paid him much mind.
When we’d finished with our ear-shattering rendition of “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” surely the loudest version President Truman had ever heard, some men climbed up on the car platform with him. I recognized one of them— Chester Matney, a scrap-iron dealer from Welch and a friend of my parents. He’d even attended a couple of our launches at Cape Coalwood.
Mr. Truman, Mr. Matney, the other men, and the one woman came off the train and climbed in automobiles and took off while we launched into a sprightly “Missouri Waltz.” Mr. Polascik gradually came back into my focus. His tie was undone, his coat in disarray, his hair atangle. Then I saw Dreama Jenkins. Her pretty red hair made her hard to miss. She was waving at the band, so excited it looked like she was going to fly right up into the sky. I heard her cry out “Go Owls!” just as if she’d graduated from our high school. I wondered what her fellow Gary High School Coaldiggers would think of that. There was no sign of Cuke.
As the “Missouri Waltz” wound down, I noticed other high school bands had arrived. The Excelsior band formed up beside us. Excelsior was the high school for colored students in Big Creek district. It was located about a mile away from Big Creek High. I was proud of the Excelsior band, although I felt a little jealousy when their drummers started up. How they managed such complex syncopation was beyond me. It was like their wrists were double-jointed or something.
Bobby Gray, our drum major, held up his baton to keep us in place until all the other bands marched past. We were pulling up the rear in the parade this year because we had been selected to go into the Pocahontas theater to play the National Anthem before Mr. Truman spoke. I wasn’t certain how we’d managed to get that honor. Maybe it was just our turn.
The Welch High School band, dressed in smart maroon-and-white uniforms, led the parade. We watched them with not a little envy. It was the judgment of Big Creek students that Welch students were all rich, their parents all lawyers and doctors and politicians and such. Margie Jones was our head majorette, and she had all of her girls especially charged up to match the stellar Welch girls. When we got moving, I’d never seen Margie and the other majorettes throw their batons so high.
As we marched down the street, it seemed the crowd grew in size and enthusiasm. There was wild cheering and applause from all the Big Creek fans as we tramped by. We paraded down Elkhorn Street, then turned into the steep maze of narrow streets that made up downtown Welch. We passed Belcher and Mooney, the men’s shop that my brother Jim had almost single-handedly kept in business before he’d gone off to college; Davis Jewelry, where my mom liked to look but never bought; the Chris-Ann store with women’s fashions all the way from the capital city of Charleston; and the Flat Iron Drug Store, where you could get a fountain Coke and a banana split just like, I was told, in New York City.
American flags flapped from nearly every window, and men took off their hats and women put their hands on their breasts as our color guard marched by. I was swept up by the whole red, white, and blue spectacle and felt so patriotic that if the entire Russian Army had landed at that moment, they would have had their hands full just with me. Mr. Turner, our high school principal, had once given us a speech when he said he felt sorry for the Russians because they were going to have to compete with the boys and girls coming out of Big Creek and McDowell County. This was at a time when a lot people in America were saying we ought to just give up, that communism was an unstoppable force. Mr. Turner said the only unstoppable force was us, and we believed him.
At the corner of Wyoming and McDowell Streets, there was a line of American Legion men in their navy-blue caps. We stiffened our spines and cut loose with a rendition of “E
When we’d finished with our ear-shattering rendition of “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” surely the loudest version President Truman had ever heard, some men climbed up on the car platform with him. I recognized one of them— Chester Matney, a scrap-iron dealer from Welch and a friend of my parents. He’d even attended a couple of our launches at Cape Coalwood.
Mr. Truman, Mr. Matney, the other men, and the one woman came off the train and climbed in automobiles and took off while we launched into a sprightly “Missouri Waltz.” Mr. Polascik gradually came back into my focus. His tie was undone, his coat in disarray, his hair atangle. Then I saw Dreama Jenkins. Her pretty red hair made her hard to miss. She was waving at the band, so excited it looked like she was going to fly right up into the sky. I heard her cry out “Go Owls!” just as if she’d graduated from our high school. I wondered what her fellow Gary High School Coaldiggers would think of that. There was no sign of Cuke.
As the “Missouri Waltz” wound down, I noticed other high school bands had arrived. The Excelsior band formed up beside us. Excelsior was the high school for colored students in Big Creek district. It was located about a mile away from Big Creek High. I was proud of the Excelsior band, although I felt a little jealousy when their drummers started up. How they managed such complex syncopation was beyond me. It was like their wrists were double-jointed or something.
Bobby Gray, our drum major, held up his baton to keep us in place until all the other bands marched past. We were pulling up the rear in the parade this year because we had been selected to go into the Pocahontas theater to play the National Anthem before Mr. Truman spoke. I wasn’t certain how we’d managed to get that honor. Maybe it was just our turn.
The Welch High School band, dressed in smart maroon-and-white uniforms, led the parade. We watched them with not a little envy. It was the judgment of Big Creek students that Welch students were all rich, their parents all lawyers and doctors and politicians and such. Margie Jones was our head majorette, and she had all of her girls especially charged up to match the stellar Welch girls. When we got moving, I’d never seen Margie and the other majorettes throw their batons so high.
As we marched down the street, it seemed the crowd grew in size and enthusiasm. There was wild cheering and applause from all the Big Creek fans as we tramped by. We paraded down Elkhorn Street, then turned into the steep maze of narrow streets that made up downtown Welch. We passed Belcher and Mooney, the men’s shop that my brother Jim had almost single-handedly kept in business before he’d gone off to college; Davis Jewelry, where my mom liked to look but never bought; the Chris-Ann store with women’s fashions all the way from the capital city of Charleston; and the Flat Iron Drug Store, where you could get a fountain Coke and a banana split just like, I was told, in New York City.
American flags flapped from nearly every window, and men took off their hats and women put their hands on their breasts as our color guard marched by. I was swept up by the whole red, white, and blue spectacle and felt so patriotic that if the entire Russian Army had landed at that moment, they would have had their hands full just with me. Mr. Turner, our high school principal, had once given us a speech when he said he felt sorry for the Russians because they were going to have to compete with the boys and girls coming out of Big Creek and McDowell County. This was at a time when a lot people in America were saying we ought to just give up, that communism was an unstoppable force. Mr. Turner said the only unstoppable force was us, and we believed him.
At the corner of Wyoming and McDowell Streets, there was a line of American Legion men in their navy-blue caps. We stiffened our spines and cut loose with a rendition of “E
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