The year was 1949.  I remember it so well because that was the first year auto makers changed car body styles since before World War Two and I was very much into cars though still too young to drive legally.  It was also the year when it appeared war was again looming on the horizon.

Crooked Springs, Indiana is the fictional name  I applied to the town near where I grew up in previous posts and I will continue that practice in this piece but the story is true.  It has to do with an adult relative of one of my close friends.  His name was Wilbur and he was blind.

There were only two meeting places in Crooked Springs–the truck stop and the card parlor unless you counted the two taverns but there weren’t that many beer drinkers in town.  There were probably as many underage boys obtaining beer as there were guys sitting at the bar on a given weekend.  Bob, the owner of the truck stop, didn’t much care for folks hanging around where he and Tom were working on semis, partly because he thought it was dangerous and mostly because when Tom became engaged in conversation he tended to stop working.  If one entered the restaurant side there was a sort of obligation to buy something–a cup of coffee and a piece of pie.  Who had twenty cents to throw away on social intercourse?  That meant the card parlor was the men’s gathering place of choice.  The womenfolk had no such place.  It was not considered proper, nay even necessary, for women to have a spot to get together although the church had a ladies’ group called the Friendly Circle Class which met at each others’ homes during daylight hours.  There, they held Bible study and, during the war years, made bandages and arm slings for the Red Cross.

Men would come to the card parlor to play cards, of course, but also to sit behind the coal-fired stove and discuss the day’s events, the price of corn, the way kids were going wild, etc.  One of those men was Wilbur.  He was not a farmer but he enjoyed the company as he lived alone and had no friends or family of consequence.  He would walk the two blocks from his house to the card parlor every day and since he lived right alongside the railroad tracks (and the card parlor was built alongside the tracks, too) he would not walk the street but rather down the center of the rails, counting the crossties with his cane.