Bob Sanders: Good times in the big city of Columbus, Miss.

We were talking about my little hometown last week. The big city we went to when we needed things only a big city could supply was Columbus. Not “our” Columbus, but Columbus, Miss. Its current population is about 26,000. When I was growing up, it was about 14,000, although it seemed much bigger.

Columbus was 30 miles from my hometown, and somewhere along that stretch, Appalachia, oh so gradually, changed into the South of Gone With the Wind.

Ah, Columbus. After we had hit the places in my hometown and the neighboring town for Christmas shopping (on Christmas Eve, of course — did anybody shop for Christmas any other time?), we might head toward Columbus.

My! There were department stores, jewelry stores, men’s and women’s clothing stores, the Princess Theater, a respected college (Mississippi University for Women, known locally as The “W”), a big hotel with a radio station in it ... and the mighty Tombigbee flowing just downhill from that hotel.

For the six months before I was drafted, I worked at a (different) radio station there. What a fun time that was. It was in a tiny building on the edge of town, near a big lumberyard. It was a daytime-only station with a staff of exactly two, me and Ralf Faber, a University of Wisconsin graduate, and the coolest dude you’d ever hope to meet. He’d work half a day and I’d work half a day, seven days a week.

In our courtin’ and early marriage days, Frosty and I discovered a real, honest-to-goodness night club right across the river, just like the ones we’d see at the picture show. It was called the Silver Spur. I remember seeing a very important man of our town and his group there on one of our few visits. “Now, don’t you tell your dad I was here,” he said. I didn’t, and hoped he would return the favor.

Nobody ever had a wedding in our hometown. Frosty will tell you, and she knows about such things. People went to Columbus to get married because Mississippi didn’t require a wait for a blood test. That’s where we tied the knot.

And there was Columbus Air Force Base, where bomber pilots were trained, and from where those little silver training planes that flew over our patches came. During the war, Columbus was a jumping place. Why, you could even order a beer with your meal at the restaurants there. Gollee!

And I haven’t even mentioned the fair. Oh, Columbus had a big fair every fall, and for several years, that was a Mecca of kids in our community.

We could see the lights and the Ferris wheel turning long before we got there in Uncle Kelley’s pickup. What an anticipated and wonderful thing was the fair.

Anyway, Columbus, you were special to me, and still very nice, I suppose, although the last time I was through there, I noticed that you had moved the river. Tsk, tsk.

Bob Sanders is a longtime radio personality with WAUD in Auburn and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.