No Hill Too High for a Stepper

by Mike Mahan

  At church I did play the violin along with Kate McConagee on the flute and her brother Walter on the clarinet. I was also able to play duets with the minister’s knockout daughter, Jane Triplett, who was a good pianist. In addition to directing the school bands, Victor Talmadge Young (Vicious Tiger), was music director at our church, and he much favored moving beyond the piano and organ in planning church music. This I enjoyed very much, and it was then that I realized that whatever communication with the Almighty I was to have—in church or out—was to be had through music. I could not keep my mind on the sermons, and scripture reading might as well have been in Greek or Aramaic, as it meant nothing to me. But the music was another matter. Even as a boy of nine or ten, I somehow knew that I was participating in something sacred.

  From the seventh to the ninth grades, I added the trumpet to my instruments. I continued to play violin in the college orchestra at the suggestion of Chicken Ordway, and I played trumpet in the school bands under Mr. Young. I began in the junior high band, but Mr. Young told me that if I worked hard I could march with the senior band starting in the eighth grade. I did what he said, and the next year I was marching with the Montevallo High School Bulldogs band.

  Mr. Victor Talmadge Young, band director. His occasional stuttering did not keep “Vicious Tiger” from producing excellent concert, marching, and swing bands.

  It was commonly said that Vicious Tiger was a grouch, which accounted for the name we students gave him. But the more we were around him, the more we liked him. He had been trained at one of the leading music schools, Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, and he had a master’s in music from the University of Ohio. He encouraged those with talent by forming swing bands, and I was quite impressed that a song he had composed, called “Golden Earrings,” was played by the swing band I was in. How many high school band directors were composers, I wondered, a bit in awe of him.

  While I was in high school, with Mr. Young’s encouragement, I and a number of other boys in town formed a band called the Dixie Cats. Johnny Ziolkowski played cornet, Ed Givhan valve trombone, Teeny Mahaffey trumpet, and Eddie Mahaffey clarinet. Mr. Young allowed us to practice in the bandroom. Ralph Sears let us do tape recordings at his radio station. Pretty soon, music became more than a mere avocation to me.

  I was about fifteen or sixteen when I began to play for money—and in the least likely of places, given this was still in the forties. Sam Brown, a black man who worked at Rat Scott’s Chevrolet dealership, had a band called Sam Brown’s Band of Renown, a name he had borrowed from the nationally prominent bandleader Les Brown. Sam played dances for blacks at the VFW in Centreville, the Cucumber Club out on Highway 25 near Centreville, and other venues in the area, and he played for white dances at the old cotton mill in Siluria. Sam was always needing players, and he asked Johnny and Teddy Ziolkowski to join the band as the first white members. A bit later he came to Dad and asked, “How about letting Mike play trumpet with my band, Mr. Red?” Amazingly, my parents agreed, and I began earning three or four dollars a gig working with Sam, becoming very close to the man.

  I would go down to Rat Scott’s place, and I’d seek out Sam. I’d find him in his dirty overalls, usually in the grease pit or at the wash rack. He was probably earning minimum wage, but he was a hard worker and he never slowed down when we talked. We’d talk about the coming gig, or we’d go over song titles. Nobody had more of a positive attitude than Sam. He’d say, “Mike, we gonna knock those cats dead.” And he meant it. And we did.

  When Sam would come by the house to pick me up to head out for a job, he looked nothing like he did in the grease pit. He’d drive up in his old Chevy sedan, with the trunk tied with baling wire because the drums made it impossible to close it. He would be wearing a natty black suit, with tight pants and a loud tie. His pointed-toed black shoes were always spit-shined, and his hair would be slicked back with grease. The band members did not wear suits—just the leader did—but we did wear matching black pants with either white or black shirts. As I entered the car, I would be sort of stunned by the odor—a combination of cigarette smoke and body odor—a smell my friends and I called the Negro smell.

  Sam was a mighty presence. He played both drums and sax expertly, and the other players were also very good. It was a big band. There were two trumpets, an alto sax, a tenor sax, sometimes a baritone sax, one or two trombones, a piano, a bass, and drums. We had sheet music, but we were highly improvisational. In fact, I learned to fake under Sam—which is what we called improvising when you couldn’t follow the written music—a skill that has served me well in my musical life. When the dance was over and the managers gave Sam his cut of the door, he paid us off immediately, with his usual quip he had picked up off a preacher somewhere, “Boys, we had a hundred-dollar sermon and a ten-dollar crowd.” But I was proud to get the four greasy George Washingtons he pressed into my hand. None of us players were bothered that Sam’s cut was bigger. He held us all together. And he was generous. I was still also playing with the Dixie Cats, and he would lend us his drums for our practice and performances.

  While I was playing with Sam, I was asked to play with another band that was just about as opposite as you could get. It was the Cofer Brothers Band from Siluria, a country band presided over by Duck Cofer, a friend of my father’s. When Duck found out I was playing with Sam, he asked me if I could play bass.

  I had fooled around with the bass a few times, which I thought qualified me, so I quickly said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Can you fake?” Duck asked.

  I could improvise on the trumpet, so I saw no reason I couldn’t improvise on the bass. “Yes, sir,” I said confidently.

  My first gig with the Cofer Brothers was to be the next Saturday night at the Buck Creek Cotton Mill. I had a week to learn to fake on the bass. I borrowed country records from Ralph Sears at the college radio station and went over to the college and borrowed a bass fiddle. I practiced every day, and by the weekend I was faking all over the place. This as much as anything qualified me for the compliment I sometimes was given: “That Mike is really a quick study.”

  The Cofer band played some fast songs, but most often we did slow numbers that couples could clinch dance to. I’d be up there flailing away on the bass, and I would watch those dancers, bellies together and the guy’s leg between the girl’s legs. I knew they were enjoying it, as I was getting a thrill out of it vicariously. I also noticed those same couples would go out and stay out for a while before they started back dancing. I had a pretty good idea where they had gone. In the Buck Creek Cotton Mill parking lot, everyone knew you could see the parked cars swaying rhythmically, and in cold weather the windows would be steamed up.

  I played lots of dances, both square and round, and it was a steady source of income through high school and into college. Like Sam Brown, Duck played for a cut of the door, and he paid us off after every gig.

  My favorite song I learned to play while I was with Sam was “Caldonia.” It was so popular with the crowd that we’d usually play it twice. Later, when I was a student at Auburn University, a fellow named Cunningham formed a rock and roll band called the Auburn Knights of Rhythm, and when we weren’t playing we would often go to a black establishment called the Dynaflow Club, which was near Tuskegee on the road between Auburn and Montgomery. Anybody could come to the Dynaflow Club, but its owner, Batman Poole, had decreed that to belong you had to drive a Buick Roadmaster with a dynaflow transmission and four holes on the front fender. Three holes wouldn’t cut it. At the Dynaflow Club, I really learned to play rock and roll. He’d invite the white boys to join them on stage.

  The Dynaflow Club was pretty basic. It was a cement block building painted a dark brown, and it had a gravel parking lot. There was very little light other than on the sign over the door. There was usually a $1 cover charge, but when they saw the instruments we were carrying they never asked us to pay. Inside, it was smoky and dark, with colored lights hanging dow
n. Tables and booths were arranged around the room, at which black couples were sitting with drinks before them. We were told to go to the back of the room, which was a real reversal for us. We were in for many new experiences there. For the first time in my life I shared bathroom facilities with black men.

  A long bar ran all along one side of the room, and there was a stage at the far end, standing about two or three feet above the floor. It had its own colored and white lights. It was here that I saw my first electric piano, electric bass, and electric guitar. The musicians were all black.

  When Batman saw us, he would go to the microphone and say, “Hey, here’s my musician friends from Auburn.” He’d motion at us, saying, “Come on up here, boys. Make yourself at home.” I would be carrying my bass and the others had their instruments, and we would join the colored musicians already on the stage. We were thrilled to be there because we were able to see the beginnings of rock and roll. R and R pretty much used the same four chords I used when I played country with the Cofer Brothers and blues with Sam Brown, so it seemed quite natural to me.

  Batman was an impressive looking man. He dressed impeccably in dark suits and handsome ties. His kinky hair was cut short, and a part had been made in it with a razor. The Dynaflow Club had no air conditioning, and in no time he and everybody else was sweating. The sweat would be falling from his face, but he always waited to the end of an eight bar to pull out his handkerchief and mop his face. He reminded me of the great Louis Armstrong.

  One night while we were sitting in with the band, he said, “We gonna play ‘Caldonia’ now.” Then, with a somewhat mischievous look on his face, he looked directly at me and asked, “Boy, can you play ‘Caldonia’?”

  “You bet,” I said.

  He looked surprised. “Where’d you learn that, boy?”

  I proudly said, “I learned it from Sam Brown when I was playing with Sam Brown’s Band of Renown, from Montevallo, Alabama.”

  Batman looked impressed and he counted off the beat for “Caldonia.” In unison, the horns blew rhythmically and the singers began: “Caldonia, what makes your big head so hard.” When the phrase ended, I let out a loud grunt, as Sam Brown had taught me. The audience laughed loudly in approval. By the end of the evening, everyone in the house was doing it. I was thrilled to death.

  As I survey the happiest moments of my youth, it is amazing how many of them have to do with music. And that has continued throughout my life.

  20

  Having Fun

  Having fun has always been a very high priority in my life, and my life on Shelby Street was filled with fun. I spent hours skating down our sidewalk or riding scooters. Just after World War II, Dad bought me a used bicycle and painted it bright red. Then my adventures spread out beyond Shelby Street. The neighborhood guys played marbles—or deebees, as we called them—and slid off the terraces at the Presbyterian Church on sleds made from pasteboard boxes we got at the stores downtown. We played cowboys and Indians all the way down to Frog Hollow.

  Ain’t no hill (or tree) too high for a stepper. Climbing the wonderful chinaberry tree on top of the wall at Gene Baldwin’s house.

  The annual wading party at Little Springs behind and down the bluff from Agee and Pat Kelly’s house. Teachers furiously yelled, “You be careful, and don’t get your clothes wet.” That command always led to a “who pushed who” discussion.

  Another activity on Shelby Street was rubber gun battles. E. G. Smitherman and Charles Cox were master builders of these weapons. They cut a strip of inner tube and attached a clothespin to the end. When it was released with skill, the rubber would fly off and hit its mark. I was hit by many of them, and it hurt like everything. In addition to the guys who played with the rubber guns, there was one girl—Catherine Bridges, the neighbor girl who stared down Mr. Dyer. Catherine was fearless, we thought, and we admired her for joining in.

  One thing we all loved occurred not on Shelby Street, but not far from Highland Avenue. If you went through the college campus and up behind the president’s home, there you would find what we dubbed “big ditches.” A barren red clay hill with hardly any vegetation had been eroded over the years, the rain having washed large deep ditches and gullies on the surface of the hill. The grade of the ditches varied from straight down to angles as steep as those of the terraces at the Presbyterian Church or Ed Bridges’s house on Shelby Street. We boys were overtaken by a desire to live dangerously, and we would take cardboard boxes up there to slide down the ditches. The dust would be as thick as the dust coming from behind the stagecoach in a Saturday afternoon Wild Bill Hickok or Johnny Mac Brown movie. After about a half day of big ditches—up the slopes on foot and down on cardboard box tops, we would be “red clay dirty.” Returning home with our clothes caked with the red dust, we always knew that our mothers would not be happy. But sliding the ditches was worth it.

  Living as I did on Shelby Street, with Shoal Creek right in my backyard, I could not avoid being interested in swimming and fishing. Before Big Springs swimming hole was completed, I usually swam at Little Springs, which served as the water source for the town of Montevallo. Later, Little Springs became the swimming hole for blacks. It was located just behind Mrs. Maggie Lou Kelly’s house, and there was a park there. I envied Agee Kelly because he could see Little Springs Park from his back steps, and many times he and I and other friends would walk down the stone path and cross the little wooden bridge that took you to the park. The bridge was close to the water, and we would lie down on our stomachs on the bridge, put our heads down and lap up the cool water. Next to the park, the creek was wide and shallow, and I remember at school picnics when I was a small boy spending hours wading in the creek. My lifelong fascination with the Civil War had its beginnings in this very place when I learned that this was where the Yankee soldiers forded Shoal Creek after camping in Mulkey’s Bottom for three days.

  Later I was occasionally invited to swim at the college, and after summer term was over we townspeople could swim there for a small fee. Located behind Hanson and Tutwiler Hall, the large concrete pool was filled with clean, blue water that was always cold, even on hot summer days. It was surrounded by a tall green wood fence with only one gate to go in and out.

  The pool had a regulation I disliked. Before you could swim, you had to put on a shower cap and take a shower. Even the boys had to. I hated those rubber caps, which always hurt my ears.

  Since Alabama College was a girl’s school, the boy’s dressing room was quite small. As young inquisitive boys, we learned quickly that you could go outside and sneak a look through the knotholes into the girl’s dressing room, and you could sometimes see girls with almost no clothes on, or occasionally no clothes on at all. How we managed not to get caught, I could never figure out.

  Later the city started a recreation program, with Dad as the first director. Under his leadership, Big Springs was improved greatly. The City Council hired lifeguards to be on duty during certain hours to ensure the safety of the swimmers. The beauty of going to Big Springs was you didn’t have to take a shower or wear a shower cap like you did at the college pool. The Alabama College bathing beauties we all admired had to wear a one-piece black bathing suit with a white cap, but at Big Springs the girls wore whatever they wished, including revealing two-piece suits.

  We guys especially liked it when Martha Ann Cox, Laura Ann Hicks, and the other girls would swing on the rope tied to a sycamore tree and drop into the water. We always hoped that the impact of hitting the water would cause their tops to fall down. We watched and watched them and hoped and hoped, but every suit stayed in place. But that didn’t keep us from wishing and watching.

  Dolan Small, left, and Joe McGaughy waiting for a top to fall at Big Springs.

  Fishing always appealed strongly to me. The fishing was especially good below Mr. Dyer’s dam, and many a time I grabbed a pole, dug some worms or night crawlers, or found crickets under the water meter c
overings, and went to the creek bank. Getting the crickets proved difficult. The heavy steel water meter covers had to be pried up with a screw driver enough to get your fingers under the lid. I had many a mashed finger trying to get that cover off. Also you never knew what one might find in the meter hole. Occasionally you could find large black lizards, long-legged spiders, roly polies, hard-shelled thousand legs, black roaches, and other critters. We never found a snake, but we always feared we might.

  The best place to fish, by far, was the Sewer Hole. It was called the Sewer Hole because it was at the point that Alabama College dumped its raw sewage into a small creek flowing into Shoal Creek. Only blacks fished there.

  It was at the Sewer Hole that I met Montevallo’s champion fisherman, a huge jet-black muscular fellow named O. C. That’s all I ever knew him by—O. C. He rolled his own cigarettes and usually had one stuck in his lips. The thing that impressed me first was how beautiful his fishing poles were. They had a golden glow, as if they had been varnished. He kept all his gear in perfect order, and he was an excellent teacher. It seemed to me that everyone who encountered him respected him because of his knowledge and his ability to teach what he knew. He taught Montevallo boys, black and white, to find hellgrammites—or thousand legs, as we called them—by seining with screen wire in the shoals of the creek, though I had already been introduced to hellgrammites by Mister Pittman out at Montebrier. It took two people to catch hellgrammites. One person held the seine, which was two sticks to which the screen wire was attached. He stood downstream from the other fellow, who turned over rocks and kicked the bottom of the creek. The many-legged hellgrammites would wash downstream into the screen wire. Hellgrammites were not the only critters that would wash into the seine. Sometimes you would catch a small turtle, minnows of different colors, and all kinds of black water bugs. But it was the hellgrammites we were after. O. C. instructed us on how to put a hook in just the right place on the hellgrammite’s back and set him a-wiggling. We’d make our cast, hoping he’d entice a prize big-mouth bass. Truth was, we never caught a prize fish, but we did catch our share of more modest fish.