Saturday, August 30, 2003
The Dairy Bar.
At Ninth Street I parked on Washington where Mr. & Mrs. Spears had retired to a corner house and ran a dairy bar and restaurant of sorts there during the years after WWII. I never knew their given names. We called her Mrs. Spears… he was Pop.
Pop: You’re a smart kid, Johnny, – suppose you woke up one morning and everything in the universe had grown to twice its size. Would you know the difference?
Me: Everything? Pop: Everything. Me: I don’t think so. No.
Pop: That’s right, Johnny, that’s Einstein’s Relativity Theory and he proved it.
Kids met there on summer days or Saturdays to form up for sandlot games or long bike rides or to just sit in front of the fireplace on one of the chairs Pop bought from the Penal Farm. Today they would call that furniture style rustic. Log legs, planed table tops, cane bottom chairs with log arms. What a great seat they made for a 9-year-old to contemplate relativity (his over-simplified explanations fit our young minds) or physics (the paper cone placed in the fireplace would not burn until the water inside it boiled away) or the great economic question of the day – What’ll you have?
I was of the Royal Crown Cola and a Holloway All-day Sucker school of kid economics back in 1949. Quality issues aside, the 12 ounce R.C. lorded over the new 8 ounce Pepsi, the 7 ounce Seven Up and the 6.5 ounce Coca Cola.
I’d like to tell Pop Spears that: everything in the universe has more or less doubled in size since 1949 and that I’m still trying to measure the differences, his corner has improved in his absence, his house and yard are neat and bright, a deck has been added in the space where he used to keep the returnable bottles between the house and the old Dairy Bar. And I’d like to tell him that I knew that he knew where some kids who cashed in a carton of empty coke bottles so they could buy an R.C. and a Holloway All Day Sucker got the empties – from the place where he stored them.
Old Oak on Harrison Avenue.
In 1944, I moved with my family to the house at 8th Street and Harrison Avenue. It was my 5th birthday and I called it my house and it is there that my character was formed. I lived there only twenty years and there was time away for college and active duty military service so it totals out that I've lived elsewhere for more than two thirds of my life. Yet it seems that home is 8th and Harrison.
Later that month, we went to my Uncle John’s properties on the other side of the river and picked out five pin oak trees. He had some helpers dig the holes and set the trees then he let me throw some of the dirt and run some water on the transplanted roots so that I could claim I helped plant those trees. The tree in the center of the picture was the largest when we put them in and my uncle said he doubted it would live but it might.
It is the only one of the oaks still standing but it is a beauty.
Swan, the Toasty Shop and the Beauty Academy Girls.
Sights stir memories. Today it was the house on the south side of Swan. Three houses still stand side by side there. The middle one has pigeons on what must be a buggy roof. I walked by that house thousands of times but I never noticed it until the girls from the beauty school moved into the attic apartment.
We hung out at the Toasty Shop in 1958. It was shaped like a diner car but packed between other businesses in a thriving downtown. A large steel door with a window allowed entrance to a vestibule where similar door, different only because it had a diagonal push bar, provided entrance. This arrangement kept the winter air from blowing into the Toasty. There was a long aisle with booths or counter on either side. The front window looked out on 7th Street, Business US 41, a half block from the intersection with US 40. The old buildings that were on that half block disappeared in stages: there were still second story gambling joints in the 40s, until the mid 50s, there were taverns in the alley across from the newspaper building and until the mid 60s, when people still shopped downtown, many would stop in the Toasty Shop for coffee, snacks or a sandwich. Girls who worked downtown frequented the place as did coeds from the teacher’s college and the sweet smelling girls from the Terre Haute Beauty Academy. One day two girls pushed the door and spilled into the Toasty Shop and our lives. The short one was cute with short blond hair and an impish face. The taller was, clearly, something special. I looked for flaws and found none. But I was slow.
My friend said, “I’ll take the tall one.” They were soon married and have been since.
It didn’t work out for me and the blond. She never married and last I heard she was a cosmetologist in a women’s prison. Last month, a friend of theirs recognized my name. She’s past 60 now, and working as a receptionist. She wanted to know if I once lived on south 8th Street. That’s how I found out, much too late, that the girls from the Beauty College cruised my house in those days. I had to laugh at that because I knew I was never home. I was always out on the main drag, Wabash Avenue, looking for them.
