Remembrances
by Tod Davis and David Eady
Transcribed from a Recorded Conversation. Tod is the son of Ted and Harriette Davis. David is the son of Virgil and Louise Eady. The Eadys lived on Bonnell Street and the Davises on Hammil Street when they were children. They have been friends since about the age of four.
The college was like our back yard. We would go to the athletic field and play softball or throw a Frizbee, but when we were younger, we didn’t have footballs or baseballs, so we would crush a Coke can and go between where the tennis courts and the woods are, the place that is now a parking lot, you and me, Scott Santilly, Robin Moody … Jay McKibben would show up every once in a while … and Steve Rigby and we would play football with the crushed can. There was no strategy, basically, we’d just throw the can at another guy and then try to tackle him.
There was one year, we’d had a really heavy snow and I remember rolling a snowball all the way down Dowman Street and across the athletic field all day long until it was huge – it was way taller than us -- about six feet tall. It was more like a giant wheel because it was about two feet wide. We pushed it into the middle of Moore Street and left it standing there. This lady pulled up to it and tried to push it down and we got so upset; here she was trying to undo all our hard work.
We made spears out of long sticks and then we proceeded to take them up to the college and throw them at squirrels. We never hit any of them; they always just ran away, but the amazing thing is, no one said anything to us. Security these days would have asked what we were doing and we would get into trouble. But everyone knew everyone and they probably just looked out of the window and said, “Oh, there’s Davis’s kids again, messing around on the campus.”
We would often walk home from Palmer-Stone, this was from first through fifth grade, and go to Allgood’s Store where Mom and Dad had accounts. We would each buy an apple pie and a Fanta or a Coke and put it on their accounts. Then we’d walk across the street to the Yarbrough Oak and relax under the tree, eating until we had to go home and do homework.
It was no big deal to walk everywhere or ride our bikes wherever we wanted to go. We’d ride our bikes to Covington all the time and ride all around Covington.
When I (Tod) was in elementary school, one of the things they used to do was to bring over high school students to assist in the P.E. activities. My sister, Becky was in high school and I remember thinking that it gave me an advantage over the other students -- that my junior-year high school sister was there with me on the playground. We were playing Red Rover and someone said some slight against me or my team. So, I went to Becky and told on them, trying to get them into trouble and she said to me, “Stop being an as***le.” And that was the end of me trying to get my big sister to take up my problems for me. She was probably right.
This was the same sister who would babysit for us Eady kids and tell us ghost stories and then leave us to our parents.
Another thing I do remember is walking over to Elizer’s pasture and occasionally jumping on the back of one of their horses and riding them bareback. We would go behind their house to Dried Indian Creek and walk the creek, looking for crawdads. We were just wading at first, but there was this one point where the creek got deep – you just turned and all of a sudden there was a big drop.
The most fun I (Tod) ever had was when you guys (David) had a dirt bike, the XL100, and we would go to Moore Street, back before there was anything back there … we’d drive over the last hill where Longstreet Circle is, past where the Boy Scout (something) was, and it was all dirt back there for about a quarter mile. That was really our playground for a lot of the time. Your dad (Mr. Eady) had that 3-wheeler for a while, and the jeepster, and any truck we could get our hands on, and we would just walk down there or ride the bike down there and cut up for hours on end. Then we started taking guns and we would actually carry a shotgun through Oxford – start off at our house and three, four, five us, all with a gun in our hands, walking down Moore Street to go and shoot. Sometimes we’d go over to the power lines and we’d ride the bikes over there because there were a lot of good hills over there and we could get some air on and stuff. We’d also shoot over there because you could get on top of one ridge and shoot across down to the other side. This would have been the late ‘70s or early ‘80s. Before Jonathan was driving. It seems crazy now. I can’t imagine anybody allowing a group of kids with guns to walk down the street.
We had some BB gun battles down Moore Street. There was a pond that was right there, right after Longstreet Circle, behind the house that was on the corner of Longstreet and Moore Street and we would dress up in long-sleeve jackets and take our pump rifle pellet guns and BB guns and there was a rule: one pump if you’re close range, two pumps if you’re far away and you’d have to shoot at a low level, below the chest. We would also shoot bottles. Throw them out in the pond and then shoot at them until they sank.
On this one excursion that I (David) took with my cousin Jim (Herrington), we took a canoe down to the pond at night with a pellet rifle and a gig. The idea was we were going to go frog gigging. Then we had the bright idea that we could just shoot them in the head with a BB instead of gigging them. It wasn’t quite as gory. Then we’d throw them into the canoe. We were making great headway, popping all kinds of frogs, toads, whatever. It turns out that we weren’t killing them; we were just stunning them. Pretty soon, these frogs started coming back to life, jumping around. The zombie frog apocalypse in the canoe. So we just started throwing them back.
There was one year, we’d had a really heavy snow and I remember rolling a snowball all the way down Dowman Street and across the athletic field all day long until it was huge – it was way taller than us -- about six feet tall. It was more like a giant wheel because it was about two feet wide. We pushed it into the middle of Moore Street and left it standing there. This lady pulled up to it and tried to push it down and we got so upset; here she was trying to undo all our hard work.
We made spears out of long sticks and then we proceeded to take them up to the college and throw them at squirrels. We never hit any of them; they always just ran away, but the amazing thing is, no one said anything to us. Security these days would have asked what we were doing and we would get into trouble. But everyone knew everyone and they probably just looked out of the window and said, “Oh, there’s Davis’s kids again, messing around on the campus.”
We would often walk home from Palmer-Stone, this was from first through fifth grade, and go to Allgood’s Store where Mom and Dad had accounts. We would each buy an apple pie and a Fanta or a Coke and put it on their accounts. Then we’d walk across the street to the Yarbrough Oak and relax under the tree, eating until we had to go home and do homework.
It was no big deal to walk everywhere or ride our bikes wherever we wanted to go. We’d ride our bikes to Covington all the time and ride all around Covington.
When I (Tod) was in elementary school, one of the things they used to do was to bring over high school students to assist in the P.E. activities. My sister, Becky was in high school and I remember thinking that it gave me an advantage over the other students -- that my junior-year high school sister was there with me on the playground. We were playing Red Rover and someone said some slight against me or my team. So, I went to Becky and told on them, trying to get them into trouble and she said to me, “Stop being an as***le.” And that was the end of me trying to get my big sister to take up my problems for me. She was probably right.
This was the same sister who would babysit for us Eady kids and tell us ghost stories and then leave us to our parents.
Another thing I do remember is walking over to Elizer’s pasture and occasionally jumping on the back of one of their horses and riding them bareback. We would go behind their house to Dried Indian Creek and walk the creek, looking for crawdads. We were just wading at first, but there was this one point where the creek got deep – you just turned and all of a sudden there was a big drop.
The most fun I (Tod) ever had was when you guys (David) had a dirt bike, the XL100, and we would go to Moore Street, back before there was anything back there … we’d drive over the last hill where Longstreet Circle is, past where the Boy Scout (something) was, and it was all dirt back there for about a quarter mile. That was really our playground for a lot of the time. Your dad (Mr. Eady) had that 3-wheeler for a while, and the jeepster, and any truck we could get our hands on, and we would just walk down there or ride the bike down there and cut up for hours on end. Then we started taking guns and we would actually carry a shotgun through Oxford – start off at our house and three, four, five us, all with a gun in our hands, walking down Moore Street to go and shoot. Sometimes we’d go over to the power lines and we’d ride the bikes over there because there were a lot of good hills over there and we could get some air on and stuff. We’d also shoot over there because you could get on top of one ridge and shoot across down to the other side. This would have been the late ‘70s or early ‘80s. Before Jonathan was driving. It seems crazy now. I can’t imagine anybody allowing a group of kids with guns to walk down the street.
We had some BB gun battles down Moore Street. There was a pond that was right there, right after Longstreet Circle, behind the house that was on the corner of Longstreet and Moore Street and we would dress up in long-sleeve jackets and take our pump rifle pellet guns and BB guns and there was a rule: one pump if you’re close range, two pumps if you’re far away and you’d have to shoot at a low level, below the chest. We would also shoot bottles. Throw them out in the pond and then shoot at them until they sank.
On this one excursion that I (David) took with my cousin Jim (Herrington), we took a canoe down to the pond at night with a pellet rifle and a gig. The idea was we were going to go frog gigging. Then we had the bright idea that we could just shoot them in the head with a BB instead of gigging them. It wasn’t quite as gory. Then we’d throw them into the canoe. We were making great headway, popping all kinds of frogs, toads, whatever. It turns out that we weren’t killing them; we were just stunning them. Pretty soon, these frogs started coming back to life, jumping around. The zombie frog apocalypse in the canoe. So we just started throwing them back.