Climbing the Water Tower

Today if you drive through Dresden you will find the city’s water tower over by the old Bay Bee Shoe Company factory site, but the old timers will remember the older water tower that once stood across the tracks from the Dresden train station.  As a youth I lived a short distance from the station and the old tower.

I ran with many of the boys in the neighborhood. We would play touch football, ‘cowboys and indians’, and ‘steal the bacon’. One afternoon, we got around to playing a new game, a game we called ‘I dare you’.  David and Bill (last names withheld to protect the guilty in this story) were a little older than me and as I recall not a couple of the guy I normally ran with. Oh, I don’t mean I never hung with these guys, as I said, they just were a couple of years older and as the kids today would say, they were not my homeboys. The three of us lived pretty close to the depot and on this particular day we found ourselves riding our bikes down Depot Street past the depot and near the base of the water tower. I am not sure which of my two friends made mention that he had already climbed to the top of the old tower and dared me to do the same, but I stand on the fact that one of them dared me.

I was an adventurous 9-year old and I figured that climbing up to the walkway might just be a very cool thing to do; and besides, I had never seen the city of Dresden from the height of 200’ …so off I went.

I grabbed onto the ladder on one of the legs of the tower and before I knew it I was on the walkway skirting the belly of the tank and was taking in a view extraordinaire! I could look up and down the railroad track toward Martin looking north and toward Gleason to the south. I could see Dresden Elementary and the old high school and past the schools I could see the square and the courthouse. Looking back toward Cedar Street I could even see my house and my Father’s veterinarian clinic.

As I recall I was a pudgy, awkward child, a fact that would be borne out over the next couple of years. Between the ages of 9-15, I went on to break both collarbones, my wrist, my ankle; I cut a deep gash in my arm with one of my Granddaddy’s carpenter tools, I stuck my finger in the blade of a table saw, and as a glorious finale; I caught my foot in a rear bicycle sprocket and cut off my heel while being doubled on a bike driven by my sister. A kid with a track record like that really had no business climbing to the top of ladders and water towers.

But, let me get back to my story. I had been atop the tower a few minutes admiring the vistas before me. I was so entrenched in the view I had paid no attention the swelling number of people gathering near the base of the tower. When I did finally looked down, of a sudden it seemed that I had become the star of my own one-boy aerial performance. There I was on stage some 200 feet in the air and I was gathering a number of folks in my audience as the moments ticked away. I am not sure who all was in the crowd but I can assume they were the locals from the area establishments plus some other that happened by. There was Mr. Capps and Charlie Woods both of whom had a grocery along Depot Street. Sam Butts the station agent came out of the depot. Mr. Jack Jolly and some of the others who worked at the stockyard would surely have poked their heads out of the office door to see the hullabaloo as well.

Some 30 years later I would meet some of the old timers on the square and time after time they would comment to me that they remembered the day I climbed the water tower. I am not sure how many of them were actually there and how many just heard the story second hand. Nonetheless, there was a pretty good crowd awaiting me when I did come down.

My youngest sister Jennifer was born in October 1959. This story takes place in late August or the first weeks of September of that year so you can do the math to see where I am coming from when I relate the next part of this saga. The one person I did not see franticly running through the crowd was my 8 1/2-month pregnant mother. Some one on the ground must have made a call to her and since we only lived about one and a half blocks from the water tower she had gotten to the scene pretty quickly. By the time I spotted her, she had grabbed the bottom rungs of the tower ladder and she along with my soon to be born little sister were climbing upward toward me.

Even at a young age I realized that a very pregnant woman has no business climbing a ladder toward her wayward son. Mother had made her way up about twenty feet before I called to her and told her to stop her ascent. I told her to reverse her course and that I was very capable of getting down on my own. I made my way down to the safety of the ground and the drama ended.

And my two friends … gone by the time I hit terra firma. Loyalty wanes somewhat when you are 12 and some kid has just climbed to the heights of danger on a dare you had made.

I do not remember this part, but years later when my mother would recount the story, she says that she marched me home and as soon as I entered the house I slipped on a loose rug and fell to the floor. As memory does not serve, I will have to defer to Mother’s version for that part of the story.

I sometimes wonder how some of us Baby Boomers made it to adulthood.

Our mothers smoked and dank while they were pregnant with us. Medicine bottles did not have safety caps, our cars did not have seatbelts, and we rode all over town in heaven forbid, the back of a pickup truck. All the boys carried pocketknives and still we have all ten fingers. We drank from creeks and did not die from dysentery. We did not need a policeman on hand in our schools and we were never afraid to run the streets. We did not have cell phones to check in with our mothers every 15 minutes but somehow they knew we were safe. We went out to play in the mornings and as long as we made it home for supper or sundown depending on which came first, we were OK.

I guess it was a different world then.