BACK IN TIME

Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Edited with additional text

November 2009

Cover Photo – Downtown Humboldt

Diane F. Wright

Byron Printing Alcoa, TN

Remembering

Jeanne Jones Little

Twice an Angel,

And Forever Young.

PREFACE

For those of you who read this and are not familiar with Humboldt, I fear you may get bogged down in the details of street names, locations of certain homes, and other trivial items that are no doubt of more interest to local folks. I apologize in advance for that, but, you see, I wanted this to be so specific and in such detail that those from Humboldt will know exactly where each passage takes place. Besides, I actually wrote this for an audience of one: my son, Jeremiah. I see the rest of you folks as friends who are just reading over his shoulder.

I first came up with the idea of sending Jeremiah back in time during a trip home when mom was released from the Humboldt hospital following re-hab after hip surgery in the summer of 1994. Personally, I always wanted to take the time travel trip myself, but I wasn’t sure I could go back to the time when I was a young boy and visit with myself, because of the theory that says that a person can’t be in two places at the same time.

So, it is Jeremiah who gets to take the trip back to see what Humboldt was like in the early summer of 1961. Jeremiah, as I read over these pages I’ve written, it all springs to mind so easily – my dad’s store, mom’s homecooking, the boyhood experiences of riding bikes and swinging on grapevines. But as you read these pages it’ll probably read just like any other story or book you’ve selected from a library shelf. I’m sorry I can’t make it real for you, so you too can know the joys, and values, of growing up in the 1950s and early ’60s.

But, alas, every young person has his own youth. Your days in Fort Smith and Tuscaloosa will no doubt be as treasured to you as my Humboldt memories are to me. But trust me, those days were especially golden back about 1961.

It’s like Mark Twain wrote in “The Story of the Old Ram”, when the old timer Jim Blaine says, “I don’t reckon them times will ever come again…”

Happy Reading.

Ron Pyron

August 28, 1994

BACK IN TIME

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