LITMIR.BIZ

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Ernest Tubb would call in Billy Byrd for a guitar interlude, he would say, “Awwwwwww, Billy Byrd,” which Yeager thought was a nice touch. For months, Yeager would say “Awwwwwww, Billy Byrd” for no reason whatsoever. Later he began saying, “Put a feather in your butt and pick it out, Billy Byrd,” again for no reason except that it seemed to give him great joy to say it.

      Like I said, it’s funny what details the memory recalls.

      Dudley Stamps. He was the crazy one. He once drove his father’s truck into White Oak Creek to see if trucks will float. They won’t. There was not a water tower or a forest ranger tower in three counties he hadn’t climbed. When he was old enough to get a driver’s license, his parents bought him a used 1958 Thunderbird with a factory under the hood.

      I was riding one night with Dudley when the State Patrol stopped him. His T-bird had been clocked at 110 MPH, according to the patrolman. Dudley was incensed and launched into an argument with the officer. He insisted he was doing at least 125.

      Mike Murphy. He had a brother and sister and his father was called “Mr. Red.” Mr. Red Murphy was the postmaster and helped with the Boy Scouts. With the possible exception of the Methodist and Baptist preachers, he was the most respected man in town. Mike had to work more than the rest of us. Mr. Red kept all his children busy tending the family acreage.

      “You don’t see Red Murphy’s children out gallivantin’ all over town,” the old men around the stove used to say down at Cureton and Cole’s. “Red keeps ’em in the fields where there ain’t no trouble.”

      This was the late 1950s, when “gallivanting” meant doing just about anything that had no practical end to it, such as riding bicycles, roller-skating on the square, and hanging out at the store eating Zagnut candy bars and drinking NuGrapes or what was commonly referred to as “Big Orange bellywashers.” Gallivanting, like most things modern, seems to have grown somewhat sterile and electronic. Today, I suppose when children gallivant it means they hang around in shopping malls, playing video games and eating frozen yogurt.

      The day Mr. Red died was an awful day. It was the practice at the Moreland Methodist Church to return to the sanctuary after Sunday School for a quick hymn or two and for announcements by Sunday School Superintendent Fox Covin. Fox would also call on those having birthdays, and the celebrants would stand as we cheered them in song.

      That Sunday morning, Fox Covin announced it was Mr. Red’s birthday and asked his daughter to stand for him as we sang. As everyone in church knew, Mr. Red had been hospitalized the day before for what was alleged to be a minor problem.

      Soon after we sang to Mr. Red, another member of the family came into the church and whisked the Murphy children away. Something was whispered to Fox Covin, and after the children were safely out of earshot, he told the congregation that Red Murphy was dead.

      We cried and then we prayed. Mike was no more than twelve or thirteen at the time. He had to take on a great deal of the responsibility of the farm after that, so his opportunity to gallivant with the rest of us was shortened even further.

      “Mike Murphy will grow up to be a fine man,” my mother used to say.

      Bobby Entrekin. I loved his father. I had secretly wished there was some way my mother could have married Mr. Bob Entrekin, but there was his wife, Miss Willie, with whom to contend, and a quiet, soft, loving woman she was. I decided to remain content with spending my weekends at the Entrekin home.

      Mr. Bob worked nights. Miss Willie worked days at one of the grocery stores in the county seat. The Entrekins, I noticed, ate better than the rest of us. While my family’s diet consisted mostly of what we grew from our garden or raised in our chicken coops, the Entrekins always had such delights as store-bought sandwich meat and boxed doughnuts, the sort with the sweet, white powder around them.

      The standing contention was that because Miss Willie was employed at the grocery store, she was given discounts on such elaborate foodstuffs others in the community would have found terribly wasteful to purchase.

      Whatever, as much as I enjoyed the company of my friend Bobby Entrekin, it may have been the lure of the delights of his family refrigerator and his father that were the most binding seal on our friendship.

      Bobby’s father was unlike any man I had ever met before. He had a deep, forceful voice. His knowledge of sport was unparalleled in the community. He had once been an outstanding amateur baseball player, and on autumn Saturdays, Bobby and I would join him at radioside to listen to Southeastern Conference college football games — as comforting and delicious an exercise as I have ever known. My own father, having split for parts unknown, had shared Mr. Bob’s affinity for sports and other such manly interests, and Mr. Bob stood in for him nicely.

      Mr. Bob also had more dimension to him than any other man I had known. He had educated himself. He had traveled a bit. He sent off for classical records, and when I spent the weekends with Bobby, his father would awaken us on Sunday mornings for church with those foreign sounds.

      As Beethoven roared through the little Entrekin house out on Bexton Road, he would say to us, “Boys, that is what you call good music.” How uncharacteristic of the time and place from which I sprung, but how pleasant the memory.

      Bobby was a con man from his earliest days. He slicked classmates out of their lunch desserts, and by schoolday’s end, he usually had increased his marble holdings considerably.

      Only once did he put an unpleasant shuck on me. Mr. Bob had driven us into Newnan, where the nearest picture show was located. The Alamo Theatre sat on Newnan’s court square, across the street from the side entrance to the county courthouse. Admission to the movie was a dime. There were soft drinks for a nickel and small bags of popcorn for the same price.

      As we walked toward the Alamo, we came upon a bus parked on the court square.

      “Boys,” said a man sitting outside the bus, “come on inside and see the world’s fattest woman.”

      “How fat is she?” Bobby asked.

      “Find out for yourself for only fifteen cents, kid,” said the man.

      Bobby started inside while I did some quick arithmetic. I had twenty cents. That was a dime for admission to the picture show and a dime for a soft drink and popcorn. If I paid fifteen cents to see the fat lady, I couldn’t get in to see the movie.

      I mentioned this bit of financial difficulty to Bobby.

      “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll loan you enough to get into the show.”

      We each dropped fifteen cents into the man’s cigar box of coins and stepped inside the bus.

      The smell got us first. A hog would have buried its snout in the mud to have escaped it. Then we saw the fat lady. She was enormous. She dripped fat. She was laid out on a divan, attempting to fan away the heat and the stench. We both ran out of the bus toward the movie house.

      When we arrived at the ticket window, I reminded Bobby of his offer to stake me to a ticket.

      “I was only kidding,” he said, as he pranced into the theater. I sat on the curb and cried. Later, when I told his father what Bobby had done, Mr. Bob played a symphony upon his son’s rear and allowed me to watch. I took shameful pleasure in the sweet revenge.

      Charles Moore. His mother called him “Cholly,” and he eventually achieved some renown in high school when The Beatles hit in 1964 because Charles, even with his short hair, was a dead-ringer for a seventeen-year-old Paul McCartney. Charles was never able to make any money off this resemblance — that was before the imitation craze, e.g., the Elvis impersonators after his death and the three or four thousand young black kids currently doing Michael Jackson — but he obviously took a great deal of pleasure from standing in the middle of a group of giggling girls who were saying things like, “Oh, Charles, you look just like Paul.”

      What I remember Charles for most, however, is the fight we had in the seventh grade over a baseball score. I was a fierce and loyal Dodger fan. Charles held the same allegiance to the Milwaukee Braves.

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