A Day Remembered From Summer 1952

I had just turned fourteen. It was about four in the afternoon on a sunny Saturday. I had finished my farm chores, showered and dressed in clean Lee blue jeans, a white T shirt and black Converse high-top sneakers for a four-mile trip to down-town Christiansburg. I would run down hill from our hill-top farm house five hundred yards through an alfalfa field last mowed two weeks before to Route 8, the two-lane highway running North-South between Christiansburg and Floyd, seats of Montgomery and Floyd Counties. There I would stand beside the highway with right thumb elevated, asking for a ride to Christiansburg. Catching a ride would usually take just a few minutes on a Saturday afternoon. Chances were about 50-50 I would know the driver.

In town I would first visit Ballard’s Pool Room, in the basement of Roses Five and Dime Store on Main. There the Ballard Brothers, Sam and Joe, cigars in mouths, would be racking and collecting 10 cents a game from self-proclaimed sharks shooting nine-ball on six 4’ x 8’ tables, their green felt surfaces lit by round shaded lamps hung from above. The self-judged sharks were largely farmers and other blue-collar types with widely divergent talent, few that could be objectively judged good shots. A sign on the wall ordered No Gambling, but a small-stakes game would be in progress on most of the tables.

At the lead table the players would invariably include Red Phillips, veteran of the battle of Iwo Jima, who had left his right leg there. In its place hung a prosthesis. Red worked at the Post Office and drove a Cadillac Convertible, replaced each year with a new one. Red was a good pool shot and an every-day-after-work-until-closing patron.

A town ordinance forbade shooting pool to those under sixteen, the principal attraction of the dark, smelly, smoky pool room for those my age.

I might attend the double feature at the nearby Palace Theater, a B-western and a B-mystery with a serial between the features. Or I might visit the the Royal Cafe, one of two Greek-family-operated diners, the other being the Palace, across Main from the theater of the same name. There I would likely have a grilled hot dog or a hamburger, 15 or 25 cents and a Coca-Cola, 10 cents.

But on this remembered Summer Saturday afternoon I would not make it to town. And this is what makes the day memorable.

A few jogging steps into the alfalfa from the top of the hill, my sneaker-clad left foot landed on something soft and alive hidden in the foliage, and completely startled I tumbled. Then I was engulfed with a blinding spray and an awful, acrid odor.

The soft living thing under my foot that had caused my fall was a baby skunk, one of a half-dozen being led through the alfalfa by their mother, all unseen by me until after my fall and my spraying by mother skunk, whose black and white form with tail lifted suddenly appeared before me as I sat startled in the low alfalfa. In shock, I rose slowly to my feet, gagging on the odor. The skunk family disappeared as quickly as they had materialized after my fall.

Staggering, I walked back to the hill top where my mother was working in her flower garden. She caught the odor just as I came into her line of vision. “Leave your clothes outside and get it the tub,” she said.

I scrubbed and scrubbed but the skunk-spray smell would not leave my skin and hair for hours which seemed like days. I did not hitch-hike to town that long-ago day when I was fourteen.