RGee’s Darkroom

Do you remember Elija Harris’ son Roy Lee? He was a local photographer after WW2 and was killed in an auto accident.

That brings to mind…I had a dark room underneath the high side of my dad’s house at 3 W 2nd Ave while in HS and later. I did a sorry job of see-sawing roll film in the developer and making contact prints. At that time if a body wanted to get film developed you took it Dr. Mills drug store and he sent it on the daily bus to JACK RABBIT in Spartanburg. You were not allowed to send nude photos etc, Jack Rabbit would not return the film or prints. As a result I developed and printed rolls that men brought to me when they snapped nude photos of their wives etc. They knew I would keep my mouth shut. It might surprise you how many women, even today, would be very unhappy if they knew how much of them I have seen.

You mentioned the 25 cent per room rent, it was also 25 cent for window screens and it was also 25 cents for a kitchen sink with no drain, it just dumped the drain water on the ground below the house. $1.00 for a bathroom. When you lived on N. Main, did the bath still require you to go out on the back porch to reach it? And was the floor tilted, or sloped, downward a good bit to drain off rain water? There used to be an old well pump out near the garage area but it had not been used in years since water was now piped into the houses.

Crawford Carpenter lived in the next house down, near the railroad tracks. Later it was the Robinson family , can’t come up with the fathers name but had a daughter…Elaine ? and two sons, Fred and Junior. The house on the other side, up hill, was the Shufords. George worked in the office, Daughter Sarah was killed in an auto accident and son Robert Lee made a career in the marine corps…died in Hawaii with a heart attack not too long after attending the fifty year reunion of our Class of 39.

Austin Robinson was the name I could not remember. Talking about Sarah Shuford…the debate team was practicing after school one day and Sarah was on stage while the rest of us were in the audience. When finished, instead of walking down the ramp to the seats in front, Sarah walked up to the footlights and jumped down to the floor below. She was wearing a full skirt and as she came down, the skirt went up! Boy, was she ever surprised!

Bet you never saw a train on the tracks beside the Robinson house. I did, but only a few times and I think it was just a short test run after doing work on the engine. Do you know where that track went to? NOWHERE. IT JUST LAID THERE! (Kids’ joke.) The tracks went past Academy St. a short distance then over a high trestle over the creek below [Riddles Creek] and stopped not very much further. It is a wonder some kid was not killed on that trestle for we used to walk the rails across that high structure. Was told that Mr. Haynes wanted a second track connection into and out of the village so he was going to lay track to Gaffney. Don’t know why he did not complete it. The creek underneath the trestle ran thru cow pastures above the trestle and below it. It meandered down behind the row of houses on Academy St. and the teenage boys used saw mill slabs to make a dam across the creek. No one thought of the conditions of the water and it was the village swimming pool. Mothers brought their kids down and joined to cool off.

Further downstream, the creek ran between Academy St. and Valley St., then thru a culvert under Church St. There was a wooden gate that could be lowered on the upstream side of the culvert to impound water in the flats there and it was to baptize people. As the water left the culvert it would wash out a hole in the sandy bottom and I remember many times going in that little swimming pond. That was near the old sulfur well. Did you ever have the distinct pleasure of drinking the sulfur water? It was thought at that time to cure anything that ailed you. That area was called Goforth Flat and the dirt road it was on emerged behind the Methodist Church at the end of a bridge that crossed over the creek from Church St. Later it was used only as a foot bridge after the state built the new Shelby Highway bridge. Where the Goforth Flat street emerged from behind the church, it wound around under the Shelby Highway bridge past the blacksmith shop (later converted into a house where Hollaway White lived) then underneath the ‘big’ bridge to River St., past the laundry building and on to the boiler room. Right in there behind the blacksmith shop is where people would gather (including my father and me) with long-handled basket nets made of chicken wire to catch the fish being flushed out when the mill pond was drawn.

Maybe more later, right now I think I’ll finish reading the Sunday paper, have a cup and go to bed early for a change. IF I CAN GET THIS EPISTLE TO ENTER THE E-MAIL ROUTE!