Published in the Jefferson County Historical Quarterly, Spring 2014.
When We Moved to Pine
Bluff
By David Trulock
Quite a few historically significant 50th anniversaries have come
and gone recently. Among them, the anniversaries of President Kennedy’s
assassination and of the Beatles arrival in the United States have deservedly
received the most attention. One event that occurred between the JFK
assassination and the Beatles debut in America has deservedly received no
attention at all, until now: My family’s
move to Pine Bluff.
We weren’t particularly special in moving to Pine Bluff at that
time. Between 1960 and 1970, the city’s population grew from 44,037 to 57,389,
a thirty percent increase that resulted in the highest census count Pine Bluff
has yet achieved. There were numerous
jobs to be had in Pine Bluff in the 1960s, jobs with the railroad, the two paper
mills, the Pine Bluff Arsenal, Arkansas Power & Light Company, the newly
built Jefferson Hospital, and the huge nearby dredging operations on the
Arkansas River that helped to create the McClellan-Kerr Navigation System and
the Port of Pine Bluff.
In contrast to people who moved from far away to take new jobs in
Pine Bluff, and severed or stretched ties with family and friends in doing so,
my family moved only about ten miles.
And my father didn’t change jobs—he’d done that a few years before, when
he went from farming to being a stock broker and owning his own business,
Trulock & Company, in downtown Pine Bluff.
Since 1955 my family had lived on my Trulock grandparents’ farm
along the Arkansas River, just across the Free Bridge five miles north of town
on Highway 79 (now Highway 79B). We lived in a sort of an extended-family
compound, in an arrangement reminiscent of the Old South. My grandparents’ home
was about a double stone’s throw from the converted brick dairy-barn house my
family lived in, and my uncle, aunt and cousin (Leo, Sue and Lynne Trulock)
lived within a half mile of us.
In the middle of our family compound were the “quarters,” a few
basic sharecropper houses, rather old but constructed of long-lasting cypress,
where some of the black families whose fathers worked on the farm lived. Two
families with kids close to my age were those of Calvin Murry and Charlie
Lee. Although we weren’t supposed to go
in their houses and vice-versa, the outdoor activities among the boys in the
Lee, Murry, and Trulock families were a free-for-all of swimming in cattle
ponds we weren’t supposed to swim in and playing in cotton trailers—at least up
until a cap pistol caused a fire at the gin and my grandfather put the cotton
trailers off limits.
So moving to town did change the childhood activities my brothers
and I had taken for granted, but it didn’t stretch family ties or change my
parents’ friendships and community activities. My maternal grandparents, Arch
and Elner (King) Miller, weren’t affected by our move, either. They’d lived in Pine
Bluff in the 1920s, 30s, and early 40s, but by 1964 they were living in the
Pulaski Heights section of Little Rock (a frugal middle-class couple could
still afford to buy a house there in the 1950s). So they were still about the
same distance from us once we’d moved into town.
The address we moved to was 4006 Cherry Street, with Eden Park
Country Club a few blocks to the east, and Jefferson Hospital a few blocks to
the west. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, the move to town was
inevitable, given the fact that my parents wanted their sons to attend school
in the Pine Bluff school district, as they both had done, rather than in the
Altheimer school district. Prior to buying the house on Cherry Street in the
late summer of ’63, my father had been paying tuition at Trinity Episcopal Day
School for three of his sons, and two more would be entering the school system
in a few years.
The purchase of the house on Cherry Street meant my parents could
enroll my two school-age brothers and me at Forrest Park elementary school for
the 1963-64 school year. (Other cities have their Forest Parks; Pine Bluff has
its Forrest Park section of town, the result of either a misspelling of forest or of someone's desire to memorialize the Confederate general of that name, or both.) My
brother Jeff was in the 5th grade, I was in the 4th grade, and Steven was in
the 2nd grade. At the start of the
school year, Greg was two years old and Arch was still in the womb.
When Mother asked Greg the standard question of whether he wanted
the baby to be a boy or a girl, he chose a third option: “A turtle!”
Being the youngest of five brothers, and not having any sisters, Arch
probably sometimes wished he’d had a protective shell. He was born on October 23rd in Jefferson
Hospital. We were still living on the farm at the time.
With Arch’s birth our family was complete, and the remodeling of
the house on Cherry Street, under the supervision of Leslie McIntyre, was about
halfway finished. In December, we had
our last Christmas on the farm, and sometime around the beginning of the New
Year we moved into town.
In the world at large during 1963 and ‘64, changes were occurring
that would have lasting effects. I can
think of quite a few others besides the two events mentioned at the beginning
of this article, but will focus only on two more, each historically significant
in its own way. I’ll also mention one other event related to my family,
significant only to me.
In Pine Bluff, in February of ’63, sit-ins at Woolworth’s lunch
counter by AM&N students and others signaled the beginning of the end of
the city’s retail establishments’ racial discrimination in its most blatant
form, the unequal segregation of "colored" from "white." In May of ’64, in New Jersey, two physicists at Bell Laboratories—trying to find the source of the constant, low-level noise picked up
by their microwave antenna— accidentally discovered the “cosmic background
radiation” that later provided the first incontrovertible evidence for the Big Bang
cosmological model.
Also in May of 1964, a Pine Bluff Commercial photographer came to
4006 Cherry and took a photo for an article about the League of Women
Voters. The original photo is reproduced
below. As is often the case in the newsprint business, something had to be cut
to make the published item fit the space available. I was cut out of the published photo, and
also not mentioned along with my brothers in the caption. After fifty years, I’m glad to be able to put
myself back in the picture.
One of the things us Trulock boys (and our dad) had to grudgingly put up with was Mother's insistence on having "family meetings" that turned out to be lectures from her. The photographer who snapped this picture thus captured an emblematic moment in our family history. From left: Steven, Betty, Arch, Jeff, Greg, and me (the one who got cropped). --D.T.
