The way things used to be

Second choice for a title to this post: "If the good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise."

A post over on the Hillbilly Savants site today got me to reminiscing about the past. I remember when I was growing up, I always hated hearing grown-ups say things like, "kids today don't know what it was like," or "when I was a kid we did this and we did that." Yeah, yeah, yeah, we've all heard it before, how our parents had to walk 2 miles to school, uphill both ways, barefooted, in the snow... But now that I'm in my 40's and I've got 3 kids of my own, I find myself doing the same doggone thing. Now granted, I had it a little worse than most of my peers. I grew up in a 4-room cinder-block house with no plumbing. We heated in the wintertime with a coal stove and we cooled off in the summertime by leaving the doors and windows open. But this post isn't to let you know how "bad off" things were when I was a kid. I honestly didn't know that there was a different way of life back then and I was happy.

Anyway, on with the topic of this post.

A few months ago, I posted about my dear sweet papaw, Preacher Ed Spencer. He was taken way too soon from this world and from me. I loved him dearly and still, to this day I get sad thinking about him. On a visit to my parents house a few months ago, I went through a bunch of old photographs and I picked out a hundred or so that I took home, scanned, and saved on my computer. The photos at the end of this post are some of my very favorite. They are of my papaw baptizing people in different places in Knoxville. Most of them are in Loves Creek, on Loves Creek Road (just down from where the Walmart at Knoxville Center is now.) They used to call the place where he baptized at, "Old Blue Hole." Folks used to come from all over to see papaw do a baptizing. They would hang out on the creek banks and make a day out of it. Boy, times sure have changed. Nowadays, most folks have a concrete baptismal tank built right into the Church! Not so back in the day. Anywhere there was water deep enough to dunk you under, my papaw would oblige you. Check out these old photos of the way things "used to be."