The Frank McCall family took our first official family vacation in the summer of 1962. Two purchases made that vacation possible. In the fall of 1961 my father purchased our first family automobile, a 1961 Chevrolet Parkwood station wagon. Prior to that purchase we did all of our traveling in a farm pickup truck. Yes, it was beginning to get a little crowded for a family of seven.
Then, in the summer of 1962, he bought a camping tent. It was a monstrous thing, fully eight feet by eight feet square and fashioned from a heavy dark green tarpaulin material. When folded up it made a cumbersome bundle that weighed every ounce of sixty pounds. Before it could be set up an elaborate framework of aluminum poles had to be put in place to support the body of the tent.
In July of 1962 we took the first of what would be a number of camping trips in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
On one trip we camped in the Chimney Tops camp ground just inside the national park. We put up our tent around mid-afternoon. That evening our mother prepared a savory dish of pork and beans and ground beef in a black iron skillet on our Coleman gas stove. Ah, there’s nothing like camping in the great outdoors to whet one’s appetite! When supper was over my mother decided to leave the skillet on the concrete picnic table and wash it the next morning. After straightening up the campsite, we retired just after dark as everyone was tired. .We had a big day ahead of us on the morrow.
Our station wagon was parked squarely in front of our tent, creating a walk space no wider than three feet between the two. The door of the tent opened directly in front of the back door on the passenger side of the car.
My mother and father bedded down in the station wagon on a bed fully equipped with air mattresses, pillows and quilts. My brothers Tom, John, Dewey, and I, along with our cousin, Ray McCall, Jr., took up residence in the tent. We all settled down for a night’s sleep that was slow in coming.
The campground had just fallen quiet, when our mother, in a startled whisper, called out, “Boys, there’s a bear on the picnic table!” We all sprang into a sitting position. She had rolled the car window down about an inch so we could hear her warning.
“Don’t come out of the tent!” she whispered, “I’ll keep an eye on him.”
The bear seemed preoccupied with something on the picnic table. But after a few minutes he climbed down off the table and headed toward the car.
My mother, a note of desperation now in her voice, whispered, “He’s coming this way!”
The bear ambled on down between the station wagon and the tent. My mother and father could see the top of his back as he passed by the car. Dewey was sitting up near the front corner of the tent. He felt the bear brush the side of the tent as he went by. That was one tent full of big-eyed little boys!
The bear, his curiosity satisfied, left our campsite to explore other opportunities and did not return. We were not in danger. I did, however, notice that Dewey slept with one eye open for the rest of the night.
The next morning we found our black iron skillet licked cleaner than a whistle.
That is one bear tale that will never be forgotten.
Over the course of the next two or three days we would see seventeen bears counting the one that cleaned our skillet. Of course, some of us didn’t see him, but we had witnesses and enough physical evidence to count him in with the others. Among that number were a mama bear and two small cubs we saw on the roadway up to Clingman’s Dome.
Over the mountains at a trading post in Cherokee, North Carolina, we saw a bear in a cage that could drink Nehi sodas. Located at the front of the cage at floor level was a wood-framed opening about twelve inches wide and five inches high. Tourists could purchase a Nehi for ten cents and give it to the bear. When an opened bottle was placed at the opening, the bear would take it between his paws and pull it under the opening without spilling a drop. Then he would raise the bottle, turn it up, and guzzle it down.
He drank Nehi after Nehi after Nehi. We watched him drink half a dozen in a row until
he was about to pop. I kept thinking, “Now, that is one lucky bear!”
We would return to the Great Smoky Mountains to camp many times, but we would never see that many bears again.
Nor would we ever leave a dirty skillet on a picnic table.
Copyright 2018 by Jack McCall
