Words Of Wisdom From A Mother: Water Valley Has Never Looked Better
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By Chris Goodwin
Water Valley Main Street Director
(As pictured in the 1986 WVHS Yearbook)
I always knew Main Street in Water Valley was special. It was where the fun was, the action, the excitement! My first real memory of it as a specific place is going to a Disney movie with my mother in the Valley Theater – just a few doors down from the office I’m now sitting in as director of the Water Valley Main Street Association.
Our first house was a duplex on Panola shared with Betty, Larry, and Lane Hart, who was my first best friend. The Harts would move to Georgia for a spell, and my family went to Senatobia when they hired my father as a basketball, football, and track coach.
When we moved back to our hometown my family rented the Knox house atop Wood Street. I’d fly down the hill on my bike to spend happy hours buying new comic books at Turnage’s, old comics at Mrs. Rusk’s dime store (usually also learning my weight and fate from the scale outside the front door), fishing lures at Wilbur Herring’s hardware store on the east side of the street, and .22 cartridges from Sartain’s on the west. I don’t believe I ever came close to pedaling all the way back up that hill.
My grandparents thought it was important to support all local businesses, so my first savings account was at the Bank of Water Valley, but my first checking account was at Mechanics. When the Watermelon Carnival was relaunched in 1980, our Humanities class sold snow cones at a stand to raise money for our first classroom computer. Our teams didn’t win as many games as they had in the years prior (and like they’d go on to do soon after), but we all cheered for locals made good like Wayne Harris in the USFL, blocking for Herschel Walker on the New Jersey Generals.
It wasn’t all fun and games. When I was young my father would take me to sit in Mr. Holder’s barber chair for a too-short (it seemed to me) haircut. And I spent hours and hours with my grandfather in the NAPA on South Main in search of the correct O-rings, hydraulic hoses, and another half-inch socket to replace the latest one I’d lost. (I’m still buying hydraulic fluid at NAPA, now just off Main Street, and batteries and belts at Midtown on Main proper).
Many of us, after years of watching shops close down and fires claim downtown businesses like the Blackmur Hotel, Ray’s (later Lawrence’s), and the Crafters Mall, felt great hope in the 1990s when Steve Thompson and David Burns revitalized a block of buildings on the south end of Main Street. When I would take my grandfather to Cornerstone and run on the treadmill while he worked the machines, it seemed like everyone in Water Valley was coming through there.
And things did get better. After the Mug and Cone closed, I remember the restaurant choices pretty much as the Early Bird Café and then Sonic. Now there are fantastic dining options all up and down Main. I can even get barbecue again from Dunn’s, in the same spot where my classmate, DeMarc White, and his brother, Dede, operated their late, lamented D&D House of BBQ.
When my mother rides through town she never fails to say that Water Valley looks better than it ever has in her lifetime. The plantings and banners by the Town & Country Garden Club add color to Main Street, the city maintains the infrastructure and keeps the green spaces clean and the trash cans emptied, and the buildings reflect the care and attention they’ve received from active and involved owners.
I’m so pleased with all the good things that have happened. I see committed people, groups, and elected officials working together to continue to build on that hard work, and I’m excited to support those efforts in every way the Water Valley Main Street Association can.
(Chris Goodwin is a 1986 graduate of Water Valley High School. He retired from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History at the beginning of the year and started as director of the Water Valley Main Street Association in March.)
