Well, let me just digress for one moment. I’m going to have to tell this little tidbit. Having parked my car behind Marlene’s house was the right move. My brother got wind of where it was and took someone with him to do up the car, but Marlene’s mom met them coming around her house and stuck her head out the door and asked them who they were. They told her, but she told them she was going to call the police because they were trespassing on her property. This thwarted their efforts and they left without incident.
Okay, now we’ll start the wedding. I won’t go through this in detail. We were all dressed up like Barbie and Ken along with our wedding party. John walked Julie down the aisle while I stood as is typical. Ron was performing his first marriage since moving back to North Carolina. All of the wedding party was in place. The photographer was doing his job snapping pictures and Roy’s young adopted son was heard to say aloud during the ceremony that his dad had a camera. This statement was apparently made because he watched the photographer as he worked around the sanctuary getting his different angles.
I goofed my vows repeating one line twice in spite of myself, but otherwise by all intents and purposes it went well. Nobody fainted. Vickie didn’t show up to object as we had she might do.
The reception was fairly elaborate for the day. Nothing heavy was served that I remember. The cake was well done and traditionally ornamented. All the little niceties were done et al the cake cutting, the first drink, but no first dance. That had not come into as a traditional thing to do back then.
Then of course we had the bouquet toss and the garter toss and I kept asking could we leave now. Julie got a bit irritated that I kept asking that question, but eventually we prepared to leave.
Norcum had his car in the ready and we went out and low and behold my brothers and friends had done up Norcum’s car. I had hoped they wouldn’t. The bird seed was thrown and we were ushered to the car and got into the back seat of the car and Norcum and Marlene got into the front to chauffeur us to the apartment and then to our car so we could head for Myrtle Beach. But we couldn’t leave, because someone also went under the hood and removed the coil wire to the distributor and we had to get someone to fix that. So eventually we did get away.
We changed into comfortable clothes and said our good byes to all and struck out for our destination. Myrtle Beach wasn’t where we announced in the paper were we would honeymoon so as to throw off anyone intending to follow us. Unbeknownst to us Ruby and John headed for the same beach town. I don’t think they knew that’s where we were headed and only found this out after the fact.
Well, the trip down was uneventful. The thing I wasn’t used to was making reservations for the evening. We didn’t either have a lot of money. I’d only been working a couple of months and had spent most of my money getting a reliable vehicle to drive, so we blew into town with little money and no place in particular to go. We drove throw town and began to realize we came in on the tail end of the Sun Fun Festival weekend. The place had been jammed all weekend. Fortunately for us we came in as a lot of people were heading back home.
I still had a huge hint of redneck in me so I drove up to the first place that appeared to not be full. It was a Howard Johnson’s and I left Julie in the car and went inside and registered in my name only. Hum, marriage apparently hadn’t completely sunk in yet.
So now with a $20 a night room we parked the car and went up to our second floor room overlooking the pool in the center court. How romantic for being at one of the biggest beach resorts on the east coast. We probably didn’t have enough money for one of the more upscale motels with an ocean view. That didn’t happen until the mid 1990’s in Atlantic Beach. Anyway, more redneck jumped out when Julie said she was hungry, so I volunteered to drive down the boulevard and find a Hardee’s and get us some burgers and something to drink. Let me just say this. There were so many girls in bikinis in the place I found myself in a quandary. Isn’t it ironic? That morning I was single, now married and in the midst of such temptation.
I survived getting something to eat and beat a path back to the motel and we ate. And if you think I’m going to tell the rest of the night in detail, you got to be kidding.
Okay, the next morning we got up and I realized my car payment was due. How romantic is that? Still be a dumb redneck I didn’t realize I could have paid it at any First Citizens Bank, but I only knew I got my loan at the one in New Bern, so we decided to head back to Wilmington. We were back around noon there and got something to eat at KFC and ate at the apartment and then still packed we headed for New Bern where I made my payment.
From that we decided we were so close to mom’s we took on off and went there in Aurora and showed up at the door about the time school got out. We certainly surprised mom. She wasn’t expecting us to be anywhere near that part of the world. Not long after the school bus came by and dropped off my brothers and the first thing Danny said when he walked in the door was to ask Julie to walk around to see if she was bowlegged. He could be smart that way. We all got a laugh out of it.
Needless to say it was getting late in the day so we stayed there overnight on our second day of marriage. No details will be given about that night either, safe to say mom gave us her bedroom and the use of a very loud fan.
The next day we ate breakfast, said our good byes and headed back to our “new” home. Our furnished little one bedroom apartment off Lullwater Drive a block from her mom’s home was not occupied by a newly married couple on a daily basis.
That first week after the wedding was supposed to be a whole week off for me, but come Thursday I went to work for the only day I’d work that week. Julie said she cried after I left. What for I don’t know. I would be back by six that evening. I guess having lived with the work-a-day world and having spent three days off with her was enough. I’d never had more than a few days off at any given time unless I was laid off from work. Besides, both of us took the week off without pay and we needed a paycheck that week, so I worked ten hours, got my paycheck and was off another three days anyway. Julie did have her whole week off and it was the last week we took anything that resembled a vacation for some time to come. The next week the only pay either of us got from the previous week was $22 from the ten hours I worked that Thursday. Today that wouldn’t cover an hour’s pay at what I do now.
The next three months we fell into a work-a-day schedule and as I mentioned earlier, we had our nights at home, except for the nights she worked till nine when the store closed and I had my three day weekends. During this time of making a grand total of $144 a week between us we managed to amass enough money to buy a complete living room and bedroom set and got our apartment rent reduced by $15 a month since we didn’t have to rent the furniture any more. Now our total rent was $135 a month. These numbers are meant to give you, the reader, some idea of the monetary values of the 70’s era. Also, we were able to set aside enough money so that by Labor Day weekend in September we had enough money to take a long weekend. Well, I had one every weekend anyway, but Julie asked for her schedule to be worked so that she would have three days off and not lose any pay. We paid cash for the furniture at the used/new cheap furniture barn next to her mom’s home and still had a whole month’s pay set aside. We really only had rent, utilities and my small $40 a month car payment.
So that weekend, we set out for Morehead City and checked into the Buccaneer Motel on Arendell Street. That evening we went down to The Circle on Atlantic Beach and walked around the streets and ended up at the Ember’s Club in the middle of the circle. The Embers were playing that weekend and it was a good show. It was crowded and a lot of beer going down. Julie was still too young to drink, so the test for me was that I had to drive, so I didn’t drink. See, Julie still didn’t have a license. The night was good and the next morning we got up and as a young couple would have it, we ended up driving to New Bern and then on to my parents home to see the family.
Three days went quickly and we were back to work. From October on we started through our first winter together. It would prove to be interesting in a couple of spots. I think we may have spent Thanksgiving with Ronald and Becky. But during the month of November Cinnie got sick and had to be hospitalized. There was something that hadn’t been told me till around this time. Cinnie was 63 at the time and during the wedding reception she told my mom that she felt her work was done seeing her last child married. During her first stay in the hospital it was found she had peritonitis and was treated for it. Also during this time the old home place was going into quick disrepair. The ceiling in one of the little bedrooms was falling out even. There was no bathroom. Just a closed in area on the back porch where a toilet and a sink had been installed years before was all they had. Bathing was still done out of a wash pan.
Solomon Towers had just been recently build down by the Cape Fear River next to the ramp to the Cape Fear River bridge. It was a retirement home for the elderly and Cinnie qualified for it, so during her first hospital stay the family got her an apartment there. When Cinnie got out of the hospital she was still staying at the little house waiting for final approvals to be put in order and then she was to move. But she never made it. Just after Thanksgiving she was readmitted to the hospital for another issue with her intestines. The doctor went in to repair a perforated intestine and taken care of it and she was in the intensive care unit when in the evening of December 4th, she suffered a heart attack and passed away. So, six months to the day from the wedding she was gone. I cried for the first time in years with grief. Not since my grand dad had died had I felt grief.
