Remembering Christmas Past

When John, David, Tommy and Mary Marshall were very young, each year on the first Sunday in Advent, Jack Marshall would try to set the proper tone for the upcoming Christmas season.

"Stir up thy power, we beseech thee oh Lord, and come!" he would read with his most fervent Catholic voice, while John, the oldest, enjoyed the privilege of lighting the first candle on our homemade Advent wreath as we sat down to our Sunday meal.

The process was repeated with the appropriate reading for each Sunday in Advent. Then the candle-lighting privilege passed down through the birth order, so that David was accorded the honor on the second Sunday, then me on the third, and finally little Mary, usually with some help from Mom, lit all four candles in the final days before Christmas.

For a while it worked.

All of us spent the weeks watching as Dad added little creatures to his homemade nativity scene. The manger remained empty, though, until Christmas morning, when a tiny little plastic baby Jesus appeared as if by magic.

But despite Jack Marshall's best efforts, the weeks leading up the big day in the Marshall household inevitably and steadily devolved into a frenzy of gift buying, tree trimming and house decorating.

It started perhaps with the famous Christmas Festival just down Highway 1 in tiny Natchitoches, LA, where our St. Joseph's band sometimes marched in the annual parade on the first weekend in December. (The festival was made even more famous years later when it was portrayed in the movie "Steel Magnolias.") The same parade where Jack Marshall snapped the photo, below, of "Miss Christmas Festival" on December 5, 1959, as she proudly waved to the crowd in front of the Piggly Wiggly store.

It continued when we finally persuaded Dad it was time to buy and trim the Christmas tree.

Buying a tree always was a big deal to Jack Marshall. The whole family would pile into our '52 Chevy (nicknamed "The Metal Monster" by my older brothers) and drive to the big tree sale lot run by the Optimist Club near the corner of Youree Drive and Kings Highway. I imagine that when the tree salesmen saw our big crew unload, they all suddenly wanted to take a break and duck into Murrell's Grill for a cup of hot coffee. Because each of us had a different -- and strong -- opinion about which tree was best.

After careful inspection of every tree on the lot, and mindful of Dad's budget restrictions ("Nothing over $10 kids"), a tree was selected and ceremoniously tied to the roof of The Metal Monster using an intricate series of slip knots that my father proudly demonstrated to us. Then we drove home with our prized possession blowing in the wind above us, like the carcass of a giant moose that was going to feed the family for the winter.

Once home, the fun turned serious.

First, Dad, John and David were charged with putting the tree into the stand and getting it straight. This usually took only an hour or two, while Mom, Mary and I were unboxing the rest of the decorations and checking the lights. For some reason, Christmas tree lights mysteriously ceased to operate during their summer in the scorching hot attics of Louisiana. After several trips to the TG&Y store for spare bulbs and working extension cords, the tree was lit and decorated with ornaments.

And then, the much anticipated final glorious ultimate level of decoration: tinsel.

Each of us was given a carefully tied bundle of tinsel from last year's tree, which my father had carefully saved. (Others families inexplicably discarded their trees each year after Christmas with most of the tinsel still tangled in the branches, but not the Marshalls!) And we were reminded vigrously that for the most realistic effect, each and every strand of tinsel must, repeat MUST, be hung carefully and individually from the limbs of the tree. Dad ceremoniously demonstrated the proper technique, and then retreated to one corner of the room to watch his young charges follow his careful orders.

John was exacting and perfect in following the guidelines (he is now an accountant by the way). David, being tall, always did a great job at the top of the tree. Which left the bottom branches to Mary and me.

Let's just say that's where Jack Marshall's plan usually went awry.

I promise, I tried to follow Dad's instructions. And I actually did for the first few minutes. But my young attention span was not focused enough for the task and soon I was sneaking two or three strands at a time onto the limbs. And almost from the start, Mary believed the tinsel was just plain fun, and should be twirled, spun, waved and ultimately tossed in huge unruly chunks anywhere and everywhere on the tree.

In her defense, Mary had more fun than the rest of us put together. And, I believe, Jack Marshall had fun watching her too, as you can see by his photo at the end of the article, taken in December of 1958.

With the tree decorated, it was time for one last photo, top, before the presents began to fill the space underneath. And then began the countdown to Christmas Day itself, when all those wonderful presents provided the Marshall kids with a fitting end to the holy season of Advent.

Wherever you are this morning, I hope you are with family, sharing the wonder and magic of Christmas. I am in Shreveport at Mary's home, and her expertly trimmed tree is a perfect centerpiece to this happy day. Somewhere in heaven, I am certain that Jack Marshall is enjoying his fragrant fir with real icicles hanging gloriously and perfectly from each branch.

Merry Christmas everyone!

–Tom Marshall, New York City
on Christmas Day 2009 in Shreveport

Christmas Shopping at the TG&Y

As we officially approach the end of the annual Christmas shopping season, I am finding special inspiration in some of Jack Marshall's classic holiday photographs.

When I was a kid, Christmas shopping was easy. You saved your allowance, supplemented it with income from odd chores and perhaps a little parental largesse, and a few days before December 25 you headed to the TG&Y Store and knocked it all out in less than an hour. No muss, no fuss.

What's that you say? You haven't heard of the TG&Y Store? Well, let me tell you...

Long before the big Shreve Memorial Library that now occupies the site off Kings Highway between Patton and Preston just east of the bayou in Shreveport, there was an outdoor movie house called King's Drive-In Theatre. In the mid- to late-1950s, the theater closed and the state-of-the-art Shreve Island Shopping Center opened in its place.

It was the newest idea around, something totally revolutionary, called a strip mall.

The center featured a big A&P supermarket (relocated from near Centenary College), a small department store called Beall's, the Shreve Island Drug store (which featured 5¢ cherry Cokes at the soda fountain), a dress shop called Sa-Ru's Fashions, a barber shop (75¢, four chairs, no waiting), a dry cleaners and the greatest thing ever to hit our end of town, the TG&Y.

TG&Y was sort of like Walmart, only smaller and cheaper.

Back then I had no idea what TG&Y stood for. The kids in the neighborhood concocted a slogan that went something like, "Take It, Grab It, and Yell" for how we felt when we went shopping there. Jack Marshall liked to call it "T-Gyp-and-Y." The chain's slogan was "Your best buy is at TG&Y."

(The all-knowing Wikipedia now tells me that TG&Y actually represented the last names of the store's three founders – Tomlinson, Gosselin and Young. The chain was based in Oklahoma City and at its peak boasted more than 900 stores. After a series of sales and consolidations, the last vestiges of TG&Y went out of business in 2001.)

My brothers John and David and sister Mary and I did all our Christmas shopping there. We also hoped Santa was smart enough to shop there too, because it seemed to us that the store had everything we wanted. Mary had her eye on a Chatty Cathy doll, and I was a big fan of coin collecting and model airplanes. Lucky for us, TG&Y was just the place to find such things.

In Jack Marshall's photographs, you can see mannequins (top of post) sporting the latest scarves for Mom, Mary and I reaching for our dreams (above), Mary enjoying the Chatty Cathy display (below), and finally, Mary counting her pennies to see if it all adds up (end of post).

I fear I am starting to sound like –no, I fear I am becoming – an old fogey who too fondly remembers times past. But I make no apology for happy memories of walking into that TG&Y a few days before Christmas with considerably less than $10 in your pocket and buying something for everyone on your shopping list, with enough left over for a bag full of Hershey's Kisses to give you strength for the bike ride home.

For some reason, I especially remember a framed painting I bought one year at TG&Y for my grandmother, my father's mother whom we called "Muds." It was a mountain scene and I thought it was beautiful, and I hoped fervently that Muds would appreciate it, for she was an accomplished oil painter herself. I recall that the painting, frame and all, cost 79 cents. I remember the delight on my grandmother's face when she unwrapped the present on Christmas Eve, as we all gathered to open the non-Santa presents before going to Midnight Mass at St. Joseph's.

But what I especially remember is that for the next 20 or so years, that 79¢ painting hung on the wall of Muds's little house on Rutherford Street and then in the nursing home where she spent her last years, proudly displayed among her truly beautiful oil paintings.

Because for 79 cents at the TG&Y, you surely could show your grandmother how much you loved her.

Here's to your own successful last-minute Christmas shopping!

– Tom Marshall, New York City

My Friend Tommy Wall

A long time ago, I had a friend named Tommy Wall.

In Jack Marshall's photograph, above, taken in the summer of 1963, my friend Tommy Wall is standing confidently in the back row, second from the left, with his hat cocked just so. Tommy Marshall is the one just in front of him, leaning in to hold the bat with my right hand. We were playing for our first baseball team, in the South Shreveport YMCA. I recall we chose the name "Tigers" for our team that long-ago season. We were 9 years old.

Tommy Wall lived on the same street as I did, just a couple of blocks away. Tommy was his family's only son; he had 5 sisters. From kindergarten through eighth grade, we played together on all the same sports teams. Usually we played for teams sponsored by St. Joseph's Catholic Church. We played football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring and summer. When we were kids, there was a perfect symmetry to the seasons of sport, because those three were the only pursuits available to us. There was no such thing as soccer or lacrosse or any of the other more exotic sports that kids play today.

In our corner of Shreveport, Tommy Wall almost always was the best athlete on our teams. And even when he was challenged for athletic superiority -- which was rare -- Tommy Wall was our undisputed leader. It was never questioned. He just led us, and we followed.

Chances are you knew someone like Tommy Wall.

Have you ever seen the Disney movie, "The Sandlot"? It's about a group of boys who spend an early 1960s summer playing baseball together. Tommy Wall reminds me of the Benny "The Jet" Rodriguez character in that movie, the kid who is the fastest and best athlete on the team, and also the undisputed leader of the group.

At St. Joe's, whenever the nuns let us troop outside for recess, Tommy Wall was the kid who was organizing a game of some sort. Choosing up sides and playing whatever sport was in season.

All these years later, the most amazing thing I remember about Tommy is not how well he played the games of our youth. Instead I remember him most for a certain innate skill he had from the earliest age of being that game organizer, and more importantly, the one who made sure everyone was included, and that the teams were fair.

Tommy Wall was the one who switched teams to even up the competition. Or who played catcher for both teams when no one else wanted the job. Or who coaxed the shy or unsure kid from the sidelines into the game.

I was that kid on the sidelines once. Though never shy (ask my family and friends about that), I never was a very confident athlete. I played on all the teams, and I had a great time with sports, but I just didn't feel I had the same skills as many of the other kids.

That didn't matter to Tommy Wall.

He wanted everyone to play, and in a prescience beyond his years, I believe he understood that we were better as a team than he ever could be as an individual player.

The most special thing that Tommy Wall ever did for me happened at recess one day at St. Joseph's, during our third grade year. We were playing baseball, and Tommy was the catcher for both teams. Since it wasn't an official practice there was no real equipment, just a baseball and a bat someone had brought from home. And no protective gear for the catcher.

When it was my turn to bat, a kid named Danny Brooks was pitching. Danny wound up and threw a fast, hard pitch, right down the middle. I closed my eyes, took a mighty swing and hit a foul tip that changed the ball's course just enough so that Tommy Wall was not able to catch it in his glove. Instead, the ball plunked loudly into his ribs, and he rolled onto the ground in obvious pain.

Everyone gathered around, waiting to see how badly he was hurt, what he would say, what he would do. I was in the crowd, half expecting him to come up ready for a fight. After all, I had injured the great Tommy Wall! Slowly he rolled over, grimacing from the pain. And then he said words I'll never forget: "That's all right, a lot of batters do that." The best athlete in the school had just saved my life, I thought, and on top of that, he had called me a "batter." On that day, Tommy Wall set for me an example of leadership and fairness among peers that never would be surpassed. I felt I owed him a debt I never repaid.

Throughout our elementary years, our St. Joe's teams won and lost games, but due to the skill of Tommy Wall and several other good young athletes, we won far more than we lost.

In the middle picture above, Jack Marshall's camera caught Tommy Wall scoring a run in a seventh-grade baseball game in 1967. Immediately below is our 6th grade football team, in November 1965. Tommy Wall is in the front row, No. 18, our quarterback. The picture at the bottom of this post is our 5th grade basketball team, celebrating one of several city championships. If you don't recognize him by now, Tommy is 3rd from the right in the front, smiling and reaching out to touch our plaque.

After St. Joseph's, I went on to Jesuit High School, and Tommy Wall went to a different high school. Somewhere over the next few years, we lost touch as we finished high school and enrolled in college.

For my freshman year in college, I lived at home and went to Centenary College, where Jack Marshall received his education. Tommy, like so many other young Shreveporters, headed down to Baton Rouge for college at LSU. One weekend during the fall of that 1972 freshman year, on an infamously treacherous road between Shreveport and Baton Rouge, Tommy Wall was tragically killed in an automobile accident. I never got a chance to thank him for how he treated me on that 3rd grade playground.

Because of the memories inspired by Jack Marshall's photographs of our glory days at St. Joseph's, today my sister Mary and I went for a run on a chilly, breezy morning in Shreveport. Our route took us to Forest Park Cemetery, where we found the shaded gravesite of a boy who died too young, just 18 years old, on September 14, 1972. We wiped away the fallen leaves from the small marker, and when I saw the name Thomas Charles Wall, Jr. etched in the cold, hard stone, it brought tears to my eyes. Tears I never shed for a friend to whom I never said goodbye.

So today, finally, I stood quietly for a moment and said goodbye to my boyhood friend Tommy Wall. And, most importantly, I whispered a silent prayer of simple thanks, remembering a wonderful act of genuine sportsmanship bestowed upon me nearly 50 years ago by a young athlete and forever friend. And for which, to this day, I remain grateful.

--Tom Marshall, New York City

Written while visiting Shreveport