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Red Greets friends at the front
door of his shop, Golf, Etc.
C.H. Summers could be called many things, for all the hats
he's worn. He's earned the title of doctor and was for two
decades a professor at Bethel College. A master magician and
humorist, he's used his art not only to entertain but to help
raise funds for worthy causes, making him a philanthropist as
well. He's a businessman, a golfer, a world traveler and,
though now a widower, remains a father. While for most of his
nearly 91 years he has been known simply as "Red", most people
would agree that the title with the best fit for the congenial
gentleman is "friend".
Red can be found most days nestled among bags and boxes of
thousands of golf clubs wedged tightly into his shop, "Golf,
Etc." located on Main Street in McKenzie. A narrow path into
the store leads to a small alcove carved into the massive
collection of old and new clubs and accessories, where Red
reads and greets visitors to the shop, as well as performing
an occasional feat of magic.
It's a sort of oasis, though in the middle of a sea of
magic-so
awing is the sight of so many golf clubs-with visitors leaving
as refreshed as if they'd drunk long and cool from a fresh
spring in the middle of a desert.
"I've been in this business, come December 26, for 62 years,"
he declares. "I guess I'm the oldest businessman in town."
The business that began as C.H. Summers Wholesale Candy and
Sundries was located across town at the corner of Paris Pike
and Carroll Street for 30 years before moving into town. Old
visitors to both locations, then children, who reappear at the
door from various locales, smile in memory of Summer's antics
that always included a magic trick or two. And, they say, the
crowded shop hasn't changed a bit from so many years ago.
Red's own childhood, as one of four children in his family,
began in Henry, population 350. "It got to be 351 when I was
born and I had to leave town," he says with characteristic
humor. He also jokes that his parents used to move around a
bit, and sometimes they would forget to tell him. "I'd come
home and they'd be gone," he says incredulously, with a
telltale smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
He did leave home at the age of 15 during his third year of
high school, a move he soon discovered was a mistake.
"I begged a man in Henry to give me a job for a quarter a day
at the filling station," he says.
Just across the street, he recalls, a café where for a quarter
one could enjoy a meal with three meats, four or five
vegetables and a choice of desserts.
"Do you know how many times I ate there?-None," he says. "That
was a day's work."
In 1934, he came to McKenzie where he worked in a cheese plant
for two years before marrying Laverne Scott and moving to
Lebanon. There, he opened his own cheese plant before later
going into the insurance business. People told him he was
crazy to quit a good job to sell insurance, but in a month's
time he was making $150 a week instead of $20.
"I didn't wear a watch," he says. "I worked so long as I could
get somebody to listen to me."
So zealous was he that when a new baby was born he'd be at the
hospital in the hopes of writing a new policy, sometimes
before the child even had a name.
He grins upon recalling visiting a home in Memphis where a
woman was lying in bed, having recently given birth. When she
said the baby had yet to be named, he said, "Let me name that
baby for you," and bestowed upon the young man the name
"Curtis Hooper" the name for which his initials "C.H."
represent.
"She said, 'That's the prettiest name I ever heard,' and as
far as I know he's still got that name," laughs Summers.
The business took him to Gallatin and Murfreesboro, then back
to McKenzie where, in 1943, he started his own agency.
"I sold it out-almost gave it away-and started to work in this
business in 1943," he says.
Two years after his 1950 divorce, Red married Wanda Johnson,
who was working at "the dime store" when they met.
"She was a real nice girl, very religious," says Red, who
courted her relentlessly before she finally agreed to
accompany him on a date. The two were married nearly 40 years
before she died of myasthenia gravis two weeks before their
anniversary.
She lived 17 years with it, suffering all that time," he
frowns, fairly sputtering, and then lightens the mood again,
ending with a mischievous grin, "I'll never get married again,
well, not unless I have to get married."
Red says he's seen more changes in golf equipment in the last
15 years than in 45 years before that, with wood heads giving
way to all steel among other things. But the biggest change
has been in the way Wal-Mart has eroded his livelihood.
"Wal-Mart has chased more small business out," he says.
"Things I sold the most-balls, shoes, umbrellas, head covers
and golf bags-you can buy in Wal-Mart cheaper than I can buy
it. They mean to chase everybody out; if they thought they
could make a dollar off of it they'd be writing stories like
you."
In better days, however, Red was selling golf clubs and
supplies, oddly enough, for years before trying the game,
though he is fond of saying, "You don't try golf, it tries
you."
"I thought it was a silly game; people getting out there and
hitting a little ball that way," he admits. But when he had an
opportunity to play with some friends, he headed out with a
dozen second-hand balls. By the time they'd finished nine
holes, he'd had to borrow three more.
"This game's not for me," he told his friends, who coaxed him
into another round.
"I hit a couple of good balls and it just set me on fire!" he
says, "and for 50 years I played or practiced every single
day. It's the most addictive game I've ever seen; you're never
satisfied with your game."
A photo in the January 27, 1966 edition of The McKenzie Banner
attests to his assertion with a photo showing Red, Bob
Quesenberry and Jerry Weatherford playing in ankle deep snow
at the Carroll Lake golf course.
During his golfing career he had a hole in one, two eagles and
many birdies. He was forced to quit playing the game after
four bypasses and a diagnosis of diabetes.
Meanwhile, after he'd passed his G.E.D., school Superintendent
W.O. Warren in 1955 took it upon himself to enroll Red in
classes at Bethel College.
"Man, you know I can't do that," Red had protested, but he
graduated two and a half years later in the winter of 1958 and
moved on to Murray State, where in one year he completed his
master's degree and began teaching at Bethel.
Red with brothers R.B. (left) and Ray on the event of his
graduation from Murray State College.
"I taught business, economics and some sociology," he says. "I
told somebody I taught everything but the Bible," that despite
the fact that he took every Bible class offered at the
college. About ten years later, he began working on his
doctorate at the University of Memphis.
"It took me four years to get that," says Red, who at the time
was still teaching as well as running his candy and sundries
business. "That doctorate almost got me. If it hadn't been for
my wife, I don't think I'd have made it; she encouraged me in
every way she possibly could."
Summers was sponsor of Omega Phi fraternity for several years
and was responsible for starting the golf team at Bethel, a
sport that afforded many young sportsmen a scholarship by
which they were able to pursue higher education.
He taught at Bethel for 20 years, until 1980, and then 20
years later went back and taught for three semesters for $1.00
a semester. "I gave the dollar back," he grins.
Students from all over the country come back to visit Red, if
they are as near as the Memphis airport renting a car to come
back to McKenzie and see their old professor.
"I hear from a lot of my ex-students; they let me know they're
successful," he smiles. "They say I was a hard teacher but
fair and they always tell me some joke I told in class."
He recalls a "brilliant" woman from Huntingdon who sat on the
front row for three classes before telling him she thought she
would have to drop the class because she didn't feel capable
of passing.
After an unsuccessful bid to convince her to stay, he
dismissed her with, "Well, young lady, I hate to lose you but,
I tell you, it doesn't take a very smart person to quit.
"Next Monday there she was in the same seat," he says, his
mission accomplished. She later confided, he says, "You made
me madder than I'd ever been in my life; I just wanted to show
you I could do it."
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Red performs magic in 1949.
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Red still puts on magic shows every once in awhile, but he
used to have a hundred shows a year.
Magic is always sleight of hand, he admits, demonstrating a
coin trick in which the hand is quicker than the eye (the
reason that there are so many black eyes, he jokes) but, he
declares, "I have two tricks that will go with me to my
grave."
One is the method for pulling off a trick that sent a Kentucky
man to the hospital with a heart attack, and the other is how
he magically places a dollar bill into a lemon: when he
instructs a volunteer to cut open the lemon, they slice it
apart to reveal the bill inside.
In the first instance, as an advertising stunt, he drove a car
blindfolded through town, accompanied in the backseat by
McKenzie Mayor Robert Hearn, a preacher, and the mayor of
Gleason. The stunt was designed to prove that the 1956
Oldsmobile was so easy to drive, even a blind man could do it.
Red keeps plenty of rope on hand with which to amuse
visitors to his shop.
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The ruse was made more believable by the method of blindfold
employed. First, two silver dollars were placed over Red's
eyes, fixed in place with modeling clay, over which a black
cloth, folded eight times, was placed. A sack pulled over his
head completed the ensemble. Thus encumbered, Red pulled off
the stunt in McKenzie and then in Gleason.
A couple of years later, when he was invited to perform the
trick for a dealership in Harrisburg, Kentucky, the event was
much "ballyhooed", Red says, with the dealers leading him out
to the vehicle, apparently blinded. So convincing was the ploy
that one of the dealers himself had a heart attack.
"I've been doing magic shows practically all my life, since I
was just a kid," he says. The real secret, he confides, is
woofle dust, which is really just mud with the juice squeezed
out.
He proudly carries a card that proclaims him to be an honored
member of the Brotherhood of Magicians in the Order of
Merlin-Excalibur since 1948.
While he used to enjoy ballroom dancing in his younger years,
these days he enjoys country-western couple's dancing three to
five nights a week at various dance barns (in Henry, Paris and
Camden) and nursing and retirement centers 'round about, such
as Lakeside, McKenzie Health Care and Oak Manor.
"I like a band, there's just something about it," he says,
"and it's good exercise."
Red has been to Europe three times, first joining Eisenhower's
"People to People" goodwill program in a three-week tour to
some ten countries, including Russia, that took him to both
sides of the Iron Curtain.
"That was scary," says Summers of the barrier that separated
East and West Berlin, which was actually constructed of
concrete blocks glued with mortar or broken glass, atop which
ran barbed wire.
"I couldn't believe the things I saw," he says.
He and Wanda later traveled together to Germany, Switzerland,
Russia, Holland, Poland-about 15 countries in all.
His daughter, Alice, recently moved back to McKenzie. His
three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren remain in
Chicago.
Red sits in an alcove of his
store talking golf with old friend Rick Rosenjack, who thanked
Summers for starting the golf team that allowed him to attend
Bethel College on scholarship.
Summers joined the Rotary Club in 1943, upon returning to
McKenzie, then took a leave of absence after seven or eight
years. Fifty years later, he went back to the club. "They
didn't even have to swear me in," he grins. He was also a
member of the Lions Club in McKenzie for 25 to 30 years.
But he is most proud of his membership in the First Cumberland
Presbyterian Church in McKenzie. "I like church," he says,
allowing he attends at least once and sometimes twice a week.
He reads the Bible every day, and in fact is on his fifth
reading of the book.
"I like to read," he says, acknowledging the stacks of books
beside him. He reads several chapters a day in as many as half
a dozen books at a time.
Concerning his reading of the Bible, he says, only
half-joking, "What I'm really doing is looking for some
loopholes, but I can't find any; we've all got to die, that's
one thing we've got to do."
In the meantime, he says, "I like to have a good time."
That generally means time spent with friends. He shares a
letter he says, "I'm right proud of." From Larry and Sarah
Dailey, the letter reminisces about the times of Red's life
from the time he was a student at Bethel. He was "the kind of
fellow that attracted attention, and a fellow who was
personally attentive to others," it reads. "He made friends
easily and could be depended upon."
Half a century later, as Dailey considered a gift from Summers
that had since 1962 sat upon his desk--a metal cup inscribed,
"For My Matchless Friends"-he wrote, "a lifetime of good
memories remain."
Reflecting on Red's support of the rebuilding of the CP church
at its new location on Highway 79, he continued, "He shall
forever be remembered for his dedication, support and
commitment-and his friendship. Red, we appreciate you and give
thanks for your years of leadership, inspiration, friendship,
and support."
A loving community echoes his comments.
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