I must go back a bit now.  I’ve rambled too far ahead.  Mom and dad started planning on a new home for us when I was nine.  This wasn’t too long after the infamous turd throwing incident.  I remember someone coming to see us one evening with house drawings and floor plans.  At the age of nine I was fascinated with the drawings, since I was starting to draw things.  It was a three bedroom house with one bath.  An actual bathroom in the house with plumbing and everything, including a septic system was included.  That meant we’d be “living in high cotton” as we used to say.  It was so far above what we had.  It had a kitchen, dining room, living room, bath and three bedrooms.  Now I’d have my own bedroom.  Mike was growing up now and was more or less potty trained.  I’m not sure, but I believe this was one of those times I remember something that was amazing.  My dad and the man who brought the plans over went outside as dusk to look at where the house would be and the mosquitoes where so thick in the air you could swat your hand in the air and literally hit hundreds of them.  It was unbelievable.  Well, the day came and a big truck loaded with building materials arrived and it was raining.  It was late afternoon and my dad told them where he wanted the material dropped so the driver proceeded to drive across this field, which would become our new yard.  He got to where he was to put the materials and off loaded them, but then came a problem.  The rain had soaked the ground and he got stuck in the mud.  He was buried up to the axles.  Fortunate for us we were farmers with tractors.  It took till dark, but we managed to get him out of the mire and back on solid ground and he was on his way. 

 

          Dad was not only handy with farming and such, but he was a skilled carpenter.  He and a man named Jamie Lamm and dad’s Uncle Rufus formed a partnership and started building.  First came the concrete footers, then the piers and outer brick foundation.  Then the floor joists and subflooring.  The house came together quickly.  We saw it closed in and then the inside work of wiring, sheetrock and solid wood flooring came together.  It began to look like home.  I remember one thing in particular was the sanding those wood floors with the big sander.   Then they applied the sealers and such and got it slick and shiny.  The final things include of all things a real modern day washer.  No dryer though.  We still used clothes lines.  We had a new stove and instead of that wood heater in the middle of the room we now had a kerosene furnace that would heat the whole house, not just the living room.  Wow, what a change in lifestyle this would be.  Mom got a new stove, too. 

 

          I remember the move.  I was now nine years old and I would do what I could to help.  After all it was only a couple of hundred feet from one house to the other.  I had a new bedroom all to myself.  It was in the front middle way part of the house.  The windows were high up, so to see out I would have to stand on my bed.  The church across the road was now more directly out my window and my best friend who had a new home built about the same time was straight across the other side of the church on the other road of the fork in the road.  The church sat squarely in the fork in the roads.  One thing my Dwight had that I didn’t was a yard or night light.  For the first time in my life I would also have its glow coming through my bedroom window at night.  I wouldn’t be totally in the dark. 

 

          This new house was just getting settled into with Danny and Mike sharing the largest bedroom, mom and dad in the back corner bedroom and me in mine when the old adage came into effect.  New babies come with new houses.  Mom was pregnant again.  Timmy was on the way.  I was ten when he was born and we had the last of our black mammies.  I remember her well.  I just can’t remember her name any more, but if I do I’ll add it into this story.  She was a nice woman.  She tended to Timmy as if he were her own and mom could get some rest.  By this time mom was no longer sold on the idea of breast feeding, so Karo syrup and milk mixed and warmed was the formula used to feed Timmy.  I remember one instance that mom got after me for.  Our mammy was dressing in my room and she was in her undergarments and I was sitting at my desk and mom told me I shouldn’t be in there while she was dressing.  This coming from my mom who walked around the house in her bra and panties most any time whe was getting ready to go somewhere seemed a little hypocritical.  The mammy told mom it was okay and not to worry.  At that time I wasn’t interested in women anyway, so who cared.  Certainly not I. 

 

I was more into drawing my cars and playing with modeling clay at this time in my life.  I loved doing this.  I would spend hours making cars and tractors and other stuff with my modeling clay.  This is not to be confused with modeling dough.  That stuff would get hard if you left it out, but clay was always pliable.  My drawing though was much like my thinking.  I was developing a sense of symmetry and everything had to have balance and I also liked straight lines.  Most all of my cars had straight lines.  I liked drawing race cars.  I’d put numbers and stuff on them to make them look fast.  I had a desk now with a goose neck lamp and I would spend hours with my ruler, pencil and paper drawing.  One other pastime I got well into was reading.  My imagination would follow what I was reading with a fervor that gave me a voracious appetite for books.  I read every Hardy Boys mystery and then I started in on Nancy Drew.  I loved the mysteries.  But one of my most favorite books was a book title Sabre Jet Ace.  I have to admit I read this book at least three times and always imagined myself in that jet through every dog fight in the Korean war this title character fought.  Another less admirable admission would be this book was in the school library and my liking for this book lead me to steal it.  I kept it in my closet for years.  You see I didn’t check it out.  I just took it.  My room became my sanctuary. 

 

About this time I began to experience a problem.  It was around the fourth to fifth grade.  When I’d read I would get about fifteen minutes down the road and my eyes would start to hurt.  It would be unbearable and most times I would get a headache and would quit reading.  I guess I was about eleven going on twelve.  Things around me started changing too.  Puberty was beginning to rear its ugly head.  But the eye problem was more dominant.  It took till between the sixth and seventh grades before teachers at school convinced my parents I needed to see an eye doctor.  I remember my grand daddy and grandmother wore glasses.  Was I doomed to this malady?  Well, the trip to see Dr. Davidson, a name I’ll never forget, and the exam that caused me to have plastic frames wrapped around my face holding the lenses that saved me from headaches when I would read.  I was so farsighted it would just about run off the scale.  It changed my life at the time.  I had to be more careful now to not get hit or bumped in the face and break my glasses.  That was an expensive project for my parents to get them fixed.  At this same time they decided to go whole hog and took all of us boys to the eye doctor and Mike ended up with glasses for a while too.  His vision corrected as he got older.  Mine only got worse till I was in my thirties.  Then it leveled out.

 

Much began to change then.  Puberty was beginning to take a full swing at my maturing body.  I honestly thought sometimes I was dying.  Sometimes I would wake up at night with my heart racing for no reason whatsoever.  One night I got up with this going on and ran into my mom and dad’s bedroom and woke mom up.  She asked me what the matter was and when I told her, you know what she said?  Of all things, she said if I didn’t go back to bed and go back to sleep she was going to do something to me give me a reason why my heart was racing.  Wow.  I settled for no reason over that and went back to bed and roughed it till my heart settled down and then I went back to sleep.  Then something really strange happened.  I began to grow hair in places I’d never had hair before.  Hummm, what to do.  I found a strategy, but my dad more or less put an end to it when he started questioning me about why there was hair in his razor.  I swore I didn’t know anything about it, so I quit shaving all the hair off.  I realized about then that it was supposed to be there, although I wasn’t too keen on this new change.  The most sudden change took place in what seemed like overnight.  No, it wasn’t my voice.  That did irritate me though.  High pitch, low pitch.  Oh well, I wasn’t a singer anyway.  It was girls!  Wow, I didn’t know testosterone could be such a powerful hormone.  By this time I was entering the seventh grade.  My dad had decided to learn to cut hair a little better.  I was now wearing glasses.  My outward appearance had changed dramatically.  I was showing a more mature look as I was entering the teen years.  I hadn’t paid much attention to my brothers during this time.  I was too busy exploring who I was and those around me that were my age.  To back up just a bit, I will have to say when I was in the fourth grade I had my first girlfriend.  Her name was Taffy Hollowell.  She had a sister named Bootsie.  Taffy was beautiful to me.  I even gave her a ring.  But even that time was nothing to compare with the fire that was starting to burn at this new time in my life.  I think I must have been right on the cusp of thirteen when the seventh grade class I was in went to the state fair.  This was a rite of passage, as every seventh grade class under Mr. Leary went to the state fair.  It was a great awakening for many of us, including Mr. Leary.  He was overheard to say later that our class was the most “mature” class he’d ever taught. 

 

This comment came from the fact that the lot of us learned to “make out” during the trip back from the fair.  I was a bit gentlemanly and mostly shy, but bold enough to take to a girl on the way back.  Her name was Betty Reece Broome.  Her boyfriend on the way up dumped her and I felt sorry for her and also found that catching a girl on rebound so quickly could reap good results.  I sat with her on the way back from the fair, but I never did more than put my arm around her and comfort her.  The fair was in October and we went steady the rest of the school year.  Oh, and I gave her a ring too.  The only thing that I wouldn’t do a second time now is that I gave her the same kind of ring I gave Taffy three years earlier.  It was a twin cultured pearl setting.  Betty Reece and I were always together at school.  Her dad was a member of the school board, a well respected man.  Somehow I had managed to elevate my red-neck status for a short while.  Problem was I was to go back to working on the farm the next summer and Betty Reece broke up with me at the end of the year because she said we wouldn’t be able to see each other since I worked the farm.  I was then relegated back to being a regular red-neck.  My social status was doomed to remain like this for a few more years.  One big thing that occurred during this time was the Beatles were introduced to the American public via the Ed Sullivan Show and Betty Reece thought Paul McCartney was the best looking thing in the world.  She and Susan Austin were best friends and I remember the talk on that subject. 

 

During this time I was struggling with my grades.  School had become a boring institution to me.  It wasn’t really relevant to me.  Plowing ground, pulling cockleburs, feeding pigs and such were my world.  How does world history relate to this?  I was now beginning to wonder what would I do with myself as a grown up when the time came.  I really had no plans at this time.  I was a “go with the flow” sort of person. 

 

At this time I became aware of something that I hadn’t put much stock in until then.  Church had played an important part of my life.  I began to feel a pull on my life that became very strong.  At thirteen I sensed a calling on my life by God.  Perhaps I was to be a preacher.  I would lie awake in my bed at night and preach to an imaginary crowd about their need for salvation.  I guess I learned the technique from watching Pastor Lupton, the pastor at White Hill Free Will Baptist Church where I went most every Sunday.  My dad always said he preached the Word on a deep scale.  I had heard my grand daddy preach too and his approach wasn’t all that much different.  Around this time my church experienced a change of pastors and we got a new pastor who had a son and two older daughters.  The son was about my age and had red hair.  I never did take a liking to him.  He was a bit too aloof for me.  Once they came all in tow to dinner at our house after Sunday morning church.  After we ate Danny, Mike and I took this lad for a walk in the woods surrounding our home and tried to get him lost.  Somehow he managed to get back to our house.  We were hoping mom and dad would have to organize a search party for him.  There’s something I want to say about the daughters, but that’s for a later time. 

 

About this time we would get week long visits from cousins older than me by about three years.  Aunt Doris’s oldest daughter, Nancy, came to visit.  She was beautiful.  Her upbringing in the Raleigh area got her constant ribbing about her lack of country smarts.  She’s say something like she was going across the street to visit and we’d inform her there are no streets in the country.  Things like that.  We had Aunt Mary’s daughter come visit too.  She was about the same age as Nancy.  Her name was Carolyn.  She knew how to roll with us, so she was more adaptable to country living.

 

From thirteen to fifteen became somewhat of a blur to me.  I don’t really know why.  Too much change was occurring, I suppose.  I do recall that about the age of fourteen I became enamored with a particular car.  Johnny Summerall came by the house going up to his house with this shiny car like no other I’d seen before.  It was small, sleek and fast looking.  I had to see it up close.  I followed it up to his house and there it was in his yard in front of his garage.  He worked on cars.  To what extent I don’t know.  He must have worked at a shop somewhere for a living.  I can’t say I ever knew exactly what he did do for a living, but he was going to work on this little car.  He jacked it up and was crawling under it.  He had the hood up and I peeped over the fender.  There lay the biggest motor I’d seen to date.  I’d never seen a V-8 motor before.  All my dad had ever owned were straight sixes.  This little car had only two seats and it was two toned blue and white.  I was in love with a Corvette.  About this same time my enthusiasm for cars was beginning to grow.  Fortunately for me the muscle car era was beginning to take on new heights with the powerful small blocks and the emerging big blocks.  I was totally onboard with this.  The second impressive car I saw at this time was owned by a high school student well ahead of me by the name of Terry Willis.  His dad apparently had money.  Terry drove his first car to school one day when I was about fourteen.  It was a ’63 Chevy Impala convertible with a 409 with two four barrel carburetors.  What struck me was for the first time I saw flash on a motor.  It had chrome valve covers.  Wow.