Bill Kinney's & Mine Marietta Ramblings

 I posted this on Facebook 11 years ago:

In today’s MDJ Bill Kinney again has More Memories of Old Marietta, which stirred up some of memories of my own:

Bill mentioned McClellan’s 5 & 10₵ Store. I remember when McClellan’s came to town. It was in the early 1940s. My Daddy, who was a policeman for Marietta, their office was just around the corner on Atlanta Street, and the young new McClellan’s manager made friends. He and his wife lived in an apartment, in a big old house, at the corner of Anderson and Wayland Street that has long been demolished. The day before McClellan’s opened the manager gave our family a private tour of the new store. It was big and spacious compared to other stores in Marietta. In the boy’s clothing was a mannequin boy nicely dressed standing on a display table with newly folded shirts at its nice look shoes. Out of Daddy’s peripheral vision he saw the figure up on the table and wheeled around and said, “Eddie! Get down from there!”

In later years, late grammar school and early high school years my close circle of friends love to shoot “hangs”. Hangs were a mixture of chocolate and snot. The preparer would suck up the snot and he would have already eaten a candy bar which the chocolate was mixed with saliva then the snot was added. The hang mixture had the properties if spit on something above you, like a canvas awning it would began to pull from the base, but due to mixture could not pop from it, so it just dried up there, hanging. Jimmy Pat Presley was a hang artist. He made a point (no put intended) to drop by McClellan’s and shoot a hang up to their canvas awning. Others tried to top his work but never could get it as good as Jimmy Pat. Recently, I noticed that store front still has a canvas awning. I wonder if it is same one.

Bill Kinney also mentioned that next door to McClellan’s was Dempsey Medford’s Bookstore. Dempsey Medford was/is a distant cousin through the Hueys and Tyson of Cherokee County in the Hwy 92 and Bells Ferry Road area. The Bookstore had more office and school supplies than books, but I did by all my Classic Comics there for my book reports. I have seen Dempsey in his plaid jacket out watering the plants in front of his store. He routinely did that daily. One time somebody planted some “pot” in the plant pots. And, not knowing his plants, he continued watering the pots. He was arrested for pot possession. I’m sure with his reputation everybody but the cop arresting him knew that it was an honest mistake on Dempsey’s part.