It's Hard to Say Goodbye

There’s a particular smell associated with old garages—not the ones where we park our cars out of the weather, but those old ones where mechanics toiled on oil-soaked floors, the soaking so thick on the concrete it’s soft, like black cork. And the smell: differential oil, Varsol, engine grease, hydraulic fluid, old rubber, gasoline, a pot bellied stove in winter and later a coal-fired furnace. 

There are other aromas outside the garage: The musky, almost sweet scent of a tobacco plant; the fresh, clean whiff of freshly mown hay; the pungent odor of cattle; the bitter, oily tang of tar bubbling up on the road on a hot summer’s day, smelling exactly like it feels stuck to the bottom of bare feet dancing across the surface to avoid a burn.

I was born too late for the smoky coal fire of train engines barreling over the tracks across the field and even later for the musty, metallic smell of molten iron over my great-great grandfather’s blacksmith fire or the charcoal and sulphur from the guns of soldiers who camped and fought on the land in the 1860s. But it’s the garage and its memory-smells I return to again and again, a childhood of engine repairs and my mechanic father’s hands, never completely free from the grease-black no matter how much scrubbing with Lava soap he did.

The building where my dad spent 12-hour days, six days a week was put up sometime in the 1920s, when the federal government decided to put one of its new US highways through Russellville, Tennessee. Russellville was then, as it is now, a tiny village at the intersection of an old stagecoach road coming from further up east and Virginia and the old Kentucky Road connecting North Carolina and the Cumberland Gap.

Cars were a fairly new thing at the time. My great grandfather, Joe D Thomason, and a friend of his went in together on the first one in Russellville in the 1910s. Joe D and two of his brothers ran a grocery, first by the railroad and later a half mile away at the t-bone intersection of Depot Street and Russellville Pike. 

I never found out how it happened, but the three brothers ended up with their own individual stores, all at the same intersection. YP’s—the original Thomason Brothers Dry Goods—also had a movie theater. The theater was nothing but a store room by the time I came along, stacks of seed and flour between dusty cane back chairs. The screen was still there, and I hear tell that my dad ran the projector when he was young, and a cousin announced the start of the film by playing a trumpet out a second story window.

Tom opened TL Thomason and Sons across Depot Street, and Joe D opened his store—including son Briscoe as a mechanic—across the pike from them both.

Then came federal numbered highways. Joe D moved up Depot Street to Chestnut Street, which was to become US 11 before the governor objected that the Lee Highway through Rogersville didn’t get that designation. Several years of contention (and several route numbers) later, it was US 11E while the Rogersville route became US 11W.

And there Thomason Motor Company sprang up. The flat building sat across Depot Street from a two-story house where Confederate Gen James Longstreet was headquartered for the terrible winter of 1863-4 and where he and his troops complained bitterly about their treatment by the pro-Union residents of Russellville.

That house is now a museum. The stores of YP and TL burned long ago. The building where Joe D originally had his store was torn down, replaced by a library where community meetings took place until not enough people cared to attend and which eventually closed.

The garage on 11E remained, run first by Briscoe and then by my dad. As I write, it’s still there. Might not be by the time you read because I just sold it to the Tennessee Department of Transportation for a highway project.

For as along as I can remember—that means the early to mid 1960s—word was that the state was gonna widen that highway. They widened it between Morristown and Knoxville, between Greeneville and Johnson City, and finally between Bulls Gap and Greeneville. But it remained a meandering two-lane from Morristown, through Russell­ville and Whitesburg, over Mud Creek right up to Bulls Gap. It’s just a few miles, and maybe building Interstate 81 not so far away made widening that part of the highway less important. 

So it’s been sitting for years. The rumors of impending widening resurfaced every now and then, never more than talk, once or twice with a “proposed” map that wasn’t even to scale. Until 2016. That year, TDOT produced scaled maps, aerial views, and plot maps of what property would be needed.

The garage and my dad’s house—the house I grew up in—were on those plot maps.

My family came from the furthest south reaches of Appalachia, in Union County, Georgia, where Joe D’s father learned the blacksmith trade. I’ve been there, to a town called Gaddistown that isn’t there anymore. No trace of it whatsoever, just a dot on an old, old map on the curve of a winding mountain road.

I did see the house Joe D’s mother grew up in. The old man who lived there let me have a look inside the plain white building with worn wood floors. Cozy, small. Homey. There was a cemetery, up the mountain, he said, where her family was buried. She’s buried in Russellville, with most of her children.

Maybe my dad was thinking about that when TDOT showed him the maps. He was worried. Not about the shop—he’d long ago retired and rented the space to a German machinist. But the house. He didn’t know where he’d go. And he sure didn’t want to go at all. 

Dad took over the shop when his dad, tall and thin with a shock of dark hair and piercing brown eyes, had enough of the ever increasing complexity of cars. He sent my dad to mechanic school to learn about automatic transmissions and spent more time at the farm where he grew a little tobacco, hay, and Hereford cattle, a short, stocky beef breed with a red coat and white face.

And then the same thing happened to my dad. Cars kept getting more complex. Computers!! In his 70s by then, he gave it up. Retired. Wasn’t worth it.

So he left the shop to the machinist, and with it decades of memories, and not just the smells. Dad knew everybody. Before he took over the shop, he drove a school bus. After, he repaired all their cars and trucks, changed their oil, checked out used cars a buddy wanted to buy. Sometimes he bought one himself, fixed it up, and sold it. He entertained myriad offers to buy his personal vehicles, which everybody knew were in better shape than the day they rolled off the assembly line. And if that wasn’t enough, he played bass in several bands, performing at dozens of dances throughout the years.

And when there was no hay to bale, no music to play, or no engine to overhaul, my dad sat out front of the garage, often with friends, especially on a Saturday. They talked. Some chewed tobacco. They laughed. They were old men, young men, white men, black men. They waved hello when I came down, usually heading for the small grocery at the other end of the building with a dime for a grape soda and a candy bar. They were just keeping up what had started way back in the ‘20s—shootin’ the breeze, filling gas tanks, passing the time.

When my dad died two years ago, every one of them still alive—and in the case of one who wasn’t, his sons—came to the funeral, hugged me and my sister, said how much they loved him and how much they sure would miss him.

And so it turned out, he didn’t have to worry about the widening highway. My sister, who lived an hour up the road, inherited the garage and the house while I got what I’d always wanted: a property across the railroad that included a rickety old homestead known as Hayslope, with white clapboard covering the original logs constructed in 1785. 

Sis was nearing retirement and debated for a time whether to stay in Johnson City or move back to Russellville. She decided to stay where she was and began the process of selling the garage to the state (it turned out to be in Phase 1 of the highway project while the house was in Phase 2). 

Then came the unthinkable. Never in the best of health, my sister contracted pneumonia and was admitted to the hospital. She seemed to be improving, until suddenly she wasn’t. She had a heart attack. Doctors brought her back, they told me over the phone, and moved her to ICU. The doctor kept talking and I realized he was telling me she hadn’t made it. A second heart attack, and they couldn’t bring her back. 

It’s one thing for your 89-year-old dad to die. He lived a long and wonderful life. He didn’t suffer. He was happy. But your 56-year-old younger sister, that’s another story. It’s a shock to the system, all of them. It wasn’t even a year since dad was gone.

And it wasn’t long before TDOT was calling me about the garage.

I am writing this 25 years to the day when the local paper did a full page spread on my dad’s retirement. “The end of an era,” the paper called it. But it was really just the beginning of the end. After his retirement, dad still fiddled with cars. He toiled in his beloved garden, growing the best tomatoes on the south side of the Holston River, and maybe the north side too. He diligently took care of my mom as her health declined, right up until her death. After that, he was still there, sitting out front waving at passerby, selling little baskets of tomatoes. Learning to cook. Loving his cat, Blu, until she died and then the new cat, Pearl, along with outside cats Lucy and a ginger boy.

And just so you know, I found homes for Pearl and Lucy, and the ginger boy—now called Tag—lives with me.

Last fall, I stepped inside the empty garage for the first time in years. The smells hit me hard, barely diminished by a quarter century. There was a room at the top of the stairs that had been locked for at least that long. Nobody knew what was in there, but I had to clear it out before I could sell the building. My friends and I found the key—an old skeleton key—and opened the door. Musty and dusty, the room was stacked full of … stuff. Ancient cans of motor oil. My old scooter. My sister’s old bicycle, banana seat and all. My dad’s old bicycle. Lawnmower parts. An old electric adding machine/cash register. Official automobile repair books. Empty grease buckets. An old streetlight. Tubes and hoses, belts and rotors.

Most of it was junk. I took what wasn’t back to the house, loaded the rest into my cousin’s truck for a trip to the dump. Before he left with the truck, Brian cut down the “Thomason Motor Company” sign that hung over the cavernous room. And that was that.

I could tell you stories, lots of stories, memories. They’re swirling around my mind now, images and words, sounds and smells. An entire life in East Tennessee, the fields, the hills, the springs and creeks. Sun in summer and snow in winter, and everything in between.

I haven’t lived there in 40 years, physically. My heart still does, and when I cut my finger one day last week, I swear the blood had the faintest odor of motor oil.