When I was a boy, I spent part of each summer with my grandparents. They lived out in the country, we used to say, in a little one-story white house on an old, two-lane road that connected NC Highway 24 with US Highway 258, in a community known as Haw Branch. The place was 20 miles or so from Jacksonville, in one direction, and about 30 miles from Kinston, going the other way. The nearest town was Richlands. At the junction of that two-lane road and US Highway 258, there was a sign with an arrow pointing south, indicating that Richlands lay five miles in that direction. Back then, all these roads were flanked by tobacco fields, dense forests, the odd house or two, tobacco barns, and more tobacco fields.
Now, we did many things and Grandma's. Grandma's house is what we always called the place. Granddaddy lived there, too, of course, but we always called it Grandma's house. We played outside. We played inside. We made up a lot of our own games, me brothers and me. Sometimes we played together, the three of us. Other times I played alone. I used to throw a baseball on the steeply slanted roof of the big red pack house that sat adjacent to Grandma's driveway. The pack house was my "catch" partner --- or my fielding partner, on those occasions when I would bat the ball up onto the roof. Whenever I erred and threw --- or batted --- the ball completely over the roof of the pack house, I had to go searching through tobacco plants taller than I was in order to find it. Summertime is tobacco growing time in North Carolina.
We played marbles. We played tag. We climbed trees. We watched TV by the hour, ate home-made popcicles, ice-cream, and drank Grandma's iced-tea by the gallon. There were even times when we would shell butter beans or snap string beans while watching Hee Haw, or Bonanza, a baseball game, or a Billy Graham crusade. Granddaddy loved baseball. Grandma loved Billy Graham.
But one of my most favorite adventures was working in the Richlands post office. I should be clear here. It wasn't actually "work" in the formal sense. I never got paid for anything. We just called it work because that's what Granddaddy did, and we all wanted to be like Granddaddy.
Granddaddy was a United States Postal Service employee. He was really a farmer. But he'd had an accident about the same year that I was born and he was never able to farm after that. He and Grandma owned, oh, I don't know how many acres of tobacco land. After Granddaddy got hurt, they leased the land out to a tenant farmer. I don't think much changed except that other people were driving the tractors, yelling at the mules, and whatever else they did to raise tobacco. Maybe Granddaddy's income suffered. As a boy I had no comprehension of that, but that may be at least part of the reason why, after his injury, he had to work at the post office.
Another reason was that Granddaddy, after his fall---he broke a leg and hip bone pretty badly; had screws put in to hold them together --- became afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis. He needed crutches to get around. He had to wear special shoes. His hands were swollen and his fingers pointed out in a funny way. He stood over six feet in his prime, but the arthritis and the crutches forced him to walk down in about the five'-six" region. It brought him down a little closer to us grand kids, was one way of looking at it.
Granddaddy worked every day at the post office. It was pretty much a full day, but, looking back, I don't think it was an eight hour day. It took him a couple hours or more, each morning and with the constant help of Grandma, just to get ready for work. Grandma had to help him in and out of bed, help him bathe and dress, and all sorts of other things. (She did that for about 18 years, until Granddaddy died). So, it couldn't have been before nine in the morning, at the earliest, before Granddaddy drove off to work. Despite his handicap, Granddaddy could still drive a car. I never remember him driving anything but a Chrystler. It took him several minutes to get in, and it took him several minutes to climb out. But he could drive just like anybody else, if not better. I remember riding with him one winter night, coming home from the post office, and it was snowing. I watched anxiously as the snowflakes fell through the beams of the headlights. It was thrilling and scary at the same time. Thrilling because it was snowing and that meant, for us kids, a lot of fun to be had, and scary because we were driving through it. I'd always heard that driving in snow was dangerous.
Granddaddy came home for lunch every day. We boys watched for his car to appear past the edge of the pack house and turn in at the head of the gravel driveway where the white mailbox was, practically right under the old mimosa tree we used to climb. Grandma had his lunch ready --- she just had to pour him a glass of iced-tea. I'd run out to the car port and help him climb out of the car and hold the door for him as he entered the house. Took him 15 minutes from the driveway to his chair in the living room (specially made for him). That's where he took his meals and spent most of his waking hours. We helped Grandma cart his lunch to him. One of us would carry the tray on which sat his dinner plate, silverware, napkin, and whatever else could fit on it. Another of us would bring his big glass of iced-tea (Grandma always kept that glass in the freezer, with ice in it; when we spent summers there, we talked her into putting glasses of ice for each one of us in the freezer, too, so we could be like Granddaddy). After he finished eating, Granddaddy would look at the paper, maybe read some mail, talk to us a bit, then get up and make his way back to the car and drive back to work for the rest of the afternoon. About five or so in the evening, he would return and we would sort of repeat the lunch routine for supper.
On the weekends, Granddaddy would take us boys --- many a time just me by myself --- to the post office with him. He worked an abbreviated shift on Saturdays, if memory serves, and a short period early Sunday morning --- I'm talking 4 a.m. early! --- just long enough to meet the mail truck and sort whatever came in, before coming back home.
When I accompanied him during his weekend shifts, I did everything. Well, I couldn't wait on customers, but I did practically everything else. I took the flag down from the pole outside the Wilmington Street entrance, brought in all the mail that was dropped into the big, red, white, and blue, steel "US Mail" box outside, scooped up all the letters from the "outgoing mail" boxes that customers dropped off in the lobby, and took all these envelopes and ran them through the canceling machine. The canceling machine was a unique contraption. It was about the size of a very small kitchen table, square-ish, with all sorts of belts and pulleys and knobs on top. You had to take a stack of letters, say a fifteen or twenty at a time, place them all so that the stamp was in the upper, right-hand corner, then hold that stack upside down so that the top edges were all on the smooth table-top surface. Down underneath the table-top was a switch --- looked just like an old light switch --- which activated all the pulleys on the top. You had to nudge the stack of letters up against this little spinning wheel thing, which would rip them from the stack, one at a time, and shoot them down the maze of pulleys, and spinning wheels, and deposit them in a neat stack in a little hopper on the other side. Along the way, the postage stamp on each letter was "cancelled" with five wavy lines and a circle in which was printed, "Richlands, NC 28574" along with the date. (Granddaddy let me change the date, too. There was a little tin box with number and letter type-sets, just like those in old type-writers or in printing presses. You had to pick out the right ones with tweezers and put them in the slot --- just right, because you couldn't have anything backwards or upside down. You had to make sure the rollers were inked. Then you locked it back up and tested it on some discarded paper.
Oversized envelopes, and packages of course, had to be canceled by hand. There were ink pads and hand-stamps for that. They had stamps for everything: postage due; C.O.D.; special delivery. There was a drawer under the customer service counter that held nothing but stamps of different sorts. After we got everything canceled, Granddaddy would sort them into the appropriate mail sacks. While he did that job I would sometimes go across the street, to the filling station (I think it was an Esso station) and get us a drink from their soda machine. Granddaddy always drank an eight-ounce coke, a small little bottle, and I usually got a chocolate milk (Brown Cow, or something like that). Drinks cost 20 cents. It was always a good day when I dropped in a quarter and got a buffalo nickel for change. After all the mail was sacked up, we straightened things up for the next day and sipped on our drinks while we waited for the truck. If the truck wasn't coming until Sunday morning, we locked up and went home.
On Sunday mornings, Grandma would wake me up just before time to go. Not even the chickens were up at that time of morning! She always had a little breakfast --- we had to eat it in the car, during the five-mile trip. Grandma went with us, too. Many a day the breakfast was just a warmed up Pop Tart (they were all the rage back in those days). When we got to the post office, one of the first things I did was put up the flag. Granddaddy got the paperwork together for the mail truck. He and the driver had to sign things and keep copies. I helped him throw all the mail sacks onto the cart and push it out on the loading dock on the East Franck street side of the building. It was still dark when the truck came and backed up to the docks, a huge, 18-wheeler. Sometimes, the driver would let me carry the bigs right onto the truck. If the truck was empty, it was like walking down the block, it was so long. And always there were several sacks dropped off. I put these on the cart and wheeled them inside. Granddaddy opened them (sometimes he had to use his pocket knife) and dumped their contents on a sorting shelf and then hung them on the sack rack, fixing them in place with what looked like large, iron diaper pins. Then he'd turn himself to the task of sorting. He was like a machine. He knew where each and every letter and package went, some into little pigeon holes, some into larger ones, some into other bags for local delivery. He would go through three or four sacks lickity-split. At the post office, he always got around on a single crutch. He seemed to walk faster with one that he did with both crutches. Not infrequently, while he used the one, I'd use the other. We were a pair!
Those were some good times. I learned about money in those days, started collecting stamps, became acquainted with newspapers --- I vividly remember the day after Bobby Kennedy was shot. I spent a lot of time at the library, which was a five minute walk from the post office, and at the Piggly Wiggly, another five minutes past that. For a time, I walked the streets of Richlands collecting discarded pop bottles. I took them to a grocery store around the corner, an aunt of mine worked there as a cashier, and got two cents a bottle. But the most lasting memory of all was the time I got spend with two great people, my grandparents.
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