After church service on Sunday, I was visiting with my Pastor. I had finished playing in the worship band, and we talked music for a minute or two, then he asked me about a recent post I had written about my uncle’s dog eating his false teeth. He wanted to know if the dog ate all the teeth and whether the story was true.
I am blessed with a colorful family on both my parents’ sides, so most of what I write is factual and as accurate as my old mind remembers. My cousins disown me, and the rest of the living family thinks I make everything up and have a mental disorder, which I may have, thanks to a bad fall and brain trauma I suffered a few years back that erased part of my memory. However, I didn’t need that part anyway; I still have plenty to tell. I will admit to embellishing the historical facts a bit, only to make the story more believable and easier on those who lack imagination. If I hadn’t witnessed the events firsthand, I wouldn’t believe them either.
The Pastor and I got to talking about my experience as a child attending the Polytechnic First Baptist Church back in the 1950s. I was young, only six years old, with no formal religious training or exposure, except for a few weeks of vacation Bible School in Santa Anna, Texas, taught by two of the meanest, vengeful old bags in town —old maid sisters who were as mean as a sun-stroked Rattlesnake. So my attending that church was a tiny miracle, because I was traumatized by the old battle-axes and should have been in professional counseling. My parents were always short on cash, so a cup of hot Ovaltine and some cookies were the cure for most everything, including childhood trauma.
The good Reverend Augustin Z. Bergeron, the preacher at Poly Baptist, was no mere mortal man. He came from the deep in the Louisiana bayou country, a small Parish named Chigger Bayou, which is also the home of Le Petite Fromage and her daddy, the famous Cajun musician Baby Boy Fromage. My father was good friends with Le Petite during his teenage years in Los Angeles, California.
Reverend Bergeron possessed magical, mystical, fantastical powers, or so the legend is told in Fort Worth. He could cure folks from almost any malady, and did so weekly during Sunday services. He possessed an uncanny resemblance to the famous preacher turned comic, Brother Dave Gardner, another southerner with a bombastic Beatnik style wit and a side wink at southern-style Christianity. Reverend Bergeron either copied Gardner or Gardner saw the good reverend in Chigger Bayou and stole his schtick, which was controversial for a preacher. My father always compared him to Brother Dave, saying his wit was just as sharp and funny. I was a kid, so I didn’t get any of it. I was two years away from discovering Gardner’s comedy records, but when I did, I wore them out and fancied myself a mini-Brother Dave: when I wasn’t pretending to be Mark Twain.
The congregation at Poly Baptist never knew what to expect when the service started at 9 AM. The chorus of big-haired gals in purple robes sang the traditional hymns, all boring and dry as a week-old biscuit. Reverend Bergeron would saunter in from stage left, grab the microphone off the pulpit, and start singing like Ray Charles. The organist followed suit, and the choir became Martha and the Vandellas. That’s when the place started rocking like a black church in the Mississippi low country, which was strange, because most white folk Baptist churches in Texas didn’t have music other than a choir, and no hot-shot keyboardist. The Reverend would dance across the stage, duck walking like Chuck Berry, spinning, falling to his knees, yelling “Thank you, sweet Jesus”, then crawling across the stage like a baby, and, all the time holding on to his lighted Camel cigarette and the microphone. Another blasphemous act, since smoking was deemed a sin by the church. He also had a large Tupperware tumbler of Ice-Cold sweet tea sitting on the pulpit and would constantly refill the tumbler from a pitcher just off stage. Some folks speculated it wasn’t tea, but hooch, and that was the reason for his antics. My parents loved the guy and would smoke as many cigarettes as he did during the service. Almost everyone in the church smoked and would drop their ashes on the wood floor, another sinful citation. An ethereal cloud of toxic blue smoke hung in the air of the un-airconditioned church. It was so thick that it hid the tops of the stylish ladies’ Bee-Hive hairdo. It gave the place a creepy feeling, as if we were suspended in the clouds or the fires of Hell were seeping through the cracks in the old wood floor. I believed it to be from below, and always kept my small legs propped on the Bible holder on the back of the pew. Satan wasn’t going to pull my young butt through those cracks in the floor.
Our family left the church a year or two later and attended an Episcopal Church, which was boring compared to Reverend Bergeron’s Baptist Church. I still dig Brother Dave Gardner.
Discover more from Notes From The Cactus Patch
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Notes From The Cactus Patch 
I have many fond memories of Brother Dave. I was introduced to him through my first wife’s family (may they all finally rest in peace), all of whom were around two or three bubbles off plumb. I wish I had met that family before we got married, not after.
Anyway, my wife’s mother, Pearl, regarded Brother Dave as almost being on par with the Holy Spirit in terms of seniority, but I must say I always considered that blasphemous. Pearl was a very odd person and the only woman I’ve ever met who had more hair on her legs than Smokey the Bear.
The entire family was from rural Virginia, and just like everyone from Glasgow, Scotland, unless you were born in Henry County, you probably didn’t understand much of what anyone said.
Back in those days, the Hopkins family had a television—a black-and-white console set, but it was only turned on once a week, on Sunday morning, because Sunday School and church services weren’t enough gospel. So the TV came on around 7 a.m. on Sunday mornings just in time for breakfast.
The rest of the week, after dinner for about 45 minutes, the family gathered around the turntable to listen to Brother Dave’s records. It was part of the daily routine. The crisis of ’63 happened when the sound went out in the console. It was a crisis because if any part of the console wasn’t working, the whole thing had to be taken out for repair.
Granny and Gramps nearly divorced over that fiasco. Although I was never sure whether the main issue was the console needing repair or Gramps moving in with the colored family down the road. Of course, it might have been the blasphemy thing, too.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Mustang, you have a bit of Brother Dave in you, that is a story in itself just waiting to be written. What a batshit crazy family, just like my own. Grandpa moving in with the colored family because they had a working console? That’s darn good stuff. Great recount.
LikeLike
You’re still brimming with the inspiration of your childhood pastors, Phil. I used to drink Ovaltine, too, and Nestle’s Quick. Remember the Moose? Since we didn’t have much soda pop back then, I drank Brioschi for the carbonated fizzle. 🙂
LikeLike
Nancy, I drank Ovaltine and milk like it was a main food group, which in my household it was, and also a cure for most maladies, including Monday morning flu, tonsillitis, the Raccoon Flu, and Polio. I never got any of those dreaded diseases. I tell these stories to my Pastor and he stares at me like I have an eye growing in my forehead, but he likes them.
LikeLiked by 1 person
No wonder I got over my childhood maladies 🤮 so quickly. I never realized it was the Ovaltine! 🥛
LikeLike
I remember the Moose for Quick. I didn’t get soda pop, or coke, as we Texans call all soft drinks, until I was around ten or so. We drank Kool-Aid ( not the liberal kind), or Ovaltine, or ice water, or water from the garden hose, which was my favorite: nothing taste like cool tap water with a little rubber aftertaste. There were these tablets called Fizzies that you dropped in water and they fizzed like Alka-Seltzer tablets, they weren’t too bad. One of the neighborhood gang, Georgie, stuck a Fizzy up his own rear-end, just to see what would happen, and after the visit to the hospital, our mothers took away the Fizzies. You can’t trust little boys with anything. Georgie also stuck a bunch of unshelled peanuts up his nose and that resulted in a trip to the hospital also. The worst I ever did was shoot my father in the rear with my Daisy Red Ryder BB gun, which resulted in my Mother giving me a butt whooping with the Tupperware pan.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Another fun and well-written piece, Phil. TBI or not, you definitely have a flair for both “tongue in cheek” and “flat out lay it out there” comedic writing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Well, Terry, you are much to kind and I am blushing right now, or it could be my high blood pressure, but either way, I appreciate you more than kind words and praise. Glad you follow my musings and like them. I have been blessed with a bag full of crazy family to write about.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I used to have the album you have pictured. Funny stuff.
LikeLiked by 1 person
When I turned 8, my cousins and I started listening to him, and we could do all of his routines by heart. I still have that particular album. Loved the guy, and I take it you did too.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, sir. I think my favorite bit was where the guy gets on an airplane against his better judgement. Something happens and he says he’s gonna give half of everything he owns to the Lord. The preacher sitting behind him comes up to him after they land and says he heard him say he was gonna give half of everything he owns to the Lord and “I know you want to start right now.” The guy says he made a better deal, “I told him if I ever got back on another one, He could have it all.” That’s the abbreviated version, of course, from memory.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Herb, he had some great ones. James Lewis, you gonna be here when John gets here, the motorcycle skit and all the others, the drunk and the preacher. I lived and breathed him for a few years. I remember the one you mentioned.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ah, yes, Kool-aid was the best dyed sugar water to drink on hot summer days if you didn’t have a hot hose available to slurp from. Everyone would walk around with different colored mustaches depending on what “flavor” they drank. I never heard of “fizzies.” Your mother must have developed quite an overhand swing with that Tupperware pan. 🤣
LikeLike
Yep, I had the colored lips too. Mom was a pro with that Tupperware pan, not only for storage, but for swatting. Her swing was around 80 mph, and it felt like it.
LikeLike
Too bad your mother didn’t pitch for Texas Rangers. 🤣⚾️
LikeLiked by 1 person
Baby Boy Fromage is a rather cheesy name, don’t you think?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, but he wore it well and made good Cajun music in the bayou.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s hard to find that level of truth in church. Especially Southern Baptist, where everybody thinks that even their future sins are forgiven (though not by those thereby aggrieved).
LikeLiked by 1 person
it’s hard to find that kind of Truth in church. Especially Southern Baptist, where everyone believes that even their future sins have been forgiven (though certainly not by those thereby aggrieved).
LikeLiked by 1 person
Texas Southern Baptist, it’s a whole different world. Cowboy hats, beehive hairdo’s, Camel’s, two step dancing, cussing, smoking and all that. My family were the poster children.
LikeLike