MEACHAM LANE MEMOIRS/1507 Meacham Lane

Me with my Schwinn.  Meacham Lane 1955.

The Farley neighborhood in the early 1950’s on Meacham Lane was pretty much comprised of blue-collar men of trade, their offspring, and their wives. Almost without exception the sole occupation of the neighborhood wives and mothers was to take charge of the household in general, cook two or three meals a day, raise the children and see to their moral and spiritual education in addition to being a homework monitor, and care for everyone in sickness and health. In some instances these incredible women were also expected to manifest miracles with their husband's meager paychecks in order to balance the family finances.

The men and women were honest and decent folks that always had the screen door open for company and most all reserved Sunday mornings for church and Sunday school.  Some of the men drank beer in the evenings and on the weekend, but in those days, that was the extent of recreational endeavors to escape the week’s trials and tribulations. Some say it is a much more worldly neighborhood today. But, at the time of this writing almost 65 years since we first made our home there, I guess it would be safe to say that applies to almost everywhere.

The neighborhood guys and gals of pre-teen and adolescent ages were clannish and tough, and if you couldn’t stand up for yourself, you wouldn’t stand for long period.  But, once a member of the tribe, good times were always at hand.  Most would come to be regulars at our house, yard, and lunch and dinner table.

Donnie Wyatt didn't miss many lunches, and mother always had an extra grilled cheese for him. He was always one of her favorites and he and I spent many years as a pitcher/catcher battery in Khoury League Baseball, always on All-Star teams, he throwing heat and I catching it. When Donnie paid tribute to mother at her funeral, he acknowledged his special affection for her and knew of her 's for him.

Everyday friends would come to visit and plan and engage in the tribe's activities of the day, and included Sonny and Gary Vaughn, Randy Paris, Ronnie and Tommy Conner, Larry and Jerry Youngblood, Steve Mason, Donnie Wyatt, and David Hurt. By the early 60’s the Lambert brothers, Keith and John were there to play basketball and baseball in our side yard.

Most are gone now.  Jerry Youngblood died after falling onto a bare-ended handlebar while riding his bike one day. Within the week all the mothers made sure all their kids had new handlebar grips out of the family household accounts.  Randy passed of cancer, Donnie of diabetes, Tommy in a car accident in Junior College.  Keith and John passed away the past couple of years.  And my most special childhood companion, Sonny, passed away from complications of cancer this last year.

David Hurt lived in the small frame house directly across the then gravel road from our house, our front yards, neighbors.  The day mother and dad settled on the little house there on Meacham Lane in 1953, David Hurt was staring at me while I hung upside down from the big elm tree in the front yard next to the road.  He was several years younger than me, and he looked rather silly standing there in a saggy cloth diaper.  Being downwind from him, my first words to him conveyed my belief that he should go home and get that thing changed.

David was always small, and David was always tough.  I remember him chasing his cousin Randy Paris, my age, around the field with a baseball bat in his late pre-teens because of an errant Randy fastball to his ribs.  He was, by all accounts, also a tough Marine later on, that did his tour in Vietnam.  David was kicked to death after coming to the aid and rescue of a young woman in a bar being hassled by two men shortly after returning stateside.  That is the story at least, that I was given by several close friends.

If you drove by the little house on 1507 Meacham Lane in McCracken County, Kentucky today you would not notice too many changes from when we first moved there in 1953. Many of the neighborhood houses remain pretty much unchanged, too. But noticeably older.

But, there are certainly many differences nevertheless.

Our house outwardly looks the same in general shape and size, but there the difference ceases.  There was no indoor bathroom in the early 1950’s, and when nature called it involved a trek some distance behind the house to the “outhouse”.  The outhouse itself was located only a few feet in front of the small shed/barn that opened into the chicken yard.  Mother kept chickens for eggs for some time during those years.

In the final years of the two outbuildings.  Dad trying to manage the weeds.  He always did his chores in a white shirt and dress slacks.

The proximity of the two buildings situated so closely together resulted in a favorite pastime, though it is strange to think about it now.  We had a fascination with crawling onto the small barn-like structure and jumping from it to the top of the outhouse and then jumping from that roof to the ground, always in perfect imitation of the soldiers we saw in movies doing the drop and roll technique.  It’s a wonder we didn’t all have constant limps and sprains, if not worse resulting from our activities.

My brother, Ken, recently confessed to the undoing of the little barn.  It’s demise was never known by me until then, a lunch for his 76th birthday.  I told him of adding another chapter to “Meacham Lane Memoirs” and in it our exploits hopping across the roofs of the buildings out back of the house.  That’s when he told me of the cause and effect of its demise.

It seems Ken, while rummaging through an old box of stuff that Dad had stored in the barn, became acutely aware of a colony of nesting rats.  In reprisal for the start they gave him, he decided they must all die.  But how?  And then the answer came to him, he would start a fire in the old trash of the box and smoke them out!  But then what?  Why, then, he would blast them with Dad’s old shotgun of course!  Duh.

And so, while assassinating rats with fever pitch joy, he did not at once realize that the fire inside the barn had spread.  And in a short time, the old building from another time and another family’s story inclusive of our own, was reduced to smouldering embers.

And so, all those outbuildings have long disappeared. Every place except in my memories.

The house did not have air conditioning, of course, and in that we were no different from our friends and neighbors.  On humid and hot summer evenings our mother would come into the room and sprinkle the sheets with water from the Coca-Cola bottle with the perforated cap she used to dampen the shirts and pants she ironed.  There were no steam irons then that I am aware of, but it is possible that we just couldn’t afford one.  It helped very little with our sweat soaked torsos after the dampness on the sheets evaporated into the night air from the window we always had open.

Then there was that glorious day dad brought home our first window fan.  We felt really privileged that dad chose to install it in our room.  We did not understand for some time that the fan drawing the hot air from the house was being recirculated, and cooled by that circumstance, was being redrawn into the open window in mother and dad’s bedroom.  But, it was a substantial improvement that we were still grateful to receive.

The house did not have its own water supplied by the county or city.  Instead, we bought water from a tank truck and had it pumped into our cistern just below the concrete slab outside the kitchen door.  Seeking a more efficient remedy, Dad devised a method to “drill” a well that involved a large tripod and a suspended metal pipe that he used to plunge into the ground just behind the house. Day after day he would come home at or just after dark and spend an hour or so reaming out the small hole inches at a time.  He never gave up.  And he never hit water. It was a fortunate time the year the water lines from the county were installed in the neighborhood.  It added an hour or two to dad’s days and probably years to his life.

The house was initially heated by coal.  There was always a small pile by the tool shed only a few yards outside the cistern slab.  Dad poured a concrete slab flush with and in front of this small shed, with the intent to build a garage of cement blocks.  It never got much more than two or three blocks high, as mother’s illness put the finances for dad’s little dream out of reach. But, that slab with its block perimeter made us the hit of all our friends.  We nailed a basketball goal just above the door of the shed residing in its center and the result was the only neighborhood basketball court without a dirt floor.  We were rich. And extremely popular.

Over time we had a floor furnace installed in the hallway between the two back bedrooms and the house took another step towards modernization.  

I doubt the house in total had much more than 900-1000 square feet.  There was a tiny living room, the small kitchen, eventually a miniscule bathroom, and the two bedrooms.  Ken and I shared the back right bedroom, and we shared a bed inside it.  Until the day our parents gave the house and mortgage to Ken and my new sister-in-law, Sharon, we shared a bed and bedroom.  And that little bedroom became a place to wrestle, play ball with a rolled up magazine for a bat and a wad of tinfoil for a ball, and a place for clothes, comic books, and a place of refuge after an evening of playing kick-the-can with our neighborhood friends.

We did have a radio in those early years and we listened to Amos and Andy, Dragnet, Arthur Godfrey, and all the radio personalities of the day.  We didn’t own a T.V. set for some time. The first one in our neighborhood was a small round-screened, set of maybe 9 inches at a neighbor’s house up the street. There were no color T.V’s yet. Very few T.V.’s period. We showed up at their back screened kitchen door, pathetic little creatures like pigeons waiting for popcorn in the park, and vied for places closest to where we could best see the wonderful, albeit, snowy images on the little T.V.  They would place that little T.V. on the kitchen table facing the doorway where we were all sitting like Indians in council, fascinated by the  entertainment it provided.  It was beyond anything in our wildest dreams.  It was like having a miniature movie theater in our very own neighborhood.  

The day finally came, much later, that we finally owned our own little entertainment center. Saturday mornings meant Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Greenjeans, Tom and Jerry, Heckle and Jeckle, Betty Boops, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong-Cassidy, Tarzan, Lassie, Flicka, and Sky King.  It was incredible.  By mid-morning, though, it was always on to baseball, basketball, football, exploring, or fishing.  And only on Saturdays would we sometimes be allowed to stay up until the Star Spangled Banner played and the “NBC peacock” strutted itself out.  But, heck that never happened until midnight, an ungodly late hour indeed!

One of the most vivid of all my memories in the house was the day dad had the accident with the shotgun. Now, this story will seem hard to believe or contrived to some, but with Ken as my witness, I will convey it anyway.

Dad had a bolt action .20 gauge shotgun that developed a fault with chambering a shell from the magazine into the breech, and with ejection of the shell as well.  So, he sat down at our kitchen table and began to systematically try to get a shell to chamber from the magazine.

Directly behind the kitchen wall where he sat, was our living room.  I sat in a chair directly behind dad in that living room the day of the accident.  I was polishing my only pair of dress shoes for Sunday school.  Just as I bent down to buff for a better shine, on the other side of the wall a shell made its destination inside the chamber of the shotgun and the firing pin hammered down simultaneously blasting a huge hole through the wall over my head and impacting in the opposite wall of the living room.  Had I been upright in my chair, I, too, would have been splattered on that far wall.  But, that wasn’t the miracle that I remember most from that incident.

Covered in sheet-rock chunks and pieces and sheet-rock dust, I heard dad scream and there was a pause before he worked up the courage to peek around the doorway to address his worst fears.  He knew I was on the other side.

His relief at seeing me in that current state, covered with rubble and with eyes bugged, but obviously whole and unhurt,  was immediate.  Checking me over from head to toe, both of our sight lines reverted to the opposite wall of the living room where the dozens of buckshot pellets had impacted.  There hung mother’s favorite picture of Christ kneeling at the rock at Gethsemane, extremely common in most homes of the day.  And the little balls of lead had devastated the wall surrounding it, perforated in great numbers the frame and picture.  But, not  a single one did anything other than encircle the body of Christ, none striking it.  That image strikes both fear and wonder-- and thanks when it is recalled today.

I think of those days in that little home from time to time.  We didn’t have much money, and very little of the luxury, convenience, and entertainment that homes today are accustomed to….that I have become accustomed to….but without hesitation I can say that I miss those times, that house, my friends and family in those much, much simpler of times.