Taking time to remember

Growing up on Holcomb Bridge Road seemed to be boring at the time, but now when I recall the past, I had some fun times.

I was looking for some old photos and found this one:

I liked to wear shorts from the beginning and I wear them now every chance I can get.

Left to Right: Dad, Mom, Sister Peggy, Grandmother and Aunt Inez from Dalton, Georgia.  I am thinking her husband Harry Looper took the photo.  Here is the spooky thing, take a look at the next photo… Yes, it is the same house at the beginning of the century…

I  grew up it that house. You can find it’s history on the page called: “HISTORY OF HOLCOMB BRIDGE ROAD.” My memories of growing up here are amazing.  From the beginning I had not understood how old the house was. I just knew when we went upstairs it smelled really funny, not bad, just musty and old. Much later I found out that it started out back in the 1830’s as a two story log home. Later they added on a log addition for another family to move in I believe. In the photo above it had just been  updated with clapboard siding and really looks good. I remember so many hours I rode my tricycle and toy tractor up and down that front porch. We had a commanding view of Stone Mountain from that front porch as well as cross burnings across the river

at the sand pump. 

Memories keep flooding back and I feel bad about my random ramblings here, but back to the house.

The house was hot in the summer and even colder in the winter.  My first memory of a heating system was coal. My Grandma and I would go out to the coal pile and bring in coal every day to heat the kitchen. It was the only room that had heat in my earlier memories. Later

my dad engineered a kerosene tank just in front of the brick chimney. It was at the right height to feed kerosene to all the first floor rooms. We got heat in the Living Room, the Kitchen and my Grandmother’s Bedroom. Later I got heat in my bedroom. I was only about 4 or 5 and I remember getting into trouble in relationship to that new heater. It seems like I got a hold of my mom’s eye brow pencil, a wax liner. I found that went is was applied to the hot flu pipe I was able to draw and doodle with great ease and very dark lines that had a funny smell.  When I was caught, I said, “Donald Duck did it not me” and escaped

the hickory switch for that time. When I got caught for other offenses, I was told to go get a switch. Now I knew that a switch was and I also knew if I could just find one that was on the weak side, I figured I might escape the whelps that were brought on my a strong switch. Well I soon learned that was not a good strategy cause then my grandmother would find a switch that would raise a whelp on a tanned cow hide and I therefore learned what consequences meant.

Back to the house.

Every winter our water line from the well would freeze and stop all water flowing to the kitchen and bath.  Dad would come home and change into his coveralls and go down and bring back the blow touch. It burned kerosene also. He would take the removable cover off the crawlspace under the kitchen and heat the pipe coming from the well and finally water would begin to flow. He made it clear to us that we were to keep water running but every so gently from the kitchen, bathtub and lavatory whenever it was going into the 20’s and lower. Yes, we had Tv to get a weather forecast. But I also remember listening to Amos

and Andy on the radio.

The summers were tolerable only when we had a breeze. We had every window open with a screen to keep the bugs out. Later when I was in high school, I managed to get my hands on a box fan and put it in one of the windows and used it to blow the hot air out of the room and suck in the cool night air from the outside. Along with the cool outside air came 98% humidity and in the mornings you would wake up and the bed would stick to your back. Well it was damp, Ok?

We lived at the end of the REA power line. You can google REA, but now they have a cool name, Sawnee EMC. So back growing up, before there was global warming we had horrible ice storms. That meant we would be out of power every time an ice storm happened. There were so many times I want you to experience them all. One of the most memorable was March of 1970.  I was still living at home and going to college at Southern Tech in Marietta. The day it started was the  start of the spring break and I would be out of school for several days. That night it sounded like a war, pine trees and limbs snapping all night. The next morning brought total devastation and no power. This meant no water, no cooking, but we had the kerosene heat.  Dad and I cut our way out and down the driveway and saw tree after tree over the power lines. We looked at each other and said let’s go back and get the charcoal grille out. We cooked

meal after meal on the grill. We were out of power for 6 days and nights. There was never a mention of moving out to a hotel. We are going down with the ship I thought and that is what we did. This ice storm was one of the worst, since I did not get out of school and then to top it all was without a bath and descent food for almost a week.

On another occasion, when ice had caused a power outage, Dad and I rode up the road looking for a possible lead for the line crew from REA. We found the broken line down Barnwell Road. We also found the line crew and told them about the broken line. We watched from our warm car as the lineman came down from the repair job in the bucket. When he touched down and was crawling out of the bucket I could see icicles hanging down from each ear lobe. He had been up in the bucket

long enough and the freezing rain had nothing to do but drip from his ears. He was numb, but we had power.