James Etheridge

Happy New Year to everyone! We are now a week into this lap around the sun and hopefully everyone is still observing their New Year’s resolutions. As for myself, I am participating in Dry January, along with several other aspirations, which will, hopefully, still be in observation by mid-February. As far as New Year’s Eve parties however, that tradition ended years ago.

When I was a kid I loved New Year’s Eve because it was the one night of the year that I was allowed to stay up past midnight. My parents and I would watch Guy Lombardo host the celebration on TV, eat caramel corn and other snack foods, drink hot cocoa and watch the big ball drop in Times Square at midnight. All that changed about the time I turned eighteen. The first New Year’s Eve I remember going out to celebrate was 1973 when I took two girls to P.J. Kenney’s in Underground Atlanta. Their names shall remain anonymous, but one was a very close friend of mine. The other was a close friend of hers, who was drop dead gorgeous and happened to be a cheerleader at one of the local high schools, which shall also remain unnamed. I bought them Singapore Slings and the cheerleader and I danced and gave each other a kiss at midnight. It was a great way to start 1974 and remains one of the New Year’s celebrations etched forever in my memory.

Things progressed or went downhill after that, depending on how you want to look at it. There were a number of years that a group of friends would gather at the Admiral Benbow Inn on Buford Highway in Doraville to ring in the New Year. Those were usually pretty low-key affairs. Then in 1976 the owner of Mother’s Pub in South DeKalb Mall threw a bash that was anything but low-key. He lived in Spanish Trace apartments, which were about a mile from the mall and rented the main clubhouse for the party. He sold tickets to the party for thirty-five dollars, which was a substantial amount in those days. That covered everything including kegs of beer, an open bar, a food buffet, a band, dancing and bottles of champagne at midnight. I remember standing on the dance floor with a girlfriend, attempting to open a bottle of champagne. I could pop the top of a beer can open with ease, but had never opened a bottle of champagne. I was holding the bottle by the neck, working the plastic stopper (yes, it was that kind of champagne, but who cared?) and looking straight down at it. “You’d better point that away from you,” she said. I did, gave the stopper one more push and it exploded out of the bottle and across the room. I’ve been leery of opening champagne bottles ever since. I had parked my Volkswagen at a friend’s house and rode to the party with another friend in his ’66 Chevelle. We made it back to my car and slept in his Chevelle, me in the front seat and him in the back. The next morning, New Year’s Day, was freezing cold. My buddy woke up in the back seat, kicked the front seat and said, “Etheridge, crank this thing up and get that heater going!” The only problem was, Etheridge wasn’t there. I had woke up at dawn with a five-star hangover, got in my Bug and driven home. The next day the flu set in. It was one of the times I can count on one hand that I have had the flu. I was sick for about the first two weeks of 1977.

Next year was a celebration that made the year before look like a grammar school girl-boy party. It was right after The World Congress Center had opened up in downtown Atlanta and they had a New Year’s Eve party to rival the one in Times Square. I don’t remember how much the tickets cost but everything, entrance, libations, food, party favors and champagne was covered. There were four or five stages set up with dance floors and the featured acts were the Atlanta Rhythm Section, the Charlie Daniels Band, Mother’s Finest and several other local Atlanta bands. We had all piled into a friend’s 1972 Chevy Caprice, which was the biggest car any of us had and the only one that we would all fit into. That turned out to be a mistake. We got separated from him during the evening and found out later he had split with a girl. We were stranded and had to take a cab from downtown Atlanta to Alexandria apartments in Lithonia. The driver said he couldn’t go that far but we talked him into radioing in to his boss. His boss found out how much the fare was going to be and told him to take us. We all crammed into the cab and along the way a couple of guys who had been jawing at each other all night started trading punches. The driver, whose name was Shorty and had on green patent leather shoes, pulled over and threatened to leave us all on the side of I-20. Things settled down, we made it home and chalked up another New Year’s celebration for the ages.

Over the years, things settled down and New Year’s became a quieter and calmer affair. For a while a group of us would meet at the Moonshadow Saloon on North Decatur Road. After it closed, the celebrations began to wind down. The last regular New Year’s parties we attended were hosted by friends at their home in McDonough. The parties were a gathering of a group of us who were and are lifelong friends. The activities included food, moderate libations, fellowship, possibly a poker game and, of course, champagne at midnight and the Peach Drop. One of the highlights of the evening involved a running bet between our host Barry, a dyed-in-the-wool Bulldog fan and Sloan, a dyed-in-the-wool Tech fan. The bet was that the loser of the Georgia-Georgia Tech game that year had to wear one of the other team’s t-shirts until midnight. One of the years Tech beat Georgia and Barry had on a Tech shirt. At one point I looked at him and said, “You know, that shirt needs some red on it,” and proceeded to squirt ketchup all over it. Another year at the stroke of midnight, Sloan ripped off his Georgia shirt and tore it to shreds. He wanted to take it out back and burn it, but sportsmanship prevailed.

All those times have faded into the memory banks now. The last time Jackie and I went out on New Year’s Eve was in 2013. And, we wound up not really going out. We went to Blairsville, Georgia and rented a cabin at Trackrock Campground and took our whippet Maggie with us. The plan was to go to Brasstown, North Carolina to see the Possum Drop. Yes, you read that right. For years the tradition in Brasstown, who refers to themselves as “The Possum Capital of the World” staged a celebration each year in which a live possum was trapped, put in a glass case (with air holes, of course) raised up with a crane and lowered slowly at the countdown to midnight, then released. PETA protested, of course, but it’s better than being run over on Highway 64 by a four-wheel drive Dodge Ram pickup. Other activities included bluegrass music, fireworks and a pageant where men dressed as women and one was crowned “Possum Queen.” We rode up to Brasstown the day before and the crane and bleachers were already in place. We visited the country store and told them we would see them the following evening. That all changed on New Year’s Eve. It was bitter cold, with the high barely in the thirties and expected to get down into the teens that night. Maggie was not feeling well so we decided to stay in the cabin, cook a pot of hamburger vegetable soup and watch the Peach Drop in Atlanta. Unfortunately, like the Peach Drop, the Possum Drop has since been discontinued, although they do have one in Talapoosa, Georgia using a stuffed possum.

These days neither of us would dream of going out on New Year’s Eve. We’re in our pajamas by seven-thirty and usually in bed by nine. But before we go to bed we have to load the dogs up with CBD oil because the festive patriots around our neighborhood shoot off not only bottle rockets but mortars, chasers, aerials, handguns, shotguns, assault rifles and who knows what else. It usually starts Christmas night and goes all the way past New Year’s. Neither of them do well with loud noises, Tilley in particular. She quivers, pants and hides in the closet. Roscoe curls up under a blanket on the sofa downstairs. So even though we may be in bed by nine, we usually don’t get to sleep until after midnight. I have come to the point where I really hope for rain from Christmas to New Year’s.

Other than the neighborhood sounding like the Ukraine, I really enjoy our New Year’s celebrations at this point in our lives. We don’t get on the road, we don’t spend any money and we wake up on New Year’s Day with a clear head and ready to start preparing the pork, greens and black-eyed peas. I have come to realize that every New Year’s is a blessing. I don’t miss the old days, but I wouldn’t take anything for them. Do I have any regrets about any of my New Year’s celebrations of my youth? None whatsoever. Well, maybe one. I kind of regret not being able to say I saw the Possum Drop.