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Raisin' Delta Cain
by Kent Fletcher
My family once owned a funeral home in Cleveland, Mississippi, and I have stories to tell. Bodies and funerals . . . and sometimes a shenanigan or two. Here's one prank we pulled on New Year's Eve in 1968.My father, Johnny Fletcher, was the Christmas parade marshal for many years in Cleveland. He also took on the task of buying and setting up fireworks displays, usually during Homecoming at Delta State College/University. The fireworks he used for starting parades weren't really fireworks, just mortars that got everyone's attention when a parade was to begin.
Johnny died in November, 1965. Thus ended an event and a tradition that to my knowledge no one has ever taken on since. In December, 1968, my brother Jack and I were rummaging around in the garage behind the funeral home, just looking in some old casket shipping crates that Johnny had procured over the years and where he had stuffed "things" that were working parts of his inventions, tools, and the like. Way back in the corner of this garage, we found an older shipping crate, which was nailed shut. We finally got it pried open, and what a nice surprise! This particular crate was the one he used to store his fireworks, and there were a couple of loose mortars in there! We drug them out, trying to determine how volatile they were, for if you know anything about gunpowder, the older stuff can be quite tricky sometimes. The powder was dry, the mortars were still pretty solid, and the ideas on how to dispose of these two things were starting to churn in two mischievous minds.
There was a back gate to the funeral home lot between the garage and the Delta Hardware building, opening up on Bayou Road. It was here Ted Campbell and Madeline Fletcher loaded the flowers after a service at the funeral home, and then beat a path up to the cemetery well ahead of the funeral procession. At that time, this particular drive was not paved, but sparsely blacktopped. Jack and I determined that the blacktop was also diggable, so we found a posthole digger, and dug a one foot hole, straight down. We had also determined that New Year's Eve would be the perfect time to shoot one of them. This was all going on between Christmas and New Year's Eve.
As I was still single, I was automatically the designated firing fiend. Around 11 p.m., I drove to the funeral home on the pretense of just checking the property out, making sure there weren't any "ghosts" running around, anything like that. I parked my old Chevy in plain site at first, then slowly rolled around behind the funeral home by the back door to the garage. I slipped the door open and found the mortar sleeve and the mortar, walked out in the dark and put the articles in the hole we had dug a couple of days before. Then I sat and waited for all the fireworks, pistols and rifles, and other whizbangs to start going off all around town, signaling in the New Year.
The time finally arrived. I could hear small firecrackers being lit, a few rifles and pistols being fired into the air (I guess no one thought about what goes up must also come down!), and waited just another minute or two. Shaking with anticipation, I lit the fuse, jumped in the car and drove toward the front of the funeral home toward Central Avenue. About halfway there, the mortar went off. Talk about a thunderous explosion! LOUD! A six-inch mortar carries a heck of a punch. I got out of the car about this time, and watched the trail of sparks. It went up several hundred feet or so--about normal, I thought--and then it started arcing over in a southerly direction. It should have gone straight up. Ohmygosh (and other deleted expletives!), I thought it was going to land somewhere before it blew. I was starting to sweat bullets by now.
As it turned out, it finally ignited/exploded about a hundred feet over the police station. Where the water tower used to be. Whew! Talk about a lucky break. Needless to say, all the firecrackers and rifles and pistols ceased exploding and firing, and all was deathly quiet.
When I got to the police station, a couple or three of the night duty policemen were standing out front, looking up in the air, looking around on the ground, or just simply looking dumfounded. I drove by, wished them a Happy New Year. They kinda-sorta waved, but they were trying to figure out what in the heck had just happened. I was old enough to know better than to do such a dangerous, stupid thing, but it sure livened things up that night in our small Mississippi Delta town. We do have a reputation for finding our entertainment in strange places.
Fletcher Funeral Home? Nah, Fletcher FUN Home was a better name for that place . . . from time to time.
Read Cliff Prewett's sequel to this story by clicking here.
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The messages have been so interesting to read. It's fun to remember the days back when we were in those classrooms and a few things we might have done (or did not do) that got us called into the office! It has been interesting to go to the reunions and see someone different we might not have seen since graduation. Must say I have had trouble trying to remember names!! Thanks to all of you who have worked to put this all together to share with everyone....snip