They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. In the case of this vintage image, it was good for 535, but I could’ve easily reached a higher number. I didn’t, for the sake of keeping this article from turning into a book.
The photograph I refer to shows a group of the “Jones Trailer Park Gang,” as I now call us, though that name was the furthest from our young minds in 1963. We were just a bunch of kids who lived in a mobile home park and went to Southside School in Selma, Alabama.
Mom captured this moment because my brother and I would be moving to Texas within the month, and she had the foresight to snap it, not realizing how important it would be for me 63 years later. This is one of my most treasured Kodak moments.
While living in Jones, we lived along Highway 80, where we occasionally saw “chain gangs,” as Dad and Mom called them. Men of both colors picked up trash along the road, and if we ventured too close to the prisoners, a guard would yell for us to move back.
Once, one of the men yelled out, “Ya’ll be good little boys, or you’ll end up like me.” That statement lodged in my brain and stuck like peanut butter & jelly on bread.
Randy Coggins, Eddie Moon, Ken Moon, my brother, me, and another kid whose name I don’t recall made up this ragtag group. I use the ragtag moniker more as a reference to my pants than anything. In the color-enhanced photograph, those jeans have more ironed-on patches than tufts of hair on an American Hairless Terrier.
What we did for fun is very different from what kids do now in Lake Havasu City. Riding bicycles, without the benefit of batteries to propel us along, playing cowboys and Indians, picking wild blackberries, rolling in the dirt on occasion without fear of being bitten by scorpions, walking across busy Highway 80 and placing pennies on the railroad track, lastly, standing beside the road trying to get trucks to blow their air horns. Only once did the state police stop and ask us to move further away from traffic.
I won’t mention our BB gun wars or burning ants with a magnifying glass. We often walked to R&R Grocery for RC Colas or NEHI grape sodas, saving the empties for the nickel deposit. We didn’t have a large lake to swim in like Lake Havasu, but we did have a creek and a swimming pool located on Craig Air Force Base within walking distance.
Sadly, Ken Moon is now gone, a victim of cancer, while Randy Coggins silently bit the dust in his sleep one night. Eddie Moon still lives in Alabama, Prattville, I believe, while my brother, Jim, is in San Diego. I don’t know the unidentified boy’s whereabouts, although I’m sure someone back in Selma does.
It appears that none of us ended up on a chain gang, and I’d like to believe that all of us knew Jesus Christ as savior, for if that turns out to be the case, this classic photograph of “The Jones Trailer Park Gang” can be reshot in Heaven, minus my soiled and patched jeans, of course.
