Growing Up in Agurs
Guest Author ~ Jerry OglethorpeWhen I was a tiny, little lad living in the heartbeat of Agurs, I could walk in almost any direction and run into water within minutes. Please do not misunderstand. Agurs was not entirely bayous, ponds and Red River. We still had cotton fields, hangovers from a time when cotton was king in the old south. A plant near our house (Cunningham's, where Daddy worked) manufactured sawmill machinery, and across Highway 71 was Byrd Roofing, which made shingles to keep the rain out.
Near Cross Bayou was the “black sheep” of our neighborhood, the slaughter pen, which smelled like hell in summer. Some people called it the glue factory, but I never got close enough to really know what was inside the building on the property. A few old, worn-out horses were always outside grazing in the attached pasture. My assumption was that they would become glue one day soon. We lived at the corner of the two main residential streets in the heart of Agurs, Ricou and LaSalle. Our house was one of the biggest in the area, but it would have appeared small to people today who live in such big houses. We had four bedrooms, one for Mama and the smallest child, one for Daddy, and the other two for kids.
My earliest memories of a bed and bedroom go back to a cot in Mama’s bedroom where I slept at the age of 2 after Judy was born. The six kids in our clan never lived in the house at the same time, since Betty Fay and Bobby Ray left relatively early. She got married, and he went to the Korean War. Dorothy then took the front bedroom, and Judy and I were in the middle room after Danny was born. As we entered puberty, I moved to what had been up until then the back porch.
Agurs had many streets named for early French explorers and colonizers, names that we actually pronounced pretty well in spite of our Anglo tongues. Saying Cadillac the French way was out of the question, but the French themselves couldn't have said Ricou any better than we did. Aunt Lola and Uncle Bailey lived on the other side of Cunningham Machinery on Ricou Street, next to the little cafe where the workers often went to eat.
Aunt Lola and Uncle Bailey never went to the Mr. and Mrs. Sutton's cafe, although it was just a few feet away. They never went anywhere much except to church and on an occasional visit to relatives. It's possible that they may have viewed going to the cafe as a sin. For one thing, the cafe had a jukebox that played "worldly" songs, and the language among the workers may have been interspersed with "cussing."
They had sycamore trees growing in front of their shotgun house, and even on the hottest days it was cool on their front porch. Life Tabernacle Church was the center of their world, and all conversations tended to include their beliefs. Sometimes Aunt Lola could be rough as she quickly condemned the young girls walking past in shorts. I didn't ask her why the teenage girls were going to hell because I already knew that shorts were a sin.
Once when I was about 9-years-old, I came in from Barrett School and told her that the world is round. Mrs.Murphy had told us in class that day that the world is round and goes around the sun. "The world is not round," she told me with total conviction and reached for her Bible. She found a scripture that spoke of the four corners of the earth, and for her, that was proof enough that the world was not round.
Uncle Bailey was taciturn and sometimes didn't seem to like kids much, but he was always there for me later as a teenager when I would break down somewhere out on the road. No matter how far from home I was, he would get in his old car to come out and help me. "Oh, you thought cars would run without gas," he might say with his funny little half-smile. Then he would take a can of gasoline out of his car and put some in the carburetor and the rest in the tank. I never thought to give any compensation, not even for the gas he had to buy. He didn't seem to expect anything either. I usually went to Sunday school with him, and maybe that was enough.
Sometimes Aunt Gracie would come to see Aunt Lola, and Judy and I could see her all the way down at the end of Ricou Street coming from where the bus stopped downtown. She always had Cracker Jacks for us, the box with the little prize in the bottom. I didn't care for the Cracker Jacks as such but would eat them quickly to get to the prize. She was always so much fun to be with, and she had wonderful stories about the kids at the Shriners Hospital, where she worked. We would often eat watermelon in the backyard when she was at Aunt Lola's.
I always thought Aunt Lola seemed a lot older than Uncle Bailey, and I never had seen a husband and wife with such an age difference. When I mentioned this to my mother, she said, "They ain't married. They're brothers and sisters."
Freddie, my best friend, lived down at the end of LaSalle, next to the black Baptist Church and cemetery. The Denler property was about as close as Agurs got to a plantation. Freddie's dad, Mr. Denler, never learned to read and write, but he knew all about selling pecans and refinishing expensive furniture. His shop was in back and off to the side of the house, and the rest of the backyard was covered with fruit trees. Mr. Denler, Freddie and me would go up to the plantations near Dixie on the Red River to pick up the pecans that he sold on Highway 71 every fall.
Mr. Denler was just about the greatest dad I would ever meet as a kid. Relatively tall, he towered over Freddie and me and told us funny little anecdotes about people, such as Mr. Agurs, the man the neighborhood was named for, who was very stingy.
Once I saw Mr. Denler dive from the diving board with a cigarette in his mouth, then come up out of the water and show us that it was still lit. He had a trick that involved putting the lit end of the cigarette inside his mouth diving.
He must have had an interest in black girls because once he took Freddie and me to the Harlem show at the state fair, which was full of black women in skimpy outfits. The two of us must have been about 12-years-old at the time, and we thought it was a strip-tease show.
One of my favorite tricks of Mr. Denler was the one involving his false teeth. Sometimes when we were stopped at a red light in the truck, he would look at someone standing on the street and make his false teeth come about half-way out of his mouth. The person on the street didn't quite know what to make of it, and we all laughed, Mr. Denler laughing the loudest.
Bittick's Store, the heart and soul of Agurs, was catty-cornered to our house across La Salle, and almost everyone living on those two streets made it to the store at least once a day. Mr. Bittick was a quiet, middle-aged man, with glasses, and he parked his ancient car in a primitive carport next to the store. Maybe as often as once a month he would go out and start the car, which was a long and painful ordeal, and go somewhere over in Shreveport. Otherwise, the car just set there all of the time.
Mrs. Bittick was a small, white-haired woman with a limp. I never remember her as having anything but white hair, although she would later live a long time after Mr. Bittick died. Mama never wanted us to go outside when we missed school "because Mrs. Bittick might see you." She seemed to think Mrs. Bittick would call the schools, but I think Mama misjudged the storekeeper's wife. Mama never crossed the street to go to the store and didn't know Mrs. Bittick, who seemed to like the Oglethorpe kids. Mrs. Bittick's younger sister, Pudge, was a dwarf, the first one I ever saw. Once in a while Pudge would visit the store, and Mama would tell us she was a midget. I don’t remember ever talking to Pudge, nor do I know what kind of life she may have had in the world of that time. It must have been rough, but as children, we hardly thought of such things.
Most of the people going to the store walked past our house, and if Mama was out on the porch, they would stop to gossip a while. Many of the houses were small, and people spent a lot of time outside. Freddie's house wasn't so small, but he loved being out because he enjoyed being with the other boys. We knew each other like brothers by the time we were in the third grade.
Some of Mr. Denler's salesmanship skills seemed to have rubbed off on Freddie, the only boy in his family. His two older sisters were married and for the most part gone by the time Freddie and I were good buddies. Freddie would be the natural recipient of Mr. Denler's acquired tricks of the trade. His knack for selling things worked in my favor during the days when Hamilton Terrace Junior High made us go out in the community to support the school. We had to sell booster tickets for the football team. These were not tickets to get into the football games since admittance was free; they were simply to show support for the team, which, by the way was called "the Terrors." Never before or since have I heard of a team called "terrors," but it fitted well with the school name, Hamilton Terrace.
A student could take up to eight tickets to sell, but everyone had to go out with at least two. I would take my two tickets and walk around Agurs, going to the barber shop on North Market, then to the businesses on Grimmet Drive, which was the small downtown area when Agurs was a town independent of Shreveport. When I had sold my two tickets, I sighed with relief and turned in the money. I knew from that time on that I never would be a salesman.
For Freddie the experience was entirely different. He looked forward each year we were in Hamilton Terrace to selling booster tickets. He relished it and took home the maximum eight tickets to sell. What made it different for the two of us is two-fold. I was shy, and he was not, and secondly, he had discovered a potential in selling booster tickets that I never would have dreamed of. He could imagine the benefits that would come to him as well as the school if he didn't give the tickets to contributors. When Freddie would go into the barbershop, he would make the usual spill about supporting the school team. Then he would show the ticket without actually handing it to the person. It was, for him, like someone showing you his office card, and it probably gave him an air of being legitimate instead of a con artist. The truth is that Freddie was both legitimate and a con artist at the same time.
"If they don't ask for the booster ticket," he told me, "I don't give it to them.”
That meant he could keep selling the same ticket over and over until someone asked for it. When the last ticket was gone, he would give the school the price of eight tickets and keep the rest for himself. It turned out ok, considering that the school got its money, and Freddie was paid for his work.
Our destination then was Bittick's Store, where Freddie would buy R.C. colas and Eskimo Pies for the two of us and any other kids who happened to be there. We would pay Mr. Bittick, whom I had been seeing since the day I was born, and go outside on the porch to enjoy our snacks. The red, wooden store had three sets of steps going up to the porch, one in front and two on the sides. We liked to sit on the east-side steps, facing the railroad, and to watch the switch engines pulling cars of sand to the Coastal Plains cement plant. In other words, we put Freddie's newly earned booster ticket money to good use. While there was no shortage of soft drinks in those days, it was not everyday that I had an Eskimo Pie to go with my R.C. (Royal Crown).
Omar Helverston lived in the house behind the store, and sometimes he would walk past and say a few words when we were there. He had been in Agurs a year before I learned his name was not Homer. Everybody called him Homer, which was an indication of what a weird life he had experienced. In a time before he moved to Agurs, Omar had broken his arm, and his parents, evidently, had not brought him to the doctor. The bone had grown back wrong, so that the palm of his hand was facing forward when his arm drooped down. He lived in the three-room house behind the store with his brother, sister and parents.
"I heard you learning to drive, Homer," Freddie might say.
"I'm trying," Homer would respond, “but that danged old car ain't been running all week."
The other skill Freddie learned from his father, working on furniture, turned out to be a mixed blessing. As we edged over the line into puberty, we began to worry about how we looked. I don't mean the color of our eyes or the condition of our hair, but our muscles. Lifting weights seemed the answer to our prayers to be big and strong so that big boys wouldn't be bullying us around. Both of us were familiar with the Charles Atlas ads on the backs of comic books. They showed a skinny boy lying on the beach while a big boy kicked sand into his eyes. The solution, according to this ad, was to order weights from Charles Atlas.
We filled in the form and sent our required 10 cents for information. Charles Atlas sent a brochure that mostly told what kind of weights was available and what they would cost. The price was beyond our means, even with Freddie's income from the booster tickets. We responded with a letter written on a brown, paper bag saying that we were just poor boys who would really appreciate a charitable discount on the prices. It wasn't our fault that we lived in Agurs and our parents had no money. Why shouldn't we be given a chance? Charles Atlas probably couldn't have stayed in business if he had started giving discounts, and we never heard from him again.
Then one day we were walking down the railroad passing Cunningham's foundry when we saw flat, iron disks piled outside the pattern shop. Since it was the weekend and Cunningham's had no fences, we walked over to look at them. "Nice," Freddie said, picking up one of the disks. "We could put two of these on a bar and have barbells."
We walked inside the open door of the little pattern shop to look around. Nobody was around, not even the old, deaf night watchman. Patterns were stacked everywhere. These were the wooden forms into which molten iron was poured in the foundry. It took a skilled worker to make them because their measurements had to be precise.
"I have a plan," Freddie said, "but I'll have to go home and get my hammer and nails."
This sounded suspicious to me, but who was I to challenge Freddie's ability to size up any situation and know exactly what to do? He was a year older than I was and much older in worldly experience. I went to school, church and the A&P, and there wasn't a whole lot else. Every summer we went to the family reunion down in the country with Uncle Bailey and Aunt Lola, but I couldn't have called that a maturing experience. Maybe more educational were the horror and cowboy movies I saw in downtown Shreveport on Saturday mornings. I loved movies and enjoyed walking down with the gang. Afterwards, we would stop and look around in the five-and-ten stores on the way home. Our parents had a vague idea of where we were, and it didn't really make much difference as long as we got back some time in the afternoon.
Freddie came back to the pattern shop with the hammer and nails, and soon I could see what he had envisioned with the patterns. He made each of us a bench for the bench press. You can't imagine how quickly he had the patterns nailed together to form two lovely benches. I wouldn't have dreamed it possible. Then we went out and picked up some of the iron disks to serve as our weights and carried them inside the pattern shop. After a brief workout to try our equipment, we left our new gym until next time.
There would never be a next time. Mr. Russell, the new manager of Cunningham's after Mr. Cunningham retired, called our house the next morning and asked for me. "I need to talk to you," he said. "Come on up to the office."
You have to remember that this man was Daddy's boss, and there was no question of not going. The workers must have complained that Monday morning when they came in and found the patterns nailed together. A few questions were asked, and somebody, obviously, had seen us on the premises. In any case, I wasn't about to report to Mr. Russell by myself, and I called Freddie. "Mr. Russell wants to see both of us in his office right now."
We went together and went into the brick office that I already had been inside a number of times with Daddy. For Freddie, it was the first time. We were told to go upstairs to Mr. Russell’s private office, and the elderly, bald plant manager in glasses explained to us that we had cost the company a lot of money by ruining the patterns. We told him that we had just wanted to have some good benches for the bench press, and he responded that a foundry was no place for a gym. The three of us descended the stairs together and walked across the street to the pattern shop.
"Can you take the patterns apart?" he asked Freddie.
Freddie had the nails out in five minutes. His father had done a good job teaching him about furniture work. Then when Freddie was finished, he had the nerve to turn around and ask Mr. Russell if we could keep some of the old, unused iron.
"We don't really have any old, unused iron," Mr. Russell said. "But tell you what, I'll get Mr. Adams to look around and find you something."
And he did. We left very happily carrying loads of iron. My iron went to the garage in back where I would take very seriously our unwritten pact to become muscular. Freddie took it seriously, too, and we were on our way to stunting our growth and wrecking our bones, both of us. We both were the same height, and neither of us would grow much after that as we tried to lift heavier and heavier weights. In trying to make ourselves big and strong, we would assure ourselves in the future of always being the shortest in every group for the rest of our lives.
Sometimes life is that way.
Life among the bayous of Agurs was full of irony and sometimes tragedy.
All of that water was perpetually there in the bayous, lakes, ponds and puddles, yet we didn't learn to swim until we were about 11-years-old.*
Mr. Denler started taking us to the Municipal Swimming Pool over in the main part of Shreveport, and we both learned to swim about the same time on our second night.
Freddie's dad would always start waving at us when it was time to leave. Then we would ride back to Agurs in the back of Mr. Denler's Ford pickup. It was always at night because Mr. Denler had to work during the day, and the glow of the street lights over our heads made us look purple.
When I think of happiness, I think of those nights.
* Going into the river and bayous would have been dangerous because of snakes, whirlpools, quicksand, etc.
This was written by my cousin, Jerry Oglethorpe, a retired newspaper reporter, in honor of his close childhood friend, Freddie, recently passed.
Coypright ~ 2007
Copied and edited with permission from the author.
Thank you so much for sharing your very special memories with us, Jerry.
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