Spare me the comments about how I spend too much time thinking about the past. The older I get the more I choose to conjure a blissful childhood and come to think of it, there’s very little conjuring necessary. I had a blast.
But there seems to be hope. Not for my Tareyton 100s smoking mama but for Downtown Florence. I always speculated that nobody would risk investing the money or time to be a first-mover in a “let’s re-do downtown” strategy. But it’s slowly happening and I’m hopeful that the resurrection will be enduring. Do resurrections endure? Or is it more accurate to declare that once the resurrection is manifest, one defines the ongoing whatever as something else. Come to think of it, I hear routinely that if you “have a resurrection lasting more than four hours you should seek medical attention.” Well that settles it then. I hope the amidst renewal Downtown Florence will...sustain.
Oh, right, this story was supposed to be about Mangum’s Army-Navy on Dargan Street. Folks, here’s my late sixties-early seventies “Little Dusty (I never did hit that Kareem Abdul shit) has five dollars to spend and wants to go to Mangum’s” as it stands today.
This is the place. The destination that I’ve referred to in previous stories where Vietnam era military surplus was strewn about in cardboard boxes for the picking. It was to me, simply nirvana.
Mr.Mangum didn’t merchandise the martial surplus loot like Mel and Patricia Ziegler did in their first couple of Banana Republic stores. He simply put the boxes out on the floor and threw a delightfully low price on random ammo pouches, web belts, entrenching tools and helmet liners.
I remember one time when Mr. Mangum got in a gaggle of old nylon parachutes. Good God Man! When word tweeted through the neighborhood that Mangum's had parachutes, (Picture my little barefoot ass running across the front lawns of my ‘hood with a parachute behind me...that’s tweeting, 1968 style) every kid wrangled ten bucks and a ride to Mangum’s to get one. I think the rest of our summer was defined by those parachutes.
They mostly became tents and coverage for whatever but only after my best friend GRR tried to actually use his for what it was intended. I thought his rooftop jump-off over at JJF’s house would surely end in the confiscation of all our canopied nylon. Interestingly, the only consequence was GRR's broken leg. Oh, and Stinky Burgess, Roxanne’s brother, made a caftan from his parachute. He writes for the Village Voice today.
Onward…Entrenched...Doing finance and transportation for LFG. And loving every minute of it.
ADG-Two