Although you may not have been a member of our particular flock at S.D. Lee, many of you had your own gathering place for summer parties in Columbus in the mid-to-late 1960’s. We had the infamous Gravel Pit.
Where was this place? That was 50+ years ago, and I can’t tell you what I had for dinner last night.
Best as I can remember, you would drive out of town a pretty good ways on Highway 82. Then take a turn on some obscure barely paved road. Drive lots more until it turned into a dirt road.
Somewhere deep in the dark woods was our adolescent Mecca where we could drink lots of cheap beer and behave badly without being discovered.
As the name indicates, the Pit was maybe a three or four acre clearing in the woods. During the day it was a place where workmen dug gravel to use on the many crude Mississippi roads in Lowndes County. On weekend nights it was Babylon come to life.
A big hole in the ground filled with rainwater and rocks was our beach… not exactly Panama City. To the side was an old clapboard shack with (sort of) functioning electricity. The one light was just a bulb hanging from its own cord, swaying, flickering and covered with all manner of flying bugs.
It looked like a place where the Taliban might house reluctant guests.
Our gang mainly consisted of musicians from the various rock bands at S.D. Lee and our girlfriends. The Vickery boys and Stevie O’Callaghan were regulars. Some of the guys from the Blades of Grass would be there, and I remember Jimmy Hornsby occasionally showing up.
After drinking enough Old Milwaukee or Pabst Blue Ribbon to stone most of Ireland, we would chase each other around the gravel pit like idiots, sometimes… uh… ”falling asleep” on the trash and rock covered sand. All night.
Yes, we were a classy bunch.
We drank bottom of the barrel beer by the quart and made lots of noise.
Proper etiquette required that once you opened the big bottle, it must be emptied before it got warm. The dank, hot and humid Summer night made that a race for time. Whoever was 18 would do the buying, and we would fill grocery carts at the store with cases that took two people at least to load up.
Someone dared Stevie O to eat one of the moths circling the light bulb. Once he got a taste of the thundering applause from his audience of teenage derelicts, he couldn’t fight the lure of the spotlight. He went into overtime washing insects down with beer to louder and louder cheers. Yes… it was gross. I miss him still.
Yes, we were a sophisticated crew.
An event that’s funny now, but could have been bad, was the night we ran out of beer. Stevie was driving his mother’s car and volunteered for the run. With him went my girlfriend/future wife Denise and a couple of other juvenile delinquents.
Darkened dirt road, high rate of speed and a drunken bug eater driving are a bad, bad combination. Taking a sharp turn, the car flipped over a fence (without touching it!) and landed upside down.
Considering we had no seat belts in those days, God (reluctantly) stepped in.
All were unharmed. A new nickname was born: “Crash O’Callaghan.”
Another night I decided to take my shoes off and frolic in the shallow (and nasty) water at the edge of the “pond.” I felt what I thought was bruising on the bottom of my foot. Thinking I had just banged it on something, I decided to blow it off and keep partying.
I made it home in the wee hours and collapsed into bed.
Turns out I had stepped on a big piece of broken glass and had a half inch slice into the bottom of my foot. And my Pabst pain medication had worn off.
My Dad, in none too good a mood, drove me to the doctor.
Turns out that if you don’t get stitches in a certain amount of time, you can’t do it.
Bandage only.
The doc asks, “How long ago did you do this?”
Best number I could come up with was about 14 hours. He eyeballed me hard, paused and shook his head. As he took a high powered blower, blew the embedded sand out of my gash and jammed a big syringe into the soft part of my foot bottom. I can’t even describe the experience.
Yes, God will hold you to account at some point.
Thom Caraccio ([email protected]) is a retired musician and retired motion picture scenic artist living in West Palm Beach, Florida who hails from Columbus. He graduated from S.D. Lee High in 1968 and still considers Columbus his real hometown.
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