Evans “Buddy” King
Growing up in the Christiansburg of my early childhood, there were several “special events” each summer.
Keep in mind that the Christiansburg of the early 60s was a quiet, off the beaten path town of less than 4,000 folks. We were not only off the beaten path; you couldn’t even get to the beaten path from where we were.
We didn’t even know there was a beaten path. So a “special event” meant something different then than it does today.
I remember three “special” events each summer that marked the passage of those wonderful months, when there was no school, when I was too young to have a summer job and when the days passed slowly but joyously.
The days were occupied by neighborhood baseball games and swimming, little organized activity other than little league games and a tedious week of Vacation Bible School: summers in Mayberry.
The first special event each summer was the horse show. My memories of this event are vague, and I may have the name wrong. I read something on Facebook once about the “Christiansburg Fair.” I don’t remember a fair, so the fair might have been what my parents and their friends called the “horse show.”
Montgomery County, at that time, was largely an agricultural area, and both my Mom and Dad were born and raised on farms outside of town—my Mom on a beautiful dairy farm in Riner, my Dad on a hard scrabble subsistence farm somewhere near Huffville (suburban Pilot). Calling this event a “horse show” would have been in keeping with their rural roots.
Plus, my folks had an interesting, “country” way of referring to things. Despite being well educated, my Dad had gone to graduate school in NYC for three summers and had a Masters degree from Columbia University, and my Mom was a proud Radford alum—they speckled their speech with “countryisms.”
I think my dad never wanted to get too far away from his southern hillbilly roots. We didn’t have a lawn mower, we had a “mowing machine.” We didn’t have a washer; we had a “washing machine.”
We didn’t eat peanut butter crackers; we had “nabs.” I am pretty certain that if we had computers and smart phones in those days, we would have called them “email machines.”
So it’s quite likely that the “horse show” and the “fair” were the same event. I only remember horses running and jumping and prancing, none of the other accouterments of a fair.
As I recall, the horse show (or fair) ran for three nights in late June—I can still picture banners around town announcing the coming attraction.
It took place out on Radford Road, at a place I think they called the “Fairgrounds” (a clue?), across from the road (dirt of course) that took you to Silver Lake and Round Meadow Country Club.
There was a uniquely Christiansburg business located on the hillside just past the Fairgrounds—he Harmans’ mink farm, where unfortunate little critters were kept before being turned into coats or hats to ship off to rich people in California and New York.
My main memories of the horse show (I’m sticking with that name) are of my dad and his great friend J.C. “Colin” Grimes (my dad always referred to him as just “Grimes”) talking about the coming event, usually while sitting in Grimes’ backyard, next door to us, the two of them chewing plug tobacco and shooting blackbirds in the trees down in the empty lots behind our yards. And I remember the smell. Ugh, the smell of the horse show.
The show, as I recall, usually went two of the three nights, and was a blur for me. Sitting in bleachers with adults in front of me, I couldn’t see the horses (they could have been unicorns for all I could tell), punctuated by the odor of sawdust and horse manure.
Suffice it to say, I did not look forward to the “horse show” the way I did to Friday night football games at CHS or trips to see the Salem Rebels minor league baseball team.
But for country folks, raised on surrounding farms, the horse show had an air of sophistication much like the Westminster Dog Show does in Manhattan. Cows were their livelihood, but horses were their passion.
The second big event of the summer was the “church picnic.” St. Paul Methodist Church to be precise. (Later to become St. Paul United Methodist Church—I’m not sure who we united with, but I’m sure it was a friendly group, Methodists being quite convivial and social).
This event was more to my liking, being held at Lakeside Amusement Park in Salem. It meant a car drive down the mountain, lots of carnival rides and tons of good food and great folks under a big shelter.
Lakeside was the only amusement park in the region that I can recall, and it held a special place in the hearts of kids growing up in southwest Virginia during this time.
It had a Ferris wheel, the whip, the tilt-a-whirl, a roller coaster known as the Wildcat, etc. My father‘s favorite was the bumper cars—he preferred calling them that rather than the dodge ‘em cars.
They were little cars you steered and drove in circles by virtue of an arcing electric spark coming from the ceiling above.
My Dad took great pleasure in watching helpless cars (about a 1/3 of them were real lemons) getting rammed from the rear by other more fortunate drivers in better cars. Hey, it was a less sensitive era.
He always said the cars constantly running into each other reminded him of my Aunt Mary Alma’s driving.
There were also special smells associated with the picnic—fried chicken, fresh-squeezed lemonade and baked beans. Unfortunately, there was also the occasional smell from a kid who had spent too much time on the whip or the tilt-a-whirl and emptied his fried chicken on the grass.
But all in all there are warm memories of Lakeside and this annual summertime gathering of Methodists.
The third big event of the summer, and the crowning moment, was my family’s annual trip to the Mecca of all true southwest Virginians—Myrtle Beach.
Through the oddities of geography, and the helplessness of the Virginia highway system leading out of southwest Virginia at the time, Myrtle Beach was a significantly easier trip than Virginia Beach.
In fact, we didn’t even know Virginia had a beach, or that, if it did, we thought it was somewhere in Europe.
Plus Myrtle Beach was great—it wasn’t the endless miles of golf shops and beachwear stores and fast food restaurants that it later became.
In my early years, we stayed in a wood framed boarding house known as the Cheerio, 7 or 8 rooms, oceanfront and un-air-conditioned, breakfast and dinner served.
The Cheerio, eventually torn down and replaced by a then modern motel known as the Boardwalk, was flanked by similar boarding houses—the Murphy’s on one side and the Wee Blue Inn on the other (my parents thought this was the funniest name ever).
We moved to the Cadillac Court a few doors down after the Cheerio was torn down in the name of progress in the mid 60s.
I have too many memories of these beach trips to recount them all here. I remember how my Mom would shop at Shelton & Walters Men’s Store all summer leading up to the trip, buying me “outfits” for a “beach week” that usually lasted four days and three nights, my Dad’s tolerance for sand, sun and being away from work not being great. But I was well attired for those three or four days.
I remember riding waves on a rented float that rubbed my stomach raw and getting my back so badly sun-burned that I had to wear a T-shirt in the water after the first day and couldn’t sleep at night.
I remember lunches and dinners at the Sea Captain’s House, still one of my favorite places. I remember the Pavilion, where you could hear beach music, and, as you got older, you could dream of meeting girls one day.
Mind numbingly simple experiences by today’s standards. I am pretty certain the Christiansburg Horse Show died out in the 70s. I don’t know whether St. Paul still has a picnic, but I do know that, if it does, it isn’t at the long gone Lakeside.
And it has been at least 30 years since I spent a night in Myrtle Beach, but I cherish the memories.
Evans “Buddy” King grew up in Christiansburg and graduated from CHS in 1971. He lives in Clarksburg, West Virginia, where he practices law with the firm of Steptoe and Johnson PLLC. He can be reached at Evans.King@steptoe-johnson.com