1 February 2019
I was awake by 4:15 am and up by 5:30. The coffee pot had been prepared the night before so all I had to do was push the button. Usually, Archie and Tanis sleep late but he got up around 6:30 and Tanis a little later.
Tanis made us a fine breakfast and Archie and I decided to do the nostalgia tour. We headed out on old US 80, one of the first transcontinental highways. U.S. 80 starts on Tybee Island off the coast of Savannah, Georgia and ends in San Diego, California and for many years, I lived alongside the highway in two locations in Morton, Mississippi. I remember the transfer trucks passing the house at night and listening to their tires hitting the expansion joints in the old 2-lane concrete highway. It has pretty much been superseded by I-20 but still has plenty of local traffic. My brother and I have logged many, many miles along US 80 between Vicksburg, Mississippi and Meridian Mississippi.
Our first stop was the Searcy Cemetery just outside the metropolis of Pulaski. Our parents and paternal grandparents are buried there. Another reason was to see if the old Searcy home place was still standing – it was, albeit with a few missing windows. My grandfather and his Dad built the place in 1885. It’s the classic dogtrot house of rural Mississippi.
From there we headed to Morton Cemetery to see the graves of our maternal grandparents and maternal relatives, and then back to Sims Hill Cemetery to see if we could find the grave of our great grandmother Laura Lee McEwen. We couldn’t find her grave and couldn’t remember where she was buried – Morton, Sims Hill, or some other cemetery. Grandma Laura was the one who taught me to make tea cakes. I still do and on rare occasions, I send off care packages to cousin Jimmie and Jo and brother Archie.
After Sims Hill, we decided to visit Roosevelt State Park (where I learned to swim) and where our cousin Joe Lee Tadlock was showing out and jumped off the high board (it seemed very high back then) and hit the lower diving board with his face. Archie had to pull him out. There are a lot of Joe Lee stories, and all of them end about the same way.
There were several rites of passage at Roosevelt. My cousin Jo coaxed me out to the swim platform for my first visit to that structure. It seemed it took forever to swim out to the platform from the regular swimming area and only “big” kids made it there to dive off the high dive and low board. Jo smartly got me to do it on my back which gave me the confidence I needed.
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I spent a huge amount of time at Roosevelt with the local Boy Scout Troop 28. We were often offered an area for scout camping, spend the summer clearing the area, and then the park would confiscate the area for their use. We did this a couple of times before we got smart and quick clearing land for their use.
Another childhood memory was Tank Hill on Spring Street. It became a rite of passage to climb the water tank. Alas, the tank is no longer there. All around the base of the water tank were Chickasaw plums that came ripe around late June and early July. That was a great reason to head to Tank Hill.
As we drove around Morton, we kept pointing out houses and locations we knew as kids: Stykes and Buddy Easterling’s house, David Earl Walter’s house, the three houses where Uncle Ray and Aunt Minrose lived, the site of our grandfather’s hardware – Agnew Hardware, the Williamson house on Agnew Street, Zera Mae and Spivey Crimm’s house, and Uncle Lonnie and Aunt Maxine’s house.
Near where Agnew hardware stood and on the same corner was an old cotton gin. It actually still ginned cotton when I was a kid. Up the hill from that was Gunn’s Dairy that made the best milkshakes and hamburgers. Miss Ivy (don’t know her last name but no one ever used it) ran the place.
Morton, at the time, was a booming town compared to our neighbor town of Pelahatchie. We had a theater and many a Saturday morning and afternoon were spent there. Do you remember the 13 reeler serials?
We ended the day by traveling back US 80 to Brandon. As usual, there are some bitter memories of growing up in a small town but for some reason, you only remember the good ones. Perhaps that is as it should.
