THE HAPPY DAYS CHAPTER 3

 In the Fall of 1956 I began first grade at Martha Vaught Elementary school. I was definitely a mama's boy. If anybody needed kindergarten it was me. Kindergarten was optional then and there were no public kindergartens in Nashville. Children went straight into the 1st grade. This was before Nashville became a Metropolitan government. There were city schools and county schools. We were in the county. From the first time my mother left me alone in school I went berserk. I cried everyday and my teacher had no patience with me. She moved my desk into the cloak room and of course I failed 1st grade. I wasn't happy because I had to go to summer school that summer while my friends were enjoying the summer without me. Mother enrolled me at David Lipscomb. My teacher was a sweet older lady named Mrs. Glass and I don't think I cried one time. I actually enjoyed summer school and I passed. Martha Vaught was 1st through the eighth grade. I left after the fifth grade and Donna spent all eight years at Martha Vaught. I was in a portable in the fourth grade and we had two classes. Our fourth grade class and a fifth grade class. The teacher would teach us for awhile and walk over to the other side of the room and teach the fifth grade.

A big part of our life during this time was my father's drugstores. Daddy owned 3 drugstores at one time. In the early fifties he owned Segroves Pharmacy at 17th and Charlotte, Segroves-Kelly Pharmacy at 12th and Jefferson and Segroves-Kelly Pharmacy at 9th and Cheatham. The latter two were partnerships with daddy's friend Milton R. Kelly. Daddy and Kelly were old Army buddies. The store at 12th and Jefferson eventually expanded into a grocery store and hardware store. Around 1954 or 55 daddy and Kelly sold the store at 9th and Cheatham. He owned the other two stores until his death in 1963. Kelly would continue operating the 12th and Jefferson location until he was forced to sell it to the government. The interstate was built right through middle of where the store was located. The Kelly's would be a big part of our lives during the 1950's. We would get together on Christmas and New Years Eve. I always felt like they were part of the family. There was Milton and Betty and their children Betsy and Milton Jr. Betsy and my sister Donna were tight because they were closer in age. We spent quite a bit of time over the years visiting the Kelly's or they would come to our house.

Daddy operated Segroves Pharmacy on Charlotte. That drugstore was kind of like our second home. When I was a baby there are many pictures of me and Donna in and around the store. Several of them are pictures of me in a play pen. After the school year started we would only be there on weekends but during the summer months we were at the store a lot. As early as I can remember I was working there. Dusting merchandise with a feather duster or cleaning the glass in merchandise cases with Windex. I swept the floors, stocked merchandise, and operated the cash register when I was old enough to wait on customers. One of my funniest experiences was the day that a man came up to me and whispered in my ear, " I need a pack of Trojans". Condoms were not out in the open like they are today. They were usually hidden in a drawer or special place behind the counter. I didn't have a clue what he was talking about. In a store packed with customers I shouted out to my mother working in the prescription department, "Mother where do we keep the Trojans? For a moment you could hear a pin drop as all conversation stopped and everyone was staring at me and the customer. My mothers face was blood red as she walked out to wait on the equally embarrassed customer.

I can still see in my minds eye daddy and mother working there in the store. If daddy wasn't waiting on customers he was leaning with his back against the counter in his dark dress pants, white shirt and tie. Sometimes he wore coat or a bow tie. Daddy would either be smoking a cigar, sipping a six ounce Coca-Cola, or just standing there with arms folded waiting for his next customer. Or he would be in the prescription department filling prescriptions. If he was swamped mother would be back there helping out or she would help him by working up front. Daddy had an air of authority about him and his customers liked and respected him. He lived by the admonition that the customer was always right and he drummed this principle into my head. He was a loving and doting father but I walked the chalk line around him. We were crazy about mother but she let us get away with murder. Until I was about five or six mother's natural hair color was strawberry blond. Because of my dad she bleached her hair. I was told that this was because of the popularity of Marilyn Monroe and daddy, like most men of the time,liked her.

Daddy had a black assistant pharmacist named Dr. Nall. He was a distinguished looking man and I was told that he had worked on the Manhattan Project during WW2. He had worked at Oak Ridge on the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. Dr. Nall was probably in his mid to late 40's then and he lived into his nineties. I will never forget the day that my grandparents had a large possum trapped in their dog house. Dr. Nall wanted to catch the possum and take him home to eat. Mother drove us over to my grandparents house in East Nashville. He caught it and mother drove us over to Dr. Nall's house just off of Lafayette Street. There in his backyard Dr. Nall placed a rake handle over the back of the possum's neck while we stood on both ends of the handle, breaking the possums neck. This was one of the most unpleasant things that I have ever done. He then skinned and gutted the possum after removing the head, tail and feet. I asked if I could have them. He put everything in a big glass pickle jar and filled it up with alcohol.The plan was to take them to school for show and tell. I was in the fifth grade at Martha Vaught but in the summer of 1959 we moved to Henry Ford Drive. I was riding a school bus back and forth to Martha Vaught. Somehow I managed to get the possum parts to school without incident. That afternoon, however; as I was boarding the bus the jar slipped out of my hands and the glass busted. Broken glass, alcohol, and possum parts were all over the floor of the bus. I had a lot of fun cleaning up that mess.

Daddy had many Black teenage boys working for him. They delivered prescriptions and did other jobs for him. The two that I remember the most were Calvin and Rogers. Calvin was a light skinned teenager with curly hair and I remember him being very fun loving and funny. Rogers was a heavy set dark skinned and good natured person that was like a member of our family. He would come to our house on occasion and do odd jobs. One day we rode all over West Nashville on his motorcycle. The last time I saw him was about ten years ago. He had lost a leg to diabetes but he was still the same old Rogers. When we were real small and living on Brookvale Terrace and Brookside Ct. we had a black nanny named Carolyn. We were growing up in a period of time that was turbulent for the country as a whole, especially in the South. I was four when Brown vs. the Board of Education ruling declared the policy of separate but equal unconstitutional in regards to public education. Five during the Montgomery Bus boycott and the murder of Emmett Till. Seven during the rioting associated with the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. Ten during the Nashville sit-ins. Eleven during the freedom Rides. Thirteen during the Birmingham Children's March in 1963 and death of Medgar Evers. Fourteen when the three civil rights workers were killed near Philadelphia Mississippi, and the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Fifteen during the march on Selma, the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the year that I first attended school with black children at East High School. Eighteen when Martin Luther King was assassinated.

I remember the day that my sister Donna was forced to leave the Shelby Park swimming pool because blacks were demanding the right to swim there. All the city pools were closed that day and never reopened which I thought was stupid. One night the Klan tried to blow up Hattie Cotton School on Douglas Ave. which blew the doors of Eastland Baptist Church open and frightened my grandparents awake in the middle of the night. Until I was ten I never gave much thought to the issue of civil rights. I knew that something wasn't right when I saw Blacks riding on the back of the bus when I rode downtown. When we visited the Memphis Zoo and blacks could only go there on Thursday which was called Negro Day. I noticed it when my mother and I went shopping at Castner-Knott, Harvey's, Cain-Sloan, or Woolworth's downtown. Blacks were welcome to shop and spend their money but they couldn't sit down and eat with white people at the stores, restaurants, and diners. Or when I would look up and see blacks sitting in the segregated section of the balcony area of theaters like Loews, the Paramount, the Tennessee, and Knickerbocker I was probably just too young to take it all in. I am glad, however; that my parents raised me to be courteous, and respectful of everyone regardless of their race, or station in life. They lived what they preached.

Why my parents were like this I really don't know because I never had a real conversation with them about race or class. I don't know if they were open-minded because they considered it the right thing to do or if it was because they didn't want to offend their customer base. Never did I sense that it was for the latter reason. I like to think that my parents did it because they were good and decent people. The store was in a poor and predominately Black area of Nashville. There were shacks all around the store and most, if not all of them, had no indoor plumbing. Next door to the east of the drugstore was a hardware store and next to that was a restaurant. We were close enough to town that the state capital could be easily seen in the distance. My mother loved soul food and she would order such things as pig feet or pork brains at the restaurant.