The Gazette mentioned Grady S. Patterson a couple of weeks ago and his memoir, Small Town Boy, which was written for his children and grandchildren to share “the wonderful experience of growing up in Wake Forest in the 30s and 40s.”
Grady, now 89, was born in 1928 “in the back bedroom of my grandparent’s home on Faculty Avenue, the first child of adoring parents and the first grandchild in the family, I was undoubtedly and understandably spoiled.”
His grandfather was James L. Lake, a physics professor at Wake Forest College, who lived in the house, now named the Vann-Dowda House, from 1914 to 1954. According to Ed Morris, director of the Wake Forest Historical Museum, Grady’s great-grandfather, the Rev. Isaac Lake, was chosen as the president of Wake Forest College but turned it down because his Baptist congregation in Virginia urged him to stay instead.
Grady’s father was Grady Patterson also, and he was the registrar and director of admissions for the college, a position which paid little, not unusual for the small college and its professors and staff. Grady’s father, who graduated from the college in 1924 and understood its finances, avoided a mortgage by building the family home on Faculty Avenue two blocks north of the Lake house before he married, a Craftsman-styled bungalow from a Sears kit. It is now named the Patterson-Eppes house,
Grady began by explaining that the town grew from a “self-help school for the sons of Baptist ministers” who were required to bring two farm implements like shovels or hoes, because half of each day was spent in manual labor, raising crops. By the 1930s there was a town with businesses and a thriving college, male only, which supported many of the businesses.
He remembered farm families “who would ride to town on their mule-drawn wagons and park them down by the freight station. As parents did the weekly shopping, their kids often accompanied the rest of us as we watched such heroes as Tom Mix, Charles Starett, or Roy Rogers in double-feature cowboy movies at the old Forest Theater, where an entire afternoon’s entertainment could be purchased for 24 cents: 9 cents for the double feature, serial and cartoons, and 5 cents each for a box of popcorn, a soft drink and a candy bar.”
There were only three churches in town: Wake Forest Baptist on the college campus, Glen Royal Baptist in the mill village and Olive Branch Baptist, “which served the black community.” It was the late 1940s before Methodist and Catholic churches were built in town. (Forestville Baptist Church, built 1860, and its sister church, Friendship Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, 1862, were a mile away in the separate Forestville community. Wake Union Church where Baptist and Episcopal congregations met was farther from town.)
He recalled there were two doctors, Dr. Mackie and Dr. Wilkinson, who mostly made house calls, and a lone dentist, Dr. Squires. Officer Knuckles was the only policeman, “who in lieu of an office remained in his car or one of the downtown stores near the police telephone which was housed in a wooden box.”
Telephones were hand-cranked and often were on the wall. “In order to place a call, you would turn the crank on the set, lift the receiver and speak with an operator known as ‘Central’ who sat in front of a big switchboard at the central office.” In Wake Forest that was in either the back or the basement of T.E. Holding’s pharmacy and soda shop on South White Street. Two notable “Centrals” were Ruby Reid, who later owned an insurance agency, and Marie Joyner, who came to town as a teen and later married Shorty Joyner. Marie also played the piano at the first moving pictures in town, but that was before Grady’s time.
The women were central. “ . .. at her listening post [she] knew just about everything there was to know about everyone in Wake Forest, where the policeman had gone, where the doctor was, who had died last night, and how Mrs. Smith’s lumbago was this morning.
If there was a fire, people would “rush to the nearest fire alarm box on the street corner (but only Faculty Avenue and a few other locations had the alarm boxes) and pull a switch which activated a loudly clanging bell in the downtown area. The bell was later supplanted by a claxon horn. By listening to the number of clangs from the bell or blasts from the horn, workmen, merchants and people all over town would know by consulting a chart located in every business and home where the fire was located. In response to the fire alarm, volunteer firemen poured out of businesses, offices, and church services to rush to the fire and man the hoses and fire engine. They were quickly followed by most of the people in town, responding to the excitement of such an event in our quiet little community.”
In recounting all the later inventions and developments, Grady reminisced about the ice man who “would arrive in a truck willed with 50-pound blocks and, using an ice pick, he would hip out a smaller block the correct size for the box in your house and bring it into the house. As he did so, we youngsters loved to gather around and pick up the little chunks of ice which fell to the floor of the truck. We would suck on them – obviously this wss before the day of popsickles.”
Grady’s uncle, I. Beverly Lake Sr., told Wake Forest Garden Club members sometime in the 1970s that he was a grown man before his mother could do away with the ice box and install a refrigerator [even though the town built an electric system in 1909].
(There will be more memories from Grady next week.)
6 Responses
Great article. Thank you for writing it.
Where can we get Grady S. Patterson’s book?
In reply to Eric R, there is no book. Grady Patterson typed his memoir and included several pictures, then copied it for his children and grandchildren. He was generous enough to give a copy — held together by a very big clip — to the editor a few years back.
Grady, my cousin, recounts wonderful memories. When my family moved to Wake Forest in ’79, we lived next door to a fraternity. When the fire alarm sounded, all of the college males raced to help extinguish. Those neighbor-students often cleaned our lawns after their parties. The town was enmeshed w/sports; when the college won a game, we rang the bell in the Administration Building to announce. These events were mostly our entertainment, except for those movies that Grady described. Additionally, the Community House allowed Saturday-night “Teen-age Club,”adjacent to the swimming pool. Life was calm, happy, and rather uneventful!
Rosa Lake Lake(Rose)
The claxon horn was very loud—loud enough to be easily heard in Forestville. My earliest memory of it was that it sounded scary.
Thanks so much for reprinting this. Brings back memories of some people I knew, although most of this is before my time! I do remember the coded fire alarms — I think our block was either “13” or “17”.
very enjoyable reading. Thanks.