My good friend Dorothy K. Fletcher has written numerous books and newspaper articles detailing life in Jacksonville. She has also written articles for the Florida Times-Union, and I can safely say that “Dottie” is why I began to write. Dottie’s newspaper column “By the Wayside” included tales of growing up in the Southside of Jacksonville. Now that Dottie no longer writes her column, her focus has been books about Jacksonville life, including old movie houses and iconic Jacksonville restaurants of yesteryear. She has also written about summer camps and automobiles. Once in a while, Dottie calls to pick my brain on Jacksonville history (the fluffy stuff). Between the two of us, she has another small forgotten detail sitting on the tip of her tongue, only needing me to help her “spit it out.” I enjoy reading Dottie’s books because they chronicle my life and remind me of forgotten details. When these details surface, they remind me of a charmed, uncomplicated life with loving parents, my old church friends, summer camp, and happy times. I have all of her books and love her writing about times past. We lived in the same neighborhood and grew up together in the same church, even sharing a crush on the same boy. With some prompting, I remember most things that happened fifty years ago in great detail but don’t ask me what happened yesterday. Dottie also uses photos of mine in her books. Dottie is an inspiration and always will be my dear friend.
Dorothy K. Fletcher
On Saturday night, my parents loved to go to the movies, and the easiest way to do this was to jump in the car and head for the Southside Drive-In Theater near our house at 2767 Rainbow Circle. My dad was on the road most of the week with his job leaving my mother to deal with Neil and me by herself. My parents did not use foul language, but on occasion, I remember my mother screaming, “God-damn it…you kids are going to send me to Chattahoochee”. For non-natives, Chattahoochee is where Florida’s infamous state mental institution was. Being from Pittsburgh, I’m not sure why my mother was so knowledgeable about Chattahoochee, but she always thought about going there. My best guess is that it would give her a break from ironing the sheets we all slept on, ironing the white damask tablecloths that were always on the table, and ironing every item of clothing we wore. My mother may have even iron my brother’s cloth diapers and my father’s boxer shorts. When Dad was home on the weekend, he only wanted a home-cooked meal, a highball, and some TV. All Mom wanted to do was get out of the house. Mom usually won.
Never needing to go to Chattahoochee, our family often went to the Southside Drive-In Theater. I loved the movies (indoors or outside), and it must have been Mom’s idea to head for the drive-in. They only broadcast a few movies on TV before midnight, and my Dad always took me to the movies downtown to give my Mother some downtime. Back then, we thought nothing of arriving at a theatre in the middle of the film. Then, after the movie ended, we’d hang around until the next showing to see the show’s first half.
Dad took us all to see blockbuster movies like “Around the World in Eighty Days,” “The Ten Commandments,” “The King and I,” “Mutiny on the Bounty,” and “Hawaii.” The drive-in was also where my Dad, unfortunate enough to be at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, could practice his fine listening skills, locating and finally killing that one blood-filled enemy only equaled by the Japanese……the mosquito. Rather than rolling up our car windows to avoid breathing in the mosquito man’s toxic pesticide cloud whose fogger made its regular round down the rows of cars at the drive-in, we would roll the windows down to ensure the inside of the vehicle was well-fumigated. I never could get away from this roving fogger. He was probably the only man dumb enough to take a job like that. I truly believe he just drove and drove that fogger until it ran out of gas… he’d stop and fill up… and then go back to where ever I was at any given time. His route was from the drive-ins in Jacksonville to our street in Gainesville, then back to Jacksonville. Tell me, please, exactly what was in that fogger anyway??
I longed to go to the playground at the front of the drive-in under the big white movie screen. Unfortunately, we were never allowed to play on the swings before the movie started. My parents thought escaped prisoners would abduct us. Escaped prisoners were the only thing I was ever worried about. At the drive-in, Dad certainly didn’t take advantage of any needed snuggle time with my mother because she’d have half of her body hanging outside the passenger window praying for the cool breeze that never came. Drive-in popcorn was the ultimate treat, and Mom made us a thermos full of the dentist’s best friend, Kool-Aid.
My father was over six feet tall, so the entire front seat was pushed back to the maximum length, leaving Neil and me little or no legroom in the back seat of the family car. I remember all old cars had one front seat with no consoles, drink holders, or armrests. None of those automotive amenities had been invented. All passengers were at the will of the driver’s height regarding seat position, and my back seat comfort was never the number one thing on my father’s mind, drive-in or not. When Dad usually did most of the driving on summer road trips to Pittsburgh, I traveled in a fetal position in the back seat. Between me and my brother, the boundary determining his territory and mine was the big hump on the floor in the back middle. That hump might as well have been an electrified razor wire fence. We never allowed the other admittance to the other’s side. Whether at the drive-in or on the road to Pittsburgh, the invisible barbed wire was ever-present. Being referred to as “antsy” by my mother, I recall the torment of what is now called Restless Legs Syndrome. As one of life’s cruel little jokes, I believe I caught RLS in the back seat of our car. Some of that ancient Coca-Cola with some cocaine would have been a remarkable breakthrough for RLS sufferers had anyone given it any thought. Unfortunately, kids today have no drive-ins. On the other hand, that simple fogger may be the only reason anyone my age has cancer.
I learned how to drive in a Plymouth Valiant
The other favorite neighborhood destination in the Lakewood Shopping Plaza was the quiet and elegant “The Pharmacy” drugstore. They sold greeting cards, Revlon Make-Up, Ambush, and Faberge perfumes. In addition, they sold small gifts and hundreds of magazines that featured movie stars, teen fashion, British invasion bands, and of course, Look and Life Magazines. It was magazine heaven. I spent quite a lot of time at the lunch counter there and used the Haywood-Wakefield blonde Bell System phone booths next to the lunch counter to call my friends. The Pharmacy also had a full-service post office. Other than a visit downtown, the Pharmacy was a favorite destination well into my high school years. It was one of the two places I was allowed to go while my Mom was grocery shopping at the A&P, which was the shopping center’s anchor store. No escaped prisoners were there. After ensuring my Mom had put a “Spanish Bar Cake” in the grocery cart, I’d head for the Pharmacy or Peterson’s 5 & 10 to entertain myself until Mom finished grocery shopping. Nothing was ever on-sale at The Pharmacy. It was where young men bought their steady girlfriends Christmas gifts, and husbands bought their last-minute “I forgot my wedding anniversary” gifts. I loved the place.
At Peterson’s 5 & 10, next door, the two main attractions when I was small were: 1) I could go by myself, and 2) they sold candy cigarettes. They also sold these ridiculously over-engineered tiny wax cola bottles, “Nik-L-Nips,” filled with unknown flavored liquid. After biting the top off the three-inch wax bottle, the reward was approximately two teaspoons of colored sugar water. But…Ahhh…heaven. After the tiny bottle was empty, you were supposed to chew the wax. Chewing this wax was right up there with little wooden ice cream spoons. They both gave me the chills and made me gag. I was a big gagger back then. Things like liquid starch and tempera (the finger-paint recipe), liquid starch and newspaper strips (the Paper-Mache recipe), the smell of a bar of Palmolive soap or any milk that didn’t have a Sealtest label on it…well, to put it crudely, sent me into projectile vomiting fits that sometimes started off a chain reaction with fellow kindergartners and probably a teacher or two after they left the room to “wash their hands.” They still sell those little wax bottles in the nostalgia candy section at The World Market. I think the same guy who invented the Nik-L-Nips also came up with the idea of filling little foil-wrapped chocolate candy bottles with Jack Daniels or Kahlua. Please don’t quote me on that. Peterson’s 5 & 10 also sold Mouseketeer hats with ears.
Also in Lakewood Plaza was the A&P Grocery. It was the first store where I had memorized the entire inventory, enabling me to fetch any item that came to my mother’s mind at any moment. The stock boy would even let me use his little stamp circle price machine to stamp a few cans for him. I didn’t do enough cans so he could have a smoke break, but a good dozen or so was a real treat for a six-year-old. A & P’s signature Ann Page Spanish Bar was my favorite cake and a staple at my house. My mother also loved the dark, two-layer loaf of spice cake with a thin layer of white icing with lines in the icing accomplished by running your fork over the icing to add a little flair. All of these places from my past are gone forever, but today, when I drive by Lakewood Plaza, I still see only those stores.
However special these places were to me, they also had the ugliness of separate water fountains for white and colored, employed all white men, and, if that wasn’t bad enough, did not seat black men, women, or children at the lunch counter or cater to any of the needs of the people just down the road near Emerson Street and St. Augustine Road. I don’t recall seeing black men or women at the stores in Lakewood. Instead, they had to take a hot city bus downtown to Kress to purchase the likes of hairnets with little beads woven through them, the perfect powder puff, Noxzema, and other necessities like hankies, comic books, paper dolls, sparklers, wax lips, hand buzzers, and falsies. I never knew any black people as a child. The only exception was Earl, who worked at the A& P. He was an older gray-haired black man who carried my Mother’s groceries to her car. She always handed me a dime to give to him as a tip. He would gratefully accept the dime from me (a child) and head back quickly to help another customer. How humiliating that must have been for him. I think about Earl when I remember the A&P. He picked me up off of the sidewalk after I fell outside and carried me into the store to hand me over to my mother. I wish he had been treated with more respect in his later years. He certainly deserved more and had been given a bigger tip.
Candy cigarettes from The Pharmacy were my first introduction to addiction, and I would venture to say that I was well into a pack-a-week habit that lasted until they were banned. These little white sticks even had a little red color on the tip to give them a “lit” effect. How very cool…… I sucked a box of these down, mimicking how my Dad held his cigarette in his mouth while raking the yard or doing a paint-by-numbers masterpiece. Sadly, my Father smoked cigarettes and pipes until the world realized it wasn’t such a great idea to have cancer and emphysema and smell like an ashtray. For some reason, ignorance mainly, smoking was a cool thing to do.
At age thirteen, I began smoking menthol-flavored Salem cigarettes, along with Kent, Vogue, and Benson & Hedges brands, and wised up at age 23. The menthol cooled off the terrible taste, and my smoking buddy’s mother gave the Kent cigarettes to us. The Vogue cigarettes came in beautiful pastel colors, and I smoked the Benson & Hedges because they were long and slender.
I can’t fathom smoking a cigarette today. I was called out for lighting up in a small enclosed room by a professor from FCCJ who informed me that I hated smoking and was too dumb to realize it. He pointed out that I was constantly fanning smoke away from my face (true) and always had to have a Coke in hand when I fired up (true). I thought it was because they tasted good together. In reality, I needed the Coke to wash the nasty taste from my mouth after each drag. Professor Doby was right, and after thinking about his mean, ugly commentary about my smoking habits, I realized he was pretty accurate in his assessment. I put my fashionable Aigner cigarette case and brand-new lighter on the table and never smoked again. Oddly enough, thirty-three years later, Professor William Doby sat on a plane I was on, headed for Peru. I reminded him of and thanked him for being so mean and nasty about my smoking and saying that his comments had prompted me to quit. He had no recollection of the event since he was now in his late seventies. He was nonetheless pleased that he had positively changed my life.
“The Pharmacy”
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