Last month we talked about the “Dog Days” of August in the Ozarks, and how it was in my hometown years ago. That struck a spark with a couple of you.
So let’s go back for a bit more reminiscing, back to Goldie’s Cafe in Butterfield, in, say, 1950.
It was a time and a world away. We had electricity, but there was only one telephone then, down by the highway at John’s machine shop. There were two small grocery stores, three churches, a post office, a feed store, and Goldie’s Cafe. Butterfield by then had seen better days. There once had been a train depot, a chicken hatchery, even a tomato canning factory.
But after the end of the big war, with cars more prevalent and roads getting better, nearby larger towns could beat small town prices, and jobs moved farther away. By the late ‘40s, the only thing left of the town’s industry was, and that for just three weeks in early summer, the Butterfield Strawberry Association’s big event, when all the berries grown in dozens of small patches across that part of Barry County were picked, sorted, packed in quarts and then in crates and driven to the block-long berry shed along the railroad siding across from Goldie’s cafe. Then they were shipped overnight by rail car to St. Louis, where they were available for sale less than 24-hours after picking.
The association, which was the brainchild of my uncle, Gus Tatum, contracted with the farmers and the markets, hired the refrigerated rail car, and furnished the quart baskets and the crates to hold them, and from somewhere, contracted with someone to provide the migrant workers to pick crops that for those three weeks were beyond the capabilities of those who lived on the farms that grew them.
For those few weeks the little hamlet of Butterfield was a bustling mini-city. Businesses were hopping, especially the groceries, and they learned quick to anticipate the needs of their customers. From about the 15th of May, a giant wheel of cheddar, locally known as rattrap cheese, would appear next to the meat case. Inside the case so many rounds of the small ring bolognas were stacked and restocked for the migrants it became known as “Strawberry bologna” And crackers. Lotsa crackers. Gus and other strawberry growers built rough shacks to house those who didn’t arrive in flatbed trucks with houses built on the backs, although here were plenty of those…
When that caravan of trucks and cars arrived, my grandmother would stand at my aunt’s store window and recite the old verse:
“Hark, hark, the dogs do bark,
the beggars are coming to town,
Some in rags, some in tags
And some in velvet gowns.”
It’s a fragment of a nursery rhyme that dates back to Elizabethan England or before, the same place where much of our language came from. Nobody remembers what it was originally about. But she knew that if it referred to anything, it was talking about these colorful, amazing folks. Three weeks later they had packed up and gone, and Butterfield had returned to its threadbare, almost comatose existence.
By 1950, when I was seven, the strawberry industry was failing as the area became marginally more prosperous, so the beggars no longer came to town. But it was a godsend while it lasted.
“It was the first cash money of the year for the farmers,” Gus later told me, “That can be important after a cornbread winter.”
But Goldie’s Cafe managed to fill the entertainment gap every Friday night for a while. That’s when the movies came to town, courtesy of Johnnie Dee Henley, John and Goldie’s son. Looking to stir up business for his folks, Johnnie bought an old pre-war movie projector from God knows where, complete with a bunch of movie reels that dated back to silent film days. That was a good thing, because Johnnie had to show a few movies before he could buy a speaker. The projector also came with a box truck, canvas-bottom folding chairs and a sort of roofless tent that enclosed the theater and meant you had to pay a dime to get in where you could see the screen. Then at the intermission, when they had to stop to change reels, you could go into the cafe and, with a nickel, get a coke or an ice cream cone. If you had a dime, you could have both. They may have made popcorn, I don’t remember. I only remember that if I could get out to Uncle Gus’s field and pick me five quarts of berries, at a whopping three cents a quart, I could see me some Tom Mix and Hop-along Cassidy and have a coke. It was a world away.
There was no wifi, no smart phones, and only rumors of a thing called television, which was happening somewhere Off-World, or maybe New York. They were suspicious of the town’s one telephone down at John’s, even though most of them had used it or seen it used. They were still laughing at the story of one old farmer who called on John to help fix a broken part on his hay baler. John told him it wasn’t fixable and he’d have to order a new part from the MFA farm store in Purdy, some five miles away.
“I’ll have to get a ride up there,” the farmer said.
“No need,” John replied. “Just call them on the phone and tell them what you want, and they’ll send it down on the bus.”
Well, the old man had never used a phone and didn’t really know how it worked, but he wasn’t about to say so.
So, he mustered up his courage, walked over to the phone, picked up the receiver and shouted, “Hello Purdy? My binder’s broke!”
After a minute, John came over and made the call for him. And so the day went on, and so the story was told and retold…and retold, out at Goldie’s Cafe.
