Steven Cornelius was born and raised in Northeast Mississippi and is married to a beautiful, auburn haired second generation Irish woman with deep roots in Galway and Sligo. His love of books began at a very early age. When night fell on the farm and chores for the day were complete, he and his family sat around the fire and read until bedtime. Many of his childhood adventures are featured in his writing. He attended the University of Mississippi, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees while participating in Air Force ROTC. Steve completed more than thirty years Air Force service in the US and overseas. For the Distant Traveler Trilogy, he drew upon experiences and memories collected during assignments around the world. After retiring in 2015, Steve decided to get serious about a lifelong passion for writing. His most recent work has been published in Mississippi magazine (October 2022) and Louisiana Living (November 2022). He just finished a multicultural novel set in Cuba and Houston Texas featuring Hispanics as the main characters. Steve has written one hundred and five short stories collected in two volumes and posted stories on the Mississippi Folklore and True Appalachia webpages and has a following of more than 3,000 regular followers on each page.
Life in My Home Town
By Steven Cornelius
The South is full of quirky and strange characters, and the small town where I grew up is no exception. As Yogi Berra once said, “You can observe a lot by just watching.” I learned that lesson at an early age. A lot of watershed events happened in my town in 1964, and I had a front-row seat for most of them. On a personal level, that was the year I turned twelve. The December before my twelfth birthday, I received a small motorcycle for Christmas, and a few months later, I started working as a carhop at the Frosty Mug, riding that little blue bike back and forth to the western edge of town. After almost three years, I moved a little closer to home, working as a short-order cook in Sherer’s Drive-In, another very popular restaurant.
In both jobs, I saw the absolute best and worst behavior from fellow Southerners. I didn’t help my case as a team player or go-along, get-along guy in either job. As a kid, I was a loner, too smart for my own good, and had a smart mouth. A personality trait that often got me into a great deal of trouble. I had the bad habit of offering sharp comments while delivering food to cars at the Frosty Mug or, if I was in a bad mood, as I passed people on the sidewalk. It may surprise you to learn that many adults found my cutting comments insulting and disrespectful. I paid for being a little smartass by taking several beatings and narrowly dodging many others, only because I was quick on my feet or able to make a fast getaway on my nimble little Bridgestone.
With my own set of wheels and very little parental supervision, I avidly participated in a misspent youth, working hard and learning volumes from the school of hard knocks. None of us in the sixties were hip enough to count steps or realize what fitness pioneers we were, but I was getting well over 10,000 steps a day as a carhop, staying skinny as a rail, delivering heavy trays of food to cars at the Frosty Mug. My daily step count slowed a little when I started working behind a three-foot-by-five-foot griddle, flipping burgers at Sherer’s Drive-In.
Life marched on, and the torture of high school passed. Mercifully, graduation finally happened, followed by enrollment at the local community college. During all this, I continued to work at Sherer’s. That all changed when I received orders to report for Army basic combat training at Fort Polk, Louisiana (In the fall of 1971, my Selective Service draft number was 6).
Life rocked on, and despite a wretched experience at Fort Polk, I discovered that I liked the military, just maybe not the Army. By December 1975, I had finished bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Ole Miss while also grinding through ROTC, earning my Air Force commission. Up to that point, life had been clicking right along. My simple formula for success…work my ass off and complete every task set in front of me to the best of my ability was working just fine. About a month after my wife pinned second lieutenant’s bars onto my dark blue blouse, the Air Force sent a terse message to home addresses all over the country informing me and a couple thousand others commissioned in the 1975 year group that we would have a 15-24 month delay before being ordered to active duty.
That news threw me for a loop and put me in a real pickle. What was I supposed to do to keep body and soul together until my orders arrived? I wasn’t eager to return to my old job as a short-order cook, but few employers where I was interested in applying my university training and education were eager to hire someone for a one or two-year gig, especially if they had to invest in training the new hire.
My registered-nurse bride and I moved from Ole Miss to Corinth with no choice but to sit on our hands and wait for those much-anticipated orders, which I was certain would send us off on the adventure of a lifetime. In contrast to my struggles finding employment, my wife was quickly snapped up by the local hospital. One other facet of life in a small town is that everyone knows everyone else, and by extension, everyone else’s business. Corinth was no exception then or now.
To my great relief, within a couple of weeks, I was hired as an unemployment counselor for the state, on a one-year contract. After graduate school, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, so I was grateful to have a six-by-six-foot work cubicle in the middle of downtown, across the street from the post office. Older, more seasoned state employees assigned all the problematic cases to the new fish. These cases involved the chronically unemployed. Folks who hadn’t hit a lick for ten or fifteen years and were so unmotivated that no one else in the office had the appetite to tackle them.
I was determined to prove them wrong and jumped right in, working closely with the only state social worker in north Mississippi. Her office was in the courthouse basement; consequently, I spent a lot of time there. It was a short ten-minute walk from my cubicle to her musty, dimly lit office. One fine summer morning, I walked across the street and around the courthouse to the basement entrance. She and I had several cases to review, and, as it turned out, she was just as eager to achieve positive results in those hopeless cases as I was.
I drew in one last breath of fresh air and swung the metal exterior door open, tap dancing down twenty-five concrete steps. As I moved into the central basement hallway, I couldn’t miss a cluster of four sheriff’s deputies fifty feet down the hall from the social worker’s office. They were huddled in the corner, laughing their heads off, their guffawing echoing off the concrete walls and battleship gray floor. I moved a bit closer and realized that I knew every one of them. Curious about what was so uproariously funny, I walked over and stood for a couple of seconds before asking the obvious question, “What’s so funny?”
Three of the four guys wiped tears from their eyes and shook their heads. The fourth deputy, whom I knew very well, turned and wheezed out what they all found so funny. He pointed toward an east-facing window. The jail was just across the courthouse square from that window. I waited patiently, and he finally composed himself enough to speak, “We picked up a guy in a subdivision just off Shiloh Road a few minutes ago. A woman living there was at her sink cleaning up the breakfast dishes and looked out her kitchen window when she spotted the guy, so she called us.”
I nodded, encouraging him to continue, “So he was trespassing?” The deputy let out another gale of laughter before regaining his composure, “Yeah, he was trespassing all right. It took her a few minutes to figure out what she was looking at. She had hung a full load of morning wash on the clothesline, and she kept seeing stuff moving on the line. Then she stopped washing dishes and really focused. That’s when she saw the guy.” My deputy buddy choked up for a minute before continuing, voice rising a couple of octaves in spite of himself, “The pervert had snuck into her backyard and pulled a pair of her panties over his head! And they were still clothes-pinned to the line!”
I wasn’t sure I heard him right, “He had what and was doing what?” The deputy cackled and slapped his leg, “When we drove into the yard, the nitwit was still standing under the clothesline with a pair of her white panties stretched completely over his head. He didn’t try to run or resist. In fact, we had to tell him twice to pull the panties away from his face and come with us!” The image of a guy doing such a thing was so absolutely crazy that I burst out laughing, which triggered another round of raucous peals of laughter from my buddy and the three other deputies standing twenty feet away.
Before I walked back to the social worker’s office to take care of my business, I asked, “So what happens to him now?” The deputy wiped tears from his eyes and shrugged, “All depends on whether or not the housewife or her husband wants to press charges. I seriously doubt they will.” I had pressing business with the social worker, so I waved goodbye to the guys and got busy. Weeks slipped past, and I never followed up on the panty sniffer. About two months later, I bumped into my deputy friend, who told me that the backyard arrest wasn’t the panty sniffer’s first offense. They decided to do some checking and found out he was a serial offender. Any housewife hanging their laundry on an outside clothesline had been visited, and most had filed a complaint. He was especially likely to turn up if they had lingerie on the line.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait fifteen or eighteen months for orders; it only took eleven months for the Air Force to come through. Just before I pulled up stakes and made a beeline for Vandenberg Air Force Base for my first training assignment, I said goodbye to my buddy. Over the next year, I kinda-sorta stayed in touch with home folks, but never heard anything else from him or read in the newspaper about the Corinth panty sniffer, which suited me just fine.
The Galway Review 