Patricia Julian Mullins Hargrove

LHS '64

July 17, 1945 - March 17, 2024

Patricia Julian Hargrove, 78, of Harvest, Alabama, passed away on Sunday, March 17, 2024.

Mrs. Hargrove is survived by her children; Danny Upton, Rebecca Webster (Keith), Dwayne Upton (Wendy), and Dee Hargrove (Kelly), grandchildren; Joe Berry (Amanda), Zachery Berry, Nicole Upton, Kathryn Muenstermann (Kyle), Bret Adams, and Brooke Emery (Jayden), and 8 great-grandchildren.

Patricia is preceded by her husband; Doyal Hargrove, and parents; CO and Oma Mullins.

Serving as pallbearers will be, Dwayne Upton, David Jackson, Willie McGee, Bobby Harris, Michael Fowler and Scottie Mills.

Mrs. Hargrove was a member of Capshaw Church of Christ. She led a godly life and was an example to all who crossed her path. She will be remembered as a loving wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, friend and talented cosmetologist. 

The funeral service was held Saturday, March 23rd, 2024 in the chapel at Berryhill Funeral Home at 11:00 am with Buc Crumbly officiating.  A private graveside was held later.

THE AFTER-SCHOOL SCENE

Habitats of the Sixties Teenagers

Tommy Towery

LHS '64

(Editor's Note: Continued is an extract from A Million Tomorrows...Memories of the Class of '64 I hope you enjoy it.)

There were two primary nighttime hang-outs for the Lee students.  I say nighttime because during the day the main hang-out was Mullin's Cafe.  If any of the group did anything together right after school, it usually involved a trip to Mullin's.

Mullin's was not your fancy neon cafe.  It did have a big sign on the front wall with a spotlight shining on it, but that was about all.  To be perfectly honest, it was rather plain.  The parking lot side of the building was white shipboard, and the front of the building was brick up to about three feet high and big plate glass windows above the brick.  The front door was a screened door.  It was not air-conditioned but had only ceiling fans to keep the customers cool in the summer.  I think it stayed warm naturally in the winter from the hamburgers cooking on the grills.

Inside there were around fifteen stools along the counter, probably six booths, and as many tables and chairs as they could get on the rest of the floor without invoking the wrath of the fire department.  Up against the front window there was a jukebox but we rarely had money to play it.  Songs were ten cents each or three for a quarter.  No dancing was allowed but there were some great records in the jukebox to listen to.

Mullin's hamburgers were ridiculously cheap even for the Sixties.  They were ten cents each and were served on a type of wax paper instead of plates.  The French fries were freshly peeled and cut potatoes, and greasy, served in plastic baskets.  I had never even heard the word cholesterol then, much less worried about it.  Perhaps the greasy hamburgers of the time hid in my body waiting for someone to discover that cholesterol was bad for me before they emerged.  Maybe I was eating time-released hamburgers and never even knew it.

We usually only went to Mullin's in the afternoon.  If I did go there in the evenings, I pulled up at the drive-in side, blinked my lights or honked the horn for carhop service.  They had the trays that hooked onto the side of the car windows.  Bob Walker or Larry Bryant came out and took my order and brought me the greasy hamburgers.  In the evening it became a family cafe.  Mullin's was situated in a residential part of town and landlocked without a decent circle to cruise around.  Most of us found other places to go at night.

For nocturnal activities, the students of Lee had two places, strategically located on the same road, but on different ends of it and about four miles apart.  Most of the evenings were spent cruising between Jerry's on the south end of Memorial Parkway and Shoney's on the north end.  Both had carhops and speaker phones which you used to place your orders.  We would back into one of the places, order a Coke, flirt with the carhops, and sit and watch everyone else drive through the parking lot.  When that became boring, we started up our cars, drove down, or up the Parkway, to the other place, cruised around the other lot for a while, then stopped and had a Coke there.  Of course, this was not a solo act, so we randomly joined friends driving through the parking lots or they parked their cars and joined us in our cars.

This ritual ran continuously from about six in the evening until ten o'clock during the school week and until midnight on Friday and Saturday nights.  It was a lot like the walking of the halls at school.  The kids went around and around, with different ones taking turns as the spectators and then the spectatees.  The ritual was usually accompanied by the honking of car horns and yelling at those you recognized.  On nights after the ball games, there was a lot of crepe paper and cheers.  It was a sort of mating ritual, with carloads of boys trying to attract carloads of girls and then one or two from each car changing places for a while.

The only time anyone ever went inside the buildings was to use the restroom facilities.  Probably the most ever spent on any night by one person on food or drink was about $1.25.  You really couldn't afford to spend too much on food, because it took a lot of gas to keep a car traveling in circles from six to ten o'clock.  The biggest meal I ever ate at one of the places was at Shoney's, and it was free.  One of the carhops was bringing out a big tray of food to the car next to me when she slipped and spilled the tray onto the ground.  As she went back inside to get replacements, my friends and I scooped up the paper-wrapped "Big Boys" off the ground and checked them for damage.  The paper was still in place and the hamburgers had not been exposed to the ground, so we feasted like vultures on our find.

Jerry's was shared with a lot of Huntsville High School students since it was located close to their school.  Shoney's Big Boy, which later in life I saw across the country as Bob's Big Boy with the statue of the boy with red and white pants, was closer to Butler, and some of the Butler crowd hung out there.  Most Butler kids had their own place on their side of town near their school, so they didn't claim either of the places where we hung out.

Both Jerry's and Shoney's had speed bumps, but few people had any intention of speeding through the lots anyway.  In reality, speed bumps were a stupid addition to the parking lots.  What they really needed was something to make the cars speed up rather than slow them down.  Most people wanted to move slowly, the slower the better.  Going slow gave you more time to look at who was parked in the lot.  Quite often, cars just stopped in the middle of the drive while the driver or passenger went to pass secrets to someone in one of the parked cars.  Why they tried to slow cars down is a mystery.

The places where they needed the speed bumps were on the Parkway at the exit of both of the drive-ins, for it was at those points that the male egos took over.  The gas pedal went down and the car's clutch popped out, squealing tires and fishtailing out of the lot on the way to the other end of the Parkway to repeat the ritual upon exiting there.

Those were the main cruising hang-outs.  Among the other places of interest on the weekends were the drive-in theaters.  There was an ample supply of them in Huntsville in the early Sixties.  There was Whitesburg on the south side of town, Woody’s and Parkway Drive-In on the north end, and 72 Drive-In on the west.  To the east of town was Monte Sano Mountain, which was the only thing that prevented one from being built there, I suppose.

Drive-in theaters were relatively cheap entertainment, especially when you divided the cost between the ones that paid and the ones that hid in the trunk.  They rarely showed first-run movies and usually didn't even show good movies.  Their attractions were most often second-run "B" movies but the kids didn't care.  They usually didn't go to see the shows.  In the winter, the drive-in theaters were often too much of a challenge, even for the strong-hearted, for no one could afford to leave the car running throughout the movie.  The usual winter scenario was to get the car warm, then turn off the engine until just about the time when you lost feeling in your extremities.  Then the car was started again and run long enough to heat it up and get the blood flowing in your hands and feet again before shutting it off once more.

When a movie was not in order, dances were.  In the early Sixties, dances on Friday and Saturday nights were almost required social events for high school students.  Several places hosted teenage dances.  Perhaps the most popular spot was Bradley's Cafeteria, located on the north side of the court square in downtown Huntsville.  It had a lower level that was used for the dances after the cafeteria upstairs eating area closed.  The National Guard Armory was another good site, but it did not host weekly events.  A private club called The Aquatic Club was on the west end of Oakwood Avenue and sponsored a dance about once a month.  The other favorite spot, but less frequent in sponsoring dances, was the new coliseum on Highway 72, and once or twice a year, a dance was held at the Big Spring Park Community Center.

Terrible decisions had to be made on nights when more than one place sponsored dances.  The decision was most often based on popular vote by the group, using as a criteria which dance had the most popular band playing that night.  The usual admission was $1.00 per person, and live bands were always playing.  There were no record hops, no discos, just live bands.  The favorite group of the time for the kids from Lee was The Continentals, partially because the drummer went to Lee.  At ten o'clock or midnight depending on where it was being held, you usually walked out into the quite night air, ears ringing from standing directly in front of the speakers where the sound waves could move you without your having to exert any effort.  It seemed that walking out of Bradley's downtown always had the most startling effect on the ears.  Downtown was deathly quiet late at night and the ringing of the ears was obvious.

Once out of the dance it was off to Jerry's or Shoney's if you were by yourself or with a group of your own sex.  If you were lucky enough to have a date and lucky enough to coax her into a little privacy, the favorite parking spot was up on Monte Sano Mountain at one of the scenic overviews.  High up on the mountain, the scenic overviews offered a glorious vista, with Huntsville and all its magnificent lights far down below.  It really would have been scenic if it were possible to see through the fog on the windshield of the car.  But if that were the case, it was a waste of time and gas to have driven all the way up on the mountain anyway.

The Wayback Machine

"School Days" (also known as "School Day (Ring! Ring! Goes the Bell)") is a rock-and-roll song written and recorded by Chuck Berry and released by Chess Records as a single in March 1957 and on the LP After School Session two months later. It is one of his best-known songs and is often considered a rock-and-roll anthem.

Berry recorded the song on January 21, 1957, at Universal Recording Corporation in Chicago, Illinois. Berry's record peaked at number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (his third highest-ranked pop hit) and hit number one on the R&B Best Sellers chart.

I return to sharing a part of my book this week. Thanks again to those who are willing to share parts of their own memories with their classmates. You never know what little tidbit of knowledge kicks off some wonderful memories.

 SAVE THE DATE!

 LEE LUNCH BUNCH

CLASSES OF ’64, ’65, ‘66

THURSDAY, APRIL 25, 2024

11:00 A.M.

LOGAN’S ROADHOUSE

4249 BALMORAL DR. SW

HUNTSVILLE, AL 35801

(256) 881-0584

Please save the date for our next lunch gathering in April. We will be meeting back at our old place, Logan’s Roadhouse. We all enjoyed the change of location last year to Carrabba’s, but they were getting a bit difficult to work with. There are just precious few restaurants that are willing to let a sizable group reserve a private space, if they have one, without paying a large fee. As long as we have an acceptable number of lunch guests, Logan’s will not charge us that fee. So, it is necessary for you to let me know if you plan to come so I can keep up with the number. As always, I will need to call the restaurant by noon the day before to let them know an accurate number of guests. We cannot go over that allowed number. We have always been well received at Logan’s, and they have a menu that appeals to most everyone.

Hope to see all of our regulars plus any of our group that has not been able to come before. Thanks and looking forward to seeing you soon!

Patsy Hughes Oldroyd ‘65

keithandpatsy@att.net

H (256) 232-7583

C (256) 431-3396   or on Facebook

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