The publishers of The Eagle Democrat have chosen to publish articles from the past Oldtimer’s Notebook in memory of Robert L. Newton. This article was first published July 18, 2001.
That wedding we were privileged to attend in Nashville was a fine experience.
The bride is bubbly and lovely, the groom handsome.
The venerable church where the rites took place is in downtown Nashville.
It was erected in the days when well-to-do folks “rented” a pew to which their name was affixed on a yearly basis.
Joined by one of Bradley County’s prime civic assets, Sue Wagnon (who skillfully operates Wagnon Place) we sat in a pew behind one identified as that of Mrs. James Knox Polk.
Mrs. Polk, who died at about 90, was the widow of the president of the United States during the Mexican War.
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T’was a treat at the festivity to renew acquaintance with General Fred Feinstein (USAF-Res., Ret.) of Meridian, Miss.
The general, pushing sixty now, was commander of the Air Force reserve in Mississippi: he was also the son of Helen Richmond’s dazzling redhaired sister, Frankie Key Feinstein.
He related he went to both the third and seventh grade in Warren and that those were his happiest school years.
He recalls with pleasure a science or math teacher, a man, he had in Warren in the seventh grade. Best teacher he ever had, says the General, but like many of us being attacked with “Wabbaseka Disease” (that’s just past Altheimer’s) he can’t remember his name.
Who was a gentleman teaching this sort of thing in Warren Junior High around the middle ‘fifties?
The General would like to know, as would we.
Don’t I remember General Feinstein breaking his leg or something at the YMCA?
Still, he says his happiest memories revolve around Warren, the school here, the YMCA, the neighborhood around Helen and Dewey Richmond’s house on St. Paul Avenue, back in the peaceful years of the ‘fifties.
Ancient history department: were not the John Coles working in Eastern Mississippi for a lumbering concern in the ‘forties? Later, they went to Gloster, Miss., finally to Warren. Dewey Richmond worked with Mr. Cole in Mississippi and was recruited by Southern Lumber Company to come to Warren and join Mr. Cole.
He did so, running the dry kilns for years.
At Gloster, the Cole son was an all-state halfback.
He was later a 3-year starter for the Razorbacks.
But he rests at Oakland Cemetery.
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Three of the four youngsters (not so young anymore) of the late Alice and Brown Appleton were in Nashville for the wedding. (The fourth, onetime Lumberjack basketball center Bob Appleton, of the Chicago area, Someway didn’t get his invitation through the mail.)
The Appleton quartet was among hundreds of young people in Warren who benefitted from the wonderful services of Mary Lou and Curry Walter Martin, Jr., during their careers in school music here.
The Martins met at what we then called Arkansas State Teachers College. He was from Bald Knob or Newport or someplace in that neck of the woods (we had known him at Lee Wallick’s Dixie Band Camp half century ago). She was from either Perry or Perryville.
Both were skilled musicians, smart folk, motivators.
The Martins set up shop in Warren about fifty years ago and not only produced top bands, but top choral groups, too.
We can still remember a Warren High choral group plowing its way through the Handel “Messiah”. A twosome negotiating the tricky “O Death Where is Thy Sting” was Ann Whaley, elder daughter of Dr. Bill and Pat Whaley, and the late Rev. Glen Lewis of Southside Baptist Church. Glen died in a car wreck years ago.
In other words, the Martins tried to give the kids “something extra”. Hard stuff, in other words, because after all, as the late Edwin Ives reminded us once, “you don’t sharpen a knife on hot butter.”
And the bands were just as strong, too, with kids like Herrings, from Randall on down, surely Dr. Kerry Pennington, indeed the aforementioned daughter of the Dewey Richmonds, Patti, deemed by the Martins to be one of their best field commanders, ever.
But then…
Ah yes, then…
The Martins retired; the Warren Public Schools just could not replace them.
Band director after band director has come.
And gone.
Indeed, we are told so did the band uniforms.
One year, the kids just didn’t bring them back.
Mrs. Frank Ferguson, a Monticellonian, has kept at work on the choral program, but the band program has been nothing like as successful.
We don’t blame anybody: that isn’t our job.
We just regret that Curry and Mary Lou are our age, instead of being on the shady side of thirty.
“Backward turn backward time in your flight…”
Doesn’t work that way.
Recent band directors have done their best.
We admire ‘em for their work.
But every one has faced an unpleasant uphill battle.
Comparisons hurt: Eudora came up here last fall with a band that looked like it could have come from UAPB or Texas Southern or Grambling…uniforms, flag wavers and all.
Well, as the late Louis Ederington used to remind us: “Poor folks have poor ways”. Eudora’s a rich school district.
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Improvements in downtown Warren keep moving along, apace.
Seems like a whole new sidewalk has been laid down on the west side of “the town hill” from the railroad to what we used to call “the M&P Bank corner”, since a fiscal institution of that name was set up there in 1890 (it remains alive as First State Bank of Warren, Hermitage, Hampton, skillfully-led by one of Warren’s best gifts from Freddie Mobley: come to think of it, Maribeth Frazer, one of the leaders of that downtown improvement program, is another of those Lousiana gifts).
We used to labor in that section of town at Adams Cash Grocery (hardly anyone paid cash) for Mr. Claude Adams, a son in law of Dr. Davis, pioneer doctor/druggist.
Think I made a dollar a day as George May, uncle of Dr. Wharton, and I delivered groceries on bikes.
Oscar and Anne Greene worked there too and were Mr. Adams’ successors in the business.
Adams Cash Grocery went the way of all flesh (and most of the mom and pop grocery stores).
The Greenes stuck it out to the bitter end.
Good folks Oscar and Anne Greene.
By the way, Mr. Alex Brown worked there too.
He was the father of Mrs. James O’Neal.
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The late Joe Thompson was married to the former Miss Susan Eberle, younger daughter of the Bradley Lumber Company official, Charles E. Eberle, and Mrs. Eberle.
He was the son of the Dewey Thomasons, who moved to Hot Springs in the late ‘thirties: his elder brother, George, also played for the Razorbacks.
Thomason was a football player at Hot Springs High and showed up well in intramural football as a freshman at Fayetteville, being named to the all-star team for the whole school with people like another ex-halfback from Hot Springs, Attorney Clint Huey, plus the late Glen Throgmorton, county agent-agriculture, in later years in Bradley County.
Thomason “went out” for football on the varsity level and started at wingback, alternating with Phillip Reginelli of Lake Village on the late Bowden Wyatt’s Southwest Conference champ team of 1954.
The Thomasons were married in a garden wedding at the Eberle home at Main and Wheeler. The two were educators at Magnolia for a number of years before moving in retirement to New Mexico where Mrs. Thomason’s late mother, Mrs. Hazel Williams, Eberle, then resided.
