When I was born Jimmy and Shirley lived in Wiggins for awhile, and then moved to Waynesboro. Jimmy worked for the Mississippi Highway department. The move to Mobile and the job with Heidt-Templeton would've happened by 1957, because I know we lived on Delaware Street when Mark was born.
I remember a lot about the house on Delaware St. The house was 2-3 doors from the corner, and "Boopie" (I think) was the neighbor Shirley hung out with the most. She was a very nice, grandmotherly type who'd lost an arm to a washing machine.
On my fourth birthday Mother was down at Boopie's (possibly even baking a cake) and I was playing with the bunkbed ladder in the living room. There were, of course, no bedrails on the wall, and when I got high enough up the ladder, it slipped out from under me and my shin hit a rung hard enough to crack the bone.
It was a very minor break - our regular doctor was on vacation and the replacement couldn't even find the crack. I was in a heavy cast for four weeks, then was supposed to be in a light one for two. Daddy had to carry me everywhere - I remember what the front of the house looked like from an adult's eye-level.
I was sitting on Grandpa Kis' back porch with my leg stretched out in front of me. Grandpa had a new outboard motor leaned up against the porch rail, and a teenager from down the street bumped into it. It fell right across the new lighter cast, and re-broke the bone in the same place. Six more weeks of scratching with a coat hanger...
We moved from Delaware Street to a house out on Military Road. Last time I looked it was still there. It was on a steep hill leading down to Dog River, which ran right behind the houses across the street. We were there by my 5th birthday, 'cause I remember Mother in that kitchen complaining because I wanted chocolate cake with chocolate icing through the screen door.
Shirley shared this story with me shortly before she died. With a 2, 3, and 5 year-old in the house she'd locked the back screen door. When Jimmy got home from work one day and found the screen door locked he yanked it right off the hinges. Turns out that when he was a kid, Gammy Kis would lock him out of the house when she was at home with Gloria and Choyce. "Inside" was for girls and "outside" was for boys. But Jimmy was having none of that at his house!Evidently Uncle Jimmy and his buddies were quite the hell-raisers as kids. I know from stories that:
Unfortunately, that's about all of the details I remember, even though I heard those stories about as many times as I heard the one about me sharing a fried-chicken leg with a dog when I was two...
- He got shot in the forehead with a bb gun
- He lost a lot of his teeth in a bicycle wreck (maybe caused by getting shot by the bb? Don't know...)
- He and his buds were quite proud of being present when a beer truck overturned up on highway 26...
- When he got old enough, he liked to drive real fast. How he learned that is another story... Grandpa Kis had more guts than Jimmy did - it was Shirley who taught me to drive, and everybody who's ridden with Shirley and then with me says that shows...
Jimmy had built a set of miniature roadways for Mark and me to drive our toy cars on. I don't remember if the concrete was leftover from some fix-up project or was specially for that. I do remember how disappointed he was when one of the bridges fell down. I don't remember which of us it was, but we were both too heavy to stand on it... It was here that the three kids learned it was a bad idea to draw on the walls with a pencil...
When we saw her at Mardi Gras, Jennifer Sue said she remembered visiting us there. We all went crabbing down at the pier just North of the Dauphin Island bridge. We hadn't gotten really sophisticated wtih crabbing equipment yet - just bacon on a hook on the end of a string. You had to wait for a tug, then really slowly pull up the line until the crab got to the surface, then really quickly yank the line up to the pier where Jimmy could catch the crab. We remember someone (not one of us, I think) getting pinched, and after that the kids didn't try quite as hard to get the crabs that close to them.It would've been at this same pier, but not the same time, when a child fell off the pier. It could have been Mark, but whoever it was I remember watching from the beach (I wasn't much of a fisherman) as Jimmy jumped in to grab him. Was a low pier and shallow water, but we thought he was very brave to get his toes where those crabs were.
I started school while we still lived there, and got to finish the year there even after we moved because the new house was down the street from my teacher's commute. The move itself was quite an adventure... I was 6, Lana was 4, Mark was 3.
Jimmy and Shirley had packed another car-load of stuff to move to the new house on Farnell Lane. Mark was in the front seat, and Paul & Lana were in the back. The driver's door was open, and Jimmy & Shirley had gone back inside for that "one more thing" they could put in the trunk or back seat.
Carseats for toddlers hadn't been invented yet, and if they had we probably couldn't have afforded them. Mark (at 3) knew how cars worked. So he slid over to the driver's side of the front seat and did just what Daddy did - change the position of the gearshift... He got it from P to N, and the car started to roll backwards down the hill.
Since the driver's door was open, and the hill was littered with pine trees, the first thing that happened was a pine tree removed the driver's door from the car as the car rolled down the hill.
The car didn't fall into Dog River with 3 kids in it only because another pine tree caught the middle of the back bumper and stopped it half-way down the hill.
Jimmy had to finish the move with no door on the driver's side of the car (I really wish I had picture to match my memory), and Shirley beat the hell out of Paul (and maybe Lana?) for not stopping little brother from playing with the gearshifter. It wasn't fair for me to get a whipping for that, but was probably first lesson that "Life isn't always fair." Shirley made sure we knew that, and is still comfort to me that she did (teach me that).
Send email to Paul Kislanko