Okay. What next? I’m beginning to find more things to say about this time frame. I had glasses by now. My hair was long. At least on top. And I had hair in other places I wasn’t used to. Hummm. I had gone through some trying times, yet good as well. One thing I can say. Having started driving farm tractors at age seven had me into the farm truck by age ten. By the time I was twelve I was plowing and cultivating the fields and dad had given me thirteen acres of soy beans to tend by myself. He also gave me eight rows of tobacco to take care of and the money from that harvest was mine. But at this point in time, I began to drive the family car. Wow, that was so much fun. By the time I was fourteen my mom would give me the keys and send me to the store a mile up the road at the highway to get this or that. No one ever bothered me except Jody Sawyer. He was an old coot who lived half way between my house and the store. For the first year he didn’t know I was driving past his house. I don’t know what set him off, but it became a game of cat and mouse. Most of the time I’d slip past him and get what I needed and get back house before he called the highway patrol. Of course I lived in a community that was fairly forgiving and had its own highway patrolman living a scant three miles from my house. I got away with this all the way past getting my driver’s permit and was three months from getting my official license to drive alone when I went to the store one day and had gotten what I needed and had gone back to the car and started it. Just as I was beginning to pull away one of my friends who had his license turned the corner and halted right next to me frantically waving at me. I rolled down my window and he said the cops were coming and sped off. So what did I do? I just shut the motor of and sat there. Sure enough around the corner came the highway patrolman. He pulled up next to me rolled down his window and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was just sitting there. He asked me how I got there and I was honest. I told him I drove there. He asked where my mom was and I told him she was at home. Unbeknownst to me my friend had already beaten a path to my house to tell my mom and dad I was being picked up. Well, the highway patrolman told me since he hadn’t actually caught me in the act of driving to get into his car and he was taking me home. So I go into the car and we started home. Not a quarter mile from home I saw mom and dad round the corner barreling towards our direction. Well, all of us knowing one another we all stopped right there in the road and my mom got out of the car and laid into the man. He said “Stop Peggy, I not going to do anything”. He said he had gotten many complaints about me driving the road to the store and he figured he’d better do something before he got into trouble for letting me run the road under age. He was okay with my driving to an extent. He knew I knew how to drive as good as anyone, but he told me to lay low. I only had a couple of months and I’d have my own license and Jody would have no more fodder to throw at me. So I did, but when I was sixteen, you can bet I was at the driver’s license office to make me official. I was out partying that night, too. I was unstoppable from then on. I had developed a pretty good knack for driving.
I must relate this at this point. Along around the age of thirteen or fourteen, my grandmother had decided it was time to get out of the old drafty house over across the ditch. Our old house next to us was still a sturdy frame dwelling, so she had Uncle Rufus, her brother in law and Jaime Lamm to fix it up. They did a bang up job. Rooms were reassigned new use. The living room was still the living room, but the kitchen became the master bedroom. The hallway where we kept the Johnny pot and was the back entrance to the house became the bathroom. Yes, it finally had running water and a bathroom. The bedroom where I slept with my two brothers became the kitchen and mom and dad’s bedroom became the guest room. The porch was finished out complete with swing. An outside well was driven and a pump was installed to furnish the water for the house.
Along this time Jaime Lamm’s wife had died of cancer and was a widower. He started dating my grandmother. My mom used to get a kick out of it. This woman was my mother’s mother in law. Mom used to wait for them to come home from a date and would peep at them kiss under the porch light before him leaving.
Well, to make this story complete without going into a long dissertation, they got married at White Hill Free Will Baptist Church. I had a part in the wedding. My grandmother bought me a suit to wear to the wedding for being in it. I remember a 8mm movie was made of it, but I have no idea where that would be now. Jaime was now a full fledged member of our family. Jaime also had a side-kick name Waylon who hung around a while in and out, but eventually he was out of the picture. I really don’t know what happened to him.
Jaime was a carpenter and a farmer, much like dad, so he closed in the front porch and made a small dinette area off of the kitchen and the living room expanded out to make it more spacious. In the back he built a huge workshop area, but just of the end of the guest room he built another bedroom that was a step down from the general floor level. It had its own little half bath and a door leading to the work shop area. It was very nice to have this when Julie and I visited later after I got married. It was somewhat private.
During that time from puberty till I got my license girls were around and I had fair social skills, but I was still a backward young country boy that was shy. Nonetheless, I was finding out that sex carried a big curiosity for me. What with all the girls now developing all those refining qualities that drew my imagination to new levels, I was now wanting to kiss one of them and find out more about this thing called love. We’re talking about after I had already had two sterile relationships with girls in my class from previous years. It wasn’t until I reached sixteen and my dad had given up farming for the most part that I began to seriously look into this matter. Of course now having a license made this whole endeavor a new adventure. Danny was now twelve, Mike was ten and Timmy was growing into a school age twit that I was totally ignoring. Danny and Mike were only on the fringe so they didn’t count in my equations. I said that to give some perspective to my plights, as sometimes I was encouraged to take them along with me when I would drive the car out for some cruising. I didn’t like my style being cramped. I’ll get back to this in a moment. I have to build a little foundation to my first true love.
At sixteen I had acquired my farming skills and I used them during the summer with Danny, Dwight and some new friends who had moved to the area because of the phosphate mining that was now beginning. There was Danny Lee and Donald Ray Johnson (typical Southern naming, huh?). And of course they had another brother named Junior. Wow, what a stretch. Junior Johnson. That was the name of a NASCAR race driver at the time. Can you tell we were rednecks? This family didn’t seem to know when to stop either. They also had a sister that was the youngest of the family. Can’t remember her name presently. We all, except for the sister went to work for a local farmer who was raising tobacco and “primed” his fields. I found this job’s name morphed into “cropping” in later years. It was hard work, but we could make as much as sixty dollars a week doing this. That was big money for us guys. Barn hands got about $45 a week. Oh, I forgot. During this time we were forming the band I wrote about earlier. I know this is going in layers. It’s difficult to put it all into sequence so just bear with me. Little Bud Leary was working with us as well. He was about fifteen at the time. We all worked hard and got wet, sweaty, hot and still managed to get the crop in. Some days were over a hundred degrees. One time we had to throw Donald Ray into a tobacco truck and send him to the house to get under a cold shower. He suffered a heat stroke, but he recovered and was back the next day. Well, back to Little Bud. We all noticed one of the barn help was a young thirteen year old girl named Vickie. She was a little cutie and she had this thing for Little Bud. But Little Bud says he wasn’t interested for whatever reason. At first, my take was she’ll be a real heart breaker someday when she gets older. Problem was, the attraction for her to me became an obsession of sorts. My mind got all clouded and love, or was that heat, started to take over and I felt she had to be mine. Here I was sixteen going on seventeen and she was still a budding young thing. But you have to remember, my dad and mom married at a young age as well as my grandparents, so that redneck lifestyle was dying very slowly. Eventually by the time summer was over, the crops were in and school started I had made my move and she became my first love, much to my parent’s chagrin. Her parents weren’t all that happy about it either, but they weren’t saying much about it for the moment. Vickie lived a couple of miles away so she was close enough I could see her as often as we desired. She wasn’t my first kiss, though. Must I back up a moment? Okay.
My grandmother’s brother who lived in Manteo had an adopted daughter named Susie. Susie was a fast moving girl. They came down to visit before I started dating Vickie and there was an overnight stay where Susie slept at our house. That was a mistake. I was sleeping in the recliner in the living room and she came and got in my lap and laid her head on my shoulder and we naturally got all hot and bothered and we started kissing. She taught me how to French kiss and I loved doing that so much I think we made out for several hours. We never did more than that, but that lead to me taking trips to Manteo until she decided some Navy guy had more to offer than I did. She was only thirteen as well. Geez, I picked them young. Well, that’s when I had an overlap of girlfriends. I also dated Sue Campbell about this time and Shirley Hopkins. Sue was 16 and Shirley was almost 16. The oldest of my girlfriends at the time. I guess I tried to at least keep their names in the S’s. Remember? I broke off with Sue Campbell, because her mother was about to have us married in her thinking, and my mom told me I couldn’t date Shirley because she was my cousin. I had a problem with that because Shirley was such a good kisser. I later learned she was good at something else too, but not with me. Am I getting on the border of having to rate this story? Let’s hope I keep it clean. Well, after all this was when I met Vickie.
Vickie Lynn Cayton was from a low class family, but in our community it didn’t really matter all that much. It was what went on to bring this family together that made it such a mess. James and Geraldine Cayton had a somewhat sordid background. James was what we now call a player. Geraldine ran loose and hard when she was young. She had one son, who at this time, lived in Virginia. As I understand it the oldest daughter Sue was on the way when someone paid James $500 to marry her so they could avoid marrying her himself. I know who was named as the father, but I won’t say it here. He came from one of the better families in the neighborhood. Then came Vickie, then Rosemary and then little Jimmy. There are a couple of stories I could tell about Geraldine, but I can’t print them lest some young mind be given to bad thoughts later. I don’t know why I became involved with this family other than I was in heat and Vickie was as well as time went on to tell. Read into that what you may. Let’s just say at some point wild oats got sown. But that was a two and a half year adventure, so give it some time to get Vickie older before that happened even though she was still young. I’m so glad for the draft. The Army took me away and saved me from a very disastrous and likely marriage.
