Songs from the Mo-Jo

I grew up at the Mo-Jo. It’s where I first learned about responsibility. About money. About when to keep secrets and when not to. It’s where I learned how to treat other people. Where I first learned about hard work. Its rewards. And it’s heartbreaks. I first learned about sex at the Mo-Jo. I learned the lessons of class. Who was important. Who seemed important. Who thought they were important. I learned how to be a boy. I learned how to be a man. I learned how to be a son. And I learned how to be a father. All at the Mo-Jo. It was my schoolhouse and my church. It was the one place that brought me the most delight and the one place that frightened me most. I laughed out loud there and I was scared to death there. Anything and everything I am today I owe to the Mo-Jo.
The Mo-Jo sat in the middle of a triangle. An intersection of vastly different roads. To the left was East Avenue, a busy street for my little town. It ran from out beyond the ballpark and Mr. Freeman’s fine, fancy home all the way through what folks back then called the Quarters, where the black families lived, on out to the Cove. You only went to the Cove if you lived in the Cove. Large Southern Gothic mansions hidden behind trees of Spanish moss were the treasures to be found in the Cove. Directly in front of the Mo-Jo was Highway 231. 231 was the biggest road in my town and it didn’t really do anything except give the folks north of us a way to get out of Alabama and down to the ‘Redneck Riviera’, the beaches of the Florida Panhandle. But 231 was good for the Mo-Jo. To the right of the Mo-Jo was Orlando Road. I’ve never known who gave it that name or why. My little town of Hiland Park was, as I said, deep down in the panhandle of the state. A place some folks called L.A. Lower Alabama. Orlando Road was a dirt road back then, when I was a child. And it was my favorite of the three roads that intersected there, making a nest for the Mo-Jo. It was the one I liked best. It was the road I lived on. I could walk from the house to the Mo-Jo in about five minutes.
Daddy opened the Mo-Jo when I was only three years old. I remember how big the sign seemed when I was a boy. The long slender steel growing from the ground of concrete. Reaching higher and higher. Becoming a large circle on top. Two lights, one on either side, straining out from the top of the circle only to bend down and look back at it. A false moon in the evening. A white sign with red lettering telling all who would come that this was BASS MO-JO. Our family name being Bass. This was our Mo-Jo. Daddy’s name was Junior. His first name was Bascom, just like his daddy. But Daddy wasn’t a Jr. Junior was his middle name. It was on his shirt. Bass Mo-Jo was the only service station you could find from just south of Dothan to just north of the Beach. A span of about 40 miles. And it was right in the middle. 20 miles south of deep fried country folk and 20 miles north of suntanned snow-birds. Bass Mo-Jo, which we just called ‘the station’ at our house, was a true service station. Not a pay-at-the-pump, fast food generation type of gas station that’s on every corner that doesn’t have a Starbucks. We offered service at our station. When somebody pulled up to one of the three pumps out front, whether they wanted a dollar’s worth, which was a very common request then, “Gimmie a dollar’s worth of regular!”, or they wanted to ‘fill ‘er up’, their automobile got the full treatment. We washed the windshield and the back glass. We checked the oil and water. All four tires were checked and filled if they needed it. And every customer was treated like family. ‘Yes Sir’ and ‘Yes Ma’am’ were words I learned early. They were handed to every customer like a gift on Christmas Day. Every customer. Rich or poor. Black or white. Christian, heathen, or Methodist. It didn’t matter.
There were three of us boys in the Bass household. My older brother, Ray. Al, my little brother. And me, of course. The one in the middle. Tim. A name I hated for years. Mama’s name was Georgia. In the only picture that is known to exist of her as a young woman she is dressed in a beautiful white prom dress leaning against a convertible. The picture is in black and white and slightly out of focus. But it tells the truth. She was a beautiful 17 year old girl then. The year she married Daddy. A year later Ray was born. I came the following year. Two years later my brother Al arrived. Bass Mo-Jo was born the following year. The next year, a sister, Frances. By the time I could reach the pumps I was already at the station. Daddy believed in hard work and just because I was a kid didn’t mean I got out of it. I was big enough to sweep the floors and clean the bathrooms and clean Daddy’s tools after he finished changing someone’s oil or fixing someone’s car or truck. When I could reach high enough to take the handle from the gas pump I was pumping gas. I spent my entire childhood there at the station. As did Ray and Al. Al met his future wife there. And his future career. He opened his own car service center, minus the pumps, when he was in his early twenties. Ray became a teacher and teaches just down the road from where the Mo-Jo stood for all those many years. And I have moved a long way away from that triangle in the panhandle of Florida. From that tall round sign. From the smell of gasoline on my hands. I have traveled a million miles or more since taking my last look at the Mo-Jo. And yet I can’t seem to go far enough to ever really be more than a whisper away from days sitting on a Coca-Cola crate in front of the station, wishing no cars would drive up to those old red and white gas pumps so I could listen to the songs Daddy loved, coming from the old green radio sitting in the window of the only Mo-Jo within 40 miles.