By Neal Wooten
I worked most of the day at the Depot Museum Saturday during Fort Payne’s Boom Days celebration. We must have had over 200 visitors from all over the country.
And of course we had plenty of locals. Among the visitors from this area, there were about two dozen individuals and couples who made the long hard day worthwhile. Those were the ones who said “Are you Neal? We read your articles every week.”
That meant a lot to me. I noticed the majority of the folks who were kind enough to share this info were like me — from a bygone era when things were simpler and more honest. The older we get and the more the world changes around us, I think the more those trips down Memory Lane mean.
Together we have once again played Hide-and-Seek with our cousins, smoked Rabbit Tobacco, swam in the creek, made Muscadine wine, enjoyed the nectar of a honeysuckle, fiddled earthworms, baled hay, and turned the antenna so we could sit up late and watch Shock Theater.
We rediscovered how much fun we could have with just a wooden thread spool, a rubber band, and a matchstick. We could play barefoot all day in the sand with our new tractor. Finding an old inner tube meant also finding a forked stick so we could make slingshots.
Once again we sat in a circle in the dirt with friends and played Jacks or Marbles, or sat around the table after dinner playing Rummy. Sometimes when we didn’t have a deck of playing cards, I would cut up empty cracker boxes and make a set. Of course it didn’t take long to learn that the card with “Saltines” written on the back was the Ace of Spades.
We’ve relived flipping the little plastic knob on our 13-inch TV to one of three channels we were lucky enough to get. Well, at least until the knob broke and then we used a set of pliers. And to this day, nothing comes close to Andy Griffith, I Love Lucy, Hee Haw, and Saturday morning cartoons.
The old holidays have been revisited when we died dozens of hardboiled eggs, carved jack-o-lanterns with Mom’s butcher knife, make homemade banana pudding, popped popcorn for Christmas tree decorations, and shot mistletoe out of a tree with a .22 rifle.
Even the things we hated back then are missed, like helping Mom can vegetable soup and Blackberry Jam, splitting firewood, and nothing was more frightening than coming home and seeing a huge aluminum tub full of string beans.
So let me say “Thank you” to all who read my articles and remember. If you keep reading, I’ll keep writing.