I overdid it today. I am careful not to do things my body won’t let me, mind you, but the repetition did me in today. There were things to do, you see, things that needed to get done. Household work, if you must know, Copper. The Yankee was doing a great deal of it. I’m limited with my bum shoulder, that’s my alibi, Slim. I don’t like not being able to do things, though. And I like less watching someone else do it, even with an injury that limits me. Do you know what I mean?
At one point she told me “You’re done.” But I wasn’t, you see. I had, in my mind, already drawn the stopping point, and it was about 20 minutes beyond that moment. And so I did it, the extra 20 minutes. Now I’ve come to ache because of it. Maybe I was done when she said so. Perhaps earlier. It doesn’t really matter.
I hurt.
So, tomorrow, I’m taking it easy.
But we got almost everything done. None of it more exciting than household work. But at least the things were ticked off of the day’s list. I have the satisfaction of that and a large ice pack on my collarbone.
I’ll leave you with this:
That’s from the 1903 Glomerata (the Auburn University yearbook). It arrived today. I picked it up on e-bay for $20. A steal, for a sixth volume, despite a few missing pages. This book is 109 years old. Everyone in it is dust. Some of the buildings are still with us. There are tantalizing things in this book, which we’ll dive into one day. But, just read that ad again.
Don’t drink. But if you will …
The temperance movement was in full swing, or headed there, in the South in those days. In 1908 four counties were wet. People in the movement could easily count how many counties, otherwise, had between one and four bars. And so this guy wanted you to avoid the sauce. But, should you need to know, he had the sauciest stuff around.
I love that phone number, too: 59. We note the old ads all the time and think: Surely there were more than 59 phones in town by then. But in 1900 Opelika only had 4,245 people. The first phones apparently came to the state 20 years before, but wouldn’t this technology still be elusive in poor, rural areas? In 1919 there were all of 650 cars in the entire county. Sure the phone number 59, in 1903 was part of an exchange much larger than one small town.
But wouldn’t you like to have that number today? Every now and then someone that knows too much about cell phone prefix systems is amazed at my old number, but it has seven digits. Fifty-nine? I’d just make that the business card.
G.P Butler would be named a judge a few years later — before Prohibition. No word on if his store stayed open. Around that time Lee County built a brand new and modern jail, in 1914, according to a statewide prison report. Butler served two meals a day. You woke up and ate, had dinner in the mid-day. Then you waited from 1 p.m. until the next morning for more food.
Back then prison food was probably even worse than today.
He also fed the residents of the local pauper home, at least once, for Christmas in 1922. If you will eat …
That story was published last year in one of the local weeklies. It is a collection of details about the Poor Farm. Times were tough. “The people who lived there worked on the farm if they were able to work. They planted, tilled and harvested the crops, then cooks prepared the meals.” I wonder how that’d go over today. (Not very.)
Anyway. Butler served as probate until he died in 1933, but that genealogy page doesn’t give the date. Did he outlive Prohibition? It was killed the same year.
And what was his phone number when he died thirty years later? Sixty?
