Walking the tracks

This one isn't a long story, but it encapsulates several good memories. 

When I was about eight we moved "into town." I don't remember if I was told any reason for this, but it changed my landscape tremendously. Prior to this we had rented a house on someone else's farm, and play centered around the swing set my dad built underneath the largest oak tree in the world, or going down to the creek to catch crawdads with the black children from the other side of the fields, or just running through the cotton fields themselves.

Moving into town put me around some kids my own age, and there were plenty of good places to play, especially the enticing treehouse in Tony Roberts' back yard. We were only about a hundred yards from a railroad track that went straight to and through the center of town, Cartersville, Georgia. For reasons I don't completely remember, my parents (who seemed to have many fears) warned me never to "walk the tracks." Since there was a perfectly good sidewalk parallel to it only half a block away, I never gave it much thought.      

...Until Bob Butler tempted me one Saturday. My parents had given me permission to go downtown to the "picture show" with him. I was not expecting a moral conflict to arise from so innocent an enterprise, until he ran through the hedge, yelling, "Let's walk the tracks!"  

Later in life I became very stubborn about not yielding to peer pressure, but at this age, I gave in easily. What nine-year-old boy could not see or hear a train coming, and jump off to the side in time?

Although there were no trains that day, I discovered it was slightly more thrilling to walk the tracks than to take the sidewalk. 

There are two unrelated but great memories associated with the subsequent Saturdays we spent "walking the tracks" to town (which was only about half a mile away). The first was the treat of a Saturday double feature at the Grand Theater in downtown Cartersville. For a mere fifteen cents, we "owned" a seat for a whole afternoon of delights - a double feature, plus a newsreel, serial, and a cartoon in between. Sometimes there was also a "short subject" of the sort that Mystery Science Theater 3000 would make so much fun of years later.

The highlight for me was the serial, which always ended in a cliffhanger - thrillingly designed to bring us back down the tracks the next Saturday to find out how Batman or Zorro or Tarzan would escape from destruction in the explosion/ambush/waterfall in which he was doomed to die in at the end of the previous episode. Imagine my joy years later as a adult when those old treasures became available on VHS. I now own two complete Batman serials, and have enjoyed them over and over again.

I should mention that the day of delights cost more than the fifteen cents admission.  For an additional ten cents, we got popcorn and a coke (five cents each). You can understand how much today's concession stand prices horrify me!

On one of those Saturdays we saw a big crowd at Shellhorse Appliance, so of course we went in to see what the attraction could be. A demonstrator was putting little cupcake papers of dough into a box and then opening it just thirty seconds later to a warm, fully baked cupcake. Adults were crowding around asking questions I didn't understand about why this was possible, but all Bob and I were interested in at the time was the free cupcake! It was more than twenty years later that microwave ovens became available for home use, and we had owned one for about ten years before it dawned on me - it was the same technology I had seen that afternoon in 1955!