"A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood"

Center Hill was a fine place to begin the earliest days of life. Not far from West Fulton High School, and dissected by Bankhead Highway (it will NEVER be Holowell Parkway to Atlanta natives and old timers and me), the neighborhood where this writer began his growing up was just that - a neighborhood.

In the Atlanta I knew as a boy, the scourge of metropolitan sprawl known today as the dreaded "subdivision" was rarely seen. Rather, folks lived in neighborhoods. There were no cookie cutter houses on barely enough ground to hold them. Yards seemed like acreage instead of postage stamp size. There was a plentiful supply of big, shade-producing trees. The homes were modest, the streets wide, and the atmosphere for a boy to grow up in was, in a word, SAFE.

Kids in the Atlanta I knew could ride their bikes just about anywhere, go to the corner grocery or the nearby park, walk home from school, linger after dark at after-school activities or playing touch football in the street, and stay outside all day, every day, all summer long, all while never giving a second thought to their/our safety.

The only "Neighborhood Watch" in the Atlanta I knew were the neighbors who shared care for each other's children, and hosted "spend-the-night" parties and impromptu, pick-up football games in their yards. If a child acted up in a neighbor's yard, the neighbor administered the same form of discipline that the child would find at home. If the neighbor child was hungry, they would get the same cookies and milk that one's own children received.

Mothers were at home during the daytime hours in my old neighborhood. The father worked and brought in the living. The wife and mother kept the home. Kids were not left to let themselves in and out the family home with no one around to supervise their comings and goings.

Most families had one car, and so there were no soccer moms in mini-vans keeping the roads hot. Women in most families embodied the life of June Cleaver. There were no rallies or protests with feminists carrying signs declaring that they were oppressed, or that, somehow, personal fulfillment had passed them by. Thank God for them. They were one of the reasons that America was such a strong, moral, and vibrant nation in those days.

Another part of the neighborhood that was Atlanta in those days was the corner store. There were no Arabs who could barely speak English encased behind bullet-proof glass enclosures. The corner grocery was owned and run by your neighbor and his family. You knew his name, his wife's name, and his bratty kids' names. If he sold gasoline, he pumped it for you. His store was the drop-off for the local newspaper truck that supplied "paper boys" (I was one) for their routes. If you bought a big "bill" of groceries at his store, he or his son delivered them to your house in a pasteboard box. And, his was the place where you got your first taste of Coke in those big, greenish glass bottles.

In Center Hill, we had three such stores.

Mr. Jake Rakestraw ran one of them. His was the biggest of the three stores. Looking back, he had so many things in that store, it just may have been the early forerunner to Wal-Mart. Jake's wife and kids helped him run the store. Included in his brood was a large, strapping son named Larry. Those familiar with University of Georgia football history will remember that name. Larry became well-known and successful as one of Georgia's first-string quarterbacks during that era. I well remember seeing him working around the store.

Just down Bankhead Highway from Rakestraw's was Bagwell Sales. This store was owned and operated by the Gospel Music star, Wendell "Wendy" Bagwell, of "Wendy Bagwell and the Sunlighters." Wendy and his two female singers had a well-known, regional, "hit" during the 1960's-70's called, "The Rattlesnake Song." The song highlighted Wendy, humorously telling about their first and only experience in a little, rural church that handled snakes. Hilarious!

Wendy was a great story-teller.

Like Rakestraw's, Bagwell Sales was a General Store of sorts, but more toward the furniture and home furnishings side of things. Wendy, himself, would meet you at the door and talk to you like you were a long-lost cousin. You could sit in the rocking chairs on the front porch of the store or "play" with just about anything in his store and he didn't seem to mind. It was a very "homey" place to wait on your mother while she shopped.

The third little store in Center Hill, the name of which escapes this writer's memory, was just across the side street that ran perpendicular to Bankhead Highway. This same street ran beside Center Hill Elementary School. All the school kids stopped in this little store every morning to "blow" their lunch money on candy and soft drinks. It was in front of this little store that, as a third grader, this writer had his first experience seeing a couple "making out." Right there in broad, open daylight, they were, "going at it," one morning before school. What a sight!

Toward the middle 1960's, a little farther down Bankhead Highway and back toward West Fulton High, the very first K-Mart to open in Atlanta was built. Like the infamous Wal-Mart Supercenters in our modern day, this K-Mart had both a large department store and a grocery store built into one facility. This monstrous, "shop-a-tropolis," became the mecca of our neighborhood, and all but sounded a death-knell for the Rakestraws and Bagwells - just like WalMart does today for countless little Mom & Pop stores in neighborhoods all over America.

Some of the other chain stores and businesses I remember that lay between our house and West Fulton High School included: C&S Bank, Shoe Town, Miss Georgia Ice Cream, The Big Apple Grocery Store, and the Ben Franklin Five & Ten Cent Store. Along with an array of local businesses such as drug stores, dry cleaners, automotive repair garages, filling stations, and barber and beauty shops, our neighborhood had every sort of retail experience anyone could want. This was long before the advent of shopping malls. Simply, there was no need for such.

In 1966, my family moved from Center Hill to my father's old stomping ground of Riverside. We bought a house that had been built in the 1920's on a 1-2 acre lot - just five doors down the street from where my father was born and raised.

Riverside was also a true "neighborhood." Same characteristics as Center Hill. There was Gary's Store, and later, the Busy Bee. There was a local Phillips 66 station, a fire station, a doctor's office, a drug store, and a local barber shop.

In nearby Bolton there was a Dairy Queen, Paris' Hardware and the Bolton Drive-In Theater.

Again, what else could a family possibly need?

Neighborhood memories such as the preceding recall a time before the monumental changes that would change forever the South and the America that this writer once knew. Things like "white-flight," illegal immigration, terrorism, and rampant crime. It was a time and a world that was so truly pristine, and remarkably similar to Andy Griffith's, "Mayberry." Neighbors knew one another and seemed to have a genuine sense of what it meant to be neighbors. There was room for kids to be kids, and to explore their surroundings - rather than constantly sitting in front of a television set or computer.

And, of course, there was always time set aside on Sunday for families to go to church together.

In The Good Book, "Heaven," is presented as THE ultimate place to spend life eternal. For people who follow Christ, there will never be a place on earth quite like it.

But, this writer does know a place where, at least to a young boy, a lot of what he saw and "lived" seemed a lot like heaven here on earth.

How great it is to go back to that place in time - if only in memories, pictures, and words.

As the late Fred Rogers used to sing, "It's a Beautful Day in the Neighborhood."

Thanks for walking down those streets with me once again.