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Edited on Sun Apr-17-11 12:05 AM by mgc1961
I took a drive today, back to Clarksville, TN. It's the town in which I spent about half of my youth. To be exact, it was the second half of my youth having moved there in 1974 after my Dad's retirement from the U.S. Air Force.
Mom and Dad still live there though they were not home today. They went to visit Mom's sister in Greensboro/High Point, NC. I had other things on my mind today than a visit with my parents.
The reason I was in Clarksville was twofold: Browse the inventory of a motorcycle store and drive around town a bit to see what changes I've missed over the years since most of my recent visits were confined to my parents house.
The view was quite an eye opener. The old-and-so-inadequate-by-today's-standard-mall is still standing although it's only partially used and the Hungry Farmer buffet restaurant that tooled along for many years is now gone. I drove around back, along the river side, to see if I could still spot the door (despite the alterations) where we unloaded the Robert Orr truck of canned vegetables onto a dumbwaiter for storage over the kitchen.
The original Acme boot factory has given way to a block of apartments and the somewhat dilapidated old two-story brick house on Golf Club Lane that remained for many years mostly concealed from local traffic by vegetation was plowed under for a Lowe's Home Improvement store.
Memorial Hospital, were I worked for a time after high school, is now gone to make way for a supermarket. The drug store where my brother and I waited in the early morning hours for our bundles of Sunday newspapers is still there although it's now being used as a small clearance store. Eastside Bowling Lanes is still there too, seemingly forever.
My high school is still pretty much as it was when I was there although it has a couple of new additions and competes with three more high schools in town. One of the additions appears to be classrooms and offices, another is for the wrestling team, and the football team now plays on the school grounds rather than sharing a field with Austin Peay State University. And despite the changes I think it's still possible to use my cross-country team's trail around the campuses outskirts.
I wondered, as I sometimes do, if somewhere in the basement there are copies of the school paper my sister edited while we were students. I wasn't much of a writer (nothing much has changed on that front), but I did create a couple of decent cartoons with a little inspiration from Mad Magazine.
Those alterations to the city scape, though somewhat disturbing, were nothing in comparison to the personal impact of what occurred in the proximity of my parent's home.
My parents house has been rezoned commercial. This makes the land around them very valuable to the encroaching city's economic needs to which some of their neighbors have succumbed. The most recent departure was their widowed next door neighbor.
The Wicks were already living in their expanded renovation when we moved in next to them. Their daughter became my first girlfriend so I spent a great deal of time in their home, far more than anyone else in our family, so I learned something of the house's history from its unique parlor.
The parlor was the room into which visitors once entered the old section of the house although when the Wicks lived there that door wasn't used in favor of a second door at the front of the addition and the back door which was near to where they parked their cars. The parlor was used only for Christmas, where they put their tree. In addition to the tree however, were Victorian furnishings and full bookcases along one wall, the remnants of the previous owner that were included in the sale of the home.
One evening (c.1978) I began thumbing through the books and expressed some interest in some of the titles. Bobbi asked her parents the following day if I could have some of them and they agreed. I didn't want to violate their hospitality so I confined myself to a few history books (History of England by Edith Thompson, 1874 and Taking Manila by Thomas Hurst, 1899), poetry (The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 1876), some children's books, and a University of Tennessee year book that belonged to a man who lived there before the Wicks, Norfleet Lynn Carney.
Norfleet graduated from UT in 1913 with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. He was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. He studied German and was a member of the university German club and the school's Athletic Association. Since the University of Tennessee enrollment at that time was pretty small by today's standards (According to the annual there were only 156 freshmen in the incoming class), many of the students knew each other. Consequently, personal inscriptions were added to senior photos. About Norfleet, it was written: "This is our friend Norfleet Carney, He's handsome but awfully shy; He could win any girl that he wanted Except he's too timid to try."
About a month or so ago Mom told me the house in which the Carney's and Wicks' lived was leveled along with the perimeter of trees that shielded the old house from the fossil fuel highway along which it stood for so many years. Today, I saw the result. In it's place is a muddy, denuded lot on which sits the cinder block skeleton of a soon to be completed gas station.
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