We took a short vacation trip pre-Thanksgiving, visited relatives near Charlotte and its horrible traffic, comparable to Metro Atlanta.
I had my brother drive me around scenes of childhood, including my old grammar school, no longer in operation. Four classrooms held seven grades, four teachers with one also serving as school principal.
My dad was a Methodist preacher and taught me a lot about storytelling. Also one of my uncles, a Hogan from Marietta, Ga., who had been trained and paid to be a guide for tourists swarming the Civil War military park at nearby Kennesaw, Ga.
Father’s regular Sunday service always contained a simple Children’s Story section, which he researched from books and ended with a moral lesson. His members sometimes half-jokingly told him they understood the kids’ lesson more than the sermon.
Teachers in my little school learned that I could remember and then repeat these stories. So they often took me around to the classrooms early in the week.
I found myself like a little first-grade talking parrot, telling stories to the bigger, older kids who literally looked down at me. Liked being a storyteller, then and now.
Crime story
In the second grade there I learned that all stories are not happy, nor teach a good lesson.
One day there was a knock on our classroom door and three adult strangers came and took one of our girls away. We were not told why and would never see her again.
My newfound reading skills came in handy the next day when I devoured the gory story in the daily newspaper, probably the first story I had ever pursued. It told in detail what had happened at the girl’s home.
Her drunken father had shot and killed her mother with a single-shot .22 rifle, in broad daylight and in full view of her preschool siblings.
He had reloaded the gun, cocked it and held it to his heart. Then instructed her 2-year-old brother to pull the trigger. Taught me to start reading newspapers.
Trade deals, Easter fraud
Also learned how to trade at that school, most playground trading back then involved the pocketknives all boys carried to school daily.
But a sweet deal fell in my lap one day when my dad gave me a smooth brown little river rock he’d found. It was the exact shape, size and color of a hen’s egg.
Life was simple and one of the Easter games was called “pipping” our hard-boiled eggs against each other, to see whose egg was harder and would break the opponent’s shell.
Standard combat saw the eggs clutched in the fists of the opposing players and only the tip of the egg showed, where impact would occur.
I colored my rock “egg” with a red crayon and never lost a match. Winners always won the loser’s egg and we usually gulped down the yellow part, discarding the rest.
A friend was the richest kid in school, his dad a doctor, they lived in a Gone With the Wind mansion with white columns out front, still stands.
He traded me a brand-new Zippo cigarette lighter for my “egg” and my parents promptly confiscated it from me.
They gave it to my mother’s Kennesaw storyteller brother for a Christmas gift and he used it for years to light the smokes that killed him.
Lots of good stories out there, often in newspapers, most oral tales, sometimes inspiration for the books I’ve written.
Wally Avett first wrote for the Cherokee Scout as editor in 1969. His books are available as signed copies at the Scout office in Murphy. Call him at 837-5531 or email wallyavett@gmail.com.