Mark Millican: Bear grease and Happy Top

As firsts go, I suppose it wasn’t that spectacular. Perhaps there are others around these parts who can remember mimosa trees blooming in May, but not this scribe. Seems to me it has always been deeper into the year — yeah, June — when these invasive trees that botanists tell us originated in Japan take to flowering in their pink, bird-of-paradise style.

Every kid needs a mimosa tree in his or her yard. With their trunks that are sometimes as horizontal as they are vertical, they’re an easy tree to learn to climb — and sit in the forks of a branch and watch the world go by. We had a couple of mimosas in the front yard where I grew up on Hawthorne Street. After returning to the area a few years ago I took a tour of the old “home place” neighborhood hard by Happy Top — Dalton’s impoverished area of yore. It had been years since I’d been on that side of town, so of course the neighborhood had changed.

Lewallen’s Store down on the corner of Hawthorne and Jones Street had vanished, long replaced by the northwest corner of the First Baptist Church property where I attended kindergarten. My mentor in the construction business, Billy Raper and his family, lived across the street from us. There’s a senior adult housing complex there now. Speaking of summer, I’ll never forget the time we were eating supper out on the back porch — where it was cooler in the days without air conditioning — when a black racer found his way through the screen door, made a quick loop under the table to screams and raised feet, then snaked back out the door as quickly as he’d entered.

Young boys also learned how a woodframe house was heated 40 to 50 years ago — it didn’t take but a second to realize you’d best not walk across that grate over the furnace in bare feet when it got good and hot.

In the back yard was a monumental pear tree that made it hard to mow in later years when I returned as a teenager to do the chore for my grandmother. Shoving the mower through those rotting pears was like walking through mushy baseballs. Shearing the tops off the pears drew the yellow jackets, and to top off the olfactory experience you had the smell of cut grass wafting up into a sickly-sweet aroma. Then there was the wall of honeysuckle vines in the back yard, a natural barrier between our property and Happy Top. Don’t go through those vines, I was warned, for there’s rough boys over in Happy Top.

Of course, today Happy Top is home to the Creative Arts Guild, the public library, Dalton High School and around 200 upscale homes.

It was sad to see the mimosa trees had been felled in front of my old home. That’s a shame, because in the crook of one of them you could watch the 1950s-era cars go by or talk to people walking up or down the street. On top of the incline at Hawthorne Street right above us was the old building first used as a store and then a clubhouse, where my Dad taught veterans in a classroom setting to get their high school diplomas on the old GI bill. The old building has stood with a padlock on the door for years.

No, the old home place wasn’t what it used to be — but are they ever?

Old Hawthorne has become what we now call a “transitional” neighborhood, meaning Latino folk have moved in. I took the old road behind the honeysuckle vines, and lo and behold, some of Happy Top was still there in the form of four or five ramshackle Appalachia-type houses — but now they have vinyl siding. I’m somewhat of a traditionalist, but I don’t know whether still having some of Happy Top is a good thing or a bad thing.

I wheeled away and went further north to Tyler Street, where we used to get a haircut at the barber shop. And I mean a real hair cut — a flat top. Dad would buy us a tube of butch wax — we dubbed it “bear grease” — to whip out and slam that front edge straight up. Pardon me if that sounds dated, but it was way cool back then.

I just had to go by the old church, so after crossing busy Highway 41 my battered station wagon veered left on Luckie Street at the top of the hill, cruised by where my great uncle and aunt lived, and turned again to where the old Hamilton Street Methodist Church still stands. How I remember the days of open windows during summer services, handheld fans with funeral home advertisements on one side and the Good Shepherd on the other, waving back and forth out of unison.

Then a big bumblebee would fly in the open window and everyone’s attention followed its erratic flight, with the preacher wondering if he should speak louder to get us back on track or swat at the bee. There’s a moral story in there somewhere, I’m sure. The church has a Hispanic name now, so it’s good to see it’s still being used as a house of worship.

Up the street was the old North Dalton Elementary School — it’s gone now — where we met as a church while the new Trinity UMC was being built to unite us with East Morris Street Methodist. As kids we thought it great that a school could double as a church. We had upstairs Sunday school classrooms and used the creaky wooden auditorium as a sanctuary.

Yes, times change. But other things remain the same — the star on Mount Rachel, Gen. Joe Johnston remains vigilant over Hamilton Street and the homes along Thornton Avenue still serve as the Grand Dames of Dalton.

But I miss that guy and his team that flew across downtown once a year. Can any Forum readers tell me who and where?

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Mark Millican: Bear grease and Happy Top

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