Hometown Memories Are Made Of This...

What makes a hometown a hometown? Would it not be memories? Of course a hometown is neither what it is today nor what it will be tomorrow. A hometown is what it was nearly a lifetime ago. Yes a hometown is made up of those pleasant scenes that drift into your mind when you slow down enough to reflect. Such is Beaumont, my hometown. Following are a few of my hometown memories from the 1940s.

• Growing up on Pipkin Street in the South Park area of Beaumont.
• Playing in the vacant lots with the Pipkin Street Gang (PSG), a group of kids who lived in the 1300 block of Pipkin.
• Walking with the PSG eight blocks to the Lamar Theater on Saturday afternoons. You had to have a quarter to pay the nine cents for a ticket, five cents for a bag of popcorn, and with the eleven cents left over, buy candy and bubble gum.
• Playing sandlot football on the rear campus of Giles Elementary School.
• Mud fights, usually pitting the girls against the boys. Those crawfish chimneys provided the perfect ammo.
• Some of us boys climbing on the roof of our house and jumping to the ground. We were practicing to become paratroopers so that someday we could join the army and fight in WW II.
• Climbing the tallow trees behind the Collier’s house. Those trees bordered the backyards between the Collier’s and the Ray Asbury home.
• Flying paper airplanes. Jackie Garretson and I designed and produced some of the finest paper aircraft known to man.
• Attending Giles Elementary from the first through the sixth grades.
• Building clubhouses out of mowed weeds in the vacant lots. One time, we set one of the clubhouses on fire from the inside so we could practice getting out of a burning building. Unceremoniously, the fire spread to the vacant lot. My mother and Mrs. Burch from next door doused the flames with their garden hoses.
• Learned to love that petroleum aroma from Spindletop Oilfield and listen to those oilfield pumps that said, “Pom-Pom-Pom” in the night.
• The Victory Gardens that my sister and I cultivated during WW II. She grew flowers and I grew one stalk of cotton and two stalks of corn.
• Having Sunday lunch with my sister and parents at The Golden Arrow Café or at Shelton’s. On occasion, we drove into downtown to splurge at the Toddle House on Pearl Street.
• The best local toy suppliers were the Kress Store and Morgan & Lindsey’s.
• Going to the movies and attending the Saturday morning Kiddie Organ Club at the Jefferson Theater.
• Going swimming with the PSG in that humongous Alice Keith Park Swimming Pool.
• Fishing at Twin Lakes. There were plenty of fish and more than enough water moccasins to keep your day lively.
• Some of the PSG would go around our neighborhood knocking down wasp nests with sticks. I used a baseball bat. Our approaches to these situations were to “hit and run.” No one in the group ever got stung.
• Riding bicycles all around South Park.
• Sliding down those fire escape slides at South Park High School.
• David Bean and I buried a secret treasure (monopoly money in a larger match box) on the rear campus of Giles Elementary School. The spot was three paces east of the third oak tree from that bus barn located next to the caretaker’s house. Problem: They removed the bus barn, caretaker’s house, oak trees, and demolished the school building. Most likely, David and I never will find our treasure. And there were some $500 bills in the mix.

Yes, hometowns are made up of those sweet, sweet memories…memories we never shall forget.

Winston Hamby

Winhamby@gmail.com