Our town of some 6,000 pre-war residents had doubled in size during the war, largely due to the creation of Camp Tyson, a center for barrage-balloon production and training during the war. Perhaps the local authorities counted on the army base remaining in place and autos remaining in short supply. Whatever their reasoning, the camp soon closed (converted to a clay and cattle company), and the city buses soon disappeared.
I think of those mid-1940s buses each May when my birthday rolls around. One close boyhood friend in those days — Larry Gardner — had my same first name and was only two days older than I. His dad owned a short-order restaurant on Wood Street — later known as the Wel-Com-In Café — and we sometimes would get a bag of free hamburgers at his dad’s place and then get on the city bus. The fare was only a nickel, and transfer tickets were free, so we could ride all day for five cents — which we did, sitting on the rear seat and eating burgers.
Now another birthday has come and gone, and some 60 years later, I am still enjoying remembering Paris — and bus rides, bags of burgers, and boyhood friends. In the classic “Casablanca” movie we know by heart, Humphrey Bogart tells Ingrid Bergman, “We’ll always have Paris,” as she leaves to fly off with her patriotic husband.
Psalm 90 tells us, “The years of our life are three-score and ten” and then warns, “They are soon gone, and we fly away.” Both Paris and I have changed in my 70 allotted years, but we have not yet flown away. Despite not living there for 52 years now, it is still “home.”
When we visited Paris recently and stopped by the cemetery to check the graves of our grandparents, parents, brother, aunts and uncles, it suddenly struck us that we have no living relatives left there except one distant cousin.
Driving down still-familiar streets, we found old landmarks missing. The buildings around court square are the same as ever — at least on three sides of the square — but the occupants have all changed. No more Trevathan’s, Sullivan’s, McSwain’s, Russell’s, or Fry’s drugstores, no more Woolworth’s or McElroy’s dime stores, no more Blanton’s grocery or First Trust bank or Joe’s Poolhall, and no more Paris Dry Goods, National Stores, or Davis Store for women.
But even as we acknowledged during our visit our growing list of Paris people and places “missing in action,” there was no accompanying pain of sadness. People and places may change, but not as long as we have memory. In the scrapbooks of the mind, everything and everyone are right where we pasted them, omnipresent.
A goodly number of survivors from our childhood will be gathering in Paris this year to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the opening of E. W. Grove High School. Although our high school closed in 1969, it was in its day one of Tennessee’s most prestigious academic institutions, and the bonds among its alumni have always been as tight as those within families.
The great strength of living our entire pre-adult years in one place is that we can watch changes come and go, can learn to relish them and embrace them, can make “change” a virtue and a way of life, and still stay anchored in an unchanging world of human memories.
We’ll always have Paris, even when the people we know there have moved to one of its several cemeteries and out-number the living people we know there now. Everything changes, but nothing changes. What a precious paradox!
Larry McGehee, professor-emeritus at Wofford College, may be reached by e-mail at mcgeheelt@wofford.edu.
