Neighborhood Mamas a valuable resource

By GRAHAM OSTEEN
Item Editor-At-Large
graham@theitem.com

I visited recently with Rosa Schwartz, the wonderful, funny wife of Sumter attorney and former South Carolina House Speaker Ramon Schwartz, and the mother of Barbara Burchstead, Ray, Milton and Bill.

Milton was one of my best friends growing up here in Sumter, and we remain close today. Rosa has been going through a tough time physically for some time now, but her mind and spirit are still strong.

Milton and I, along with Bill, Curtis Melvin Spencer, Barnes Boyle, Buck James, Billy Cubbage and a variety of other renegades kept the Haynsworth-Calhoun-Winn Street region stirred up in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We were considered, on the whole, to be highly mischievous boys.

The first thing Rosa said when I saw her was, “You boys were bad.”

We enjoyed a great sense of freedom roaming all over Sumter in what now seems like a much more innocent time. We had access to charge accounts at Touchberry’s Store and Lawson’s Pharmacy, and we rode our bicycles everywhere. Key locations for deep exploration included old Sumter (Edmunds) High School, the original stand-alone Simpson Hardware in Palmetto Plaza, the YMCA when it had only the “upper” gym, and the back of Big Jim’s. Good times.

To cross over Guignard Drive was to venture in to enemy territory, and we considered the boys of the Swan Lake and Tucson Drive areas to be hated rivals who deserved to be taunted, harassed and drawn into dirt clod and bottle rocket fights at every opportunity. That could be dangerous business, given that such infamous characters as Lee and Cam Harvin, Warren and Sims Propst, Brett Dabbs, Bob “Killer” Graham, Alfred Shaw, Donald Benson, Al Floyd, the Moses brothers and the terrifying Burns brothers were mostly older and always intent on knocking us off our bikes while chasing us back across the Guignard Drive safe zone borderline.

Our favorite activity on weekend nights was to play “The Doorbell Game.” We’d sneak through one of the many long front yards in the area, ring the doorbell and run. It was hilarious.

The allure of this game ended one night when, after a successful ring and run, a peculiar homeowner was waiting for us next to the sidewalk, standing against a tree, smoking a cigarette.

“How’s the doorbell business, boys?” he said.

I think he told our parents, but I can’t remember any specifics. I do know that from then on, Rosa would say, “Don’t go ringing any doorbells. And I don’t mean maybe.” She always added, “And I don’t mean maybe” for emphasis before we could offer any sort of weak defense.

We had a serious Little Rascals-style “He-Man Woman Haters” clubhouse behind the Schwartz’s home that we used until seventh or eighth grade. We covered the walls and floor with carpet samples collected from all over town, which created an evolving smell that changed with the seasons.

The fun ended when the neighborhood girls started showing up and one of them was suspected of smoking cigarettes. The accusing mother said her princess had come home smelly, and we said that she had probably been across Guignard in the bad area of town. They had a clubhouse, too.

We were ultimately blamed, and our clubhouse was deemed off limits because of the heat Rosa got from some other parents. We learned the hard way that girls are serious trouble.

Rosa was a good neighborhood Mama, and she defended us against both uptight neighbors and tattletale parents, no matter how bad we were accused of being.

That’s why we all loved her.

Graham Osteen is co-president of Osteen Publishing Co. and Editor-At-Large of The Item. Contact him at The Item, 20 North Magnolia St., Sumter, S.C., 29150; graham@theitem.com, or call 803-774-1352.