Mary's Genealogy Blog: The Best Summer Of My Childhood

Growing up in Pewee Valley, Kentucky was not too different from growing up in Andy Griffith’s “Mayberry.” Today, Pewee Valley sits on the edge of Oldham County as a mere suburb of Louisville. It has grown to about 1400 in population now that many old properties have been sub-divided. But, when I was young it felt much more remote, with miles separating us from the real suburbs. As a child, growing up in this small town, you might not know everyone, but they sure as heck all knew you. There was no public library, only the weekly bookmobile in Beard’s parking lot. The whole Beard family—Mr. and Mrs. Beard, and their twin sons, ran Beard’s Grocery. Pewee also had one old-fashioned barbershop, a community theater, a beauty shop, a volunteer fire station, one gas station, a tractor and machine repair shop, a small bank, and the Pewee Valley Women’s club where some of our mothers went for luncheon meetings once a month. Of course, I can’t forget the little post office where we all picked up our mail. There was no home delivery of the mail. Mackey Fletcher, our postmaster, a Brown University graduate with a dry sense of humor, sorted our mail and liked to visit when you came in to pick it up each day.

As you can probably guess from my description, there wasn’t a whole lot for kids to do during the summer, except roam the town on our bikes. So, one summer, when my friends and I were in junior high school, we concocted a plan to visit some of the older homes in town. The primary motive, initially, as I remember, was to secure trust in the homeowners and then politely ask if we could dig around in the back yards of their property to look for old bottles. My friend John was a bottle collector and helping him find old bottles seemed just about as much fun as anything else that was available for us to do that summer.

We rode our Schwinn bikes through town, often with a picnic packed so we wouldn’t even have to go home until suppertime. We would head down the long driveways, confidently walk up to the front doors, knock and wait for the owner to arrive and greet us. Most of the people in these old homes were elderly and quite thrilled to have some young visitors. We would explain that we were interested in old houses and then ask if they could tell us about their old house. Most droned on for a long time with this opportunity for a bit of attention. Later on, when they felt comfortable with us, we’d spring the part about digging for bottles.

These are a few of the folks we met that summer:

Wilda Martin- Mrs. Martin lived in the oldest home in Pewee Valley and when we met her she was about 80, a widow, and as we realized later, senile. Her home was called, “The Locust” with a driveway so long that you could not see the house from the main road. In the serial “Little Colonel” stories, “The Locust” was the fictional home of the Old Colonel. She liked us and despite our growing realization that she wasn’t playing with a full deck, we visited her several times that summer. Once, while walking with us across the gravel drive she stopped suddenly. She took off her sandal, telling us that she had something fascinating to show us. She turned the sandal over and we could see that because the heal cap had come off; bits of gravel had gotten stuck inside the heel. She marveled as she showed us the printing on the bottom of the shoe that said “Made in Italy” and explained that those were Italian rocks! She wasn’t joking and went on and on about how they had come all the way from Italy. We played along at being thrilled by this and suppressed our giggles. She also showed us her bottle collection, lined up against a mirror in her main hallway. She proceeded to count the bottles, also including their mirror reflections in the count. Mrs. Martin died the next year.

Herbert Ross: Mr. Ross was a bit of a mystery to us. His home was almost invisible from the street and we’d never heard of him or seen him in town. But, never the less, we trudged up the front steps of his 1870 Italianate home one hot sticky humid day. For some reason the place seemed a bit spooky to us, so we timidly knocked on his front door. He came out to talk to us from the top of his front porch steps as we stood down at the bottom looking up. He told us that he was an artist who had lived in New York City but had recently come back to this, his childhood home, and was now living there with his sister. We wondered about the sister, who he kept mentioning, but who never appeared, and visions of Psycho danced in our heads. After going on and on for a while, telling us his story, our eyes began to wander and we all seemed to notice at the same time that the large expansive flower beds in front of the house were completely planted with plastic flowers. He gave us permission to do a bit of digging but I don’t think he said we could poke around in the small house behind the main house. We did, and found the tattered and cobweb filled place filled with Mr. Ross’s old paintings. Moments later we were stopped dead in our tracks by a loud ripping sound. Sure we had been caught in the summer house, we turned to see that it was only the wind that had blow through the open window causing the peeling wallpaper to rip. We were relieved that old Mr. Ross hadn’t caught us, and counting our blessings we never returned or saw him again. Today most of the Ross property is a large subdivision.

Lillian Brackett: Mrs. Brackett was someone we had heard about because she had just recently moved to town. She had a home in Pewee, named “Twigmore”, but more commonly know throughout the region as “The Haunted House.” It had been vacant for years and looked after by her nephew, our postmaster, Mackie Fletcher. I’d heard stories that Mackie would sit up in the vacant house sometimes on Saturday nights with his shotgun full of rock salt, to discourage unwanted trespassers; often fraternity boys from the University of Louisville, who wanted to get into the house to satisfy a dare. In Pewee, nobody really thought of the house as haunted. We all called it the “Ivy House” because it was covered in ivy. Mrs. Brackett was the widow of Charles Brackett, producer and screenwriter of Hollywood fame. He was best known for “The Lost Weekend”, “Titanic”, and “The King and I.” After his death, Mrs. Brackett moved from Hollywood back to her home in Pewee Valley. She was a kindly lady who took us in as if we were stray dogs, and later in the summer when we did discovered a stray dog she adopted it too. She delighted in showing us around her home and once fixed a complete formal lunch for us in her dining room. We visited her often that summer and over the years to come. Each Christmas, when we would go caroling, we would head across town especially to visit her and she would beg us to sing the carol that “made her cry.” She could never remember which carol that was, and we didn’t either, so we would have to sing all the ones we knew until we hit it. As we stood in her living room one Christmas, singing carols, I looked around at all the Christmas cards she had set up, seeing that many were from famous Hollywood stars. “Merry Christmas, from Jimmy Stewart and Family.” It seemed unreal to us that someone who had hobnobbed with the rich and famous of Hollywood, was living here in little ole Pewee Valley Kentucky.

We covered miles and miles that summer on our bikes, and found how to make our own fun in a town with nothing to do. I’ll always remember the people we met and how they welcomed us. A few years later, when I was about to head off to college, Mackey Fletcher, the postmaster, and his wife “Honey Bunny” invited me over for dessert one evening to discuss my college plans. Our families weren’t close friends and I only knew Mackey though our visits to the post office, but that’s how small towns are. He had watched me grow up and therefore had a vested interest in my success.

-Mary