Slowly, I backed myself from the area where the unkempt and threatening young man was talking to my beloved friend Freddy Wyatt.
My slow backward “gait’’ was with purpose. I was going into the “bait room” of the Sack ‘n’ Pack market on Riverside Drive with one purpose: To grab an aluminum Louisville Slugger (it may have been a different brand, as this was the day before Thanksgiving 1976, so there is that blur. Oh, that blur. It only gets worse.)
The Slugger was on the right side of the back wall in the bait room, along with a couple of ball gloves, a badminton-for-beginners set or two, a few basketballs and footballs. Thank God, no soccer balls, as this was 44 years ago and soccer had not yet infected our American sports world, other than high school intramurals. Oh, I should mention here that one of my three broken noses came playing soccer in high school. I may not be a tough guy, but I played sports for keeps. I kept playing as blood flowed. No Magic Johnson rules back then.
That’s another story, maybe for my obit or something. Broke the nose twice more playing football along with a few “stingers” as they euphemistically refer to concussions on the gridiron.
Anyway, back to the day before Thanksgiving in 1976. At the Sack ‘n’ Pack. It may have been spelled “Sak ‘n’ Pak,” but I like it better with the “c” in both words.
By the way, also in the bait room was this huge plywood and plastic bin filled with crickets – you’d lift the metal screen door and scoop up some to use in your crappie-fishing expeditions – as well as nightcrawlers in little cartons of dirt. Different kinds of worms for the fisherman. Probably even “Red Wigglers, the Cadillac of Worms.”
Then there was the standard fishing gear, poles, rods, reels, scaling knives, hand grenades to throw in the water so you could kill a batch and scoop them off the top of the water, shotguns and more. I’m lying about the hand grenades and shotguns. If Freddy had those in his Sack ‘n’ Pack bait room stock, I may have used those to try to kill this thug who seemed so threatening.
The guy, probably was my age, which was 25 back then. I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. Not really, of course.
Most people already were on their way to see their families on this Wednesday, back when the world shut down for holidays and viruses generally didn’t kill whole floors of nursing homes and nice people in general. I had a basketball game to cover that night and would go see my folks the next morning.
Carefree days, with me holding onto a metal baseball bat, preparing to whack the brains out of a guy if he attempted to rob or otherwise harm this guy who I thought of as a best friend. I still keep him among those ranks of best friends, as I love him now, 40-very-odd years after we did our hanging around, drinking beer and playing pinball for quarters in the store.
Love his family, too. Mary Coleman Wyatt remains the kindest friend’s wife in my memory. And their baby, Diana, was a beautiful and warm little girl then. Baby Freddy T, now a preacher of some renown, came later, though I did get a chance to know him, too. Praise be to God, etc.
Back in those days, I ate at their house at least once a week. I was a single guy working in a town where I knew no one.
I met Freddy one night when I walked from the apartment that I rented in a rat-infested house near the railroad tracks – actually the train went right through my back yard, a sound I came to relish. The Last Train to Clarksville? Shit, trains ran day and night, hauling coal and gasoline and Malt-o-Meal or whatever within 20 feet of my kitchen. The landlord got rid of the rats, after I complained. Her name was Mrs. Blackwood and she always wore a neck brace. Her daughter, paralyzed, always was sprawled out in the back of the station wagon when her mom came to collect rent. I’d go talk to her. Name was Birdie, or maybe not. Nice young woman.
Anyway, when I moved to Clarksville in September of 1974 – went to work September 12 for The Leaf-Chronicle newspaper, the oldest paper in the state of Tennessee; Founded 1808; I think the phone number was 552-1808, but I may be wrong on the prefix – I had no friends in the Queen City of the Cumberland.
The AP Bureau chief in Nashville had – when I inquired about jobs there, fresh from my Easy Rider ramblings in a 1965 Ford Falcon Futura and a short and uninspiring stint at a PR/Ad Agency – told me Sports Editor Gene Washer at The Leaf-Chronicle was looking for a high school sports reporter.
The chief called Washer, who then told me to come on up, which I did, and I got a job. The long version of this story has James “Fly” Williams, a great basketball player with an undisciplined life, now in jail and labeled a “heroin kingpin” in the Bronx, involved. For that you should read the book “When Newspapers Mattered: The News Brothers & their Shades of Glory” that I wrote with my running buddy for decades Rob Dollar. I’ve been told it would make a helluva movie about murders, alcohol, Tennessee Williams, dead monkeys and friendship, but mostly about how newspapers WERE before Korporate Fukkers gutted them. That happened long ago. Buy the book. You’ll laugh, cry and be amazed. And I think I get $2 for every sale.
Anyway, enough on that. I got the job, mostly working with Max Moss, the assistant sports editor/prep editor, who taught me the veteran’s tricks to covering high school sports. Max – the best newspaperman ever to be my boss – also taught me the fine points of shooting sports events.
And, with the help of photo chief W.J. Souza, a tank driver during World War II, I learned how to develop film and print pictures. Sometimes if we were in a hurry, the printing was done from wet film and we didn’t let the photo paper dry, we just ran it to Ronnie Kendrick in the camera room. Ah, but that’s another story. About newspapers.
This one’s about Freddy. And it won’t capture everything I love about the guy because I wrote one before and while I waited to finish it, my computer malfunctioned, the guts needed to be purged and the tale of Freddy Wyatt became so much formerly digital air.
What I really am illustrating above is that while I was working sports, I was working a lot of odd hours. Early mornings until about 1 or 2 p.m. and then again at night. I was not on the same work schedule as the rest of the people in the newsroom, who worked 5-5 or so and then went drinking or to a movie or out to eat.
So for a long time I had no friends there. Only nodding acquaintances … other than with Washer and Max and W.J., and I have to admit I loved all of them, Max best, but they all were good men and were kind to me.
The problem was I had big holes in my day. And after ballgames got done at night or if I had a night off. No friends, not enough money ($125 per week) to have a phone, I’d make my own entertainment or stay in my apartment watching “Gunsmoke” reruns and the news on a TV with a 7-inch diagonal, black-and-white screen.
I hate being stuck inside, so often I sat out on a bench on the porch and smoked. Yeah, I smoked two or even three packs of cigarettes a day for many years as a newsman, but I never liked to smoke inside my apartment.
I had seen the bright Sack ‘n’ Pack sign down on Riverside Drive, about a half-mile downhill from my house (and a block south), so one lonely evening, I decided to walk down there. Buy some ice cream maybe. Some smokes. At that point in my life I wasn’t yet into drinking alone, all by myself, so usually I wasn’t buying the Natural Light that later would become my life’s blood (along with 12-year-old, low-end Scots whisky.)
There was just one person in the store that first night, and he was a little bored. Clarksville is not New York. Hell, back then it wasn’t much more exciting than Mayberry, except for the soldiers at Fort Campbell who kept running off the road and dying after nights on the town. Liquor store owner Johnny Maddox was kidnapped during a robbery and murdered and his whole family became my friends later, but that was an unusual big-city type of violence. Different for Clarksville.
The guy at the counter – and I can’t remember now if he was smoking Winstons or Marlboro – was so friendly. He asked me to go ahead and plop up on the second counter, facing him, and we visited for a few hours.
I learned all about Clarksville, golf and running a market from Freddy. I think he just adopted me because I was lonely and was pretty much a foreigner. Back then, Clarksville had only 63,000 people. Lots more now, but from what I can tell from my occasional visits, quantity seldom equals quality in this life.
Basically, what began that night was my new routine. If I had an afternoon off, I’d go down to the store and help Freddy. Sometimes I’d run the register. Occasionally I would do other things, like help him with the sandbags for the storefront when the Cumberland River across the street flooded.
When the Sack ‘n’ Pack empire expanded, with two more stores, I went wherever Freddy was working. In his second store, just across the river in Southside, he had a deli counter. I’d try to get there for the lunch rush so I could make sandwiches.
Half-inch slice of bologna on white bread, all soaked red with hot sauce, was the $1.25 house special. But we sold ham, salami, head cheese, whatever someone might want. And it was busy. The same at the store that was opened in St. Bethlehem.
Again, I’d try to make the lunch rush. And by then, his store was selling beer from a keg -- $3 a gallon or whatever – and we’d do our best to drink what wasn’t sold. No use letting the beer go to waste.
And we’d play the quarter bingo pinball machine. Put a lot of quarters in, back in the days when such machines were legal. Made $100 one night. The payout, of course, came from the cash register, so the thrill was in the playing, with the winnings going back to the store.
I met most of Clarksville, it seems like, in those stores. Guys like Peter Primm, an old man from the Trenton, Kentucky, area who liked to go for afternoon drives in the country and who wouldn’t mind a by-then well-known local journalist coming along.
Or the golf partners who met up with Freddy at the store. I didn’t play golf. Still don’t. But he tried to teach me, unsuccessfully, so I became the golf cart driver and beer distributor as we worked the Swan Lake Golf Course perhaps an afternoon per week.
And perhaps the best thing about being Freddy’s friend was the fact he was married to one of the world’s most-wonderful women. Freddy often would drag me home with him for dinner after a hard afternoon of beer and sandwich-making and pinball.
Or if he didn’t, Mary Coleman would either drop in at the store or call and ask if I wanted to go to dinner at their house.
For a guy who had no friends in Clarksville, they became my family. Diana, too, as she grew.
My only bad experience at store in St. Bethlehem was that one day I entered during a blizzard. I’d just come from Nashville, where my parents lived, and I had an armload of albums to take to my apartment. Because it was so cold outside, I took them all into the store. I forgot to get them before I left that night and they were gone the next day. One of the workers had likely taken them home. Ralph? Freddy? If you have a vinyl copy of “Wheels of Fire” and more from my collection, give me a call. I still want them back. Still, I don’t suspect anything nefarious. It’s a world of finders-keepers, after all.
I need to wrap back around and get to the end of the story soon, as I’ve got paperwork to do this afternoon.
But I do have to mention that all good things really do come to an end. Freddy and his partner Ralph Mickle (also a nice guy) were slowly backing out of the weird hours of the quick shop world and they’d become grocery wholesalers.
At first, I treated it like I had Sack ‘n’ Pack. Their warehouse was over behind the plaza where Pedigo Hardware was and not far from Camelot, which later became my all-night drinking place, where cops bought me scotch, Jimmy in the Morning also, if he could raise his head from the table. A good night included drunken soldiers fighting over women or football. Bodies flying, tables breaking.
I would walk over to the warehouse after work and hang out with the guys in their office at the new warehouse.
As expected, Freddy and even Ralph, welcomed my visits. But it was a more-formal atmosphere. More serious business, I suppose. More at stake, I’m sure.
And they had partners. One of them was a former high school tennis coach and I'll bite my tongue before expanding on my description. He was from the “right” side of the tracks in Clarksville. We got along fine, especially when I covered his team’s matches.
But one day, as I was sitting there in the warehouse office, enjoying a Merit 100 or two, Freddy was back in the warehouse, working.
He had told me to hang around, but I was worried I was getting in the way.
That’s when the one-time coach decided it was time, I guess, to claim his territory. “What are you doing here?” he asked, cold and cruel. “Why are you here every day? We really don’t want you here.”
Actually, I felt like crying. But then I figured that maybe I really was in the way. And I certainly wasn’t welcome by at least one of the partners, so I left the warehouse, essentially ending my daily contacts with my friend.
He was busy anyway, but he’d always have made room for me. But I didn’t want to tell him what his former tennis coach partner had said. Stirring up trouble between partners was something only an asshole would do, and generally I'm not perceived in that way.
So I moved on. Finding friends, good and bad, and living life that eventually ended with great relationships and a love of that town that I probably would have left long before if it hadn’t been for the friendship of Freddy Wyatt. And Mary Coleman. And Diana.
Eventually, I left Clarksville for Nashville, and it became my home. I love it in Nashville. I have a good family, dog and cat, nice little post-War house, decent life (except for the fact I was put out to pasture by the morning newspaper when I was 56. That’s another long story, and, again, check out the “When Newspapers Mattered” book by my friend Rob Dollar and me.)
And I haven’t done a real good job of keeping track of Freddy and his family. There had been years between when the former coach threw me out of the warehouse and I left Clarksville, so I hadn’t seen him much in the last almost 10 years I lived in Clarksville. I always missed our Sack 'n' Pack days and nights, though. Still do, actually.
And I still love Freddy -- and Mary Coleman and Diana -- and I think of them often.
Squashing out cigarettes on the floor in the late-night hours as Freddy and I talked at his store remains one of my great memories of warmth and friendship.
Which brings me back to Thanksgiving Eve in 1976.
It was cold outside. Boy was it cold. And this guy had come in from the highway (Riverside Drive) not making any sense, talking about having no way to get home to see his family, just generally blathering. His eyes darted like a madman or a drug-dazed guy. Either way, it was frightening.
He was pretty big too. And there weren’t any other people in the store besides me and Freddy. The guy kept pushing himself closer and closer to Freddy and the cash register. He would pat against his upper chest, as if there may be a firearm there.
I looked at Freddy and nodded my head backward, toward the bait room, where the bats were. Freddy nodded, softly, fear in his eyes.
We both knew this guy was planning on sticking up the store. At least we thought we knew that.
Which is why I stepped into the bait room and came back into the store, swinging the aluminum bat, blood spurting from his head, splattering on the door onto the highway. Fear strikes out.
Naah. Not really, though that might have been fun and make for a better tale. Really I was just holding the bat.. Pounding the barrel into my fist, making intimidating sound of aluminum on flesh, while we told the guy he’d better get going." Happy Thanksgiving, mother fucker."
He looked from me to Freddy and disappeared into the cold. Freddy locked the doors for a few minutes while we caught our breath.
That’s pretty much the end of the story, except for the fact I put the bat away in the bait room and we drove out to his house, near the Swan Lake course, for an early dinner.
I had a basketball game to cover that evening.
I guess I’m glad I didn’t have to use that bat, but I have no doubt I would have killed that punk if he had tried to rob or harm my friend Freddy Wyatt. I always loved a good Peckinpah film, and have little doubt, this would have led to slow-motion bloodshed as my bat cracked punk skull.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I have had many friends in life and too often I am writing about them after they are dead. That’s a good thing, as it helps the families and I know it helps me heal. Today I decided to write this because, as far as I know, Freddy is fine. He can read this and know I’ll always love him and his family. Then when he does die, I won’t have to spit something out in regret.
