Bob Sanders: Small town America missed

I don’t like cities. Between cities and ghost towns, I’d take the ghost town every time. But that’s not a perfect situation, either.

I like the way small towns used to be.

Saturday afternoon towns, vibrant centers that had all the shops and services people in the surrounding area were likely to need.

The owner of the gin, usually the richest man in town, ginned cotton for farmers who used that money to buy clothes and seed and fertilizer from the store owner who used the money to eat beef stew at the Sanitary Cafe or to buy an ice box from the dealer who bought groceries so the mom and pop who owned the grocery store could go to the picture show so the owner of the theater could get a shave and a haircut, etc.

Nice system.

Things changed very slowly.

A baby was born; somebody died. At school, maybe one family’s kids were added to the rolls that fall, and they would soon assimilate; and cute Louise would suddenly be gone.

Oh? They moved to Birmingham.

The system existed for decades and decades.

What happened?

King Cotton got dethroned.

I recently went through a few ghost towns. Camp Hill is one, even with Lyman Ward and a historical spot or two.

The stores in what was downtown are boarded up. Same at Scooba, Miss., even with a nice junior college there.

Notasulga.

Wadley.

Even lovely LaFayette, on a federal highway, has the courthouse to prove downtown is breathing.

And those are just samples of once busy downtowns that just dried up.

I use my hometown as a metaphor for thousands of similar towns It had almost everything a town should have, a cotton gin, a couple of restaurants and a hole-in-the-wall hot dog place, three general stores, three filling stations, a bank, two blacksmith shops, four churches, a newspaper, two barber shops, a beauty parlor, a mule barn, two lawyers, two GP doctors, and from 1940, a picture show.

It was that way for decades, and it was good (The 1940 census was 759, and Daddy wouldn’t let me ride my bike to town because of the traffic).

Even so, there was a certain sophistication amongst town people we country folks didn’t have, and when we bumpkins flocked to town on Saturdays or to school, we felt a little in awe of the people who actually lived there.

Sidewalks!

Grassy yards!

Pavement!

When the Borderer cotton farmers gave up, the system fell apart. So sad.

Oh, I know I’m a dreamer, but I wish a way could be found to bring back small town America.

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