THE HAPPY DAYS - CHAPTER 4

I was always thinking of ways to play practical jokes and I rigged the restroom at the restaurant with booby traps. It was firecrackers on strings that you could tie in such a way as to make the firecrackers explode when someone opened the door. Across 17th to the west was an auto garage and a few businesses up from that was a restaurant called the Chicken Shack. It had some very good barbecue chicken and it was famous for being hot. We called in to go orders on a regular basis and they would give you a loaf of white bread to help you endure the heat of the barbecue sauce. I have been told that because it was a black owned business during segregation black people ate in the main dining room and white people ate in a back room. There was an Esso station just across the street from the drugstore on the corner of 17th and Charlotte to the north.. On the hill above the Esso station was the projects. West of the Esso station across 17th was the Duck Head factory which made blue jeans. There were numerous small businesses up and down the street.

My parents were genuinely liked and respected by everyone. I would walk in the neighborhood around the store and people would smile and call me "little Doc". They called daddy "Doc" I loved everything about the store. It was like a second home to me. Crime was a problem but it was nothing compared to now. Daddy was never robbed at gunpoint in the fourteen years that he owned a drugstore. He was burglarized, however; at least twice. Daddy would get a call from the police that the store had been broken in to. Mother would wake us all up. Wearing our pajama's, the kind with feet on them, we would all ride to the store to look at the damage. On one occasion safe crackers broke in through the back door and cracked the safe open. On another occasion burglars not only stole but they vandalised the store. The burglars took a trash can and filled it up with cigarettes but they broke the glass in the merchandise cases. They threw everything they could into the floor and it looked like they just jumped up and down on everything. Wreaking havoc just for fun. During business hours daddy could handle anybody that got out of line. I remember the day when he caught a shoplifter and he had the man penned against the wall next to the front door.

 On a Friday afternoon in November 1958 mother picked me up at school. She told me that very early that morning a lady crashed into the front of our store. She was traveling south down 17th Avenue from the direction of Pearl High School toward Charlotte. Coming off the hill she was speeding and lost control. Veering to the left she crossed Charlotte and smashed right through the front door of our drugstore and of course she was drunk. The car smashed everything in it's path and came to a stop just short of the prescription department in the rear of the store. By the grace of God it happened after closing, otherwise it could have been a horrible disaster resulting in injury and death. I could not believe my eyes at the sight of the damage when we arrived. Workmen had removed what was left of the front of the store. They were closing it in with plywood until a more permanent structure could be built. Incredibly the store was packed with customers as it normally was on a Friday. The car had traveled straight up through the middle. The counters on both sides of the store were still intact making it possible to conduct business. Much of the crowd coming in and out of the store were curiosity seekers.

Another thing I remember about this night was that this was the first night that I ever saw the movie Frankenstein. There was a new late night feature on what was then Channel 8, WSIX. It is now Channel 2 WKRN. The new show was called "Shock Theater". Shock Theater introduced me to Frankenstein played by Boris Karlof. The Mummy played by both Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr. Dracula, played by Bela Lugosi and the Wolf Man played by Lon Chaney Jr. Seven months into the show the host became a Dracula like character wearing an eye patch and smoking a cigarette named Dr. Lucifur who was the narrator. Dr. Lucifur claimed to be the president of Transylvania and spoke with an accent. He spoke in a creepy voice and would introduce the movie and speak at various points in the show after commercial breaks. Dr. Lucifur would sign off by saying, "Good night, pleasant dreams" and the show would fade out as he laughed his evil laugh. The guy playing Dr. Lucifur was a man named Ken Bramming who was born in 1926 and died in 1997. The show lasted from 1958 until 1967.

In the mid to late 1950's we started going to Chickasaw State Park for a week long vacation every year. Daddy would rent a cabin and we would go there for a week of fishing, swimming, and just hanging out at the Lodge. There was a lake and a roped off area of the lake for swimming. The park also had paddle boats and a playground. My Aunt Didi, her boyfriend Allen Smith, aka "Frog" if you were an adult and "Gigs" if you were a kid and my cousins Roy and Alton would all come with us. Then there was daddy's first cousin and best friend Howard Wilkinson along with his wife Ruby and my cousin's Sandra and Sherry. Sometimes my half sister's Carolyn and Faye would also come with us. We would rent a couple of cabins if we had to in order to accommodate that many people. No matter it was always fun. For us kids having that many people staying together for a week was an adventure. Daddy and Howard would rent a boat and fish from sunrise to sunset. They would come in all sunburned and carrying a huge string of fish between the two of them. We would eat fish all week.

Daddy was the best fisherman that I have ever seen and always seemed to know where the best spot was. He was always taking me fishing and I loved to fish when I was catching something. When i wasn't catching fish I would easily get bored and get on daddy's nerves. That was because I would start throwing rocks and scaring the fish. At Chickasaw I usually stayed with my mom back at the cabin and we would spend the day swimming or on the paddle boats. At night we would go to the lodge and my sister Donna and all the teenagers would dance to the music of the jukebox while Mark and I would shoot a mechanical bear that had sensors on it's belly and side. When you hit the sensor with a beam of light from the rifle it would roar and raise up on it's hind legs changing direction every time you hit it. One night Mark told me that he put a centipede down my shirt and I became hysterical. My mother came close to taking me to the hospital in order to calm me down. Mark was only kidding but I totally freaked out.

While at Chickasaw we went to see Graceland about 1957 when Elvis was at the height of his fame. It was a rural area compared to now and the commercialization that now exists was virtually nonexistent then. The thing that stood out then, as now, were the thousands of names written by the fans on the wall. One year we also visited the Overton Park Zoo. At that time, as I have already stated, blacks could only visit the Zoo on "Negro Day" which was on Thursdays. It is still unbelievable to me that there was ever a time like that in America. Although I witnessed these things firsthand it seems like a dream to me today.

Another place that we spent a lot of time during the 1950's was at Fair Park, Cascade Plunge, and the Tennessee State Fair. Fair Park was an amusement park next to the State Fair grounds. It had the usual rides that you would find at an amusement park. A train, a haunted house ride, bumper cars, a tilt-a-whirl, Ferris Wheel, kiddie rides and a variety of other rides. One thing that I liked was a theater that featured Disney cartoons. In later years they added a large wooden roller coaster and a batting cage. My parents took us there often and I have many fond memories of Fair Park. I took my own children there. Daddy would talk to a nice man that worked at the Fair Park Diner. He is the only person there that I still remember today. After I married Debbie her cousin Gloria met and married Steve Travis. At a family gathering I met Steve's father and realized that he was the man that my father always talked to at Fair Park.

My favorite place to go swimming was Cascade Plunge at the State Fairgrounds across from Fair Park. It was a 200 ft. by 80 ft. pool with two giant water slides. One was straight while the other had bumps. It had a 60 ft. tall diving platform. Two one ton Spanish anchors, fountains and a restaurant. Exhibitions included a fire diving water clown soaked in kerosene and lit. There were local music combo's, which was the contemporary name for a band. A ten ton ice pyramid and a Miss Iceburg contest. An urban legend constantly being circulated was that someone put razor blades on one of the slides and a girl was badly cut. Daddy was an expert diver and he would show off by diving off of the tower performing dives such as the swan and jack-knife. He would literally draw crowds to watch him. One day he hit his head on the bottom of the pool nearly knocking himself out. It took a long time before he was able to get out of the water. This was one of the places that I would take Debbie after we started dating. Cascade was finally desegregated in 1968 but was closed for good in 1974. It was filled in and demolished in 1975.