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Porterdale Mill on the Yellow
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Porterdale Mill on the Yellow
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DOWN
MEMORY LANE |
| Let us take a trip from Porterdale, Georgia to Cedartown, Georgia to visit Grandpa and Grandma Ollis. The distance is about 100 miles and the time is in the late 1930’s. You make a lot of preparations the day before, packing suit cases, water bottles, and tying extra tires on to the rear, front, top or wherever on the car. You always carried water, since most cars in those days on long trips would over heat, and you would have to stops and refill the radiator. The extra tires were needed for two reasons. Tires in those days were not made as well as today. The roads were mostly gravel and rough on tires. These conditions made blow outs (tires exploding) a frequent event when traveling long distances. In those days, I do not recall ever making a trip between Porterdale and Cedartown without having at least one blow out. Some time the blow out would be so severe that you had to not only replace the tube, but the tire as well. (Tubeless tires are a modern product). However, repairing the blow out or flat tire was no easy task. You had a patching kit which consisted of rubber patches of various sizes, a scraper to rough up the rubber, glue for gluing the patch on. Some kits were called hot patches, where you would put a clamp and patch holder onto the tube and light it with a match to melt the patch onto the rubber tube. After the patch was applied you had to wait a while before you HAND pumped the tire. The patch had to dry and set up before the air pressure could be applied.. So you were on the side of either a hot or cold road for at least an hour when you had a flat tire. There was no such thing as air conditioning, you generally traveled with the windows down and the gravel and dirt roads always provided plenty of dust. Knowing what you had to look forward to you always got an early start. I do not think that being an Ollis had anything to do with it. You normally started around day break, because you did not want to be in the dark if you happened to have a flat. We kids always looked forward to these trips, because it meant that we were going to get a treat. Where Daddy got the money to treat us I do not know, but I can not recall a time that we did not stop at either the Varsity, downtown Atlanta, Krispy Cream Doughnuts on Ponce de Leon near the old Sears and Roebuck Store or a BBQ restaurant out on the Buckhead Highway. Now we got really excited about these stops. When we stopped at the Varsity I had a hard time deciding what I wanted to drink, orange juice or chocolate milk. I think I chose the Chocolate milk most of the time. This is about the only times I can recall that we got to eat out. Our route from Atlanta was generally through Austell, Villa Rica, Dallas, Rockmart then to Cedartown. Sometimes just before or near Dallas we would stop for another lunch, which Mother had prepared. Generally it consisted of butter biscuits with sugar, or sometimes ham if we were lucky, peanut butter and crackers, and home made cookies of some kind. We would generally arrive in Cedartown around sun down. I always loved to go see my Grand Parents, either side, so the trip was always worthwhile. Every summer after I was six or seven I got to go and spend two weeks every year with both of my Grand Parents. |