Good Morning Tellers Gap!

Good Glorious Morning Tellers Gap. WGTL We Got the Love news time is 6:05 a.m. It is a quiet morning in Tellers Gap. Temperatures are a little on the cool side. The First National Bank clock thermometer outside Studio A says it’s a brisk 46 degrees so bundle up those jackets on your way to work and school…
The Main Street Transit Car Company used to run a single streetcar up and down Main Street from the front steps of the Second First Baptist Church on the western most end through town and around the square on to its eastern most end and the steps of the First First Baptist Church. The tracks were paved over when the Main Street Transit closed up in 1966 and the lone streetcar put on display along the bend in the courthouse lawn resting in perpetual transit on a 20-foot section of track.
The streetcar would take a one and a half turn around the square on each pass through town and you could make the half-mile run for a nickel a ride.
Days start early here when sunrise is just a fool’s folly as the first lights about the square flash on sometime after five. It is a race sometimes to see who gets their day started first. Either Nick and his twin girls Mavis and Marietta at the Dew Drop Inn frying up bacon and sausage in anticipation of the breakfast crowd that starts hitting the door shortly after 6 AM or the lights inside WGTL’s Studio A on the second floor of the First National Bank building where news director and office manager Ginny Elrod shows up in house coat and pink fuzzy slippers to start scouring the newspapers and church bulletins for her morning newscast.
The buildings assembled about the square looking like plastic game pieces arranged on a Monopoly board had weathered the ravages of time quite well. Across the square from Nick’s and his angled tin awning that creates the worst racket during thunderstorms is the First National Bank building looking all regal and fortress-like with its granite and marble façade and latticed brickwork to look like battlements along the rooftop that says to all customers, “Your money is safe and sound here.”
The WGTL sign flashes continuously atop the bank, a sore spot for many Tellers Gapians whose bedroom windows have the misfortune of facing the square.
The letters W… G… T… and L blink in bright red one after the other then flash on and off three times. To Complete the light show the words “We… got… the… LOVE!” flash in a subscript sweeping up from the base of the W to the trunk of the L in bright white. The light bulbs behind the words “the” and “LOVE!” burned out three years ago and were never replaced, so now it simply says “We got …” and leaves the rest to your imagination, which along the counter at Nick’s or in Buddy’s barber chairs have run the spectrum of transmittable diseases to mental afflictions to bad disco songs of the 70s.
The sign had been erected after the war by then owner Two Bob Perkle (called Two Bob because he was named Robert Robert Perkle after both his granddaddies. Rob and Bob didn’t get along very well. Rather than share a name “with that no-good two-timing low life son of a – ” as apparently each dallied a little fling back in high school with the other’s then to be wife they opted instead for Robert Robert).
Originally the sign said, “We got the Lord!” when the station ran a Southern gospel format but was changed to “LOVE!” when Brother Jasper took over the station after Uncle Two Bob died in 1988.
Originally Brother Jasper changed from Southern gospel to a country oldies format until he recorded his only hole-in-one during the Tellers Gap Open in 1996, a 7-iron shot from 169 yards that two-hopped into the hole.
Jasper claimed to have seen Jesus holding the flagstick before teeing off and dropped to his knees after “Jesus guided my ball into the cup.” Kind of like a Sunday school version of Bagger Vance, Brother Jasper says when he recounts his being saved.
WGTL has run a Southern gospel format ever since.
Ginny Elrod even went so far as to sue the town for not making WGTL remove the sign as the day-in-and-day-out flashing of lights outside her office window, according to Ginny’s affidavit, caused her outbreak of Tourette’s.
At 5:30 a.m. Deputy Dewey makes the walk across the courthouse lawn from Nick’s where he gets a thermos of coffee and a Big Man’s Breakfast Special to-go to take his seat high atop the First National Bank building for his eye-in-the-sky traffic reports during WGTL’s morning newscasts, Monday through Friday, rain or shine, all year long. Deputy Dewey’s Eye in the Sky Traffic is brought to you every morning by your Hometown Pharmacy and General Store, “where we give you exactly what the doctor ordered.”
The blue neon sign that says Millie’s Cut N Clip flashes on at quarter til six as Millie Whelchel (Buddy’s wife) likes to have the coffee as hot as the curling iron by the time she starts taking appointments at 7 a.m. Buddy doesn’t fire up the barber pole at the shop until 7:30 but he can normally be found sitting at his corner stool at Nick’s by 6:30 sipping coffee and eating his usual short stack with blueberry syrup.
At 5:55 a.m. the bells atop the Second First Baptist Church sound saying it’s fixin’ to be time to get up, and at six sharp the bells atop the First First Baptist Church tell all of Tellers Gap it’s time to rise and shine.
Commenting on the Second First Baptist Church’s obsession at being first, Pastor Brother W.T. (Dubya Tay) Howell of First First says, “It just goes hand in hand with anything you hear come out of Pastor Brother Love. You just hit the snooze button, roll over and go back to sleep for five more minutes.”

Episode 2: This is what started everything...

This is what started everything…
Dawn is just a faint smear of color staining the dark horizon behind him. To the west, far beyond the lake’s great dark windowpane, the first flickers of the approaching thunderstorm pulsate a muted yellow inside the chests of the great storm leviathans reaching for the top of the sky.
A heavy stillness settles about the early morning as if God Himself dare not breathe.
This is Death’s Quiet.
Even the leaves dare not rustle.
Cyrus Ledbetter sits in his favorite lawn chair at the dock’s edge casting his line weighted with three clamps of lead shot and hooked with a big hunk of stew meat out into Tellers Lake. The lead weight is the size of an old cats eye shooter marble and is designed to take this bait clear to the bottom of the lake.
That’s where the bigguns live.
Both the stew meat and his breakfast of biscuits and sausage gravy come from Nick’s Dew Drop Inn. Nick’s gravy alone can qualify as its own food group. The doctors have told him to lay off the rich foods, but the way Cyrus sees it, if you can’t enjoy a good breakfast of Nick’s cathead biscuits and sausage gravy, what’s the point in getting out of bed in the mornings?
Cyrus gives the rod a few gentle tugs, scooting the stew meat bait along the bottom out where the ancient creek bed used to wind before the Corps of Engineers backfilled the lowlands here and formed Tellers Lake.
Few remember that little tidbit of lake history. The water in this bend of Blessew Creek ran deep, deathly still and very cold before it emptied into the Achewee River.
Even now, beneath some 80-odd feet of Tellers Lake, the water still runs deep and very cold.
Cyrus and his best friend Red Granger used to fish this bend in Blessew Creek back when they were boys. This was where he and Red first hooked the great demon spawn Big Blue, the king of all Striper bass, hooked him right in the side of the snout… set the hook deep too.
It was the first time Cyrus had ever heard a fish roar.
The monster was massive back then and that was more than 50 years ago… back when Red first hooked him… that’s when the war started between Red and Big Blue.
Like Captain Ahab and Moby Dick, the great white whale, they’ve battled ever since.
The slightest ripple disturbs the glass pane of liquid onyx, the faintest gurgle of roiling wake.
Poor Cyrus… his hearing isn’t as sharp as it used to be.
Only Cyrus and Red know that Big Blue has a hankerin’ for beef.
The great fish wears the scars as medals of Honor… valor perhaps… battles neither won nor lost, but survived.
The first is the remnants of an old tear tracing a jagged line up from the corner of his large mouth to betray a perpetual leering kind of smile. It is a deep rivulet from an embedded, ancient hook that had long ago dissolved away.
His routine is methodical… instinctive.
Food.
Meat.
While some insist there is a working evil mind behind those cold, steely gray eyes, certainly the soul of the Devil himself is trapped beneath his leathery back, there exists simply that which eons of evolution and close to a century of survival left behind.
Instinctive cunning.
There is no cold vile heart beating inside that white underbelly, simply the heart of a really big fish.
Only a few have ever laid eyes upon him, and fewer still lived to tell the tale of their encounter with Big Blue.
Over the decades yes, many have hooked him though most dismissed the violent returning yank to be the unyielding pull of deadfall or lake bottom, or perhaps a stubborn old snapper that refuses to budge from its home of sludge and sediment.
It is said that to look upon the great beast will exact a precious toll… the last beat of a terrified heart… or the final whispered remnants of a departed soul.
If the great monster Striper bass could smile, he would have just then.
He smells meat and with a great swishing of his massive tail, skids along the lake bottom to strike.
So great is the Striper bass in size, this is what creates the ripple some 80 feet overhead.
Cyrus had dozed off and didn’t feel the first tug on the other end of his line. Only when the muted flashes of lightning flicker beyond the far shore and the cascading rumble of thunder rolls across the lake does he stir.
Just as fear’s icy talons slither around his heart.
One other secret that only he and Red Granger share with Big Blue is the great Striper’s love of direct A/C current, a phenomenon that occurs when God’s finger points down from Heaven and touches Tellers Lake.
A jagged white snake of lightning uncoils from the dark cloud’s underbelly.
God’s finger.
The bellow of thunder follows.
That’s when Big Blue strikes and so fierce is the drawing of 20-pound test from Cyrus Ledbetter’s Eagle Claw HG Baitcast XG reel that it begins to smoke.
He jerks back hard to set the hook and sees his graphite rod bend from tip to tail. The reel’s whine is a banshee scream.
“God in heaven help me,” Cyrus utters and starts to stand, but even Cyrus knows… he is too late for God’s help now.
That’s when Big Blue explodes from the water, all six-and-half-feet of him, his massive head and large mouth looking like a garbage can with fins.
And he roars.
Cyrus gasps and like candle flame to a gust of wind, his breath is stolen from him and he sits back down.
The line snaps like a strand of hair and is left to dangle, floating on the first whispers of the storm’s squall as it creeps across the lake.
To the last, I grapple with thee…
His final words riding the wings of his dying breath, his toll paid to the ferryman to carry his soul across the River Styx.
This was the second time Cyrus Ledbetter ever heard a fish roar… and his last.
It set in motion all that is to follow in tiny Tellers Gap.

Episode 1: It Ain't Much But It's Home

The sign welcoming visitors to Teller’s Gap at the bend of Dirt Nap and Fools Gold Roads out by the town cemetery says, “Welcome To Teller’s Gap, population 529. It ain’t much but it’s home.”
Only now following Cyrus Ledbetter’s heart attack this morning someone had scratched out the 9 and written an 8 above it.
Folks don’t waste time here when it comes to counting numbers.
Barely a wide spot in the road, and nestled in the bosom of the South, Tellers Gap is as Mayberry as Andy, Opie and Aunt Bea.
Baseball, moonshine and apple pie.
Biscuits and gravy, grits and sweet tea.
Tellers Gap sits above a bend in the Achewee River, a little sneeze of running water that’s not quite creek and not yet river meandering listlessly through Georgia and the Carolinas with no apparent sense of direction or purpose. The Achewee is named after the lost Achewee Indian tribe, best known for a chronic hayfever condition and the inability to sneak up on their enemy in battle. They were wiped out back during the old Indian wars of the 1790’s.
Tellers Gap came to be when a bunch of procrastinating prospectors who had their sights set on heading west back in the Gold Rush of 1828, decided a day’s ride was west enough for them. Nobody seemed in any real hurry to go anywhere nor did they appear all that concerned about getting there once they started. They decided going west was too dang far if you couldn’t get there by suppertime, and this place was as good as any.
The Founding Fathers, including the town’s first mayor, Pennsylvania (Penn) N. Teller, for whom Tellers Gap is named, looked around at the expanse of mosquito infested bog and rocky outcroppings standing off the bend in the Achewee River and said, “It ain’t much but it’s home.”
Originally the town was called Teller’s Gap but back before the War of Northern Aggression not many people cared about schooling, book learning and proper grammatical use, so they dropped the apostrophe.
The town derived its name from Penn Teller’s orthodontic condition saying, “This spot in the road is about as wide as Teller’s gap.”
Legend has it that Penn Teller could eat an apple through a picket fence and it is a distinctive genealogical trait that has afflicted all Tellers since.
Patriotic Americans loyal to our God, flag and country, Tellers Gapians are good at three things: arguing, eating and church-going. We are a proud people, proud of our town and we’ll tell you just how proud we are as soon as the ball game or the race is over.
Here the stars hang so low you can actually reach up and pluck one or two if you had a mind to, and the smiling face of the full moon always shines down Main Street and the Old Courthouse Square.
We are a small town but we have two First Baptist Churches of Teller’s Gap, the First First and the Second First. We do not do our religion casually around here. This isn’t just the Bible Belt, Tellers Gap considers itself the buckle that holds up the Bible Belt’s pants.
We are the sons and daughters of the Swamp Fox, Old Hickory and Stonewall.
We take our tea sweet and our grits slathered in butter.
We consider biscuits and gravy the fourth food group.
There is no cell phone coverage here so leave your Blue Teeth at the door.
No cable either but folks do gather around the big screen at Nick’s Dew Drop Inn to catch the Braves, Dawgs, or Gamecocks and if Tellers Gap’s own Smilin’ Bobby Lee Renfro ever wins a NASCAR race, Nick fires up the old civil alert siren mounted atop the restaurant and gives the town a good yell.
This is a town where we teach our children to count, “One, two, Dale Earnhardt, four,” where there’s always an extra place at the table, where families can hold on to a grudge like a dog to a bone but strangers here are merely friends whose acquaintances we haven’t made yet.
We’ll sit anywhere and tell a story.
We’ll talk a yarn, shoot the breeze, pass the time, ask after your mom and them… we never met a story we didn’t like.
We love to tell stories.
Grab an empty chair at Buddy’s on Saturday mornings and catch the latest on the Great State Record Striper Bass Controversy. You can see the state record striper bass for yourself, mounted on the wall next to the air conditioner, or you can head across the square to Red’s Hardware and Sporting Goods and see Red Granger’s own claim to the state record striper bass hanging there.
You can hear Buddy say that half the lies Red tells aren’t even true, and then listen to Red talk about the real monster striper, Big Blue, lurking in the murky depths of Tellers Lake and how he nearly caught him one stormy night in July a few years back.
“Moby Dick he is,” Red will tell you with a faraway look in his eyes. “As big as a grown man and twice as mean.”
Drop by Millie’s Cut and Clip and watch as Millie puts on Buffy Heckler’s Face of the Week. Say what you want about Tammy Faye Bakker, but folks around these parts say Tammy Faye learned all she knew about expressive cosmetic design from Buffy Heckler.
That, and nobody can build a beehive bouffant like Millie. She calls Buffy’s current coif her tribute to the twin towers of Sept. 11.
Grab a plate of Nick’s own fried pickles and pig’s knuckles at the Dew Drop Inn and he’ll tell you the whole Chicken Leg Story and why Teller’s Gap has two first Baptist churches.
“It’s all about being first,” Nick says. “The First First Baptist Church chimes the six o’clock dinner hour every night. Well, the Second First Baptist Church did them one better by sounding the ‘it’s fixin’ to be dinner time at five til’.”
So grab a seat and set a spell.
Take a load off your mind.
The tea is cold and sweet and the grits are always hot.
You want to hear a good yarn?
Well, let me tell you about the time…