Tom Jenkins was just taking a slow (literally) drive back to his parents past. He left Interstate 65 around Georgiana, heading north west on little farm to market roads, county roads and little trails. He was looking for something that he thought was long gone in this country.

His parents had lived all of their lives as young people in a now long gone hamlet called Goodshoe. In the early 1800’s a blacksmith and cobbler, from South Carolina, set up shop in a fork in the road that in that day until the early 1950’s was highly traveled. They called their shop Goodshoe. They first, with the help of some of Creek Indians from a settlement nearby, felled trees and cleared a site large enough for their shop and two houses for their families that were still in South Carolina, awaiting word to start their journey to join their men.

The little hamlet never had more than 1,000 people at its peak in the 1940’s during World War II. In fact it was about 1946, when the baby-boomers birthing began to hit America and all of the returning service personnel either hooked up with their high school sweethearts or brought a “Mrs.’s” home to Mom, Dad and good ole’ Goodshoe.

Nevertheless, like many towns in America in that day, the old song, “how are you going to keep them down on the farm, after they have seen Pariee” became their funeral dirge. And Tom Jenkins’ parents were two of the many American’s that left the old home place for bigger and better places and more money.

Tom had vague recollections of that type of life. They had made visits until both sets of grandparents had passed away. He was grown now, having been raised in Mobile, to the south. There were no towns around Mobile that retained that small turn of the century air. There were some in Baldwin County, across the Mobile Bay or the Bay of the Holy Spirit as the original Spanish explorers called it. But now that area between New Orleans and Pensacola was almost one metropolitan area. At any rate, even the small retreats are less than 30 minutes from a Wal-Mart, multitude of churches instead of just 2 or 3, Waffle House’s, and multiplex cinemas. And now with cable and satellite television bringing the outside world into the very depths of the glens and valleys of the south, there was probably no bastion of small town life anywhere.