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
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