I love Marlow. I am so glad I was born there. I am so glad I it is there for me to go back to....I wrote this some years ago and ran across it by accident today looking through some old emails where I had sent it to someone. Anyway, I hope you can relate to it, having grown up in Marlow. MARLOW Think of a child of 11. Think of them as being your child and think back. As you think back you may have a tendency to summarize his or her existence for that first 11 years. Sure, you nurtured them as an infant, you prepared them for kindergarten, 1st grade and you watched them grow. They moved on from that tiny infant and became 11. The secret is that the 11 years they experienced was probably a bit different from the 11 years that you recall. I started life in Marlow, a small community in East Tennessee. Marlow is in a valley. It is surrounded by ridges on both the North and the South. Its county seat is Clinton to the East and Oliver Springs is to the West. Marlow IS an ordinary place. Most people would not give it a second look or a second thought. Probably anyone who was not born and raised there would not even chance a glance in its direction. The secret about Marlow is that it is a wonderful place. It has a huge church. From the outside it looks bigger than a small community of its size should have. When you get inside it then seems smaller. As a child, I thought of it in the same light you would think of the White House with the exception that at that time in my life, I really didn’t know what the White House was. The L&N Railroad comes into Marlow at the small community of Dossett to the Southeast and continues northward to intersect with the Southern _______________Railroad that runs on the West side. Give history on both railroads. When I was young, I suppose its main reason for being was that it had a train depot. It lies just north, across the ridge from Oak Ridge. Oak Ridge, of course, became well known just before I was born because of the war with Japan. Back to Marlow. The church was the busy spot of the community. The church, of course was the main place of busy ness but the train depot was where anyone could go to hang out, meet new people, good and probably bad. It was where a lot of conversation occurred between those that knew things and those that were hungry to know things. Anything….didn’t matter. Just to learn what ever there was being discussed and, I’m sure, argued over. My grandfather, Floyd Griggs was there. He seemed to know a lot. He had been in several wars so he did speak from experience. He would get angry at the ignorance of some but he admired the traveler. He was a traveler, himself, and found people who traveled, an interesting lot. He took his family to Ohio, California and places in between. My father, James E. Griggs was born in Dennison, Ohio and his sister Evelyn was born in Uricksville. Bill, I believe was born in Tennessee. Grandpa Griggs worked on the railroad for some years out of the Dennison Depot in Dennison, Ohio either before he went into the Army or after he came out. Maybe both. He was of Irish/Dutch descent. He was born in Knoxville but had settled in Marlow with Lillie, Jim, Evelyn and Bill. He would rather have been somewhere else. I don’t know where he loved the most. I know he liked Chattanooga and was buried there at the time of his death in the National Cemetary. He took us to the Chickamooga Battlefield. It had an awesomeness to it that I was never able to exactly pinpoint being a teenager at the time. I didn’t understand the Civil War at that point in my life so I didn’t pursue the feeling I had while I was there. I know if I went back there now, I would probably find myself very humbled by the thought of its history and the magnitude of what happened there. I believe he probably was irritated, somewhat, at our maybe lack of interest in the battlefield at the moment but I did feel something while I was there. I just never told him about it. I would venture to say I would not have known how to describe that feeling I had and certainly wouldn’t have known how to convey the feeling to my grandfather. My mother, Felsie Owens Griggs was born only about 300 feet away from where I was born in Marlow, Tennessee. I wonder if that is why we had a close connection to each other as I grew up after moving to Merritt Island, Florida at the age of 11 ½. Probably. I understood why she loved Tennessee and also some of why she hated Florida for all the years she lived there. She lived there because that’s where her husband had to go for work. He moved the family, my Mom, my brother James and I there to go to work for Pan American World Airways at Patrick Air Force Base, as a stock clerk. My brother, Jim was born April 13, 1941 in Clinton, the county seat. Dad then built us a 2 room house called a Victory House in Marlow before he went to the U.S. Army. He also had built his sister, Evelyn a house in Marlow next to his parents house, Floyd and Lillie. I was born January 11, 1945. My Dad was in France or Belgium at the time in the U.S. Army. My brother was in the same room when I was born and didn’t even wake up. He’s either one heavy sleeper or my Mom didn’t make much noise. When he woke up after I was born and looked at me in the crib, all he wanted was his pillow which was in my crib to keep the air off me. Dad came home when I was 1 year old. I was a bit stand offish, as they say, until he had been home for awhile and I got used to him. But, getting back to the life I led in Marlow………………..the winters were cold, the summers were hot, red face hot. No wind blowing anywhere, hot. The fall of the year was filled with turning leaves, wind gusts and the wonder of the coming winter. The spring was the wonderful time of year for me. I loved being able to go barefoot in the soft, green grass. I loved the freedom that the spring brought with it. The freedom to take off your shoes and run around feeling like there couldn’t possibly be a better place on earth to be. Spring brought with it, also, the picnics, the swimming hole excursions. It was just the most wonderful time a child could feel. As I have grown and seen the way people live in big cities, I realize they, too, have wonderful memories of where they grew up. It’s just a different type of existence. I have surmised that wherever a person grows up, it is a very special place for them so you can’t say that one place is actually better than the other. The place you live is what you make it to be, don’t you think? Marlow was fun to grow up in for a lot of reasons. There wasn’t much crime. Everyone knew each other. I especially enjoyed Vacation Bible School. When I smell certain types of white glue and the kind of paper lined with the bold line and the not so bold line, I can still be transported, if only for a moment, back to those times. I wish I could grab onto the moment and make it last but it’s fleeting. It won’t stay. It was just a quick gift and it’s gone. My first memories were around 4 years of age. I remember this early time because we moved from Marlow to the big city of Oak Ridge to Jarrett Lane, just off Jefferson. One of the reasons for this early memory is that I pulled one on my Mom and snuck off to school with the others who were older than me. What I didn’t think about, of course, was what would I do when they all went to their classrooms. Well…….I played on the playground for a few minutes. I took a ride down the slide all the way down to the ground or asphalt or concrete, whichever it was. It wasn’t soft. I don’t remember the pain but when my Mom found me I was walking down the middle of Jefferson on my way home with my forehead bleeding. She said when she spotted me she didn’t know which she wanted to do more, call an ambulance or spank my little behind for scaring the living daylights out of her. She had been alerted by a young boy who didn’t go to school with the others because he could not speak or hear but he could motion to my Mom that I had gone with the others. We had an old car then. It was a B model or something close. My Dad worked at Y-12, K-25, Rust Engineering over those years after he got out of the U.S. Army. He was able to buy a newer car, a Chevy, I think and for a short period of time, we had 2 cars sitting in front of our apartment. I distinctly recall coming out with my family and asking, with a bit of pride, “Which car are we taking?” Can you believe that you could have pride in owning 2 cars at that young of an age? My grandmother, Esther Owens, worked at one of the elementary schools and my grandfather, Floyd Griggs worked at another in Oak Ridge. I thought that was pretty cool. After my brothers school was out in 1949 my Dad had joined the National Guard and was stationed at Ft. Lewis, Washington and we all moved there. We went by train leaving from Knoxville. We crossed several states and I remember seeing cows standing with snow on their backs. My Mom, Jim and I shared our dining car table with a gentleman because there were a lot of people on this trip. My Mom, of course, tried to make us not look like country folk but sometimes no matter what you do, it still shows. My brother broke out into singing Mule Train about the same time I started to eat a sandwich that had a toothpick stuck in it. Now, people in Tennessee didn’t normally serve their sandwiches with toothpicks stuck in the middle so how could I have known? When that toothpick met with my little nose, I let everyone know I had been hurt! For an encore, after the porters made up all the berths for sleeping one night, I went to the bathroom in my long, Pricilla nightgown. It was only a short distance down the hall. My Mom was to watch for me coming back down the aisle. Well, she was pretty tired and when I came back down the aisle, the berths all looked alike. Which one was mine? What’s a hillbilly to do? Well, this one marched herself right back to the bathroom and sat with my legs up and my arms around them until my Mom came through the door. She said she should have had a camera. My eyes were as big as saucers! I remember specifically going to kindergarten, riding the school bus and missing my bus stop. I got off at the wrong stop and somehow found my way home. My brother, Jim had some friends and I was allowed to tag along sometimes. One time we took our wagon that had no rubber on the wheels and ran through the base washhouse with it making so much noise no one could hear themselves think! We got into a little trouble for that. We went to the movies on base on Christmas Eve and when we got back to our quarters Santa had been there. I have a good memory of walking into the kitchen and asking my Mom whose doll and buggy was under the Christmas tree. I guess I was too young to realize that it would have only been for me, being the only girl. She had black hair and wore a satin blue dress with matching hat and had little, tiny black patent leather shoes. In kindergarten, we had a teepee and tom tom’s and I just loved it. We got cookies and juice or milk and took naps. It was just cool. When I got older and read the poem about All I Ever Really Needed To Know, I Learned In Kindergarten, I related to it in a major way and I still like to refer to it when things get really complicated in my life or I see someone else with problems and all they need is a little encouragement, I give them a copy. I hope Robert Fulgham doesn’t object. Somehow, I don’t think he would. Dad was deployed to Korea so we went home to Tennessee. Ater he came back from Korea Dad built a home for us in Dossett, a few miles from Marlow on Rt. 61, on property my Mom had bought with money she received from him while he was gone. He didn’t know she was buying the property but it turned out to be the right thing to do. She received money for everyday expenses already but this was $600.00 that he had won playing cards with his fellow soldiers. Dad sometimes was so determined to finish up something on the house that he would leave the car lights on to do it. After we had lived there a couple of years, I remember us having to push him off down the hill to get the car started. I didn’t think of the connection until years later that it was probably because he drained the battery working on the house at night. We had a fireplace. I had my own bedroom and Jim had his. I loved living there. We had dogs and cats and cats and dogs. To be continued…………..
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 22:14:53 +0000
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