The white house closest was Tony's house. The house to the right in the background was the Sanges house. Both are buildings for businesses now.
Across the street
was a dirt road that led to a pasture and behind the pasture was woods and
behind the woods was South Cobb Dive.
Two houses down my
late friend Tony lived with his family.
He had two sisters younger than him.
Tony’s family had an outhouse. Tony
was very mechanical minded. He built a
little tree house on their property and also a wagon. Behind his house is Larry Bell Park. Even with our house on Manget Street in Larry
Bell Park is/was a long deep gulley lined with high slim trees . Playing by myself one time I found I could
climb up one tree and get it swinging, and swing over to a nearby one, and
catch hold to that one, let go of the other one and climb down on the 2nd
one. I wanted to show Tony, and went and
got him and I climbed up the tree and started swinging. The tree broke and down I fell. I was knocked cold.
Tony thought I was
just playing, trying to fool them. He
threatened. If I didn’t get up, carry me down to his yard and take off my pants
and underwear in front of his sisters. I
didn’t make a movement. He went down to
his yard, got his wagon, came back, loaded me on to it, carried me down to
where his sisters were playing and de-clothed me. Still I didn’t wake up.
Now, Tony thought I
was dead. He carried m home and nobody
was home. They carried me to my bed and
laid me down and left.
A couple years ago Tony’s
mother died. I went to the funeral home
to pay my respects. Tony wasn’t there
but I talked to his sisters. Me being
nude in front of them never came up.
Across the street
from them were mostly woods and an opened field.
Next door were the
Sanges. The sons were Gene, about one
year younger, than me, and Clay, about 4 or 5 years older. They had an addition lot which they had a
small country-store size building. The
rented storage space to Route Tea Salesmen.
Older brother Clay
had a high stack of bicycle
parts, frames, tireless wheels and more.
He worked for Tom Gordon, head of the Atlanta Constitution morning
delivery. Clay also had MS which
effected his body movements and speech.
Not long ago I read an Internet article about Clay was in
Prison for murder. He killed his wife, I
think with her insistence. She was dying
with a disease and Clay could not afford the high price of medicine, so that
was the only recourse, she was doomed anyway, so for him to get the medicine he
needed, he would have to be in prison.
Tony, Gene, others, and I had a good time for several years in the neighborhood. I last saw Gene in Mabeton, at an A&P
delivery a bundle of papers for the Atlanta Journal. We were glad to see each otgher. My friend Paul Roper saw him within the past
couple of years on Hwy 5, near Woodstock
in a whiskey store’s parking lot selling vegetables from his truck. The
next house or two down was where Jack Forkner lived. He sat next to me in the 3rd or 4th
grade and kept me stiches giggling. I
don’t know whatever happened to him. I
think he was one of the teenagers that pushed Eddie Nichols and I into a
fight. Another teenager lived next door
to Jack and one time me and them played hooky and went to a lake with a high
rock to jump off. It is wonder we were
not killed.
Across the street from Jack Fortner was a big white house
that belonged to Eddie Nichols’ grandfather.
On down the same driveway was a small house on the edge of the woods. Whoever lived there had a big garden in the
summer time. One night after dark we
slipped into the garden to swipe a cantaloupe or watermelon or something and
their dogs started barking. The front
door opened and we heard a shotgun go BOOM!
That was the end of our watermelon stealing, it ended before it started.
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