Memories: Introduction & The Neighborhood

 

INTRODUCTION

This account of childhood experiences is presented from an entirely personal point of view, in the sense that it is a narrative of my own memories (of the 1930's & 40's), augmented with some additional information provided by my sister, one of my aunts, and by my mother, some years before she died. In order to keep the narrative from being simply a description of people and places, I have included as many anecdotes as possible - all of them true to the best of my memory. But bear in mind that I observed them through the eyes of a child, and I look back on them now through the rose-colored eyes of nostalgia.

PART ONE

THE NEIGHBORHOOD

In the depression years of the thirties southeast Roanoke was a quiet neighborhood of poor, hardworking, God-fearing families. Many of them had recently moved there because of the availability of work at the "silk mill", one of the few companies that maintained full employment in spite of the bad economic times. Being a subsidiary of Crown Rayon Corporation, a British concern, it was not adversely affected by the depression; and it employed a complete three-shift work force seven days a week. It was located in a large area of flat land between the railroad track, which hugged Belmont Hill, and Roanoke River, which bowed outward toward Mill Mountain as it circumnavigated the southern side of the city. Most of the commuters drove to work by taking the Ninth Street thoroughfare over Belmont Hill, or they rode the streetcar to the south end of Ninth Street, where the line terminated at the bridge that led into the rayon plant. The bottom of the hill had been chopped off to accommodate the railroad tracks, so that the bridge did not arch upward, but simply stretched outward over the tracks and then curved down into the company grounds. The employees that lived in our neighborhood could easily walk to work, and many of them did not own a family car. Our house was on Eighth Street, but we had a clear view of the activity on Ninth Street through our back window, because the Ninth Street lot that lay behind our house was vacant.

I said that the neighborhood was quiet; but it was quiet in a relative sense. There was no airplane noise and virtually no automobile noise between the morning and evening rush hour traffic on Ninth Street, and there were no power mowers or other gas-powered tools. The streetcar had its own distinctive sound of metal wheels on the metal track, and an occasional clang of the bell that served the same purpose as an automobile horn.

When the wind blew from the south, we could sometimes hear the clackety-clack of train wheels and the chugging and puffing of the locomotives, but most of the train noise was shielded from us by the intervening trees and houses. A different kind of train noise permeated the night air. After dark, when the regular train traffic had been terminated, a shifter went to work. On a warm summer night, with the windows of my upstairs bedroom wide open, I could hear it pull forward, wait while the brakeman threw a switch, then back onto a different track - slowly, slowly. Then there was a clatter as the latch engaged a stationary car, a pause to change gears, then a slow chugging forward again. Over and over the sequence was repeated at irregular intervals on into the night. I fell asleep to that sound, and if I awoke in the middle of the night, the distant periodic clanking activity would still be going on, a kind of night watch reassuring me that all was well and proceeding according to plan. I grew to think of it as a peaceful sound, and later in life, when I came home for visits, I would look forward to being sung to sleep by that metallic lullaby.

If the early summer daylight woke me at dawn, I could hear the milkman, below my second floor window, making his deliveries. He had to make two trips to each porch: the first to pick up the empty bottles, one of which contained a rolled up note stuck in the neck with the current day's order; and then a second trip to deliver the fresh milk. He rattled the empty bottles when he picked them up, and he rattled the metal racks that held the full bottles. Between him and Grandma Wiley's rooster there was enough early morning racket to render alarm clocks unnecessary. The milk was not homogenized, and the cream at the top could be easily distinguished from the low fat milk by its creamier color, and it could be skimmed off to be whipped, or for any number of other uses in pastry recipes. The pastries - cakes, pies, candy, cookies - were all made from scratch in those days, long before the era of prepared foods.

The milk was kept fresh in an icebox, which as its name implies, was cooled by a large block of ice. The ice was delivered in the late morning, not by a truck, but by a horse-drawn wagon. The blocks of ice came in four sizes, from ten to twenty-five pounds, as I remember. A square ice-delivery sign was posted on each porch, facing the street. Imprinted on this square was a green figure, resembling a four-leaf clover with different sized leaves. The iceman knew how much ice to deliver by the size of the leaf that was at the top of the sign. He carried the block of ice with a pair of pincer-like tongs around the house to the kitchen door. On a hot summer morning, some of us would follow the wagon up the street, begging and nagging the iceman, until he would relent and give us each a sliver of ice to suck on. He set aside one block of ice for the neighborhood kids, and would gradually whittle away at it with his ice pick as he went from street to street.

After the war ended, refrigerators became available (they were all called "frigidaires"), and the ice business rapidly became obsolete. The children missed the fun of chasing the ice wagon, but the mothers felt greatly blessed, not only because of the convenience of the refrigerators, but also because the streets became free of horse droppings.

In the late afternoon the Rainbo bread truck, loaded with goods straight from the bakery ovens, would come creeping up the street, with the driver swinging a bell out the window to let everyone know that he was on the way. Sometimes when he stopped for a sale, I would rush out and wait for him to get out and open the doors at the back of the truck. Then the delectable aroma of warm bread that came rushing over me was so tantalizing that I could have eaten a whole loaf on the spot.

On warm summer evenings we would hear the tinkling bell of the ice cream truck - which was not really a truck at all, but a kind of motorized tricycle or three-wheeled motorcycle - with a box containing frozen confections cooled by slabs of dry ice. On the rare occasions that I could afford a purchase, I would take so long choosing among the selections that the ice cream man would grow impatient and force a choice. It was not easy, what with popsicles, creamsicles, fudgesicles, icicles, ice cream sandwiches, and dixie cups to choose from. Usually the dixie cup won out because it contained real ice cream, but the tastes of the cardboard container and the flat wooden spoon blended with that of the ice cream to create an experience entirely different from eating ice cream in a dish or cone.

Occasionally an open bed truck carrying locally grown produce would make its way slowly up the hill, pausing periodically to allow a housewife to examine the fruits and vegetables critically and inquire about prices. But our family usually purchased produce at the open-air market downtown, where many nearby farmers hawked their wares on Saturdays. The Saturday trip to the market often included a stop at the A&P for some canned goods and fresh ground coffee, but the corner grocery was the source of the day-to-day staples: a loaf of bread, a spool of thread, or a pound of hamburger. There were two of these family-owned groceries within a short walk of our house: Stinson's and Angle Brothers. I don't know why but my mother preferred Angle's, which suited me just fine, because the proprietor always gave me a few free pieces of candy when we paid for our purchases. A couple of dollars worth of meat and bread would net me a half dozen licorice sticks, suckers, and bubble gum chunks.

The homes on Eighth Street were mostly frame houses of various nondescript designs, nearly all two-story, with an attic and basement. The lots were narrow, only about fifty feet wide, and a maple tree had been planted at the south front corner of each one, not only for shade but also for aesthetic purposes. It was a beautiful sight, to stand in the middle of the street and look at the long rows of maples on both sides, budding with pastel leaves in the spring, becoming a full lush green in the summer, and changing to brilliant yellow in the Fall. I could climb a few of the trees by standing on a fence post or a stone wall to reach the lowest limb. They made an excellent hiding place, because nobody ever thought that anyone would be lurking above them; and I eavesdropped on many interesting conversations in this way. When the yellow leaves fell to the ground and turned brown, it was leaf raking time. They were burned in small piles in the street at the curbside - dozens of little columns of smoke drifting lazily upward, filling the still, crisp evening air with the smell of Autumn, and giving rise to visions of jack-o-lanterns, pumpkin pie, and frosted window panes, together with an uneasy foreboding of the cold weather that lay ahead.

Many of the homes had a small vegetable garden, and they all had flower gardens, but "Maw" Wiley's backyard, though hardly more than three hundred square feet in area, was actually a tiny farm. It contained a large shed which served as a single car garage and a coal bin, a chicken coop, a walkway to the alley that was shaded by the huge grape arbor that formed a canopy over it, an apple tree, a peach tree, a plum tree, vegetables and flowers.

Every backyard also included a pair of clotheslines, in those pre-electric-dryer days. Monday was wash day if it didn't rain, and the washing machine, the tub, and the wash board were moved to the center of the back porch, where the pulsating agitator, the wringer rollers, and the bluing in the rinse water worked their magic. I remember standing on the back porch steps one breezy March morning and looking up the hill, where I could see each lawn with its green carpet of springtime grass, and row after row of white sheets and pillowcases billowing and flapping in the wind, while overhead, majestic piles of cumulus clouds sailed in a stately manner across a sky so blue that it could have been stained by that rinse water bluing.

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