Gerald Bailey Remembers the Family Store and a Slower Pace of Life in Mentone

Curious about what life was like in Mentone in the 1940s and 1950s? Just ask Gerald Bailey. Gerald was born and raised here, and when he looks back on his early years, he does so with affection, but also with a tinge of sadness about some of the old ways and places that are long gone. (Who among us doesn’t do the same?)

Gerald Bailey (Photo by Rebecca Henderson)

Gerald was born on Nov. 22, 1940, in a house on Cutler Avenue. He is named after his Uncle Gerald, who was killed in World War II. “I don’t really remember him,” Gerald says, “because he was already in the service. He’d been on the front lines and got wounded, then went back to the front lines and invaded Normandy. I’ve got his two purple hearts. They had an air raid and him and two or three more guys dived under a half-track [an armored vehicle]; the half-track took a direct hit. He’s buried in that cemetery over there in Normandy.”

Bailey’s Grocery and Other Landmarks

Gerald’s father, Floyd, and his mother, Catherine, owned Bailey’s Grocery on Hwy 117. His mother also taught school in Menlo. “It was just a country grocery store,” he remembers. “Sold gas and oil products, serviced cars. Had a feed room for feed, an oil room for all the oil, then the grocery part of it. We had a Coke machine and sold dip ice cream. It was the only store in Mentone at the time that had a fresh meat market. And back in those early days, about everything was credit business. Up here was mostly sawmillers and farmers. When it got to where they couldn’t work, Mother and Daddy would carry them all winter, and when it got to where they could go to work, they’d come in and pay their bill. Everybody was pretty good about paying up.”

In addition to the family store, other local landmarks from that era no longer exist, but Gerald offers some interesting stories about them. There was a covered bridge over Little River at that time, left over from the days when Cutler Avenue was the main road through town. (“That was before my time,” Gerald says.) He remembers walking over that bridge; but he also remembers the day the bridge collapsed. “I was about 6 years old. Some men that worked for the state and a truck were on the bridge, and it fell — the truck, men and all. They walked up to our store to use the telephone.”

The historic Hitching Post in its early days holds memories for many. (The building was destroyed by fire in 2023). It used to house the local post office and a store or two. The upstairs was used as a dance hall, and Gerald chuckles as he recalls how he rode to the Hitching Post on his bicycle with his friend Guy Smith. They would sneak upstairs, inevitably get caught, and get sent home.

An Idyllic Childhood

Many of the camps that call Mentone home were here when Gerald was growing up. “They had gyms,” he says, “and they would let us have ball games in the gyms, because we didn’t ever tear up anything or bother anything.”

Life wasn’t all play, but Gerald had fun. “After I got big enough to help in the store, [Daddy would] give me two hours off every day to go to the river. We could swim down where the camps are now, where they got their docks and stuff. When the girls come down to take their swim lesson, we had to get off the dock, but they didn’t care if we used it. And we had a big, big tree down there that kind of leaned out over the river. Somebody before my time built a platform, and we had a rope probably 40 feet up in the tree. We could swing three quarters’ way across the river. It was a lot of fun,” he reminisces. It was mostly private property along the river then, as it is today, “but people didn’t care then. You could go anywhere to the river, swim anywhere, fish anywhere…even in people’s yards.”

Getting a little older meant increased work at Bailey’s. He pumped gas and eventually did basic maintenance on cars. He also delivered the Chattanooga paper on his bicycle, mowed yards, and worked at Camp DeSoto in preparation for summer. “When I first went to work, we got 35 cents an hour. When we got 11 years old, they raised us to 50 cents. And then when the camps opened, we’d carry their luggage and stuff to the cabin. We’d make good tips doing that.”

These photos from The Groundhog archives capture Mentone’s past.

Gerald attended Moon Lake Elementary through the third grade. His mother, a Valley Head native, had adored her 4th grade teacher and wanted Gerald to have the same experience. He transferred to Valley Head and never left. He played high school football and was one of two boys on the team with a car. “About half the football team lived up here [on Lookout Mountain],” he says. The school gave the boys gas to take their teammates home after practice. ”They had a gas pump at school for the buses, and they would give us 5 gallons of gas a week.”

Winter 1960 brought ice, cold, and snow. Gerald still recalls that winter clearly. “Sterlyn Brown and myself were going to school over at Snead [State Community College], and all the power went out over there. The next morning, they told us we could go home. I had a car and got Sterlyn and two girls from Crossville and two girls from Fort Payne in the car with me. There wasn’t a telephone pole or a light pole standing across Sand Mountain.” Gerald delivered the girls but didn’t know if he could get up the mountain to Mentone on 117. As it happened, a truck from the power company with chains on its tires had left ruts in the ice. Gerald put his wheels in those ruts, hit the gas, and didn’t stop until he reached the top.

“Nobody else for two weeks got up or down the mountain,” he says. Luckily, Bailey’s Store had a big wood-burning stove, and locals came to cook their food and eat at the store. “Some would bring their families and sleep on the floor at night. In about two weeks, we got to go back to school. They got power down there, but some places here, it was out a month or more.”

A Truck-Driving Life

Gerald’s father Floyd used his truck to deliver food and merchandise to area families, and Gerald wasn’t that old when he started helping. Apparently, he enjoyed that line of work so much he did it for the next 58 years. He drove mostly company trucks, but sometimes he drove his own (at one time he had three of them). He made runs for a variety of companies, often carrying carpet from Dalton, Georgia, to the West Coast. “I made 46 trips one year. I liked the Seattle run. I like the Northwest. I’d run back and forth and take carpet up there and bring apples or something back, because, you know, Washington’s a big apple state.” He figures he drove between 8 and 9 million miles over those 58 years.

Councilman Bailey

After living in Rainsville for several decades, Gerald retired and moved back to Mentone, where he is now heading into his 21st year on the Town Council. Serving in official capacities for the town is a Bailey family tradition. His father served on the council, and his mother was town clerk for a number of years. Gerald, Mayor Rob Hammond, and current council member John Paul were all elected in the same year. When they began their tenure, Gerald says, “the town was broke and didn’t even have money to pay the council or pay employees. We had to borrow money from banks to operate for a while. Now we’ve built up money and got the town in good shape.”

Among many other things, the town has purchased police cars and installed the sidewalk that runs along Hwy 117. The council has also been putting money into Moon Lake Village, deeded to the town by the county after the school closed in 2021. “It was just a small school,” Gerald says, but it “always had a lot of community support. A lot of people think, and I kind of agree with them, that the county should have spent money and kept it going. But then the student count got so low that they were losing money. So you can see their side of it, too.”

When asked if any issues have caused controversy during his tenure on the council, Gerald mentions the 117 bridge built in front of Camp Skyline, completed a few years ago. “There were a lot of people that fought it hard for a period of 10 or 12 years,” he says. Tiny homes within town limits was another issue that drew quite a few folks to town council meetings. The council passed a zoning ordinance that says nothing smaller than 800 square feet may be built within town limits.

These Days

Gerald says he plans to run again in the next municipal election, scheduled for August. There are some projects he would like to see through, such as the completion of the sidewalk extension and ongoing improvements of Moon Lake Village. The town also hopes to build an observation deck and a hiking trail at Brow Park.

These days, Gerald lives right across the street from the Cutler Avenue house he was born in 84 years ago. Things have changed over the decades, he says, not all of them good, but not all of them bad either. He is mostly pleased with the current state of affairs in Mentone and always hopes for the best for the little community atop Lookout Mountain.

BY JAY ROBBINS