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The View from Brindley Mountain: A Memoir of the Rural South ReviewI am a reviewer with Pinnacle editing. I give this book five stars because of the vivid recollection of memories it gave me.
This book is subtitled, A memoir of the rural south. The title is well chosen, but the subtitle speaks to this reviewer quite personally. I was born and reared within thirty miles of the places the author describes in loving--mostly--detail.
Scruggs grew up just outside the small town of Cullman, Alabama. The city is named for Johann Gottlieb Cullmann, a Bavarian immigrant who, at first, settled in Cincinnati. He formulated a plan to build a "Deutche Kolonie" to be a haven for Germans who immigrated to the United States. After several missteps, Cullmann met a former governor of Alabama who introduced him to a land agent of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company (L&N). The railroad was seeking people to inhabit land along a newly laid stretch of railroad in north Alabama. Cullmann was made a Colonel and given the authority to act as agent for L&N to sell 349,000 acres of land. From this, sprang the city of Cullman, Alabama.
Scruggs has researched the pioneer days of the city and recounts the growth of Cullman without becoming overwhelmed by detail. He then takes the reader through a section that recounts some of the difficulties faced by the German immigrants in the face of two world wars, because of their heritage and clinging accents.
The author moves the clock forward, bringing us along as the little town grows and begins to develop. Some of the day-to-day business in a southern town during the forties and fifties now seem antique and, except for a book such as this, are forgotten by all but older readers. An example is the trip, faithfully described, by farmers in their mule-drawn wagons to the cotton gin--sights and sounds from a bygone era, clearly recreated.
The chapters devoted to old time (some of them still exist) comics ("funny papers," they were called then), and old time radio programs were doorways into the past. The time spent lying on the couch reading "Alley Oop," and laughing at the escapades of Dagwood flashed back like summer lightning. Hours spent sitting on the floor listening intently--through the static--to The Lone Ranger and Sky King came back as if they were only yesterday.
Scruggs devotes a chapter to farm animals and tells a hilarious, though painful to imagine, story of a young mule, Queenie, who bit. Not just people but other mules, too. Stories of animals on a farm are particularly appropriate. Telling about life on a "hardscrabble farm" in Alabama in the forties would be incomplete without describing the animals that shared the place with the people.
I enjoyed reading The View from Brindley Mountain for several reasons. Mr. Scruggs and I have several memories in common (the dentist he describes was mine, too),
I've eaten hamburgers in the same café and shopped in the same "dry goods" store. The value of the reminiscences in this book are not limited to people who, like me, shared them; they are like a virtual slideshow for younger people who have never--and now, will never--experience some of the happy and unhappy times from those days.
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