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they said, laughed at the sight of his dog chasing off the ladies of the church, and once back inside his house, he had himself another beer, secure in the fact that he and Norman would never be bothered by another tolerance committee.

      They found Pop dead one morning after he failed to make his appointment with the mail train, and the ladies of the church all said the Lord was getting even with Pop for all his sinful ways.

      I sort of doubted that. Pop always had a good joke to tell and always was kind to his dog, and although I was no expert on the scriptures, I was of the belief that a good heart would get you a just reward in the afterlife as quick as anything else.

      We also had a town drunk, Curtis “Fruit Jar” Hainey, but the ladies of the church figured he was too far gone to waste their efforts on. Curtis walked funny, like his knees were made of rubber. Somebody said it was because he once drank some rubbing alcohol when the local bootlegger left town for two weeks and Curtis came up dry and desperate. I figured the Lord could have had a little something to do with this one.

      Although Moreland was a small town, not unlike so many others across the country in the early 1950s, we still had plenty of scandal, intrigue, and entertainment.

      It was whispered, for example, that Runelle Sheets, a high school girl who suddenly went to live with her cousin in Atlanta, actually was pregnant and had gone off to one of those homes.

      Nobody ever verified the rumor about Runelle, but they said her daddy refused to speak her name in his house anymore and had threatened to kill a boy who lived over near Raymond. That was enough for a summer’s full of satisfying speculation.

      For further entertainment, we had a town idiot, Crazy Melvin, who allegedly was shell-shocked in Korea. Well, sort of. The story went that when Crazy Melvin heard the first shot fired, he began to run and when next seen had taken off his uniform, save his helmet and boots, and was perched in his nakedness in a small tree, refusing to climb down until frostbite threatened his privates.

      They sent Crazy Melvin home after that, and following some months in the hospital, the Army decided that Melvin wasn’t about to stop squatting naked in trees, so they released him in the custody of his parents.

      Once back in Moreland, however, Crazy Melvin continued to do odd things, such as take off all his clothes, save his brogans and his straw hat. They finally sent Melvin to Atlanta to see a psychiatrist. When he came back, the psychiatrist had cured him of squatting naked in trees. Unfortunately, Melvin had ridden a trolley while in Atlanta and returned home thinking he was one. Every time you were walking to the store or to church and crossed paths with Crazy Melvin, you had to give him a nickel.

      “Please step to the rear of the trolley,” he would say, and then he’d make sounds like a trolley bell. The church later got up enough money to buy Melvin one of those coin-holders bus drivers wear, so it was easier for him to make change when you didn’t have a nickel.

      * * *

      Those were the days, when young boys roamed carefree and confidently around the streets of Moreland — Every-town, USA.

      We were Baby Boomers all, born of patriots, honed by the traditional work ethic. That meant you worked your tail off and never quit until the job was done, and you saved every penny you could and never spent money on anything that didn’t have at least some practical value. You kept the Word, never questioned authority, loved your country, did your duty, never forgot where you came from, bathed daily when there was plenty of water in the well, helped your neighbors, and were kind to little children, old people, and dogs. You never bought a car that was any color like red or yellow, stayed at home unless it was absolutely necessary to leave (such as going to church Sunday and for Wednesday night prayer meeting), kept your hair short and your face cleanshaven. You were suspicious of rich people, lawyers, yankee tourists, Catholics and Jehovah’s Witnesses who tried to sell subscriptions to “The Watchtower” door-to-door, anybody who had a job where he had to wear a tie to work, and Republicans.

      We were isolated in rural self-sufficiency for the most part. Television was only a rumor. We kept to ourselves unless we went to the county seat of Newnan to see a movie or to get a haircut or to see the little alligator they kept in a drink box at Mr. Lancaster’s service station.

      I never did find out how the little alligator got into a drink box at a service station in Newnan, Georgia, but rumor had it that Mr. Lancaster had brought it back from Florida to keep people from breaking into his station after he closed at night. In fact, Mr. Lancaster had a handwritten sign in front of his station that read, “This service station is guarded by my alligator three nights a week. Guess which three nights.”

      In such a closed, tightly-knit society, it was impossible not to feel a strong sense of belonging. Even for a newcomer.

      When I first moved to Moreland at age seven, I was instantly befriended by the local boys. In those idyllic days, we molded friendships that would last for lifetimes.

      There was Danny Thompson, who lived just across the cornfield from me, next door to Little Eddie Estes. Down the road from Danny was where Mike Murphy lived. Clyde and Worm Elrod lived near the Methodist Church. Bobby Entrekin and Dudley Stamps resided in Bexton, which was no town at all but simply a scattering of houses along; a blacktop road a mile or so out of Moreland. There was Anthony Yeager, who lived over near Mr. Ralph Evans’s store, and Charles Moore was just down the road from him.

      Clyde Elrod was a couple of years older than his brother Worm, who was my age. Clyde had one ambition in his life, and that was to follow his father’s footsteps into the Navy. Clyde often wore his father’s old Navy clothes and regaled us with his father’s Navy stories. Clyde’s father apparently single-handedly won the battle for U.S. naval supremacy in World War II.

      Worm got his name at Boy Scout camp one summer. There is only one thing worse than biting into an apple and finding a worm, and that’s biting into an apple and finding half a worm, which is what happened to Worm Elrod and is how he got his nickname. Clyde and Worm did not get along that well, due to a heated sibling rivalry. Their father often had to separate them from various entanglements, and Worm invariably got the worst of it. Only when Clyde graduated from high school and left to join the Navy was it certain that Worm would live to see adulthood.

      Anthony Yeager joined the gang later. He was the first of us to obtain his driver’s license, and his popularity increased immediately. As teen-agers, we roamed in Yeager’s Ford and slipped off for beer and to smoke. Once we went all the way to Fayetteville to the Highway 85 Drive-In and saw our first movie in which women appeared naked from the waist up.

      Funny, what the memory recalls. The movie was Bachelor Tom Peeping, and it was billed as a documentary filmed at a nudist camp. At one point, Bachelor Tom was confronted by a huge-breasted woman who was covered only by a large inner tube that appeared to have come from the innards of a large tractor tire. As she lowered the tube, we watched in utter disbelief.

      “Nice tubes you have, my dear,” said Bachelor Tom.

      Yeager was the first total devotee to country music I ever met, and he is at least partially responsible for my late-blooming interest in that sort of music. Yeager owned an old guitar that he couldn’t play, but he tried anyway, and common were the nights we would find a quiet place in the woods, park his car, and serenade the surrounding critters.

      Yeager’s heroes were Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb. His favorite songs were Hank’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” — later butchered by B.J. Thomas — and Ernest’s classic, “I’m Walking the Floor Over You.”

      Hank was dead and long gone by then, but one day Yeager heard that Ernest Tubb, accompanied by picker-supreme Billy Byrd, was to perform at the high school auditorium in nearby Griffin. Me and Yeager and Dudley Stamps and Danny Thompson went. It was our first concert. Ernest slayed us, especially Yeager.

      “I’m walkin’ the floor over you.

      I can’t sleep a wink, that is true.

      I’m hopin’ and I’m prayin’

      That my heart won’t break

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