RAY DEAN JAMES - My Life chapter 3

This is the 3rd installment of my Dad's life story, taken from a 30-page document he wrote in 1999. Before he passed in 2015 he added a few more little details and anecdotes. I might chime in here and there with some context in red italics.

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By the time I was old enough to start school we had moved to Watertown, a hilly, curvy, six miles away. Watertown was big enough to have a high school complete with football team called the Purple Tigers. Their big stadium must have seated 300 people and was surrounded by an ivy-covered chain link fence. But you could still see the game through the ivy and not have to pay your way in. I attended first and second grades in Watertown and I have enough memories of those years to fill a separate volume. I remember the first crush I had on a girl in the first grade. Her name was Myrna Love Boyd. That middle name says it all. My mother had a photo of the first grade rhythm band with me and my first love with her long curls.

We lived in several rooms of an old rooming House close to the town square where all the action was. This is where I found that there was no Santa Claus. That's the beginning of the growing-up process. What a cruel joke! I'll never forget the sound of what every little boy had asked Santa for: a Radio Flyer little red wagon being pulled around the house by a not too quiet Santa. What a surprise and disappointment. Although I almost believed that Santa was so busy he left things in the front yard. Watertown was also where I first went to a movie theater. You could see two Westerns and a serial. My first favorite cowboy movie star was Don Red Barry who played Red Ryder in a serial. His movie career went downhill after that and it hurt me every time I saw him as something less than the star. The name of the theater was the Rex and years later my best friend would be named Rex.

It was while we lived in Watertown that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. (December 7th 1941) I remember exactly when they announced it on the radio. We were listening to the show of a young boy singer who's theme song was "Ta Ra Ra Boom Dee Ay". I think it might have been Bobby Breen. Watertown is where I made my singing debut. At the age of six, no, I mean 7. It was right after my birthday and when the MC asked me my age I said, "Six years old. No, I mean seven." I sang "Greenback Dollar" at this traveling tent show that came to town every year and somehow it was recorded. For many years my mother hung on to that recording. I don't know where it is now. I learned to ride a bicycle when my older brother put me on one and shoved me down a hill toward the railroad tracks. Along these tracks was an old warehouse where they had dances during World War II. That's where I first heard Glenn Miller. I'll never forget my dad, who couldn't carry a tune in a basket, trying to sing "Little Brown Jug".

Watertown is where I took the keys to Dad's A Model Ford and me and my brother's older friend took a ride on the railroad tracks. My brother caught Hell for not stopping me. It's where my brother and the same friend were caught breaking into the local hardware store and felt our gentle Dad's wrath. Where I pooped in my pants on the way walking into town and hid in the high weeds along the road until my brother could run home and get me some clean clothes. Where we took the oily rags from the boxes on the wheels of the railroad cars and burned them for hours. We would go into the nearby fields and make rooms with connecting tunnels by pushing sticks into the ground and bending them and covering them with long grass.

The Watertown of today is much as it was back then. The shirt factory is still the place to work. The stadium is still the same size. The old hotel is still a rooming house. They now have twice a year a Mile Long Flea Market that brings people by the trainload from as far away as Nashville. Halfway between Watertown and Nashville is Lebanon, the county seat of Wilson County Tennessee. The home of the Cedars of Lebanon State Park, where my daughter Gina would learn to swim. But I'm getting ahead of myself…