At this point, I believe I must introduce a new ideology that I found to be a fact at least in this couple’s lives. Someone, I don’t remember who, told us that when a young married couple buys a home new babies come with it. We had kind of chuckled at this idea. I had long ago cast aside my superstitious beliefs and old wives tales. Of course I forgot nature does take its course regardless. In just a short month after we moved into this new home of ours we could even say when this event happened. Let’s just say I had afternoon’s at home while working as an insurance agent. Most of my calls were late afternoon, early evening, so I’d go home for lunch after making my rounds doing collections. It seemed my insurance company was one of the last that the agents actually went on their territory and stopped by the policyholder’s homes and collected the premiums. I’m getting off track here, so let me back up to the original thought. It had to do with afternoons at home. I think you’ve already picked up on the idea I’m pushing across to you. Anyway, after a missed period by a couple of weeks or so, Julie went to her GYN doctor and got the results of the rabbit’s condition. I remember the moment she drove back up into the driveway. Oh that reminds me of something else I need to tell. Anyway, when she got out of the car she walked around to the other side to the sidewalk where I was sitting on our front porch and said she was pregnant. Our first child was on the way.
Now, I know this is like, what the. . ., but I’ll let that part sink in and I’ll go back to that thought I just mentioned. As I said when we got married Julie didn’t have a driver’s license. She and her mom didn’t even have a car, because her mom didn’t drive either. So, when we got the house Julie was going to be too far from work to walk anymore, so I had been taking her to Green Lawn Cemetery over on the corner of Shipyard Blvd and 17th Street in Wilmington, because it had paved streets all throughout. I would give her the wheel and I sat and let her go with it. I figured if she’s in a cemetery who could she hurt. Right? Anyway she could get out there on a Sunday morning and no one would be there. One good thing about the Dodge was that the bench seat sat pretty high. Julie is a tall 5’ 3”, so it was to her advantage. It wasn’t long before I deemed her proficient enough to take to the DMV office near our home and take the test. Oh, she had also been studying the driver’s manual as well. I took her to the DMV out by where Thompson’s Restaurant used to be and parked the car in the parking lot, gave her the keys to the car and I went out and sat under the trees off to the side of the office. She went in and was there a while and then I saw her come out with a License Examiner and they got into the car and he did the once around the car and then they took out down the highway. In a few minutes they returned and went back inside. I didn’t see her weeping uncontrollably nor did I see an overstressed examiner, so I figured she come back out and show me her first driver’s license. And yes, she did. She could now drive. That meant one other thing. I needed a car.
Just a couple of hundred yards back down Market Street from the DMV office was a used car lot. On it sat several older model used cars. Something cheap was all I needed. But there was this little red car that looked like an escapee from some foreign country. When I got close enough to examine it, I found it fascinating. I liked the unusual and very different. It was one of the first Honda cars in Wilmington. It was a two door sedan with what can only be described as a four cycle motorcycle engine. It was two cylinder, air-cooled and the transmission was chain driven. It’s wheels were only ten inches. They were smaller than a modern day (2009) lawn tractor’s rear wheels.
So, I bought the car and instantly enjoyed the benefits that came with it. The Arab oil embargo was about to go into full swing and this car got something like close to fifty miles to the gallon. Don’t tell me the automotive world can’t do that now. I was getting that back then. I used it to drive my insurance route on five dollars worth of gas a week at somewhere around seventy five cents a gallon. Whoa, you say? Well gas prices at that time doubled and some from about twenty eight to thirty cents a gallon. That high priced gas back then would be a treasured thing to have if it were in this present age I wrote this part. The only drawback about this little car was its wheels. The ten inch wheels were rough on tires. The stock ones were narrow like a regular passenger car tire only much smaller. I found a tire dealer on Oleander Drive next to the Ford place that sold Michelins for a decent price. These tires lasted twice as long (about a year) and were twice as wide.
As the fall neared so did the end of my guaranteed pay. I was dreading it. Although I was always in the top three in sales every month I had figured my pay would drop like a rock. Selling insurance just didn’t seem to be the type of job I liked. Don’t get me wrong, I was good with people, but selling intangibles was a hard thing to do. I even sold a young couple a small policy on their child one time and they wrote me a check for the first premium and by the time I got back to the office with check in had the office admin had already gotten a call from them that they didn’t want the policy and had put a stop payment on the check. That always stuck with me.
One highlight that came on into the fall that blew my mind. Remember me telling about the hefty pregnant blond who sat beside me when I got my job physical? Well, I always went to the court house to the register of deeds office to pour through the new birth certificates. From that I would find the ones in my area and I would call or go by their house and ask them if they were interested in a policy that would afford their child something for college and still have coverage. Are you interested?
Well, I picked out a few names of potential folks and headed out that morning. I stopped at a few houses and after a bit I came to this house and I walked up to the door and knocked. This petite blond came to the door and I introduced myself and she invited me in. Her husband happened to be home and the baby was sleeping nearby. I talked to them a few minutes, but as I did the woman kept looking at me strangely. Then at some point she stopped me and asked me why I didn’t remember her. I was at a total loss as to what to say. I said something like I didn’t have any idea who she was. She kind of laughed and said that maybe it was because she weighed fifty pounds more when I saw her last. Then it hit me. Thinking of how old the baby was and all I realized it was the very pregnant woman sitting beside me at the doctor’s office when I got my physical. Wow, what having a baby can do for a woman. She was now such a slim trim figured woman. She was so much different then than when I sat beside her. I can remember this event in my life but for the life of me it overshadowed my knowledge of whether they bought a policy or not.
I’m trying my best to remember as much as possible, but sometimes I get into a groove and way later I remember something I should have put into the time line. Doing so will require me rereading my writings and hopefully I will remember to put them in. There is so much to write about the neighborhood we lived in, something to say about the people I worked for.
One such man was a fellow named Tom Smith. He was a pipe chewing old fart who worked the area up Hwy 17 from Gordon Road to Hampstead. He told stories long as your arm and didn’t miss a beat about Justin Wilson’s comedy albums. He loved working amongst the black folks up around Hampstead. He was good at helping me understanding how to sell to their needs. There was Charles. Last name escapes me, but he was an active church member and sang with a gospel quartet. There was another young man like myself named Preston Casteen that I was in competition with to see who would be the best newbie. Preston and I took our licensing exam at the same time and passed by the way. Spurgeon Bailey, the district manager was a church going fellow, too, whose name was drawn from a famous Baptist evangelist of the 1800’s. He was lauded as a “prince of preachers”. Well, Spurgeon was a good man, but he also knew how to work the system. From him I learned how to milk an account so it wouldn’t fall behind in arrears. I always kept my accounts above the line. I had very few who were behind in payments although some thought they were. That’s how I kept them paying like I did. Thinking they were behind made them more diligent to pay.
October of that fall, I won an award for salesman of the month. I had topped all of the ten agents in the district. Even for a country boy, still talkin’ lak uh redneck, I was able to manage a bunch a sales and get my status as sofisticated (sic) slick talkin’ salesman.
It wasn’t long after there was a district banquet. Julie and I got gussied up and went to a big dinner for the district. It was the typical back slapping ceremonious type of thing that I still abhor. But I got through it and all was well, except for one thing.
Raymond was really a nice guy. He was from up Nawth and still had the accent to prove it. He and I were friends. I went to his house a few times and met his wife and kids. He trained me in all the tricks of the trade and then some. I still kind of miss him. Trouble was he was woefully underpaid for being a supervisor. By this time I’d come off of the guaranteed salary and was on my commission draw. I was about right back to where I was when I left construction.
One thing I didn’t mention is that when I quit construction work my dad was totally upset with me. Hey, but what of it? I was my own man now and had a wife and a child on the way. He could complain all he wanted, but I had my own life to live. His remark when I made it known was “construction work always put food on the table, so why change that?”, to which I replied that yes, for around two years per project I would have steady work. Then the construction of the site would be done and so goes my job as well. I’d have to move with the company at my own expense and who knows where my nomadic life would be today had I done that. I’ll tell you what it got him before this story is done.
Now, I had gone downtown one morning and had done something I thought could cure my ills. I took the postal exam. I made a paltry 72 on the exam and got a five point preference making it 77. I had tried to answer every question on the exam. I later learned that to make a good score only answer the questions I know. Don’t answer the ones I don’t know. That way the score goes up. The ones I don’t answer don’t count against me since it was a timed test. I’ll mention this now that I took the test twice in later years and made in the mid to high nineties by putting that knowledge to the test.
The thing is having made 77 got me a call to come interview. I made a mistake of telling Ray and he told Spurgeon and they both lied to me that if I went with the postal service my maternity costs would fall on me, so I never went for the interview. Youth and its ignorance prevailed. I could have retired by now with full benefits. And on top of that the insurance coverage with the postal service would have picked the maternity care. For someone smart enough to sell insurance I was so naïve.
Well the first of the year I saw the impending loss of income when Julie had to quit work. That was going to be disastrous. My pay was hovering around the nineties for take home and with a house payment of $161 (don’t laugh) we would be spending almost half our month’s income just to have a place to stay. Julie decided in her seventh month to quit work and stay at home, so we began robbing Peter to pay Paul and things got tight. I’m making this story short, because it really wasn’t a pretty sight.
By this time I had befriended one of my co-workers who was hired along this time. He was already feeling he’d made a bad move and we began to plot. More on that in a second.
I was out on my route one day when I ran across this industrious fellow who seemed to be able to talk his way around, so I recommended him to Ray. Well being short a person on our staff, Ray went out to talk to him and he was hired. I remember his last name was Futch. He turned out to be a real character. He got paid one week and went over to the First Citizens in our shopping center where our office was and signed his check with one teller and she cashed it, but for some reason she didn’t take his paycheck for her intake and this stupid kid politely took the check on down to a different teller and had it cashed again and walked out of there with twice the payment on the one check. He then had the nerve to come back and tell everyone in the office and in spite of ourselves we never said another word about it. The poor teller sure had to explain that at the end of the day though, I’m sure.
But my man Futch got his comeuppance. He liked to party and he was single till one weekend he went to Myrtle Beach. He came in that Monday morning with the biggest case of the mully grubs you could ever see on a face. I asked him what happened and he pulled me aside and told me the saddest story I’d heard since the guy in the Army who married a Mexican prostitute while in Chihuahua, Mexico on a weekend outing. He said after a night of partying he woke up in his motel room, rolled over to find the ugliest woman he’d ever seen laying there beside him, so with all his best sneaking abilities he crawled out of the bed, put on his clothes and headed for the door. Before he could get the door open she rolled over and looked at him and asked him where he was going. All he said was “bye” and she broke his heart. She said he couldn’t leave her. His simple reply of “OH, why not?” was retorted with a statement that carried with it a metaphorical punch in the stomach. “Because we got married last night.” He must have been really drunk. I mean really drunk. But this story didn’t stop there. He was so suckered he stayed and when they were ready to come back to Wilmington she said something that resembled the second punch of a one-two punch. She had to get the kids before they went home. She had something like four of them little rug rats. Futch never in his life dreamed he’d be a daddy so quickly, let alone a husband.
Now in April our son was born. It was Easter weekend. Julie went into the hospital on the Saturday morning and they induced her labor very early. I came to the hospital and found the father’s waiting room at New Hanover Hospital and started my morning with Bugs and Fog Horn Leghorn. There were a handful of dads to be sitting there with me for what turned into a long day for me. Most every one of these guys became dads before the evening and were gone and there I sat. I watched TV till the Saturday Night at the Movies came on. Finally a few minutes after ten Jonathan Erick was born. Our Easter baby had arrived with all ten fingers and toes. Julie’s Aunt Florie worked in the L&D section and she brought him out for me to see briefly after they had cleaned him up. She had carefully wrapped his little head up that had spend way too long in the birth canal. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when I insisted on seeing him completely. The little guy’s head was pointed so much from being compressed that he looked like Beldor Conehead. I felt like we’d born and alien, but wait, the Coneheads hadn’t even been invented yet. It was only 1974. SNL didn’t premier till October 1975. Oh well, he still looked like Beldor. But by the next morning he looked normal. Those little skulls are so pliable at birth.
I went into to see Julie afterward to see that she was okay and I found her crying and I asked what the matter was. The nurse said it was the side effects of the laughing gas they had given her and she would be okay. So I told her how Erick was and told her she did a good job. I then told her to rest up and I went home. Oh, my parents had come down late that day and they were with me. We all went home after I thought everything was okay. Only problem was the next morning I called her room and she was not there. I then called recovery in the L&D and they said she was still there and there was a problem. She had a severe drop in blood pressure and the found she was bleeding intrauterine and after a nurse massaged her abdomen she began to pass huge blood clots and her pressure went back to normal. By the time I got to the hospital she was back in her room and nothing else was said about the incident. We thought all was well and in fact it was for now. She is O negative and got her shot. She said her breakfast that Easter morning was the only indication to her that it was Easter. On her breakfast tray was a colored egg.
