In and Around the Prange Store

The following is a third excerpt of Crockett's Bluff As I Remember It,  David Prange's memoir of his childhood in the Bluff from his birth in 1926 until his family moved to California in 1944. See "I: Approach From the West" and "II: School Days." Pictured above in Schwab's Grocery as it was about 2000, the last surviving store in the Bluff, to which he refers in this recollection.

"Our dad's store was the most popular place of business in town, but for one.  That one, which was by some considered the Honky-Tonk, was the Schwab's store.  There were actually only two stores in town that were actively serving the public.  The August Prange store was also active but served, mainly, the employees of his vast plantation.  To say the least, it bordered on being a company store.  The Schwab Mercantile was considered the Honky-Tonk because beer could be purchased there and a pool room was a part of the establishment.  An interesting difference was our dad ran a credit business while the Schwab store, to my knowledge, did not.  Generally, as to be expected, when  folks had money they patronized the competition.  The availability of beer and the pool tables were a great attraction.  When they were short on money they often came to dad's store.  Our dad, with his gentle heart, was an easy touch, and most knew it and some took advantage of it.

"The Schwab, the August Prange and dad's stores were active within my earliest memories.  The August Prange store closed to business during the mid to late 1930s.  Our dad's store remained open . . . until the remainder of our family moved to California in 1944.  The Schwab store closed in or about 1985.

"I have wonderful memories that surround our store.  Sunday mornings, after church and if the weather was accommodating, some of the adult men gathered for the game of pitching silver dollars.  This was always played next to the store, on the north side.  This game, as I remember it, has very nearly the same rules, as did pitching horseshoes.  Rather than ringing a stake, the silver dollars were pitched into a small hole in the ground.  This was during the early 1930's and as the Great Depression progressed through the decade the game continued, but the silver dollars were gradually replaced with common steel washers.

"A very dear family friend I associate with the store was John Johnson who had migrated from Nebraska with the Prange clan.  He is a very much a part of my memories of the store.  He was rarely seen without his bolt action, single shot, twenty-two-caliber rifle.  He enjoyed shotting blue jays out of the trees, and much of this was done while sitting on dad's front store porch.  I remember him once having his eyes tested for glasses by a traveling optometrist, if I dare call him that, on the front porch of the store.   At some point during those years there had apparently been a break-in a bit before my time, so I suppose there was a reason for vigilance; therefore, for several years John actually slept in the side room of the store as the night watchman.  I do not recall a problem with burglars developing during my days, however.

"The front store porch was the gathering place for many residents.  My brother Charles and I spent hours listening to tall tales being recounted.  It took bedtime or school homework to pry us away, and always with regret.

"During the summer months, the mosquitoes provided a real challenge.  During those tall tale sessions most were stripped to the waist because of the hot and humid weather.  It was a continual swing and alap.  No one seemed to give that circumstance a second thought.  I suppose we thought that the mosquitoes were just a part of living.  You live, you slap mosquitoes." 

[Many of David's recollections -- the men playing washers, certainly John Johnson who was a friend of my fathers who was at our house often, and definitely the pool table (and eventually the pinball machine) at Schwab's Grocery during my high school years -- are vaguely familiar.  I recall the pool table set in the middle of a back room surrounded on all sides by sacks of feed, fertilizer, and other commodities. DPW]

Vandals Thought to Have Sunk the Mary Woods II

The historic steamboat pictured on the title page of this site now lies on its side in about twenty feet of water at its Jacksonport, AR  mooring.  Two local barbarians are apparently in custody, waiting to be charged with the crime.  http://www.todaysthv.com/news/news.aspx?storyid=98790

Update on the Mary Woods II   May 18, 2011

Houseboats on the White River

Although black and white box cameras were common in the 1930s even in a relatively isolated Arkansas community like Crockett's Bluff, it would have hardly occurred to someone to make a picture of the perhaps five or six houseboats moored (or tied up) along the mile or so bank of the river between the bluffs themselves and its next bend to the north just past what I recall as a favorite sand bar for swimming in the late 1940s.

I can recall clearly a very early childhood houseboat visit to Mr. and Mrs. Gosnell during which Mr. Gosnell allowed me to my great delight to choose an apple from a large container.  Years later, the Gosnells would move to a house on land a few hundred yards northward up the bank across from the Marrs families.  

On one occasion I accompanied my father on an afternoon visit during which he and Mr. Gosnell smoked pipes filled with raw tobacco roughly ground from complete tobacco leaves that I believe he ordered by mail from Kentucky.  The fumes from their pipes brought tears to my  youthful eyes.  The stories they exchanged, however, made it worth the discomfort.  [There's much more to be said about these kind and generous folks.]

While I continue to seek to acquire such pictures, I have the 1930s watercolor given to me  by "Miss Cora" (Cora Deane Prange Swindler) in the early 1970s on a visit to her home.  I had admired it on a previous visit, because it is to my memory an accurate depiction.

According to her notation, the artist is Laura Flint who was the wife of the commanding officer of the C.C.C. Camp in St. Charles in the 1930s.

School Days in Crockett's Bluff: Early 1930s

[A second selection of excerpts from David B. Prange's  Crockett's Bluff As I Remember It.]

"There also was a two-room school that taught grades one through eight.  Kindergarten was unheard of in those days, at least in and around Crockett's Bluff.  There was a large wood framed grain storage building which was owned by the Prange brothers, a small wood framed church building which served the Lutheran Denomination, a blacksmith shop owned and operated by Mr. Schwab, a cemetery, and a large steam powered relift which was owned by August Prange Sr.  This relift lifted water from the [White] river to irrigate the rice fields of the White River Prairie.  There were approximately forty permanent dwellings.  Estimating the number of homes is made difficult because of the looseness of the village boundaries.  There were an additional four or five homes floating on the river.  An elevated water storage tank was prominent within the village.

I have fond memories of that tank.  It was supported by a steel framework about one hundred feet above grade.  It served only for water storage but was a major landmark for travelers because it could be seen for miles around, projecting above the surrounding trees.

 . . . . As I mentioned earlier, the schoolhouse was comprised of two rooms.  The one room, which was referred to as the "lower room" housed grade one through four  The other room, referred to as the "upper room" housed grades five through eight.  A school day was from nine o'clock until four.  We were given fifteen-minuted recesses, one during the morning hours and one during the afternoon.  Our lunch period was for one hour.

During the winter months, our school was heated, utilizing a wood burning stove, one in each room.  The stove wood was from a huge pile located near and west of the building.  I thought then that this wood must have appeared by magic.  I never once witnessed anyone hauling it there.  Even now, I wonder who cut and delivered it.  It had to have been no small task.  Our drinking water was from a hand-powered pump.

. . . . I enjoyed my school days.  I looked forward with joyful anticipation to the ending of summer break --  well, more or less.

The advantage we had over the way teaching is accomplished today was that all of us students, in a literal sense, attended all of the classes of all the grades within the room.  How this occurred was that each class was conducted in the open room in the presence of all the other grades.  A long bench was situated in front of the teacher's desk.  When it came time for a specific class, the teacher would call forth the children of that class to sit on the bench.  The rest of the grades could watch and hear as the lesson proceeded thereby, we actually attended all the classes.  I do believe that this phenomenon was the cause for the children of Crockett's Bluff being known for their brilliance.  I think that is what they were known for.

. . . . As I look back, way back, to my days at St. Charles High, it was primitive in relation to other contemporary high schools.  Our school may have been small and backwoods, but, make no mistake, I would have have had it any other way.  Yes, we had no running water, necessitating an outdoor privy, and our only heat was from a wood-burning stove.  We may have been short on funding, but as I learned later, we matched other schools in academics.   In fact, upon entering Alexander Hamilton High School in Los Angeles, California to finish the last half of my senior year, in 1944,  I was so far ahead of my fellow students, academically, that the authorities found it difficult to place me.  In my homeroom, I was referred to as the brainchild.  Not because I was so brilliant, but that I had already had it all. Thanks to St. Charles High.

The school building . . . is gone forever, but my memories of those wonderful days will live until I am no longer here.

Bird's Eye View of the Bluffs

Not exactly Google Earth but a clear view from the air of an approach to the Woodiel place and the bluffs themselves -- thanks to a Stuttgart friend of Ken Shireman who flew us out in his small plane -- made, I believe, sometime in the late 1970s or early eighties. [A double click should produce a fairly clear view.]

Two Tales of a Noble Family

Fanny and Charles Dodson at their home near Crocketts Bluff
Summer 1968

Crocketts Bluff during my early years was in every traditional respect a segregated southern society from the mid-nineteen thirties until the decade immediately following the aftermath of the Brown vs Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court in 1954, and there certainly were over those years incidents of overt and violent, as well as covert and indirect, acts of racial oppression of its Black members. Acts of this sort to which I was witness remain etched in my memory today, sixty or more years later. One would like to believe, however, the Bluff was throughout those years a more open and just and generous community than many of those that populated the states of the deepest South.

In fact, among its most noble and respected families -- names like Allen, Phillips, and Dodson come immediately to mind -- were families we would label today as African-American, but who were distinguished in those days from their white neighbors not simply by their skin color but their reputation and example as responsible workers, individuals of integrity, faithful neighbors, and devoted parents.

"Charlie" and Fanny Dodson, pictured above, are noteworthy to me, not only for the qualities I've noted, but also for the fact that somehow they sent their four children to college even before the Woodiel family began to make it a tradition.

One has to meditate on that fact for a while to fully appreciate its significance.

Two Dodson Stories

One From "Miss" Fanny

During one of the summers between my college years at Arkansas Tech I managed to get a job once held by my father S.A. with the AAA. My task was to go from farm to farm and determine by means of large aerial photographs whether individual farmers had exceeded their allotted acreage.

It was during one of these visits that I found myself chatting with "Miss" Fanny [same old tradition: I called her "Miss" Fanny and she called me "Mr." Dale] while waiting for Charlie to come up to the house from the cotton field below the hill on which it sat. I can't recall what brought it on, but I believe it was one of those very large cast iron cauldrons used for a variety of tasks including washing clothes before the advent of washing machines.

I can hear her voice in my memory, but I'll not attempt the dialect, though the story is better with it. So I suppose that will remain special just to me. Nevertheless, she told me a story about the day just before "my last baby was born."

She had "been choppin cotton all mawnin" and had decided just before noon to come up to the house to make some lunch, or "denna," and had decided, while the lunch was cooking, to go down and "start a bit of wash" by building a fire under the large cauldron. At this point in the story, pausing while turning to look back down the hill, she slowly reflected:

"And, you know, Mista Dale,"when I cum back up that hill, I wus a carrin that baby in my arms!"


One About Mr. Charlie

Some time later that same summer I was in DeWitt on one of those sweltering Saturdays of July when lots of folks have come to town. Like many other predominantly white folks -- I had made my way to Coker-Hampton's Drug Store since it was the only -- or certainly one of the very few -- establishments with what amounted to an air conditioned atmosphere.

Am I'm sitting at the soda fountain counter, I'm suddenly aware of a disruption behind me just inside the entrance, and I turn to find the black man lying apparently unconscious on the floor is Charlie. I rush to where he's lying just as one of the Hampton crew has arrived from somewhere in the back. (There is general muttering from customers and other observers as the spectacle proceeds. The phrase "drunk nigger" sticks in my mind.)

"Do you know this man"? blurts the Hampton pharmacist.

"Yes, I do, his name is Charlie Dodson."

"Well, could you help get him out of here? Dr. Rascoe's office is just around the corner."

By this time Charlie is awake and totally startled. Perhaps he realizes he's just fainted, but he's glad to see my face, I can tell. I help him to his feet and out the door. I put his arm around my neck and my arm around his waist, but after a few strides he's able to manage on his own.

We make our way around the corner and up the long flight of stairs to the doctor's office. The receptionist is startled, and she immediately interrupts Dr. Roscoe who is with another patient. He comes forth and with an immediate smile:

"Charlie, what on earth's the matter?"

For me, it was one of those rare moments of complete satisfaction.

Charlie Dodson is all right, and so am I. He's not a young man and he has just suffered the shock of coming from a sweltering temperature into an unreal rush of cold air. And what a relief for us both to learn even the county doctor knows and respects Charlie Dodson.

Of course.

A Canal "Baptising": A Summer Ritual

 

In his memoir Crocketts Bluff As I Remember It David Prange recalls his experiences as a youthful witness of Negro baptisms that usually took place at Voss Lake, about a mile or so west of the Bluff. Unlike the baptisms he recalls at his family's Bethlehem Lutheran Church located slightly north of his family's store at the entrance to the lane leading up to the Woodiel home site, the ceremonies at the lake were carried out not ritualistically within a church itself but outdoors in natural water deep enough for total submersion -- just like that of Jesus by John the Baptist, according to their reading of the scriptures. And so it was with the local -- all white -- Baptists in the Bluff whose church was attended by my family.

Like most pictures, the one above captures a moment in time. A moment shortly before a group of people, here crudely encircled in the Prange irrigation canal in Crocketts Bluff, are to be baptised -- that is, dunked backward beneath the surface of the water by the country preacher to emerge as new members of the local Baptist Church. The ceremony marks the end of a summer "revival," a series of nightly meetings whose purpose was, along with renewing the spiritual intensity of the faithful, to bring the "lost" to salvation.

How strange are all of these terms to me today -- revival, baptism, salvation. So commonplace in my youth, but today strangely absurd. I am one of the people captured in this picture. I appear to be about fourteen. The dark-haired figure in the right foreground is "Brother" (we didn't call the minister Reverend, as I recall) Monroe Davis, and I, not quite like Athena from Zeus, appear to be rising out of his head. My memory of this occasion remains vague and faint, but I clearly recognize in addition to Brother Davis several personalities significant to me at the time: Russell Marrs, Earl Gammon, and (I believe) Glenn Widener -- all people whom I admired and respected and for whom I worked either with or for over those years. I think I learned more from Russell Marrs than from any adult in my youth other than perhaps Charles Downs, the Principal of St. Charles High School during my years there.

In his "remembrance" David includes his recollection of joining others in attempting to disrupt the ceremony of the Negro baptism as a belated confession, confident that God has forgiven him for his youthful indiscretions.

All the witnesses along the bank of the canal pictured here, apparently almost directly across the road from Schwab's Store, appear to be most orderly and respectful, even curious. When I look at them I try to recall not just what I might have been feeling and thinking at the time but what it all might have meant to me. What I glean, however, is more imagination and fantasy than recollection.

It occurs to me, however, that it was not far down the canal near a noteworthy sycamore tree from whose limbs local swimmers loved to dive, that some years earlier I had learned to swim after having been tossed into the canal by my older brothers. When I arose frantically to the surface that afternoon I did what I had to do -- frantically "dog-paddle" to the shallow water.

Rites of passage. Essential and unavoidable and valued to one's last day, regardless. Perhaps in ritual captured on this Sunday afternoon I was once again doing what I felt I had to do.