My neighbor Gayle and I were together from morning to night from the time I was 8 until I graduated from high school. That isn’t to say I didn’t have other friends, but she lived diagonally across the street and we shared learning to cook, learning to sew, even learning to knit, not to mention anguish over boyfriends or lack thereof, pets and the death thereof and the pain of many, many bicycle wrecks.
“I think it’s time for me to give Gayle a cooking lesson,” I’d tell Gayle’s mom, Norma, and she’d laugh. That really meant Gayle and I wanted to “cook” some popcorn for an afternoon snack.
Our morning and evening call to one another was “Woo, woo, woooooo-ooooo” and it usually worked.
Friendship Started With Roy Rogers Song
I met Gayle when my parents were in the midst of building their house. She was conducting a musical play on her front porch across the street with Lou Ann Barton and a couple of other neighborhood children. Her little brother, Larry, was nearby asking to play without success, something he didn’t like. I watched from afar for awhile wondering what they were doing, though it had to be something great since they were in Norma’s cast-off “dress-up” clothes and high heels that were way too big. But then I heard Gayle say clearly, “No, no, this is a cowboy play. We have to end by singing ‘Happy Trails to You'” so they broke out in the Roy Rogers theme song.
My younger sister and I wandered over, and the friendship began in earnest. I hadn’t really known Gayle before since she was in a class behind me in school. After we moved, things rocked along pretty well. We had a huge empty lot behind us to play in that we loved…..until….until….
The McWilliams family began building a house there. How shocking! What would happen to our open field? Gayle and I even had dug a pit at the end of the field where we pretended the fairies came to visit. What would happen to them? I took matters into my own hands. After the workmen left for the evening digging the footers for the McWilliams house, I would go over and kick the dirt back into the trenches. That would show them! Then I saw Mr. McWilliams coming over there digging them back out and realized he wasn’t going to be stopped.
McWilliams Family Moves In
Glad I couldn’t stop him. The family — Tommy, Lenora, David, Donnie and eventually baby Jeannie–were the nicest neighbors any of us could have hoped for. And Gayle, my younger sister and I loved playing with the baby once she arrived. It really seemed that the McWilliams home, the Johnson home (Gayle’s family) and my home were all one–at least to us kids. And the moms didn’t hesitate to put any of us in our place if they felt it necessary. Sometimes I wanted to change my name to keep from hearing one more stern “Kathy Ann!” But we had wonderful times in the old neighborhood.
In fact, the McWilliams family was responsible for the best Christmas memory I have. My sister and I were 11 and 14 at the time, and the McWilliams family had moved briefly to Kansas City. They were on their way home to Gallatin for the holiday, though, when one of the biggest blizzards we’d ever seen hit. While they finally made it to Gallatin that Christmas eve, they couldn’t make it on the uncleared country roads out to Mrs. McWilliams’ parents in the country. My parents invited the whole family of five to cuddle up with us in our tiny three-bedroom, one-bath home, and my mom hurried around to help find extra Christmas gifts for our unexpected guests.
Since my sister, Cindy, and I no longer “believed,” it was fun watching the McWilliams children wake up to the wonders of Santa, and we were a little sad the day after Christmas when Mrs. McWilliams’ father hooked up an old-fashioned sleigh to a tractor, made his way to town and carried the family home. Before they left, though, Mr. Warden gave all of us kids a ride in the sleigh over the snow-packed streets. A few days later the roads were cleared, but I’d never seen drifts so high.
Pet Cemetery, 4th of July and Childhood Musicals
The neighborhood contained a pet cemetery in Gayle’s back yard, where we buried everything from goldfish to the wayward dead sparrow we found to a couple of yellow kittens my pet dachshund, Copper, killed to even a family of bats–a mom and three babies– that we tried to keep alive without success. Gayle’s dad, Don, did a masterful job of building us a bat habitat for the little family, and we kids tried to find bugs for them, but the family perished. The burial services were always solemn and included Bible verses and hymns.
And then there was Fourth of July. The planning began early with our neighborhood musical involving the McWilliams children, Gayle and brother Larry, as well as others who wanted to join. Our stage was some shutters that had never been installed on our house that we put onto cement blocks. We put lawn chairs onto the driveway for our parents. After our production, it was usually dark enough for fireworks. We wound up with a pretty fine show once all the families pooled their resources. The evening ended with watermelon–generally, the first of the season. (We didn’t have all the imported melons one finds today.)
Gallatin Was Our Village
When Hillary Clinton wrote the book “It Takes a Village,” she really hit the nail on the head. It wasn’t like that just for our neighborhood but about Gallatin as a whole. Everyone knew everyone and watched out for everyone, with some sad exceptions. In our neighborhood, children could wander from house to house snacking on cookies fresh out of the oven or pulling up a chair for lunch leftovers. But that meant, of course, the moms and dads could correct you when you were wrong too. It all worked out pretty well.