October 1983: Bartlett Homecoming

Bartlett High School's 1983 football homecoming was held the week of October 21, 1983. We had built the sophomore float across the street from my house at Terrance Latour's house, and on Thursday evening we had had the homecoming parade on the streets around the high school campus. As I recall, I had ridden on the sophomore float, and the Bartlett High School band had led the parade. Jessie Yancey, Eugene West and Randy Mickens were all out there watching the parade, and we had thought that our float was certainly the nicest, and that we would win the competition. Had we known the political realities of homecomings, we would have realized that the senior float would win the contest, regardless of which float was really the best.

Unfortunately, the outcome of the parade float competition didn't sit well with someone, and the senior float was destroyed during the night after the parade, leading the high school principal Tate W. Thomas to cancel the afternoon pep rally that had been scheduled for homecoming. This led to several class walkouts and some protests, one of which was a march through hallways with signs reading "No Rally, No Game". Apparently, there were meetings between student government officials, faculty members and the administration, and later in the day, an agreement was reached and a pep rally was held. I don't remember much about the homecoming game, except that there was a bonfire, that the game was against Millington, and that we won.

This was also around the time that Bartlett's student newspaper changed names from the Gleaner to the Panther. The rationale was that Bartlett was no longer the big agricultural high school and community that it had once been, and our mascot was after all the Panther. But I found the name change somewhat disappointing, to say the least. Even more disappointing was the fact that although the Gleaner had existed for almost 60 years, our school had none of the back issues. Apparently, they were never preserved.

September 1983: A Family Reunion in Jackson

Every year, usually in September, the Amsler family would have a large family reunion in Jackson, Mississippi, based around a Mississippi State football game. My aunt and uncle, Sue and Owen McCoy would come, their children Rick and Marcy, my grandad Dutch Amsler, my grandmother Sally Amsler, and my great uncle Stanley and his wife Una would come, along with me and my parents, and at least the men would go to the football game. By the 1980's, we had settled on the Passport Inn in North Jackson as the hotel where we stayed. We would get several rooms, and in my memory it was always warm and sunny. The motel had a decent restaurant as well, and I usually would walk up there on Friday or Saturday night and order a steak dinner. On one of those occasions, I had met a young employee there named Moses Kendrick. He was a football star at Madison-Ridgeland High School, and we had hit it off talking about football, rap music, and a lot of other things as well. After that first year that I had met him, we always managed to reconnect on the yearly family reunion trips. His goal was to go to Jackson State University, and his enthusiasm for J-State actually made me interested in the school as well. In 1983, our reunion was on the weekend of September 18th and 19th. I don't recall who Mississippi State was playing in the game, but everyone was at the reunion except my dad, who was still in Canada working. Over time, the reunions came to an end, for a number of reasons. My grandfather passed away during Hurricane Elena in 1985, and my uncle Stanley and grandmother Sally got more feeble with age. And Mississippi State started playing fewer and fewer games at Mississippi Memorial Stadium in Jackson, preferring to play their home games in Starkville. The last reunion was held in 1992, and in 1993, I started my fall tradition of going to Grambling's homecoming weekend instead.

September 1983: Barbecue Smoke, Football and Oak Grove

I hadn't really wanted to move back to Bartlett after spending the summer in Calgary, but I soon adjusted to being back home. For one thing, I was back in public school for the first time since 1980, going to Bartlett High School as a sophomore, and I soon made friends with some of the football players, including the star running back Jessie Yancey, who was a senior, but was playing his very first year of varsity football. At 5 feet, 6 inches and 155 pounds, he had been considered too little, but he had played junior varsity for three years, and was quite tough. He and I met at a JV game, and before long we were hanging out. Through him, I met Eugene West, Dennis Person, Randy Mickens and others, many of whom lived out in the same rural community that he lived in.

I didn't know the name of the community along Appling, Ellis and Germantown Roads where they all lived back then, but it occurs to me now that the area must have been called Oak Grove. Certainly that was name of the Black church along Highway 64, and there had once been a Black elementary school beside it, also called Oak Grove. I soon was spending many an afternoon out there, both after school and on weekends, and although it wasn't close to my house at all, I was usually down to walk out there, or ride my bike. Stage Road changed into Highway 64 at Summer (the intersection was called Shelby Center in those days), and the road was only two lanes east of Summer. There were lots of woods, and farm houses. When I would get to Appling Road, the first house on the right was little more than a sharecropper's shack, but Michael Branch and his older brother Stanley Branch lived there. Further down on the same side was Dennis Person's house, then Angela Crutchfield's (her younger brother Lynard people called "Prunie Mane" for some reason-he went on to become a star football player and later a coach), Darrel Pugh's and Wayne Williamson's. The first house on the left was Jessie's, which he shared with his mother Fannie Lou, his sister Tammy, and his older brothers Leo, Leon and Jerry (Jerry moved to Detroit that fall). Orgill Road branched off to the east there, and further up, Ellis Road, where Angie Carraway lived on the corner. Down Ellis were more friends of mine- Terrance Kelley, James Chaffin (whom Jessie called "Ralla", but that might have been the way he said "Rattler"), and Byron and Sharon Cross. On the corner of Ellis and Germantown Road was Randy Mickens' house. There were no stores in the community, although there probably had been at one time, but there was another oddity: a privately-owned baseball and softball field, just south of Ellis Road along the east side of Germantown Road (which was also a wooded, two-lane road in those days). I didn't know then (but do now, of course) that such Black-owned ball fields were extremely important in rural Black communities. They were not merely used for ball games, but also for family reunions and picnics, and occasionally for the picnics sponsored by social clubs and fraternal lodges that featured the fife and drum bands. I soon knew just about everyone my age along those roads, and they knew me. And hanging out there, learning the ways of that community was one of the most fun times of my life.

Of course, Wolfchase Mall wasn't even thought of then, and the area where it now stands was nothing but woods. Across the street, around what is now Giacosa Lane was a large farm that belonged to the Viglio family, and several Black families lives in old houses on that property, including one of the football players at Bartlett, Warren Lurry. It was still very much a rural community, and on one occasion, hanging on the front porch at Jessie's house (the address was 3231 Appling Road- the site is now some industrial plant), I heard the sound of drums beating at a distance. Joking with me, Jessie said there was "a tribe" back in the woods beating the drums. I later learned that something was going on at either Ellendale or Brunswick, and have always wondered if this was the last of fife-and-drum activity associated with the Independent Pole-Bearers Society at Brunswick.

Another comfort during the long autumn with my Dad away in Canada was the opening of a new barbecue restaurant on Stage Road called Bubba's BBQ. "Bubba" was Thomas Farley, a former basketball coach at Bartlett High School, who was currently the assistant principal for discipline. Located in the building that later became Easy Way Foods, Bubba's sent so much smoke into the surrounding area that the air often turned blue, and the delicious smell could be detected for miles. I had learned to love barbecue at a place called the Boar's Back Inn (now Brad's BBQ), but that place had since turned into a meat-and-three place, so Bubba's opening was just what I had asked for. And on one of my first visits there, I had met an employe that looked so much like Jessie Yancey that I had to ask him if they were kin. As fate would have it, he was Leon Yancey, Jessie's older brother. Whenever I had extra money, I would eat there, and sometimes I would invite Jessie to go with me. Ultimately, rumor had it that the Shelby County school board took a dim view of a school principal owning a restaurant and hiring school students (or their older brothers and sisters) to work there. At any rate, sometime in 1984, Mr. Farley sold it to a couple from Virginia, who ran it for a couple of months and then shut it down.

Friday nights would find me at the stadium on the Bartlett High School campus. Not only did I enjoy the marching band, but we were having quite a football season thanks to Jessie Yancey. Our team had been predicted to be good, but this was before an injury to our starting quarterback in the pre-season. But because Jessie hadn't played varsity-level ball before, opposing teams were not familiar with him at all. And because he was so short, his center of gravity was extremely low, and it was hard to legally tackle him. Furthermore, he was amazingly fast. So Bartlett's game plan was remarkably simple- hand the ball off to Jessie on nearly every play. Although teams eventually knew what was coming, few had an answer for Jessie's speed and strength. It was fun to watch us win and win, week after week. Occasionally, I would also walk up to watch freshman and junior varsity games. They occurred on other nights of the week, but there usually wasn't much else going on, and sometimes friends like Jessie or Eugene would be up there.

Because I had enrolled late, I had been placed in beginning chorus, but the director, Edward Riddick, was cool about allowing me to try out for All-West Tennessee chorus, and ultimately I made it. This really started my love affair with choral music, that continues to this day. By the end of September, I was thoroughly at home again, and involved in a lot of new activities and friendships.

August 1983: From Calgary to Memphis

Although I wasn't happy about my Dad's decision that my mother and I should return to Bartlett and enroll me in school there rather than in Canada, he decided to drive us, and the trip was rather epic in its own right. We headed south from Calgary on August 16th, passing through towns like Cochrane and Fort McLeod before we crossed into Montana. Some towns, like Babb, were nothing more than one store and gas station, which also housed the post office, while others, like Browning on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, were significant. In the late afternoon, we came to a strange town indeed, called Choteau, Montana. Not only did it have the courthouse in the town square so typical of Southern towns, but it also had a dairy bar called the Rebel Drive-In, where we stopped for ice cream. But the town was largely empty and deserted on the late summer afternoon. (I later learned that Choteau had been founded by Mississippians who fled to Montana during Reconstruction after the Civil War). By sunset, we were in the state capital of Helena, Montana, which was a remarkably small town to be a capital. However, the Montana State Capitol was visible from nearly any spot in town, and had a strangely Moorish look. We ended up driving to it, and the view of it in the moonlight was worth the detour. Ultimately, we spent the night at a hotel in Bozeman. The next day, we headed south past Big Sky and Gardiner, Montana and across into Yellowstone National Park. After a brief stop at Mammoth Hot Springs, we drove around to Old Faithful, but found that Old Faithful wasn't particularly faithful, as it failed to erupt on the hour as scheduled, and actually erupted about 20 minutes late! Still, we got to see it, and then we drove on past Yellowstone Lake, before we left the park. That adventure took a large part of the day, and we spent the bulk of the rest of it driving across Wyoming. Although we passed through Jackson Hole, we didn't stop there, and we ended up checking into a motel in Gillette, Wyoming. On the next day, August 18th, we passed through Casper, Wyoming, stopping to meet with some relatives of a member of our church in Bartlett, and then headed south into Colorado. We stopped at a diner in Denver, and then headed due East along I-70 into Kansas. Somewhere in the state of Kansas, we stopped for a hamburger that was absolutely amazing, but I can't recall what town we were in, or the name of the place. We drove clean across Kansas and Missouri to St. Louis, and then due south into Memphis without stopping. It was an amazing and exhausting journey indeed.

An Afternoon in Lake Louise

On one of our afternoon trips to Banff in the Summer of 1983, my mother and one of her friends and I went while my dad was at work, and we ended up going further west to the town of Lake Louise, which is located in the same national park as Banff. We were amazed at the beautiful azure color of the lake water, and the lovely setting of the lake between two large mountains. The town was little more than a store, a railroad station and the large hotel beside the lake, but it was absolutely lovely to see. It would have been nice to stay longer, but as it was late in the day, we returned to Calgary.