No Hill Too High for a Stepper

by Mike Mahan

  Tired of life on the railroad, Dad first started cutting hair in a shop in Wilton.

  My mother, Ethel. Beautiful, talented, caring, and always ready to help, she is standing by her post-World War II General Electric stove in our home on Shelby Street.

  I was well into my teens when I discovered they were not my real sisters. One day when Gene Baldwin, an older neighbor who lived two houses up the street, and I were walking down by the creek behind our houses, somehow I made him mad, and he blurted out that Red was not Sister and Tootsie’s father. I was thunderstruck. I accused him of making it up and started running toward my house, tears streaming down my face. I found my maternal grandmother, whom we called Momma, sitting in her bedroom sewing, and I told her what Gene had told me. She took me into her arms and held me and patted my back, then told me to sit down on her bed. “Honey, I’ve been expecting this for some time. It was inevitable that you would find out so I guess I’m as good as anyone to explain it to you.” She told me that Mother had been married to a Mr. Peters, but that he was not a good husband. He was a bad drinker, and when he was drunk he was unkind to both Mother and the girls. She supported Mother totally in her decision to divorce him. Then when Mother married Red and I came along, it just didn’t seem worth it to bring the matter up.

  That didn’t make sense to me. Why couldn’t they tell me? All the times I had seen Dad hug the girls and tell them he loved them became sour memories. He told me the same thing, but I was his and the girls were not, and he acted like he loved them as much as me. Plus, as a teenaged boy, it seemed to me that a father should love his son more than his daughters anyway. Luckily, this line of thinking didn’t continue long, but I did resent the fact that Sister and Tootsie still went to see Mr. Peters and even considered him their father, even though he did not contribute a nickel to their support. What surprised me most was that Mother didn’t seem to object at all to their having a relationship with their father. I couldn’t hold anything against my mother for very long, though, and any uncertainty about Sister and Tootsie was forgotten.

  If Red was in perpetual motion, my mother Ethel was as steady as the North Star. Although she had only a high school education, she held herself high. She had beautiful manners, and she knew how things were to be done properly. Despite the stereotype of the beauty shop as a mecca for gossip, Ethel did not engage in it. She heard a great deal, no doubt, but she didn’t repeat it. Before long she had amassed a clientele of teachers from Alabama College as well as prominent business ladies in town and the surrounding communities. Everyone thought of hers as a high-class operation, despite the fact that the beauty parlor was located in the rear of the “bobher” shop, separated by only a half wall with a swinging saloon door. Her customers did not even seem to mind having to pass by a group of barbershop patrons sitting on a wooden bench against the left wall, some of whom were not subtle in giving Mother’s clients the once-over.

  As a small boy, I would sit and watch my mother at her daily routine of applying cold cream to her beautiful skin, and when she finished cleaning her face and applying makeup, I thought she looked like an angel. She never washed her face with soap and water, as she thought that in time it would leave her skin dry and hard.

  Mother usually worked in a white uniform, but when she would go to the regular Wednesday afternoon teas at Reynolds Hall, the most beautiful building on the campus of Alabama College, she would change out of her uniform and into her very best clothes. I was especially proud of her then. In her white cotton gloves, she held her own quite well among the faculty members, who were the chief guests at these events. Mother took great pride in being asked to “pour” at these Wednesday afternoon teas, especially when she was matched with Dr. Josephine Eddy, the imposing head of the home economics department. Only a little less special was being selected to pour with the librarian, Miss Abi Russell, or Dr. Katherine Vickery, prominent member of the psychology department. At the weekly teas, the college’s gleaming sterling silver tea service, flanked by silver candleholders, was placed on a white linen tablecloth alongside a colorful flower arrangement, usually gathered from Flower Hill, the home of the college’s president. The group took their tea in delicate pink Wedgwood cups and ate their cakes from Wedgwood plates depicting campus buildings. Mother was in heaven at these events. Just to think that a high school graduate was a valued member of such a sophisticated and classy event.

  Like Red, Ethel was a good dancer, but she lacked his enthusiasm. Often at events they attended he would wind up dancing more with Tootsie and Sister than with her. As she aged, Ethel developed arthritis and had to give up dancing. She also developed some anatomical changes that probably didn’t please Dad. He always liked shapely women, and his eyes were always open to the comeliness of the female anatomy. So his dance partners became his beautiful daughters, especially Sister.

  Red and Ethel would work in the same shop on Main Street for thirty plus years. In the back she would be curling hair; in the front he would be snipping away, and the testosterone and the progesterone seemed to find a nice balance in the barber and beauty sections. But I quickly observed that the tone of the barbershop changed radically when Mother left. There seemed to be an unwritten law that the male customers would not use profanity or vulgarity while the beauty parlor was operating, but when the coast was clear the talk turned almost immediately to more manly stories of wine, women, and song.

  So these, then, were my parents, Red and Ethel, who conceived me on Shelby Street and brought me to my home on Shelby Street. This street became the hub of my universe, a magical place that I felt extremely lucky to inhabit. There might have been more fashionable addresses in Montevallo, but I was well-pleased to live at 159 Shelby Street.

  2

  159 Shelby Street

  Pete Givhan was an excellent landlord, and he and his wife Sassy seemed more like friends than landlords. Although they might have been seen as Highland Avenue aristocrats, there was never any class distinction that I was aware of. Dad really wanted to own his own house, though, and after World War II he bought the bungalow from Pete as well as the house next door. From then on we lived in what was called the Mahan house. Later it would be numbered 159 Shelby Street, but in those days directions were given in a much more personal way. If I told someone how to get to my house, I would say, “Coming south on Main Street, you turn left onto Shelby Street at Rat Scott’s Chevrolet place and Rogan’s Store. Then come on down toward the little red bridge to the third house on the right, just two houses this side of Mr. Robert DeSear’s. And, hey, it’s just antigoglin from the Presbyterian Church.” Antigoglin was our word for catty-cornered or, more precisely, cater-cornered.

  Looking southeast from Main Street down Shelby Street. Rogan’s Store was on the left. Mr. Rogan’s truck and Pete Givhan’s Coca-Cola truck are parked nose to nose. The white building behind Rogan’s once housed the town newspaper. Directly across the street sat Mr. Givhan’s Coca-Cola warehouse. Barely visible down the street, on the left, is the white-brick Presbyterian Church.

  Our house might have been small and modest, but it was ours and we were proud of it. Except for Mrs. Craig’s huge brick house directly across the street, we thought it the finest on Shelby Street. Next to us was the Bloomer Wilson house. It was older, and its one-by-six pine siding was not painted very well. Its drab brown color was trimmed in peeling and dirty white paint, and it smelled of creosote. Inside, however, Bloomer’s wife, Miss Lucille, kept everything very, very clean. The Hartley house, down the street from us also needed to be painted at times, and the DeSear house was not very attractive either and needed paint badly.

  159 Shelby Street, my home and the home of Ethel’s tree, about 1940.

  Our house, with eight-inch clapboard siding, had four gables, and each gable had a louvered vent to let the hot air out. No other house on Shelby had them.

  Our house had hardwood floors, which Mother kept waxed to a high shine. Twice a year,
in the spring and shortly before Christmas, she would have Harry Miller, who worked for Dad in the barbershop, come down and wax the floors. To begin with, he had the difficult task of removing all the old wax with mineral spirits on a rag, working on his knees. After that, he applied Johnson’s Paste Wax to the floor with rags. Then he tied rags to the mop and buffed the floors to a high shine, back and forth, up and down, over and over again. Occasionally, if Ethel planned a big event three or four months later he would give the floors a second waxing— “same song, second verse,” to quote my dad.

  There were six rooms in our house—a living room and dining room, which we could close off from the rest of the house, leaving only a kitchen and three bedrooms to heat and for our maid to clean. We had two fireplaces, but we heated with coal stoves. We were especially proud of the shiny black pot-bellied stove with brass trim that sat in the living room, which we used only on Sundays and special days. Daddy would arrange some kindling on the grate and put some coal atop that. Then he would roll up a sheet of newspaper and light it and put it under the starter and coal, and in no time a fire was blazing. The heater had isinglass windows behind which there was a cloudy red glow. When Dad would open the heater to add more coal, a blast of extreme heat could be felt half-way across the room.

  In the kitchen there was a coal water heater. This little black monster was hot almost 24/7. The silver gray tank held enough water for cooking, washing, and bathing, and when the heater was fired with Aldrich red-ash coal, it would begin talking to you—clicking, popping, thumping, grinding. It was almost as if it were saying, “Oh, no, you’re going to heat me up again. Don’t I ever get any rest?” Knowing that Dad had started a fire at six o’clock in the morning, I would often run into the kitchen and place my hands on the water heater to see if it was getting about ready for my bath.

  Every summer Mother would tell Dad it was time to black the stove. She would not have an ashy-looking stove in her house. After he had applied the special black stove paint and made a fire, there was a caustic smell in the house that faded away after the initial fire. Mother also got the idea of painting the water heater silver, and Dad dutifully got some paint and set to work. He apparently got bad paint, because when the heater got hot, all the paint popped off and Mother’s dream of a gleaming silver water heater had to be put on indefinite hold.

  For years my job was to bring in scuttles of coal and to cut splinters from the huge hunks of fat lighter wood in the backyard. Dad would go out into the countryside to get these knots of pine, which were the taproots of the long-leaf pine trees that were so plentiful in our part of the world. The wood was so rich that red and yellow resin oozed from it. Dad’s job was to cut the knots into six to eight inch lengths, and mine was to take my hatchet and split the pine into splinters. On the back porch was a splinter box, and I was told to make sure that it never was empty. At times I felt a little put upon, but I also took some pride in contributing to the operation of the household.

  My parents were not stingy when it came to coal, and I really appreciated that when I would occasionally visit neighbors and find their houses chilly. However, the acquisition of coal was a very complex maneuver. First Dad would call Mr. Day, who had a dump truck, to go to the Aldrich, Dogwood, or Boothton mine to get a load of coal for us. The Aldrich red-ash coal was the preferred coal by far, as it would light quick, burn hot, and leave little ash.

  Sometimes I was allowed to go with Mr. Day, and I was excited to watch him pull his truck up under an overhead bin and tell the mine worker atop the bin how much coal he wanted—a quarter ton, half ton, full ton, or so-and-so many cubic feet. He also had to tell him the size—stove coal, fireplace coal, or stoker coal. Then the bin operator would pull a lever and the coal would be released, slide down a trough, and pour into the truck bed. Occasionally the size coal we wanted was not available, and we would have to get big black chunks of glistening coal, some of the pieces so large I couldn’t lift them. They would have to be broken up into smaller pieces, using a five or ten pound “blue Monday”—the name my colored friends called a sledgehammer weighing five or ten pounds. It was so called because nobody wanted to start the week wielding such a heavy hammer.

  Once Mr. Day’s truck was loaded, he took the coal to my house and dumped it in front of the coal shed. Then Dad would shovel it under the shed to keep it dry. So the process of providing heat with coal was a complex matter, and it was an important part of my childhood routine.

  When I was in middle school, natural gas arrived in Montevallo, and I felt liberated. The whole town watched with excitement as the pipe was being laid all around the city. Mother, though, was unhappy, as she feared that the laying of the line might injure the majestic water oak tree that stood in the front yard between the sidewalk and curb. It turned out the tree was safe, as the city took jackhammers and cut the concrete in the street to lay the lines so as not to get in the way of water lines that were buried between the sidewalk and curb.

  Ethel’s tree, as my mother’s water oak was known in the neighborhood, was her pride, and she would not have one inch cut from the limbs or let its leaves to be bothered in any way. She had a continuous battle with Mr. Davis and other Alabama Power Company officials as well as with people from the telephone company, and for all her life she came out victorious. But after the house was sold in 2009, Ethel’s tree was finally cut down. It took them over half a century, but the utilities finally won.

  About the time we moved up to natural gas from coal, Dad also replaced the old electric stove, a G.E. with four burners and an oven at eye level that stood on four white spindly legs. The new electric stove had a nice big oven and three eyes on the cooking surface, and with drawers, not legs, supporting it. But at that time electrical power was quite unreliable, and when it went out Momma would have to cook simple meals on the little black monster in the kitchen, which we had kept to heat our water.

  That little black monster could become dangerously hot. In fact, when I was around five years old, it got so hot that the wall behind it caught on fire. Momma calmly called the volunteer fire department. I was afraid the house would burn down. As several firemen, including Dad, rushed in, I held on to Momma’s coat tails and watched in fear as they doused the flames with a hand-held extinguisher. We had not bought the house at that time, and Pete Givhan had Dad install asbestos board behind the stove and water heater, and I was happy we were then safe from fire. That asbestos board was still in the kitchen at 159 Shelby Street when my daughter Stann moved into the house in 2003.

  Mother was proud of every aspect of our house. She bragged, quite naturally, about the oak floors in the front of the house and the pine ones in the back. She was also fond of saying our front porch, paved with red ten-inch tiles, was much preferable to the wooden porches of most of our neighbors. You couldn’t scratch it, and you didn’t have to paint it. Her pride in the home was confirmed when my Dad’s sister, Aunt Kate, who lived out in the country, followed our house-plan when she and her husband built their new house.

  Our porch was the gathering place for neighbors like Mrs. Craig, Mildred Doyle, and the Hartleys, and sometimes, to catch the breeze, we would take the glider and chairs out in the yard and sit there. On some nights when we could see a red glow in the sky to the north, Dad would tell us that that was the Tennessee Coal and Iron open-hearth furnaces all the way up in Ensley, which was forty or more miles away. He explained that we could only see it when low clouds hung over the furnaces, reflecting their glow downward.

  For many years Mother had open house for the trick-or-treaters on Halloween, and the house would be flooded with kids, some from outlying areas like Pea Ridge and Dogwood. Everybody else gave out candy at the door, but at our house the ghouls and goblins were brought into the dining room, where Mother ladled red fruit punch into paper cups for them and offered them cookies on Halloween napkins. I felt proud that our house was so popular with the kids in the area.

  As a boy,
I especially loved sitting in the swing on the front porch at night when the wind was blowing and watching the streetlight on Main blow back and forth, first in my line of vision, then out. Hanging in the middle of Main and Shelby on a wire from corner to corner, the streetlight had a shining green reflector, which cast eerie shades on the buildings and pavement. I would count the seconds the light swung out of sight as the wind blew it, and occasionally I would even get the kitchen clock to measure it. I don’t know what value that knowledge had, but as a boy I was constantly gathering information that had little practical value. I began then a lifelong obsession with quantifying, counting, and measuring. Later, along with the white streetlight, a stoplight was installed at the corner of Shelby and Main. It had only two colored lights, red and green—there was no amber in those days—and as it blew in the breeze it was even more eerie than the white streetlight alone.

  Daddy kept the yard in first-class condition, and he was extremely pleased when Mrs. Craig across the street complimented him on it. He regularly raked the lawn with a yard broom, which he prized and didn’t like for me to use. That was quite all right with me. In the fall when the leaves fell, he would rake the yard carefully, placing the leaves in a long line next to the curbing. He would light the pile at one end, and the fire would crawl slowly along the street from one end to the other. I would take a stick when the fire would die down and stir around until I made the leaves flare up again. I felt like a magician.