Foundations

THE WORLD WAS SMALL WHEN I WAS YOUNG

My world was small when I was young, there was South Cline Avenue, the Newton town square where my mother worked and where I would later work, the First Baptist Church up on Main Street, my granddad’s farm just off 6th street, Newton Elementary School, and the State Theater. Ah, the State Theater – that is one place that will never be called a “theatre.” Even in the late forties and early fifties it was showing signs of wear and tear. But, for a dime on Saturday morning, nothing could be better.

When I was in the fifth grade at Newton Elementary, Mom would give me $1 on Saturday mornings to take my brother, Tom, and I to the old Main Avenue barbershop for haircuts (25 cents each) and then we would take in the Saturday morning “flick” at the State. The Main Avenue Barbershop and the Main Avenue Grill are now part of the Artist Café on Main Street. I ate there the first week the Café opened and was amazed at how small the café and barbershop were in the fifties. When I was young, these businesses seemed large and over-powering to me.
The movie usually started at about 10 a.m. with news, a serial that we didn’t want to miss, a short – usually a 15 minute 3-Stooge – a cartoon, and then the cowboy feature. I often think these movies had a bigger impact on my brother Tom than me because to this day he collects John Wayne pictures and has a life-size John Wayne cutout standing in his garage. Back to the State Theater – The movie cost 10 cents each, and the 30 cents we had left over went for cokes, popcorn, or candy. A little bought a lot in those days, but you must remember that the average person in Newton probably made $50 a week.

As a teenager, I continued going to the old State Theater. It was managed by Mr. Pharr who had a teenage daughter and they lived on the second floor of the movie house before moving to South Cline Avenue. This was sometime in the 1950s, but I can’t be definite about the date.
As I grew older I had jobs around Newton, first bagging groceries at Smithey’s basement grocery store and then at the A&P. The A&P was across from the State Theater in those days – it had moved up to the Haupt building sometime in the early fifties. Its former location was next to Eagles 5 & 10 across from the Courthouse on 1st Street. Mom managed the Goldshop just down from there, so I was always on the “square” for something.

The Newton Theater opened sometime in the early fifties and closed after a year or so of operation. This became the theater of choice for many of us because it was large, clean, and had a curved screen for cinemascope and 3D pictures. It was located on Brady Avenue and the building is now office just up from Midstate Mills.

In a recent essay, I described the Newton of my youth in the following way:
Newton, North Carolina is the county seat of the western foothills county of Catawba and draws some importance from that fact. It is also a mill town dominated by textile mills and furniture factories. Today, the large silos of Midstate Mills, manufacturers of flour and wheat products, dominate its skyline. Two hundred years before it was the site of a large German settlement of Lutherans and the German Reform, who Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians gradually infiltrated. In the 1950s, Newton was a town of about 4,000 people, some learned but most your average citizen with a high school education or less. It had a town square built around an old courthouse and surrounded by retail stores, grocery stores, a few doctor offices, several movie theaters, barbershops, cafes, drug stores, and a pool hall. Newton was normal by most measures. This is where I was born and grew to manhood.

From an early age I idolized my teachers, especially the male teachers, and the ministers who passed through our community. They were my connection to the outside world—a world I longed to experience for myself. They all seemed to know what they were doing, where they were going, and how to get there. They were educated—that seemed to be the one thing they had in common—and respected. Education and respect became goals worthy of my personal pursuit. I thought of them as one—in my mind education was the key to respect. My mother had gone to business school for a year, and my dad abandoned school after the 8th grade. No one in my immediate family had graduated from college and I didn’t think many thought I would either. Most of my kin were businessmen or housewives. Many had started their careers in a furniture factory or a textile mill (My mother called them “silk mills” but they actually used nylon and cotton to make their hose and socks). My dad was grooming me to work with him at a local electric construction company. When I was in high school I had worked with him in the summers and knew becoming an electrician was a dead end for me.

Of course, as a young boy I could not burrow into my teacher’s or parent’s inter-most thoughts, get in touch with their hopes and dreams, or their fears. I listened. I learned from them. Holding many part time jobs as a youth, I came in touch with many different people and often wondered how they got where they are. Sometimes I would pick one out and imagine I was that person—with a store-bought suit and a leather briefcase, off to an office, talking on a single-line telephone, and traveling to far away places. From the time I was eleven or twelve years old I knew I would leave Newton and graduate from some great university and become famous—that was a boyhood dream—a fantasy—and it kept me focused.

Newton and Conover were great places to grow up. When I got my driver’s license, I begin to explore more of the area in my Dad’s old Plymouth. Tom (Stern) Harrill and Freddie Hewitt were my closest friends. I started dating Patsy James – whose dad own the Gulf Service Station on North Main Avenue – when I was fifteen and we were married during my junior year at Lenoir-Rhyne College. Together, with these friends, we took in movies, the Shady Grove Drive-in eatery, the Blue Mirror (mostly standing around the parking lot and talking with friends and admiring their cars), and places like Springs Road Drive-in Theater and Shells BBQ.

My world remained small because I held many part time jobs and was saving money for college. I borrowed dad’s car for dating or for an occasional Saturday night excursion with my friends, but mostly bummed rides with others or just walked up town to the City Pharmacy where most teenagers gathered in Newton. We loved to sit in the outside window of the CP and watch who was going into the Shipp Hotel with whom. Life was great!

Pat and I left Newton in 1961. I had worked my way through college at Bowman’s Drug Store in Conover and enjoyed the old store which was in the Conova Theater building. A class window behind the food counter allowed us to look into the theater lobby and see who was dating whom. Sometimes the ladies from the Smartshop on the other side of the lobby would order their lunch by holding up a sign in their window for me to read. This was modern communications before cell phones and telephones without party lines.

I believe by living in Newton and then working in Conover, that I had the best of all possible worlds as the Enlightenment philosophers used to say. They say you can never go home again. And, they are right. I came back here after 14 years of being away (mostly for graduate school – five years in seminary and three years at the University of Georgia - and teaching at Gaston Community College and Campbell University). Much had changed by 1975 – Bowman’s Drugstore had moved down the street, the Newton and Conova Theaters were gone, the A&P was ancient history, the Shady Shack by the Railroad Track (Shady Grove) was empty, Newton High School had moved to 15th street, and Smithey’s had closed down. But the State Theater remains and is still a vital part of downtown Newton. The State, Newton Pool Room, and the H&W Drug Store keep my memories alive.