I THINK It Was An Accident!

           "It looks taller than our water tower."

           "It would have to be. It's in the Weekly Reader!"

           "I'd like to climb that thing one day!"

           We were staring at the front page of the magazine Mrs. Paschall required us to "visit" each week. Mostly it informed us about life on the Amazon River or the magnitude and difficulty in building the Aswan Dam. And every week we learned (whether we wanted to or not) that the staple crops in Botswana or Honduras or Western Slabolia was rice, barely, corn, wheat and oats.

           This early Friday morning in 1959, the weekly publication's cover story was on landmarks. It was my first look ever at the famed Eiffel Tower. And listen, there was no doubt that Robert Holmes Brewer could climb that thing if he wanted to! He could shinny up our little town's water tower in nothing flat in the dead of night with the lone city police car circling the square every ten minutes! I had seen him do it lots of times.

           We continued the discussion that afternoon at the City Café. "Did the Eiffel Tower mark some important treaty?"

           We pondered on Bob Edwards' question in silence as we listened to Johnny Horton's "Battle of New Orleans". The juke box was way over in the corner. But the City Café had the neatest set up you've ever seen. They had a small apparatus at each booth that listed all the songs. You could drop in a nickel and push the right button and hear Marty Robbins's "Singing the Blues" without ever leaving your seat! And the hamburgers were the greatest eatin' east of the Mississippi! I think it was the extra grease..

           "They've got a miniature replica Eiffel Tower over in Paris." Pam Collins was referring to Paris, Tennessee, 20 miles northeast of us. I munched on my fries as the dangdest conversation unfolded on towers, landmarks, vacation spots, how to treat the mange, Nancy Bateman's new hair do and what was playing Saturday at the Park Theatre.

           There was a warmth and openness in the comfort of the City Café that bred spontaneous and revealing thoughts that marked our time and place. We were "we" in the friendly confines of those big red naughahyde booths.

           The aforementioned Park Theatre was our escape. In the early days we rode herd with Lash, Roy, Gene and Hoppy. Later, we watched virtue triumph in "The Bridge on the River Kwai". "Old Yeller" died there. Love was bigger than life in "Picnic" and "Splendor in the Grass". We wanted to be as smooth as Cary Grant, cool as Paul Newman and tough as Steve McQueen. We learned much in the darkness of that old theater.       

           By the tenth grade we were meeting at Frank's Dairy Bar. The booths were still red, you had to walk over to the juke box to play a song and the hamburgers contained only half the grease; but the enlightenment continued as we searched for our identity as we entered "drivers' license" age. Franks was a gathering point, and a haven, amid the turmoil of suddenly un-hip parents, serious love and the swirling social upheaval of the '60's. We moved from Johnny Horton to Bo Diddley, Pete Seager and the Beatles.

           Me and Buddy Wiggleton and Hollis Mayo were chewing the fat with Jim Dick Crews on a park bench on the Cedar Avenue side of the town square when Eddie Carden blew right through our only red light. Jim Dick was the assistant police chief. It was fairly customary for us to gather up on the square after a date or on our way home from Franks to compare notes on how the evening had gone. Jim Dick would join us on occasion. We watched in awe as Eddie roared through the light and was in the midst of buzzing us when he recognized we had "company". He hit the brakes on that old Ford, slid side ways on the empty street and skidded to a stop against the curb right in front of us. He leaped out of the car sans his shirt with both hands raised high in the air and proclaimed, "Don't shoot, Jim Dick, I surrender!"

           Mary Hadley Hayden actually shared a chocolate malt with me one late summer afternoon at John Motheral's Drugstore. And our hands accidentally brushed as we reached for the straw at the same time. She smiled! And was reasonably slow, I distinctly remember, in retrieving her hand. Folks, that landmark would make the Eiffel Tower look like your Aunt Matilda's trifling rock garden!

           And we haven't even gotten to the meteorite at the corner of Stonewall and Magnolia; or the ball park over by Bethel College; or the clay pits; or the high school football field...

           Suzie Cozart asked Miss Paschall what makes a landmark, well, a landmark! She replied, "It denotes an important place, date, situation, ideology or significant event in history. It should be visited and admired and respected for what it stands for and for the occasion that sets it apart. It usually transcends the local setting to appeal to a much broader spectrum of people. It is almost always bigger than the sum of its parts. It often touches the very fiber of our soul. It helps define who we are and what we cherish."

           It would be great to see the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triumph, the Brandenburg Gate, Niagara Falls and those presidents' heads out in the Black Hills...but I wouldn't trade all of them for one of the landmarks I was privileged to visit as a youth in our precious little town..

                Respectfully,

                      Kes