Youngsters Had A Friend In Temp

The older boys were starting to pass around a pint whiskey bottle one of them had lifted from its hiding place in a sawdust barrel in the back of the pool hall when Temp Forrest, the town marshal, cruised past giving all of us a hard look.

Temp braked to a stop. The bottle disappeared and the older boys busied themselves bumming and lighting cigarettes.

“Rowland, you and Bobby come here,” called out Temp in his typical demanding style.

It was Saturday night. My friend Bobby Carter and I had gone to Whit Muston’s picture show on Main Street. After the movie, we had a fountain Coke at Jack Dryden’s drug store, which stayed open just long enough to catch the small crowd leaving the movie.

The adults bought cigarettes, medicines and perhaps a quart of hand-packed ice cream before heading home. The teenagers made a lot of noise. Young people with dates shared cherry Cokes or chocolate sodas. We preteens mostly watched. We were old enough to go to the movies by ourselves, but little else.

When Mr. Dryden started closing up, Bobby and I wandered down Main Street past the closed hardware store, barber shop, cafe and weekly newspaper to the only place in town left open, Glen Mullnix’s pool hall.

The pool hall was off limits to boys under 16 and all members of the female gender - for our own good, of course. There was an exception. Mr. Mullnix allowed boys under 16 into the pool hall if they presented him with a signed permission slip from their parents. He kept these signed notes in a cigar box and honored them when he felt like it, which was never on Saturday nights when men from town crowded with men from surrounding farms and ranches into Mr. Mullnix’s smoke-filled sanctum.

On Saturday nights a layer of blue smoke pushed downward until only the legs and boots of the men could be seen by young boys looking through the dirty front window. Pool balls crashed and clacked. The men whooped, cursed, spat into spittoons, nipped from their bottles, made bets on everything and told loud lies about dogs, horses and women.

We kids knew there was only one permission slip in the cigar box that wasn’t forged. Unfortunately, so did Mr. Mullnix and his manager, Pappy Sharp, who also refereed area football, basketball and baseball games.

We had to overlook our own forgery in order to feel superior to the boy whose parents gave him a valid permission slip to enter the pool hall.

It would be a fine moral lesson if the one boy with a valid signed permission slip learned the values of openness and honesty from his hardscrabble parents and went on to become a missionary to the downtrodden, or some such. Instead, I was told he was the only boy among all the names in that cigar box who later went to prison.

“You boys get in the car,” Temp ordered Bobby and me. We did as we were told. Old Temp used to be the county sheriff. He had a reputation for being rougher than a cob. No one gave Temp any lip without quickly regretting it.

Temp took us home and let us out where our parents couldn’t see. He would do that if you were polite and cooperative. Temp took me home more than once when I was growing up.

If Temp ever had to take a boy home twice in one night, on the second trip he brought the youngster to the front door where the frightened young man was delivered into the hands of embarrassed parents.

We need more people like Temp today to curb the nation’s juvenile crime problem.

But rather than thank Temp for his concern and effort, today’s unembarrassed parents would obtain lawyers to collect damages for violating the civil rights of their blameless offspring.

Today we have lawyers where we used to have shame and common sense.

xxxx