In the spring of 1956 a kid out of Memphis with a greasy pompadour and a semipermanent sneer, who belted a raucous and rowdy brand of what was then known as rockabilly—a combination of Nashville country and gut-bucket Mississippi Delta blues—was drawing swarms of local belles to his appearances at the “Louisiana Hayride” in Shreveport. That, in turn, drew numerous lonely young airmen from nearby Barksdale Air Force Base, like sharks to schooling tuna.
Late one Saturday evening, after fruitless cruising at the Hayride, several other sharks and I stopped for a final cup of coffee at the Kickapoo Inn in Bossier City, just across the Red River from Shreveport. It was the last allnight café on the way out of the area, a final stop for truckers and travelers heading out.
As we sat bemoaning our lack of female companionship, a mob of honking cars roared into the parking lot, accompanied by the shrieks of what seemed to be several thousand teenage girls. The door burst open, and four hulking escorts entered, forming a wall around a somewhat flamboyant late-middle-aged man dressed like Burl Ives and a sallow, handsome kid in his late teens or early twenties.
Elvis Presley seemed polite, deferential to his elders, and gracious in signing autographs for the few fans who managed to evade the front-door security. As we finished our coffee, I looked toward his table, nodded, and raised my cup in a toast. He nodded in return and lifted his cup. My friends and I departed the Kickapoo and for several months regaled the local girls with imaginative tales of how we’d had coffee with Elvis himself! Whether or not it was a successful ploy, we did seem to have better luck arranging dates.
Almost four years later, happily married and the father of two, I was assigned to a small Air Force weather detachment at Heidelberg Army Air Field in West Germany. Our job was to provide support to the Army and, when necessary, to deploy to the field and furnish weather data from primitive airstrips. In January 1960 the largest post-World War II military exercise yet held in Western Europe was scheduled under the title Winter Shield I. A quarter of a million troops from every nation in NATO were deployed across the sprawling Grafenw’f6hr armored training center near the East German border. For weeks in deep snow with low, threatening overcast and generally miserable conditions, we froze and worked around the clock, subsisting on C rations.
Finally, in some small act of compassion, the generals decided on a stand-down midway through the exercise. All the troops were staged into the main post at “Graf” for a hot shower, a change of clothes, and some hot food at the cavernous old Wehrmacht Kaserne (mess hall). My first order of business was a steaming shower, followed by clean underwear and a layer of fresh clothes. Feeling like a millionaire, I strolled over to the mess hall with visions of steak and potatoes.
The line of hungry GIs snaked from the parade ground through the wide doors. The men were coming out as fast as they got in, and the expression on their faces was not one of satisfaction. When I reached the door and peered inside, I realized why. A long line of cooks were fishing the familiar cans out of boiling vats and clanging them onto metal trays. C rations!
I overheard the guy ahead of me talking to his buddy. ”—this—,” he said. “I’m goin’ over to the PX snack bar.”
Suddenly the thought of a great big juicy cheeseburger, heaped with onions, tomatoes, lettuce, and mayo and chased by a thick strawberry milk shake, was what I was really fighting the make-believe war for. I put down my tray and hurried over to the PX.
A double line of Brits in baggy field coveralls, French, Dutch, Danes, Turks, Greeks, Italians, Belgians, and West German Bundeswehr in Feldgrau all had had the same idea.
I was in a quandary. My truck back to the airstrip was due to leave in another two hours. It was obvious that unless some miracle occurred, I would get no cheeseburger and milk shake to carry me through another week of C rations. And then, bless him in whatever rock-star Valhalla he may now inhabit, Elvis again came into my life.
The low mutter of voices in the line suddenly changed to calls of “It’s Elvis!” A dirty jeep with two filthy GIs coasted slowly up the street in front of the snack bar. The long line melted away. Suddenly there wasn’t a soul between me and the PX door.
When his Selective Service number had come up, Elvis, like millions of young Americans before and after, had dutifully reported. Now he was serving as a rifleman with a scout platoon in an armored division in West Germany.
I strolled into the now empty PX snack bar as though I were the only man left in “Graf.” Behind the counter two middle-aged Fräuleins were bouncing up and down like frantic terriers: “Alvis! … Alvis!” But they subsided long enough to fill my order for “two cheeseburgers, with everything, and a large strawberry milk shake, bitte.” There was no delay. The unclaimed burgers and shakes ordered earlier by the horde were there for the taking. Only an older noncommissioned officer, unimpressed by “the King,” nursed a beer at the corner table and muttered about how the Army had gone to hell since Korea.
The mob began to filter back in as I finished the last of my burgers, and I strolled out onto the snow-covered front steps with the remainder of my milk shake. At about the same time, Elvis’s jeep began to inch through the crowd of autograph seekers.
As he passed by me, only a few feet away, our eyes met, and I raised the milk shake in a salute. I looked into his sleepy-lidded, tired face, grimy with dirt and stubble, and felt a kinship, born of weariness, bad food, little sleep, and bone-aching cold. We nodded, and he drove out of my life.
In 1977, as we were preparing to send our youngest off to her first year of college, the radio interrupted its normal broadcast to announce the sudden death of Elvis Presley at his home in Memphis. As a Depression baby 1 was a little too old to be a fan of rock ’n’ roll, but 1 always had a soft spot for Elvis. I’ve often wished I’d had the opportunity to personally thank the King both for improving a young airman’s romantic life and for giving him the opportunity to grab a couple of cheeseburgers and a strawberry shake one cold day when they really mattered.
—Jack DuBose is deputy director of the Arkansas Office of Emergency Services.
The Rocking-Chair Man
Every day throughout my summer vacation of 1960, I would walk around the block—no matter how many times it took—until I saw him. I didn’t know who he was, mostly because my grandmother’s quiet little town respected his privacy, but I knew there was something different about this old man at the house surrounded by the high wrought-iron fence that I tried climbing more than once. I was much older and far from Independence, Missouri, when I learned he had been President the year I was born, 1951.
To me, he had been the character who always waved but never spoke, who sat with a blanket on his lap in the summer while a mysterious shadow of a man stood behind him. I had decided the shadow man was not a black servant like those at my great-grandmother’s in Savannah but a silent protector whose only job was to watch over the old man sitting in the rocking chair on the front porch.
Toward the end of that summer, my father received priority orders to the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, where turmoil reigned under Papa Doc Duvalier. My vacation was cut short. By my last day in Independence, I was obsessed with getting the old man to talk to me. I made ten trips around his block while he sat on the porch. He waved to me every time but never said a word. So on my tenth trek, when he waved, 1 called out, “I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“I know,” he answered as he motioned behind his back. I was excited that he had answered me but also a little frightened when the shadow man stepped off the porch and walked toward me. Curiosity kept me frozen to the spot. When the shadow man reached the gate, he passed an envelope through to me and said, “He hopes you have a safe trip, Miss Savoy. Run along now.”
Hearing my name so startled me that I ran all the way to Grandmother’s pecan tree and climbed as high as I could before ripping open the envelope. Inside was a brand-new silver dollar and a hand-written note: “Be a good girl in Haiti. From your summer friend, President Harry T.”
—Catherine Savoy McCormack is a poet and freelance writer who lives in Midlothian, Virginia.
What Might Have Been
I was a young staffer with the United Planning Organization during the spring of 1965. UPO was the local District of Columbia agency of President Johnson’s poverty program. Its field office where I worked was in a depressed section of black Washington. But employee morale was high with the spirit of black and white together in those “we shall overcome” years.
There were so many ideas to debate, programs to start, and people to involve. But surprise problems often demanded attention. One morning we learned that a disturbance nearby between neighbors had escalated into a raucous confrontation between police and community. As the employee in closest contact with the police, I asked several of UPO’s neighborhood workers for suggestions on what should be done. Hubert Brown’s was the most thoughtful: Visit the police captain in Precinct 13 to talk with him about patrolmen being more sensitive to neighborhood tensions. Brown was just twenty-one years old, but he came across as streetwise, soft-spoken, and likable as well as being a frank advocate for poor people in the community.
The captain we went to see, Milton C. Reed, was an older man with a Southern drawl. I didn’t know him well and was concerned lest he be like some others in a police department practically run by Rep. John McMiIlan, the South Carolina chairman of the House District Committee. Indeed, from the way Captain Reed received us, he might have been a courteous cousin of Bull Connor.
But once Reed gave up on trying to get me to do the talking instead of Brown, he and Brown started to communicate well. They both talked and they both listened. Brown described the frustrations of black ghetto life as artfully as a Richard Wright novel, while Reed spoke of the difficulty of training officers from very different cultural backgrounds to act with sensitivity in the community. I was soon a fly on the wall, fascinated to see an older white man with lots of police power and a young black man with hardly any organizational authority obviously influencing each other.
After almost an hour Brown and I left, he and Reed agreeing to keep in touch. Although he had declined, I could see that Hubert Brown had been pleased when the captain said the police department needed young men like him and wouldn’t he please take the police entrance exam.
By my last day in Independence, I was obsessed with getting the old man sitting on his porch to talk to me.
This story would be unremarkable except for its postscript. A couple of years later Hubert Brown became nationally known as H. Rap Brown. When he succeeded Stokely Carmichael as chairman of SNCC, the radical Carmichael said: “You’ll be happy to have me back when you hear from him. He’s a baaaaad man.” In July 1967 Brown proclaimed that “violence is as American as apple pie.” He disappeared after telling a crowd in Cambridge, Maryland, that the town should be burned down—which it partially was that night. Brown was arrested for inciting to riot and arson but was acquitted four years later. But he was soon jailed for carrying a rifle onto an airliner and for participating in a New York holdup and shootout.
The twenty-eight months between Captain Reed and Cambridge had been seismic for many of us. The ideal of black and white togetherness was battered, and it has not been restored fully to this day. I have often thought that if Captain Reed and Hubert Brown could communicate so well together, why couldn’t black America and white America have talked and listened to each other better than they did, and thereby achieve so much more justice with so much less strife?
—Charles Puttkammer is a business consultant in Washington, D.C.
A Fine “How Do Ye Do?”
My brush with history came by way of Henry Thoreau, whom I thank for connecting me with my great-great-grandfather. Ebenezer Grover was a blacksmith in 1820 Ashtabula, Ohio. He kept his business records in a sturdy ledger that survived four generations, the vicissitudes of cross-country moves, and careless progeny to fall into my grateful hands.
It’s a big book, eight by twelve and a half inches, with aging leather covers. Each customer had his own account page, with every transaction neatly recorded. Debit and contra columns show that customers paid by direct barter: “to mending whippletree—0.25,” paid for “by one pail”; “to mending pitchfork—0.12½,” paid for “by seven # of Fish.”
I find some pages especially interesting. For instance, this account for Mills Case, anno 1820: From August 29, when Ebenezer Grover sharpened Mills’s plowshare for twenty-five cents and mended his wagon for twelve and a half cents, up to December 1, when he shoed two horses, Case brought work to the smith on twenty-six occasions. During that autumn and early winter, Eb pounded out red-hot iron spikes, bolts, and nails for him, mended an ox yoke and a spade, repaired broken wagon wheels and plowshares. The biggest job was in mid-October, when he fashioned a gristmill chain for the Case farm and charged $1.75. Over three months the work he turned out for Mills Case added up in the debit column to a total of $13.37½.
What intrigues me about this page, however, appears in the contra column. Case made one regular payment on October 20, “by one hog … 1.00.” Then comes the punch line, one final payment: “by peeking thow his fingers and looking at mee … 00.1.” (In defense of Grover spelling, note that this seems to have been written by a different, more flowing hand. Mills Case himself?)
Before Mr. Thoreau led me to the likely explanation for this little scene of frontier hilarity, I suspected that Mills had been sampling Eb’s eighteen-centsper-quart whiskey, which he traded to some of his other customers (duly recorded in the ledger). I smiled at the image of Mills Case peeking through his fingers at Ebenezer Grover and tucked the curious scene away in the recesses of my memory.
Then one day I reread Civil Disobedience and exclaimed aloud over a passage. Thoreau was recalling his night in the Concord jail: “It was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor came out of jail, for his acquaintances to salute him, looking through their fingers, which were crossed to represent the grating of a jail window, ” ‘How do ye do?’ ”
“How do ye do?” indeed! The early settlers on the Ohio Western Reserve, families like the Grovers and the Cases, were transplanted New Englanders. I believe Mills was signaling with an antique gesture both men understood: “Go ahead and send me to jail for a pauper if you want to, but I’m not about to pay anything on my bill.”
The way it looks to me, at least until I have a chance to examine the old account book further, the Cases may still owe my family $12.36½—allowing $1 for the hog and a penny for the peek. Plus, of course, 171 years’ worth of interest.
—Joanne Martell lives in Southern Pines, North Carolina.
