Strange and Wonderful

This is what I remember about the town where I grew up: it was full of strange and wonderful. Equal measures, strange and wonderful.

First, some of the strange.

Our sheriff was illiterate. His wife rode in the squad car with him in case they had to write out a ticket.

Our district court judge was an alcoholic kleptomaniac who swam laps with her French poodle in the ponds on the golf course, wearing a flowered rubber cap and an honest-to-God bathing costume that came to her knees. (She might have been persuaded to swim in the pool if only Cherie had been welcome, too.) Everyone in town knew she stole. Don Newton, the owner of the Town and Country Grocery Store, rang up $10 before he even started checking her out each time. He figured that came close to covering what she had stuffed in her clothes and purse. Gladys never, ever mentioned the extra $10. Neither did Don.


Our mayor’s wife kept a shotgun under the counter at her café on the town square. She waved it around on more than one occasion, mostly at family members who made her mad, and once shot at her son-in-law in front of half-a-dozen patrons. Didn’t kill him, though. (Didn’t mean to or he’d be dead.)

The airport in this one-stoplight town had a tower, lights and radar. (As Miss XXX that year, I was a guest of honor at the dedication and rode in the first plane to take off and land there.)

Marijuana was the largest cash crop in the area. (Think that's how we got the fancy airport? Really? Me, too.)

Our town and the hills beyond were filled with churches, mostly evangelicals and fundamentalists. On any given Sunday you could see snake handlers, speakers-of-tongues, faith healings, full immersion baptisms in rivers, or people “struck down” by the Holy Spirit.

The Superintendent of Schools was married to a woman he had an affair with while she was his student, many years before. She had no qualms about telling people she set her cap for him and got him. She told these stories in the class she taught on "Home Arts."

There were more students in our school system than people in our town. Kids were bused in more than 20 miles. Many of them rode the bus almost two hours each way.

You could—and I knew people who did—graduate from our high school unable to read or write anything but your name.

Few of the people born there had ever been out of the county. Very, very few had ever been out of the state.

The hills were a refuge for hippies and burn-outs of all sorts. We had communes, monasteries, Wall Street dropouts and one bona fide, cave-dwelling hermit among us.