Page 66 - People & Places In Time

Matag washing machine found in grandma’s wash-house.
middle. When the cast iron lid was up, I stood mes- merized, watching it swish back and forth over and over. When the clothes were washed, grandma would use the wringer to move the laundry to the first rinse tub, filled with clean water. She would then rotate the wringer to the next position and wring the laundry into the second clean water tub, then rotated again, to wring one last time into her laundry basket, to then be carried outside and hung on the clothesline. The site and smell of clean white sheets, towels and cloth- ing blowing in a warm summer breeze has to this
day remained a fresh, secure and so very pleasant a memory. Summer or winter she did her laundry this way, thirty feet across the back yard from her house, until shortly before her death at ninety-four years old. In winter the laundry was brought inside to be hung on a wood, foldable rack positioned above of the floor furnace in the living room.
The Neighborhood and Alley
John Keyes’ family, his father Jack with wife Ada and his sister, lived on ‘A’ Street, next door to Posey’s, but their back yard opened onto our alley across from the Cobles’ back yard. So, John would then become a third party to the many adventures
in our back yards and up and down the alley. John,
I think, was one the first friends I would know, likely when as young as two or three; our mothers were good friends as well. Once when very young, I fell into the swimming pool at Ralph and Velma Montgomery’s home north of town, and it was Ada who jumped in and pulled me to safety. John and I played together
as children, went to school together, grammar school through college, we played sports together and were in each other’s weddings, we even served in the Navy together I still don’t understand how we became stationed together In the last twenty years or so I’ve seen very little of John. Circumstances can drag all of us into different places in life. I can only speculate as to how this estrangement has come about . . . That’s all I have, except that people change and move on.
Interestingly I’ve seen little of Phillip in the past fifty years, but that’s because he’s lived on the East coast most of this time, I believe in Durham North Carolina right now. I do see his mother from time to time and even went to her ninetieth birthday a few years ago. I see his sisters Patsy and Pam a few times
a year as well. Peggy and I are each on the Exeter Mu- seum and Gallery board and talk often; after all these years Peggy continues as a good friend and one of
my longest continuing friendships. Funny how things transpire. When her brother Phillip and I were playing together she was three years older and we had little contact. Sixty years later those few years difference seem of little matter.
The alley so often explored by Phillip and me was also our route to Posey’s. Here Vance Posey ran an auto lube space with several small apartments in the rear along the alley, there was a two-story board- ing house where the alley met Main Street, I think he must have owned this as well. Vance had a pet raven that would pick up any shiny thing left out in the
neighborhood, much to my grandmothers’ chagrin and my fascination. Vance’s mother was behind the counter at Posey’s Dinner on the same property, at the corner of Highway ’65’ and Main street, across from the high school. The dinner served as well, as the Orange Belt bus stop. I can’t remember if we paid 5 or 10 cents for a bottle of Dr. Pepper from the cold-water chest; non-the-less, this was a welcome treat on hot summer afternoons while sitting on a stool at the dark linoleum toped counter. From this vantage point I looked across Main Street toward the water tower and a mysterious, to me anyway, once Edison substation building.
The Edison building that I had wondered at for so long, had several other tenants over the years including the Police department, but then it sat vacant for a few years. Next door was the newer Municipal Courthouse building. These two buildings have since been remodeled and combined, to create the Exeter Museum and Art Gallery.
Recently, and I mean during the past seven years or so, I’ve served on the board of directors for this organization. As part of my responsibilities, I’m a docent on some weekends. The irony of this becomes; that on some evenings when I’ve locked the gallery and museum for the day, I can walk up the stairs in this no longer mysterious Edison building and simply look out. The upstairs room is now used for meet- ings and various gatherings and is surrounded on three sides by floor to ceiling windows. These are the original pained, iron windows that for the most part contain the original glass.
From this quiet, second floor spot, I look across Main Street to see the Smith Family Mortuary. Of course, this was the source (when Morse Erickson was the mortician) for those large creates we appro- priated. To the right of the mortuary begins the alley that Phillip and I would roam, but it has changed. Posey’s corner is gone, the dinner, the boarding house, apartments and lube rack, all replaced by another ubiquitous gas station mini-mart.
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