In 1976, my dad got transferred. He was a senior vice president of a company that manufactured polyester. We moved from Connecticut to North Carolina. It was like going back to the '50s. Everyone seemed to be wearing those science-guy glasses that have pointed metal at the top corners of the lenses. The older men still slicked their hair. The women asked if I knew Jesus and what church we went to. They were still pissed off about the "War between the States". I was a little kid; they could have left me out of it.
I lived outside of Charlotte in Mecklenburg county. It's now part of Charlotte, but back then, it was far from everything. Like when cable TV arrived in Charlotte, it didn't come to the county. This was before satellite TV. We didn't have city water, so no fire hydrants. We all had wells (not the hand-pumps, though!). We had a fluorescent blue street lamp in the back yard called a "security light". Our house was at the end of a street that had a lot of paths crossing nearby that came through the woods from a big field that had persimmon trees and a hidden trash dump that I suspect was illegal. Lots of paths connected roads in the area, and were probably mostly used by kids like me.
The nearest store was a gas station called Greer's. It had a good selection of candy and was about 3 miles away. However, downtown Matthews was about 5 miles away, so I rode my bike there whenever I could after I turned 10. Matthews was a tiny town that resembled Mayberry (a common feature of NC towns). There was a railroad that served Seaboard freight. There were some general-store buildings that looked like they were from the old west, made of wood and sagging on the main street. One of these was called Ma and Pa's Bar and Grill. I once went in there to get some water after riding my bike on a really hot day. When I walked in the screen door, a bunch of old-timers turned and looked at me from the bar, which ran longways once you walked in, so that if you took two steps from the door, you'd be sitting at the bar. I got the idea they'd been drinking, and I don't remember if I drank any water before leaving.
The reason I went downtown was to visit Godfather's Pizza, where they had a couple of video games, and to visit the Revco drug store and a toy store. Sometimes I did business at the post office. Once I rode my bike behind the shopping center and found myself in this little neighborhood called Tank Town (named for a water tank). It had little one-story houses that seemed to be sagging, with Black folk out on the porches. Everyone was staring at me as I rode through there, probably wondering what the hell I was doing there. A smiling old man called from a porch, "Hey, can I go with you?", which I thought was pretty funny.
That's kind of a sad thing about Mecklenburg county back then, though it plays out everywhere, I suppose. Black folks were still living in little shacks. I saw this one place on the regular school bus ride that was a shotgun shack in the middle of a big soybean field, usually with people on the porch or nearby in the field. It was gray and raised up off the ground about 3 feet. There was a big gray farm house a few hundred yards from that. To me, it looked like it was the 1930s. Roots came out around the same time, and it made me wonder what the deal was on that piece of land.
Another weird thing was this old institution green school bus that was overgrown with weeds that sat abandoned on a fork in the road on my school bus route. It looked like ages ago there might have been a gas station there. That bus sat there until about 1981, so I passed it for about 5 years. Then the development of Matthews really started taking off. Charlotte annexed the subdivision where I lived, and subdivisions started popping up everywhere.
That's the end of the nostalgia for now.
