I am a “Baby Boomer” and confess to a life made easier by the men and women who endured the Great Depression, went to war, and learned to do without luxuries for the great cause of freedom. That heroic generation was determined to give their children the advantages that life had denied them. I can never be grateful enough but here’s a start.
About 1950, Dad bought a small house at 116 Gregg Street. The house had a living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, a small hall and a bathroom. Dad was a pretty skilled carpenter and, mostly on his own, added a den to the house. I was five when he added the den and helped him by bending nails while trying to drive them into scrap wood. He was particularly proud of the knotty pine-paneled walls in his new den. He was proud of me too, but not for my carpentry.
In the back-yard Dad built a rough wooden shed which was quickly dubbed the “Little House.” Dad had taken shop class in high school and had a lifelong love of working with wood. He turned the little house into a shop where he would refinish and sometimes build furniture. The rich smell of fresh sawn wood and varnish filled the inside of the building. His Marine Corps uniform with gunnery sergeant stripes and his Third Division patch hung on the back wall of the Little House. Over the years it became a dirt dauber apartment complex and had to be thrown away. I wish he could have kept the entire uniform but I have saved his globe and anchor cap badge, his 3rd Marine Division patch and his Marine Kabar fighting knife.
Bob Hill was, and ever would be, a Marine. He was of that generation that was marked by a hyper-developed sense of responsibility. He and his peers were determined to make their world safe and secure for their families.
Dad had planned to go to college to study law but the money did not come along and, for better or worse, I did. Despite working several jobs, money was tight. Once when Mom had to go to the hospital, he worried aloud “Where will we get the money to pay the hospital?”
Mother, still groggy from anesthesia said, “Bob, Look in my pocketbook.” Dad was sure she was delirious, nevertheless, when he opened Mom’s pocketbook, there, tucked away neatly in a corner, was $100 in five and one dollar bills. My mother, frugal all her life, had saved a little from her grocery money for months.
With only a high school diploma Dad tried everything he could to make enough money to keep his family comfortable. He found work at Kimbrell’s Furniture Store delivering sofas and refrigerators. He also worked part time for the Post Office picking up mail from mailboxes around town. When a chance to run a small business called the “Soda Shop” came along, Dad jumped on board. The name “soda shop” is misleading.
The Soda Shop was tucked in a small strip of stores located at the corner of White Street and the Charlotte Highway. The little group of stores also housed a small grocery, a homey little restaurant and a gas station and a barber shop. The Soda shop was tucked into a narrow storefront between the old-fashioned grocery store and a barbershop. While the name implies an ice cream shop, there was nothing so frivolous about it. It was like a dark hallway and sold what used to be called “sundries”, lots of little unrelated items from magazines to B.C. Powders. Most customers were textile workers from the nearby Fort Mill Plant who, when their shift ended at four o’clock, would come by for cigarettes or nabs* and a soft drink. I remember being small enough to sit on the counter and watch them as they took a sip from their six-ounce coke and poured peanuts into it. It was a favorite drink at the time. Mother worked at the telephone company and I often spent days at the shop.
It did not take long for my industrious father to realize that the Soda Shop would break him before it broke even. He found someone who would take over the rent, tossed the keys on the counter and never looked back. Luckily, just as he was getting fed up with the Soda Shop, he met a representative from State Farm Insurance which was just beginning to open offices in SC. Dad signed on and began a lifetime career. I have been told numerous times that he knocked on every door in Fort Mill and Indian Land to build his agency.
I cannot explain what drove the man to do it but once my father decided to barbecue a goat. Notice that we don’t cook cow, we cook beef, we don’t cook pig, we cook pork, we don’t even cook deer, we cook venison. Nobody ever created a more genteel name for goat and I think that is with good reason. Why not a pig? I asked him when he was older. He didn’t have a good reason. Goat just seemed a good idea at the time.
Dad’s friend from high school, Frank Epps, managed the Spratt land which adjoined the Catawba River and there was an island that served as home for a small herd of goats. Dad and Frank, I am told, went out and selected a suitable young goat and got a local butcher to prepare the meat. The lot behind the little house was empty and Dad chose it as his venue. He dug a pit for the great goat roast and then constructed a metal spit over it.
All his life, Bob Hill loved to entertain friends. Dad’s job was fixing drinks and telling stories. Everything else fell to my exasperated mother who always managed to pull together food and to have the house ready. If I have any patience, I inherited it from her.
There was strong drink involved in both the planning and cooking the goat. Friends gathered in the afternoon and got the fire going. The meat was put on and the cooking started. By dinnertime, the “stand around the fire committee” agreed that the goat was done and the meat was ready. It looked like cooked meat should. The first brave souls to taste the meat agreed that my mother’s barbecue sauce had a good taste but the meat was chewy…very chewy. So chewy that it would just seem to get bigger and bigger. Not a morsel ever broke down enough to be swallowed. For a moment, these testers tried to be diplomatic…only for a moment and then the abuse started.
The goat was, without question, completely inedible and Dad’s witty friends were merciless. Thankfully Mom and Irene Davis, both great cooks, had created enough side dishes to feed the guests. Another glass or two of Dad’s favorite “Old Charter” bourbon took the sting out of the gastronomic failure but over the years the event took on the status of myth and Dad always winced when one of his friends would bleat like a goat.
Dad grew up during the Great Depression and his heroes were the big screen cowboys. He and his friends in Union, S.C. armed themselves with dime store six-guns and rode the backyard range on horses made of broomsticks and imagination. They created Silver City, their own Western town from anything they could scrounge around the neighborhood. Bob was the sheriff…what else?
Dad’s father once carved a wooden six-shooter for him. It was a prize and he mentioned it often. I never had to use a wooden pistol. We have photos of me in three different complete cowboy outfits accessorized with ten-gallon hats, elaborate holsters and chrome plated cap-pistols. On one trip to summer camp with the National Guard, he brought back a set of “Have Gun, Will Travel” pistols with chess-knight holster, interchangeable plastic ebony and ivory grips, and loadable cap bullets.
Like his generation, Dad worked long hard hours to give his family the things he never had. Throughout his life he never lost the boyhood delight he had watching his Western heroes. His great joy was to visit the places cowboys roamed and return with tales of Tombstone, Arizona or Monument Valley. “I could just see the gamblers in the saloons and picture the smoke signals rising from the walls of lonely canyons,” he would say.
At ninety years of age, when unable to care for himself and living at Westminster care facility, he would get testy if a guest stayed too long and threatened to keep him from watching Gunsmoke or The Virginian.
All his life, my father’s heart was in the West and his soul rode the range chasing outlaws with Buck Jones and Tom Mix.
I suspect it still does.
*nabs: a Southern term for cheese and peanut butter crackers
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