Foreward

FOREWORD

There is much good sleep in an old story.

German Proverb



“. . .Benny’s aimin’ to play all of these tapes when I’m gone. I hope they’re interestin’ to him.”

Harold Martin, Audio Journal


My father’s favorite book, which he read eight times, was Gone with the Wind. Wistful by nature, a lover of history, he, like me, would have loved to have a window through which he could look back to the past, particularly his own past. He spoke often and lovingly about the days of his youth, and I loved to listen to him.
During the last summers of his life, my father would sit often in a 1950s-era green metal lawn chair in his front yard on White House Road in Moneta. He would watch in awe as hundreds of cars a day would speed down a road that he recalled was once covered with gravel.
I never thought I would live to see a day when there wouldn’t be a single mule in this community, he once said from his perch, gesturing to the horse-drawn plow that still sits to this day under one of the willow trees. Just like that civilization of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, my father’s way of life was gone with the wind; the Moneta that he remembered as a farming community had been slowly but steadily swept away and engulfed by the larger Smith Mountain Lake community. Even the little hamlet of Moneta was all boarded up by the time he died. It resembled a ghost town in a Hollywood Western.
“We are a resort town now,” a store owner casually remarked to me during a conversation in early 2006.

My father told me much about the days when mules did the work of tractors and a trip to Bedford was a special treat. A raconteur with a dry sense of humor, he also had an uncanny ability to mimic some of the more comical characters in the community and even when I was a teenager, when I was sure that I was much smarter than he, I found his stories and reminisces both interesting and funny.
After my mother died in 1996 at the age of 56 from heart disease, my father’s own heart condition seemed to worsen quickly, so I began to write down on paper every funny story, joke, word of wisdom, wistful remark and farm fact that he ever told me. I gave him a cassette recorder to use when he felt inspired to share a story, and some of his remarks, now digitally preserved, appear in this work in italics.
For several years after his death, I sifted through musty briefcases, desks, dresser drawers and other nooks and crannies and discovered to be true what I had long suspected: my father was a packrat. However, the photos, receipts, advertisements and other bits of memorabilia speak volumes of both my father and his times.
I hope subsequent generations will not forget that Moneta was once a farming community. Though this hamlet has been transformed into one of Virginia’s premier vacation destinations and a resort town, many people who call it home now do not remember the graveled country roads and soft drinks in glass bottles bought from general stores. Surely they know little, if anything, of Dr. Sam Rucker and the small tool shed-size building where he treated patients like me as late as the 1970s. For them, I share some memories of another day. For them, I say, “Come and look through my window for a while.”

Someday, few people will remember that “Downtown” Moneta” was known once as the area of the village at the closed rail crossing, while “Uptown” Moneta” was further along State Route 122, past the library and post office, near the Shop Rite Grocery Store. This town had a bona fide country doctor, milk plant, post office, snack bar, train station and several general stores. So, here is my contribution, in words and pictures, to my hometown’s past, a past that should not be forgotten while we are enjoying the bounty of the present.
Dear Dad, you have no idea how interesting “the tales” have been!