Things Worth Remembering

There are things worth remembering about growing up in small towns.

I remember the oddest of things. I remember pimento cheese. A small grocery store on Flint Street called Lundy’s used to have the finest piminto cheese on the face of the earth. Lundy’s was a neighborhood grocery store right across Flint Street from the Donut Shop. At Lundy’s they made their pimento cheese from a secret recipe. That recipe is more treasured than the KFC recipe.

The Donut Shop on Flint made donuts by which all others are to be judged. If you were lucky enough to get them while they were hot, you were indeed blessed. Krispy Kreme can squawk all they want, but The Donut Shop will forever be the G.O.A.T. as far as donuts are concerned.

Just a little ways away, south on Wood Street was Gasaway’s Grocery. Gasaway’s was another little neighborhood grocery. Jonesboro had a lot of neighborhood grocery stores back then. If you wanted really good steaks, Gasaway’s was the only place to go. My first memory of Gasaway’s is from when we first moved to Jonesboro in 1961. We lived in a little rent house across from West School. Mom let my sister, Sweet Pea, ride her bicycle from our house to Gasaway’s to get a loaf of bread. Sweet Pea was only about 7 year old at the time, so my mother carted me and the Goob along in the car as we followed her to the store and back. It was at that little house that I learned to ride my bicycle. I also learned that ‘Magic Markers’ would not wash off my little brother. It was made abundantly clear to me that I was not allowed to write on my brother.

I can’t remember exactly where it was, perhaps the corner of Cherry and Cobb, there was a day care called Miss Helen’s Daycare. It was very close to where the Jonesboro Garden Club’s house was, and across the street from a family who owned a very old car, a Model T perhaps. I learned to tie my shoes there.

Way south on Church Street, on the left just before you get to the end at Highland, was Miss Mackey’s Kindergarten. It was in a giant, haunted mansion. I was hunting ghosts upstairs the day President Kennedy was shot. Suffice to say, I won’t do that again.

If you took Church all the way to Highland, and took a right, you’d be heading to the Farmer’s Market. We probably bought a ton of purple hull peas to shell while watching Dave Brown host the ‘Dialing for Dollars Movie’ on Channel 13 out of Memphis.

The Earl Bell Center was just called the ‘Y’ back then. There was a pool shaped like a half pie. There was a high dive that must have been 20 feet tall (actually 10 feet). Fred Tull used to do the most amazing dives off of that diving board. There were two piers built out into the water to create a 25 yard swimming course. The Swim Team used to practice there. There were two practices a day; one at 6:00AM and the water was icy, and the other at 4:00pm and the water was great. If your parents were over achievers, you went to both practices. My first swim coach was Mr. DeWitt, followed by Larry Gwatney, and Bill Rodgers. Jonesboro was a swimming powerhouse in Arkansas at that time. Charlie Sloan owned 12 year old butterfly. Both Scott and Will Emerson swam. The Little boys as well as the Deacon boys were all tremendous swimmers. To the younger kids, these the older guys were giants. For a little podunk town, Jonesboro could put some awesome athletes in the water.

In the winter time, we practiced at ASU in the old indoor pool there. That pool was 100 feet long, and the water was always frigid. Before winter really set in and a frost had killed all the mosquitoes, on the way to swim team practice we used to see the millions of bats leaving the old smoke stack at the steam plant at ASU.

The Country Club was very different back in the day. It only had nine holes, a pool and zero tennis courts. It had a marginal dinning room, and a pretty good bar, as I understand it. The circle drive was gravel and much less well defined than it is today. It featured ‘free style parking’. Dad loved to golf. Being a doctor in the days before cell phones, he carried a walkie-talkie radio so he could periodically check in to see if he was needed anywhere. I remember he bought a brand new, baby blue, 1966 ragtop Mustang. He loved that car. It replaced his MG Midget, which, not surprisingly he did not love. In fact, he came to hate that car. One day as he pulled in to park his brand new Mustang on the gravel at the Country Club, as he braked his expensive walkie-talkie began to slide off the seat. He reached to save the radio, and was in fact successful. Unfortunately, in doing so, he failed to brake hard enough and he crashed his Mustang into a tree.

In those days, the pool at the club was an old fashioned rectangular pool located directly behind the old club house. The deep end was furthest away, and separated from a tee-box by a chain link fence. I will never for get how grown up it felt at nine or ten years of age to be able to go into “The Teen Room” and get a cheese burger, fries and a coke.

On the 4^th of July cars used to line Nettleton to watch the fire works the Country Club would send up. After we bought the house in Birdland, but before we joined the Country Club, I remember Coachie and Miss Dot coming over to watch the fireworks from our back patio. As a small boy, fireworks just amazed me. Later, after we joined the Club, our view was even better as some friends and I would sneak as close as possible to the launch point.

Years ago, the Boy Scouts operated a camp called Cedar Valley. Dad used to go up there to do physicals for the Scouts. I went with him one time when I was about 7 or 8. The Boy Scouts gave me a Cedar Valley T-shirt. I treasured that T-shirt for years.

What collection of memories about Jonesboro can be complete without mentioning Craighead Forrest? The Jet that was on display near the swimming area was of great interest when I was small. I couldn’t figure out how they got it there. I wanted to know why it was there. Did it make a crash landing in the lake? To enter the park, you had to drive past a small amusement park called “Funland”. Funland had a ferris wheel, bumper cars, a train and, most importantly, a roller rink. In later years, a real live lion was added. The lion was always a topic of discussion following any Boy Scout camp-out in the park. There was always that one kid who didn’t know there was a lion in the park until the lion roared sometime after dark. Did I mention the Go-Kart track? That was lots of fun in a 1969 Datsun 510.

Aside from Funland, the Forrest’s main feature was a muddy lake creatively called “Craighead Forrest Lake”. In it you could swim, fish, or water ski. For a number of years, there was a ski jump in the middle of the lake for those courageous few who used it. All around the lake, there were little bays and peninsulas where, in the mid 1970s, we had some pretty awesome parties. It was in the mid-1970s that Jonesboro took an active interest in the state of the park and began making improvements. The fruits of that labor are evident in the beautiful park that Craighead Forrest has become.

Everyone has their favorite store. Mine was Army Surplus at the end of Main near the tracks. When I was just a small boy, mom used to buy me army ‘uniforms’ there to play in. There was all manner of incredibly cool merchandise in that store. I bought a lot of my hunting gear in that store when I was in high school. Not too much down Main Street was a coffee shop for railroad men and ASU students called The Coffee Cup.

Before Jonesboro got fancy and started having cinemas, we had ‘picture shows’. There were a couple on Main Street. The Bus Station at one time was a theater, and probably the first picture show. The picture show we always went to was the Strand Theater. The Strand began life as a real burlesque theater and successfully transitioned into movies. The velvet curtain covering the screen had a giant ‘S’ on it. My friends and I thought that it stood for ‘Sivad’ because Sivad would occasionally host Saturday afternoon shows. (We were young and not too smart.) The instant the curtain began to rise, the projector began showing a cartoon. They used to show cartoons before beginning the movie. The Strand is still alive today masquerading as the Forum. It’s much nicer now, but back in the day, they had ‘cry rooms’ for ladies who had babies with them at the movies. The ‘cry rooms’ smelled like dirty diapers.

The sports teams at Douglas MacArthur Junior High were originally called the Cadets, and their colors were blue and grey. The first coach I remember hearing about there was a Coach Spaight. A kid up the block told me how brutal football practice was. My sister was in the band. She played B Flat Clarinet. My mother, being hard of hearing, could never understand the band directors name and, to my sister’s eternal horror, Mom used to address him as ‘Mr. Backstart’.

We often rode out bikes to MacArthur. Leaving Birdland and crossing Nettleton, we would race to school. Sometimes, if we were in a hurry, we would cut through the old salvage yard behind Cooksey’s Auto Sales. “Thinkin’ ’bout trading? See Hayden at Cookesy’s Auto Sales” There was the Rex Motel next door. If memory serves me well, I believe we would call that a ‘No Tell Motel’ these days. Of course Emerson’s Funeral Home was there. Perhaps the most significant spot was the Tastee Freeze. Yeah, the funeral home was cool because every now and then three guys would dash out of the building and take off with lights flashing and sirens screaming in the ambulance, and the salvage yard was cool because…well, to a 12 year old boy, a salvage yard is full of possibilities, but the Tastee Freeze was a whole different matter. The Tastee Freeze had ice cream.

What southern town is complete without a dirt stock car track? The Jonesboro Speed Bowl was way out past the end of Nettleton Extended and off to the left. As you would expect, we had our share of local racers who became legend. My favorite was Jr. Baker. Dad used to swear by Baker’s Garage, and Jr was a hell of a man. Roland was great too, but I didn’t know him as well as Jr.

We didn’t know it at the time, but we were living a dream. Today’s internet, streaming movies, cell phones and electric cars are all amazing in their own right, but in my mind, they all fail when contrasted with the simple pleasures of a warm spring afternoon in 1960s Jonesboro.

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