Iko Iko, or Thursday in New Orleans

Big Chief Bo Dollis cuts loose while cradling a new member of the Wild Magnolias family.

May 17 – We’re squandering a beautiful Friday at Cafe du Monde in Metairie after spending a mostly quiet night on Governor Nicholls Street alongside New Orleans African American Museum in historic Fauborg Treme.
Now, Frommer’s warns it’s dangerous to walk through the Treme after dark. What do they know? Besides, we weren’t walking. We were sleeping. Nothing bad happened but the sweat. Despite a voluptuous canopy of shade formed by a phalanx of graceful, flowing trees, the sweat poured off us in unbecoming rivulets.
The museum, housed in a Creole villa that dates to 1829, is closed for renovations. Much of the Treme cries out for renovation. It has endured the entropy of the centuries and the ravages of Katrina. It stands without apology, dignity intact.
The Treme pulsates with the funky rhythms of the African diaspora. Once you take the French Quarter out of the equation, it’s New Orleans’ most fabled section. It is the subject of a critically lauded PBS documentary and the atmospheric HBO series created by David Simon and Eric Overmyer.
The Treme, originally called Back of Town, is the oldest surviving black neighborhood in the United States. It celebrated its bicentennial last year and was home to free blacks half a century before the Civil War ended the peculiar institution of slavery.
We walked a bit of Treme, bought a bottle of wine at a corner store and followed our ears to the weekly Jazz in the Park concert. The park in question is Louis Armstrong Park, an inviting greenspace which includes Congo Square as well as the Mahalia Jackson Theater and New Orleans Municipal Auditorium. Artistic renderings of jazz greats such as Sidney Bechet, Buddy Bolden and, yes, old Satchelmouth himself enhance its charm. Armstrong Park was born Beauregard Park, named for that Confederate scalawag Gen. Pierre Gustav Toutant Beauregard. In Congo Square, formerly Place de Negres, slaves danced on Sundays and purchased their freedom. It is also breeding ground for New Orleans’ brass band tradition and the civil rights movement.
We had the immeasurable good fortune to arrive at Armstrong Park in time to catch Bo Dollis and the Wild Magnolias. Bo Dollis, New Orleans legend, was unknown to me until yesterday.
Old Bo’s battled strokes and battled an array of maladies in recent years, and he needed a walker to get to the microphone. Theodore Emile “Bo” Dollis looks every bit his 69 years, and perhaps a few more. Make no mistake, he can still belt out a tune with a ragged joy that makes you feel like you’ve landed in the real New Orleans and not some touristy sideshow. Sure, Iko Iko is a careworn standard that would make Davis McAlary howl with derision, but it felt good to hear Bo holler and growl. Damn good.
I was inspired to take a little video. The sound is poor and the video shaky, but you can get a feel for the art of Bo Dollis:

Once Bo had had been assisted from the stage, Gerard “Bo Jr.” Dollis took center stage. Me? I needed a toilet in a pretty undignified way. I waited in line for one of four porta potties. When I made it to the front of the line, I discovered with considerable chagrin an absolute lack of toilet paper.
I wandered out across Rampart Street, which divides Treme from the French Quarter. First place I stumbled on was a hipster hot dog shop at the corner of Rampart and St. Ann called Dreamy Weenie.
I hesitated. I looked along Rampart and then up St. Ann. Then I hesitated some more.  A woman at the corner table beckoned me with a welcoming smile. I am weak. If she bids, I will come.

My friend Catherine at the Dreamy Weenie at the corner of North Rampart and St. Ann.

As for the hot dog, I opted for the vegan kielbasa with onions and mustard. I recognized this as a culinary atrocity, buying a vegan hot dog in New Orleans. Becky, she is a strong-willed vegetarian. I ponied up the extra 55 cents for roasted garlic. At $8.18, it wasn’t a bargain. But it was good, and the bathroom was clean, vacant and stocked with toilet paper. I was close to nirvana.
After exiting the restroom, I shuffled over to chat with the woman who brought me here. Sit down, she said. I sat down. If I don’t flatter myself, I do believe Catherine had an eye for your ramshackle narrator.
Ahmed, one of the guys behind the counter, was her son-in-law. Her name is Catherine, and she used to live in the upper Ninth Ward. Took in water during Katrina, but nothing disastrous. Now she lives uptown. Catherine said she’s never been to Armstrong Park. Besides, she allowed, she was wearing the wrong sort of shoes for a concert in a park.
She invited me to look at her stiletto-heeled ankle boots. They are nice, I said. She smiled. We continued the small talk, till I made a reference to “we,” as in “we are just passing through New Orleans.” Who’s this we? Catherine wanted to know.
I’m sure I imagined it, but it seemed as if her demeanor hardened just a bit. At last, and not a second too soon, my tres-chic hot dog was ready for consumption. I bid Catherine goodbye. She said to say hi to my wife and son. I said I would.
Then I had to smuggle the hot dog back into the park, as no food or drink is allowed in the park during concert time. I stuffed it in the bottom of my backpack and never once thought of Ignatius Reilly.
I crossed Armstrong Park and found Becky and Max at the bounce house. The bounce house kids were the craziest, flippingest bounce house kids we’ve ever seen. Watch them battle for the eye of the camera. Check out poor Purnell, a 6-year-old jumping jack. First Javon, the kid in the Perry the Platypus T-shirt, decks him with an elbow. Then Max screens him out just as he’s about to show off his flip.

As for Max, well, looks like he’ll be hounded by the ponderous Wallingford genes. We like to stay close to terra firma, you see. When he’d had enough running and bouncing, we exited the park as the evening crowd filed into Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Broadway hit “Wicked.”
We wandered Treme in search of bread. We struck out at two convenience before we bought three Po-Boy rolls at a corner store.
We made our way back to the Behemoth. I fried up potatoes and onions for our self-styled veggie Po-Boy: cheese, cole slaw and Thousand Island dressing topped with fries and onions. Not Creole, but not bad.
Then we got a fitful night of sleep, haunted only by the ever-present New Orleans song of sirens and the street palaver of passing drunks.

Bo Dollis, Bo Jr. and the Wild Magnolias.

Cafe du Monde

Becky and Max in Vienna, Alabama, with Everett Owens, our ridiculously gracious tour guide.

May 16, Metairie, La. – We are on the edge of New Orleans. My laptop is covered in powdered sugar that falls from beignets like snow cascading off a shaken branch.
Yesterday we went looking for the vanished town of Vienna, Alabama. Vienna (they say Vy-enna down he-yah) sat on the Tombigbee River in Pickens County in western Alabama. To be fair, the Tombigbee River’s not here anymore, either. It’s now part of the Ten-Tom (Tennessee Tombigbee) Waterway, a man-altered water system that includes 10 dams, a series of locks and alligator-infested backwaters. Perhaps “infested” is a bit of hyperbole.
As to how we got on the trail of Vienna, Alabama, that’s a typically convoluted story. I was in the Alabama Room of the Anniston public library on Tuesday afternoon when I was accosted by a genial southern fellow named David Hodnett. David has a bit of an obsession about Vienna. His family, you see, once owned most of Vienna. David has written two books on the bygone steamship port, and he is working on another.

David Hodnett, in a photo stolen from a short video I took of him in the Alabama Room.

Anyway, that’s how we got Vienna on our minds. Yesterday we drove up and down Alabama 14 from Eutaw to Pickensville in search of Vienna. Then we tried Alabama 17. No luck.
We circumnavigated Aliceville a few times in our fruitless search. We were so inept we couldn’t even find the library. (And yes, Kenny Via, I remembered Aliceville as the hometown of perennial NFL Pro Bowl tackle Walter Johnson.)
We got lost and we got lost and then we got lost again.
And then we got found.
We parked the Behemoth on Broad Street and wandered over to the Aliceville Museum, which chronicles the town’s role as host site for German POWs during World War II. I walked in and asked Martha Horton, a retired public-school history teacher, if she knew the whereabouts of old Vienna. She didn’t.
Now, I had asked the same question of the woman at the Tom Bevill Lock and Dam visitors center in Pickensville.
“No sir, I do not,” she said.
At that was the end of it. Not so with Martha.
Darn if she didn’t repair to the back room and start making phone calls on our behalf. In less than five minutes, Everett Owens walked through the door and offered to take us on a tour of Vienna.
Everett Owens is Vienna nowadays. His family bought the Vienna site in 1960 and farmed here until Everett retired a year ago.
Anyway, I’ll have lots more on David Hodnett, Everett Owens and our search for Vienna later, just like I’ll have much, much, much, much more on our visit to Tallapoosa and our subsequent trip to Anniston, Ala.
Our Tallapoosa odyssey began before we ever crossed paths with Anthony and Audrey Williams. We drove into town on 78 Highway and pulled into the parking lot at the Piggly Wiggly. We bought two Piggly Wiggly T-shirts and had a nice chat with our checker, a sweet woman named Barbara Anderson.
She noticed the Maine on my T-shirt and asked if we came from Maine. She’s been there, she said. It was on her bucket list. As far as bucket lists go, Barbara’s is most intriguing. I’ll get back to her later, too.
As for Anniston, in addition to meeting David Hodnett, we also ran across Terry Paschal. Terry owns the Wine Cellar on Quintard Avenue.
The sign on his door says he closes at 6 p.m. It was well past 6 when we entered. These people, the Williamses and the David Hodnetts and the Terry Paschals and the Everett Owenses, I can’t quite account for their generosity. It never fails to startle me.
Terry’s a retired Army engineer, and has operated the Wine Cellar for eight years now.
Things have been rough since the bottom fell out of the economy.
“Back in 2005, people were spending money willy-nilly,” he said. “Now they’re tighter. And they have to be.”
Terry asked if we’d been to Cheaha State Park, which features the highest point (2,413 feet, in case you were wondering) in Alabama. We said we hadn’t. He insisted we go there. Immediately.

Terry Paschal sells us some wine at his store in Anniston, Ala.

Having already figured us for dilly-dalliers, he selected a wine for us and ushered us out the door so we’d arrive at Cheaha in time for sunset.
On the way out, I was greeted by a nice couple, Jacqueline and Randy. She asked if she could come with us, wherever we were going. I think she was joking.
Despite our deadline, I found time for small talk. I asked Randy how things were going. He said they were going OK, in spite of trials that were implied but unmentioned.
“God is good to me,” he said. “Even when I’m bad to myself.”
I bade them adieu, and we rushed off in search of the highest point in Alabama and a sunset that would match the color of our rose wine, as Terry promised it would.

Sunset on Bald Rock, Cheaha Mountain, Cheaha State Park, Alabama.

Oxford, Alabama

May 14 – Just a quick update on our whereabouts, in case anybody has wandered into this journal and wondered if we’d gotten lost in the pages of Deliverance.
We departed Tallapoosa, Ga., this afternoon after a serendipitous and wholly wonderful 11-day stay with Anthony and Audrey Williams. When we rolled into town on Friday afternoon, May 3, we had no plans but to check in with the family of our old friends, the late siblings Stan Clarke and Clara Williams.
Briefly as possible: I fell under the sway of Stanley D. Clarke shortly after moving into the little hovel on Rocky Point outside Bremerton, Wash., in the summer of 1996. From then till his death at 90 on Oct. 15, 2005, I sat on Stan’s couch, drank his liquor and listened to his stories about growing up in Tallapoosa.
One of John and Emma Clark’s 11 children, Stan graduated from Tallapoosa High School in 1935. He was the only one of his siblings to graduate from high school.
Everyone loves Stanley. He was one of a kind. He added an “e” to his surname and gave himself a middle initial, D. When people asked what the D stood for, he said Darling. Stanley Darling.
I first came to Tallapoosa in October of 2002 and had a great visit with Clara. I had such a nice time I returned to Tallapoosa with Becky the following year. Then I brought Lauri Lebo here in 2007.
Clara passed away on Aug. 26, 2009, 12 days after her 92nd birthday. I figured we’d stop and pay our respects to the family and then move on, either east to Atlanta or west toward Birmingham. After visiting the cemetery at the Riverside Baptist Church, we drove toward Clara’s old house, which sits right on U.S. Highway 78. Down here, they call it 78 Highway. I love the way they talk here.
We slowed down as we passed the house. A man waved to us from the driveway. We drove on, made a U-Turn and returned. I nosed the Behemoth into the driveway just far enough so we wouldn’t get clipped by transfer trucks rumbling past on 78 Highway. They call them transfer trucks down here, by the way, and not tractor trailers.
As I walked hesitantly up the incline toward the porch, a lilting voice cried out: “Have you folks gotten lost in our big city?”
So we met Audrey Mae Robinson Williams, Anthony Williams’ wife and Clara’s daughter-in-law.
We parked the Behemoth on a flat spot farther up the driveway, where it stayed for most of the ensuing 11 days. Anthony and Audrey introduced us to relatives and friends and a roiling vat of southern stories.
We’d planned to leave Sunday. We planned to leave just about every day in the past week. On Sunday we met Melvin and Gladys Agan, Audrey’s sister and brother-in-law. I was in the camper when they pulled into the Williams’ driveway. Melvin marched straight toward me, knocked on the door and introduced himself.
As we walked toward the house, Melvin said he couldn’t have hand-picked better in-laws than Anthony and Audrey.
And that about sums up our last 11 days. We couldn’t have picked better people to stumble upon. We stayed nearly a fortnight and somehow failed to overstay our welcome. Every night we deconstructed the day which had just passed and looked for clues that we had become loathsome interlopers. And we kept failing to leave.
Yesterday, Audrey shared this wonderful definition of hospitality:
“Hospitality is making people feel at home even when you wish they were.”
Then she stressed this definition did not apply to us.
They have a 6-year-old grandson, William, living at home. Max and William bonded over tractor rides and TV shows. We visited with Wally and Polly, Rodrick De Luna and Tiny Arlene and spent a couple afternoons in the Alabama woods with the one and only Johnny Devere, an old friend of Anthony’s and a self-described hermit. There will be lots more on all of this when I get a chance to process our time in Tallapoosa. For now, here’s a brief video of Johnny Devere on the harmonica:

OK … This was supposed to be brief. We’re at the public library in Oxford, Ala. In the past two hours, I’ve gone from the Oxford library to the Anniston library and back again. I went to Anniston to chase the trail of Ty Cobb, who played semipro ball for the Anniston Noblemen in 1904, the year before he hooked on with the Detroit Tigers.
I visited the Alabama Room and inhaled the deep, intoxicating aroma of history. I met a genial Anniston native named David Hodnett, who is chasing a story of his own. He’s researching and writing about the vanished Alabama town Vienna (down here they say “Vye-enna”), where his people came from. His grandfather, William Battle Peebles, played baseball for George Leidy at Marion Military Institute. Leidy was Cobb’s manager with the Augusta Tourists of the South Atlantic League in 1905.
David was gracious enough to sit and let me record two short videos where he described some of his research, and we will return the favor by making a pilgrimage to the lost town of Vienna, Alabama.
The library here is a world-class discus throw from Oxford High School, home of the Yellow Jackets.
The Yellow Jackets are presently engaged in spring football practice. You can hear the shrill call of coaches’ whistles blowing up East 6th Street.
Oxford’s well-appointed brick football stadium, Lamar Field, is a brick colossus. It looks like a mini-Franklin Field. On fall Friday nights, reporters follow the action in the Lane Thweatt Jr. Pressbox. The Dr. James H. Lett Fieldhouse is located across the field.
In case you didn’t know, they take their football seriously in Alabama.
And that about sums up this brief return to the blog. I apologize for the long absence.

Happy Birthday, Debbie Wallingford

Columbus, Ga., May 2 – Greetings from Muscogee County, Georgia.
From here in the heart of the Chattahoochee River Valley, I’m happy to deliver the good news that you can be a redneck from Muscogee even if you’re not an Okie.
We haven’t accomplished much this week, except escaping the tenacious clutches of Florida after a month’s exile. On Tuesday we visited Weeki Wachee Spring, a decaying roadside attraction of the kind that were popular in the decades following World War II. Max enjoyed the live mermaid shows, and that was the primary purpose of our visit. There’ll be more on our visit to Weeki Wachee later.
It dawns on me we better get moving if we want to see a significant portion of the country on this expedition. We have traveled a grand total of 650 miles since April 1. We spent the first third of April stuck in St. Augustine, and most of the rest in the vicinity of St. Petersburg.
Which brings me to the present, Thursday, May 2, in the Barnes and Noble outpost in Columbus, Ga., and the main purpose of this post.
I came here to say happy birthday to my sister.
Fifty-four years ago today, Deborah Lynn Wallingford entered the world in a hospital in St. Petersburg. For the first week of life, her legal name was Baby Weidemann.
Our parents, who had experienced much frustration in the baby-making business, flew to Florida, picked up Debbie and thus started a family.
All we know is our great uncle, Dr. George Beck, was an OB/GYN in Philadelphia. He knew the birth mother’s family. He contacted my parents, who jumped on the opportunity.
“He called and said, ‘Do you want a baby?’” our mom recalled. “And I said, ‘Yes,’ without even thinking.”
The rest of the story is shrouded in mystery. In most places in this country, adoption records are state secrets. In Florida, a court order is required to unseal an adoption record.
Now a half-century has breezed past like a sunny afternoon on a Florida beach, and Debbie knows no more about her birth mother than her name.
My sister and I, we’ve had our moments. We’re different sorts of people, and we never understood each other very well when we were kids. Not that we tried all that hard. We were kids, after all.
For the better part of our lives, we’ve fought and argued and yelled and taunted and hurled insults at each other and then retreated to our neutral corners to nurse our wounds.
We’re not kids any more.
Many years ago, underscoring the pressure my sister’s adoption must have relieved on my parents, my friend Peter said, “If it weren’t for your sister, you wouldn’t be here.”
I thought about it for a couple seconds and remarked, in my usual flippant style, that it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference to me.
But he’s right on the main point. I probably would not be here had not it been for my sister.
And I’m glad to be here, struggling to make sense of this world in my brief residency on the planet. And I’m glad to have a sister.
Last year she was diagnosed with Stage 4 head-and-neck cancer, and she fought the battle of her life. Along the way, her illness forced us to endure a closeness we’d never been comfortable with before.
Not that everything was sunshine and popsicles. We still had our moments. I still managed to make her cry on Christmas Day.
But generally, things are better.
I suppose a lot of that improvement in our relationship is due to the arrival of that 5-year-old miscreant we call Max.
For the past five-plus years, she’s played the role of World’s Greatest Aunt, and she’s played it like Bette Davis took to Baby Jane Hudson.
So without further ado, and without descending further into the maudlin:
Happy Birthday, Baby Weidemann.
I love you.

The Traveling Man

Phillip Bowler as captured by Vermont photographer Gillian Randall (gillianrandall.com).

April 27, Treasure Island, Fla. – I got another email from Phil Bowler today. There are 29 emails from him in my inbox, and it’s been just 24 days since we met in St. Augustine.
He just returned to his home in Burlington, Vermont. He traveled 11,885 miles in nearly four months. He reports he’s disappointed to find Burlington freshly stocked with red-light cameras. He thinks this is yet another sign of “BIG BROTHER WATCHING.” As a result of Big Brother’s preoccupation with traffic lights, he forecasts an increase in neck and spinal injuries as drivers “SLAM ON THE BRAKES” to avoid tickets.
He concluded his journey in our backyard, touring three “top quality” museums, Winterthur, the Hagley Museum and the Brandywine Museum.
He’ll now plan summer trips to eastern Europe and Monhegan Island in Maine.
I think that gets us up to speed.
I met Phillip Bowler at the McDonald’s near St. Augustine Beach back on April 3. I met him the same day I met Gary X.  We were all there, freezing together. The indoor temperature was uncomfortably cold. We all wished we’d dressed for something other than spring in Florida. When I walked outside to make a phone call, the temperature rose 20 degrees.
I asked Phillip Bowler about his name. Specifically, how to spell it.
“The derivation is from people who make wooden bowls in England,” he said. “But all the people in my family, my grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great grandfather as far back as I can trace from that side of the family, they were all brewers. When I say brewers, I mean the heads of the brewery. They owned their own breweries. My grandfather and great-grandfather in upstate New York and my great-grandfather’s two brothers in Worcester, Mass. The buildings are still there. They died in the ’30s. Unfortunately they kept the magic formula and all the fortune.

“The two brothers had the largest brewery in New England at the turn of the 20th century for two or three years.”
I thought of Jefferson Pepper. I wondered if the Bowler Brothers survived into the age of beer cans. This should worry me.
“I don’t think there’s any beer cans,” he said. “I have lots of old bottles. I have trays. They used to have a thing you keep matches in, old wooden matches.”
Anyway, I don’t think beer is Phil’s thing. Traveling is Phil’s thing. He’s the travelingest man I’ve met in all my travels. The way he travels, it seems like work. He is an obsessive, fanatical planner.
He is an obsessive, fanatical traveler.
He’d go insane if he had to a spend one day in the Behemoth.
Phillip Bowler wants to know everything about everything and every place.
“People say, ‘How can you travel so much?’ When you work seven days a week for 55 years, after that you can do whatever you want,” he said. “My first full-time job I worked in Bridgeport, Conn., for Sikorsky Aircraft, a division of United Aircraft, and actually Igor himself came through the plant with a big entourage.”
When you ask Phillip Bowler a question, you better be prepared for long and detailed answer. His head, like Wikipedia, is full of facts. His mind works like a computer that spits out endless reams of information. It flows in swollen streams, and no one byte is invested with more significance than another.
He left upstate New York and moved to Burlington in 1961 to work at General Electric as an engineering technician. He worked for 15 years in the design department of IBM, retiring as a staff engineer in 1981.
I asked about his educational background, at least I think that’s the question that provoked the following answer. It is typical:
“I have a bachelor’s and master’s degree in business administration with a major in finance from the University of Vermont,” he said. “And then I started working on a doctorate in behavioral psychology. I had a 3.86 average. But I only got into that 15 out of 75 credits. While I was at IBM I started buying apartment houses. I had 21 rental units for 27 years, so that’s what I was doing when I retired. I just got out at the top of the market.”
He is the oldest of Frederick and Claire Bowler’s three children. I asked about his relationship with his father. Now that I’m a bewildered dad myself, I’m forever bothering strangers about their relationship with their fathers.
“My dad worked all the time,” he said. “I wasn’t un-close to him. He worked nights, and when I got home from school he was out of the house. He worked for quite a few years in motion-picture projection. He worked at a company called Jewel-T in Chicago. They had a big, brown truck or something that went around selling spices, tea, household items.”
The Jewel-T truck leads him to consider the roots of his own obsession with organization.
“My father used to take me down when the truck would come and deliver packages, and I would help him sort and organize you know, the blue tea, the green tea. the this tea, the that tea, and put everything in an orderly fashion, and it gave me you, know, a sense of organization,” he said.
He was 21 when his dad died of a heart attack at age 45.
“He smoked, and I think he had tuberculosis,” he said. “I think he smoked two or three packs of Camels a day, and I’m sure that helped. I don’t smoke. When i was 13 or 14, I tried, and my mom said ‘I know you’re smoking!’ And I thought, well I can’t fool Mom. I guess I’ll quit.”
He has two kids of his own, and they live in Burlington.
“I don’t favor my dad at all, because he had beautiful, thick curly hair and he could play the guitar and all those things,” he said. “But you know he taught me a lot, fishing and hunting and that kind of stuff.”
I ask him where he thinks he got the traveling yen. He said he’s been in every town in Vermont, which makes him a member of the 251 Club. When he was 18, he hitchhiked from upstate New York to Las Vegas.
“There were no interstates at all, it was all state and federal highways, and not too fast at all,” he said. “Fifteen miles per hour was a good speed. Then I went from Las Vegas to Provo, Utah, and then back across the country, generally on Route 40. I did a whole summer doing that. Just seeing everything made it very interesting. Then I read a book by William Least Heat-Moon called “Blue Highways.”
I know about that one. Some days I feel like I’m traveling in William Least Heat-Moon’s shadow. It is enormous.
There’s a dinosaur staring me down. It’s a Tyrannosaurus rex, the king of the tyrant lizards.It’s on his sweatshirt, which he purchased when he visited the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta. It’s Canada’s preeminent paleontology museum. He can eat up museums like Cookie Monster eats up rounded sugary confections.
“I am interested in a wide, wide, wide spectrum of things,” he said. “I’m interested in the Civil War, World War II, the Indian wars. I’m interested in just about everything that happens, you know. I’m interested in paleontology. I’ve been to just about every place that Van Gogh was, just about every place that Monet was. Where they painted, where they were born, the churches they were baptized in, where they’re buried, and seeing most of both of their paintings as well. I’ve been to art museums all over the world. And I’ve gone to places where musicians are. Last year I was in Central Europe, I went to the home of Franz Liszt in Budapest. They have maybe 10 pianos and organs there with an audio guide. You can hear playings of each one of them. And the women probably wondered, ‘What the heck is wrong with this guy, anyway?’ Because I listened to every one of them probably four times. They were so beautiful.”
And now you have an idea about Phillip Bowler. But there’s more. Oh Lord, there’s more. Watch out. Here it comes.
He used to travel from Bridgeport to New York to see rock concerts at the RKO Paramount Theater.
“They used to have these rock and roll shows by Alan Freed in New York City, so I’ve seen Buddy Holly live,” he said. “When I was in Sun Studios in Memphis, they had some posters from these shows. It was just unbelievable. They had 30, 40 artists. I looked at the price. It was like two bucks to go to one of these concerts. Buddy Holly, he was just there with a whole group. You know, Fats Domino, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers. You know Sam and Dave? They were all there. so you know, it was just an enormous part of rock and roll. And they were good, but everybody else there was good.  A lot of ‘em only had like one song on a 45 record. Fats Domino had a band there with probably 30 people in a big horn section. Stuff like that. Little Richard played there, Ike and Tina Turner. All in one day!
“I never saw the Beatles live, but I’ve been to the Beatles museum in Hamburg, Germany. but I saw the Rolling Stones live, the Who live, in their prime. They’re still playing today. I saw them at a football stadium in Buffalo, N.Y. They started playing ‘Love Reign O’er Me,’ guess what, the instant they clicked on with that song, it started raining. The whole stadium just went ballistic.”

Another shot of Phillip Bowler courtesy of Gillian Randall.

He’s like this about everything. World War II. The Civil War. It doesn’t matter. He’s a traveling Pandora’s box of surging, roiling, insistent information.
“I think everybody should go to Gettysburg because it was the largest battle fought on American soil,” he said. “I’ve been there three times. I’ve climbed Little Round Top, Big Round Top. It’s just discouraging to see people go there with the windows down driving through and they’re going to go home and say ‘I saw Gettysburg.’  Maybe you saw it. But if you haven’t spent three full days there, then you haven’t seen and understood Gettysburg.”
If you wonder what it might be like to have Phil Bowler for a grandfather, this should give you an idea:
“The third time I went, I took my two grandsons. I said, ‘We’re going to go to Gettysburg.  I want you two guys to go into the bedroom, and here’s the itinerary and here’s what we’re going to do. I want you to discuss between yourselves who’s going to sit in the front seat.’ They were about 9, 10 years old at the time. ‘And I don’t care how you do it, if you want to switch every hour, if you want to go halfway there.’ I figured out about the halfway mileage point. ‘If you want one in the morning, one in the afternoon. But I want you to agree to it, and then I want you to tell me. And I’m going to tell you what. The first time I hear ‘Grandpa, he’s in my seat,’ I’m just going to turn this car around and head right back home and then I’m going to come back here by myself and enjoy it.’ Well they got that settled. Then I made them watch not once, but twice, the movie ‘Gettsyburg.’ And it’s a long movie, two and a half, three hours, so they don’t get the idea that there weren’t tanks and helicopters and walkie-talkies there. To get the idea of what the dress was like, how they fought and so on and so forth.”
That’s what it’s like to be Phil Bowler’s grandson.
Of course, they probably don’t see him all that much.
“I travel eight to 10 months a year,” he said. “One thing I do is I do an awful lot of research before I go. I don’t want to say I went to Prague and I didn’t make it to Franz Kafka’s house. I spend a lot of time on what to see, what to do, and then it’s all planned. and regulated. All my hotels are booked before I leave.”
He’s traveled just about everywhere and he’s traveled just about anyway a human can travel. He’s even traveled on container ships. He can tell you all about TEUs, or twenty yard equivalent units. That’s how they measure container cargo, in TEUs.
He left from Long Beach, Calif., and sailed for eight days across the Pacific Ocean, from Tokyo to Singapore, and then through the Strait of Malacca into the Indian Ocean, and then through the Red Sea and across the Mediterranean to Paris, Rotterdam and Hamburg.
“When I came back from that trip to Hamburg, we then went to Port kilang in Malaysia and sailed for 15 days through the pirate zone,” he said. “And when I came back from that trip, I sent a travelogue/news kind of thing out, that within three to five years, we would be in an economic depression. Not a recession, a depression. And I got a lot of nasty emails back. ‘You’re really stupid. What do you know about anything? One trip on a container ship and now you’re a worldly expert.’ My background, I told you about my education, I’ve worked for major corporations. I’ve been to every town in the United States. And that doesn’t mean going to Boston and getting on I-90 and then getting off I-90 and I-5  in Seattle and saying ‘I’ve been there.’ My route zigzags around everything and I stop to see an awful lot of stuff. My grandson William and I have been over or under every one of the bridges on the Mississippi River. At the time there were 221 of them.”
I tried to slow down the freight train of information before I got crushed. I asked him about his eccentric look, and how it relates to his organized, exacting personality. And I wondered what people on the road made of him.
“You know back in the ’60s and ’70s, you used to hear a lot ‘get a haircut’ when the hippie thing was coming in,” he said. “But I’ve never known that or felt that in a foreign country. Little kids all over the world look at me, and they’re yanking on their mother’s dress, ‘Mama, Mama, Pere Noel, Pere Noel!’ They think I’m Santa Claus. If they can speak English, I go over and say, ‘Shhh! Don’t tell anybody, I’m on vacation.’
“The last time I shaved was 1968, even when working at IBM. And I haven’t had a hair cut or a beard trim.”
The conversation returned to the Civil War. I mention our recent visit to Antietam. And Burnside’s Bridge. And he tells me that Ambrose Burnside manufactured rifles. And I ask him about his favorite figures from the war, and he tells me the life story, chapter and verse, of a fanatical Christian general from Leeds, Maine, named Oliver Otis Howard.
On this trip, he left out of Burlington on April 22. He’s been to Harrisburg, Pa., and Harrisonburg, Va., and a thousand points east and west, north and south.
Over five days in Santa Fe, he dug deep into the life of Georgia O’Keefe.
How deep? Not deep enough to satisfy his insatiable appetite for facts.
“Then I went about 50 miles north to a place called Abiquiu, where she lived,” he said. “And I came back with more questions in my mind. I still had a couple more days left. So I went to the courthouse and I pulled her probate records on microfilm and I photocopied 227 pages, which was probably a quarter of her probate record, to try to understand who she was, what she was, how much money did she make, how much money did she have, what were her end-of-life relationships like, who got what, where was the family? Because her husband died a few years before her. They didn’t have any children. He never went to New Mexico, never went out there. So I went through all that.”
And that’s Phillip Bowler in one long, dizzying paragraph. Two hundred twenty-seven pages of probate record on microfilm, just to get to know Georgia O’Keefe a little bit better.
I didn’t even ask him what intimate details he found that unlocked the door to Georgia O’Keefe. I didn’t have that much time.
So that’s Phil Bowler. That, and one more thing.
He wants to be a Renaissance man. He’s written medical essays on hypertension, cancer and Alzheimer’s. And he’s made a study of global economics, as he alluded to above.
On that score, he left me with a bit of bad news:
“My prediction, if I view the sequestration that’s coming up, by the end of June this country will be in total economic collapse. If everything holds, people will lose their jobs. I was in Daytona Monday, I went to the Internal Revenue office to get papers so I could do my income tax. Hello, the office was closed. No people. There were signs on the door, no people available. What is wrong with this picture? Hello, this is the United States. I’m going through Washington and I can’t stop at the White House to go through it. It’s gonna be major. Major.”
Not that I asked.

St. Augustine: Rick’s Muffler Shop

Lil’ Allen Baker, left, and Joe Dovan underneath the Behemoth.

Editor’s Note: It’s Saturday, April 27. We’re still in Treasure Island. We’ve been holed up all week at the Sunrise Motel, which is cheap and clean, just across Gulf Boulevard from the Gulf of Mexico. Max has thrown over the aquamarine bath of the Gulf for the cozy confines of the motel pool. He calls it the “giant drink,” as in, “Daddy, are you going to come into the giant drink with me?” He’s a little frustrated with me because I’ve had my nose in this laptop for most of the past two weeks. He says the gulf water is too cold. I am pretty sure it’s warmer than the water in the pool.
We’ve been getting a lot of work done. I’ve been writing, Becky’s been editing, and we are set to check out of here Monday morning and resume our journey. We have tentative plans to head north through Tallahassee in the direction of Tallapoosa, Georgia. We’ve been there before, and though our friend Clara Williams has since passed on, I want to return and look up some of her family.
Below I finally get around to wrapping up the long, twisted saga of our efforts to get the “check engine” light turned off and return the Behemoth to a smooth-running gas-guzzler. The saga began, more or less, at Durham Tire way back on March 25. It wound its way through Fairmont, N.C., St. Augustine Beach and the Working for Jesus 24/7 Garage before we sought refuge in the welcoming arms of our new friends at Rick’s Muffler shop at 210 Ponce de Leon Boulevard. A bit of the story below appeared earlier in this journal, and I hope you’ll forgive any redundancies. 

April 10, St. Augustine – What day is it? Wednesday?  I’m getting confused. We’re stuck in St. Augustine with the Behemoth Blues again. Last night we slept at Rick’s Muffler Shop, safe in the Fat Man’s genial glow. Our accommodations came courtesy of the good people at Rick’s. It is the Fat Man’s legacy.
It’s fair to say most people wouldn’t be thrilled about the prospect of camping at a muffler shop. It’s also fair to say we are not most people. Esther Molnar, who was married to the Fat Man for 27 years, showed us uncommon hospitality. She set us up with an electrical connection and access to the men’s room.
We were thrilled. Camping with a power hookup is like staying in a five-star hotel to us. The Behemoth being so prodigal in its use of gas, we skimp on lodgings whenever possible. It’s why we spend far too many nights at that ubiquitous blight on the economic landscape I like to call the Walton Family General Store. RV parks and state parks usually run $30 and more. Might as well get a motel.
Our thrill was short-lived. As we availed ourselves of the Behemoth’s convection oven for the first time, and as the jalapeno poppers were just about to pop, we lost power. A breaker tripped. The box being somewhere inside the garage, our power supply was gone for the rest of our stay at Rick’s Muffler and RV Park.
We uttered an expletive or two, took a collective breath and rolled with the shot. We’re good at this. We embrace simplicity. What really discomfited us was the occasional visit of a hell-bound freight train on the Florida East Coast Railway line on the tracks across Ponce de Leon Boulevard. At least they sounded as if they were bound for the nether regions.
We were engrossed in “Hitchcock” when the first train arrived. We had to pause the movie, for we couldn’t hear a thing. The sound was infernal. The freight train rumbled like thunder. It roared and it hissed and it squealed with the agony of a thousand tortured souls. And it took a good five minutes in the passing.
This is Americana. This is what we wanted. I guess we should be happy. We are happy.
Rick’s opens at 8 a.m. We got up early so we could get out of their way. I’ve always thought of 8 as early. Maybe you don’t. That’s OK.
I felt better about my world view when I encountered Rick’s usually engaging staff.
Poor Joe looked like he just rolled out of bed on the back end of a tequila bender. I said hi. He grunted. Lil’ Allen didn’t have a single black smear on his face. Esther managed a smile, though it took an effort. She handed me a folder of yellowing newspaper clippings. They offer fragmentary evidence of the history of Rick’s Muffler Shop.

A faded newspaper clipping provides a look into the old days at Rick’s. That’s Rick Sr. in the overalls with Esther cradling Little Ricky.

Rick Molnar, aka The Fat Man, was born Enrico Leonardi E Fiew de Molinaro in Sicily on Jan. 3, 1936. His father, Esther said, had some connection to La Cosa Nostra.
He lived a vagabond’s existence. He spent time in Switzerland. His family came to the U.S. and settled for a time in Westmoreland County in western Pennsylvania.
By the time he was a teenager, the family had moved to Florida. The Fat Man attended Andrew Jackson High School in Jacksonville. He served with the Marines. He taught math and physics at Jacksonville Naval Air Station. He managed a Midas shop in Jacksonville before opening Rick’s Muffler on nearby Anastasia Island in 1975.
They called him “Muffler Man.” And “Papa Rick.” And, yes, the “Fat Man.” Twice he ran for St. John’s County Commissioner, first as a Republican and then as a Democrat. He seems by all accounts to have been an influential, beloved cog in St. Augustine. There’s a clipping from a forgotten journal called “The Traveler.” There’s no date, but it must be early 1976, since the story says he’d been open for six months. His trademark beard is absent. As are the overalls. He’s not even fat.
Asked why he liked muffler work so much, he said, “Because I’m weird.” Only the reporter transposed the “e” and the “i” and it all came out wierd. No one caught it. Then someone doubled down on the typo and inserted it right into the headline:
“Because I’m Wierd.” The Fat Man might’ve thought himself weird, or maybe he was employing a flair for self-deprecation. Nonetheless I’ll bet he thought the headline was very weird.

Rick Molnar Sr. pictured with his assistant, Billy Gogo, about six months after he opened his shop on Anastasia Island in 1975.

Rick Molnar died in a VA hospital in Gainesville on June 29, 2007. He was only 71. Diabetes  hounded him. The heartbreak is etched into the creases around Esther’s blue eyes.
He was 17 years older, not that it ever seemed to matter.
“We were best friends,” Esther said. “Age doesn’t matter, if you’re of a like mind and have things in common. We worked together 24/7, year-round. We played together. We were buddies. It was awesome, I loved it, and I miss him.  He’ll be gone six years in June. He was too young.”
The emotion is palpable when she talks about her husband. The pain is too near.
He was 46 when Ricky Jr. was born. Maybe I feel an invisible connection to the Fat Man and his shop. I’m 14 years older than Becky, and I was 44 when Max joined the family.
They first met when she was 16. She said she didn’t want me to write this, but I can’t see the harm in it. Their relationship was sweet. Anyway, nothing happened at first.
“I met him where the (St. Augustine Beach) pier is, there was a restaurant-bar,” she said. “I had gone there with a girl I worked with. Rick was at the bar with two of his friends. He keeps looking at me, and I keep looking at him because he was very gorgeous, and I told my girlfriend, ‘We need to get out of here ’cause I’m about to get in trouble.’ So we got up and left and then a few years later my sister had moved to Jacksonville and was managing apartments. Well, he had the gas station down the street. So again I ran into him. And then when  we started drag racing. We were always around each other, and it just happened.
When he launched his business on 600 Anastasia Boulevard in August of 1975, she called for advice.
“I called him one day and said, ‘How do I, where do I start to take the manifold off my Dodge truck?’” she said. “He chuckled, said, ‘Bring it in.’ I said, ‘No, I’ll do it.’ It had a bad gasket.”
They hung out and did a lot of drag racing together. They shared an obsession with speed.  Her dad, Doc Blantz, was a carpenter who built houses. She helped. She’s always been handy.
“When I was 3 years old, I was helping my Uncle Wayne put a transmission in a car,” she said. “He had  put a cement block, put the tranny on one end and me on the other end, and he’d say, ‘Walk this way a little bit, walk that way.’ I was the ballast. It was funny.”
They were a natural pair, and everyone seemed to see it.
“The first time he  met my dad, he shook his hand and said, ‘Hey, Sonny!’ ” Esther said. “My dad had dark hair, and he did look like a kid next to Rick, because Rick’s hair was white. It was funny. My dad just chuckled.”
Rick, she said, had an adventurous life. The experiences informed his business and personal philosophy.
“He was very humble,” she said. “He loved people. He was a POW in Korea for 18 months in a very small bamboo box. Fed rice with maggots in it. He was beaten and mistreated. And I guess through that experience you learn that you value people. We’re all people, we all make mistakes, we all have our own personal demons. And he, knowing that, just looked at people differently than most people. He loved them in spite of their faults. People in general are too quick to judge.
“He was running guns to Cuba for the governor. He got caught and wound up in a federal prison in Atlanta for five years. It wound up that he got a presidential pardon.”
Together, they also shared a belief in old-fashioned business principles. Do the job right, and don’t do anything unnecessary. Be straight with customers.
“We just tried to fix cars and make people happy,” she said. “Life’s too short to get all serious and nasty. I like sleeping at night. Like my husband, Ricky and I both, we like to help people. If you’re car is broke, it’s like, ‘oh my god’ How are you going to get to work? How are you going to get the kids to school? How are you going to get Grandma to the doctor? It’s transportation and they need it, and we like to see them have it. Everybody likes to make money, but sometimes helping people is worth more. But we can’t do it all for free.”
You hear a lot of business people say this sort of stuff. For most, it’s advertising boilerplate. Here, it seems genuine and heartfelt. And born out by experience.
And she says she holds her staff to the Fat Man’s standard.
“They’ve got to be respectful,” she said. “I won’t have them be ugly or disrespectful in a male-chauvinist way to female customers. They just better not.  ’Cause if I catch them, they’re down the road. I won’t tolerate it. And older people, they better open the door. Just be respectful, that more than anything.  And don’t cheat people. If they don’t need the part, don’t sell it to them. If it’s iffy, give them the choice.  If they do need it, show it to them, tell them the consequences of not doing it. It’s still they’re choice.
“There have been some very unscrupulous things done, but we don’t tolerate it. People deserve better.”

Our relationship with Rick’s began on Saturday morning, April 6. We’d been in St. Augustine since Monday night. On Thursday and Friday, we’d exposed the Behemoth to the hazards of the Working for Jesus 24/7 Garage across town.
By Friday night, it was running worse than it has in all the time we’ve had it. We lost our faith in Jesus’ automotive powers, cut our losses and thrown ourselves on the mercy of Rick’s. They were very nice from the start. Lil’ Allen looked under the hood.
They closed at noon, and wouldn’t have time to work on it until Monday.
Lil’ Allen said he was sorry.
I told him it wasn’t his fault.
“Sometimes  it is,” he said.
I liked Lil’ Allen right away. He looks like Lil’ Ray Liotta,
We dropped it off Monday. We returned after touring St. Augustine and the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument. My man Joe had fixed most of what poor Mark, the overwhelmed mechanic at the Working for Jesus 24/7 Garage, had screwed up. He tightened all the air-flow connections. He installed the O2 sensor so it, um, worked.
I think the total charge was $37.
I like Joe, too. His full name is Joseph Dovan. He’s 34, and he has a 16-year-old daughter. His 9-year-old, Skyler, was hanging around the shop on Monday. She gave Max some stickers.
He’s lived in the Philadelphia area, on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River. His grandmother still lives there. She’s 93.
I nodded and said something about his genetic makeup.
Joe smiled uneasily and said he hopes he gets his longevity from his mom’s side. His dad died at 42, from hardening of the arteries.
Joe knows he should get a full-medical checkup, but he doesn’t like going to doctors.
I said nobody likes going to doctors, the same way nobody likes going to auto mechanics.
He thought this was funny.
Joe said we need to get the Behemoth’s motor mounts repaired. We didn’t necessarily need them replaced today, but at some point in the future, the job would have to be done.
And when what the manual described as a one-hour job turned into an eight-hour trial by wrench, we ended up sleeping at Rick’s for the second time in four nights.
I asked Esther about the Fat Man character on Rick’s logo. She said it was drawn by a 13-year-old girl who was waiting with her father for their car to be done. That was at least 20 years ago, and now the off-the-cuff drawing by an anonymous 30-something is practically a St. Augustine institution.

We were at the McDonald’s near the St. John’s County Public Library when Lil’ Allen called and said the Behemoth was ready. For the record, it was 1:17 p.m., Wednesday, April 10. The official ending point of the Behemoth saga in St. Augustine. It started on Tuesday morning, April 2, on St. Augustine Beach, where Mark Badgley, with unsolicited advice from a chorus of curious passers-by, tried to help us out.
An hour after getting the call, we made the half-mile stroll in the sunshine to Rick’s. Everything’s ready to go, and I’m strangely subdued when I should be relieved.
Oh, but wait!
Lil’ Allen says we need an oil change. He just completed a pain-in-the-ass job of replacing the Behemoth’s motor mounts, a job which was far more complicated than the repair manual had indicated, and now he wants to change my oil.
Says he can taste it. The oil. It has a metallic flavor.
I believe him, because he looks like he drinks oil by the quart. He’s a grease rat. He always looks like he just came off an eight-hour shift of cleaning chimneys.
I tell him to go ahead and change the oil, if that’s what he wants to do.
The estimate Joe prepared to replace our motor mounts was $327, or something close. It included a grand total of $75 for one hour of labor. The manual estimated it would take half an hour to replace each mount, of which there are two.
I’m pretty sure Lil’ Allen worked on it for at least eight hours if not more. We dropped it off around noon on Tuesday, and when I showed up a little after 5, it was ripped apart and not even close to being done. I felt bad. They put the whole thing back together so we would be able to drive it. I didn’t care. Long as we could sleep in it.
Instead of taking a half-hour per motor mount, it took four or five.

Lil’ Allen in his element.

Now the Behemoth’s up in the air again, and Lil’ Allen’s back underneath it. Oil is pouring out of the pan, and predictably, he’s got a handful.
I ask if he ever tires of being called ‘Lil’ Allen. He says no.
“Hey, I know I’m small,” he said.
I asked Allen to explain why, exactly, replacing the motor mounts took so much work.
He laid it all out in one big, Faulkneresque sentence:
“I had to unbolt the lowers, and then I had to pull the motor out with the top jack, the hoist, and then actually I had to completely separate the motor from the frame, and then float the motor, and unbolt the transmission from the rear and take off all the torque plates and pull the starter out, and after that get a really big pry bar, and actually the whole motor and transmission moved about two inches forward, and that allowed me enough room to stick a 19 millimeter all the way up in there to bust one bolt out that held the whole thing together.”
All that for one bolt, I asked.
“All that for one bolt,” he said with a wry grin. “And that’s just one side. There were two sides.”
And then he had the chutzpah to thank us for our patience.
“That’s really nice of you,” he said.
I thought it was nice of Rick’s to work on our vehicle all week and charge us an hour and a half for their labor.
Everyone seems to get along well here, though I get the feeling Lil’ Allen is kind of the whipping boy. He’s 28, Joe Dovan is 34, and Rick Jr. is 30. Allen says him and “Little Ricky” are good friends. But there are limits to friendship.
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, I’ve worked for him, I think this would be the fourth time now. We get sick of each other. He’s like, ‘All right, Allen, I’m done with you.’ And I say, ‘I’m done with you too, buddy. I’m going to take a little break.’ And I go on and do something else.”
He works as a disc jockey around St. Augustine, and his colleagues say he’s something of a computer wizard. Nobody’s quite sure why he’s working at Rick’s.
“I like to turn a wrench,” he said with a shrug. “And I like the people here and the routine.”
I figure he mostly likes to DJ so he can meet and impress all the pretty women who come to clubs after spending their days on the beach in their string bikinis and working diligently on  their bronzed goddess look.
“That’s where most of my income comes from,” he said. “What I get here goes straight into an account and that gets pulled on. Everything else is just cash in hand to get me by.”
He recently helped spearhead a large computer roll-out for Duval County. He said he made as much during that two-month project as he does in six months of turning wrenches.
But he needs a steady job. He’s got a 6-year-old daughter named Melia, and he’s trying to get his life in shape so he can get a place and live with her.
“The nice man at the courthouse told me I have to have an on-the-books job, no more of this side-business crap,” Allen said. “He told me he’d let me keep my license if I got an on-the-books job, and I told that to Ricky, and he said, “Well, it looks like we’ve got to find you an on-the- books job to work at.’ And I said, ‘That’s what I’m telling you.’”
All he really wants out of life is to have a little house of his own where he can live with his daughter. Though I suspect he’d love to have the occasional beautiful woman around, too. And who could blame him?
Speaking of romantic entanglements, he’s got a girlfriend. Of course it was the girl he met at the bar last night he had on his mind today. Anyway, he said, his girlfriend is crazy.
I asked how the crazy girlfriend related to his daughter Melia.
“You know, I didn’t really fully grasp the word ‘narcissistic’ until I met Monica,” he said. “She had her iPhone turned on two months and she managed to take about 1,400 pictures of herself.  She dropped her phone and it wouldn’t turn on anymore, and she cried. Because she couldn’t get on Facebook.”
I asked if she was, perhaps, 22 or 23.
“You would think so,” he said with a sigh.
She worked as a go-go dancer at one of the clubs where he DJ’d. They’d known each other for five, six years before they started dating.
“I went over to her house that evening and didn’t leave for two weeks,” he said. “I was like, it’s been fun, but I gotta get back to Jacksonville. She whined and whined and whined, and here I am. And now she can’t stand me.  I don’t blame her, I’m terrible. I cook, clean, do laundry and go to work six days a week. It’s just ridiculous.”

Mother and son, carrying on the Fat Man’s legacy in St. Augustine.

I asked Rick Jr. about his father’s legacy, and what it means to him to perpetuate it.
“I’m working beside my father’s legacy, there’s no way to work with him in what he did,” he said. “This is like breathing, it’s what it is to me, it’s what I’ve always done. Most people go to work, I come here. I don’t go to work, I go where I live. It’s kind of weird. And being that I am the successor to my father, those are shoes that can’t be filled. I just do the best I can.”
Not that he always dreamed of following in his dad’s bootsteps. Quite the contrary.
“When I was a kid, my dad would ask, ‘So what do you want to do when you grow up?’ And I’d say, ‘Dad, if you do everything right, I won’t have to do anything.’ He’d just look at me,” he said. “I think I was about his (Max’s) age when I told him my dream job was being a couch potato. I didn’t want to have to work. I wanted to be wealthy enough that I could enjoy life, I didn’t want to work my butt off to have a free minute.”
He inherited a yen for speed. He also seems to have inherited his father’s gift for mechanical wizardry.
“When he was in his early 20s, late teens, we bought him a Lexus,” Esther said. “A respectable car. We’re respectable people. We told him to be respectful, no riding around like an idiot, you know. I get home one day and that car’s in a thousand pieces in the garage, and I think, ‘Oh my God! Oh, what is this going to cost to put back together?’ He put it back together like a Lego set. My kid! The Lexus dealer in Melbourne wanted to hire him because of his knowledge of those cars. It shocked me.”
Now he’s doing some work for St. John’s County, helping devise and implement an exhaust system for the generators that power cell-phone towers.
I ask how he handles irate customers, though my guess is they don’t get all that many, and if he has his father’s temperament.
“My dad wasn’t afraid to take somebody out in the parking lot and beat the crap out of them,” he said. “That was a different time, we’re going back a ways. And now, I just think of it as how he was when he was older. He was considerably older than me. With age comes wisdom and a tempering of spirits. I try to think like that. Try to remember that. I actually know what I’m talking about, so that when a customer is being belligerent or something, I try to educate them, bring them up to speed.”
He’s 30, and he’s got a son of his own due to arrive in a couple months. Rick the third.
Max walked up in the middle of our conversation. He asked me to lift him up.
I stood at the counter. Rick was behind it.
I lifted Max onto my shoulders.
I had not even considered the ceiling fan.
And immediately, a sickening THUNK echoed in the office.
The room fell silent.
What a proud father.
“OH!” Esther said. “OW!”
Max was stunned.
“I think you found the fan,” Rick said.
And then he let loose with a horrible wail.
Becky returned from the bathroom. I had to tell her what I’d done.
“Oh my gosh!” she said. “Let me see your eyes.”
Of course, I felt like a total moron. I am a total moron.
“There you go,” I said to Rick, trying to laugh off my idiocy, “a free lesson in fathering 101. What not to do.”
And there we stood. Becky consoled Max.
I couldn’t find a hole to disappear into.
I looked out the window. I saw Allen tearing around the Behemoth and dashing for the garage.
“OH SHIT!” Esther exclaimed. “FIRE! FIRE!”
Oh shit. Our engine was on fire.
Rick grabbed a fire extinguisher and met Allen under the hood. A two-mechanic blaze.
They quickly extinguished the blaze.
No damage incurred.
I felt bad for Lil’ Allen, and hoped he wouldn’t get yelled at. But I was thankful for the distraction.
“Max, look, our car’s on fire,” I said. “Does that make your head feel any better?”
He said it didn’t.

Fairmont 2013

All roads into Fairmont slice through the expansive and fertile coastal plain that once was the seed bed of the region’s booming tobacco industry. Located just an hour’s drive from the South Carolina beach resorts, Fairmont today wallows in an economic no-man’s land in a time beyond tobacco, cotton and textiles.
It wasn’t always thus.
Before there was a Fairmont there was Union City, and after that, Ashpole.
Fairmont was incorporated in 1907. Joseph Mitchell, the great New Yorker writer and the town’s most famous son, was born the following year. He grew up alongside Fairmont. His family, with father Averette Nance Mitchell at the head, was part of the engine that drove Fairmont as it developed into a major tobacco hub.
A century ago, Fairmont’s brick-lined Main Street was fresh and inviting. Fairmont bustled with sawmills, cotton gins and an ever-expanding roster of tobacco warehouses. The Fairmont Light and Power Company came online in 1914, and the town lit up figuratively and literally. The Dixie Motion Picture house showed three or four movies a night.
By the 1920s, as Mitchell entered his teenage years, Fairmont was roaring. Tobacco warehouses popped up all over town. At one point, 23 of them were stacked to the ceiling with “yellow gold” during tobacco market season.
For two and a half months every summer, Fairmont transformed from respectable rural town into round-the-clock carnival of roiling humanity. Big shots and small-timers rolled in from all over the south. Money men from the big tobacco houses kicked back on the front porch of the Fairmont Hotel. Seersucker-clad and whiskey-saturated, they swapped stories, smoked fat cigars and reveled in their importance.
The tobacco market was a circus of curiosities, replete with medicine shows and traveling musicians and gypsies. Trains rumbled into town and sidled up to the station, which now houses the Border Belt Museum. Cotton and tobacco went in on one side of the street side, out the other.
The tumbling madness of it all mesmerized young Joseph Mitchell and just about any kid who came of age during the heyday of King Tobacco.
“All kind of things would be going on here, like minstrel shows, circuses, people selling all kinds of snake-oil type medicines,” said Jack Mitchell, Joseph’s nephew. “That really interested Joseph. He loved that. Because the rest of the time there was nothing happening but farming. The gypsies, for instance, he got interested in them. He became a member of some society that studied gypsies.”

*****

Fairmont Mayor Charles Kemp.

That seems a long time ago today. It’s Good Friday in Fairmont, 2013. It is hard to see what else Fairmont could count on that is good, the past notwithstanding. The present is bleak, the future appears forlorn.
A week ago today, a 16-year-old student at Fairmont High School was shot to death while shooting hoops at a local park. Another 16-year-old boy was charged with murder. He rode up in a car with four adults, including the 22-year-old female driver and a 23-year-old woman with her 2-year-old child in tow. Police say the shooter got out, engaged the victim in a brief verbal confrontation and then fired multiple shots.
Two days later, a 34-year-old man accidentally shot to death his 10-year-old son while wiping down his shotgun.
An aura of sadness hovers. It doesn’t matter where you look. Now I’m looking across Main Street at the Hector McLean Public Library. More walk-in closet than library, it’s open  just 20 hours a week and contains nary a volume by Joseph Mitchell. The door to the Border Belt Museum is open 12 hours a week.
The town’s website boasts a “beautiful, historic downtown,” but this is pure marketing. The page includes only photo advertisements for chains like Family Dollar, Food Lion and True Value Hardware.
Proud past. Promising future. Yesterday I spent a pleasant hour in the mayor’s office. Charles Kemp is a tireless promoter of both his town and himself. Among the posters on his wall is one bearing the familiar face of an old vaudevillian who was born Samuel Horwitz. Above the face is this caption: Legalize Shemp.
Charles Kemp is nobody’s stooge. He takes himself too seriously. A retired history teacher who taught for 30 years at Fairmont High School, Kemp fancies himself a human bridge from the happy days of the 1950s to a better future.
We sat in his humble office, upstairs in the old Fairmont Hotel at 421 S. Main. The door was wide open when I wandered in Wednesday. A 9-year-old girl named Megan sat at the receptionist desk. We traded smiles. I introduced myself to Mayor Kemp and asked about Willie Broox Webster, who served four term as mayor. The town druggist, Webster was 87 when we met him. He gave us a tour of Fairmont in his Buick Skylark back in 2003. Then I asked if we might talk at length, and he said I should come back this morning.
So here I am.
Today he appeared a bit guarded. He cautioned he had just a half hour to talk. Nonetheless, our conversation had spilled into a second hour by the time I thanked him for his time and made my exit.
Office hours are scribbled in orange marker: 8 a.m to 5 p.m.
At 66, Kemp is old enough to remember Fairmont’s flush times. In 1950 alone, just shy of 50 million pounds of tobacco were sold here.
“There’s a siren on top of this building that went off  every day at noon if we paid out a million dollars of tobacco,’ he said. “And it went off every day at noon during tobacco season.”
When he was in college at North Carolina Wesleyan, he came home and worked a summer job for R.J. Reynolds.
“I put many a set of 32 envelopes tied together with string in a tobacco boxcar with 32 hogsheads in it, big barrels of wood filled with 1,000 pounds of tobacco,” he said. “Three cars left each day to go to Whitaker Park and Brook Cove in Winston Salem for American Tobacco Company and R.J. Reynolds tobacco company to start the process of turning it into cigarettes. I did that all summer for R.J. Reynolds. I was the last man to touch that tobacco before it pulled out. I’d close it with an iron bar, put an aluminum seal on the handle and click it. Tobacco. … it was a big deal. You couldn’t find anybody who didn’t have their hands in tobacco in some way. They either grew it, or they were a business person who gave farmers credit until their tobacco was sold, or they worked in fields, or they went to college off the tobacco money their parents made. Everybody was touched by tobacco. It’s like jumping in a pond. You’re going to get wet.”
Those are misty-eyed memories now. The roof fell in on the tobacco market in the 1970s, and Fairmont got crushed. Giant firms like R.J. Reynolds and the American Tobacco simply stopped sending their buyers and circuit riders to town during harvest season, and that was it. Then came NAFTA, which gutted the North Carolina’s textile industry.
I wonder if his pond analogy was intentional. When he was 18, Charles Kemp learned a terrible lesson: When you jump in a pond, far worse things can happen than getting wet.
He was shooting pool downtown when a friend talked him into going along on a swimming outing to an irrigation pond outside of town. On his fourth time down, he got his feet tangled, slipped, landed awkwardly and fractured two cervical vertebrae. He spent two months staring at the ceiling in a Duke University hospital. He stewed in his own bitterness until his doctor walked in one day with a message.
“He reached into his pocket and pulled out a Parliament cigarette, the ones with recessed filters. He stuck it right under my face and said, ‘See how far the filter’s recessed?’ I said, ‘Yeah I see it.’ ‘Well, that’s how close you came to never moving a muscle from the neck down. I was overcome by shock. From that day till this second, I ain’t never had a bad day.”
As it is, he walks with a painful, palsied gait. His legs are bent and gnarled. Just putting one foot in front of the other demands tremendous effort. Watching him rise from his desk and walk across the hall to show me a photographic roster of former mayors was like watching a man climb a mountain on stilts in the teeth of a blizzard with a cast-iron stove on his back. One thing’s for certain, he doesn’t lack determination or can-do spirit.
If anyone is to defy the staggering odds and resuscitate Fairmont, Charles Kemp might be that man. He appears to have something of a savior complex.
Charles Kemp, who chokes up when telling an anecdote about Robert E. Lee, who longs to be the Man in the Arena, like his favorite president, Teddy Roosevelt.
He said when he was 12 he knew he’d be mayor of Fairmont one day. Fairmont is in his blood. He is part Billy Sunday, part P.T. Barnum, part David Brent.
“My favorite person in the world, the person I would love to have interviewed, is P.T. Barnum.,” he said. “P.T. Barnum was the ultimate marketer. He convinced people that if you paid him a nickel and went into that tent, the smallest man in the world was in there. And he got them to go in there. I’ve got to be able to convince people to get off of I-95 at exit 10. And that if you come through Fairmont, and by the way, if you stop and get you a McDonald’s hamburger, or a pizza at the pizza place, or a sub, or by the way you can get you some gas here on the way to the beach, which is the shortest route on that street right there (N.C. Route 41). That’s what I got to do. And if I can do what P.T. Barnum did, then we’ll have lots and lots of  out-of-state people coming through.”
He knows this. He convinced Kenneth Rust, who owns the McDonald’s on Walnut Street, to fund the printing of 200 flyers which promote North Carolina Route 41 through Fairmont as the shortest route to the South Carolina beaches from Interstate 95
He might have delusions of grandeur. He has a bit of the David Brent in him. You can’t help but like him, though
When you stroll along Main Street and take in its bargain houses and second-hand stores and empty storefronts and decaying buildings with birds nesting amid crumbling concrete, you begin to think reviving this town would be a daunting task for God Almighty.
Don’t tell this to Charles Kemp.
If there’s one person left in Fairmont who believes in the future, it’s Charles Kemp. He talks a hell of a game. He is unfazed by the troubles pressing in on Fairmont from all sides. And he’ll tell you straight up, he’s the only man for the job. He’ll run for a third term in November.
“Our best days our ahead of us,” he said. “I firmly believe that. If I could ever get my fingernails dug into that proverbial cliff wall and establish a secure footing and we can get this economy turned around, we can really blow up, to use Martin Lawrence’s phrase. We’ve got the people that want the jobs. We’ve go the desire. We’ve got the enthusiasm, the community energy. Bu you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
The sow’s ear which concerns Kemp lies beyond his influence. The Republican-controlled state Legislature is going all-in on a boatload of austerity-inflected bills which would slash funding for all sorts of governmental outreach.
“They’re doing stuff in Raleigh that’s going to cripple this town,” he said. “If they pass some of the laws that they’re suggesting, they’re going to wipe us out. And we have to have a balanced budget. There ain’t no deficit spending in this town.”
Will he face any significant opposition on the ballot come November? He responds with typical salesmanship.
“I will tell you this: Whoever it is, be he or she black white or Indian, Native American, they better bring their lunch,” he said. “Because I’ve got a lot invested in this job. I’m just not prepared or willing to give it up without a fight. Nobody else, trust me, there’s no one in this town, male or female, young, old, black, white or Indian, there’s no one who would do the job I do.”
Long odds, formidable obstacles and setbacks only seem to stiffen Kemp’s resolve. All the factors of his life have conspired to breed him a self-confidence that borders on unreasonable. Maybe he’s just watched too many movies.
I asked if his catastrophic injury has something to do with his unwavering optimism.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “That’s an understatement. I won’t quit. My favorite scene in a movie is from “Cool Hand Luke” when George Kennedy keeps knocking down. Everyone’s saying ‘Stay down, Luke. Stay down.’ And Luke keeps getting back up. It’s my favorite scene of any movie I’ve ever seen. I guess I’m Luke.
“I will find a way to be successful. I’ve been trying to find grant funding for a billboard on I-95 to promote exit 10 for two years. I’ve struck out everywhere I turned. I’m still trying. I sent a letter to 10 local businesses in this town to ask if they would give $50 a month toward the $500-a-month rental fee for the billboard. I will be successful. We will have a billboard on I-95, Some way, somehow, I’m putting one out there. I know what it will mean to this town. Ten thousand cars a month gonna come down I-95 during beach season. I know they ain’t gonna all come through Fairmont. I’m not stupid. But some of them are.”

Newly remarried (his first wife died in 2010), Kemp will be 67 when he stands for reelection in November. As long as he’s able, he will continue to bang every drum he can lay his hands on to promote Fairmont. He gets paid $161.61 each month for serving as mayor, and he’s fond of saying he’d do it for free.
“I stopped a car from Maryland in the McDonald’s parking lot last summer,” he said. “On Saturdays in the summertime I drive through town to see how many out-of-state license plates are out there. I got out of my car and walked around and introduced myself. I said, ‘Why’re you here?’ He said, ‘We stopped at Roanoke Rapids at the welcome center.’ He didn’t have to say anything else. He got one of my flyers out of the rack there. We printed up a flyer that says this is the shortest route to the beach. I said, ‘Bingo, you got one of my flyers!’ We put  2,000 of those out in the  last six months. I handed him my card and asked him to give me a call and tell me I didn’t lie to him.”

*******

Joey Mitchell poses alongside the historical marker which honors his uncle.

Yet it’s a beautiful day. After a chilly week in the Tar Heel state, I finally found a place in the Carolina sun. A woman parked her truck across Main Street and gave me a smile as she walked toward the door of an unmarked building opposite me.
“It’s a pretty day to be lost,” she said.
I smiled back, but I wasn’t lost. The sky above was a canopy of blue, save for a renegade cloud positioned high above Main Street. I sat a few minutes in the grass beneath the historical marker honoring Joseph Mitchell, which was erected two years ago by the Sidney Lanier Book Club.
I flipped through my ragged copy of “Up in the Old Hotel.” I’ve carried it everywhere on our travels, but I hadn’t picked it up in a long time. A car drove up behind me. It was Joey Mitchell, son of Harry Mitchell, one of Joseph’s brothers. We shook hands, and I hopped into his silver Jeep Compass for my second driving tour of Fairmont’s Mitchell sites in a decade.
Joey eased onto East Thompson Street, named for one of Union City’s first commissioners, Charles B. Thompson, and coasted alongside an old rectangular building of faded orange brick. A metal plaque, inscribed with A.N. Mitchell and Sons, still hangs on the exterior facade.
Averette Nance Mitchell was Joseph Mitchell’s father and Joey’s grandpa. I’ve read several places where Joseph Mitchell was the son of a Fairmont tobacco farmer. This is not strictly true. His daddy was a shrewd, no-nonsense businessman.
“He got started there,” Joey said of his grandfather. “He borrowed some money, and then somehow he had a little bit of money at a time during the Depression when nobody else had any. He bought some land, and one thing led to another. It was after the Depression that things begin to take off. He bought a lot of land and did real well in tobacco and cotton.”
While Joseph Mitchell showed little interest in the family business, he was fascinated by the carnival atmosphere that animated Fairmont during tobacco market season.
His bookish predilections were encouraged by his mother.
“They would go down to Charleston to sell cotton, to buy cotton and to speculate on cotton, and Uncle Joseph would go to a bookstore and buy books,” Joey said. “My grandfather was a conservative type of man, and Uncle Joseph was a liberal.
Joey turns onto South Walnut Street and slows to a stop alongside an open field which used to be home to A.N. Mitchell and Sons tobacco warehouse. It had been rented out to a furniture business when it burned to the ground a decade ago.
At the First Baptist Church, he turns right onto Church Street and glides past the Mitchell compound. He drives around the back of the old Mitchell house at 407 Church. We bounce along a dirt path lined with Pecan trees. Cows, after grazing to their heart’s content, would leave the pasture and lounge here and fertilize the trees.
This is where they laid out Joseph Mitchell after he got hit in the head with a cow.
Joey points across the field to the old barn where that episode unfolded. Mitchell related the anecdote in “Hit on the Head With a Cow,” which tells the story of an irrepressibly eccentric old Yankee who called himself Captain Charley and ran Captain Charley’s Private Museum for Intelligent People in the basement of a New York tenement building.
A.N. Mitchell had hired a man named Alonzo to help butcher a cow in that barn. Ten-year-old Joseph was hanging about, hoping to get in on the action. And then:

We were hoisting that cow up in the air with a block and tackle so we could skin her, and Alonzo and I had hold of the rope. We had the cow off the ground when something went wrong with the gear, and when I came to I was out in the barnyard running around in circles and screeching, and my head was bloody. I was caught and subdued by Alonzo and stretched out on the green grass under a pecan tree, I looked up at my father and said, “What happened, Daddy?” My father had a faraway look in his eyes and said, “Son, you were hit on the head with a cow.”

We moved past the pasture where that cow grew fat before knocking Joseph Mitchell senseless, and Joey reflected on his famous uncle’s work.
“I didn’t understand it, but as I grew older and enjoyed reading more, I kind of eventually understood what he was doing that was so remarkable. The way that he could say something that would sound almost off-the-cuff but would describe chapters of a person’s life. It’ll clean the cobwebs out of your head, that’s for sure. He’s a writer’s writer.”
Occasionally the cows would get a little rambunctious and wander up Church Street in search of greener pastures.
“They would get out every Sunday morning and end up down there at the Presbyterian Church and we’d have to go and get them,” Joey said.
Inevitably, a cultural gap grew between the New York writer and his father.
“My grandfather, I don’t think he was really literate,” Joey said. “He was good with numbers. I mean, I don’t think he would sit down and read Mark Twain or anything. But he was stern. He was an old-time parent.”
We left the Mitchell home place and traveled a mile north to the Floyd Memorial Cemetery, where Joey’s kin rest. No romance in this graveyard. Not a blade of grass out of place. It’s clean-cut and groomed to the point of dullness. This is the sort of cemetery Joseph Mitchell would have visited only on the occasion of his own death.
Not a single wildflower here. Nothing grows here that might’ve provided balm to Mitchell’s soul, nothing of the sort he uncovered on his walks among the old cemeteries on the South Shore of Staten Island. He was an obsessive amateur naturalist. He could rattle off the names of wild-growing flora with encyclopedic brio, as he did in his 1956 tour de force, “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” based on time spent with 87-year-old George Henry Hunter in the overgrown cemetery at Sandy Ground, a settlement founded before the Civil War by free blacks who’d come to Staten Island from Maryland to work in local oyster beds.

The older graves were covered with trees and shrubs. Sassafras and honey locust and wild black cherry were the tallest, and they were predominant, and beneath them were chokeberry, bayberry, sumac, Hercules’ club, spice bush, sheep laurel, hawthorn, and witch hazel. A scattering of newer graves were fairly clean, but most of them were thickly covered with weeds and wild flowers and ferns. There were scores of kinds. The majority were the common kinds that grow in waste spaces and in dumps and in vacant lots and in old fields and beside roads and ditches and railroad tracks, and I could recognize them at a glance. Among these were milkweed, knotweed, ragweed, Jimson weed, pavement weed, catchfly, Jerusalem oak, bedstraw, goldenrod, cocklebur, butter-and-eggs, dandelion, bouncing Bet, mullein, partridge pea, beggar’s-lice, sandspur, wild garlic, wild mustard, wild geranium, rabbit tobacco, old-field cinquefoil, bracken, New York fern, cinnamon fern, and lady fern. A good many of the others were unfamiliar to me, and I broke off the heads and upper branches of a number of these and stowed them in the pockets of my jacket, to look at later under a magnifying glass.

As we stood there above A.N., Joseph and the rest of the bygone Mitchells and basked in the warmth of the sun, I asked Joey to rephrase what he’d said on the phone yesterday, that Joseph Mitchell’s legacy confers a kind of intellectual legitimacy on the whole family.
He smiled.
“What was that movie called, The ‘Six Degrees of Separation?” that separates you from everybody else?,” he said. “Well, he took out a few degrees of separation from everything.”
Joseph Mitchell came home from New York one final time and was buried here following his death on May 24, 1996. The fourth line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” is inscribed on his stone.
Joey’s not so sure about that. Maybe Shakespearean sonnets are not his thing.
“His legacy wouldn’t be bare ruined choirs,” Joey said. “That’s what literature is supposed to do, tell you how it was at certain time at a certain place for generations to come.”
What was it like to hang out with an uncle who just happened to be a famous journalist in the biggest city in the country?
“Uncle Joseph, he was a reporter in every relationship that he had,” Joey said. “He used his ability for listening and included you. You never felt like you were talking to somebody famous. He was always interested in you.”
Much like in New York, when Mitchell came home he liked to get out in the country and collect flowers and artifacts.
“We’d have farms out to the south of town along a run called Hog Swamp, and then he had another of his farms down on 904 called the Butler Place,” he said. “And he would go down there. You’d take him down there in the morning. I think the first pair of Cargo pants I ever saw, he had on. And then you’d go back and pick him up in the afternoon, and he’d have pottery, Indian pottery, shards of this and that. He would go out to the farm and collect mourning doves’ nests, and he would write ‘mourning dove found at Slasher Field,’ or things like that. He was excited just to be here. You kind of expected him to be real sophisticated and real citified, but he wasn’t. He loved eating watermelon, and he was enthusiastic about anything.”
Having paid our respects to Joseph Mitchell et. al, we climbed back into the car and headed back to the Border Belt Museum. I asked Joey about his hometown. He said he likes it more the older he gets. But he’s under no illusions about Fairmont returning to something approximating its former glory.
“It’s kind of the end of the line down here in North Carolina,” Joey said. “It’s us then the South Carolina state line. When you go from Lumberton to here, you probably go back in time 30 years. And from here to Lakeview, S.C., it would be another 50 years back in time. We’re kind of in a pocket right here, too far south for Fort Bragg, and too far northwest for Myrtle Beach.”

******
I take a couple pictures, thank him for the tour and we part ways. He’s off to play golf with his nephew, the son of his cousin Jack.
I have an appointment to meet Jack Mitchell here in about a half hour. With time to kill, I decide to take a stroll about downtown Fairmont.
I walk past the old Mitchell offices on East Thompson and then come up on an old tobacco warehouse which was run by A.D. Lewis Jr. Fading letters still advertise it as the “Big Brick” warehouse. The tobacco’s gone, but there’s some sort of agricultural work going on here today. An old semi truck rumbles down Walnut Street, aka Route 41, in the general direction of South Carolina. There’s a gas station on the other side of 41 without so much as small sign to indicate who the hell owns or runs it.
I walk through the open field once occupied by the Mitchell warehouse and gaze south across Center Street (formerly Bulldog Avenue) toward the stately, slate-roofed steeple atop the impressive white cupola which crowns Fairmont’s First Baptist Church.
I make a flanking maneuver on the old town, circling in toward the south end. From this perspective, things look shaggy, ragged, shabby and sad.
Discarded tires are piled up outside the Tire Recapping garage. Birds emerge from gaping holes in concrete walls.
Main Street seems a hopeless jumble of peeling paint, cracking concrete and stores that either have gone out of business or are going out of business.  As I draw closer, even the First Baptist Church seems more pedestrian. It’s got the antebellum-style columns holding up the portico out front and the big cupola top, but the rest of the structure looks like any other humdrum building erected in 1981.
It used to be called Ashpole Baptist Church, and I find myself wishing it still traded under that name. It dates to 1792, when it was called Pitman’s Church, for early settler Isham Pitman, who preached there until his death in 1825.
The old Fairmont cemetery lies just across Church Street. This is a little more Joseph Mitchell’s style, not that it’s teeming with wildflowers or anything.
He has kin here, too. Quince Bostic Mitchell and Kathryn Rebecca Nance were buried here in 1896 and 1924, respectively. I suspect them as Averette Nance Mitchell’s parents. Later I confirm this suspicion.
Town Hall sits opposite Main Street. This is where the tobacco graders and buyers used to hole up during market season.
I leave the old cemetery and walk north along Main. Golden banners hang along the length of the street, touting Fairmont’s “proud past” and “promising future.” Deep and loud and insistent, the thump, thump, thump of hip-hop bass blares from a passing Toyota 4Runner. I walk past empty storefronts and occupied ones without signage. You can buy some stuff here: beauty supplies, cell phones, medical products. The Webster Pharmacy, opened by our friend Willie Broox Webster in 1948, is still doing business at 214 S. Main.
At the corner of E. Thompson and Main, against all odds, the Fairmont Department Store is open for business.
I am back at the historical marker. And Jack Mitchell is here. He’s found a lovely spot to park his white pickup, in a grassy spot beneath a dogwood tree along Leesville Street. We shake hands, and he invites me to sit beside him on his tailgate.

******

Jack Mitchell sits on the tailgate of his truck outside Fairmont’s Border Belt Museum.

Averette Jack Mitchell is 75, so he goes back a little farther than his 58-year-old cousin Joey in the family lineage. He is the family’s point man for all things relating to his famous uncle. He said he owes his name to his Uncle Joseph.
“He named my father, so he named me,” he said. “He told my grandfather, ‘We’re going to call him Jack.’”
We talked a bit about Joseph Mitchell’s uneasy relationship with his father. A.N. Mitchell had wanted his son to become a doctor or some other kind of professional. His son had as much interest in medicine as he had in tobacco.
As we sat there, white flowers fell from the dogwood trees at our backs  and floated past us on a gentle breeze. I couldn’t help but think of this as an auspicious setting.
I asked him to explore his uncle’s relationship with his hometown. He talked about how the tobacco market had fueled his uncle’s imagination, and how when he arrived in New York City, he found a year-round variation on the theme in the Fulton Fish Market.
Joseph Mitchell said as much in a 1992 interview with the Raleigh News and Observer.
“God-a-mighty, it was like home,” he said. “All that activity, it was the damndest thing. Something about it reminded me of Bulldog Avenue and those fish cafes.”
A.N. Mitchell was a respected pillar of the Fairmont business community, but he didn’t seem to get his son Joseph. He had little experience with literature, and he had trouble understanding what all the fuss was about.
On Joseph’s visits home, they often found themselves at each other’s throats. If the conversation turned to politics, tensions tended to boil over. The old man was conservative by nature. He didn’t, for instance, have much use for civil rights. Jack Sr. witnessed one argument which ended when the enraged son bolted from his chair and kicked the spindles out of the banister on the front porch.
“He was a very kind person and all, but he had a terrific temper about certain things,” Jack said of his uncle. “And my grandfather was that way about making a living, taking care of business. My uncle was one of the most liberal people I knew. My grandfather, I don’t know if he even thought of things as liberal or conservative or anything like that. And he wasn’t very interested in civil rights. He didn’t want anybody to be held back. Joseph really had a bigger heart for things like that. He lived in a completely different environment.
“But there was a great amount of love between them.”
Despite their differences, Joseph Mitchell shared one significant trait with his father.
“He didn’t know anything about literature,” Jack said of his grandfather. “It wasn’t that he was ignorant or anything. But from the time he was 14 years old, he had the responsibility of his whole family on him. So he was very practical. Because the world is a cut-throat place, here and everywhere else, not just in New York and Chicago, survival is important to serious people everywhere. It’s very important, and he was.
“My uncle had that too, about his work. All of his written work. He was a lot like his father. In other words, he was deadly determined, like a hawk diving into a bush after a bird at 90 miles per hour. The hawk can get it just as bad as the bird could if he makes a mistake.”
At least on one occasion, the simmering rivalry between father and son took a humorous turn when the old man took to an accidental pet he’d discovered in the yard.
“We’d been through a drought in the 1950s that was pretty bad,” Jack said. “You could get government money to have these reservoirs or tanks dug so you can irrigate out of them. My grandfather had one made and an alligator came and made it his home. My grandfather used to feed the alligator bread and chicken backs and things like that. He just loved that alligator. He was an old man then. He was 96 years old when he died.
“Joseph couldn’t drive. He didn’t want to drive. He didn’t have a driver’s licence. So when he came home he would go around with grandfather, and while grandfather was glad to see him and all, he couldn’t stop talking about his damn alligator. Joseph mentioned it to his wife, Therese,  and she said, ‘See Joe, you have sibling rivalry with an alligator,’ like he was jealous of the alligator. Things like that he thought were real funny.”
Jack spoke in a slow, deliberate cadence. He considered his words carefully. He was dressed nattily, houndstooth cap complementing his dark sweater. Prominent jowls and deep-set eyes give him the aura of an old sage.
It is clear Jack Mitchell battled a bit of envy where his famous uncle is concerned. He left Fairmont for the big city, too. In 1961 he traveled to New York and attended the Art Students League and the New School, where he studied under Hans Hoffman, the German abstract expressionist painter.
Not long after he returned to the south, he got sucked back into the family business. His father was declining, and he needed assistance. He would have preferred to pursue his art, but he felt he had no choice.
“The guys that are really successful painters or sculptors, later on I realized they would about kill their mother to get what they wanted,” he said. “We had to live. I just couldn’t walk off and leave my family and say, ‘the heck with  you.’ My uncle, he had a job that went right along with what he was doing. I had to work on an old IBM, nothing like the computers we have today, setting up orders in a fabric house. Orders came in from decorators and fabric houses from all over the United States. They had to be set up with keypunch cards. It’s just the same dead work. Things turned out good for me. Certainly not that kind of life I would’ve liked to have had.”
A solitary bird issues a shrill cry. Teenagers taunt each other as they pass by on bicycles.
“Is that OK,” Jack said. “Does that give you some insight? Anything else?”
I ask him about his time in New York, and whether he got to spend a lot of time with his uncle. Occasionally he’d come into the city to dine with Joseph and Therese, and sometimes they’d come to his place in the suburbs.
I’m worried he thinks I want to know about the fashionable and famous people his uncle knew in New York. He digs deep in his memory to produce names like fellow writers Joe Liebling and Philip Hamburger, and editors Harold Ross and Stanley Walker. I tried to steer him back to the personal and local.
“When Joseph would come to town, he would get in all kinds of predicaments down here,” he said. “He liked riding horses, but he would get thrown off all the time. Joseph liked nature, all the fish, birds, turtles, snakes. My father did too. They were out at some farm some place, and Joseph picked up this turtle. He was going to take it back and identify it with a reptile field guide or something. So he put it in the foot of the truck and they were driving along and all of the sudden he felt the turtle was trying to get away.
“It had climbed up Joseph’s leg and was in his pants. And so they stop the truck and jump out and my father was standing there with his arms folded as if he was Uncle Joseph’s mother, looking at him sternly like was a child. Joseph pulled his pants off and was standing there by the side of the highway, jumping up and down and shaking them out. Joseph with his pants off and my dad sitting there like a schoolmarm. I thought it was funny.”
The dogwood petals continued to fall about our heads. Despite the historical marker at our backs, Joseph Mitchell remains something of a prophet without honor in his hometown. At least as of 2009, he hadn’t so much as earned a spot on Fairmont’s Wall of Honor. Jack said it’s been that way as long as he can remember.
“I had already read everything except when I was in college he finished up the “Bottom of the Harbor” stories,” he said. “His work was never mentioned here in high school. I went to a junior college to begin with, and the English department there had very good teachers, but they didn’t know anything about him.”
As for Joseph Mitchell’s hometown, Jack can’t help but lament its faded glory.
“It’s not like it was when I was a boy,” he said. “Not all. There’s no middle class down here. There are farmers, but there are different kinds of farmers then they were. Big, mechanized farming operations. When my grandfather started out, it was a family farm. He started buying cotton and made enough money to expand his business. He worked for the big people who exported cotton to New York and other places in North Carolina.
“All the people I went to school with and grew up with, they went away. They went somewhere else. They were college educated, and there was not any room for them in a place like this. There’s not even a doctor here. They’re all at the hospital in Lumberton.
We’d passed a pleasant hour and half on the tailgate of his truck. I told him I appreciated his time, and he said he appreciated my interest in his uncle.
Before parting, I asked him one more time to put Joseph Mitchell’s relationship with Fairmont in some kind of neat perspective.
“I remember he told me he’d got to a place after a while where he felt like New York had passed him by,” Jack said. “Then he would come down here and stay and he would get to feeling like North Carolina had passed him by. He couldn’t get straight with either place.
“We’re very proud of what he did. He was very good to me after my father died. Joseph was real kind to me in that way. I don’t know what to say. I loved him to death because he was so good to me and he was so interesting.”