Allow me to introduce myself. I am a “baby boomer” – a “child of the fifties”. I am part of that generation whose fathers came home from winning a great war, and then had us. Officially, we are those who were born between the years 1946 and 1959 although there are a few of us on either side of those years. We grew up during the stability and prosperity of the “Eisenhower Years” then looked forward with hope and anticipation to the promised glories of John F. Kennedy’s “Camelot.” I am part of that generation that came to my maturity in a time before our dreams were shattered by the twin debacles of the War in Vietnam and Watergate. I was blessed to grow up in the country, in a small East Texas town called Center and to have spent the vast majority of my life through young adulthood in the heart of the ‘pineywoods’ of East Texas and North Central Louisiana. To what is probably the vast majority of readers I have become what my parents and grandparents once were to me — a member of the “older generation”.

There was a time – a now long ago and mostly forgotten time – when things were different than they are today. It was a simpler time, a safer and less complex time. It wasn’t as technologically advanced as our present day world, but – it was a good time. It was the time of the “baby boomers” – the time of the great boom of expansion in all areas that followed the great tragedy that had been the Second World War. It was the world of Andy Griffith and Donna Reed – It was a great time to be a kid, and a pair of little kids on a roll could really have a blast. It was a time to be remembered, and now, some fifty years gone, a time to be cherished. My girlfriend and I (yes, I had one. I was almost 9 and she had just turned 6). My dad was Southeast Regional Manager for Ford Motor Company and traveled all the time, and her dad was a career Marine… who traveled all the time. Between them and our grandparents, we got a pretty good tour of the rural south of the time – almost always together — and numerous other places. But, we always loved and always returned to our tiny little hometown in East Texas.

They say that you start remembering things when you reach a ‘certain age’ that you’d forgotten long ago. I suppose that’s true. For the most part you remember the good things. Sometimes there are a few tragedies thrown in for good measure. Almost always, they are things that no longer exist in any other place than in your memory. I suppose that’s a sign of getting older. They (whoever ‘they’ are) say that too. I don’t know. Some things are just worth remembering. Some of those things are hard to explain to those who don’t remember them. Life in a small country town in the 1950s and very early 1960s is one of those things.

How do you explain an alien world to those who have never seen it? How do you explain a way of life that is completely foreign to those listening or reading? How do you explain a way of life that once existed but no longer does — and fades farther into the remote past with each passing day? How do you explain experiences, hopes and dreams that, at the time, everyone thought not only ‘could’ come to pass but — ‘would’ eventually come to pass? How do you explain a world so recent as to be within the span of a single lifetime and yet so distant as to have become a fading myth to even the following generation? Do you start it off like a fairly tale with ‘once upon a time’? How do you tell even your own children what it was like to grow up in the same little country town that they grew up in thirty years before the youngest of them was born and now over sixty years ago?

Can we take our cue from that lilting, forlorn and yet hopeful song from the musical ‘Cats’? Can we echo Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice in their hope that the ‘memories’ will ‘live again’? How can those memories ever live again when the only possible people for whom they can live are those who share them… and any to whom they try to relate them to are so removed from the time that it’s impossible for them to relate to even the smallest part of them?

It really was a different world then. I have often wondered what happened to that world. I know they say that things are “better” now, but I wonder. It was a great time to be a kid, it really was. I wish that my kids had grown up in a time like the one that I grew up in – and that theirs could.

I know. There was no air conditioning in homes or cars, no color television — no television at all for most. There were no special effects in movies to speak of. Television was new (we were the first generation to grow up with it). There were cars with standard transmissions (most of them still) and no air conditioning (most of them unless you had one about like my dads or Price Daniels’ or Uncle Earl Long’s and most folks couldn’t afford that. But there were other things.

Of course, we had all of the “childhood” diseases. We had chicken pox, mumps and measles. I had all three and they didn’t kill me. We also had isolated cases of scarlet fever and rheumatic fever still. It was my generation that was the last to see a major polio epidemic hit. I have several friends who had it. One’s still paralyzed from the waist down today. Two have gone on. One of them passed away when she was only six or seven years old. Another spent twenty-odd years of her life in an iron lung. There are already people – and have been for some time — who have never seen or heard of that kind of living death. No, it wasn’t a perfect time by any means.

Rock and Roll was brand new for us and so was FM radio. Cassettes, videotapes, CDs, DVDs, iPods and MP-3s were thirty years in our future at least and none of us even dreamed there’d ever be anything like that. We’d never even seen an ‘eight track’ tape player. Remember them? We were already in our teens when ‘Star Trek’ showed us the ‘communicator’ and even then we never dreamed we’d carry something very similar – the cell phone – in our pockets only thirty or so years later.

We lay on the living room floor and watched flickering images in grainy black and white on a screen not much bigger than a cigarette pack as Bobby Vinton, Elvis and the Shirelles… Sandra Dee and others performed. We watched ‘Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo – and we laughed at ‘Uncle Miltie’.  We sang (and tried to dance) along with the Mouskateers and added our own names to the end of the ‘roll call’ of the singing, dancing kids who were so much like us — or so much the way we saw ourselves as being.

We’d walk or ride our bikes downtown to the theatre, pay our half-dollar (admission for two) and watch terrible ‘B’ grade science fiction movies showing as a Saturday Matinee. Sometimes it was a double feature. There was always a newsreel, cartoon and previews of coming attractions. How do you explain to kids today about a movie theatre showing all that for a quarter — and for years throwing in a ‘short feature’ like Buck Rogers, Captain Video and his Video Ranger, Flash Gordon or a ‘two reel’ comedy like Our Gang or the Three Stooges? How do you explain that a large ‘Cherry Coke’ was a quarter (with two straws of course) or that a large bag of popcorn (likewise enough for two) was a dime?  We’d leave for the movie with a dollar between us and have fifteen cents left over after the show. It cost less than a dollar for two kids to have a whole Saturday afternoon of fun in a tiny little East Texas country town.

After the movie – almost always science fiction on Saturdays — until the ‘beach party’ craze hit a few years later (and we saw all of those movies too) we’d leave the theatre dreaming of one day traveling in space. That theatre and a now long-gone roller rink were the highlights of Saturday entertainment for kids of my generation. They were places that kids could go safely, enjoy themselves and their parents never had to worry about what they saw or were exposed to.

We saw a truly good science fiction movie a few years later and actually dreamed of living in space by the year 2001. It didn’t happen of course. The year 2001 became a year of tragedy. For me, one of those tragedies was extremely personal.  But, long before that, ‘other things’ became more important. There was Vietnam, Watergate and Iran-Contra – a dozen other ‘events’ that managed to mask over the vanishing of an era and possibly cause that disappearance in part. Our world was never the same again. But – we saw the first satellites, a little dog whose name was ‘Liaka’ and chimps named ‘Ham’ and “Able”. We stood on the front porch under the stars and watched a tiny specks float by overhead that contained first Gagarin and then Glenn. We saw ‘all’ of the first men and women in space. We saw man walk on the moon for God’s sake.

We had no metal detectors or guards in schools, no drugs and no violence to speak of. You could go to bed at night with your doors unlocked and your windows open. You could stop on the side of the road and eat at a roadside park, use the toilet or take a nap. Nobody would bother you.  There were no “drive by” shootings. We all walked or rode our bikes to school. We kids rode our bikes or walked just about everywhere and as long as we got home around dark nobody got worried. Even then they didn’t worry about crime, just about accidents and such. We didn’t have fancy electronic toys and games.

There wasn’t a lot of crime, even nationwide. People like Charles Starkweather and Eddie Gein were anomalies – horror stories from far away that were whispered about but thankfully didn’t happen every day and never happened in the place where you lived. We never dreamed there’d be anyone like Manson, Bundy, Gacey or Dahmer. Not quite the same today I’m afraid. It started changing at some point in the mid sixties. Our first real exposure to anything like that in Texas was the infamous ‘bell tower shooter’ but even then it was something truly unbelievable and something ‘far away’ to most of us. Austin was a ‘big city’ after all – nothing like that could happen in our little town. It never did and even though the crime rate now – especially violent crime — would have nauseated any of us fifty years ago or so, it still hasn’t. But — how do you explain to today’s generation, and those to come — growing up in a town that had one Chief of Police and four patrolmen for a population of four thousand? Between the years that I was born and the graduated from high school – that’s 18 years — our county had six murders. Not one of those was premeditated.

There was no vandalism — unless you count ‘class of ’68 graffiti painted on the side of the town water tank or a few fire lookout towers as vandalism. A major theft made ‘big’ news in the weekly paper — maybe once or twice a year. It was the same with any violent crime of any kind. Our jail had a capacity for 20 inmates and usually contained two or three at any given time, for very short times. There was no ‘gang’ or drug culture. The most serious ‘offense’ any teenager was ever charged with was stealing an occasional watermelon from some farmer’s field or crossing the river into Louisiana and bringing a few cans of beer into our ‘dry’ county.  No one ever went to jail for it. The constable would just make who ever he caught with the beer pour it out one can at a time, let them go, and then call their parents. Once or twice a year the highway patrol would catch a few drag racers on some deserted road or out on the old (deserted) airport runway. They did the same thing. No one went to jail. They got sent home and later someone called their parents — end result being ‘grounded’ for a few days or a week. I’m in my seventh decade of life now. Isn’t it amazing just how much difference a few short years — or is it a few all-too-short decades can make?

During hunting season all of the boys old enough to have licenses had a shotgun hanging in the back window of their pick-up trucks or in the trunk of their cars — even when they were parked at school. So did all of the teachers who hunted. As soon as class was over they’d all head for the woods. There was never any thought of crime. Little kids played with toy soldiers and toy guns at recess in elementary school. I don’t recall it causing any sporadic violence of any kind and all that I know of — all 500 who attended my school from grade 1 to 12 — grew up to be responsible adults.

On weekends when our girlfriends were somehow occupied we boys would load up our camping and fishing gear and head off to one of the local lakes for an overnight campout. Lots of people kept flat-bottomed boats at these lakes and they were never locked up. All of the owners knew all of us kids and knew that if we used one of their boats on one of our weekend excursions they’d find it in the same shape, or better, than they’d left it in. We never took any food with us other than cooking oil and maybe a five-pound sack of potatoes. We intended to catch our supper and usually did. Such irresponsible parenting as our folks demonstrated in things like this would cause a huge hue and cry today but as far as I recall, no one ever drowned or managed to get any serious injury — except maybe a case of poison ivy if you weren’t watching what you were doing at times.

Naturally we all had to be home early on Sunday morning. We all went to church back then. There were only seven denominations and about ten churches in Center Texas at the time — Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, Episcopal, Nazarene,

Christian (Disciples of Christ) and Church of Christ. All of us went to one or the other and most of us visited between them when something ‘special’ was going on. That was just our culture. It was how we expected things to be and how we expected them always to be. There was no  ‘moral majority’ then and no ‘Christian Right’. It didn’t matter which church you went to. We all knew what was ‘moral’ and what was ‘right’ or it certainly seems like far more did then than do now. There weren’t any ‘mega-churches’ then. They were all tiny by today’s standards and every preacher or priest in town knew everyone they passed on the street whether they went to ‘their’ church or not. Two of those preachers and one priest married over half of the kids that I attended school with, including me. That doesn’t happen too often today, does it?

Some of my happiest childhood memories were trips that Sherry and I took with my father and with hers. We’d both been all over the Far East by the time we were ten years old with her folks, and we both knew just about every actor, actress and politician who lived in the South and Southeastern United States, or worked in them by traveling with my folks. I wonder how many people today have ever heard of a pair of professional wrestlers who called themselves “Gorgeous” George and “Sputnik” Monroe?

There was no “terrorism” then and the “twin towers” hadn’t even been built yet. There were no ‘threat levels’. At the airport you just showed your ticket and a passport if you needed one and got on the plane. There were no HLS or TSA goons standing around. There were no ‘full body scans’ even for little kids. If there was ever any trouble at the airport, even at a big one like LaGuardia or LAX –which there never was – they just called the regular cops.

Flying in “Old Connie” — a propeller driven Lockheed “Super Constellation” — was an exciting adventure. There was a galley with ‘real food’. If you were flying overnight they had “sleeper” compartments like on a train. We watched ‘first run’ movies twice a day — long trips even by airplane usually took more than one day back then. For long flights the major airlines had “sleepers” with berths similar to those on a train (but then again, most people today don’t remember passenger trains either). The Airlines always had a ‘stew’ to keep an eye on underage kids traveling without parents — from the age of about five to fifteen. The seats were big and roomy.  “Old Connie” only carried 64 passengers. There was a single wide isle and as long as you didn’t bother anyone no one cared if a couple of kids got up and moved around some as long as the ‘seat belt’ sign was turned off. Since back then you never changed planes, they only refueled the one you were on, serviced it and changed crews if the flight crew’s hours were maxed out, there was no chance of getting lost — or ’snatched’ — in a strange airport. Our folks didn’t think anything of buying us tickets and putting us on the plane. Why should they?

Remember trains that carried people? On trains you had comfortable seats, ‘Pullman’ sleeper cars, a dining car, a ‘club’ car and lots of room to move around. No one would dare bother a couple of little kids traveling alone on a train either. The Railways had stews all kept an eye on kids too. It was part of their job. It was just like riding “Old Connie”. You never changed trains so there was no chance of getting lost or “snatched”. Kids weren’t allowed off the train until their final destination, and even then a stew was with them until their parents or guardians listed on their tickets claimed them.

We made our own fun. We hunted and fished and swam. We swam in creeks, lakes, canals and ponds. If it was really hot we’d just strip off and jump in. Nobody thought anything about it. We certainly didn’t. All of it was outdoors in a place where pollution and deliberate waste hadn’t yet been seen. There weren’t any shopping malls or “super-stores” then but on Saturday kids would walk around the town square — where all of our shopping was located — and dream about some “new” or really ‘cool’ thing that they wanted. Maybe we’d go to one of the two local drug stores and sit at the table they provided and read comic books. They let us do that whether we intended to buy the comic or not. Can’t do that any more either I’m afraid.

I’ve often thought that my idea of “heaven” if there is such a place, would either be one of those prolonged road trips through the south and southeast that we made as kids or to be sitting with Sherry just one more time in the lobby of the old Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans watching my dad, a professional wrestler named ‘Sputnik’ Monroe and a man named Foster Sharrod sitting there seeing just how drunk they could get and playing cards with Uncle Earl Long and Judge Leander Perez while my Dad tried to convince Uncle Earl that the State of Louisiana really ‘did’ need to buy a new one-off Lincoln for the Governor, and that he personally needed to buy one for Miss Blaze. No, it may not be ‘heaven’ but it’s about as close as I’d ever want to get. I would like for both of us to be an adults thought and remember “now” when we’re there as much as I remember “then” today. We’d have a certain “perspective”, no, make that “attitude”.

Oh, I know, all of them were so crooked they had to screw them into the ground when they died, but at least they were open and up front about it and they did some good as well. They didn’t try to hide what they were behind a mask of pomposity and arrogance or religious mumbo-jumbo. When they stole, and they did, they didn’t try to take it all. They at least left something for everyone else.

I remember one speech in which Uncle Earl told a group of people in Alexandria Louisiana, where he’d gotten a particularly cold reception that they could vote against him if they wanted to “but God help you if I get elected anyway”. They did. He kept his promise. It was four years before there was any significant highway or bridge repair in Rapides Parish. We won’t even begin a discussion of Judge Perez. “Noooow Son…”

Uncle Earl died on election night in 1960. He had a major heart attack not five minutes after hearing that JFK had won, but hadn’t heard the news about the latest ‘upset landslide’ that he’d just won in his own race for the US Senate. We were over in Biloxi that next morning with my dad and I remember seeing Senator Bilbo (remember him?) make the announcement of Uncle Earl’s death on one of the local TV stations. I remember I cried and Daddy took Sherry and me with him to the funeral. We sat two seats down from Miss Blaze.

They say that there were a lot of ‘Civil Rights’ problems and issues around the time that I grew up but honestly in a little-bitty East Texas town deep in the ‘piney woods’ we just didn’t notice any. There were as many blacks as whites in our county — practically no other people of any kind — and we all got along fine. We kids played together and no one paid any attention to it. We went to different schools until I was 15 years old or so but they were so close together no one noticed. There were four schools located on two campuses. All of us kids together totaled just over 500. When ‘desegregation’ came, we just shuffled kids around between schools that were all within a few blocks of each other and created a ‘junior high school’ that we’d never had before. Up until then elementary school lasted from grades 1 to 8. There wasn’t any such thing as ‘junior high’. Since all of the schools were built about the same time (around 1901) there really wasn’t any difference in them as far as the facilities went. There was just a different view from the window to break up the usual cases of boredom.

We had no fights other than the usual playground and parking lot scuffles over girlfriends and boyfriends. We had the usual ‘after the game’ fights with our football rivals from time to time. None of them were particularly violent or malicious. There were certainly never any weapons of any kind produced unless you call some little kid squaring off with a much bigger one with a roll of dimes in his fist a ‘weapon’. That might have happened once or twice. No one ever wound up in jail or the hospital.

Remember when boys (and a few girls) would ‘blow’ the gunpowder out of ‘Black Cat’ firecrackers, pack it into model airplane paint bottle and blow up a red ant hill/? If that happened today someone would call the ‘bomb squad, the kid would be locked up and charged with ‘terrorism’ and most likely his or her folks would be locked up as ‘accomplices’.

We all knew where the local ‘lover’s lanes were located and as soon as we boys had cars — that term is applied fairly loosely to some of our vehicles — we managed to find them all a time or two every week. Going ‘parking’ was another standard ‘pastime’. It just didn’t mean quite the same thing that it means now, or meant even a few years later. We were all part of the ‘Eisenhower Years’… we grew up with Annette and Frankie and Sandra Dee. We held hands and kissed and we had fun. Did some of us end up marrying those girls we went ‘parking’ with. Of course we did. I’d say more than half of us did. But — not because we ‘had to’. I’m sure a few did ‘have to’ — positive of it in fact. Don’t kid yourself. Kids know. But, with the society we grew up in and as close as we all were, they would most likely have gotten married eventually anyway. As far as I know, our generation, at least in my little hometown, has one of the lowest divorce rates around. You see, back then things like love, and truth and real devotion meant something, at least to the vast majority of us.

What happened to parades on Veterans’ Day and the 4th of July? What happened to ‘County Fairs’? What happened to sock-hops in the school gym on Friday nights? Where did they go? How could such important things vanish so slowly as to not be noticed until after they were gone — and then only by those who remember them at all? How do you tell even your own children about a time when you personally remember people who couldn’t drive at all or those who simply preferred to still ride a horse or in a buggy? How do you explain to even your own children that you remember some – a few of those long-gone parades in which men who had fought in the US war with Spain actually marched? Most kids today don’t even know that there was such a war or that it was in what we (my generation) called ‘the last century’. Now, my generation and the little town that I grew up in and love still so much are part of ‘the last century’. It’s a strange thing to consider but it’s true. There is now an entire generation of children – born after the turn of the century — who do not and cannot remember a year that did not begin with the number “2”. Some of those are my own grandchildren. In thirty years or so when their parents are the age that I am now, how many of my faded memories will their own faded memories contain to pass along? Who will the strangely dressed people and what will the odd-looking old buildings in the old and faded photographs be to them? Let’s see. Thirty years from now. That will be almost 100 years since the earliest of those photos were taken. I wonder if any of them will still think that they live in a “quaint” little country town. I hope so, but I doubt that it would fit my own definition of that term.

What happened to the local teenage ”’hang-outs” like Center’s ‘Rider’s Roost’ (named after our football team the “Roughriders”) or the Youth Center (where we’d have a dance every Saturday night and some local live group once each month? Where are they? When were the ‘Dairy Queen’ and ‘Handy Andy’s’ replaced by McDonalds and Burger King? When was Mr. Brice’s market on the town square replaced by the “Walmart Superstore”? What happened to the Soda fountain at Roger’s Drug and that nice Miss Jackie Phillips who once took such great care in serving us kids the best ice cream sodas and sundaes ever made? Gone now. All gone.

No, it wasn’t a perfect world back then — not by any means. But, yes, I miss those times – and those people. I miss my hometown. There’s still a town called Center Texas. I suppose there always will be, but where is the town that I call ‘home’? They say it’s experiencing a real ‘boom’ now. I don’t know. It’s been almost 15 years since the last time I went ‘home’ and it was almost unrecognizable to me then. I can’t even imagine what a ‘boom’ would be like.

I was recently told about, and shown some beautiful photos of the restoration of our County Courthouse and the few scattered county buildings around it to their original appearance. Those few buildings in Shelby County are the last examples of ‘Irish Castle’ architecture in the State of Texas – all of them built by J.J.E. Gibson in 1885. They’re beautiful and deserved the care and attention that they were given. But — no one ever goes downtown anymore. There’s no shopping downtown anymore. Even the county and city offices have moved out of downtown. Were it not for the recently renovated movie theatre and one remaining bank no one would have any reason to go to our town square any more at all. So dies a little country town. The town lives, but those things that made it unique — and the best of all possible worlds for a kid of the fifties to grow up in — are gone. Of all the buildings surrounding our courthouse square only three outside the courthouse complex retain their original façade or even the façade that they had when I was growing up in the fifties. Two of those, like the courthouse, have been restored. The third is an empty shell but still recognizable to those who remember when it was the best-stocked hardware store in two counties.

They say that you can ‘take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy’. That’s true. They also say that ‘home is where the heart is’ but that’s not quite correct. Your home is always in your heart — but it’s also in you mind and in your memories. People often ask me why I so rarely go ‘home’. My answer is hard for some of them to understand but to me it’s so crystal clear that it defies further explanation. I tell them all the same thing. I ‘do’ go home. I go home for at least a few minutes almost every day. All I have to do to go home is close my eyes and remember a time and place — and people — who now live only in the recesses of my mind and the very deepest recesses of my heart.

© 2011 by Dr. J. Lee Choron. All rights reserved unless granted specifically by the author in writing.

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a “baby boomer” – a “child of the fifties”. I am part of that generation whose fathers came home from winning a great war, and then had us. Officially, we are those who were born between the years 1946 and 1959 although there are a few of us on either side of those years. We grew up during the stability and prosperity of the “Eisenhower Years” then looked forward with hope and anticipation to the promised glories of John F. Kennedy’s “Camelot.” I am part of that generation that came to my maturity in a time before our dreams were shattered by the twin debacles of the War in Vietnam and Watergate. I was blessed to grow up in the country, in a small East Texas town called Center and to have spent the vast majority of my life through young adulthood in the heart of the ‘pineywoods’ of East Texas and North Central Louisiana. To what is probably the vast majority of the readers I have become what my parents and grandparents once were to me — a member of the “older generation”.

There was a time – a now long ago and mostly forgotten time – when things were different than they are today. It was a simpler time, a safer and less complex time. It wasn’t as technologically advanced as our present day world, but – it was a good time. It was the time of the “baby boomers” – the time of the great boom of expansion in all areas that followed the great tragedy that had been the Second World War. It was the world of Andy Griffith and Donna Reed – It was a great time to be a kid, and a pair of little kids on a roll could really have a blast. It was a time to be remembered, and now, some fifty years gone, a time to be cherished. My girlfriend and I (yes, I had one. I was almost 9 and she had just turned 6). My dad was Southeast Regional Manager for Ford Motor Company and traveled all the time, and her dad was a career Marine… who traveled all the time. Between them and our grandparents, we got a pretty good tour of the rural south of the time – almost always together — and numerous other places. But, we always loved and always returned to our tiny little hometown in East Texas.

They say that you start remembering things when you reach a ‘certain age’ that you’d forgotten long ago. I suppose that’s true. For the most part you remember the good things. Sometimes there are a few tragedies thrown in for good measure. Almost always, they are things that no longer exist in any other place than in your memory. I suppose that’s a sign of getting older. They (whoever ‘they’ are) say that too. I don’t know. Some things are just worth remembering. Some of those things are hard to explain to those who don’t remember them. Life in a small country town in the 1950s and very early 1960s is one of those things.

How do you explain an alien world to those who have never seen it? How do you explain a way of life that is completely foreign to those listening or reading? How do you explain a way of life that once existed but no longer does — and fades farther into the remote past with each passing day? How do you explain experiences, hopes and dreams that, at the time, everyone thought not only ‘could’ come to pass but — ‘would’ eventually come to pass? How do you explain a world so recent as to be within the span of a single lifetime and yet so distant as to have become a fading myth to even the following generation? Do you start it off like a fairly tale with ‘once upon a time’? How do you tell even your own children what it was like to grow up in the same little country town that they grew up in thirty years before the youngest of them was born and almost sixty years ago?

Can we take our cue from that lilting, forlorn and yet hopeful song from the musical ‘Cats’? Can we echo Andrew Lloyd Rice and Tim Webber in their hope that the ‘memories’ will ‘live again’? How can those memories ever live again when the only possible people for who they ‘can’ live are those who share them… and any to whom they try to relate them to are so removed from the time that it’s impossible for them to relate to even the smallest part of them?

It really was a different world then. I have often wondered what happened to that world. I know they say that things are “better” now, but I wonder. It was a great time to be a kid, it really was. I wish that my kids had grown up in a time like the one that I grew up in – and that theirs could.

I know, there was no air conditioning in homes or cars, no color television — no television at all for most. There were no special effects in movies to speak of, television was new (we were the first generation to grow up with it). There were cars with standard transmissions (most of them still) and no air conditioning (most of them unless you had one about like my dads or Price Daniels’ or Uncle Earl Long’s and most folks couldn’t afford that. But there were other things.

Of course, we had all of the “childhood” diseases. We had chicken pox, mumps and measles. I had all three and they didn’t kill me. We also had isolated cases of scarlet fever and rheumatic fever still. It was my generation that was the last to see a major polio epidemic hit. I have several friends who had it. One’s still paralyzed from the waist down today. Two have gone on. One of them passed away when she was only six or seven years old. The other spent twenty-odd years of her life in an iron lung. There are already people – and have been for some time — who have never seen or heard of that kind of living death. No, it wasn’t a perfect time by any means.

Rock and Roll was brand new for us and so was FM radio. Cassettes, videotapes, CDs, DVDs, iPods and MP-3s were thirty years in our future at least and none of us even dreamed there’d ever be anything like that. We’d never even seen an ‘eight track’ tape player. Remember them? We were already in our teens when ‘Star Trek’ showed us the ‘communicator’ and even then we never dreamed we’d carry something very similar – the cell phone – in our pockets only thirty or so years later.

We lay on the living room floor and watched flickering images in grainy black and white on a screen not much bigger than a cigarette pack as Bobby Vinton, Elvis and the Shirelles… Sandra Dee and others performed. We watched ‘Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo – and we laughed at ‘Uncle Miltie’.  We sang along with the Mouskateers and added our own names to the end of the ‘roll call’ of the singing, dancing kids who were so much like us — or so much the way we saw ourselves.

We’d walk or ride our bikes downtown to the theatre, pay our half-dollar (admission for two) and watch terrible ‘B’ grade science fiction movies showing as a Saturday Matinee. Sometimes it was a double feature. There was always a newsreel, cartoon and previews of coming attractions. How do you explain to kids today about a movie theatre showing all that for a quarter — and for years throwing in a ‘short feature’ like Buck Rogers, Captain Video and his Video Ranger, Flash Gordon or a ‘two reel’ comedy like Our Gang or the Three Stooges? How do you explain that a large ‘Cherry Coke’ was a quarter (with two straws of course) or that a large bag of popcorn (likewise enough for two) was a quarter?  We’d leave for the movie with a dollar between us and have fifteen cents left over after the show. It cost less than a dollar for two kids to have a whole Saturday afternoon of fun in a tiny little East Texas country town.

After the movie – almost always science fiction on Saturdays — until the ‘beach party’ craze hit a few years later (and we saw all of those movies too) we’d leave the theatre dreaming of one day traveling in space. That theatre and a now long-gone roller rink were the highlights of Saturday entertainment for kids of my generation. They were places that kids could go safely, enjoy themselves and their parents never had to worry about what they saw or were exposed to.

We saw a truly good science fiction movie a few years later and actually dreamed of living in space by the year 2001. It didn’t happen of course. The year 2001 became a year of tragedy. For me, one of those tragedies was extremely personal.  But, long before that, ‘other things’ became more important. There was Vietnam, Watergate and Iran-Contra – a dozen other ‘events’ that managed to mask over the vanishing of an era and possibly cause that disappearance in part. Our world was never the same again. But – we saw the first satellites, a little dog whose name was ‘Liaka’ and chimps named ‘Ham’ and “Able”. We stood on the front porch under the stars and watched a tiny specks float by overhead that contained first Gagarin and then Glenn. We saw ‘all’ of the first men and women in space. We saw man walk on the moon for God’s sake.

We had no metal detectors or guards in schools, no drugs and no violence to speak of. You could go to bed at night with your doors unlocked and your windows open. You could stop on the side of the road and eat at a roadside park, use the toilet or take a nap. Nobody would bother you.  There were no “drive by” shootings. We all walked or rode our bikes to school. We kids rode our bikes or walked just about everywhere and as long as we got home around dark nobody got worried. Even then they didn’t worry about crime, just about accidents and such. We didn’t have fancy electronic toys and games.

There wasn’t a lot of crime, even nationwide. People like Charles Starkweather and Eddie Gein were anomalies – horror stories from far away that were whispered about but thankfully didn’t happen every day and never happened in the place where you lived. We never dreamed there’d be anyone like Manson, Bundy, Gacey or Dahmer. Not quite the same today I’m afraid. It started changing at some point in the mid sixties. Our first real exposure to anything like that in Texas was the infamous ‘bell tower shooter’ but even then it was something truly unbelievable and something ‘far away’ to most of us. Austin was a ‘big city’ after all – nothing like that could happen in our little town. It never did and even though the crime rate now – especially violent crime — would have nauseated any of us fifty years ago or so, it still hasn’t. But — how do you explain to today’s generation, and those to come — growing up in a town that had one Chief of Police and four patrolmen for a population of four thousand? Between the years that I was born and the graduated from high school – that’s 18 years — our county had six murders. Not one of those was premeditated.

There was no vandalism — unless you count ‘class of ’70 graffiti painted on the side of the town water tank or a few fire lookout towers as vandalism. A major theft made ‘big’ news in the weekly paper — maybe once or twice a year. It was the same with any violent crime of any kind. Our jail had a capacity for 20 inmates and usually contained two or three at any given time, for very short times. There was no ‘gang’ or drug culture. The most serious ‘offense’ any teenager was ever charged with was stealing an occasional watermelon from some farmer’s field or crossing the river into Louisiana and bringing a few cans of beer into our ‘dry’ county.  No one ever went to jail for it. The constable would just make who ever he caught pour it out one can at a time, let them go, and then call their parents. Once or twice a year the highway patrol would catch a few drag racers on some deserted road or out on the old (deserted) airport runway. They did the same thing. No one went to jail. They got sent home and later someone called their parents — end result being ‘grounded’ for a few days or a week. I’ll be entering my seventh decade of life soon — with a little luck. Isn’t it amazing just how much difference just short years — or is it a few all-too-short decades can make?

During hunting season all of the boys old enough to have a license had a shotgun hanging in the back window of their pick-ups — even when they were parked at school. So did all of the teachers who hunted. As soon as class was over they’d all head for the woods. There was never any thought of crime. Little kids played with toy soldiers and toy guns at recess in elementary school. I don’t recall it causing any sporadic violence of any kind and all that I know of — all 500 who attended my school from grade 1 to 12 — grew up to be responsible adults.

On weekends when our girlfriends were somehow occupied we boys would load up our camping and fishing gear and head off to one of the local lakes for an overnight campout. Lots of people kept flat-bottomed boats at these lakes and they were never locked up. All of the owners knew all of us kids and knew that if we used one of their boats on one of our weekend excursions they’d find it in the same shape, or better, than they’d left it in. We never took any food with us other than cooking oil and maybe a five-pound sack of potatoes. We intended to catch our supper and usually did. Such irresponsible parenting as our folks demonstrated in things like this would cause a huge hue and cry today but as far as I recall, no one ever drowned or managed to get any serious injury — except maybe a case of poison ivy if you weren’t watching what you were doing at times.

Naturally we all had to be home early on Sunday morning. We all went to church back then. There were only seven denominations and about ten in Center Texas at the time — Methodist, Baptist, Catholic,

Episcopal, Nazarene, Christian (Disciples of Christ) and Church of Christ. All of us went to one or the other and most of us visited between them when something ‘special’ was going on. That was just our culture. It was how we expected things to be and how we expected them always to be. There was no  ‘moral majority’ then and no ‘Christian Right’. It didn’t matter which church you went to. We all knew what was ‘moral’ and what was ‘right’ or it certainly seems like far more did then than do now. There weren’t any ‘mega-churches’ then. They were all tiny by today’s standards and every preacher or priest in town knew everyone they passed on the street whether they went to ‘their’ church or not. Two of those preachers and one priest married over half of the kids that I attended school with, including me. That doesn’t happen too often today, does it?

Some of my happiest childhood memories were trips that Sherry and I took with my father and with hers. We’d both been all over the Far East by the time we were ten years old with her folks, and we both knew just about every actor, actress and politician who lived in the South and Southeastern United States, or worked in them by traveling with my folks.

There was no “terrorism” then and the “twin towers” hadn’t even been built yet. There were no ‘threat levels’. At the airport you just showed your ticket and a passport if you needed one and got on the plane. There were no HLS or TSA goons standing around. There were no ‘full body scans’ even for little kids. If there was ever any trouble at the airport, even at a big one like LaGuardia or LAX –which there never was – they just called the regular cops.

Flying in ‘Old Connie’ — a propeller driven Lockheed ‘Super Constellation’ — was an exciting adventure. There was a galley with ‘real food’. If you were flying overnight they had “sleeper” compartments like on a train. We watched ‘first run’ movies twice a day — long trips even by airplane usually took more than one day back then. The Airlines always had a ‘stew’ to keep an eye on underage kids traveling without parents — from the age of about five to fifteen. The seats were big and roomy.  ‘Old Connie’ only carried 64 passengers. There was a single wide isle and as long as you didn’t bother anyone no one cared if a couple of kids got up and moved around some as long as the ‘seat belt’ sign was turned off. Since back then you never changed planes, they only refueled the one you were on, serviced it and changed crews if the flight crew’s hours were maxed out, there was no chance of getting lost — or ’snatched’ — in a strange airport. Our folks didn’t think anything of buying us tickets and putting us on the plane. Why should they?

Remember trains that carried people? On trains you had comfortable seats, ‘Pullman’ sleeper cars, a dining car, a ‘club’ car and lots of room to move around. No one would dare bother a couple of little kids traveling alone on a train either. The Railways had stews all kept an eye on kids too. It was part of their job. It was just like riding ‘Old Connie’. You never changed trains so there was no chance of getting lost or ‘snatched’. Kids weren’t allowed off the train until their final destination, and even then a stew was with them until their parents or guardians listed on their tickets claimed them.

We made our own fun. We hunted and fished and swam. We swam in creeks, lakes, canals and ponds. If it was really hot we’d just strip off and jump in. Nobody thought anything about it. We certainly didn’t. All of it was outdoors in a place where pollution and deliberate waste hadn’t yet been seen. There weren’t any shopping malls or ‘super-stores’ then but on Saturday kids would walk around the town square — where all of our shopping was located — and dream about some ‘new’ or really ‘cool’ thing that they wanted. Maybe we’d go to one of the two local drug stores and sit at the table they provided and read comic books. They let us do that whether we intended to buy the comic or not. Can’t do that any more either I’m afraid.

I’ve often thought that my idea of ‘heaven’ if there is such a place, would either be one of those prolonged road trips through the south and southeast that we made as kids or to be sitting with Sherry just one more time in the lobby of the old Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans watching my dad, a professional wrestler named ‘Sputnik’ Monroe and a man named Foster Sharrod sitting there seeing just how drunk they could get and playing cards with Uncle Earl Long and Judge Leander Perez while my Dad tried to convince Uncle Earl that the State of Louisiana really ‘did’ need to buy a new one-off Lincoln for the Governor, and that he personally needed to buy one for Miss Blaze. No, it may not be ‘heaven’ but it’s about as close as I’d ever want to get. I would like to be an adult thought and remember “now” when I’m there as much as I remember “then” today. I’d have a certain ‘perspective’, no, make that ‘attitude’.

Oh, I know, all of them were so crooked they had to screw them into the ground when they died, but at least they were open and up front about it and they did some good as well. They didn’t try to hide what they were behind a mask of pomposity and arrogance or religious mumbo-jumbo. When they stole, and they did, they didn’t try to take it all. They at least left something for everyone else.

I remember one speech in which Uncle Earl told a group of people in Alexandria Louisiana, where he’d gotten a particularly cold reception that they could vote against him if they wanted to “but God help you if I get elected anyway”. They did. He kept his promise. It was four years before there was any significant highway or bridge repair in Rapides Parish. We won’t even begin a discussion of Judge Perez.

Uncle Earl died on election night in 1960. He had a major heart attack not five minutes after hearing that JFK had won, but hadn’t heard the news about the latest ‘upset landslide’ that he’d just won in his own race for the US Senate. We were over in Biloxi that next morning with my dad and I remember seeing Senator Bilbo (remember him?) make the announcement of Uncle Earl’s death on one of the local TV stations. I remember I cried and Daddy took Sherry and me with him to the funeral. We sat two seats down from Miss Blaze.

They say that there were a lot of ‘Civil Rights’ problems and issues around the time that I grew up but honestly in a little-bitty East Texas town deep in the ‘piney woods’ we just didn’t notice any. There were as many blacks as whites in our county — practically no other people of any kind — and we all got along fine. We kids played together and no one paid any attention to it. We went to different schools until I was 11 years old or so but they were so close together no one noticed. There were four schools located on two campuses. All of us kids together totaled just over 500. When ‘desegregation’ came, we just shuffled kids around between schools that were all within a few blocks of each other and created a ‘junior high school’ that we’d never had before. Up until then elementary school lasted from grades 1 to 8. There wasn’t any such thing as ‘junior high’. Since all of the schools were built about the same time there really wasn’t any difference in them as far as the facilities went. There was just a different view from the window to break up the usual cases of boredom.

We had no fights other than the usual playground and parking lot scuffles over girlfriends and boyfriends. We had the usual ‘after the game’ fights with our football rivals from time to time. None of them were particularly violent or malicious. There were certainly never any weapons of any kind produced unless you call some little kid squaring off with a much bigger one with a roll of dimes in his fist a ‘weapon’. That might have happened once or twice. No one ever wound up in jail or the hospital.

We all knew where the local ‘lover’s lanes were located and as soon as we boys had cars — that term is applied fairly loosely to some of our vehicles — we managed to find them all a time or two every week. Going ‘parking’ was another standard ‘pastime’. It just didn’t mean quite the same thing that it means now, or meant even a few years later. We were all part of the ‘Eisenhower Years’… we grew up with Annette and Frankie and Sandra Dee. We held hands and kissed and we had fun. Did some of us end up marrying those girls we went ‘parking’ with. Of course we did. I’d say more than half of us did. But — not because we ‘had to’. I’m sure a few did ‘have to’ — positive of it in fact. Don’t kid yourself. Kids know. But, with the society we grew up in and as close as we all were, they would most likely have gotten married eventually anyway. As far as I know, our generation, at least in my little hometown, has one of the lowest divorce rates around. You see, back then things like love, and truth and real devotion meant something, at least to the vast majority of us.

What happened to parades on Veterans’ Day and the 4th of July? What happened to ‘County Fairs’? What happened to sock-hops in the school gym on Friday nights? Where did they go? How could such important things vanish so slowly as to not be noticed until after they were gone — and then only by those who remember them at all? How do you tell even your own children about a time when you personally remember people who couldn’t drive at all or those who simply preferred to still ride a horse or in a buggy? How do you explain to even your own children that you remember some – a few of those long-gone parades in which men who had fought in the US war with Spain actually marched? Most kids today don’t even know that there was such a war or that it was in what we (my generation) called ‘the last century’. Now, my generation and the little town that I grew up in and love still so much are part of ‘the last century’. It’s a strange thing to consider but it’s true. There is now an entire generation of children – born after the turn of the century — who do not and cannot remember a year that did not begin with the number ‘2’. Some of those are my own grandchildren. In thirty years or so when their parents are the age that I am now, how many of my faded memories will their own faded memories contain to pass along? Who will the strangely dressed people and what will the odd-looking old buildings in the old and faded photographs be to them? Let’s see. Thirty years from now. That will be almost 100 years since the earliest of those photos were taken. I wonder if any of them will still think that they live in a ‘quaint’ little country town. I hope so, but I doubt that it would fit my own definition of that term.

What happened to the local teenage ‘hang-outs’ like Center’s ‘Rider’s Roost’ (named after our football team the ‘Roughriders’) or the Youth Center (where we’d have a dance every Saturday night and some local live group once each month? Where are they? When were the ‘Dairy Queen’ and ‘Handy Andy’s’ replaced by McDonalds and Burger King? When was Mr. Brice’s market on the town square replaced by the ‘Walmart Superstore’? What happened to the Soda fountain at Roger’s Drug and that nice Miss Jackie Phillips who once took such great care in serving us kids the best ice cream sodas and sundaes ever made? Gone now. All gone.

No, it wasn’t a perfect world back then — not by any means. But, yes, I miss those times – and those people. I miss my hometown. There’s still a town called Center Texas. I suppose there always will be, but where is the town that I call ‘home’? They say it’s experiencing a real ‘boom’ now. I don’t know. It’s been almost 15 years since the last time I went ‘home’ and it was almost unrecognizable to me then. I can’t even imagine what a ‘boom’ would be like.

I was recently told about, and shown some beautiful photos of the restoration of our County Courthouse and the few scattered county buildings around it to their original appearance. Those few buildings in Shelby County are the last examples of ‘Irish Castle’ architecture in the State of Texas – all of them built by J.J.E. Gibson in 1885. They’re beautiful and deserved the care and attention that they were given. But — no one ever goes downtown anymore. There’s no shopping downtown anymore. Even the county and city offices have moved out of downtown. Were it not for the recently renovated movie theatre and one remaining bank no one would have any reason to go to our town square any more at all. So dies a little country town. The town lives, but those things that made it unique — and the best of all possible worlds for a kid of the fifties to grow up in — are gone. Of all the buildings surrounding our courthouse square only three outside the courthouse complex retain their original façade or even the façade that they had when I was growing up in the fifties. Two of those, like the courthouse, have been restored. The third is an empty shell but still recognizable to those who remember when it was the best-stocked hardware store in two counties.

They say that you can ‘take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy’. That’s true. They also say that ‘home is where the heart is’, but that’s not quite correct. Your home is always in your heart — but it’s also in you mind and in your memories. People often ask me why I so rarely go ‘home’. My answer is hard for some of them to understand but to me it’s so crystal clear that it defies further explanation. I tell them all the same thing. I ‘do’ go home. I go home for at least a few minutes almost every day. All I have to do to go home is close my eyes and remember a time and place — and people — who now live only in the recesses of my mind and the very deepest recesses of my heart.

© 2011 by Dr. J. Lee Choron. All rights reserved unless granted specifically by the author in writing.

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a “baby boomer” – a “child of the fifties”. I am part of that generation whose fathers came home from winning a great war, and then had us. Officially, we are those who were born between the years 1946 and 1959 although there are a few of us on either side of those years. We grew up during the stability and prosperity of the “Eisenhower Years” then looked forward with hope and anticipation to the promised glories of John F. Kennedy’s “Camelot.” I am part of that generation that came to my maturity in a time before our dreams were shattered by the twin debacles of the War in Vietnam and Watergate. I was blessed to grow up in the country, in a small East Texas town called Center and to have spent the vast majority of my life through young adulthood in the heart of the ‘pineywoods’ of East Texas and North Central Louisiana. To what is probably the vast majority of the readers I have become what my parents and grandparents once were to me — a member of the “older generation”.

There was a time – a now long ago and mostly forgotten time – when things were different than they are today. It was a simpler time, a safer and less complex time. It wasn’t as technologically advanced as our present day world, but – it was a good time. It was the time of the “baby boomers” – the time of the great boom of expansion in all areas that followed the great tragedy that had been the Second World War. It was the world of Andy Griffith and Donna Reed – It was a great time to be a kid, and a pair of little kids on a roll could really have a blast. It was a time to be remembered, and now, some fifty years gone, a time to be cherished. My girlfriend and I (yes, I had one. I was almost 9 and she had just turned 6). My dad was Southeast Regional Manager for Ford Motor Company and traveled all the time, and her dad was a career Marine… who traveled all the time. Between them and our grandparents, we got a pretty good tour of the rural south of the time – almost always together — and numerous other places. But, we always loved and always returned to our tiny little hometown in East Texas.

They say that you start remembering things when you reach a ‘certain age’ that you’d forgotten long ago. I suppose that’s true. For the most part you remember the good things. Sometimes there are a few tragedies thrown in for good measure. Almost always, they are things that no longer exist in any other place than in your memory. I suppose that’s a sign of getting older. They (whoever ‘they’ are) say that too. I don’t know. Some things are just worth remembering. Some of those things are hard to explain to those who don’t remember them. Life in a small country town in the 1950s and very early 1960s is one of those things.

How do you explain an alien world to those who have never seen it? How do you explain a way of life that is completely foreign to those listening or reading? How do you explain a way of life that once existed but no longer does — and fades farther into the remote past with each passing day? How do you explain experiences, hopes and dreams that, at the time, everyone thought not only ‘could’ come to pass but ‘would’ eventually come to pass? How do you explain a world so recent as to be within the span of a single lifetime and yet so distant as to have become a fading myth to even the following generation? Do you start it off like a fairly tale with ‘once upon a time’? How do you tell even your own children what it was like to grow up in the same little country town that they grew up in thirty years before the youngest of them was born and almost sixty years ago?

Can we take our cue from that lilting, forlorn and yet hopeful song from the musical ‘Cats’? Can we echo Andrew Lloyd Rice and Tim Webber in their hope that the ‘memories’ will ‘live again’? How can those memories ever live again when the only possible people for who they ‘can’ live are those who share them… and any to whom they try to relate them to are so removed from the time that it’s impossible for them to relate to even the smallest part of them?

It really was a different world then. I have often wondered what happened to that world. I know they say that things are “better” now, but I wonder. It was a great time to be a kid, it really was. I wish that my kids had grown up in a time like the one that I grew up in – and that theirs could.

I know, there was no air conditioning in homes or cars, no color television — no television at all for most. There were no special effects in movies to speak of, television was new (we were the first generation to grow up with it). There were cars with standard transmissions (most of them still) and no air conditioning (most of them unless you had one about like my dads or Price Daniels’ or Uncle Earl Long’s and most folks couldn’t afford that. But there were other things.

Of course, we had all of the “childhood” diseases. We had chicken pox, mumps and measles. I had all three and they didn’t kill me. We also had isolated cases of scarlett fever and rheumatic fever still. It was my generation that was the last to see a major polio epidemic hit. I have several friends who had it. One’s still paralyzed from the waist down today. Two have gone on. One of them passed away when she was only six or seven years old. The other spent twenty-odd years of her life in an iron lung. There are already people – and have been for some time — who have never seen or heard of that kind of living death. No, it wasn’t a perfect time by any means.

Rock and Roll was brand new for us and so was FM radio. Cassettes, videotapes, CDs, DVDs, iPods and MP-3s were thirty years in our future at least and none of us even dreamed there’d ever be anything like that. We lay on the living room floor and watched flickering images in grainy black and white on a screen not much bigger than a cigarette pack as Bobby Vinton, Elvis and the Shirelles… Sandra Dee and others performed. We sand along with the Mouskateers and added our own names to the end of the ‘roll call’ of the singing, dancing kids who were so much like us — or so much the way we saw ourselves.

We’d walk or ride our bikes downtown to the theatre, pay our half-dollar (admission for two) and watch terrible ‘B’ grade science fiction movies showing as a Saturday Matinee. Sometimes it was a double feature. There was always a newsreel, cartoon and previews of coming attractions. How do you explain to kids today about a movie theatre showing all that for a quarter — and for years throwing in a ‘short feature’ like Buck Rogers, Captain Video and his Video Ranger, Flash Gordon or a ‘two reel’ comedy like Our Gang or the Three Stooges? How do you explain that a large ‘Cherry Coke’ was a quarter (with two straws of course) or that a large bag of popcorn (likewise enough for two) was ten cents?  We’d leave for the movie with a dollar between us and have fifteen cents left over after the show. It cost less than a dollar for two kids to have a whole Saturday afternoon of fun in a tiny little East Texas country town.

After the movie – almost always science fiction on Saturdays — until the ‘beach party’ craze hit a few years later (and we saw all of those movies too) we’d leave the theatre dreaming of one day traveling in space. That theatre and a now long-gone roller rink were the highlights of Saturday entertainment for kids of my generation. They were places that kids could go safely, enjoy themselves and their parents never had to worry about what they saw or were exposed to.

We saw a truly good science fiction movie a few years later and actually dreamed of living in space by the year 2001. It didn’t happen of course. The year 2001 became a year of tragedy. For me, one of those tragedies was extremely personal.  But, long before that, ‘other things’ became more important. There was Vietnam, Watergate and Iran-Contra – a dozen other ‘events’ that managed to mask over the vanishing of an era and possibly cause that disappearance in part. Our world was never the same again. But – we saw the first satellites, a little dog named ‘Liaka’ and chimps named ‘Ham’ and “Able”. We stood on the front porch under the stars and watched a tiny specks float by overhead that contained first Gagarin and then Glenn. We saw ‘all’ of the first men and women in space. We saw man walk on the moon for God’s sake.

We had no metal detectors or guards in schools, no drugs and no violence to speak of. You could go to bed at night with your doors unlocked and your windows open. You could stop on the side of the road and eat at a roadside park, use the toilet or take a nap. Nobody would bother you.  There were no “drive by” shootings. We all walked or rode our bikes to school. We kids rode our bikes or walked just about everywhere and as long as we got home around dark nobody got worried. Even then they didn’t worry about crime, just about accidents and such. We didn’t have fancy electronic toys and games.

There wasn’t a lot of crime, even nationwide. People like Charles Starkweather and Eddie Gein were anomalies – horror stories from far away that were whispered about but thankfully didn’t happen every day and never happened in the place where you lived. We never dreamed there’d be anyone like Manson, Bundy, Gacey or Dahmer. Not quite the same today I’m afraid. It started changing at some point in the mid sixties. Our first real exposure to anything like that in Texas was the infamous ‘bell tower shooter’ but even then it was something truly unbelievable and something ‘far away’ to most of us. Austin was a ‘big city’ after all – nothing like that could happen in our little town. It never did and even though the crime rate now – especially violent crime — would have nauseated any of us fifty years ago or so, it still hasn’t. But — how do you explain to today’s generation, and those to come — growing up in a town that had one Chief of Police and four patrolmen for a population of four thousand? Between the years that I was born and the graduated from high school – that’s 18 years — our county had six murders. Not one of those was premeditated.

There was no vandalism — unless you count ‘class of ’70 graffiti painted on the side of the town water tank or a few fire lookout towers as vandalism. A major theft made ‘big’ news in the weekly paper — maybe once or twice a year. It was the same with any violent crime of any kind. Our jail had a capacity for 20 inmates and usually contained two or three at any given time, for very short times for things like public intoxication or ‘disorderly conduct’. There was no ‘gang’ or drug culture. The most serious ‘offense’ any teenager was ever charged with was stealing an occasional watermelon from some farmer’s field or crossing the river into Louisiana and bringing a few cans of beer into our ‘dry’ county.  No one ever went to jail for it. The constable would just make who ever he caught pour it out one can at a time, let them go, and then call their parents. Once or twice a year the highway patrol would catch a few drag racers on some deserted road or out on the old (deserted) airport runway. They did the same thing. No one went to jail. They got sent home and later someone called their parents — end result being ‘grounded’ for a few days or a week. I’ll be entering my seventh decade of life soon — with a little luck. Isn’t it amazing just how much difference just short years — or is it a few all-too-short decades can make?

During hunting season all of the boys old enough to have a license had a shotgun hanging in the back window of their pick-ups — even when they were parked at school. So did all of the teachers who hunted. As soon as class was over they’d all head for the woods. There was never any thought of crime. Little kids played with toy soldiers and toy guns at recess in elementary school. I don’t recall it causing any sporadic violence of any kind and all that I know of — all 500 who attended my school from grade 1 to 12 — grew up to be responsible adults.

On weekends when our girlfriends were somehow occupied we boys would load up our camping and fishing gear and head off to one of the local lakes for an overnight campout. Lots of people kept flat-bottomed boats at these lakes and they were never locked up. All of the owners knew all of us kids and knew that if we used one of their boats on one of our weekend excursions they’d find it in the same shape, or better, than they’d left it in. We never took any food with us other than cooking oil and maybe a five-pound sack of potatoes. We intended to catch our supper and usually did. Such irresponsible parenting as our folks demonstrated in things like this would cause a huge hue and cry today but as far as I recall, no one ever drowned or managed to get any serious injury — except maybe a case of poison ivy if you weren’t watching what you were doing at times.

Naturally we all had to be home early on Sunday morning. We all went to church back then. There were only seven denominations and about ten in Center Texas at the time — Methodist, Baptist, Catholic,

Episcopal, Nazarene, Christian (Disciples of Christ) and Church of Christ. All of us went to one or the other and most of us visited between them when something ‘special’ was going on. That was just our culture. It was how we expected things to be and how we expected them always to be. There was no  ‘moral majority’ then and no ‘Christian Right’. It didn’t matter which church you went to. We all knew what was ‘moral’ and what was ‘right’ or it certainly seems like far more did then than do now. There weren’t any ‘mega-churches’ then. They were all tiny by today’s standards and every preacher or priest in town knew everyone they passed on the street whether they went to ‘their’ church or not. Two of those preachers and one priest married over half of the kids that I attended school with, including my late wife and me. That doesn’t happen too often today, does it?

Some of my happiest childhood memories were trips that Sherry and I took with my father and with hers. We’d both been all over the Far East by the time we were ten years old with her folks, and we both knew just about every actor, actress and politician who lived in the South and Southeastern United States, or worked in them by traveling with my folks.

There was no “terrorism” then and the “twin towers” hadn’t even been built yet. There were no ‘threat levels’. At the airport you just showed your ticket and a passport if you needed one and got on the plane. There were no HLS or TSA goons standing around. There were no ‘full body scans’ even for little kids. If there was ever any trouble at the airport, even at a big one like LaGuardia or LAX –which there never was – they just called the regular cops.

Flying in ‘Old Connie’ — a propeller driven Lockheed ‘Super Constellation’ — was an exciting adventure. There was a galley with ‘real food’. If you were flying overnight they had “sleeper” compartments like on a train. We watched ‘first run’ movies twice a day — long trips even by airplane usually took more than one day back then. The Airlines always had a ‘stew’ to keep an eye on underage kids traveling without parents — from the age of about five to fifteen. The seats were big and roomy.  ‘Old Connie’ only carried 64 passengers. There was a single wide isle and as long as you didn’t bother anyone no one cared if a couple of kids got up and moved around some as long as the ‘seat belt’ sign was turned off. Since back then you never changed planes, they only refueled the one you were on, serviced it and changed crews if the flight crew’s hours were maxed out, there was no chance of getting lost — or ’snatched’ — in a strange airport. Our folks didn’t think anything of buying us tickets and putting us on the plane. Why should they?

Remember trains that carried people? On trains you had comfortable seats, ‘Pullman’ sleeper cars, a dining car, a ‘club’ car and lots of room to move around. No one would dare bother a couple of little kids traveling alone on a train either. The Railways had stews all kept an eye on kids too. It was part of their job. It was just like riding ‘Old Connie’. You never changed trains so there was no chance of getting lost or ‘snatched’. Kids weren’t allowed off the train until their final destination, and even then a stew was with them until their parents or guardians listed on their tickets claimed them.

We made our own fun. We hunted and fished and swam. We swam in creeks, lakes, canals and ponds. If it was really hot we’d just strip off and jump in. Nobody thought anything about it. We certainly didn’t. All of it was outdoors in a place where pollution and deliberate waste hadn’t yet been seen. There weren’t any shopping malls or ‘super-stores’ then but on Saturday kids would walk around the town square — where all of our shopping was located — and dream about some ‘new’ or really ‘cool’ thing that they wanted. Maybe we’d go to one of the two local drug stores and sit at the table they provided and read comic books. They let us do that whether we intended to buy the comic or not. Can’t do that any more either I’m afraid.

I’ve often thought that my idea of ‘heaven’ if there is such a place, would either be one of those prolonged road trips through the south and southeast that we made as kids or to be sitting with Sherry just one more time in the lobby of the old Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans watching my dad, a professional wrestler named ‘Sputnik’ Monroe and a man named Foster Sharrod sitting there seeing just how drunk they could get and playing cards with Uncle Earl Long and Judge Leander Perez while my Dad tried to convince Uncle Earl that the State of Louisiana really ‘did’ need to buy a new one-off Lincoln for the Governor, and that he personally needed to buy one for Miss Blaze. No, it may not be ‘heaven’ but it’s about as close as I’d ever want to get. I would like to be an adult thought and remember “now” when I’m there as much as I remember “then” today. I’d have a certain ‘perspective’, no, make that ‘attitude’.

Oh, I know, all of them were so crooked they had to screw them into the ground when they died, but at least they were open and up front about it and they did some good as well. They didn’t try to hide what they were behind a mask of pomposity and arrogance or religious mumbo-jumbo. When they stole, and they did, they didn’t try to take it all. They at least left something for everyone else.

I remember one speech in which Uncle Earl told a group of people in Alexandria Louisiana, where he’d gotten a particularly cold reception that they could vote against him if they wanted to “but God help you if I get elected anyway”. They did. He kept his promise. It was four years before there was any significant highway or bridge repair in Rapides Parish. We won’t even begin a discussion of Judge Perez.

Uncle Earl died on election night in 1960. He had a major heart attack not five minutes after hearing that JFK had won, but hadn’t heard the news about the latest ‘upset landslide’ that he’d just won in his own race for the US Senate. We were over in Biloxi that next morning with my dad and I remember seeing Senator Bilbo (remember him?) make the announcement of Uncle Earl’s death on one of the local TV stations. I remember I cried and Daddy took Sherry and me with him to the funeral. We sat two seats down from Miss Blaze.

They say that there were a lot of ‘Civil Rights’ problems and issues around the time that I grew up but honestly in a little-bitty East Texas town deep in the ‘piney woods’ we just didn’t notice any. There were as many blacks as whites in our county — practically no other people of any kind — and we all got along fine. We kids played together and no one paid any attention to it. We went to different schools until I was 11 years old or so but they were so close together no one noticed. There were four schools located on two campuses. All of us kids together totaled just over 500. When ‘desegregation’ came, we just shuffled kids around between schools that were all within a few blocks of each other and created a ‘junior high school’ that we’d never had before. Up until then elementary school lasted from grades 1 to 8. There wasn’t any such thing as ‘junior high’. Since all of the schools were built about the same time there really wasn’t any difference in them as far as the facilities went. There was just a different view from the window to break up the usual cases of boredom.

We had no fights other than the usual playground and parking lot scuffles over girlfriends and boyfriends. We had the usual ‘after the game’ fights with our football rivals from time to time. None of them were particularly violent or malicious. There were certainly never any weapons of any kind produced unless you call some little kid squaring off with a much bigger one with a roll of dimes in his fist a ‘weapon’. That might have happened once or twice. No one ever wound up in jail or the hospital.

We all knew where the local ‘lover’s lanes were located and as soon as we boys had cars — that term is applied fairly loosely to some of our vehicles — we managed to find them all a time or two every week. Going ‘parking’ was another standard ‘pastime’. It just didn’t mean quite the same thing that it means now, or meant even a few years later. We were all part of the ‘Eisenhower Years’… we grew up with Annette and Frankie and Sandra Dee. We held hands and kissed and we had fun. Did some of us end up marrying those girls we went ‘parking’ with. Of course we did. I’d say more than half of us did. But — not because we ‘had to’. I’m sure a few did ‘have to’ — positive of it in fact. Don’t kid yourself. Kids know. But, with the society we grew up in and as close as we all were, they would most likely have gotten married eventually anyway. As far as I know, our generation, at least in my little hometown, has one of the lowest divorce rates around. You see, back then things like love, and truth and real devotion meant something, at least to the vast majority of us.

What happened to parades on Veterans’ Day and the 4th of July? What happened to ‘County Fairs’? What happened to sock-hops in the school gym on Friday nights? Where did they go? How could such important things vanish so slowly as to not be noticed until after they were gone — and then only by those who remember them at all? How do you tell even your own children about a time when you personally remember people who couldn’t drive at all or those who simply preferred to still ride a horse or in a buggy? How do you explain to even your own children that you remember some – a few of those long-gone parades in which men who had fought in the US war with Spain actually marched? Most kids today don’t even know that there was such a war or that it was in what we (my generation) called ‘the last century’. Now, my generation and the little town that I grew up in and love still so much are part of ‘the last century’. It’s a strange thing to consider but it’s true. There is now an entire generation of children – born after the turn of the century — who do not and cannot remember a year that did not begin with the number ‘2’. Some of those are my own grandchildren. In thirty years or so when their parents are the age that I am now, how many of my faded memories will their own faded memories contain to pass along? Who will the strangely dressed people and what will the odd-looking old buildings in the old and faded photographs be to them? Let’s see. Thirty years from now. That will be almost 100 years since the earliest of those photos were taken. I wonder if any of them will still think that they live in a ‘quaint’ little country town. I hope so, but I doubt that it would fit my own definition of that term.

What happened to the local teenage ‘hang-outs’ like Center’s ‘Rider’s Roost’ (named after our football team the ‘Roughriders’) or the Youth Center (where we’d have a dance every Saturday night and some local live group once each month? Where are they? When were the ‘Dairy Queen’ and ‘Handy Andy’s’ replaced by McDonalds and Burger King? When was Mr. Brice’s market on the town square replaced by the ‘Walmart Superstore’? What happened to the Soda fountain at Roger’s Drug and that nice Miss Jackie Phillips who once took such great care in serving us kids the best ice cream sodas and sundaes ever made? Gone now. All gone.

No, it wasn’t a perfect world back then — not by any means. But, yes, I miss those times – and those people. I miss my hometown. There’s still a town called Center Texas. I suppose there always will be, but where is the town that I call ‘home’? They say it’s experiencing a real ‘boom’ now. I don’t know. It’s been almost 15 years since the last time I went ‘home’ and it was almost unrecognizable to me then. I can’t even imagine what a ‘boom’ would be like.

I was recently told about, and shown some beautiful photos of the restoration of our County Courthouse and the few scattered county buildings around it to their original appearance. Those few buildings in Shelby County are the last examples of ‘Irish Castle’ architecture in the State of Texas – all of them built by J.J.E. Gibson in 1885. They’re beautiful and deserved the care and attention that they were given. But — no one ever goes downtown anymore. There’s no shopping downtown anymore. Even the county and city offices have moved out of downtown. Were it not for the recently renovated movie theatre and one remaining bank no one would have any reason to go to our town square any more at all. So dies a little country town. The town lives, but those things that made it unique — and the best of all possible worlds for a kid of the fifties to grow up in — are gone. Of all the buildings surrounding our courthouse square only three outside the courthouse complex retain their original façade or even the façade that they had when I was growing up in the fifties. Two of those, like the courthouse, have been restored. The third is an empty shell but still recognizable to those who remember when it was the best-stocked hardware store in two counties.

They say that you can ‘take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy’. That’s true. They also say that ‘home is where the heart is’, but that’s not quite correct. Your home is always in your heart — but it’s also in you mind and in your memories. People often ask me why I so rarely go ‘home’. My answer is hard for some of them to understand but to me it’s so crystal clear that it defies further explanation. I tell them all the same thing. I ‘do’ go home. I go home for at least a few minutes almost every day. All I have to do to go home is close my eyes and remember a time and place — and people — who now live only in the recesses of my mind and the very deepest recesses of my heart.

© 2011 by Dr. J. Lee Choron. All rights reserved unless granted specifically

First of all, let me say that I am an American, living in Moscow. I am an executive with a major U.S./Multinational company, dealing with imaging technology. I hold a PhD in European History, and am a decorated veteran (officer), and active in my religion. I have lived in the Russian Federation for over ten years, and have lived in my current appartment for that entire time. I am married, and have four children, one of whom is currently “at home”. My wife is Russian, as are our two youngest kids. I say this to establish the fact that I am not prone to exageration, or flights of fancy.

The building that we live in has a “guardian”. Everyone in the building has seen him. He manifests himself as an old man, wearing “workers” clothes, the kind that were worn in the very early days of the century (collarles, belted tunic that pulls over his head and has only three buttons and baggy pants tucked into the tops of his boots, which are the large, heavy looking felt boots that are still common to older, working class people. He has a little visored cap… we’d call it a car cap that he usually carries stuffed in his hip pocket along with a large rag, and he sometimes is seen with a toolbox, broom, mop or some other “implament of destruction”. He looks to be about seventy years old, and his features are quite distinct, even though he is transparent, or almost so. He’s bald on top of his head, and has a van dyke beard and moustashe. His movements are slow and deliberate, just like those of an old person, and he always has a somewhat concerned look on his face. He usually has a home-rolled cigarette dangling from his mouth, and is followed by the smell of the old-fashioned, cheap, black Mikorka tobacco… the kind that hasn’t been sold, in most places, in fifty years or more.  He looks, as my wife says, like the typical “Old Soviet Man”… a phrase that is usually used to describe someone who is “slightly” behind the times… a “lovable eccentric”.

Our building was built in the early 1900′s, around 1905, and it is interesting to note that when it was built, it only had five stories… two upper stories were added in the 1940′s. Our “guardian” is never seen above the fifth floor. It is as though he does not know that the other two stories are there. Ours was one of the first private buildings in the city to have an electric lift, wihch is ome of the most common places to run into our “guardian”. The “Old” lift, which is still working, is one of the open cage variety… a steel cage with an accordion like door, and it is, to say the least, a bit tempermental. Now, getting out of it, when it stops, is easy. You just open the door from the inside and climb or drop to the next floor. It is not wired for a phone or alarm. Still, when it stops, the alarms go off on whichever floor it’s on, in the new lift, which is across the hall. At one time or another, everyone in the building has seen the old man walking away from the lift (the working one) just as the alarm goes off.

Usually, when he is seen, he is “fixing something”, or making an “inspection tour” of the building. It happens both at night and in the daytime. He does not seem to notice people around him, as if he does not see them. Most of us now believe that he was once “Nachalnik”, which is a Russian word for a cross between a building superintendet and maintaince man, and that he is still trying to carry out his job.

Even though he ignores us most of the time, he DOES know that there are people in the building, The old man is truly our “guardian”. On several occassions, the building has been in danger, twice by fire and once with a gas leak, and the alarms went off, well before the danger was noticible to the automatic system, with no one around to trigger them, manually. On one of these occassions, it happened three times before anyone noticed a smoldering fire in our garbage chute, on another, a fire in a nearby dumpster was climbing up a tree which overhung several of our balconies. Gas had filled the sub-basement, and was working it’s way toward the, basement level, furnace, but was still unnoticible to those of us in the ground level, and above floors, when the alarms sounded, and an inspection found the problem.

Children seem to see him more often than adults, although every adult in the building HAS seen him, at least once. Once, a group of us followed him, to see where he was going. He led us to a little room in the basement, near the furnace. The room is now used for storeage, but when the building was originally constructed, it was an appartment for the Nachalnik.

Over the years (I’ve lived in this building since I came to Russia in the mid-eighties) we have all taken to greeting him when we see him and calling him “Tavarich Nachalnik”, which means, “Comarade Building Superintendent”. He seems to appreciate it., and when something happens that no one can explain, or there is a noise that seems to have no detectable source… like banging on pipes in the middle of the night, or an unexpected power surge that doesn’t effect the other buildings in our block, the common comment is “it must be the Tovarich Nachalnik at work”. While I bacame aware of him about ten years ago, many of the residents of our building have lived here their entire lives, and cannot remember a time when he was not present.

On one occassion, about six months ago, I was wakened at three in the morning by someone shaking me (I was alone in the flat) and got up to find a broken water pipe flooding my kitchen. On another occassion, my neighbor, Savanov, was wakened the same way to find his stove still burning… he had forgotten to turn it off, and the wallpaper behind it was hot to the touch. Like I said, everyone in the building has had some sort of experience with him, and he has, in one way or another, helped us all out. Every kid in the building will tell you about seeing him at the door, watching them come in from school. They say he counts them to see that they are all there, and if one is not on time, he stays “on patrol” until the missing kid shows up, or until it’s obvious that they won’t. Anyone who is badly ill can count on several silent, unobtrusive visits a night until the illness passes. Everyone in the building has some story relating to the “Toverich Nachalnik”. The Fabrishnikov children’s missing cat was found locked in the coal bunker when someone pounded on the door… from the inside the densly packed sub-cellar… wifh a hammer or some other kind of heavy object.

We have all tried to find out exactly who the old man is. So far, we have two possibillties. One was a man named Petrov who was Nachalnik of our building in the early 1920′s. He died fighting a fire in the basement. The other is another former Nachalnik named Fabrishnikov (no relationship to the current occupants. It’s a common name, here… He died in 1919, during the great Spanish Influenza epidemic while tending to sick tennants.

Whichever one of them it is, we’re proud of him. We wouldn’t trade our “haunted” building for any other building in Moscow. Our “Nachalnik” is the best. Whether it is a sense of duty of some kind that keeps him on the job, or just the fact that he doesn’t realize he’s dead (which some of us suspect), we’re glad to have him with us. There is much to be said about the “Old Soviet Man”… not all of it is bad.

© 2000/2011 by Dr. J. Lee Choron. All rights reserved unless  granted specifically by the author in writing.

Tatyana Andrevna is not a beautiful woman… she does not have the “face that launched a thousand ships”… in fact, it is safe to say, that on the “traditional” one to ten scale, that is crassly used, worldwide, to rate beauty in women and good looks in men, she would rate about a one. Getting a zero rating is impossible… Tatyans’s looks are legendary in Mamontovka… As a child, she was burned horribly when a kerosene heater in her parent’s flat exploded and showered her with the burning liquid. Ever after, she was undeniably the most recognizable person in the village. Her scars didn’t matter… Her late husband would simply smile when someone mentioned them… Then he would state a simple truth… Tatyana is beautiful… physical beauty is not everything… It is not Tatyana’s face that makes her beautiful… it is her soul. You see, everyone in Mamontovka loves Tatyana Andrevna… She has a beautiful spirit…

For years, she was the community “welcome wagon”. She took it upon herself to greet every new person and family moving into the Mamontovka area… armed with the traditional Russian offering of bread and salt… and the warm smile of an angel. In rain, snow or summer heat, Tatyana was always there.

Four generations of children played under her watchful eye as their parents went about their daily tasks… Since she did not work, it was “the least that she could do”. In times of sickness and times of mourning, Tatyana was there… always with a word of comfort and some small offerning… home baked bread… a bottle of home made wine… cakes… She was there… Tatyana with the beautiful soul…

In time, age, and artheritis… the fragile bones that come with eighty-odd years… took their toll, and Tatyana Andrevna could no longer carry out her self-appointed duties. Still, even now, when weather permits she sits in her wheelchair, on the balcony of her little third floor flat on Kuznetski Most Avenue, and watches the people pass, waving to each, and smiling brightly. When the weather is foul, as it often is in Russia in the fall and winter, she sits by her kitchen window and watches the street below. Everyone in knows her. Everyone waves and smiles when they see her face in the window…

But… no one ever goes to her flat… No one ever goes to see Tatyana… For her, there are no gifts of “bread and salt”… no cakes and wine… For her, there is only the balcony and the window… and the smiling faces below. She doesn’t seem to mind. The smiles of passersby seem to be enough for her.

Now, after all the years that Tatyana Andrevna spent making people welcome, after all the sleepless nights she spent sitting with the sick and watching over the bodies of the departed, you would think that those people would be kinder. She might not be a beauty, but she does, in fact, have a beautiful soul… The thing is, you see, the little flat is locked. If you look closely, when the light is just right, you will see that the wheelchair on the balcony is a rusting relic. Tatyana died almost ten years ago… The entire community mourned the passing of their “welcome wagon”. It was one of the largest funerals in the history of the village. Everyone turned out. They even let out school in her honor… It is Tatyana Andrevna’s beautiful soul… her spirit… that greets people from the window… with the warm smile of an angel…

My first paranormal experience in Russia began, literally, the first day I arrived. This story is not about a ghost that I have seen, but rather, one that I very much want to see. I shared a suite with him the first week that I was in Moscow, but he stayed to himself that week, and I never saw him. I’m still trying…

When I first came to Russia, in the fall of 1987, I was with a major international company which had decided to take advantage of the newly “open” Russian Market. I was one of three foreigners to come over in the “first” wave and open an office in Moscow. I arrived in Moscow on 5 November, 1987 with high hopes, a knowledge of the Russian Language taught to me by the U.S. Military, and a lot of misconceptions. The company, in conjunction with the (then) Soviet Government, had arranged for an apartment for me, but, of course, it wasn’t quite ready when I arrived. This is Russia, you know.

Now, most people know that in the “bad” old days, 7 November was a very big holiday in Russia. It was “Revolution Day”, marking the anniversary of the “Great October Revolution” (a calendar change made it a November date). Next to New Years Day, it was the biggest holiday of the year. Of course, since my flat wasn’t ready for me to move into, the company had to put me up in a hotel until it was ready, and since it was Revolution Day, every hotel room in Moscow was full… what to do?

Well, to everyone’s surprise, the company found me a room. It was in the Hotel Metropol, the most exclusive and, needless to say, most expensive hotel in Moscow at that time. I not only had a room, I had a three room, corner suite on the top floor that overlooked Red Square… a perfect vantage point from which to watch the Revolution Day Parade without standing in the freezing slush of one of the foulest autumns in recorded Russian history.

Upon moving in, I noticed immediately that this suite must have cost the company a fortune… at least $500.00 an night, which at that time, was an unbelievable sum. Later, in 1991, when I came back to Russia permanently, in the era of Yeltsinite banditism, it would be nothing, but this was 1987. In any case, the Metropol is the oldest hotel in Moscow, and at that time, it was the only Five Star Hotel in the city. The suite that I moved into was decorated in turn of the century style, with heavy green carpeting, genuine oak paneling, and had elaborate carved ceiling with hanging cut crystal chandeliers in each room. It consisted of three rooms… a master bedroom, a sitting room, and a smaller bedroom that had been converted at some time into a rather ornately decorated (by turn of the century standards) office. The shelves in this office were filled with books in at least six languages, the desk was well stocked, as was a liquor cabinet behind the desk. The furniture, throughout the suite was heavy, leather upholstered and comfortable in an almost decadent way. The bathroom was huge, with a tiled floor, and an elaborate mural inlayed into the tiles that made up the wall. It had one of those fine old porcelain bathtubs that would make Caligula proud… large enough for an entire family. On one wall of the master bedroom was a small plaque which read “On this spot, died Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov, People’s Kommissar, President of the Russian Republic and First Deputy to V. I. Lenin. 18 March, 1919”. Now I was enthused. The suite was not only beautiful and comfortable, it had a history.

Being the warm, trusting and loyal company official that I was, only one thought went through my mind as I began to unpack my things. Something had to be wrong. There was no conceivable reason for a suite this nice to be empty two days before a major holiday, and… the company would never shell out the kind of money that this suite represented if it had any choice, at all. Don Martin, the man who was in charge of our “overseas operations” was the Scotsman who gave all other Scotsmen their reputation for “thrift”. I decided to make another, slightly more thorough tour of the suite.

Upon looking around more carefully, I was even more confused. The heat worked, the carpet was dry (no leaks) and everything in the bathroom was in working order. As I was looking around, I heard the key turn in the lock, and saw the door into the hallway open. A maid stepped in. She looked around for a moment, and was seemingly quite shocked to see me in the room, and my things scattered on the bed.

The woman silently went about her work, straightening the linens, placing new towels, and dusting. Every once and a while, she would look over toward me, and stare at me as though I had two heads. Finally, I asked her what was wrong. Her response was to ask me, quite quizzically, if I liked the suite.

I told her that it was beautiful, that I was lucky to get it, and that I couldn’t understand why it had stood empty just before the holiday. I went into detail about how well it was furnished, and how comfortable it was. Then, pointing at the little plaque on the wall, said… “This suite even has history…”

The woman looked over toward me, smiled a sweet, smile, and pointing to the same plaque said… “It also has a ghost…”

Now, I never saw Yakov Mikhailovich while I was there. I stayed in the suite for three days, and honestly, I really looked for him. Sverdlov had been Lenin’s deputy. He was Lenin’s hand-picked successor, and by all reports, one of the most intelligent and best informed men in the original cadre of the Bolshevik Party. Had he not died in the great worldwide Influenza Epidemic, he would have followed Lenin to power, and the Soviet Union would never have been subjected to Stalin, whom Lenin did not care for, and who actually forged his way into power over an ailing Lenin’s signature. I had a couple of questions for Comrade Sverdlov if I saw him… the first one was… “Why in Hell didn’t you wear your overcoat and take a little better care of yourself?”

I have stayed in the Metropol several times since that day, and have visited there on numerous occasions. In all those times, I have not seen him. I’m still looking. On behalf of 32 million dead, we have some serious matters to discuss.

©2011 by Dr. J. Lee Choron, all rights reserved unless granted by the author in writing.

In Memory of Dr. John Thomas Bailey

(South Louisiana Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1866)

We’ve all of us heard o’ the Queen o’ the West

In the summer o’ forty-five.

And how they desp’ratly clung t’ the boats

When she took her final dive.

We’ve all of us heard of the boilin’ sun.

And the hunger And tharst bearin’ down

For twenty-nine days on the rolling sea

And prayin’ for to drown.

Some says they ate their shipmates

So as to stay alive.

Ninety-eight souls in two little boats

And ended with thirty-five.

And we’ve all of us heard o’ Doctor Death

And his pickin’ who lived and who died.

And maybe it’s true and maybe it ain’t

But the women and children survived.

But when it was over and when they was found

The doctor, his life was done.

He lived but he died in that terrible ride

Of twenty-nine days in the sun.

They called him a killer. They called him a fiend.

They called him a murderin’ lout.

He crawled in a bottle of whiskey.

Crawled in… and didn’t crawl out.

He gave up on healing. He gave up on life.

He took for to death as a trade.

He cleaned ‘em and dressed ‘em And buried ‘em

And he wept and he drank and he prayed.

He drifted around to hide from his shame

Through the years that the tale would span.

How Doctor John became Doctor Death

Then, “Buzzard” the Buryin’ Man.

For ten long years he ran from his past

Then finally settled down

As the funny old drunk with the measuring tape

That laid people down in the ground.

In a tiny town where nobody knew

And nobody seemed to care

That the village drunk and buryin’ man

Was more than it would appear.

In time he built a life, of sorts

But not like the one he knew.

And sodden drunk and sombre

He watched as his business grew.

Sodden drunk And sombre

And dressed in his black frock coat

He’d  clean ‘em And dress ‘em and plant ‘em

And remember those days in the boat.

He dwelled at society’s bottom.

Humanity’s lowest place.

He hid behind his bottle

And his sombre buryin’ face.

Then a horror came to the little town

Worse than those days at sea.

When Yellow Jack stalked the village

Taking one out of three.

And wagons rolled in with the dying,

And the hospital beds were full.

And the moans of the sick and suffering

Gave the Buryin’ Man’s heart a pull.

Three wagons came in, in the morning

Thirty souls who were at deathes door.

Thirty desperate, suffering people

The poorest of the poor.

And the Burryin’ Man, he saw it,

And he knew what had to be done,

And he knew there was no one to do it.

And he went to them at a run.

And they laughed when they saw ‘im comin’

With his battered old bag in his hand.

Sodden drunk and sombre,

Old “Buzzard” the Burryin’ Man.

But he didn’t come for the dyin’

He came for to make ‘em live.

And in he dove with a mighty shove

And gave all he had to give.

For four long days he stood there,

With his measure around his neck

But in his mind he wasn’t there.

He was back on that pitching deck.

Back then they’d called him “killer” and “fiend”

And called ‘im a “murdering lout”.

But whatever they’d thought of “Doctor Death”

The women and children got out.

Now the sodden drunk old Burying Man

Looked to the work to be done,

He stayed on his feet through the tormented days

And he never lost a one!

And the whiskey vapors left him.

And ‘is mind began to clear.

An’ th’ man that they’d called a murderin’ fiend

Felt somebody standing near.

And when it was over and when it was done,

He silently went away.

As if it had never happened,

With not a word to say.

Nobody noticed his going.

Nobody noticed he came.

Except for the sick and the dyin’

Who prayerfully uttered his name.

Sodden drunk and sombre,

Dressed in his old frock coat.

He slaved o’er the sick and the dyin’,

The same as he had in the boat.

And sodden drunk and sombre

With his battered old bag at his side,

T’was sodden “Old Buzzard the Burying Man”

As kept us all alive.

No matter how other folks seen him;

For those to whom he came

T’was th’ angel o’ God’s own mercy,

And “Buzzard” was his name.

NOTE: Dr. Bailey was essentially accused of implementing a system of “triage”, assisting only those who he estimated had a chance for survival. This was considered unethical for a physician at the time. There were accusations of “cannibalism” made by the press although there were still supplies in the lifeboats when the victims were recovered. None of those charges were ever substantiated and he was acquitted in a public trial of any wrongdoing. None of the survivors of the shipwreck would testify against him. This however did not prevent his license to practice medicine revoked or his being denied a further licence to practice medicine.

© 2011 by J. Lee. Choron; all rights reserved unless specifically granted in writing by the author.

This is an exercise that will give you a sample of Temporal Displacement and Travel. It is fairly easy to do, but takes a lot of practice. It is perfectly safe, if you follow the directions exactly. You can use it to travel both time and in space, to other physical locations, and in time, both forward and back.

First of all, if you already practice dream recall, I won’t go into it, but you will need to use the same procedures to remember what you are seeing in these exercises. If you do not practice dream recall, or do not normally remember dreams, you will need to learn to make mental notes so that you will remember what you see.

Second, It is necessary to either use a form of meditation to induce a wakeful trance state, or to do this in the time just before falling to sleep, when your mind and body are completely relaxed. This requires complete concentration, and you must not think of anything except this experiment and carrying it out. Otherwise, it will simply not work.

Once you have attained a relaxed state, concentrate on being in a long corridor or hallway. It looks like a hotel hallway, with doors on either side. It extends infinitely in front of you and infinitely behind you. The place where you begin is your “now” or “here”. It is the place to which you return. Imagine the door immediately to your left or right having the number “O” on the door. That is where you will come back to at the end of the exercise to simply drift off to sleep in the here and now.

Start walking down the hallway, in either direction, as far as you like. The farther you go, the farther away from “here” or “now” you will get. You can stop at any time and open a door. Look inside and use your dream recall techniques to remember what you have seen. Then, close the door and go on to another place, or return “home”.

DO NOT go inside any of the rooms. Only open the door and look inside. As you practice, you will be able to go inside, but don’t attempt it at first. No one in the “room” will be able to see you, whether it is a temporal or spatial trip, unless you DO go inside. Then, you will be noticed.

You will have no control over intervals of space and time in the beginning. As you practice you will be able to judge how much time you are passing in either direction, or where you want to go in real time and space. To do this, you simply assign numbers or names to the rooms corresponding to where you want to go. This focuses your energy on locating that particular time or place.

It is easier to find a particular place, either in time or space, if it is one that you are familiar with. It is also easy to find a particular person if you know, or knew that person.

Within the span of your own lifetime, it is easier to go backward than forward, since you have an existing  frame of reference. In practice, it’s sort of like “Quantum Leap” but instead of being limited to your own lifetime, it’s just easier.

What you will see will vary. It will be like looking into a room and seeing what is going on in that room, except it will not always be a room that you see. Some of the time, you will see something outside, sometimes in a building, sometimes it will be like watching a panorama or a movie.

Remember that as long as you go inside, no one will see you  or be aware that you are there. If you go inside, you become part of that reality and they will see you and be aware of you. This can cause problems if you are so far ahead or behind your own time and place that you would stand out.

If you want to visit a particular place, you should mark it, then go back, once you have formed a solid mental image of yourself that would fit into that particular setting. Remember that it is reality to those you will be visiting. It is their “here” and “now”. If you are going into the past, people will remember your presence and it will be noted. If you are not going very far in the past, and people that you see and interact with are still alive, they will remember seeing you, and realize that it was you once your appearance matches the one that they remember.

An example of that is this. If you go back in time to visit yourself in the hospital when you were born, people will remember seeing someone who resembles the adult you. At the time, they will not know who you are. You will be able to use a cover story to explain it, and should have one ready. Eventually, someone will notice how much you resemble that stranger that they met in the hospital. You should always know enough about the period that you visit, or the place you visit, if you plan to actually interact (go inside the room) to “fit in”. For example, if you’re in 1949, then you need to know enough about that time that you won’t stand out as “odd” or “strange”. You will be dressed as you dress yourself in your mind. It must match the period that you are visiting. Street clothes that we wear today would stand out like a sore thumb in 1949. It gets worse the farther back you go. Going into the future has the same problem. You must always view the place and mark if first, note the way people dress and learn the period before trying to visit. Otherwise, you will stand out. There will be places that you simply cannot visit, only observe, simply because you will not be able to blend in, no matter how hard you try, because it is just too different.

There is no such thing as a paradox. You can go to places where “you” will meet “yourself”. The child “you” would not recognize the adult you, nor would anyone who knows the child “you”. Likewise, maybe an older “you” would recognize a younger “you” but it’s not likely that it would register. Since the recognition would not be mutual there would be no paradox. The same would apply to anyone from the earlier time that knew the child ‘you’. They might think that you look somehow familiar but there would be no mutual recognition, therefore no paradox.

Once you have seen all you want to see, just leave the room, or close the door if you’re just looking in, and return to your “O” point. At that point, you’ll just drift off to sleep and when you wake up, you will remember your experiences like a very vivid dream.

© 2001.2011 by Dr. J. Lee Choron; all rights reserved unless granted by the author in writing.

It was the summer of 1994, and Nikolai Nikolaiovich was dying. He knew he was dying, and he was ready to go. He had cancer. That was alright with Nikolai. He was ninety-four years old, and he had outlived all of his family, all of his friends, and most of his relatives. In his long life, he had seen the world change in ways that he did not understand, could not fathom, and did not like. The cancer, in fact, had come as a sort of perverse blessing.

He had long before made his peace with whatever powers that be. Now, as he lay in his bed, surrounded by his doctor, and two of his grandchildren, in the comfort of the neat little flat that he had shared for over sixty years with his wife, Olga, he had nothing to do but wait. He had declined pain medication. It wasn’t so bad. He had, many times in his life, experienced worse. At least the doctor had allowed him to come home to die. He could not bear the thought of leaving the world in the sterilized, sanitized and frigid environment of the hospital. Here, at least, he could spend what little time was left to him amid his own things, in the place that had been his home for over half of his life.

The old carpenter was wasted, a shadow of his former self… only his large, callused hands showed any evidence of the strength that had once been his. He had never been a large man, and the sheets… clean and crisp… and the blankets… made him look even smaller than his five-feet, four inches. Of course, the cancer had taken its toll, and the extra weight that he once carried had long since melted away. Still, his eyes were bright, his mind was clear, and his intellect keen.

Every five minutes or so, his oldest granddaughter, Elena, would gently brush an unruly shock of snow-white hair away from his forehead, smooth his bushy eyebrows, and ask the old man if he needed anything. From the look on his face, what he needed most was to be left alone. Of course, he would never tell the girl this. He simply shook his head, and said in a weak voice, that he was fine the way he was. The younger girl, Natasha, sat quietly beside the bed, occasionally glancing at the wall above the headboard, where an old photograph of Nikolai Nikolaiovich and his late wife hung in a handmade wooden frame.

The old man glanced up at the girl, and caught her staring at the picture. “You look a lot like her, you know”. He smiled weakly, and reached for her hand as he spoke. “The same eyes… the same smile…”

“Save your strength, grandfather,” she said softly. “You have to conserve your strength.”

“Why? Your grandmother will be here for me soon…”

“What are you talking about, grandfather?”

“Your grandmother,” the old man replied softly. “She’s coming for me. She promised me that she would.”

Both girls had been present when their grandmother had passed away. Both of them had heard the old woman make that promise to her nearly frantic husband. She had done it to calm him. They both knew that. Now, it looked as though the old man was living some sort of fantasy. Did he really believe this? Certainly not…

That day passed, as did the next. With each passing hour, Nikolai Nikolaiovich grew weaker and weaker. Finally, after a ten weary days, it looked as though the end was near. With each passing day, the old man grew weaker. He stopped eating altogether. Elena and Natasha had both suggested putting him back in the hospital. The old man was weak, but he still had his wits about him. He simply would not hear of it. The priest was called. He came and went.

He slept all through the day on the twelfth day. The doctor came, shook his head, and left. There was nothing more he could do. The old man’s breath grew shallower and shallower, but still he held on. Neither girl left his bedside. Neither expected him to wake from his sleep. Then, in the small hours of the morning, on what was to be the thirteenth day, he rallied.

Both girls… they were hardly girls… but that’s what he called them… they both had grown children, and one had a grandchild of her own… had nodded off into a fitful sleep. They didn’t notice at first. Then, they heard his voice… Not the voice of the sick old man that they had come to comfort in his dying, but the voice that they remembered from childhood… a strong, firm voice.

Elena and Natasha looked up to see the room bathed in a gentle glow. Their grandfather was sitting bolt upright, looking intently at the door, across the tiny room, at the foot of his bed. He spoke again.

“So you’ve come,” he said… a smile lighting up his lined face. “I knew you would. You said that you would. I was waiting for you. I told you that I would wait… remember?”

The young woman in the doorway smiled back at him and said, “Yes, darling, I remember, and, now, I’ve come for you. It’s time for you to go.”

The two girls sat frozen in their chairs, unable to speak or move. Both saw the young woman. Both recognized her. She was younger than they remembered. She looked exactly like she did in the picture hanging above the bed. She was dressed in a long, opaque dress, of the style worn at the turn of the century. Her chestnut hair was long and flowing, and there was a look of gentle concern on her face. She looked solid enough, but not quite real.

The figure glided across the floor to the side of the bed, and took the old man by the hand. “Come darling,” she said. “It’s time”.

“Past time,” he replied. “Long past time”.

With that, he laid back gently into his pillow and heaved a deep sigh. The glow faded, and before Elena and Natasha’s startled eyes, the woman vanished. As if a spell was broken, both reached for the bed. The old man lay there, still, his eyes closed, a smile on his face… quite dead.

©  2011 by Dr. J. Lee Choron; all rights reserved un less specifically  granted by the author in writing.