The Lunchroom Just Burned Down and I’m Hungry

By Bobby Jarrett

This is a collection of mostly humorous short stories, with the occasional more realistic ones, telling about coming-of-age in the South from the 1950s until today’s modern world. You’ll go from phones made from two tin cans attached by a piece of waxed string in 1950 until today’s “it must be true because I saw it on the internet” era. You’ll travel from the sleepy small settlement of Cassville, Georgia, where you know everybody, to bustling cities full of people you’ll only pass by on the sidewalk, not knowing and not being known by any of them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664135796

Bobby Jarrett

I was born in 1944, the first of six children. I served in the Marine Corps for 4½ years right out of high school. I worked in manufacturing for fifty-plus years. I started college at age thirty-seven, obtaining a bachelor’s degree in business. I was a lifelong avid reader turned into wannabe writer in the mid-’70s. I love writing short stories.

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Copyright © 2020 by Bobby Jarrett.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 10/09/2020

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

A Little Bit about Me

CASSVILLE: DON’T BLINK TWICE

Cassville, 1950

A Yankee Comes to Cassville

Chickens, Cats, and Kittens

First Grade, and Where’s Billy?

Leonard and the Milk Run

Uncle Bob

Don’t Turn It Backward; You’ll Unfreeze It!

Them Cotton Fields Back Home

Cottage Cheese? You’re Kidding, Right?

So That’s Where They Live

Sliding down Highway 41

Men of Constant Sorrow

That Sweet-Smelling DDT

It Doesn’t Take Me Long to Hold a Baby Squirrel

Cassville’s Saddest Day

Till The Cows Come Home

Hot A’mighty!

The Lunchroom Just Burned Down, and I’m Hungry

Alvin Jarrett, What in the World Do You Think You’re Doing?

Inventory? What’s That?

The Rolling Store

Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head

Mama’s New Washing Machine

God Bless the Wide Spots

MEMORIES OF ADAIRSVILLE

Pass The Salt, Please

Aunt Kate

Aunt Leacy

Number, Please

Mawmaw and The Tea Cakes

ACWORTH: COMING OF AGE?

Big Game Hunting in Acworth

Lemons, Train Wrecks, and Tennis Shoes

Snakes and Trees

Can I Drive, Daddy? Please, Please?

Common What? Oh, Common Sense!

Vanilla Flavoring Is for Baking Only

Oh Lord, He’s Gonna Eat It All

Wanna Shoot Some Nine Ball?

MEMORIES: MARINE CORPS

Footprints and Doors

Do You Like Me, Maggot?

Don’t Lock Your Knees, Jarrett

But for The Grace of God

They Call Them Veterans

Twenty-One Guns

Those Raggedy Old Caps

FRANK’S GENERAL STORE, ACWORTH

Grizzletown’s Finest? Uh-Huh!

Ted Gets Shot, and I About Died Too

Doggone It

Let The Judge Do The Sortin’

Thanks for The Memories

MEMORIES FROM WEST GEORGIA

God Got Another One Right

Careful with That Prayer

Oh Well

SPECIAL PEOPLE

Mama

Mama, We’re Going to Miss You

The Twelve Days of Christmas

From Deijah’s Papa

A Reminder

Deijah’s Bear

SOME OF THIS AND A LITTLE OF THAT

Sounds of a Deafening Silence

May the Circle Be Unbroken

Homecoming

I Was and I Still Am

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Yearning of My Soul

Then and Now

I Know It’s True because I Saw It on the Internet

Big Cities and Little Towns

Tugs of the Heart

You Got a Big Bowl for Them Fries

Tin Roofs, Rainy Nights, and the Devil

Marlin Perkins, Call Home

Old Buildings, Childhood Memories, and Acworth on My Mind

A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME

I ’m a seventy-six-year old man as of this writing. I was a former grocery store bag boy, a marine, a college graduate, and even a Boy Scout. Because of the massive gap between my high school grades and activities and my sister’s, I am also known as Donna’s brother. Despite that gap, I still managed to work in various places for fifty-plus years.

In these seventy-six years of living, I’ve been up, and I’ve been down; but mostly, I guess I’ve just hung around the middle, and that probably puts me about dead center with a lot of you. I’ve been single and still am, and I have been married and divorced three times. You fortunately won’t find a single story in this collection dealing with relationship advice. Obviously, I leave the writing of those columns to those better qualified, so maybe I have learned a little something here and there.

As of this writing, I’m in the luckiest stage of my life. I’m with a great woman. We had a great dog until it passed on in its fourteenth year. We have found a really good garage, and I have found a great barber lady. Come on now, how much better does it really get? I’ve been accused of being intelligent, I’ve been accused of being dumb, and I freely admit to both accusations, the second one probably being the more common of the two. I’ve enjoyed almost every stage of my life, and I have been blessed by God more than I’ve had any right to expect.

One blessing, however, keeps coming back into my mind time and time again. That blessing was to have been born in 1944, making me a six-year-old boy in the South in 1950. I don’t know if the blessing was in just being a six-year-old boy, being a six-year-old boy in 1950, or being a six-year-old boy in 1950 in the South. I think I’m going with the last one. You have to have been a really young kid from that era to know how really awesome it was. Bliss and ignorance of the real world made it the best of times for my friends and me. I believe the old saying Ignorance is bliss was created by somebody who lived in that particular time.

We had no shirt, no shoes, big toes you could write in the dirt with, no bicycle helmet, and—now that I actually think back on it—almost no toys to speak of. My buddies and I did have what seemed the whole wide world to run and play in though. Ah, I almost forgot that I actually did have a phone, not just a phone but a cell phone. Yeah, it was a completely portable, carry-it-with-you cell phone, thanks to Campbell’s tomato soup. You took two of their cans, punched a hole in their bottoms, ran a piece of string through those holes, and tied a knot in each end of the string. Once you ran a bar of Octagon soap over the string to wax it up, you had it. You talked into one can, your buddy put the other one to his ear, and you both swore you could hear each other. On top of this, we had wagons to build, trees to climb, houses to play under, all the dirt you could ever want, and not a single, solitary clue about what was going on in the rest of the world—the rest of the world being anywhere over a mile from where you were. Innocence—pure, unadulterated innocence—was God’s special gift to the lucky ones among us.

God had a good day when he made six-year-old boys; I don’t think there’s anything else like them anywhere in the world as we know it. My South was named Cassville—Cassville, Georgia. It was about fifty miles north of Atlanta, and it’s one of my favorite places to think back on, Adairsville being another. Adairsville, about eight to ten miles north of Cassville, was more of a town; Mama lived there when she was growing up. Cassville, on the other hand, was only a wide spot on Highway 41, maybe big enough to be called a settlement. From what I learned later, it also had a big Civil War history about which my buddies and I were clueless. The only Civil War we knew anything about was the occasional rock and pine cone fight we had with one another when we were never ever going to talk to one another again, much less play together. Shoot, I can remember some of those never ever playing with you again times that would last over an hour sometimes.

Looking back at 1950 and a couple of years on either side of it, I think that a major part of its innocence and purity was the fact that we knew so little about anywhere or anything else. Atlanta, just fifty miles away, may as well have been on the moon as little as we knew about it. At six years old, I didn’t know anybody who had ever even been to Atlanta, my circle of friends being limited to other very young boys, each one of us being poorer than the others.

Each of the following stories is true. OK, OK, each one is pretty much almost true. All right, there is some truth in all of them, some more than others, OK? Now moving on, most of them did happen almost seventy years ago, and time can dull a few things here and there; and speaking only for myself, I didn’t take notes growing up. In fact, I didn’t start taking them till I went to college, at age thirty-seven, something my high school grades would most definitely bear witness to. Nevertheless, these memories are written as I have remembered them over the years. Other little writings are just things I wanted to write; lord knows why. Some are about people and things that are important to me, others just spur-of-the-moment things. Some will most likely make sense only to me, but there may be one or two that don’t even do that now that the writing is cold.

I just wrote these stories as they came to me, so they are not necessarily in any particular order time-wise. I did attempt to cut and paste so I could put all Cassville stories together, Adairsville together, and so on. While cutting and pasting, I completely lost three, had to retype parts of several others, and had come to the conclusion that this cloud thing that supposedly saves everything evidently rained itself out on my iPad and just blew away. I can’t find the lost ones anywhere, and I am sick and tired of looking for them. I even went to Best Buy, where I bought Office 365, for help. They said, You have iCloud on your iPad, but you need to go to iCloud.com on a laptop to see what you have saved. iPads only have limited space. This laptop I have is about as fast as a car with a blown motor, but it did eventually connect me. I’d have been better off just not even getting on the darn thing. Questions to which I had no clue about the answers just fell all over one another before I slowly closed the top of that thing and put it back in a bottom drawer.

So much of today’s technology is wonderful, and I love it. But some of it is as foreign to me as Greek and Latin. My memories of high tech go back to a Blue Horse tablet and a just resharpened number 2 pencil; that will obviously be a yellow number 2 pencil.

Hopefully, you will laugh a little at some of these stories and maybe cry a little at others. Sadly, life really isn’t a Hallmark movie and doesn’t always end with happily ever after.

CASSVILLE:

DON’T BLINK TWICE

(EARLY 1950S)

CASSVILLE, 1950

T oday just as it did in the early 1950s, Highway 41 still runs from the north end of Michigan to the south end of Florida, and it splits Cassville, Georgia, right down the middle. I lived on the northbound side of that highway, and being just six years old in 1950, I had never heard of either of those other states. In fact, I don’t think I even knew what a state was. My buddies and I just knew that Highway 41 ran from one end of the world to the other and that it passed right in front of our houses. In fact, the only thing between our front yards and Highway 41 was a ditch.

In the late ’40s, early ’50s, Cassville was the poster child for a sleepy little Southern town. But truth be told, you’d have to leave town out to fully describe that little place back then. Two small stores, each with a couple of gas pumps out front, were kitty-corner across the road from each other. We lived right beside the one on the northbound side, the one without the garage, and right across the road from the Cassville Post Office. That old post office had about forty, maybe fifty, cubbyholes behind the counter and one really old lady in it. When you’re six years old, people are young, old, or really old; she was probably in her fifties, really old to me. That old post office is on the National Register of Historic Places today, but back then, it was just a little wooden building your mama got her mail from. That did it for the town.

There was an almost gone old warehouse beside the store on my side of Highway 41, its crumbling walls about head high in most places and completely gone in others. Kudzu, and whatever else was growing wild, covered most of those old walls. As much as we didn’t like it, we had to give Sherman his due. He didn’t do any half-stepping when he came through Cassville. We’d been told that if he couldn’t burn it down, he tore it down, and that was exactly who everybody said was guilty of tearing that old warehouse down did.

That paved highway that ran between the stores, the main road between where the Yankees lived and whatever was at the other end of the world going south, was a busy road. We could feel the wind coming off the cars, Greyhound buses, and tractor trailers as they came by the cars my sister Donna and I used to build. These cars were built right there in the ditch, right beside the road. Fortunately, none of the other cars, trucks, or buses ever wanted to share that ditch with us while we were in it.

The steering wheel would be whatever kind of small wheel we could find; it was nailed into the top of a stick or board of some kind. When you stuck the steering wheel in the ground, you had most of the car built; a few more sticks in front of the steering wheel were the brakes, clutch, and gas pedal. A final stick stuck in the ground beside your right arm was the gearshift. Of course, you had to make your own engine sounds when you stepped on the gas, but every boy could do that.

Donna was three years younger than me, so she had to sit in the back. She hated that, but back then, very few women drove; and besides that, there was no way I would let my buddies see me in the back seat while a girl drove. We put a lot of miles on those cars we made, probably not ten feet from the real ones that flew past us as we sat in that highway ditch; that was until somebody told Mama. That ended our car rides.

If you saw one six-year-old Southern boy in the summer of the ’50s, you pretty much saw most of them—shorts, no shoes, no shirt. The shoes came off the day school was out; shirts usually just weren’t put on in the mornings. This let a couple of things happen—scratches over some of your body all the time and scratches all over your body some of the time.

We also had a God-given ability to write and draw in the dirt with our big toes. That wasn’t as hard as you might think; Highway 41 was the only thing paved for miles around. Red dirt, gravel, and rocks—that was the South back then, and you were never far from any of the three. We could print our names and pick up rocks, marbles, and sticks with those toes. Our feet were like leather a couple of weeks after school was out and stayed that way till school started again. Today I cringe when I see somebody walking on a sidewalk or a road barefoot. It actually makes my feet hurt.

You have to understand the South in the early ’50s to understand some of the things I’m going to write about. Most of us had no TV or newspaper, and the only books in our homes were the Bible and maybe a catalog or two. The catalogs were mainly for the outhouse. Just a side note—every outhouse seemed to usually be about a half mile behind the house, and the johnsongrass seemed to be five to six feet tall on both sides of the little trail that led to it. At least it seemed that way if you had to use ours. The radio, if you had one, was for baseball games when Daddy had time, the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday night, and sometimes country music in the morning. Most of the news was whatever somebody heard from somebody else and passed on, if they saw you. Being six-year-old boys, we never got anything passed along to us unless our mamas called us by our full name. That was rarely a sign of good news though. Living way down deep in the South, if something didn’t happen pretty much within sight or hearing in 1950, a six-year-old kid rarely heard anything about it—or a sixty-year-old grown-up for that matter.

All we knew about the rest of the world, and that would be anywhere more than a mile or two from us, was that a long time ago the Yankees won some kind of war and that Sherman had just about burned and torn Cassville down to the ground in the process. Knowing how strong and tough our own daddies were really made us wonder just what those Yankees looked like. If they were able to whip our daddies, they had to be big for sure. We knew they had to have been not just big but really big, and really mean, to do what they had done to the South. Everybody already knew that they talked funny too, even though us kids didn’t really know what funny meant. Yankees just walking around and talking funny were not an everyday thing in Cassville.

We knew that some of the cars and buses that came by must have had a Yankee or two in them, but we couldn’t really see them all that well as they came by. It didn’t matter though; we already knew what they looked like. They were big, real big; stronger than anybody; and mean. They just had to have been like that to have whipped our kinfolk, didn’t they?

A YANKEE COMES

TO CASSVILLE

I ’ll never forget the day my buddies and I saw our first real, live Yankee, and he wound up standing not more than five or six steps away from us. It was a normal hot summer day in Cassville. My friend Billy and I were playing on the old chicken coop behind my house, and the other boys were scattered around on both sides of the highway, some climbing trees, a couple shooting marbles, and one, Peewee, playing tag by himself; I figured about every little settlement had a Peewee in it. He was just a little different, but he was still our buddy.

The first we knew about the Yankee was when Leonard came running up to me and Billy, just about out of breath, hollering, There’s a Yankee at the store! There’s a Yankee at the store! It turned out we were the last two he told, so everybody else was already standing in a little knot in the parking lot when we got there. Everybody was there—Billy, Melvin, Harold, Peewee, Johnny, Leonard, Kenneth, and Danny. Melvin and Harold were older than the rest of us; they were both eleven. Kenny and Danny were eight, Billy, Leonard, Johnny, Peewee and I, were six. None of us had ever seen a Yankee, and now there was one right there at the store right beside my house. Oh my gosh! A Yankee, a real one!

The reason we knew he was a Yankee was that Harold and Melvin had seen his car tag when he pulled into the lot. They both said it had New York written on it. We didn’t know anything about New York except it was up north, way up north. Somebody had said that one time, and Cassville being as little as it was, every kid told anybody they saw, New York is way, way up north. Like I said, we lived in a sleepy little place where nothing much ever happened, and anything out of the ordinary that we heard just got passed right along.

Whoever was driving the car was in the store when we got there, so we just stood around, looking at that car like it was something from another world. And then it happened. We saw him. We actually saw a real, live Yankee. He came out of the store, heading for his car, and he was coming right toward us. We jumped back so fast that Peewee fell down, and I tripped over him; it didn’t take us but a second to get up though. We didn’t know what this man might do, so we were all ready to run if we had to. He was a big man, bigger than Leonard’s daddy, who weighed over two hundred pounds. But Leonard’s daddy was strong and had muscles everywhere. The man coming toward us was fat and had a big old belly. But he was still a Yankee, and we still didn’t know what he might do, so we kept our distance.

He kind of nodded at us as he got in his car, and just as he sat down, he jumped back out before he could pull his door shut. Now little Southern boys can run as fast as anybody, probably faster than most when they had to; but bunched up as we all were and all trying to go different ways at the same time, we just wound up lying all over one another. Talk about a scramble, trying to get up before he could get to us; well, we had ourselves one. We got untangled about the time he headed back to the store. It wasn’t but a minute, though, before he came back out, holding his keys in his hand; he’d left them in the store. Whew!

We all just stood around and watched as the first Yankee any of us had ever seen drove right on off, going to who knew where. Why, he wasn’t scary at all, not after he left anyway. We talked for days about what we would have done to him if he had come toward us again. Shoot, he wasn’t so bad, we told ourselves. We’d just tripped over ourselves, trying to give him room to get out of his car. That was all that was about; Southern boys were mostly just raised to be polite back then.

CHICKENS, CATS,

AND KITTENS

T here was a small tin-roofed building behind my house that had started out as a small chicken coop but had been made a little bigger over the years. Even so, it was way too small to be called a chicken house. About halfway up each side, chicken wire had been added to replace the wood.

Billy and I had climbed up on that roof once, and we each had a blanket with us. We had decided to learn how to parachute. We held our blankets by their corners, two corners in each hand, and we just jumped right off that old chicken coop, just like we’d planned. We were going to parachute right down to the ground. Billy’s daddy had done it when he was in the war, and he had told Billy all about it. Billy passed this information on to me, and we just knew we could do it too. Fortunately, after our first jump, the idea of using a blanket as a parachute never came up again. We jarred every bone in our bodies loose, both of us sore as a risen for the next few days. Good thing that old chicken coop was only about six to seven feet high because even that was still more than enough to jar every bone in our bodies.

We never had more than three or four chickens in that old thing at one time, and sometimes we didn’t have that many if somebody’s dog got in there with them. When my mawmaw would come stay with us, and that was whenever Mama was getting another baby, she would sometimes catch one of those chickens and wring its neck. That was really scary because no matter which way you ran, the chicken would always seem to come right after you. I’m telling you that a headless chicken, blood flying everywhere, particularly one that seemed to be chasing you, is a flat-out scary thing to a six-year-old