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MEMPHIS, TN. - I'm still getting some good inputs on my Huntsville memories quest and I encourage you to keep 'em coming. I won't limit the Traveller to that, but hope to continue adding meat to the proposed book.It seems most of you are more comfortable with visual "Memory" questions rather than just text, so we'll go back to those. I've included a good one this week.Please include your class year with your e-mails.
In my early years, the Central YMCA building on Greene Steet always looked to me like Scrooge McDuck's Money Bin - a big square building sitting high on a hill, but missing the dollar sign on the front. I went to the "Y" a lot when I was young, but when I moved away from East Clinton it was too far to walk to so I quit going.. I rejoined the YMCA while I was at Lee High School so that I could become a member of the Hi-Y Club to wear the cool jacket and the chance to go to Florida for Spring break. Though that did not materialize, I have recently been trying to remember all the things I did there as a child. I did not play on any of the football or basketball teams, but I do remember going there to swim in my younger days. Now that I am working on my new book, I have started to wonder what everyone else remembers about the place back then.I know that the pool was downstairs and that there was a "foot wash" pool you had to walk through to get to the pool area. I also remember there was a ledge that went around the pool because we used to walk around it for fun. It was also that ledge that gave me the scare of my life one day when I fell off of it while I was near the deep end of the pool and I almost drown before I could finally grab onto the side and save myself. That was before I learned to swim, and was the reason that I later did learn to swim - it scared me that bad.What seems perverted today, but seemed okay back then, is that many of the young male swimmers were allowed to swim nude, and no one worried about it or made a big deal of it. It was clothing optional. (Not the case these days!) Of course it was only males swimming at the time.I know they had a gym, and if I remember correctly there was a track around the top of the gym. Mostly I just tried to shoot baskets when I was there, and cannot remember any other organized activities.The other thing I remember (I think) was that there was a shuffleboard table out in the lobby and that you had to put sawdust from a can on the board to make the pucks slide easily. There was also at least one ping pong table, and a pool table.What I would like to know is what the rest of you remember about the building and the activities at the YMCA when we were young. I would especially like to know if any of you females ever had anything that you did there? I honestly don't remember.One of my problems is that when I got to Memphis I started to work in the YMCA and did that for almost my entire college career. So, some of my memories get mixed. I even taught swimming and life saving - an odd thing considering I almost drown in a YMCA pool earlier. Please send me your memories of the Green Street YMCA.
In thinking about Five and Dime stores, this item came to me. Do you know what it is? Do you know when and why stores stopped selling them? Class year with emails please.Easter ChicksEaster Chicks and Window PaintingYou mentioned the colored chicks at the dime stores, At the restaurant this Easter I brought that subject up to my children while we were eating lunch and to my surprise not one of my three children, nor my three grandchildren had ever heard of this. They thought it was one of the most disturbing things they had ever heard of. Dyeing baby chicks how in-humane and cruel. I never thought of it that way. I would spend a great deal of time each year trying to decide just the right color for my chick.That would have been right after we picked out my new Easter suit at Fowler's. My wife who was from Aberdeen, MS. just barely remembered those chicks.The Halloween Window painting, and yes there were some beautiful Christmas windows painted, were a great part of my early art education. I would stand and watch the painters paint for hours. I never thought about it until you mentioned it this week in the newsletter.Painting stroe front windows was the way I paid my way through college and had money for extra Christmas for my children. I painted windows from the first of Oct. till the end of March each year, usually two or three large windows each weekend from 1974 till about 4 years ago. I painted two Christmas windows this past year. I never thought about watching those window painters till today. THANKS, THANKS, AND THANKS for the memories I'm enjoying at this moment.I have many wonderful memories of the Huntsville, Alabama, of my youth. However my memories of the Five and Dime stores is somewhat limited and I defer to the ladies when it comes to what the decorations were like or what the shopping experiences consisted of.One vivid memory I have of the Five and Dimes is they all had wooden floors. I especially remember Grants and McClellan's but all the Five and Dimes, at that time, as well as most of the department store floors, were wooden. Not the laminated stuff of today that passes for wood flooring but real, solid, all the way through wood floors.What is significant about those wooden floors was the "creaking" sound they made as you walked them. I loved that sound. As I walked down the aisle, usually headed for the toy department, those old wooden floors would literally sing to you as you walked. I suppose the combination of looking through the wood framed glass cases, the anticipation of lusting after new toys and the event being trumpeted or rather croaked out by those floors seemed to herald the anticipated moment. If you found a toy on the shelf that was of particular interest and you began playing with it for too long a time, those floors served as a sentinel. Any approaching clerk who might think you'd "inspected" the merchandise long enough could be heard coming your way well before you were discovered. This gave you ample time to drop your toy of interest and faint interest in others as if you were shopping.The stairwells and hand rails of that day were likewise made of wood and had a creaking distinctive sound of their own. I certainly didn't have a musical ear back then nor was I blessed with perfect pitch. But I could always tell from the tone of the "creaking" whether a person was coming down my aisle, the next aisle, going up or coming down the staircase.To this day whenever I am in an old hardware store or country store or a Cracker Barrel restaurant, off some interstate, and hear that familiar "creaking" sound my thoughts nearly always revert back to a wonderful time in my youth. A time of nickle cokes and ten cent hamburgers, soda fountains, wooden staircases, pretty girls in bobby socks and stores with "creaky" wooden floors.Reading about Paradise On The Tennessee, I had a vivid memory come to me. It is not as romantic but certainly was very colorful. One friend from the Lakewood area was Don Catlett. Don was maybe a year older than most of us and already had his driver license. His family had a ski/fishing boat and I recall several of us convinced him to plead with his dad to allow us to take the boat to the river.I think it was the summer of '63 that his dad finally gave in and a four of us decided that the "ski" trip would be better on a week day to avoid the weekend crowds.Don had just gotten a '57 Chevy with three on the column and we hooked a bumper hitch to the chevy and headed to the river where we put the boat in at a different lauch area than I was familiar with. The ramp was very steep. Don backed the trailer down the ramp as if he had done this a thousand times and stayed in the car, foot on the brake as we winched the boat into the water. There was a short pier beside the ramp and we tied the boat off while we were bringing coolers, sandwiches etc that were in the trunk to that pier so we could load the boat while Don was parking the car.Before Don could get to the pier, one of us was in the boat being handed the coolers and noticed water gushing in the back of the boat and was coming out of the floor board. Seems Don forgot something his dad had preached for days and that was to make sure he put the drain plugs in. When Don got to the pier, he knew exactly what the problem was and started mumbling something about getting killed by his dad. The plugs were no where to be found so the plan was to bring the car back, trailer the boat and see if we could buy a couple of plugs.We got the boat winched onto the trailer but by this time it had to weigh half as much as it did a few minutes earlier. The hand brake on the car would not hold the weight, the bumper started pulling making a nice bow shape and when Don dropped the clutch, the clutch started smoking and it was obvious the car was headed into the river.He had to sit in the car while we found bricks, blocks and whatever we could to keep the car from going into the river.We then heard the sound of what turned out to be a tractor driven by a fellow that had seen the whole thing. He had a long chain that he hooked under the car and pulled car and boat out.None of us wanted to even look for drain plugs knowing the near miss so we drove back to Lakewood and when we got to Don's house, there were two drain plugs on a shelf.Not romantic but certainly colorful. 
