A couple of weeks ago, I attended a funeral for a friend. As a child, I watched my grandfather’s generation pass away. They were a generation that had suffered in the mud caked trenches of WWI and who faced a flu pandemic that killed more people than the war. They had suffered through the Great Depression and knew how to live on the barest essentials.
I have, as an adult, watched my parents and their contemporaries, immortalized by Tom Brokaw and others as “The Greatest Generation” grow old and leave us one by one. They went from poverty to prosperity with a deadly World War in between. They are generations whose memory is written not just on stone markers and in our DNA but in the stories we tell.
We mark in granite the resting place of those we loved in life and who we continue to love. We visit them to talk and weep and sometimes tell them of our successes and joys. We visit often for a year or two and then begin the slow process of moving from mourning their death to celebrating the memory of their lives. We don’t look for them in cemeteries but in anecdotes and tales of their adventures.
I have, for instance, visited the grave of my great grandfather Billy Lackey. He was born and died over 100 years ago in Chester County. His gravestone means far less to me than the story about him as church choirmaster riding his horse home from choir practice in August of 1886 and having the horse shaken to its knees by the Great Charleston Earthquake. I wonder at all the stories of ancestors that I did not hear.
My mother’s father, Elwyn Lloyd Case grew up in Patchogue, Long Island, New York. I know only a few bits of stories about his ancestors except for one shining exception. Lillie Horton Case, my great grandmother. As a young girl, growing up in the mid 1800’s on Long Island, Lillie kept a diary. In it she talks about the days of going to church, of activities with friends and of her family, of school and play.
There are no startling revelations or grisly tales, just the everyday life of a young girl. There is one especially endearing thing about her diary. She wrote parts of it in code. It is a simple letter substitution code and was easily broken by my persistent father. Lillie used it when she wanted to write about a handsome boy at church or about how she and her friends liked this or that boy. I have never been to Long Island to visit her grave but she left her mark on my family. My granddaughter, Lillie Anna Felts carries her name and can know about her namesake her through that diary.
I work with the Fort Mill History Museum and feel it is my role to keep people of the town in our memory. Of course we need to keep the stories of our town’s leaders in business, education, religion and politics but we need to know, as much as possible, about the people themselves. We need to remember the tales as well as the honors.
Every year, despite knowing better, I look for Everett Griffin in his clown make-up and big shoes leading an invisible dog on a leash in our Christmas parade. We need to know about Miss Julia Martin She was married to a prominent pharmacist but in the South, “Miss” is an honorific given to prominent ladies of a “Certain age”. We need to remember that she was driving her car well into her eighties. To say Miss Julia was a cautious driver would have been to condemn her with faint praise. When Miss Julia crossed the bridge on her way to Rock Hill, a good half mile of cars would trail along behind her. And we need to remember J. B. Mills who owned the hardware store beside where the Caboose sits at the bottom of Main Street today. A character by intention and birth, J. B made the local news every year by predicting the number of snows we would have. There was something in his formula about fogs in the fall. Sometimes he was right.
Much has been said about the bandstand on the corner of the park on Main Street. Legend has it that it was built to move the whittlers and tobacco spitters off of the Town Hall porch across the street. By the time I was a boy, it was the haunt of old men in loose cuffed trousers and worn white shirts with the sleeves rolled up. It was equally populated by other old men in faded blue overalls and brogan shoes. It was a respite, for a few hours, from honey-do’s and yard work. Women were not welcome on the bandstand and didn’t want to be.
On the steps of the Bandstand, retired barbers and store clerks traded lies with retired loom fixers and carpenters. It was a safe-haven for war stories both true and enhanced, a resting place where off color jokes mingled with comments about how the town was getting too big too fast or what a crime it was to charge a dollar-fifty for breakfast.
Many sat where their daddies had sat before them. Their hands were wrinkled and crisscrossed by blue veins, their hair was gray and thinning or just gone. There were names like Rogers and Mills and Nims and Hoke and Patterson and Young. They were the same names that are chiseled into old stones in Unity Cemetery.
And they could recall things…Things that are lost forever. They remembered the trestle that crossed over the railroad tracks close to where the War Memorial now stands and they talked about the fire on the corner when the old town hall burned down.
They spoke about growing up on farms and moving to town for work in the mills, about the days when Fort Mill boys went with their National Guard Unit to fight and win honors and too often die on a battlefield in Belgium or France. They knew how to replace the handle of an axe and how to carve a baseball bat by hand and they knew how to raise tomatoes and chickens and children.
Now the bandstand is used for ceremonies where local dignitaries deliver speeches on July 4th or at the Christmas Tree Lighting. It has become a setting for graduates and brides to commemorate their life changes and a place where children, bored from sitting still in one of the Main Street restaurants can let off a little steam and burn off their chicken strip dinners. Sometimes it brightens the night, festooned with Christmas lights and garland and sometimes it sits, lonely and abandoned on a cold rainy February day. But it is there and serves as a right of passage when a newcomer, and there are so many of them, asks why we leave that old artifact there when we could make room for one more restaurant or brewery.
We who have been here know why. We know that this place that was built to exile whittlers and spitters has become our touchstone for the past. Our most common symbol is not a fort or a mill but the small wooden bandstand that was never built to hold a band. If you walk on Confederate Street toward Main Street, on the sidewalk on the right, look down. There, cast in iron, is a manhole cover depicting the bandstand. Every time I see it I want to pry it up and roll it up to the museum. I cannot imagine a company today creating customized manhole covers.
We carry our facts and knowledge in our heads but we carry truth in our hearts. There is an idea which I have grown to love. It talks about looking at a tombstone and seeing the date of birth and the date of death with a dash in between the two. Everything, the, the idea goes, is in that dash. Every day that we live, we enrich that dash and make it more meaningful.
We keep the bandstand because, like the dash, it holds our memories, records our days and restores our souls.
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