By Dennis Richardson
Sometimes it seems healthy and refreshing to take a moment and reflect on where we come from and what we have gone through to get a better feeling of what lies ahead.
The idea for my column this week originated from a social media post that brought back some good memories.
My family lived out in the “country” on a 10-acre mini farm 15 minutes north of Nashville. Our home sat on a ridge and on clear nights the distant sky was aglow with lights from downtown.
Our community did not have a big name restaurant, and likewise did not have the chain-style fast foods that now sprinkle the landscape in most small towns. It was a huge deal to eat at a restaurant. It only happened once in a blue moon, like when we would take the Greyhound bus down Clarksville Pike into town to Harvey’s in August for school clothes and then to Woolworth’s, and then a good lunch and a movie at the Loew’s Crescent theater.
My older sister worked downtown and I remember once we caught a ride in with her to check things out. On that memorable trip a nephew of mine (her son who was close to my age) and I helped a guy carry a stack of boxes into a store building. He seemed really happy for the help and in return gave us a pair of tickets to the top of the L&C tower. On top we could look through binoculars and try to find our house way out there on the horizon. Those were good times. We didn’t have any money and didn’t need any.
Most days at home a good lunch consisted of a sandwich that we took outside in the yard. You took your school clothes off as soon as you got home and put on your play/work clothes. We had to do our homework before being allowed outside to play. We ate dinner together at the table.
Our phone was attached to the wall in the living room and had a cord. It was a “party line” which meant seven other households shared the line, each having custom rings: two short ones or a long ring, or a long and a short. Conversations were not private and we had no cell phones! TVs didn’t have a remote. To change the channel required getting up to turn the knob to one of just a few stations. With “rabbit ears” we could pick up channels 2, 4, 5 and 8.
We played football with a walnut. Who could afford a real football? Footballs and basketballs were items to put on the Christmas “wish list”. We ran track in the street, played wood tag, baseball, kick ball, dodge ball, rode bikes or fished. Staying in the house was a punishment and the only thing we knew about being “bored”— “You better find something to do before I find it for you!”
When we were kids we walked the quarter mile to the highway and picked up soft drink bottles along the way to trade in for three cents each. We would scrounge up enough to buy a nickel Coke and a candy bar.
We ate what mom made for dinner or we ate nothing at all.
There was no bottled water; we drank from the tap or the water hose. We watched family shows like My Favorite Martian, Bonanza, The Waltons, Little House on the Prairie, Dukes of Hazzard, HEE-HAW, I Love Lucy, Andy Griffith, Gunsmoke, cartoons every Saturday morning and wrestling. We rode our bikes for hours. If someone had a fight, that’s what it was and we were friends again a week later, if not SOONER. We played outside until dark.
We watched our mouths, especially around our elders because all of our aunts, uncles, grandpas and grandmas AND our parents best friends were also our parents.
Sunday mornings before church we read the newspaper.
These were the good ole days.
Reminisce Part 2
Reading over what I wrote in my previous column stirred me to recall even more stuff that today’s kids could be missing out on.
What did we do when we were “banished” to the outdoors all day long?
The woods encompassed three sides of our property. The fourth side was a cow pasture owned by the neighbor. Since our land sat on a ridge all the other sides went down into a valley. Except the back side. It ended on a cliff overlooking a community below with more cow pastures. Those cows are another story altogether. The cow pasture beside us was on about a 45 degree slant and had me wondering if those cows could have longer legs on one side in order to stand up straight. I know they did not but that would’ve been handy. The old bull kept them all in close check and eyeballed me every time I walked near to the fence.
Kids live outdoors. Until supper time at least.
Some mornings while waiting on the school bus I would pick up a dead branch from one of the oak trees and gather some small rocks from the bottom of our driveway and try to hit them over the tree line at the bottom of the hill, across the cow pasture. I don’t recall hitting any of the cows but they probably wondered why rocks seemed to be falling from the sky.
The only things that could be found “on line” were the clothes hung out to dry in the breezes. Anyone who ran through the yard was liable to be taught real-life lessons on the reality of “clothes-line tackles”
Warm summer days exploring what we imagined as “Indian mounds” and looking for arrow heads usually brought with it at least one encounter of finding an old tree stump for an outhouse. There was no fear of running out of toilet paper with all the tree leaves handy.
We became pretty good meteorologists, too. We learned to smell the rain before it got to us. If we couldn’t get back inside in time those big hickory and oak trees offered good shelter.
Somewhere at the bottom of the hill across the road lies the remains of an old log cabin that brother Jim and I started building. Trees were cut with an axe. We got the sides up and stuffed leaves in between the logs, but never finished it. Later explorers could have fun imagining what pioneers had built this house that only had walls remaining.
It is easy to get turned around in the woods when we got out of sight of the roadway. Jim taught me how to mark the trees with his hatchet so we could find our way back. Those were fun days exploring the woods and walking the creek beds.
By the end of the day we had worked up quite an appetite and gobbled up whatever dinner was prepared at the table.
We ate together as a family then enjoyed the evening together. Summer evenings were typically spent shucking corn and breaking beans. Lots of good conversations developed from this togetherness.
