Summit Mississippi

Dad grew restless. Southern Baptists have networks called associations that are usually two or three counties or parishes large in the Deep South. I am spotty on the details, but I think Dad networked around and found Fellowship Baptist Church in Summit Mississippi.

Summit, true to its name, was a high point on the Illinois Central Railroad. McComb five miles south had a big railroad shop. Summit was at the crossroads of three big industries in the pine belt: the railroad, the paper industry, and the oil fields. There was a big railroad siding where pulpwood trucks would bring a load of four to twelve inch logs eight feet long stacked six feet high to be loaded on the train to the pulpwood mill. If I hadn’t wasted so much time on education, I could be a good pulpwood hauler to this day. I joke, but those people did hard, intense work and were good people.

Summit sat on its own little mound of crude oil in that region. It wasn’t like the fields of West Texas where an army of mechanical dinosaurs lazily pumped black gold from the unknown depths. It had its occasional pump hidden in the pines, and every once in a while a new derrick would punch the surface for another lucky strike. Sadly, one of our locals opened a valve too quickly and was cut in half with the pressure. Some of our church members worked in oil. I had a comical fun neighbor, Ralph Smith, who spent his last working years flying all over the world as a drilling supervisor. It still amazes me that a man from humble beginnings was sought by drilling companies worldwide for his prowess in his trade.

Jerry Clower, the famous country comedian, was from a town about eleven miles southwest of there. He yells a story about my literal next-door neighbor there named Cutworm Smith. Cutworm earned his nickname brandishing a pocket knife, threatening to emasculate you. The other story was that he cut across the bases in baseball. He was nice, but his pocket knife was sufficient to make me never want to cross him.

We went to the most bizarre school of my resume of fourteen years. Stay tuned for Southwest Mississippi Christian Academy in a future post.

Summit and Fellowship Baptist Church had its honeymoon. Our little road had a few nice kids on it, and I really liked my new friends. The church helped us with our move and painted the inside of our parsonage. Once again, we were in the country with miles of forests and fields we could explore. We fought in plowed gardens with huge dirt clods. I have a particular fond memory of my brother Tim getting hit in the face with a dirt clod as big as his head and crying little rivers of mud. I have another great memory of the neighbors digging a dug fort in the woods and us realizing it wasn’t smart to build a fire in a hole. There was also that fun memory of me trying to bust through a cardboard box on my bicycle only to discover it was possible to fly over the handlebars like Superman.

It was fun for about a year. In my innocence, I had no idea there was a storm coming.