The Nankipooh Enquirer
"Covers the South like Sorghum Syrup"
"Nankipooh Memories"
I have a lot of great memories of growing up in Nankipooh. I also have a lot of stories to tell, some of which come from my Grandma and Grandpa Biggers, and some from Grandpa Biggers' father, Bascomb Biggers, but a lot of them are from my memories of Nankipooh in the '50's and '60's.
"The Lunch Room Lady"
When I was a kid it was hard for me to get up in the mornings, so most of the time I missed breakfast at home because I was always in a rush to get to school and not be late. Nankipooh School was about a mile walk from the Biggers' old farm, and most days I barely made it on time. Now the sweetest lady at Nankipooh was Mrs. Simmons who was the cafeteria manager, who we called the "Lunch Room Lady". When she found out that I was not eating breakfast at home, she had me stop by the cafeteria in the morning when I got to school, and gave me a couple of graham crackers to tide me over until lunch time. I still love graham crackers, and I still love Mrs. Simmons.
"The Playground Teacher"
There were no organized sports at Nankipooh after school, such as Little League baseball or Pop Warner football, but the County Parks and Recreation Department paid a local woman to be in charge of the playground and ball fields for three hours after school everyday, and we called her the "Playground Teacher". When I was in the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades it was Mrs. Newell whose son Joe went to Nankipooh and was a year younger than me. For the next three or four years it was a young woman named Margo Gointner whose husband Sherman was away in the army. Margo was the sister of Bill and Tommy Boatner, and their family had lived in Nankipooh for several years. One day Tommy, who was about 19 at the time, pulled out of the driveway across the street from the school in his 1962 Impala with a 409 cubic inch motor and a four speed transmission, and decided to show off for us kids. The car was really fast and when Tommy poped the clutch it spun the wheels so hard that the car spun all the way around in a circle and slammed into a telephone pole right in front of us. The car was totaled and I don't think Tommy ever had a car as cool as that again.
"Cub Scouts"
You got to understand that Nankipooh in the '50's was pretty poor, but of course, we really didn't know it. In 1957 when I was in the fifth grade, we were told at school that a Cub Scout troop was being formed in Nankipooh, and we were mighty excited about joining up. Down in Columbus there was an Army-Navy store where they sold the uniforms for the Scouts, so I got my mother to take me down there one Saturday. Well after looking at everything, Mama said "I'm sorry but we can't afford all this stuff." I was feeling pretty low about this, and then she said, "but maybe we can get you the cap and the neckerchief." That cheered me up quite a bit cause part of a uniform was sure better than none at all. However, the next Monday at school they told us there would be no Cub Scouts in Nankipooh because there was not enough money to support a troop. I believe that there was a Boy Scout Troop formed in Nankipooh about eight years later, but I still never got a Cub Scout Cap. Around the same time the Davy Crockett TV show was pretty big, but I never got one of those Davy Crockett coonskin caps either. Like I said, there wasn't a lot of money in Nankipooh in those days.
"Pitching Horseshoes"
The gathering place for some folks in those days was the Biggers Grocery where Grandpa Biggers scratched out a living and gave credit to a lot of folks who never paid him back, but it was a great place. There was a big old oil burning stove near the middle of the store with a couple of rocking chairs, and a few nail kegs pulled up for others to sit on. Every Thursday was horseshoe pitching day at the horseshoe pit alongside the south side of the store, right in front of the old outhouse. The regular players were Grandpa, his brother James, Uncle Harry Rogers and his son Pete, George Adams,(the richest man in Nankipooh), and plenty of others who joined in from time to time. If it rained, the horseshoe tournament turned into a checker tournament inside the store around the stove. In addition to the tournaments, there was always some story telling, and of course some time spent pulling cokes, which was about the only gambling I ever saw going on. That store was where the Fortson Road branched off of the Hamilton Road, right up from the Double Churches Road, with the Rail Line going straight up between them. To a ten year old, it seemed like the center of the world.
"The Man of War"
One of the things all of us from Nankipooh have in common was seeing the Man of War going up and down the tracks two times a day right through the heart of Nankipooh. I remember a lot of hours sitting in a rocking chair on the big old front porch at the Biggers farmhouse and watching the train go by, and wishing I was on it. The Man of War ran between Columbus and Atlanta two round trips a day from 1947 through 1971. You could leave Columbus at 7:30am and be in Atlanta by 10:30am. The second round trip left Atlanta at 6:55pm and arrived in Columbus at about 9:45pm. When the freight trains went by, we counted the cars to pass the time of day, but when the Man of War went by, we were counting our dreams of places to go and things to do, especially in Atlanta, "The Big A".
"Albert and Old Sam"
One thing a lot of us remember about Nankipooh was that there were quite a few old black folks living in the area, some of which were living in the same houses that their family had lived in for generations. Some of those houses were where former slaves had lived when they worked on the farms around Nankipooh prior to the Civil War, and some of those slaves' children and grandchildren still lived in the same house in the 1950's and 1960's. Just north of the old Bascomb Biggers house, where Margie Rogers taught piano, was an old house where "Old Sam" lived with his wife Berta about a half mile south of Nankipooh School. Nobody ever saw Old Sam much cause he used to stay inside the house most of the time, especially in winter, since he was getting pretty old. I used to see Old Sam every now and then when I would sell him rabbits or squirrels I had shot, for a quarter apiece. Another old black man from Nankipooh was Albert who lived a mile or so north of Nankipooh School just off of the Hamilton Road. Albert and my Grandpa were the best of friends, sine they had worked together on Bascomb's farm since they were both twelve years old. One night when he was in his late fifties, Albert's car stalled on the train tracks, and he was killed by the train. My Grandpa still grieved for the loss of his childhood friend years later.
"Swimming Holes"
There were so many swimming holes around Nankipooh that I can't remember them all, but the best was the rock quarry. Just about three or four miles up the Fortson Road from Nankipooh School, was a rock quarry where they had stopped digging when they hit an underground spring and the quarry started filling up with water. It was a wonderful swimming hole and even had a little bit of a beach from where the trucks used to pull down to the quarry to load up. It was so deep that the water looked blue, and it was clear and cold and, and felt great on a hot summer day. It also had a "Diving Rock", up on the steep end of the quarry. There were some rocks up there about twenty five feet above the water where you could climb up and jump off into the water below. I did it a couple of times but I was always scared. One day when there were more than a dozen of us up there, Tommy Boatner jumped off and did a belly-flop which knocked him un-conscious. We were all scared but he woke up and said he was OK, so we took him home. He started acting strange, so they took him to a doctor, who gave him a sedative and sent him back home to sleep. After two days of sleeping he woke up and said he did not remember anything from the past two days, or anything after jumping off that rock. Well, I never jumped of that rock again, but we kept going to the rock quarry to go swimming. As a matter of fact, when I was about fourteen, that was where I had my first taste of moonshine, and it sure was good. One thing about moonshine though, is never drink any until you see somebody else drink some, and if nothing bad happens to them, then you can go ahead and try it.
"Sunday Football Games"
For quite awhile between the time I was about twelve or thirteen until the time I moved to Atlanta when I was twenty, we had a neighborhood football game most Sunday afternoons in the fall and early winter. These were "Choose -Up" games of hard hitting tackle football played by folks from thirteen on up to twenty five, or even thirty years old, who lived in Nankipooh. We played hard for sometimes as long as three hours and often ended up with somebody getting a bloody nose, or once in awhile a broken bone. Some of us would usually go from house to house around the school after church, and try to get enough guys to play. The games started around 3pm most times, and lasted until dark. We would choose up sides and go at it. On a couple of occasions some of the boys from over in Upatoi would come over and take us on. There were a couple of brothers over there who had played football in high school, whose daddy ran a farm where he raised laying hens. There name was Anthony, but we just called them the "Egg Farmers". One Sunday we had a game against most of the Jordan High School team who we had been talking with for weeks about getting up a game, so during Christmas vacation when I was sixteen, they all piled into three or four cars and drove out from Columbus to play us. The way I remember it, we won the game by one touchdown which was scored after it had just about got too dark to see. I loved those Sunday afternoon games, and there were very few young men or teen aged boys who lived around Nankipooh during that time, who didn't play in at least a few of those games.
Now I could tell stories about growing up in Nankipooh for hours and hours, but that's just about all I have time for right now. Nankipooh was, and still is in many of our hearts, a true slice of the soul of our great country, and Nankipooh and neighborhoods like it all across the Unite States, are what has made America a country like no other in the history of the world.
Norman Biggers Bentley
