NEW BOY

One cold February morning in 1962, a Chambliss Moving Company truck pulled up in front of our house on Church Street in Greenwood, Mississippi. My father, who worked for Southern Bell Telephone & Telegraph, had taken a new job which included a transfer to Tupelo.

Diagonally across the intersection from our house was Davis Elementary School which I had attended since the first grade. I was in the third grade now, and every friend that I had, I had made in that massive brick hulk across the street, especially Harold Fiore. Harold, or Hal, was my first best friend, the first friend my age who lived close enough so that we could watch cartoons and play together every day after school.

My third-grade teacher Mrs. Smith’s classroom was on the second floor of the northwest corner of the school. I could actually see it from where I stood in our front yard as burly men passed back and forth loading all of our possessions into the moving van. I had already bid sad farewells to Mrs. Smith and all of my friends, especially Harold, Bill, Butch, Tommy, and Wendy good-bye.

No matter how much your parents reassure you that moving will be a grand adventure and that you’ll make new friends, when you are not yet even nine years old and leaving the only home and the only friends you have ever known for another school in another town 125 miles away, it seems less like a wonderful opportunity and more like the end of the world.

After all, the first two houses in which we lived, like the one on Dewey Street, were in neighborhoods devoid of kids. Things were better in the next house on Leflore Street. At least there were some kids in the neighborhood even if they were younger. But the move to the house on Church Street and starting school had been a game changer. And now we were leaving, and I was convinced that I would never have another friend like Harold. Ever.

So, we left the flat Mississippi Delta for the hilly northeastern part of the state and Tupelo. From February until August of that year, we lived in a rented house on North Madison Street. I finished my third-grade school year at Church Street Elementary School which was about three blocks away.

I liked Church Street fine but being the new kid in class and attending class for only a few months at that, meant that there was little time to develop anything but casual friendships although Gail Davis who lived a couple of blocks away was close enough that we played together.

 Then in August of 1962, my parents bought the only home they would ever own, the house I would live in until I graduated from high school in 1971. I had no idea when we moved in about how my life was about to change because right next door there lived a family with ten children, eight boisterous boys ranging in age from 14 years to four, and two sweet little girls, plus a mom and dad. They were the Milam family, and as providence would have it, one of those boys was exactly my age. His name was Johnny.

TWO HOMES, TWO FAMILES, TWO BOYS

That house my parents purchased, located at 848 Chester Avenue, was the modest sort of post-World War II construction in the modest sort of neighborhood to which many who had grown up during the Great Depression, like both of my parents, and were veterans of World War II, like my father, aspired.

It is a well-known fact that the homes of our youth always seem smaller when revisited as adults, and ours was no different. Partial brick with shingle siding, the house had three bedrooms, one bathroom, a galley kitchen, a dining room, a large living room and included an attached one-car garage. It was the perfect size for our small family: Mom, Dad, my younger sister by four years Jo-Jo, and me. The house was set in an ample yard with an oak tree in the front yard. 

To say that we had an oak tree in the front yard is to somewhat understate the case. That enormous spreading oak tree dominated our entire lot. Its limbs reached all the way over our house into the back yard, over the fence into the Platt’s yard on the north, across the front yard and out over Chester Avenue, as well as across the driveway and over the Milam’s yard to the south at 846 Chester.

The house that the Milams lived in was significantly larger than ours, and for one very simple and obvious reason - it had to be. With more bedrooms to begin with, they had even added a large room onto the back of the house. Not surprisingly, unlike our house, no one had a room to themselves in the Milams’ house, some even shared beds.

The Milam home was a warm, welcoming, and frequently boisterous place, whereas our house was warm, welcoming, and usually quiet.

Naturally, I played with almost all of the Milam boys at one time or another, singly and in endlessly shifting combinations. But Johnny and I being the same age became nearly inseparable from the very start.

The Catledge (L) & Milam (R) Homes 2016
Notice how the sapling in the Milam’s yard from 1950 has grown. The Catledges eventually lost the oak and replaced it with a maple.

The Milam House before the driveway was paved, c. 1950

A glance at our class picture from the fifth grade at Joyner Elementary School is revealing. Johnny was a good-looking kid with a head full of dark hair, although his usual bright smile is hidden by that serious school picture expression. He looked like the kind of kid one might select for a Schwinn bicycle ad in Boy’s Life magazine, the kind of kid who might be the star infielder on his Little League baseball team, the kind of kid who would play multiple sports in junior high and high school which is exactly what Johnny did.

  Johnny                                       the author

I, on the other hand, was the kid with the crewcut and thick horn-rimmed glasses, the kind of kid one could imagine in a few years hurrying to his next class clutching a stack of math and science books under one arm and gripping his slide rule in his free hand, a mechanical pencil tucked into his shirt pocket. Yes, that is what I looked like in elementary school and what I actually was in high school.

Another thing that jumps out from that picture is our faces which are tanned nut-brown. That is because Johnny and I lived outdoors. One of us may have looked like the all-American boy and the other the all-American geek, but we had a lot in common. We went to school together. We played sports together and joined Scouts together. We swam at the pool together, rode our bikes all over town together, traipsed in the woods together, and explored creeks together. For two years, we were nearly inseparable. I had never had a friend like Johnny before.

Our Fifth Grade Class
Johnny is far right, the author is the last person on the center row