Youth

Been thinking more about my parents buying that little grocery store on Highway 15 just south of Pine Bluff in January 1941. George would have been 27 years old at the time and Mabel was 23, just a couple of kids.

They didn’t always find it easy. A malicious shrew in the neighborhood announced to everyone who would listen that our parents were “so dumb that it took both of them to drink a Coca-Cola.” They prevailed despite her.

 A majority of their sales occurred “on-credit.” Collecting wasn’t hard. Our parents knew when “old-age pension checks” came in the mail and when paydays of local employers came around. It was just a matter of getting to the credit customers before something happened. Liquor was the chief culprit, followed closely by unemployment and crop failure. My parents were much more sympathetic with the latter two than the first.

My sister and I practiced our driving skills by driving out and bringing customers to the store. They would first pay their bill from the previous month, then purchase goods for the coming one. We would deliver them home, help carry the groceries in, and pick up the next customer.

It was a predictable life for the couple. They tended the store six days a week with maybe a Thursday afternoon off if it wasn’t time for cotton chopping or cotton picking.

If time allowed, they would take an evening off for a movie. That was before my time, but I’m told that they would haul folks in the neighborhood in the back of their truck for a small charge, maybe a penny. They usually attended the old Strand Theater on Main Street. The “coloreds” would walk around the corner to the Vesper, a theater operated for African-American patrons. They would all meet up after the double-feature and cartoon and head home.

I’m sure things changed in December of that year when the Japanese and Germans brought America into World War Two. I’m not sure if my birth was related to the draft, but I did manage to show up halfway through the conflict. Nonetheless, the Draft Board, influenced it is said by a competing grocer up the highway, had George ready to leave for induction when Germany surrendered. Thanks, Adolph Hitler.

I entered a strange new world. It was one designed to offer untold success to young boy of Northern European ancestry. Years later, I would realize it wasn’t so designed for my sister or my black playmates.

The little store in later years

Growing Up Southern: January 9, 2018

Was thinking about how much fun a teenager like me used to have on fifty cents. Four bits. Two quarters. Half a dollar. Fiddy cents. Half a Shekel. Oh marvelous coin! To some, still a symbol of America’s greatness.

It brings to mind the great day of my youth when the latest Elvis Presley single would come to the music store in our town. Sainted Mother and I would have been saving for weeks. The news would spread that He had just issued a ditty called Don’t Be Cruel, and we would head to town. For the one coin you could get a 45-rpm version, the kind with the big hole in the middle. We would be in “tall cotton” for a week or more.

You could take a girl to the best movie in town for two quarters. Of course, that didn’t include Cokes, popcorn, or Bon-Bons if she had a sweet tooth. A boy needed two more “halvers” for that.

Later, fifty cents would buy you two gallons of gas, or a whole evening of “dragging Main,” or hanging out at the “Wagon Wheel.”

For the wicked, the same amount or so would buy you three or four packages of cigarettes so you could look cool in front of the other kids. Oh, and the coins were great for flipping. (Quarters just never measured up). And you could even clasp one in your eye and pretend to be a German prince.

Some kids would spend months banging on the edges of a coin with a spoon, They said you could make a ring of one if you did it long enough. I never saw a completed one, though. Attention spans had already started to wither. These days, they give kids expensive drugs to help them concentrate. A fifty-cent piece and a spoon would work just fine, every bit as well as molasses and a feather.

They quit making them—fifty-cent pieces— somewhere along the line. Why? I don’t know. I always found them useful and it felt reassuring to carry one in your pocket. Their disappearance, as I remember it, coincided with the decision to quit making quarters out of silver. As far as I was concerned, both decisions amounted to “currency-debasement” and ushered in a whole era of instability in our lives.

Now, the only memory of this most wondrous coin resides in the name of a music rapper who calls himself “50 Cent.”

I still keep a couple around though, to remind me of those days that we use as an example of when America was great. I like the coin better than the symbol. If you think about it:

Fifty cents was less than a woman earned for filling a man’s dollar-an-hour job back then.

If you weren’t white, fifty cents only bought you a balcony seat at the movies, assuming the theater had a balcony.

Some families ate on little more than fifty cents a week.

There were kids my age who had never held a fifty-cent piece in their hand.

Oh, but if you found a buddy who also had a fifty-cent piece, you could buy (or get someone to buy for you) a six-pack of beer.

Hey, let’s do make America great again.