Pine Valley Elementary was one of four or five look-alike schools in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, built in the 1940s during the federal government’s frantic construction of a whole city to house Manhattan Project scientists and workers. Red-bricked, U-shaped, and studded with bits of un-faced siding and heavy iron railings, it’s where I spent Kindergarten through Sixth Grade. The school was sited in a flat green valley surrounded by abrupt wooded hills, two of them covered in pines. A large flat area was dedicated to swing sets and space for us to clot into groups at recess and run around. Its baseball field was bounded on the first base line by a large wet-weather creek beyond sat deep woods pierced with a dozen trails kids had worn into the hills on their way to and from school. Along one of those paths, about a third of way up a wooded hill, my family lived in a home that backed into the trees and faced a quiet cul de sac across a modest flat lawn.
The lot had been a home site before the government seized the land in 1942. Two or three small shacks had been built and then torn down on the property to house construction workers for the Manhattan Project. The government began selling lots to private homebuilders in the early 1950s and my father bought the property on first viewing; my mother selected a home design called “House 28” from a 1953 issue of American Home magazine drawn up by a New York architect, Samuel Paul. In a late-life interview, Paul said that he reckoned that half million people were living in homes and apartments he had designed.
We moved into the home in 1955 and were four of those half million: My dad Ben – called B.H. to distinguish him from his father who was also named Ben. My mother Anna Kate, whose name was considered the most beautiful in her Appalachian mountain family. My brother Ben, nicknamed Benny to keep him separate from the previous two generations of Ben Teagues. And me, Thomas Pleasant Teague, called Tommy by local friends and Plez by my mountain relatives.
Just behind our house, that path from Pine Valley crossed an unused roadbed that featured an old wagon wheel stuck in some bushes. The path continued up to other streets that were originally zoned for Pine Valley Elementary but had been moved to the Cedar Hill district. We called it Cheater Hill; the Origin Myth of Pine Valley included a contentious long-ago softball game between the schools, played on our own field, in which our championship birthright was stolen by a partisan umpire in the late innings.
Those stories that our older brothers told of Pine Valley in the 1940s and 50s also included a naked grunting Wild Man said to live in a clearing deep in the woods. Legend was that he once disrupted a softball game by running onto the field trying to snatch the right fielder but was chased away by one of the janitors and Mr. McGhee, the principal who had been at Pine Valley since its construction. The two men could not have been more iconic for that feat of bravery had they been named Gilgamesh and Enkidu and annually stripped their sleeves and showed their scars from the encounter. The fact that they never mentioned it but that our teachers forbade us to go beyond the baseball field at recess lent credence to the Wild Man story. We heeded and stuck to the trails, walking briskly on our way to and from school, always in groups.
By 1962, when I was eight and in second grade at Pine Valley, stories of the wild man kept me awake. My noticed that I frightened easily and couldn’t fall asleep most nights and so had put me on a media diet that excluded scary things: I was forbidden to watch the “Twilight Zone, or any shows that might feature a ghost or some creature. I was not allowed to answer the door on Halloween. I could not purchase the plastic monster models that my friends assembled, and could not own comics or books about ghosts, ghouls, or the undead.
My movies also were carefully screened. Three or four years before, my brother removed me screaming and board-stiff with fright from “Darby O’Gill and the Little People.” The movie featured an advanced and gruesome special effect as the banshee writhingly flew from Disney’s Mount Knocknasheega. Ben, unaware that I was already nearing complete panic, whispered to me that the mountain looked like the top of a hill behind our house – a hill with an enormous dark green water tower topped by a dim blinking red light that we could see from the back yard. Even after a grape soda in the lobby – the tonic that my family used to combat these episodes - I refused to return to the movie. I have not seen the ending in the 53 years, and I felt actual cold dread when I searched online to confirm a couple of details about the movie for this piece.
A long time after I had to be removed from the Ridge Theater, my brother and I took my 14-year-old son, Joe, to a movie; afterward he asked what was the last movie that Ben and I had attended together. Ben and I said it near unison: “’Darby O’Gill and the Little People.’” Ben added “1959. It starred Sean Connery.” The episode had left an impression.
Before the banshee scare my brother and I would frequently sit on a quilt in the back yard and look at the night sky. Ben would explain each constellation and its story, talk about the moon phases, the planets, and occasionally point to a starry smudge and tell me that we were looking at the Milky Way. Light from our kitchen window threw a pale reassuring rectangle on the lawn.
After Walt Disney convinced me that the water tower sat on Mount Knocknasheega, I no longer went into the back yard after dark. Although we sometimes looked at the constellations or even Sputnik from our front yard that was lighted by a street lamp, we mostly moved the star gazing indoors where Ben used a home planetarium to project the stars on the ceiling and walls of my bedroom. The planetarium came with a second globe that showed anthropomorphized versions of the constellations. I used that globe as a nightlight, falling asleep gazing at stern Orion with the fruits of his hunt, seated Cassiopeia, a crab, a dragon, and a centaur.
Avoidance decisions linger long into life and cause unexpected consequence: When I joined the Boy Scouts at age 12, I did not know how to find the North Star because my later star gazing had been limited to the southern constellations visible from the front yard. And because the front street light overcame dimmer night features I no longer carry any memory of seeing the Milky Way.
After all that, I was glad for company to walk to school through woods inhabited by a wild man with the banshee’s Mount Knocknasheega at my back. My regular group in 1962 included two brothers -- Billy and Mark Pinckus -- who lived nearby. Two kids, Rich and Stuart, lived on another street. None of them were my age, Billy a year ahead of me, Rich and Stuart a year behind, and Mark two years behind.
Mark was a small-framed boy with thin blond hair and permanent worry wrinkles on his forehead; his brother was athletic and tall and was already swaggering with the self- affirmation he would carry through high school. Billy was already experimenting with cursing, usually by working the word “whore” indiscriminately into his vocabulary. “Ha ha, whore,” he would say, or “We’re going to the grocery whore today.” It took a lot of bravery. Cursing was the one thing that would any of us spanked and grounded, and so the rest of us did not follow his lead. “Oh whore,” he would say if one of us protested. “Get over it.”
Rich was wiry and blond; Stuart a little pudgy with thick curly hair. I was two years away from a growth spurt that would take me from average to tall for my age. Through that year, I had gray hair on my temples, was stick skinny and had my own set of worry lines which had led each of my teachers - K through 3 - to call my mother in for a conference to find out if everything was okay at home. “Everything’s fine,” she would say, “he just looks that way.” She never mentioned “Darby O’Gill.”
I joined the four of them every morning as they walked by my house. We continued on down the path about a hundred feet to the school yard, passing the backstop where the path became an asphalt sidewalk leading to the school.
We talked a lot, often about how all five of us had bedrooms near the front doors of our homes. Billy said that the location of our bedrooms made us cheap and expendable alarms: Our screams from the muffling hairy arms of the Wild Man would alert our parents and give them precious seconds to take shelter. “Can’t you just feel his arms pinching off your breath,” he’d say.
Shelter was a big concern that year. October’s Cuban Missile Crisis had jolted Oak Ridge into realizing that its uranium plants placed the city high on the Soviet target list. Reflective, intelligent pipe-smoking men suddenly took up shovels or rented backhoes to dig bomb shelters and deepen basements. We stocked shelves under the stairs with canned food. Dad installed a toilet in the basement, filled carboys with water, and reviewed what we would do if the Soviets attacked.
Pine Valley issued photo ID cards to the students and -- in mid October -- a teacher ended a Civil Defense assembly by telling us that we might have 30 minutes warning to go to the school’s basement in case of a nuclear war, and that it was likely we would not see our parents ever again. The local Civil Defense planners began to test the loud yellow sirens every day at 5 p.m., leading Billy to point out that Soviet agents in Oak Ridge no doubt sent microfilm to their Kremlin masters saying that the best time to attack was five o’clock when we would not think it strange to hear the sirens.
There was urgency about the work that our parents did that fall. My father clipped his badge and dosimeter to his shirt each day and carpooled to one of the plants - K-25, X-10 or Y-12 - where he oversaw the enrichment of uranium for atomic bombs. If President Kennedy had to reach into his quiver for one last nuclear weapon in a World War that October, my dad and the workers in Oak Ridge would not have let him find it empty.
Stuart no longer showed up for the walks to school and other kids quit coming to school. They were rumored to be spending time at distant relatives’ homes. The three of us speculated about whether we were a primary or secondary target city – the difference, we learned, was about ten minutes’ warning. Mark began to cry easily. From our house I could hear the start up sound of the siren in front of Pine Valley School – an asthmatic growl it made before it fully wailed; I lay awake many nights wondering if the two-or three-second head start that would give was enough to wake my parents and my brother and get us safely to the basement.
In later years, I reasoned that the idea of being a target city was just some kind of civic bombast. Knoxville had nothing the Soviets would want to bomb, but Oak Ridge did. After the fall of the Soviet Union, when some Cold War secrets were declassified, I learned that Oak Ridge had indeed been targeted for an early nuclear bombardment.
The rest of us thought and talked about what might happen. My path chums and I walked off our trail and designated a spot as our half-way point, marking it with a pile of rocks. If the sirens went off before we reached it, we would run home; if they sounded after we reached it, we would run the rest of the way to Pine Valley.
The crisis ended. The missing kids drifted back to school. The drills became infrequent and we resumed worrying about the Wild Man. Billy said he had heard him rooting for food behind our homes at night. A few rains and other kids scattered the cairn that marked our Fail Safe point along the path and Soviet attacks faded back to the theoretical except every weekday at 5 p.m. when the sirens still sounded.
Then, in early November, a new worry entered our lives: A pack of dogs began to harass us on our walks to school.
The pack had a leader and two minion curs. Each morning, just beyond our old halfway point, the Lead would bound out of the brush, his muscular legs rippling, his coat sleek with the still-fresh blood of the large game he had killed for breakfast, phosphorescent drool dripping from his jutting fangs, his eyes burning like coals on a dark night. The others growled and snapped at us while lead stood ready to drag one of us into the woods if we could be cut off from the others. Mark especially was a target, probably because he would drop his books and flee which -- in their demonic eyes -- made him look like game. The rest of us didn’t stand up to them so much as we froze into a fearful huddle, inching toward the school like retreating Roman Legionnaires, our books between us and the pack, our sharpened pencils ready for a last-ditch fight should a dog pierce our shield wall.
We never mentioned the dogs to any adults out of the overriding boyhood fear of getting in some kind of trouble. Mark had already been reprimanded for his books looking dirty, mostly because he dropped them on his dashes for safety and we kicked them the rest of the way to the schoolyard rather than breaking our tortoise formation by stooping to pick them up. We had gotten yelled at for cutting through someone’s lawn when we changed to a fiend-less route. We were marked as late when we once made a tremendously wide berth through another neighborhood. In response to our questions about what to do, Billy obtusely reminded us of where our bedrooms were, and that we might have to spend twenty or thirty years in the basement of Pine Valley being raised by our teachers. In other words, we were expendable: It would not make any difference to tell an adult; we had to solve this ourselves.
One of us called a neighborhood boys’ meeting between two huge forsythia bushes in the Pinckus’s yard. From time to time, seven or eight boys around my age and a few of their older brothers would gather to discuss matters that needed non-parental resolution: A bully who had moved onto the street or a dead tree that had fallen across a bicycle path. My own brother was unable to attend the meeting about the dogs, but B.D., Mark and Billy’s brother, did. B.D. was older. He had been adopted into their family when he was around 10. He was already attending Jefferson Junior High and so did not walk with us to school. He was thin, quiet, and watchful. His accent and vocabulary indicated a more rural and rougher upbringing than any of us had known. B.D. listened to us about the dog, asked one or two questions.
I proposed that all of us walk together and maybe the dogs wouldn’t bother a larger
group. The idea was voted down as too logistically complicated given that Melvin caught rides with his father and Kenneth - who wore ties to school and carried a book bag -- liked to get there early to review his homework before he turned it in. Besides, waiting for Leonard, a wild-haired kid from up the street who kept to his own personal time zone, would land us all on the truant list. Then Leonard and Kenneth both said that they had never seen the dogs and they and Melvin left the meeting to go look in a nearby winter-brown kudzu patch for a baseball glove that Melvin had lost over the summer.
B.D. then presented the rest of us with a characteristically tough solution: We must hit the dogs with a rock or stick. They would not bother us after that. The meeting was over, he said, and we should go help Melvin before his parents found that he had lost the glove and shorted his Christmas out of self-righteous pique.
We decided to try B.D.’s solution. On Sunday, in the dead kudzu near where we had found Melvin’s rotting glove, the five of us practiced throwing rounded rocks at boards, pocketing the stones that we could throw most accurately. Billy armed himself with a stout hickory stick. We memorized commands and even practiced a couple of formations that we thought would keep the dogs from our flanks long enough to consolidate and gain the initiative. On Monday we met up and walked down the path armed and trembling with readiness. But, that morning, the next, and all that week, there were no dogs. In fact, there followed a three-week peace in which we did not even hear the brush rustle. We gradually relaxed and so, on a cold morning two days before the Christmas break, the dogs charged out of the brush and found us unready, unpracticed and unarmed, able only to follow Mark on his dash for life to the school.
It was cold that night and snowing lightly and we held the neighborhood boys’ meeting in a corner of the Pinckus’s basement. Mark had tearfully briefed B.D. earlier and so he went straight to his previous advice. “You have to hit the dogs with something. They won’t bother you after that.”
The snow fizzled around eight which meant that we would go to school the next morning - the day before a two-week Christmas break - and would be tested by the dogs. We took up sticks and rocks and declared ourselves ready.
The next morning, Friday December 21, 1962, we discovered the flaws in our plan.
First, Napoleon’s complaint: The weather had robbed us of our mobility. Although we got one or two decent snows in East Tennessee every year, no one bought clothing for it. Our parents dressed us in light waffle weave cotton long underwear, jeans, two tee shirts and two pair of cotton socks. We wore thin coats and light gloves featuring licensed cartoon characters such as Goofy or Bugs Bunny. Then our parents draped things that looked warm around our shoulders - big scarves or -- in Mark’s case -- a small wool blanket safety pinned under his chin that gave him the look of a miniature count. Over our sneakers we wore adult-sized rubber boots; my mother stuffed plastic dry cleaning bags into mine so that they would stay on. Our tracks in the light snow showed that we mostly scooted our feet instead of walking plantigrade.
We also were encumbered by holiday extras. In addition to our books each of us carried treats for the class Christmas parties and a gift for the teacher. I had an uncovered tray of cupcakes with red and green sprinkles on top. I also carried a small illustrated Christmas song books because, before the school party, my class would sing “Up on the Rooftop,” in an assembly; I had not yet learned to snap my fingers, required for the “Click Click Click” and had practiced the night before until my thumbs were sore.
When the dogs leapt out of the snowy brush we discovered the final flaw: None of us were brave enough to carry out the plan. We scattered, scraping our feet along the path. Mark’s cape trailed straight behind him, his hands empty, his Christmas cookies and books lying on the path; I was unaware of where the others had gone except that I saw Billy well into the safety of the playground when I realized that the large lead dog had gotten between me and the school and was growlingly eyeing the cupcakes. I froze and then thought about throwing the cupcakes one by one to the dogs and trying to back onto the school grounds.
I trembled as I picked up a cupcake with my sore hands. The lead dog crouched and bared his teeth as I pulled my arm back to throw it at him. But the dog didn’t stay crouched long, he stood with his eyes wide and began to yelp, quickly turning and running into the woods. Then one of the minion dogs also yelped and ran and the third ran after him. I looked to my left and B.D., grinning, stood from behind a bush. “Shouldn’t bother you no more,” he said, showing an un-thrown rock and then turning o jog to school.
He was right. We never saw the dogs again.
Three years later, my fifth grade teacher took us on a long walk in the woods along the creek. We walked deep into the woods, past where the Wild Man was supposed to live. I was astonished to find that the deep and boundless woods extended less than a mile from our path along the southern edge. From there, I could see a city street. A right turn and another 100-yard walk brought us on to the Cedar Hill schoolyard. There was no Wild Man’s lair. There was no pack of dogs.
Around that time, B.D. took a baseball bat and robbed a dry cleaner. No one was hurt, but he was sentenced to time in a juvenile detention facility and when he left he joined the Marines and went to Vietnam. His disregard for appeasement and the skills that he used ambushing three dogs turned out to be helpful to the military in a jungle war. There were some problems with his homecoming though; he was asked to leave the house. Years later Mark reported that he had he straightened out his life but I never saw B.D. again.
Dad died in 1992. Ben was killed in 2009 two months after mom’s second husband died. I live 500 miles away in Ann Arbor. I stay at the house when I visit mom. Pine Valley is still there although it is now the Oak Ridge school administration building with a Head Start program; on nice days, I can hear kids on the playground.
I was there two days before the December 2011 full moon. Some noise awoke me around 3 a.m. I looked out a back window and saw the back yard lit stark by moonlight. I went outside in pajamas and a pair of running shoes and looked at the moon for a while the way I had when my brother and I sat on a blanket, a yellow light from the kitchen window making a square of light in the yard. I thought about walking down to Pine Valley to see the school yard in the bright light – something I had never done. But it was cold, windy from the front that had blown out an afternoon’s heavy rain. I was sure that there were skunks along the path to the school, rabid animals occupying some of the same ground in my adult life that the wild man had in my youth. I craned my neck north and looked for the banshee floating down from her water tower on the hill behind the house, but 53 years of forest growth had now obscured it from view.