Camelot, Alabama

Camelot in Lower Russell County Alabama

One of my friends tells me that when we start talking about the past, it means we don’t have much going on in the present and don’t expect much from the future. Gosh, I hope that’s not true because I sure seem to be reminiscing a lot lately.

The fifties for me are a blur of “Roy Rogers,” “Sky King,” “Lassie,” “I Love Lucy,” and Elvis coming home from the Army. But oh! the sixties!

In the 1960s JFK was in the White House and from 1961-1963 our country experienced a period of optimism that his widow later referred to as an “American Camelot.” That very special decade was larger than life. I haven’t seen another like it in forty years.

Barbie had made her debut in 1959, the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan show in 1964, and soon after that, the Kraft Paper Company built a mill within a few miles of my parents’ store bringing all sorts of changes to our rather isolated, insulated lives. We even got a caution light in the Cottonton-Jernigan metroplex. It was the best of times for three young girls who were on the cusp between outgrowing their Barbie dolls and Nancy Drew books, and still secretly wanting to indulge in “childish things.” Lynne, Joan, and I were not quite old enough yet to navigate our own lives, though we were still young enough to celebrate them.

My two best friends and I “married” the Beatles and drank Pomac soda, a strange foreign blend of what tasted like fermented fruit that the Dr. Pepper Company distributed for awhile. We pretended it was champagne at our wedding receptions on Mama’s patio between the two ivy-covered Mulberry trees as we clinked the wine glasses we had snuck outside for the special occasion. A year or so earlier, we had “married” the Cartwright brothers and we remained very fond of Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe, but when we saw the Beatles we traded our cowgirl boots for go-go boots in a heartbeat.

During the time that the paper mill was under construction, Daddy rented living space to construction workers who had come to work in Russell County from as far away as California and Oregon. Sometimes, especially during the summer, some of the married men brought their families to stay with them for a week or two and, in doing so, doubled my playmate pool. A couple of times I got drafted to play “Hell Is For Heroes” or “Combat” with someone’s visiting son in exchange for him memorizing some lines from To Kill A Mockingbird so he could be Jem to my Scout. Joan’s mother turned their huge old family home into a boarding house during that period of time and cooked home-style meals every night for their renters. One day when Joan and I were straightening the rooms for her mother, we discovered certain magazines in one of the men’s room, but we never told her mother who didn’t drink, smoke, or swear (except the one time that we heard her mutter “hell’s bells” when she got outdone with Joan’s daddy). Those magazines were mild compared to what we now see on billboards, not to even mention the Internet, but we were so full of secret over that discovery that we nearly popped.

Lynne had started the“Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Family Prayer Group.” She, Joan, and I were the sole members. She made her family’s living room closet into a small prayer closet for us to meet in, and decorated it with glow-in-the-dark crosses, pictures of Jesus, and copies of Dale Evans’s inspirational books. I don’t remember whether Joan and I confessed to finding those magazines at the next prayer meeting or not, but hindsight tells me we might have kept quiet.

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Life threw us curves over the years: Joan’s daddy died, Lynne’s family’s house burned. Soon were going to different schools, and then we were off to college. Marriages were interrupted by death and divorce, and beautiful children were born. Suddenly, it is 2010 and Lynne and Joan and I have all done some navigating, sometimes with faulty compasses, perhaps. But thankfully, we are still celebrating this wonderfully rich pageant that is life.

Copyright, Marian Carcache 2010