Three Indelible Marks in Jock Lauterer’s Running on Rims

Three Indelible Marks in Jock Lauterer’s Running on Rims
2004 photo, T. Price

Recently, I revisited one of my favorite reads:  Runnin' on Rims by Jock Lauterer.

Lauterer's Rims captures personality, place, and the heritage soul hunkering down
and lingering in western North Carolina.

Three Rims profiles are most familiar to me:  J. Lewis Hardin and the old Hardin's store; and Grover Robertson and Saney Monroe McEntire from the Piney Knob Community Shingle Hollow Community.

Grandpa Fred McEntire and I walked often together to the J. L. Hardin's store, the hub of the hollow.

Lauterer informs before this community at the feet of Pinnacle Mountain was called Shingle Hollow, it was marked on the map as "Nanito," an Indian name of unknown origin.

For generations in the hollow, the source of pubic information had long been communicated from the base of Hardin's store.  Lauterer writes, "The mail was delivered by old Oscar Geer riding on mule-back from Darlington to Nanito with that mail sack slung over the mule's rump.  The post office consisted of a window on the south side of the Hardin's house."

Grandpa Fred and I walked regularly to Hardin's to watch the checker games in
progress on the table sitting on front porch planks, to drink brown bottle ice-box Orange Crush, and to collect available community news.

At the time, two of the famed Hardin Store Checker Champions (and the title changed frequently according to the fan re-telling the event) were my Uncle Virgil (Jerry) McEntire and my Great Uncle Dan Breeden.

I was a young, mischievous girl known for constant pranks.  My favorite prank at the store was to climb under the table where champions McEntire and Breeden (nephew and uncle) challenged one another.  My Uncle Dan had a wooden leg, and for a reason that I am sure had to do with science and orthopedic construction, there was a small round hole in the center of his rebuilt leg.

Planning my own strategy, I had great fun hoisting his trouser cloth and putting items into that hole in Uncle Dan's leg, usually a pencil or such. The victory for me was to accomplish the prank without riling Dan's detection, knowing that he was fully engaged in his cunning and often winning moves.

Just east of the Hardin Store and around the curve from Grandpa Fred's house, lived an old man, Grover Robertson.  Robertson's shack was within eyesight of the Piney Knob Baptist Church.

In the sixties, folks at the Knob Church occasionally claimed fame to housing one of the Reverend Billy Graham's first pulpit sermons.

For me, a hollow visitor from California each summer in the sixties, the time was a world away from city streets and a time for renewal outside.  It was also a time when children ran regularly across fields on bare feet, rode horseback, and often walked miles to drop in on friends and family.  Sammy Crain, my favorite cousin and fellow prankster, lived a stone's throw past Grover's place.  My summer horse, my old blue Schwinn, and my ground-hardened feet carried me there.

Grover was a curiosity all of his own.  He lived in an open three-sided shack erected near a stately, but crumbling and deserted white clapboard house.

Grover's shack coaxed a woodstove to burn year round.  In my mind, I can still see that trellis of smoke wafting from his old shack's roof.

Mama and I visited Grover frequently where she would often gift him with her fried pies, cold roast beef slices, rabbit dumplings, and whatever leftovers Grandma Maggie would have sent from her McEntire kitchen.

On these stops to deliver food, aside from teaching me ministry and the importance of serving others,  my mother also taught me the best place to rest and get a cold drink of water from a spring across the road from Grover's shack.  Since taking that tin dipper off a laurel's limb and lifting it to my lips as a young girl, I have never tasted better water.

Mama taught that serving Grover also meant taking the time to get to know Grover.  "When you are out walking, just throw him a wave or two as you pass," Mama said.  "He'll not bother you, and he always be glad for the hello.  He is full of good stories, too."

In reading Rims, I learn more about Grover that what my mother had nurtured.  I learn that he once attended Kentucky's Berea College and was on the debate team there.  "Come to see the ol' Indian fort, have ye?"  Grover asks Lauterer.

Grover claimed to Lauterer that the government had interest in preserving his home and land as a historical site.  He explained to Lauterer that at a time when "there warn't no hospitals in Rutherfordton," that the very place they were standing served as the county's hospital during the war.

Lauterer also shares through Grover's remarks that Grover's homestead once belonged to "William Guffey," and before Guffey, a "Mr. Smart," and prior to Smart, "W. P. Patterson and his sister," and before them, "Ol' man Jesse Scoggins who had it from 1836-1902."

In Lauterer's record, Grover describes Scoggins as a "Vet'inarian, tooth dentist, and a sergeant doctor."  Grover holds firm on his research that aside from serving as a hospital, his ground was once an old Indian fort, and he claims that there are both unmarked Indian and soldier graves there on his land.  Some of my online searches since have yielded a few maps and notations that cause me to consider there is validity to Grover's stories.

After a visit with Grover, mother often took a similar basket of food around another bend to her Uncle Saney Monroe McEntire's house.  Lauterer's interview resurrects my great uncle's claim as being at that time, "Rutherford County's oldest living World War I veteran."

Saney McEntire lived in a small frame house near his nephew, and my mother's older brother, Elzey McEntire.  Similar to our stop at Grover's, our time at Uncle Saney's was for sharing a meal, home visitation, and a swapping of stories.  Uncle Saney loved to spin a yarn, and he also claimed mastery at checkers.  Where you found Saney, you often found his other nephew, my Uncle Virgil, also mentioned in Rims.

As I grew older still, and when I continued to visit Uncle Saney, now bedridden, he would get my attention by lifting a thin, round aluminum disc that hung on an old strip of ticking fabric from around his neck, asking, "Child, do you know I am the oldest living vet?"

Runnin on Rims for me is a keepsake book.  My copy belonged to my mother, and I treasure where she scribbled her notes, particularly in the columns of these three profiles.  Lauterer's photojournalism and creative nonfiction reminds me that each life makes an indelible mark, and each community marks a significant place.

Teresa Price, © 2004

The Blue Train Case

I grew up in California.  My first home, a travel trailer parked on the shore of Long Beach. Later a dilapidated rental in Orcutt, and then years after we moved to a three bedroom pink stucco on Edgewood in Santa Maria.  
My father a concrete foreman was constructing missile bases on Vandenberg.  In the summertime, my parents took us to both Carolinas.  But we largely went to visit my mother's parents, the octogenarians.  
It wasn't that my grandparents needed caretakers.  I think it was more my mother needed her community.

Mother was blessed with good genes and a large, healthy family.  One of her paternal aunts, Essie, lived to 106.  When Essie was, oh, a hundred or so, my mother took me to visit this aunt.  Arriving on the street where Essie lived, we pulled into her drive.  Essie unbent her ancient frame from pulling weeds in a garden, wiped her hands on her long apron, and waved, welcoming us to her home.

In the early nineties, newly divorced, and which brought great shame upon my folks, I moved from my comfortable home to a small trailer that I'd bought and placed into the yard next to my mother's country home.  Mother needed help with Daddy.  Although I had children, and I had been a faithful wife, I was now the single one in my family and had been taught that marriage was intended for life.  Therefore, when Daddy's cancer was clearly not going to go away, someone had to help mother.  And, well, we were a family that by example, took care of our own.  My siblings and their families provided constant help to our mother.  No one had to ask me, "Will you go help, also?"

Since this post is not about my father's journey with cancer, or the next five years of a daughter's care-taking, I'll push past to my witness of what happened in the aftermath and Dad's gift, post death, to my mother and by association, his final gift to me.  
The evening of my father's passing, a gentleman from the mortuary in town visited my mother's home.  This visitor spoke with us and brought to us written instructions my father had dictated. In other words, my father had prepared in great detail how his earthly life would close.  He had loved and maintained my gentle mother well for more than forty years; in death he would no less. To be brief here, all plans were made and visible.  Due to my father's attentive foresight, we now had a sense of direction. The next steps were taken with minimal effort.

After this caller's visit bearing my father's directions, my mother was left to simply don her silk black dress in preparation for a funeral...his funeral.  She next retreated inwardly for years to the grief in her own mind and as my father knew she surely would need to do.  Before he passed, Daddy reminded us to treat her with respect and to allow her to make changes at her own pace.  I soon moved again, this time to a cottage in town.

Four years passed, and as a result of a car accident, my mother's tragic and untimely death felled me to my knees.  Named her executor, my time to serve had come once again.  When I was strong enough to stand, I knew the first steps.

Mother had prepared me well. She had told me more than once, "I'm a McEntire. I'll probably live to be a hundred, but Teri, if I don't, look in my blue train case."

I knew this luggage as it was the only set I had ever seen Mother use.  A set she had lovingly maintained since early in her marriage to my father.  Her packing was meticulous, and when she carried her "good luggage, she did so proudly and with memories in tow. 

Mother stored her train case on a high shelf in a narrow hall closet.  I removed it from its place one afternoon late May a few hours after her passing and relocated to her tidy kitchen.

It was there upon a familiar childhood table and among the contents of an old blue train case that I drifted though my mother's mind, back in time and through the layers of her life.  In her train case, my mother had grouped items for my viewing. Some of these included: (1) Read this first. (2) You'll enjoy these. (3) This needs to be done. (4) I'd like for this to happen... (5) Cards I've loved. (6) For Teri, my tumbleweed. (7) You know you'll have to...  

Mother had tied each packet with a small white, and ribbon, and in her neat and beautiful script, she'd left notes, anecdotes, instructions, and musings for my review.  Sitting there, I imagined her hands as she had written and wrapped these items.  Not only was my mother a stunning beauty, she was willowy.  Her hands were tender, her finger long.  No one touched like she.

I studied the fine script of her notes.  Her touch came across my face.  She stroked my arms.  I read her menagerie in gentle peace.  Some of her notes were detailed to the umpteenth.  Some were direct, some her silly-funny, some gentle, some sad, and some introspective.  Some were secrets.

As I sat there drinking tea, celebrating my mother's life, and looking deeper into a soul that I realized I had only known in segments, I had the impression that a gentleman with instructions on how to proceed had just entered into the room.  Through the contents of a blue train case, a map had been provided.  I could don my simple frock.

Published by T. A. Price
2009, Open Salon (Scupper)