Hot Pops in the Summertime

American boys love horses, cars, and the great outdoors.   It must be one of those XY chromosome things.  They all want to run and play and they dream of riding the best horse, catching the biggest fish, and driving the fastest car.  Mankind has had thousands of years to develop their love for nature.  But, when the first automobiles came into being shortly after 1900, it was an instant hit with boys all around the country.  Of course, it took Henry Ford making an “affordable” car before many were seen in Newton County.  When a vehicle came down the road, it was a big deal.  The noisy motor and the rocks rattling made it easy to hear an approaching car.  Barefoot kids would come running out of the hills and woods to marvel at the passing car and wave to those fortunate enough to be riding in the car.  I suppose, if you ask, each of the James kids can recall the first time they ever rode in a car.  Hard to imagine isn’t it? 

The boys got to where they could identify a vehicle by its sound long before it came in sight.  Often times, they could even tell whose car or truck it was.  So, the game was to tell as much information as possible about the approaching motor coach before it came in sight.  The game still goes on today.  We could hear a car coming loud and fast up the road.  It was somewhere between Herbert Carter’s house and the turn off to Ben Vanderpool’s.  I heard someone say, “I’ll bet that’s Fast Eddie!”  “Who?”  “Eddie Vanderpool.  He must go up and down this road ten times a day and he has the muffler knocked loose on that car again.”  That conversation took place just last year.

Yes, by the late 30s and early 40s things were getting modern in Newton County.  There was a well right outside the kitchen and electric lights in the house.  There was a movie house, The Buffalo Theater, in town.  There were gas stations and even some sales route delivery trucks.  Small stores located in towns like Jasper, Parthenon, Deer, and Judy (Mount Judea to some) made it feasible for a truck to be loaded with store goods in Harrison and then travel a route to all those small stores replenishing their stock.

The boys along Gum Springs Road were especially fond of the Soda Pop delivery truck.   It was loaded down with NEHI strawberry and orange, RC cola and Grapette soda.  In those days there were no plastic two liter bottles or throw away aluminum cans.  Soda was bottled in heavy glass bottles that were refillable.  The driver would start out in Harrison with a load of full bottles.  At each store along his route, the driver would stock the shelves with full bottles and pick up all the empty bottles to be returned to the bottling plant.  The truck was specially manufactured to help the driver perform his job efficiently.  Along both sides of the truck, shelves sloped down toward the center of the bed.  That way the driver did not have to worry about doors or the load sliding around in the truck or even outside the truck.  Twenty-four bottles would fit in wooden cases and then be loaded into the sloping shelves of the truck.  The driver could then easily slide a case in or out of the slots when he loaded or off-loaded the truck.  About once a week, the truck made a delivery in Jasper and then Parthenon.  From Parthenon, the truck came up Gum Springs to number seven, continuing on the route toward Deer and other stores along his route.

“You hear that?”  “I sure do! That’s the soda pop truck!” “Let’s go!”  Sure enough, every Thursday, the truck came lumbering up old Gum Springs Road with glass bottles rattling and the old truck moaning and struggling with the grade and roughness of the road.

Remember the specially designed truck to keep pop bottles from sliding or falling out or breaking?  The design engineers had not been to Newton County.  Certain parts of the road were so steep, rocky, or wet and muddy that every bottle in the truck could be dislodged or broken at any speed above a crawl.  The driver would have to down shift and slowly ease over these difficult spots if he wanted his load to survive.  Somehow, he always managed to lose a few bottles along that stretch of road though.  No matter how slow or how careful he was, there were often bottles missing when he got to the next stop.

“Get back in the brush. He’s gonna see you.”  “Oh he can’t see me, but he may hear your big mouth!”  “Shisssssss! Both of you, shut up, here he comes, get down!”  The boys crouched quietly in the roadside brush, right beside one of those harsh nearly impassable spots in the road.  Then, as the truck came almost to a complete halt, they ran along the offside of the truck and each of them pulled one of the wooden cases out from the sloping shelf.  They pulled it just far enough so that a bottle of pop could be removed.  They each took a bottle and back into the woods they ran.

Why didn’t the driver see the soda pop bandits?  It was another engineering blooper.  Until the 1950s most trucks only had a mirror on the driver’s side and many did not have any at all.  You could stand on the passenger side of the truck behind the cab and the driver never knew you were there.

The boys ran a safe distance down a hollow and sat down to enjoy their bounty.  “What kind did you get?”  “I got a NEHI Orange, how bout you?”  “Oh, I got a Royal Crown Cola… RC is the best!”  “No boys, I got the best…I got a Grapette!  You know “THIRSTY OR NOT, GRAPETTE HITS THE SPOT” (that was an advertising slogan for Grapette soda).”  Grapette was the favorite flavor for most of these young highwaymen for a couple of reasons.  Grape was good any time but it was especially better than the others if you were going to have to drink it hot.  Another and more relevant reason in this situation was that the Grapette bottle was about an inch or so shorter than the other brands.  That made those bottles a little easier to pull from the wooden cases as they passed by on the truck.  These heavy glass bottles did not have screw off lids either.  I doubt that any of them had a bottle opener.  But, that did not present a real problem for these boys.  A pocket knife can be used for just about anything.  The soda was hot.  But, it was wet and sweet.  It also had some special mystery flavor because of how they got it.

Lex says he is pretty sure that if we looked in a certain hollow today that we might find some old empty Grapette bottles.  It seems that they were not bold enough to turn the empties back in to be refilled.  I wonder if the bottling company did not collect and redeem deposits.  Many bottling companies used to charge a deposit on bottles.  When you returned the empty bottles, you got your deposit back.  It may be that the boys did not turn in the empties because they did not want to raise suspicion about how they came to possess those bottles.  After all, it was very few bottles of soda pop that were ever bought by the James household.

Remember, just because Lex told this story does not automatically mean that he or his brothers were the ones who liberated the NEHI, RC, and Grapette sodas along Gum Springs Road.  I also know for a fact, that this story is not how Lex came to be known as Jessie James.

And that’s the way I heard it on the mountain,

Tony Peoples

Rock and Roll on Gum Springs Road

It is nearly impossible to imagine a world without all the technology and electronic gizmos that surround us today.  What if they were all gone, even television and telephones?  What would you possibly do for entertainment?  The James kids found plenty to entertain themselves.  Some of them say that is what the family farm was all about.  Grandpa and Grandma knew that the farm was not big enough to provide food and income for the large family.  They also knew that it would provide plenty of hard work to keep all those children out of trouble.  Well, most of the time anyway.

When these kids went for a road,trip it meant walking down the road.  One of the most common and eventful road trips was down to Parthenon.  They walked down to Parthenon at least once a week to attend church.  Some of the boys have said they didn’t care that much about going to church, but it was about the only entertainment around.   They walked, ran, and played all the way down to town and all the way home, throwing rocks, talking and laughing as they went.  Sometimes, a rock was just too big to throw.  So, they would give it a roll.

Uncle Lex describes rock rolling as finding a large round rock on top of a hill or ridge and sending it down the hill.  He and his brothers, Lytle and Gerald, would pry and dig around on a large rock until it was dislodged.  Then, with just a little persuasion, gravity and inertia would take over and away she went; crashing trees, brush and anything else between the rolling boulder and the bottom of the hill.

Gum Springs Road is the main thoroughfare to Parthenon.  But, in those days, all of the hills were covered with trails and smaller pathways.  So, when one took off down to Parthenon, he might not just go down the big main road.  One path is out “the Narrows” (pronounced more like narras).  It is a nearly flat road out a long extremely narrow ridge.  It is a much easier walk until the last quarter-mile.  Then, you descend almost vertically into the Parthenon area.  It requires a billy goat or a James boy to make it up or down that near cliff- like slope.

One Sunday afternoon, Lex, Gerald and Lytle were playing along the Narrows on the way back from Parthenon when somebody spotted a huge rock and said, “Let’s roll that sucker!”  “You gotta be kiddin’, that thing must weigh a ton!” “Awh come on you big babies, we can do it!”  It was huge, maybe three or four foot across and eight to fourteen inches thick.  It would take a lot of work and it did probably weigh four or five hundred pounds. But, if they could get it up on its edge and pointed down hill?  Wow, look out below!  For the next half- hour or so, they clawed, pried, and dug around the monster rock until finally it stood upright on the edge of the ridge ready to make rock rolling history.

The boys stood back and admired their work for a minute and then with all the strength they could muster they sent the mighty destroyer down the mountain.   Small trees were swatted to the ground by the rolling thunder.  Limbs cracked and snapped as the massive stone picked up speed.  Soon it was out of sight but still in hearing range.  “Man, I never dreamed it would go that far!”  “Wow. It’s still a goin.’”  “You think it’s ever gonna stop?”  “What’s down there?”  “The road.” …………“The road?”………… “THE ROAD!!!”  “Good Lord! What if someone is on the road?”  They could still hear timber crashing in the distance but somehow it was not as funny as it had been just seconds ago.  “Hey boys, it’s not just the road.  I think we are right above Ole man Casey’s place.”   Sure enough, they had started the boulder down from directly above Mr. Casey’s house.  Finally, they could no longer hear it.  One looked at the others and ask, “Do you think she stopped or has she gone so far down the mountain that we just cain’t hear it anymore?”  “I don’t know about that, but one thing I do know is that we better skedaddle.”  And they did.

As usual, they could not stay away and returned to the scene of the crime to survey the damages.  It looked as though a two to three foot wide tornado had come straight down the hill over a quarter of a mile to the grader ditch.  When the rock hit that ditch it went airborne and landed right in the middle of Gum Springs Road.  It then skidded across Casey’s small yard and right up to the back door of the house.  They tell me old man Casey used that slab as the back step for as long as he lived there. 

Fortunately, no one was hurt and Mr. Casey got a new back step. They were just that close to rolling a rock through the old man’s house.  Some days you are lucky to be a James and others you are just James lucky!

And that's the way I heard it on the mountain,
Tony Peoples