The more things change....

..the more they stay the same.

sscarver said...
I live in South Shore, KY...probably not much has changed since you were here.

As my children would no doubt testify, I’m kind’a fond of regaling them with tales of my ‘way back when time’ and the almost mythical town of South Shore.....Well, South Shore ain’t a myth altho’ some of my stories are certainly suspect.....
I left Kentucky in 1960. In person and in fact but, as Jesse Stuart wuz fond o’ saying, “Once you’ve tasted the lonesome water of the hills, you’re bound to come back.”
I’ve been back a number of times to visit friends and family but, in some ways, in my mind, I never left at all.
I visited South Shore a lot in the stories that I told to my children, to my friends and, well sometimes, to ‘most anyone who wanted to listen....A lot of times, I changed the names to protect the guilty but now and then I just told the stories the way they happened. Or at least, the way I remember them happening......
When my kids finally visited South Shore, they pretty much had an idea of what they were seeing.....but there have been changes.
Oh, the place is about the same size as it was in the fifties, the difference was......
“Those were the days, my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we'd choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way....”

Back then, South Shore had three theaters....the Kentucky and across the street, the Bluegrass.... and across the tracks, the Bluegrass Drive In.....
and restaurants, Wright’s, the Triangle and the Tea Room....Bennett’s Tea Room was on the corner as long as I c’n remember. In the mid-fifties, Teddy Thompson bought it. But he never changed it. It still had the same wooden booths carved with generations of names...
There were two new car dealers in South Shore then...Frank Wheeler Chevrolet and Sims Kaiser/Fraser....Paul Davis had the gas station but Paul only came out to pump gas for very special customers...the rest of us pumped our own long before self-service became the norm.
There was a bank, a couple barbershops, a beauty parlor and Harvey’s Appliances.....
McDonald’s Drugstore had a soda fountain which you can’t hardly find anywhere in this day and age...and they built a brand new Methodist Church right up the street from Pop’s Pool Hall....My kids were a little disappointed that those places were gone but they know where they were and, more importantly, that they were.
“Oh, my friend, we're older but no wiser
For in our hearts, the dreams are still the same...”