paddle’s splash disturbs the peace of the bayou. Snapping turtles slide from their sunning spots on half-submerged driftwood. Water birds take flight. A water moccasin swims away from us, only his head and his shallow wake visible on the surface. The air is humid and close, heavy with the smells of mud and lush vegetation bordering on decay. The black man is Lee Rainey. I am five years old and this is high adventure. Lee is taking me fishing in the bayou. At the edge of the open channel in the middle of the bayou, Lee sets his paddle down and we pick up long cane poles, unwind the lines, bait our hooks with earthworms from a coffee can and drop the lines into the water. Afternoon passes slowly as we keep silence so as not to scare the fish. Now and then a cork bobbles and Lee or I lift a small fish -- bream or catfish -- into the boat and Lee tosses the smallest ones back in the water and adds the bigger ones to his string. At the end of the day there is enough fish for his family and for mine. Back at the house, Mother takes our photograph – two fishermen standing together with our catch. Lee holds my hand.  

He had a wife named Queen who worked for Mother before Hattie Calhoun and before the arrival of electric washing machines. I remember watching Queen boil laundry outdoors in a big cast-iron washpot, scrub the clothes on a washboard, wring them dry with her bare hands and hang them out to finish drying. Lee built St. James Church on a corner of our farm backed up to the bayou. Ben DeFir, a neighbor, built a footbridge across the bayou behind the church, in a spot that was a fine place to fish. I remember fishing there on Sunday afternoons, watching my cork for a catfish’s nibble and listening to the gospel singing from St. James. It was like music from another world – strong, rhythmic and irregular, rich and complex, like nothing I ever heard in Mrs. Weatherall’s class or the First Methodist Church.

Rainey was a tough but gentle man. I watched him apply insecticide to a field of cotton using a homemade wooden box with a crank-operated beater inside and four flexible metal tubes extending from it. He wore the box across his chest, supported by shoulder straps, and turned the crank as he walked down the rows, spreading a cloud of lethal dust. As he walked away, he disappeared in the acrid cloud, made up of benzene hexachloride, DDT and sulfur.

Rainey’s children preceded him to Topeka. One fall, after the cotton was picked, he left the farm to visit his family, asking my father to care for his milk cow while he was gone and promising to pay for the cow’s feed when he returned. Before spring planting, Daddy received a note in the mail explaining that Rainey had decided to stay up North. In closing, he said, “Mr. Stroud, you can keep the cow. I reckon by now she’s done et herself up.”

Lee Rainey was the last black sharecropper on the Stroud place. I wish now that I had known him and other black people better. I did know many people whose circumstances differed from his only in that they were white. They lived in rough, unpainted houses on land that was not theirs. They farmed with mules and traveled to town on Saturdays in wooden wagons. Many of them did not have the skills that enabled Lee Rainey to write a letter or build a church.

In fact, most of the dirt poor farm people I knew were white.

Mother said more than once that she didn’t think the impact of school desegregation would be as great as the impact of the wave of school consolidation that swept across Arkansas after World War II, reducing the number of school districts in the state from more than 1500 to fewer than 500 and sending many of the poorest, most disadvantaged rural white children to school in towns. Suddenly is became necessary for first-grade teachers to literally toilet train some of their pupils – teaching them how to use flushing commodes and sinks with running water.

We had a steadily diminishing number of white tenant families on our farm and some of those who stayed on had had long connections with my father and grandfather. As a landowner’s boy, it was common for me to go visiting – to drop in on tenant neighbors and play with their children or sometimes to hang around and talk with the older people as they did their work. I sat with old Mrs. Wimberley as she churned butter the old-fashioned way, pumping a long-handled wooden dasher into a long crockery jar that rested between her knees. She said I would grow up to be a lawyer because I liked to talk so much and asked so many questions. Sometimes I would walk alongside her husband as he ploughed or planted cotton with a team of mules. I must have been a pest, but I don’t remember them ever sending me home or my parents ever telling me not to bother them.

I used to think poor Delta tenant farmers inhabited in a world so bound by manual labor and illiteracy that it that their lives differed only slightly from those of serfs who lived in the Middle Ages. Mrs. Wimberley’s common dasher churn, for example, followed a design documented to have been in use 14 centuries ago and a variant of the song we sang during the churning was written down in the 1600s. Mr. Wimberley’s heavy, rough wooden sled -- a sledge, he called it – which was used to haul water barrels and other heavy materials to the field – would have been familiar to ancient Romans or Egyptians and the commands he used the direct his mules would have been familiar to a medieval English ploughman. But the truth was that most farming tools and other basic instruments of rural living had been invented or sharply improved since the middle of the 19th Century. Mule-drawn mechanical rakes and mowers for grain and hay had replaced scythes and pitchforks. Steel ploughs cut through soil faster and more cleanly than their clumsy iron predecessors. Mule-drawn machines planted seeds reliably and quickly. The coming revolutions of gasoline power in the fields and electric appliances in the homes merely accelerated the pace of change exponentially.

Behind our house, at the northeast corner of the back yard, were a feedlot and two barns. The white new barn, built after World War II from materials scavenged from the Japanese Relocation Center at Rohwer, formed most of the front side of the lot. It was long, straight and simple, a single-story structure with a raised storage floor covering the center and one side. The other side of the barn, facing the lot, was a line of dirt-floored stalls with racks for hay and troughs for milled feed. Across the lot, at the back corner farthest from the house, stood the rough old green barn, tall in the center where it was used for stacking hay. On either side, at a first-story level, eaves extended to form sheds. On the lot side, there were hayracks under the shed and behind the racks were holes in the wall, enabling me to break open bales inside and shove the hay through for the cows. On the other side, facing a lane that led back alongside a cotton field, a matching shed was used to store equipment. In the late 1950s, after tractors had taken over completely, the weedy ground under the shed was covered with a forlorn collection of planters, ploughs, discs and harrows, the machines that had been drawn by mules.

For many farm boys, high school sports with their practice sessions lasting from the end of the school day to well past dark, presented a conflict with the chores their parents required at home. Daddy solved the problem for us by installing lights in the barn, making it possible to work whenever we got home.

Behind the old barn, furrows a quarter of a mile long stretched from a dirt lane, past the Indian mound and right up to the edge of Judge Wallace’s place. The soil was good here and most years this field was a showplace, producing high yields of top quality cotton. When boll weevil infestations rose in late summer as they inevitably did, the strategy was simple, to attack from the air, hard, morning and evening, using nimble Piper Cubs and Stearman Bearcats to spread clouds of 3-5-40 dust on the plants while they were still damp with dew from an altitude not much higher than a porch swing. My longhaired golden cocker spaniel saw it as his duty to chase the planes. At the first whine of cropdusters, Eustis would stir from his sleeping place under the carport, yawn and stretch, and position himself for the first pass. When the plane came in low and the spraying began, Eustis would break into a dead run, disappearing as he raced down the furrows that were now overshadowed by the dark green cotton plants. It was not for lack of trying, but he was constantly falling behind. As the plane started to climb and turn at the far edge of the field, Eustis would finish his run, taking the time to slow down, turn around and get ready for the return trip. He chased the plane, breathing in huge lungfulls of sulfur, DDT and benzene, galloping with his ears flying in quarter mile sprints for half an hour to 45 minutes every day, morning and evening. On those days, between flights, Eustis slept in the shade, not bothering to move.

I got Eustis when I was nine and he died when I was in college. I am sure the ingestion of so much insecticide was not good from him, but he lived to a ripe, healthy old age.

Tenant houses in Desha County were basic – unpainted wood outside and rough plank walls inside, with a tin roof and a brick chimney. The sills were set up on blocks so there was a shallow crawl space under the house. There were two basic designs. Shotgun houses were one room wide and three or four rooms deep. If a shotgun blast was fired through an open front door it could exit through an open back door without hitting anything inside the house. The other design, more common on our place, was a squarish four-room layout with a front room and kitchen on one side and two bedrooms on the other. The front room, which had the heat stove or fireplace, often doubled as a sitting room and bedroom. These houses had an open, covered porch that ran the width of the house. The red cast iron water pump, capping a shallow well pipe, was a few feet from the back door and nearby was a hemispherical cast iron wash pot. There was as outhouse at the back of the home site, at the edge of a farm field, and there was a shed and a fenced lot for a milk cow and perhaps a pig. Chickens roamed free and dogs slept in the cool dirt under the porch. A single clothesline stretched across the yard, which was kept scraped down to bare dirt.

Tenant farmers did not have lawnmowers, and scraping the yards bare with a sharp hoe made it easier to spot rattlesnakes and chicken droppings and for boys scraped yards had the added advantage of making it easier to play mumblety-peg, tops and marbles, games that required bare dirt. These were sports that were hampered by rules at school – no playing for keeps, no use of steel ball bearings as marbles, no knife throwing and no tops with spikes – but could be played to their fullest on the farm.

One year a tenant family from our place went to Indiana to visit relatives. When they came back, I asked their son what it was like up north.

“Their barns are better than our houses,” he told me.

Housing envy explained why some poor farm workers were resentful of the people who were held behind barbed wire at the Rohwer Japanese Relocation Center, where in a few months early in World War II the federal government built a town for almost 8,500 residents. The houses were starkly utilitarian barracks-like structures covered in black tarpaper, but they were clearly more substantial and less drafty than the tenant houses on nearby farms. In addition, the camp had electric lights and, though individual units did not have bathrooms, there were modern, communal shower and latrine facilities. Similar envy was aimed at the black families who bought small farmsteads in the federally sponsored Wolfe Project, near McGehee. Project houses were as sturdily constructed as those at Rohwer and were painted white and equipped with electricity and running water.

After World War II, many of the buildings from Rohwer were jacked up, put on trailers and hauled to farms all over the county, replacing dilapidated tenant houses. Most were covered with faux brick asphalt siding or asbestos shingles. For years after the war they were known as “Jap houses.” We had two of them on our farm. But however rough or simple the tenant houses were, the people who lived in them exhibited a certain pride of place. Once when I was about nine a tenant farmer’s son and I were on all fours on scraped ground in his family’s yard, setting up for a marbles game, digging holes in the dirt with old spoons. I don’t know what prompted me to say it, but as I dug, I remarked, “This dirt belongs to us.”

The boy I was playing with said flatly, “It’s ours while we’re living on it.”

My connections with other children on the farm were always a little strange – in many ways some of the closest friendships of my life but always with a distance that was never completely bridged. Franklin Delano Brown, a white tenant farmer’s son, was my age and, when we were teenagers, a virtual match for me in size, though he was stronger and a better natural athlete. He had a blistering fastball and a deadly jump shot. Franklin’s maternal grandparents had been tenants on our farm, raising a large family. His mother had a brother who became a big-city school superintendent and another who was a missionary in the Amazon jungle. Eventually, Franklin’s father would acquire land of his own and become an independent farmer.

We worked side by side on the farm, bagging oats and stacking hay, and we played endless games of one-on-one basketball and, with a few other boys, workup baseball. He had a quick little pony long before I got a horse of my own and he gave me permission to ride his horse whenever I wanted. One day when I was about 11 and Franklin was not at home I saddled his horse -- something I had never done without supervision – and went for a ride. Having trouble steering the animal, I got no farther than the Browns’ back yard. The horse ducked his head under a clothesline that ran the width of the yard. Panicked, I dropped the reins, a signal to the horse to run flat out, which he did. The clothesline caught me across the middle so I was like an arrow in a bowstring as the shallow clothesline posts ripped up and the line snagged between a cistern and a smokehouse. I held on to the saddle horn, but the poorly fastened girt came loose, launching me, in reverse, across the yard, straight back, then down on the scraped dirt in a bolt upright seated position, a landing as painful as it was humiliating.

I was stunned and sore, but not seriously hurt. The horse came home, the saddle was not damaged and the clothesline was easily re-established. Franklin’s mother comforted me and Franklin himself was more amused than angry. I think my parents decided that I had already suffered a punishment that fit my crime.

Our farm was in the rural Desha Central School District and Franklin, his brother and sisters and the children from neighboring farms went to Desha Central schools. Even though Daddy was an elected member of the Desha Central School Board, I went to school in McGehee, as did my brothers. The McGehee schools had an instrumental music and band program, plus football and track and field teams. Desha Central had only basketball, played in a wooden gymnasium that had been part of the Japanese Relocation Center. McGehee also offered at least a bare minimum of college preparatory classes. I asked my older brother George if we paid tuition to the McGehee schools and he said he remembered tuition being discussed once, but believes we attended the town schools free under an informal agreement. Although Franklin and I were friends, the fact that we went to separate schools defined a gulf between us. In our social lives and as athletes, we moved in different circles and these circles were far apart in affluence, resources, aspirations and opportunities, styles of clothing and, subtly, in dialect.

Town schools had some rural children, but Desha Central children were all rural. Town children called them yokels, hicks, rural bastards (RBs) and rednecks, never conceding that some of them, such as Andrew Wargo, a planter’s son who attended Desha Central but came in to town for Boy Scout meetings, could have been prime candidates for valedictorian at McGehee High School.

Franklin, whose experience and imagination ran light years ahead of mine, provided much of my early sex education, or perhaps I should say miseducation. Not only did he have a stash of risqué magazines hidden in a corncrib, he seemed to have encyclopedic knowledge of the sexual histories and proclivities of half the teenage country girls in the county. His stories about his own exploits and those of others were crude, graphic and messy, punctuated with raunchy songs and raw aphorisms. He also had stories of boys on nearby farms who he swore were having carnal congress with barnyard animals, sometimes with dire consequence either for the boys or the poultry.

The Browns lived in what had been my grandparents’ home, a one-story house with a screened dogtrot down the middle. A dogtrot would have been more common, I think, in the hills of northwestern Arkansas. It was a covered opening separating the house into two parts, in this case with a large bedroom and sleeping porch on one side and a bedroom, sitting room and kitchen on the other. My grandparents had installed generator-powered lights before the arrival of electric power lines, and the light switches in the house were still the push buttons that came with the old system. Heat was from three fireplaces and a wood stove in the kitchen. There was no indoor plumbing until some time in the 1960s.

When television came to the farm, it came first to Franklin’s family some time around 1954, as a gift from one of their grown children. The black and white TV was placed in the sitting room, opposite the sofa that backed up to a bay window. The tall, boxy outdoor antenna loomed over the front of the house. Its receiving apparatus could be rotated via a control box on top of the set to pick up stations in Pine Bluff and Little Rock to the north and Monroe, Louisiana, to the southwest. As often as my parents would let me I would go out after dinner and walk the quarter mile up the gravel road to the Browns’ house. Usually no cars would pass as I walked along with the bayou on my left and a fenced pasture on my right. I could see the lights from houses on nearby farms and now and then hear the faint hum of a truck in the distance on Highway 1. From the bayou would rise a chorus of bullfrogs and crickets. Occasionally I would hear a splash, probably a turtle slipping off a log into the water. Now and then a small animal would cause a rustle in the underbrush. The gravel would crunch under my shoes. These gentle sounds were reassuring, even comforting. On the other hand, if the cows in the pasture were over near the fence and I had not noticed them, an unexpected moo would be enough to make me jump and take my breath away.

At the Browns’ house I was introduced to Steve Allen, Jan Murray, Jack Benny, Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Ed Sullivan, Adolphe Menjou, Imogene Coca, Jayne and Audrey Meadows and Little Rock meatpacker and wrestling entrepreneur Chris Finkbeiner, who would end his pitch for cheese-injected wieners with a loud, “Now let’s get on with the rasslin’. Walking home when the 10 o’clock news came on did not bother me, but I avoided late night trips to the outhouse. If I had to pee I would do it in the yard or on the road on my way home. In addition to Franklin, the Brown’s had four children at home – an older son and daughter, another daughter who was a little younger than Franklin and another daughter who was younger still – plus a son and two daughters who were grown and gone. I got on well with the children most of the time, although I remember Vonda, the youngest, hitting me once with a fresh killed water moccasin and I once shot Loretta, the daughter closest in age to Franklin, with my BB gun.

The BB incident resulted in the gun being taken away by my parents for a long time. While today’s preoccupation with safety in all things would have seemed ridiculous to us then, gun safety – even air rifle safety – was a serious matter. Guns were part of every household and were not locked away. My father had a revolver in a dresser drawer and a shotgun his closet. We learned to shoot while we were in elementary school and while I don’t remember exactly when I got a firearm of my own; I think I was about 12 when Daddy gave me a single shot 20-guage shotgun.

Gun crime, and violent crime of any kind, was almost non-existent in Desha County. The county’s 765 square miles was policed by an elected sheriff and a couple of full-time deputies. We left our doors unlocked, even if we were going to be away for a few days, and we left the keys in our cars and trucks. Everything we owned was out there for anyone to steal and no one did, at least not in a big way. Because formal policing was so thin, it seemed prudent for each farm family to be properly armed. On the other hand, there wasn’t enough crime to justify more formal policing. Rifles and shotguns were for hunting. Handguns were for protection, not that we seemed to need it. Part of Daddy’s job at McGehee Bank involved visiting three tiny branch banks, in Tillar, Arkansas City and Watson. When he made these visits, he served as the bank’s courier, transferring money to and from them. He traveled alone on lonely roads, unarmed and carrying substantial sums of cash and never felt threatened.

I am aware of only one instance when Daddy armed himself for a personal confrontation. A contractor was digging a drainage ditch for a neighboring farmer and was encroaching on our land. Daddy faced him down and got him off our place. Daddy never said whether he had to display the pistol he took with him.

Boundaries were of paramount importance in Desha County. People might not lock their cars or homes, but there were those who would take a weak person’s land away, bit-by-bit. There was a place along the backside of our upper pasture where a neighbor’s house was so close that the road along the property line between it and our fence was barely wide enough for a single car. A logger who was clearing a tract on another farm near Canal 43 wanted to use the road, so he came to Daddy and asked permission to move our fence to widen the right of way. Daddy refused, saying the neighbor should move his house. He had nothing against the logger, but the property line had a history. Years earlier, the neighbor’s father had moved our fence, claiming an edge of our land. My grandfather had sued, taking the case all the way to the Arkansas Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the neighbor had moved his house right up to the edge of the road.

Granddaddy won his case, the fence was put back where it belonged, but the neighbor never moved his house, creating a bottleneck that always looked like it would be easier for Granddaddy or later Daddy to solve. Move the house or move the fence? People who understood the strength of Daddy’s will understood why moving the house would have been easier.

Schools and the City

Tue, 6 Nov 2007 20:47:48 -0500

This afternoon, I walked three blocks to Summit Presbyterian Church to vote in the general election. A cold front had passed through in the morning with a little rain and now it was clear and crisp, with the wind chasing a few cumulus clouds across a bright blue sky. We have had a warm autumn and fall colors are just now approaching their peak of reds, oranges and yellows.

This was not a big election. The mayor’s race was decided in the Democratic primary, just as state and local elections were decided when I was growing up in Arkansas. The other races, for judicial and City Council positions, offered chances to make some small improvements in the way we are governed. Despite the lack of high-profile races, the turnout in our precinct was good, as usual. As I waited in line for the voting machine, I visited with a neighbor, a teacher in one of Philadelphia’s grand old public high schools. She is nearing retirement. She described to me how her school has been deteriorating, with most students coming to high school without the ability to write even simple paragraphs and many students rude and disrespectful, even to the point of taking cell phone calls in class.

Cell phones are banned in the schools, but this teacher said the calls that disrupt her classes are often from the pupils’ parents. We talked about how discourtesy and disrespect spill over from the school to the workplace, with young workers so often treating customers with rudeness and disdain.

Still, we acknowledged, there are some reasons for hope. Some employers seem to be able to make courtesy and helpfulness part of their corporate culture. From big box stores to the coffee shop on the corner there are places where doing business is a delightful experience. It is not a store, but Fox Chase Cancer Center, where I have doctor’s visits and treatments every month, has a culture of cheerfulness and courtesy that extends from its world-renowned medical specialists, to its nurses and technicians to its security and maintenance staff and parking attendants. I’ve asked people there if they can explain their positive, helpful attitude, but there is no clear-cut answer beyond just, “It’s who we are.”

An article in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer described how West Philadelphia High School, which as recently as a year ago was making news for violence and failure, was starting to turn things around. There is a new, energetic and popular principal and alumni and students together have been working to improve the school.

Inquirer columnist Annette John-Hall wrote:

“This academic year seems light years away from 2006-07, when turmoil went on nonstop within the dingy walls. Hardly a day went by when West wasn't in the news, and every day the negativity surrounding the school seemed to intensify. There were students assaulting teachers. Troublemakers setting fires. Police roaming the halls, threatening arrests. A few bad actors creating a siege mentality for the kids who wanted to learn.”
The siege mentality has been replaced not by some fancy new educational formula, but by familiar old values – pride, optimism, determination and the leadership of adults who grew up in the neighborhood, graduated from the school and made their way successfully in the world in spite of hardships and obstacles.
Today’s election confirmed that Michael Nutter will be Philadelphia’s next mayor. As cynical as I am about politicians in general, I am cautiously optimistic about him. His daughter attends a Philadelphia public school, suggesting a commitment that has long been missing at the top of this city’s leadership.
I believe in public education. It is fundamental to our democracy, providing the means for generations of newcomers and strivers to obtain the skills and cultural literacy necessary to claim their place as productive citizens, people with a real stake in the strength and character of our country. Both of my parents were public school teachers, although my dad switched to government work and then to banking after a few years. They taught in one of America’s poorest counties and many of their pupils were, like my father, children of nearly illiterate parents. My three daughters are products of Philadelphia’s public schools and all of them have gone one to earn advanced degrees in their fields, Ellen with a Ph.D. in history from Columbia, Beth with a Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary and Mary with a Master of Social Work from the University of Vermont. All three attended elite, selective public high schools and benefited from special programs for the gifted.
The challenge is to improve public education in the city not just for the gifted, but for everyone who can benefit from it. The obstacles are tremendous – greed and corruption in local government, entrenched incompetent teachers and administrators, dilapidated buildings and equipment, parental indifference, drugs, violence, poverty and suburban legislators elected on a screw-the-city platform. But success, one school at a time, one child at a time is possible. And necessary.
America’s great cities are necessary for our nation to survive and flourish. They are our ports, our commercial centers, our transportation hubs and the homes of our great cultural institutions, our art museums, great libraries, orchestras and universities. They are also the entry point for millions of people to the mainstream of American society. Our cities for good or ill, Americanize people from all over the world and at the same time our cities absorb and appropriate foods, customs, music, culture, faith and values from across the globe. We can’t afford to wall off our cities and abandon them, nor can we afford to write off the children of our cities.
What ever they become, they will help shape our country’s future.
In Philadelphia, at the moment, that future does not look particularly bright. The city has experienced more than 330 homicides this year alone. Last week a policeman walked into a Dunkin’ Donuts just as a robbery was taking place. The robber shot him in the head, killing him. A suspect, the son of a city corrections officer, was arrested today in Miami. Police Officer Chuck Cassidy’s funeral is tomorrow.
And I think my neighbor’s assessment of her high school’s decline is far from an isolated story. In fact, it is still probably more typical of the Philadelphia public schools than the story of revival at West Philadelphia High. Still, there is the optimism engendered by that example of cooperation among staff, alumni, neighborhood and students. And there is hope in having a new mayor with enough faith to send his daughter to a Philadelphia public school.
This thing can be turned around. One school, one child at a time. 

Football, Conditioning and Toughness

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:46:45 -0400

A few weeks ago I started a flurry of email exchanges with some questions about what it was like to play high school football for the McGehee (AR) Owls in the 1950s. I pointed out that we struggled through twice-a-day August practices in 90 to 100 degree heat without a drop of water, because our coaches believed that drinking water while practicing would cause cramps.

There were other differences between high school football then and high school football now, for example:

Head tackling – now called spearing – was made illegal in high school, college and professional football in 1984. The result was a dramatic drop in debilitating spinal injuries. But that was the way we were taught to tackle. I can still hear Coach Lynn Nix shouting, “Put your hat on him!” The helmet was a weapon.

Protective equipment in the 1950s was crude by today’s standards. Mouthpieces were not used. Facemasks were optional until some time in the late 50s and when they were required, they did not have to meet any minimum standards. Backs and receivers often wore one that consisted of just a single lightweight bar. Jockstraps were standard equipment but steel cups were used rarely, usually only after an injury.

In addition to spearing, there were other techniques that were taught that have since been declared illegal – the cross-body block, the leg whip, the head slap -- particularly used against the center in long-snap situations. (The defensive lineman’s first move would be to smash the heal of his palm into the opposing player’s helmet somewhere near the ear hole in order to, as Coach Nix put it, “ring his bell”) and high-low double-team blocking in the line.

Yet most of us made it through football with good memories and few lasting physical side effects. Why?

One reason was that we were smaller than today’s football players. At 6’ 3” and 190 lbs. I was one of the biggest players on our team and players weighing more than 210 were rare. Today 250-pound high schoolers are not unusual.

Bill Howell, an Atlanta architect who played end for the Owls in the late 50s, suggests that we were better conditioned to begin with than today’s teenagers. We didn’t spend our time in air-conditioned houses playing video games and watching television. We spent most of our waking, non-school hours outside, playing hard and working hard. I asked him about his own work experience.

Here is what he said, “Regarding the issue of working during the summer, you’re right I started working for my dad in the grocery store when I was 9 and worked full time during the summer until the summer after 9th grade. Was a sweet deal as the store was air-conditioned, and I had all of the free Cokes I could drink!! However being the stupid jock that I was and to get in shape for football, I convinced him that summer to let me go to work for Leta’s dad, Uncle Roger, who had a freight-hauling company. I worked my butt off for him every summer until we graduated driving a very old R.E.O. truck, loading and unloading freight all over Southeast Arkansas.

            “Regarding some of the others, I remember (James) Whitaker’s dad was a masonry subcontractor and worked James, Chick McGhee, and several others during the summer. Worse job I had and shortest period of employment was when Mike Green hired Bowman and me to help him load hay for someone. Lee and I got to walk along behind the truck picking up hay bales and throwing them up onto the truck bed to Mike Green. Naturally it was the middle of July and followed a rainstorm the previous day, so the humidity was about 98% and the bales were wet! We only lasted one day!!

            “Charles Lloyd also worked at some point for one of the crop dusting guys who taught him to fly. He invited me out to go flying with him, which sounded exciting. I envisioned a nice new plane like I had seen in the movies. The plane was like a balsa wood model airplane but with numerous tears and holes in the body! Scared the crap out of me but we did land safely.”

As usual, Bill’s story prompted a flood of memories for me and I replied:

“My toughest job was three days working at the cotton compress, but I had one almost as bad between my sophomore and junior years of college. I worked for the Army Engineers as a surveyor’s aide. I ended up in Mississippi working on straightening and deepening a godforsaken stream called Bobo Bayou. Our job was to make sure the dragline operators didn't leave the stream trying to flow uphill. When we weren't wading through the moccasin infested bayou taking soundings with a stick, we were cutting "troches," using kaiser blades to open up clear lines of sight so the surveyor could use his level and transit. Whatever was in the way, we had to clear it and that even included tipping an outhouse or two. The biggest benefit of that summer, aside from the $72.50 a week, was learning to play Booray (or Bourre) with the dirt-moving crews from south Louisiana. We lived in a boarding house called the Marks Hotel and Coffee Shop -- an un-air-conditioned room and 20 meals a week (including surprise sack lunches on workdays -- for $18.30 a week. The place was run by a big redheaded woman named Reba. Her husband was a slow-moving small-time cotton farmer who spent his evenings in front of the TV in the hotel's tiny lobby, bragging that he had invented a boll-weevil resistant cotton. I went out to his place once and he had a big white barn with huge black lettering on the end facing the road: "Leveeside Plantation. Black land, black mules, black Negroes and white cotton." When Reba got really pissed she would chase him around the cafe with a butcher knife. Never quite caught him, though. The other available on-site entertainment was a room at the second floor landing occupied whatever loose and usually dirty women Reba had working for her at the time. The guests would provide raw material for a good novel or historical situation comedy. My favorite was a deaf-mute woman who worked during the week as a linotype operator for the weekly newspaper in Marks. On weekends she would take the bus up to Memphis, where she was a professional wrestler.”

We thought we were tough and by today’s standards we were, but we were also aware that many of the young adults around us, including some of our coaches, were World War II veterans. Knowing that there are guys watching you play and practice who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, served as fighter pilots in the South Pacific or survived the Bataan death march put our ideas of toughness and hardship in perspective.

Eternity’s Best Barbeque

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 16:39:49 -0400

(The picnic shown above is from McArthur, Arkansas, in the late 40s. That’s me with the cake. Otherwise, from left, are Frances Henley, Karen Teeter, James Henley and Martha Ann Boyd. The picnic tables were from the Rohwer Japanese Relocation Center.)

Although it has been more than 50 years since I tasted it, the mention of Ashford’s barbecue in McGehee, Arkansas, puts my taste buds into overdrive as I remember the tiny café across from Clower Chevrolet. I can smell the sweet, smoking fragrance and see the sandwiches -- savory thin slices of slow-cooked pork, brown with a thin red edge, layered on an ordinary hamburger bun. The only suitable condiment was Mr. Ashford’s homemade sauce – thin, brown and fiery, shaken out of a bottle like Tobasco, one precious drop at a time. With chips, maybe a little cole slaw, a glass of iced tea and a fresh homemade fried peach pie, the bill would be less than 50 cents.

I don’t know if the streets of heaven will be paved with gold, but I am sure Mr. Ashford or his successor in business, Buster Poss, has a barbecue place there. Maybe both of them do. Now that would be heaven!

Southerners all over the world hold strong opinions about the best barbecue and the best barbecue sauces. I know that if I could take them back in time to Ashford’s, I could settle their arguments once and for all. Since I can’t do that, I have been asking my friends and family for their sauce recipes. These first two come from family members – my brother George and my cousin Lisa Landers Ramsey and her husband, Chuck. Both Lisa and George grew up in Desha County, but George lives in St. Louis now and Lisa and Chuck are in Tulsa.

Their recipes are quite different – as different as the fundamental styles of barbecue sauce in North Carolina, where a tomato base – often ketchup – is used in the western part of the state, but not in the east. I once read where a barbecuer from eastern North Carolina said, “A man that would put ketchup on a piece of meat and put it in front of a child is capable of anything.” Personally, I have used ketchup in my homemade barbecue sauce for years, along with mustard and lots of other stuff.

From George

Here is a recipe that I have used for years to baste pork while cooking:

2 cups cider vinegar
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
1 teaspoon celery seed
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon hot pepper flakes
1 onion, chopped fine
1 cup water

Combine all ingredients in a large saucepan and bring almost to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer uncovered for about an hour. Then strain the sauce, if desired, to remove the solids. Apply generously with a brush to meat before and
during cooking.

This is a Carolina-style basting sauce. I think it is the vinegar that gives the meat its red edge. Because this recipe contains no sugar or tomato, it doesn't burn and leave a carbonized coating on the meat. If you like, you can serve a Kansas City-type sauce at the table. This sauce (Maull's [ http://www.maull.com ]is a good brand) usually comes in hot and mild versions, or you can make it as hot as you want by adding Tabasco.

It's really important to keep the charcoal fire low and to cook the meat a long time, five hours or so. I like to buy a pork shoulder (sold in St. Louis as pork callie or pork butt), then bone it so I have two slabs of meat about 1 1/2 inches thick. I then trim off as much of the fat as possible. Also, if the meat comes with skin on it, you need to remove and discard that.

I have another recipe for a sauce that includes ketchup, Worchester, sugar and butter, but if you use this while cooking you get a charred coating on the meat.

Chuck Ramsey’s Recipe

Lisa writes: Chuck (my husband) has been making this BBQ Sauce Recipe for about 26 years. It has been served everywhere from Oklahoma, to Arkansas, to Georgia, and even in Boston, Mass......We had some friends that served this in a restaurant in Boston for years.

Chuck's Famous Bar-B-Que Sauce

3-lbs. Brown Sugar
1- Gallon Ketchup
1 tsp Powdered Horseradish
½ bottle Liquid Smoke (small bottle)
1- 15 oz. Bottle Worcestershire Sauce
1- 12 oz. Bottle Beer
2 Tbsp. Salt
3 Tbsp. Dry Mustard
2 Tbsp. Cayenne Pepper

In a large stockpot, mix all ingredients together. Bring to a boil, and then simmer 5 minutes.
Place in jars. This makes about 5 ½ Quarts.
(For a smoky flavor, substitute ground chipotle peppers for the Cayenne Peppers)
Store refrigerated.

Bill’s comment: Any man who makes barbeque sauce in 5 ½ quart lots has got to be taken seriously.

Comments, suggestions and other recipes are welcome!

Horace and Mary Grace Boyd and Cousin Bill Stroud with Spot about 1945 Raised on Cornbread: Whose is best?

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 23:13:39 -0400

Like any child of the Delta, I love good cornbread. But what constitutes good cornbread? I know it when I taste it. My wife, Jamie, makes good cornbread, starting by pouring the batter into a crackling hot cast iron skillet, then finishing it off in the oven. At least once every couple of weeks we have it with pork chops and blackeyed or field peas, plenty of pot likker and maybe some greens.

But unlike many of you, at this point I am still-open minded about cornbread -- round or square, white or yellow meal, buttermilk or sweetmilk, and with or without additives such as chopped onion or peppers.

I would enjoy hearing from you about the best cornbread you ever ate, whether you made it or not, and any secrets of making great cornbread that you would be willing to share.

McGehee, AR in the 1950s

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 20:39:41 -0400

U.S. Highway 65 is a mostly straight diagonal line from Little Rock to McGehee, paralleling the Arkansas River, bisecting the southeastern quadrant of the state. At McGehee, the two-lane blacktop crosses Arkansas Highway 1 on a concrete viaduct, then gently curves due south, following the Mississippi River into Louisiana. McGehee’s downtown and residential areas lie to the west and north of the main highway’s sweeping curve, a long narrow town stretched along the train tracks and Crooked Bayou. The town, which is no more than seven blocks wide in most places, lies between the Union Pacific Railroad yards on the east and Black Pond Slough on the west.

Arkansas writer Bob Lancaster has pointed out that McGehee may be the only town in America to have a swamp as its city park. The park, technically a cypress brake, is beside the viaduct on Highway 65. When I was growing up, the town also claimed to have the world’s largest mill for making barrel hoops. Staves for the barrels were made in nearby Dermott.

The town’s front door was Railroad Street. On one side were the tracks and the long brick depot, the Railroad Café and beyond them the shops and yards. For the Missouri Pacific, predecessor to the Union Pacific, McGehee was a place for changing crews and, with the roundhouse, for maintaining and repairing locomotives.

Opposite the depot was the main entrance of the Greystone Hotel, which ran the full depth of the block and had another entrance on First Street. Upstairs, the rooms of the hotel spread out over several adjoining retail stores. On the Railroad Street side were the main desk, the lobby and the coffee shop, which could be doubled in size on Sunday by opening an adjacent ballroom. Two courtly white-coated black men, known only as Jesse and Hardin, shined shoes in the lobby and served as bellmen as well.

In the block south of the hotel were the relics of McGehee’s pre-prohibition days, when the town had more saloons than churches. There were a couple of pool halls – one a little meaner than the other -- and Dutch Beck’s place of business, which, like the hotel, ran the full depth of the block. It was a liquor store on the Railroad Street end and Beck’s Drug Store on the end facing First Street. Daddy went to Dutch instead of a doctor. If he had a virus, he would ask Dutch what the doctors were prescribing for it and then just buy the medicines for himself.

About 30 years ago I was in McGehee with photographer Akira Suwa, working on a story for the Philadelphia Inquirer. The story was about a festival called Railroad Days, to which the town had invited hoboes and hobo wannabees for such events as a mulligan stew cook-off and a tobacco-spitting contest. While we were there, Suwa and I spent some time wandering around the town, eventually winding up on Railroad Street. From outside, the one remaining pool hall looked desolate and dusty, like a ghost town saloon. Inside, the place appeared frozen in 1958. The felt of the tables looked inviting under the shaded incandescent lights that hung over them. The paperback stand and magazine rack displayed the same marginally seedy publications I remembered from my time in high school and in the corner a cluster of old men sat playing dominoes, familiar men in a familiar setting, just older and grayer than I remembered.

As a boy, I did not spend a lot of time in the pool hall. It was a dangerous place frequented by peckerwoods who smoked, drank whisky, gambled and fought. For a few extra coins, Joe, the drunk who racked balls for handouts, would slip over to Dutch Beck’s and buy liquor for teenagers -- usually a half-pint of Heaven Hill or some other cheap bourbon. Pinball winnings, registered in free games, could be converted to cash at the register and the manager did not seem to mind that we cheated by balancing the machines’ front legs on our shoe tops, slowing the ball’s travel and permitting subtle manipulations that fell just short of triggering a tilt and stopping the game.

I do have one special pool hall memory. Late in my senior year of high school, my class was given a standardized test that was to be used as a basis for college scholarships. The academic leaders of our class – all girls who worked diligently, behaved properly and never colored outside the lines – did not do well on this test, but four boys with undistinguished scholastic records, including me, scored in the 99th percentile and were offered scholarships by a number of colleges. One night soon after the test results came out, I remember looking up from my pool cue and realizing that my companions around the green felt and I represented this new academic elite. (One of our group was Monty Rial, who died a couple of years ago. Monty became an inventor who developed an innovative way of extracting natural gas from difficult locations. After his death, the private company he built was sold for $880,000,000.)

Further down on Railroad Street was the Missouri Pacific Hall, a large frame meeting hall that was used for social events. I remember going there with Linda Biggs for a dance sponsored by the Girl Scouts. Beyond that point, as First Street curved a bit and the distance from Railroad Street grew wider, was a dilapidated, crowded cluster of small frame houses with a few churches and, on the First Street side a couple of grocery stores and some lively beer joints, including the T99 Club, the Casino Club and Efflie Lee Platt’s. This was the McGehee’s black quarter.

First Street was the town’s main business thoroughfare, home to McGehee Bank, the Malco Theatre, Reliable Pharmacy, Beck’s and Howell’s drug stores, Ben Franklin, Ruskin’s and Morgan & Lindsey five and ten cent stores and the dry goods stores – Eagle Store, Wolf Brothers, Simberg’s, Wolchansky’s, Fleisig’s, West Brothers, Glovers and Model Dry Goods. The block opposite the First Street entrance to the Greystone Hotel was new in the 1950s – all yellow brick buildings with big plate glass windows and air conditioning. Crooked Bayou, which is small and pretty straight as it flows through town, ran in a concrete lined channel under these new buildings on the west side of First, allowing the Malco and Morgan & Lindsay to extend over it all the way to through to Second Street. Although there were no hard lines of separation, the north end of white McGehee was wealthier than the south end. More railroad employees, clerks and tradespeople lived south of Seaman’s Drive and more business owners and well-to-do farmers lived north of the Drive. The elite neighborhoods were the extreme north end of Second Street, where the bank president, the owner of the meatpacking company and some doctors and lawyers lived. McGehee’s version of a post-war middle class suburb was the Sherland Addition, on the backside of the north end, crowding the swamp called Black Pond Slough. The addition was low, built on fill and prone to flooding. The swimming pool, tennis courts and baseball field were also at the north end of town.

The depot, the Greystone and the Malco Theater marked the north-south center of town, and along that center line were the City Hall and post office on Second Street, the First Methodist Church on Third, the Baptist and Presbyterian churches and the Jewish temple on Fourth and the white schools on Fifth. Two walking letter carriers, one north of Seamans Drive and one south, could deliver all the town’s mail.

Most people lived in one-story frame houses, although many of the fancier new houses in the north end were brick. Two-story houses were uncommon and only a handful of the business buildings on First Street had a third story. The tallest structures in town, visible from miles away, were two water towers and two grain elevators, one just off of First Street in the south end and one on Highway 65.

Only one house fit the common image of a southern mansion. Driving out south on First Street, past the black school and past Highway 65, there is a stretch where homes sit back across Crooked Bayou. In the 50s and 60s, most were modest, but they had along driveways across private bridges over the small stream. Here one home stood out, a stately red brick mansion with gleaming white columns. This was the home of Wiley McGehee Jr., descendant of the town’s founder. He drove a Jaguar sports car, drank good whisky and got himself elected to the State Senate.

For a town with about 4,000 inhabitants, more than half of whom were dirt poor, McGehee in the 1950s had an astonishingly busy commercial life. Just as farms like ours produced virtually all the foods we needed to live, towns like McGehee – augmented by the Sears and Roebuck catalog and rare trips to Greenville, Mississippi, Pine Bluff, Little Rock or Memphis – met virtually all of our consumer requirements.

Current satellite photos of McGehee show lots of green space in the heart of town, Blocks once crowded with stores and teeming with shoppers now cleared and landscaped. The traffic lights along First Street are gone now, replaced by stop signs, and the parking meters have disappeared. McGehee’s Chamber of Commerce boasts that the town has more than 100 retail businesses, but in the 1950s there were nearly twice that many -- including a dozen restaurants, 19 groceries and 11 clothing stores, three drug stores with soda fountains, two jewelers and three five-and-ten-cent stores.

Saturday was the big day in downtown McGehee. Stores were open late, the Malco Theater offered a double feature, a serial, a cartoon and a newsreel all for 15 cents for children and 45 cents for adults. The double feature usually consisted of a cowboy movie (Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Rex Allen or Lash LaRue) and a comedy (Abbott and Costello, Ma and Pa Kettle, the Bowery Boys, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis or Francis the Talking Mule). We each had our favorites and Roy Rogers ruled as king of the cowboys even thought Gene Autry’s love interest, Gail Davis, was a native of McGehee, probably our town’s only link to Hollywood.

In some ways, McGehee was just another Delta cotton town, but there were things that made it different, even special. One was the role of the Missouri Pacific railroad in the life of the town. McGehee had the roundhouse and rail yards and was an important point for changing train crews. This meant that the town had a substantial union labor presence and unionized railroad workers were fiercely independent people, beholden to no local bosses on matters of politics and opinion. Many nearby towns had bosses – a wealthy automobile dealer, a lumber mill owner or a powerful landowner. McGehee always seemed stable politically, but no one ever emerged as an all-powerful boss. Another effect of the railroad was that it opened people up to a wider vision of the world. Memphis and Little Rock were a long way away. My brother George recalls telling a neighbor farm boy about traveling to Pine Bluff and Little Rock and being asked “which one is farther away.” But railroad people had passes and therefore could travel to these big cities for free and they brought back with them an appreciation of the wider world. This may be one of the reasons so many people who grew up in McGehee moved easily into big city life and were successful in places such as Dallas, St. Louis, Memphis, Atlanta and Detroit. McGehee also had a concentration of talented, well-educated adults who could have been successful wherever they lived. Sam Bowman was a smart and talented banker/businessman who had great vision of what McGehee could be, George Brice Ewing was a brilliant engineer and Billie Seamans did magazine and advertising work that would have stood him in good stead in any big city. Charlotte and Melvin Schexnayder had newspapering skills that would have been valued in any big city, but they chose first the McGehee Times and later the Dumas Clarion and thereby influenced a number of budding reporters and editors, including me. McGehee had its experts, such as baseball maven Leo Malner and theatre manager C. B. King.
I could go on and on, but I would like to invite others to offer their ideas about what made McGehee what it was, for good and bad.
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Leon Lloyd’s catfish done right

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 19:57:40 -0400

When I was growing up, I liked nothing more than a good catfish dinner. With a cane fishing pole and a coffee can of earthworms, I would walk down to the bayou in front of our house, bait a hook and catch fish for dinner. My father would hang the fish from the eave of a low shed with a wire through the gills and use pliers to strip off the skin. and he would gut the fish and cut it into steaks. Although Mother did almost all of the cooking in our household, fried catfish was Daddy’s specialty, but he never taught me how to do it right. I have had to depend on infrequent trips to Arkansas to get an occasional catfish fix. I’ve seen all kinds of recipes for coating, breading and seasoning the fish, but none seemed right. Leon Lloyd, star running back of our McGehee Owls football team in the late 1950s. has given me a recipe that works perfectly and with his permission, I pass it along here.

If there is enough interest, I will follow up with an essay on hush puppies, the required bread for a catfish dinner.

Southern Catfish (Leon Lloyd)

Bill, I'm not" braggin" but I've literally cooked thousands of pounds of catfish in the past thirty years, as I have done the cooking at the Agri Building in McGehee which will accommodate up to 300 in a sit down meal. It is mostly for farm meetings. This is the way they expect us to cook Southern Fried Catfish:

1. Yellow cornmeal
2. Add (Tony Chachere's) Cajun Seasoning to taste (very important)
3. Add Salt to taste
4. Dip in nothing -
5 Dredge in the cornmeal and shake off excess
6. Fry in Pure vegetable oil
7. Heat oil to 310- cook between 310 and 325 degrees temp.
8. Time depends on size of fillets, but when fish float and bubbles begin to subside fish is done
9. DON'T OVER COOK

This is true Southern Catfish and it works every time.

The joy of discovery

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 11:12:53 -0400

One of the many things I love about photography is the joy of discovering the remarkable among the familiar. Almost every day, I walk through my neighborhood in Philadelphia, seldom venturing more than two or three blocks from my home. I carry a camera and keep an eye out for things that are new, beautiful or unusual. Right now, hydrangeas are in full bloom. Yesterday I was struck by this white cluster illuminated from behind by strong early morning sunlight. The photograph was made with a Fujifilm Finepix S5200 digital camera and edited in Adobe PhotoShop.

Motherhood

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 13:01:14 -0400

This is an old photograph, made at my mother’s home in McGehee, Arkansas, about 25 years ago. Robins had built a nest in a low tree in her front yard and the pair was constantly at work feeding and guarding the babies. It took about three days of spending time each day just standing closer and closer to the tree until the birds took my presence and my camera for granted and I was able to make this photograph without disturbing them. My camera at the time was an old Nikon FG.

Morning with Grandmother

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:26:05 -0400

Today is her grandmother’s birthday and she was sleeping over. When she awoke this morning, Grandmommy brought her to bed and they both fell back to sleep. She found that the down comforter draped over Grandmommy’s hip made a perfect pillow.

The photograph was made with a Fujifilm Finepix S5200 digital camera, using image stabilization and natural light. Film grain was added in PhotoShop to mask digital noise and sepia toning was applied. ISO 800, F3.2, 1/4 seconds.

Bringing Elvis home to McGehee

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 17:48:20 -0400

White teenagers in the Deep South were in a strange place in the 1950s, separated from our contemporaries in other parts of the country by culture, religion and language. Our ways of relating to adults and people not of our own class and race were dictated by complex and archaic regional traditions. In religion, we belonged to the Bible Belt, distinguished from the rest of the nation not so much by the content of our beliefs as by the intensity, the passion with which we grasped them. We spoke a form of English shaped by centuries of separation from the rest of the country and varied across our region according to race, class and locale. There was a subtle accent break between McGehee and the town of Dermott, nine miles away. Their accent was softer and they were more prone to drop the “r”s at the end of words. We had more of a twang, probably because of the hill people who came to McGehee to work for the railroad. To us the thick southern accents across the river in Mississippi sounded as almost as foreign as New Jersey.
But through radio, television, magazines and the movies, we shared as no southerners before us could have in a national teenage culture, learning irreverence from Mad Magazine, aping James Dean, Sal Mineo, Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood, drag racing on deserted roads, watching American Bandstand and dancing to Fats Domino, Johnny Mathis, Chuck Berry, The Platters, Little Richard, Connie Francis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Ray Charles. Our local radio station, KVSA, the Voice of Southeast Arkansas, usually played sappy music aimed at a white bread middle-aged audience, except for Saturday mornings when the station staged a rock ‘n roll dance party for teens from Dermott and McGehee. The station signed off every day at sunset, as its license required. Teenagers kept their car radios tuned to WGVM in Greenville, MS, a station that seemed to have perfect pitch when it came to playing what we wanted to hear. The music was a mixture of black rhythm and blues, rockabilly and mainstream rock ‘n roll, ranging from Little Richard to Carl Perkins to Pat Boone, the same recordings we had on the jukebox in our all-white teen center at the American Legion hall.
There were other strong musical traditions around us, but we mostly ignored them. Blues, hard-driving dissonant and visceral black blues of Howlin’ Wolf, B.B King and John Lee Hooker, is the native music of the Delta, but it was beyond us somehow, confined to juke joints that didn’t seem welcoming to us, whether they would have been or not. My brother George remembers Daddy “buying a harmonica now and then for one of the black tenants, who would sit on our front steps and play for us.” White gospel music was a staple in country churches and especially among the Pentecostals and, along with our parents, we listened to radio broadcasts from Little Rock of the Stamps Baxter Melody Boys. But gospel wasn’t teenage music. Country music had its fans. After we got television Daddy would tune in Red Foley’s Ozark Jubilee and the Tennessee Ernie Ford Show. We could get the Grand Ole Opry on AM radio, so we were aware of Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Hank Snow, Roy Acuff and Little Jimmy Dickens, but if the popular kids in town listened to country, they didn’t say so. The Delta was a musical crossroads where rock, country, blues and gospel crossed paths but remained separate -- until July 1954, when 19-year-old Elvis Aaron Presley recorded “That’s All Right, Mama” at Sun Records in Memphis and the strands of Delta music came together. Presley made his first record one month after the Supreme Court outlawed public school segregation.
Patsy McDermott, daughter of the McGehee High School head football coach, was a high school junior when Presley performed at the Dermott High School Auditorium, nine miles from McGehee, on March 25, 1955. She had heard “That’s All Right, Mama” over the loudspeaker at the Desha County Fair the previous fall and one of her group of friends had bought the 78 rpm record, but until she saw a newspaper photograph shortly before the concert, she didn’t know Presley was white. “We were at that time dancing to and collecting the records of a lot of black artists -- Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry,” she said.
The previous fall, Presley had become a regular Saturday night performer on the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport, a radio show competitor of the Grand Ole Opry, and he spent his weekdays barnstorming small town clubs and high school auditoriums in Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Texas.
Dermott was home to about 3600 people, more than half of whom were black. By the summer of 1955, Presley had moved up several notches and was only playing cities and considerably larger towns. But on that night in March, tickets were 75 cents and because one of her friends was dating the president of the Dermott senior class, Patsy and her group were seated front row center. Elvis was the last act of the evening. “When we actually got to watching him perform, we all acted, I would say, a little bit, uh, unusual . . .because we had never acted that way before,” Patsy said. She said the performance was beyond anything she had expected, and after the show the girls from McGehee went backstage, bought 8x10 photos of Elvis for a quarter apiece and got them autographed. Elvis was invited to come back to McGehee for an after-show party.
The girls had been driven to the show by parents, but on the return trip to McGehee, Berta Jo Taulbee and Pat Lally rode in Elvis’ pink Cadillac. Patsy had gone ahead to Pat’s house to get things ready, informing Dr. and Mrs. Lally that Elvis and sidemen Scotty Moore and Bill Black were coming to the party and making sure that “That’s All Right, Mama” was playing on the phonograph when Elvis arrived. His entrance went as planned, she says, but she remembers being dumbstruck when Elvis spoke directly to her, asking, “Where’s the bathroom?” He was asked to dance, but declined, saying he “really didn’t dance very well,” which, given his gyrations on stage of few hours earlier, seemed beyond belief. Patsy McDermott, (now Pat Scavo, owner of an art gallery in Hot Springs) said that at the party Elvis made a point to visit with Pat Lally’s mother, leading her to describe him later as “one of the nicest young men she had ever met.”
By the end of 1955, Presley was playing Houston, St. Louis and Indianapolis and on March 24, 1956, one day short of a year after his appearance at Dermott, he performed on national television on the Dorsey Brothers Stage Show at CBS Studios in New York. In a short time, his songs would top the charts in pop, country and western, rhythm and blues and gospel categories, rocking the world with a blend of all the styles that were the sounds of the Delta. Those of us growing up in Desha County on the white side of segregation were enthralled by black musicians and then later by the best of the white performers who borrowed from them -- Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and most of all Elvis Presley.

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