Pikeville in the good old days

I’m at that age now where it’s fun to sit around and think about my life. I now live out in the county where everything is a bit slower and the pace more comfortable for an old-timer such as me, but when I was young, being the daring fellow I was, I made the move to the Big City of Pikeville.

Well, you have to understand that this was back in what now passes as the good old days. That would have been around 1975 or so and Pikeville wasn’t quite the impressive metropolis it has since become.

I lived in an apartment then overlooking Deskin’s Motors. This was when railroad tracks ran through that part of town that is now Hambley Blvd. In fact, the railroad that went through town was still called the C&O. I had a two bedroom apartment, utilities paid, including a $5.00 per month cable TV fee, fully furnished, for $125.00 a month.

I worked at South Central Bell’s Second Street offices. I was temporary, part time. This meant that I’d come into repair where I helped get info for anyone who had a complaint. I worked three weeks and was off a week.

There were still a lot of 8 party lines then. The 633 exchange didn’t exist. This meant that whenever one subscriber took their phone off the hook, the other seven called repair. How much fun was that?

I’d walk the railroad to get to work. There were still coal cars on that track. They actually served to let me know that I’d had too much to drink at the Christmas party the phone company threw in 1975. On my way back, I couldn’t quite make out the letters C&O unless I closed one eye.

You wouldn’t believe how many people worked there then, even operators. Remember the people you could get by dialing “0”? This wasn’t an option, either; you couldn’t make a long-distance call without them.

There were still real service stations all around town in those days, too. You’d drive up; they’d pump your gas and check under your hood, just like Goober.

Groceries I got from the only Velocity Market opened in those days. I think there’s a pizza place there, now. In town, you could go to G C Murphy’s and buy, well, pretty near anything.

I didn’t drive in those days, so having a lot of time on my hands, I used to walk around the berg to see what I could find. You’d had to have seen the scenery to have believed it.

If you went towards Goff Furniture, you’d get to the Upper Bridge, but if you stayed in town, you ran across a real, honest-to-God dirt road. I used to love to walk out that way.

There was an actual illegal garbage dump before you ran across what passed for housing. There were real tar paper shacks out that way. You could find the same thing on the other end of Pikeville near Poor Farm Hollow.

From the top of Peach Orchard Mountain, you could see the work being done on the cut through. If we’d only known what was coming.

Yes, Pikeville has so much more now, but it seems like there’s a lot less, too.