Way down below Holcolmb

That town had a lot of lifetimes. Once upon a time, there was a mud street and they'd put boards across there for the ladies to walk on so they didn't get their dress skirts dirty. Didn't work, of course. Can you imagine the finer dressed women trooping along in their long dresses with caked on mud at the hem?

Once upon a time they had cork sidewalks. That was a problem, too. When the lumberjacks came down out of the hills on Saturday night, the spikes on their boots would pierce the sidewalks. So, the townsfolk would roll up the sidewalks and put them underdeath the highest sidewalk in a little storage area made for just such a pupose.

Another time, there were brick streets and a huge tree in the center of town where later, the (the only) stoplight hung. Flooded three times and burned twice, the little town kept coming back.

I don't remember those incarnations, though, I was only told about  all that.

The town I remember best was when I was a kid. Oh, that was a busy town in those days. There had been two theaters, but the Star was turning off its light just about the time we came back to town the first time in 1959. I was five years old. We went to see a movie, the first movie I ever saw. It was Jailhouse Rock. We also went to see King Kong. I was in awe.

I remember sitting in our little livingroom in that house next door to my Grandma and Grandpa up on that hill on the South Side of town. Mom was counting out money and putting it into envelopes. Dad had a job and it looked like she was going to be able to budget the money and make sure we had something to eat all month long. That didn't last, of course, but in that moment, the possibility was there so we'll let it live there a moment.

I watched her divide up the payday, and I remember asking about the envelopes and she told me what each one was. One of them even had money in it for a movie. She loved movies as much a I did. There were stars in her eyes. I asked her why couldn't we take the bigger bunch of money out of that one enevelope marked groc. and put it in the one for movies. When Mom laughed, it wasn't even an outloud sound, but she'd shake she laughed so hard.

Town was way off from where we lived. We would walk there and buy groceries and walk back home again. If it was raining, the paper bags would get wet. Sometimes, if the payday was good enough, we'd get a taxi home. There were two taxis in town. One of them parked up beside the liquor store. The other one parked down near Prelaz restaurant. They both made a living because no too many people owned cars. It seems impossible now that a little one street town could keep two taxis in business.

There was  a laundromat built out in the air at the back of that garage you can see in the picture. There was a sign there before you get to the post office. It said, LAUNDROMAT OVER YONDER. You can still see the signpost in the picture -- it's just beyond the garage.

Right next to that is the post office. It is still the post office. A little parking space indent off the street for the mail truck or for someone to pull up and run in and get their mail and run back out. Our mail box, when I was a kid, was to the right of the little part of the L, once you were inside. You'd go in, turn left and then right and our mailbox was there, about eye level to a seven year old, and about three rows from the end. I don't recall the number.

Mom would be busy when we were at the post office. She would have her mind on keeping the old man out of trouble. If he got in trouble and got in jail, she'd have to take the grocery money and bail him out. If there wasn't any grocery money, then the chief of police would take him, along with the other jailbirds, down to work on his new house on Riverside Addition.

Sometimes, a deputy would buy Dad a drink to get him started. A couple of bottles was a cheap way to get work done. If you hired him outright, it would cost you a dollar and a quarter an hour. He was an excellent brick mason and did the finest stonework around. He wouldn't cheat you like some would. And he wouldn't drink while he was working. He never said so, but I know it was a real work incentive to think that each hours work brought the price of a bottle, even though he did not intend to spend them all on that. He intended maybe one. One bottle out of eight or ten hours of work, one hour for his own. Wine cost a dollar and a quarter, unless you bought it bootleg from ole' George. On Sundays, you had to buy from George or from the Chief of Police by way of one of the taxi drivers. One businessman in town hired Dad to build for him and, at the end of the week, took him for a drink to celebrate and after a few drinks, gave him a few dollars and told him he'd paid him. Dad came home and pulled his money out of his wallet. It was $15 for two week's work.

Once in a while, we'd take a notion we ought to be in church. We went to the Church of God on School Street for awhile. Then the Seventh Day Adventists came to town and put up a big tent one block over from the Church of God. We went there every night to listen to the preaching and see the slides the fellow showed of the big snake he'd seen in some country he'd been to. He told about the natives and how they'd wash their clothes and take their baths in one place and then get their drinking water downstream from there. We were drinking water in that town that came from the paper mill and the tannery. Those had been gone for years, but the poisons they'd left are still there. Cancer is a great risk if you live there.

The Seventh Day people got them a room overtop the liquor store and Mom joked that now the whole family could get their spirits in the same building. She took some of the signs the preacher had made, little circles that read NO DRINKS/NO DRUNKS. She peeled one of them and backed up to lean on the door of the liquor store and accidentally stuck it there.

We liked the Main Street Restaurant best when there was enough money for a hotdog. Hotdogs in Richwood were dressed with coleslaw and chilli and onions. If you ordered one without the wiener on it, it was called a chilli dog. Still is. You'd get a nice little glass of coke on ice. If you went to the News Stand, you got cherry coke. You could still put a nickle in the jukebox. By the time we came back the second time (1974), it had raised to a dime.

Other places you could get a bite to eat were Prelazes and the Richwood restaurant. Those were side by side and sandwiched between two pool rooms. Or you could go to the Oakford, which was a restaurant attached to the hotel. For awhile another little restaurant opened across from Prelazes, but I don't remember the name of it. There was also a custand stand. Everything was kept hopping in those days -- thriving.

From the hardware stores, the grocery stores, GC Murpheys and the restaurants -- and of course, the churchs and the pool rooms, everything was busy and prosperous.

There's a saying in our family when things are not too great, we say it is "way down below Holcolmb". Now that's pretty much a description of the place that boasted a tree from the center of town was used in construction of the Titanic. I suppose we all thought at one time we were unsinkable.