When my mother married my stepfather, Theo Abrams, in the early 1940s, we moved to a two-room shack of a place just off the Red Hill-to-Kent dirt road and within sight of Channahatchee Creek. The outhouse for this house was located a fairly lengthy walk up the hill in front of the house.
Papa Theo got off from the first shift at Mt. Vernon Mills in Tallassee at two in the afternoon. When he got home depended on how many mill workers Fred Fomby would be hauling on his mill bus to Red Hill on any day. Mom would have a meal for him when he arrived, and afterward, about 3:30 p.m. or so, he would walk up the hill to the outhouse for the usual reason one visits an outhouse. This arrangement was another sore spot for Momma, as she didn't like the primitive nature of this particular outhouse. It was very rickety in its construction, being essentially a wooden frame in the shape of an upright rectangular box, with very little bracing having been used then covered with tin sheeting, top, sides and door.
There were two or three hounds that ranged between our little place and Granny Abrams' house. I think they were sorta Papa Theo's dogs, and when he brought in three more people and moved over to the little house of ours, they were a little confused about which place was to be home base. Anyway, these dogs would follow Papa Theo from the time he got off the bus and walk with him to our place. And then, when he began his afternoon ascent to his rickety throne room on the hill, these hounds would again provide him with company on his walk, find a place very close to the outhouse to lie down, wait for his emergence from the tin box and again return with him to our place.
Momma had been on Papa Theo to shore up the rickety condition of the outhouse, as it seemed to her about ready to collapse. Of course this project had not gotten on Papa Theo's bucket list as he made his way up the hill that afternoon. He reached the spot, opened the door, went in and closed the door. This was all observed from afar, as we kids were playing in the front yard and Momma was hanging clothes on the line in the back yard. Within what seemed a very short time, a loud crash of crumpling tin sheeting resounded across the hillside. The dogs immediately began to wail and holler as if their worst canine nightmare had descended upon them and ran down the hill in terror.
Momma came around the corner as we kids were starting to look up the hill toward the outhouse. The whole tin and wood structure had shifted to the right, folded and collapsed like an accordion. Momma was running up the path ahead of us kids, and up at the collapsed outhouse Papa Theo was crawling out from under the timbers and tin. This was several years before he became a Christian, and the profanity and curses of Papa Theo's vocabulary for such an occasion was now replacing the sounds of the terrified hounds.
He wasn't hurt all that bad, considering the pile of wreckage, from out of which he was crawling. But this incident was just one more nail in the coffin of her satisfaction that was slowly dying because of our current housing arrangements. We shortly moved to a better home in Red Hill.
