Prologue – I survived the Dog Days of this summer, 2025, in Jefferson. I came across a copy of a column I wrote about the Dog Days of Summer, 1999. GreeneCountyNewsOnline publisher Tori Riley republishes it here:
I’ve spent the dog days of the summer of ’99 in Jefferson, my hometown. It’s been a hot, humid, cicada summer, like all the summers of my youth.
When I was little, I played under the trees in the front yard of our house on South Oak. When it rained, I never got wet. This is the metaphor of my growing-up years – the safe sheltering place called Jefferson. I never thought about it at the time, of course, because I knew no different, and in high school I knew for sure that everything about Jefferson was too narrow, too nosy, too constricting. I couldn’t wait to leave.
And over the years, I could never wait to come back.
Drawn home by family and friends, drawn back finally by the town itself, the cornfields, the quiet. I am in love with this little town even as it makes me sadder than sad.
Blaes Shoes is closing. Rolfe’s is the last store to fall except for Figenshaw’s Furniture. Of all those places on the square that I think of when I’m gone from here, soon none will remain. There was Louie’s, the teenage hangout with the black and white tiled floor. And Potter’s Drugs – vanilla cokes like nectar. Cleata’s for pancakes after Mass on Sunday, Shuey’s for Yeastos, the Creamery for nickel ice cream cones, Shoppes for a special meal with the family. I hung out at odd places for a little girl – Sidney’s, that quiet and sedate jewelry store, where I gazed with longing at tiny china horses; Coast to Coast hardware, where I gazed just as longingly at tiny screwdrivers and ran my fingers through the penny nails.
Gately’s dime store was where I shopped for Evening in Paris perfume for my mom. At the BonTon and Downes, dress shops where teenage girls – my idols- worked in matching sweater sets, I hung around and watched them carefully as Mom looked at blouses. I was going to be one of the Downes girls when I was 17. But I wound up as a soda jerk at Tucker Pharmacy. Once, I went into Sandy’s Pool Hall, bastion of males, to get change for Tucker’s, and old L.B., sitting like Buddha on his chair above the snooker table, growled at me, “What’re you doin’ in here?” I ran.
The streets of Jefferson are nearly canopied again, 20 years or so now after the blight of Dutch elm disease. The path through Russell Park is once again the familiar route I took to school, and Chautauqua Park oaks are as cooling as ever on a summer’s day. The smell of chlorine at the pool is the same, but the Post Office smells different now that they no longer use ink and leather bags. The house I grew up in is the same, only small, and the tree I read in day after day the summer of my 11th year is gone. All the Jefferson yards are neat, the houses cared for, the flowers flourishing. The 7 o’clock whistle blows, and the mist from the river winds up Jackson Hill.
But the water tower is gone, and the old North Grade might never have been. Its bricks sit on front porches across the country, and no laughter haunts the grounds where thousands of kids grew up, learning from Miss Mable how to cover their mouths when they coughed and from Laura Herman how to do times tables in their sleep.
The courthouse and Mr Lincoln are constant. My friends and I climbed that statue, ran through the courthouse, up and down the marble staircases. No one shooed us out or paid much attention to us, but I always knew they knew who I was and there wasn’t much I was going to get away with.
I stand by the fence at the pool and see a summer dawn 40 years ago: a covey of slumber party girls climbs over the fence at the pool and swims for about two and a half seconds. They hear a car and run shrieking, over the fence, down the back path. They circle up to Saba’s bakery, to the back door to beg for fresh donuts, then home to sleep till noon.
We grew up, oh so slowly it seemed, finally got our driver’s licenses, cruised the square, hung out at Tiny’s and the Dairy Queen and outside the library on Wednesday nights. We went to dances at the youth center under the pool hall. We went to school, we spent our summers at the pool, we left town.
But so many of us come back.
A city friend listening to our hometown tales could not get over that we still remembered where our friends had lived in Jefferson, that we still had friends in Jefferson, that we return at all.
But how can we not? As much as it’s changed, Jefferson is as familiar as the scent of peonies, as real to me as those long-gone trees that I played under on the rainy afternoons of my childhood. These hot, humid nights and cicada-sung days I’ve spent here this summer are a lullaby of my childhood – You are safe, secure, they sing.
No place on earth can cradle me like Jefferson does.
Colleen O’Brien Clopton left Jefferson in 1962 but returns often to visit her family and friends.
Epilogue – A few things have changed in a quarter of a century. Jefferson has lost too many downtown businesses while beautifying the square is a Jefferson Matters endeavor that is impressive.
