To fill in some more background on that part of my life, I had quite a few friends. At one point there were over twenty of us redneck boys who pretty much kept the neighborhood awake late at night on weekends. One of those guys was Dickie Walker. He was dating Vickie’s older sister Sue. Dickie had a brother we called H.D. and a sister who was in my class at school. Her name was Katie. She was a genuine female redneck. Well, there was another guy in the community at the time named Terry Jones. Terry wasn’t in our group. He was a bit older. Well, to tell the truth so was Dickie, but the Cayton family kind of tied him and me together since we were dating sisters. Well, Terry and Dickie were out all night with Sue and one other girl. They got drunk. Just before daybreak Terry and Dickie drop the girls off at their homes and go for a final run before going home. Terry had a 1959 Chevy Impala. It was a very fast car. There was an open stretch of road on Hwy 33 just past Edwards and they decided to run it out. As Dickie recalls they had topped 120 mph when they came up on a curve and Terry couldn’t get around it. He lost control and flipped across a field. For the younger people reading this, seat belts did not exist in cars during this time. Both were thrown from the car. Rescuers said Terry’s stomach was cut completely open and he was standing there with his insides exposed, screaming. Dickie was out. Terry died before they could get him to the hospital. Dickie was in surgery for better than five hours to repair his arm and all the other injuries he had. He was out for a while. I went to see the car the next day. It was like a roll of aluminum foil on a truck bed. It was sobering to me. The issue came to light that these particular Chevy’s had a thing for lifting off at a certain speed because the fins on them acted as wings. Check out the picture of the one below and you’ll see what I mean. That’s one of the factors that made the wreck so bad. Of course being drunk and running at 120 didn’t help either.
I was in high school now. This was the mid sixties. Civil rights was the hot topic at the time and John Kennedy had been assassinated a couple of years earlier in ’62 and about this time Martin Luther King was as well. It was all televised on TV. I spend the whole weekend watching news reports with the Presidential assassination. It was a horrible time for the country. Then when Martin Luther King was killed I was visiting with Susie in Manteo and was supposed to catch a bus in Elizabeth City back home. There were riots in Elizabeth City that weekend over it. I’d never encountered such a thing as this. And as an incoming freshman in high school a whole new life was beginning to unfold for me.
Even though all this was going on, I did have things going on in high school, which is where I am about now. Timelines and ages may not be clear, but I’m writing as I remember things, so just enjoy as we go. Eighth grade wasn’t much to write about. But let’s see if I can recap the teachers I had over the years just to bore you for a minute. There was Mrs. Cuthrell, first grade. Second grade I remember, but not the teacher for some reason, Mrs. Mintz, third grade, Mrs. Bonner, fourth grade. I remember her because her son, Mike, was in my class. That’s also the year Mrs. Redditt subbed for her. She was a trip. Fifth grade? I may have to research that one too. Sixth grade was Mrs. Sadler and eighth grade was Mrs. Dorothy Bonner.
Now for high school. I was always considered a smart person, but somehow that didn’t translate. Honestly, to this day I believe I have a disability of some sort. Perhaps ADD. Don’t laugh. I have an attention span like that of a child. I start something and in the middle of it all it takes it one little thing to put me on another track as being more important and I’ll completely forget about the first endeavor. Well, I took the usual subjects that year, except I wanted to take Algebra. Big mistake. It was too abstract for me. It didn’t have enough information so far as I was concerned. I struggled with it and flunked it at the end of the year with a 68. The teacher was Mr. Wynne. He could figure Einstein’s Theory in his head, but he couldn’t explain it for anything to me. I could not understand the man. And he wouldn’t give me the benefit of the doubt for being so close to a low D. So I passed four subjects that year, but failing one didn’t stop me from going on to my Sophomore year. Another mistake I did was sign up for Geometry under the same teacher before I knew I’d failed Algebra and was saddled with Theorems and Postulates. Guess what. I flunked that too. This held me back as a Sophomore for a second year. Now I was humiliated. See one of the things I got to do that year was be a waiter at the Junior/Senior banquet, which got me into the Junior/Senior Prom. At the end of the year I cherished it because I didn’t think I’d see that as a Junior. Oh, I had to learned how to do what is now called the Electric Slide and the Cha Cha. These are my only endeavors into dancing. I would never have qualified for Dirty Dancing. More like Ugly Dancing. But see, this was where my back up plan was paying off. I was a musician. What’s so weird is I wasn’t coordinated enough to dance, but I could play drums. That is a coordinated effort involving all my limbs to work together to create the rhythm for everyone else to follow. Go figure.
In spite of all my love life I have expounded on thus far, my freshman year, I had not yet met Vickie. But I had met Peggy Sexton. She was hot and most everyone around that wore pants knew it too, but I somehow managed to befriend her. We never really became an item, but we were close. My Sophomore year I was beginning to develop a better relationship with my classmates and I had more friends that were girls. My mom was teaching me how to relate and how to treat girls about this time, so it made it easier for me. Anyway, when I had to repeat my Sophomore year, my Junior classmates knew I was not cool with being back. One of the girls in the class invited me to the Junior/Senior, when I should have been a Junior. Her name was Susan Dixon. She was a sweet girl. I really liked her, but we never really had the chemistry. The only thing I could go for was she was big up top. She was self-conscious of it so she always wore jackets to hide it. I was very respectful to her for inviting me to take her to the prom. We had a good time and I promptly took her home afterward. This is about the time I was running the road to Manteo. Vickie was on the horizon.
I had a serious problem during that second year of being a Sophomore. I had a really great English teacher and I loved literature, but I hated English. I wasn’t doing bad at it and would have been passing except for one big time draw back. I had to take U.S. History that year and I had a gay teacher named Mr. Thomas Ragland. He used to like to sit on the front of his desk and prop his leg up and show his “package”. That’s a sidebar and I could say more, but back on track here. He would assign us to do oral reports. No pun intended here. At this time I didn’t mind playing drums, because I wasn’t out front as the main attraction when we played, but I was deathly afraid of public speaking. So, to avoid doing the oral reports, I would not do the assignment, thus a big fat zero. He would take these oral reports, grade the papers for content and then pass them to the English teacher who used the assignment to grade it for composition, thus another big fat zero. So, my second Sophomore year ended with having flunked four subjects thus far in high school. This meant I had only enough units to take me to my Junior year. Humiliation had taken a toll on me, but then something happened. For the first time in the history of the school they were having summer school. In order for me to skip the Junior year and jump to my Senior year all I had to do was go to summer school, retake U.S. History and English III and I was in like Flint. So, guess what, Mr. Peele taught the classes and she and I had a good understanding. I passed both course with an A. I was elated. I skipped the Junior year as in I was a Freshman, a Sophomore two years and went straight to a Senior. This meant I had to kick into another gear. I had to pass all five subjects that year to graduate with my class. I was stoked to do this. Vickie and I were an item that year. It was also the first year of total desegregation. That’s another adventure in itself. Somewhere in here I have to write about being a wannabee Klan member and how I never got around to it. That’s not a subject many people like to talk about, but it is a part of my past.
My Senior year was full of adventure. It was like I had awakened from a sleep and was aware of everything around me. I had some change coming in too, since when I turned sixteen and gotten my license I also got a license to drive a school bus. Student drivers were how the kids got to school and back everyday back then. We apparently were more dependable than students are now. We had very few incidents. I know of only one bus accident then years I was in school and it happened directly behind me my Senior year. Remember Shirley, my cousin? She was a very petite girl and they gave her a bus license and also a bus with very hard steering. None of the buses actually had power steering. The first day out for Shirley, we had gone from the high school to the elementary school to pick the little kids up. Well we were fully loaded and going out the drive onto the highway we had to make a left turn and proceed to the stop sign about a hundred yards and make a right. Shirley was leaving the school yard and was trying to make her left turn, but she couldn’t get the wheel to turn completely and ran the school bus into the ditch on the other side of the road. It almost laid over on its side. She never drove again.
Now for the skinny on my Senior year. Of course I was driving a bus full time. I had Bus 30. It was the route I lived on and fortunately I lived near the end of my route. I was coming into my own. Vickie and I were going strong. I had taken my friendship with my classmates to a new level I had not been on before. There was Taffy Hollowell, Ray and Fay Cratch (twins), Betty Bell Howerin, Mack Parker, Dana Hollowell (not related to Taffy), Bob Cayton, and a list of others. The list finally had depth that I had not had before. With my twenty redneck local boys and all I was pretty well known for a change. Not only that, but I had taken a step up the social ladder. All my life I had worn blue jeans and flannel shirts or something of the equivalent. My Senior year I had moved up to Hagar slacks and dressier shirts. One thing I had not noticed was some of my pants were skin tight. There was a comment one time to the effect that I must spray them on. Not all of my pants were like that. Along this time there was a fad for bleeding madras. They came in some pretty bright colors. I was able to snag a pair of pants that were orange, yellow and some other matching colors in that. Then there was the pair with blue tones. I wore the brighter pair to Sunday school one Sunday morning and was the talk of the crowd. At school you could see me coming way down the hallway.
I was taking crip courses my last year. I took General Math, Bookkeeping, English/Lit, stuff like that. A sort of irony in this last year was the last half of the year we had gone through the entire math book and the teacher decided we’d finish the last half of the year in the same Algebra book I was using when I was a Freshman. Guess what. I made an A on the course my final year. Actually I graduated with two A’s, two B’s and a C. My big accomplishment for the year was I was on the high school newspaper staff. I was a typist and the artist for the paper. Being the artist was a bit overplayed. We did everything on a mimeograph machine. Drawing on mimeograph paper was about as easy as climbing a greased pole. My artistic talents had taken a good move forward. I could draw most anything by now. My straight line drawings from the fourth grade had now taken on more lifelike dimensions. I specialized in cartoon characters. I mostly worked on drawing the Peanuts characters and was doing bulletin boards in the hallways at school. Mr. Wynne’s wife was the typing teacher and was also teaching my bookkeeping class. The latter was my “C” class. She was about as easy to understand as her husband, but I was getting along with her quite a bit better.
This year, being the grandest year of school for us 25 or so who had been together for twelve years was a bit stifled by the fact that total desegregation had come into being. S.W. Snowden High School next door to us had been the “black” school. It was now the elementary school for grades 1 thru 7. The 8th grade was housed with us, so we had a large contingency of new black students in our class. There were about fifty added to our class that put us somewhere around 75 for our graduating class. I’d be crazy to say there weren’t problems, but surprisingly those problems were small and mostly isolated. We had a couple of low-life poor white trash students that were expelled. True to form, they never came back. They quit school. I learned a lot on how to assimilate, adapt and overcome most of the issues that came about during that year. I was beginning to dispel an issue I was most in favor of not two or three years earlier.
To back up a moment, I must explain that “two or three years earlier” statement. When I was fifteen or sixteen I remember standing in the driveway of our home listening to my dad and his cousin Herman Baker and another man talking about the black/white issue. The whole foundation of it was based on their interpretation of Biblical proportions. And you know what that led to? The Ku Klux Klan. There was a chapter forming in our neck of the woods. Herman was a Baptist preacher at the time, and may still be if he’s alive, and my dad and this other fellow were discussing this and I injected my desire to become a member of the Klan myself. They said I was still a bit young to be a member but was glad at my enthusiasm to do so. When the day of incorporation of the chapter came about a four acre field on the Tunstall Field road up from our house was designated as the first meeting place. It was full of people in robes, carrying torches. The gala wasn’t without it’s cross burning. The cross was probably 25-30 tall. There was a lot of who ha over it. I was impressed for the moment. I was also impressed by the fact that the Klan wasn’t just into surpressing the blacks, but also something of a self-appointed vigilante group. By this time Vernon and Lena Rowe had moved into the house Dwight lived in about ten years earlier. It was across the field from our house. Well, in spite of the things I had seen around my own house Lena’s indiscretions with other men became the vocal point of the Klan. I was awakened one night to a commotion outside. When I looked outside I saw a cross burning in their yard. She was being warned to cease these indiscretions or suffer further humiliation at the hands of the Klan. Now I must stop this rabbit trail.
That Senior year was a learning experience to say the least. I found friendship with quite a few of the blacks. We had that music talent show I mentioned earlier when I was playing in a band. The Fulford brothers sang R&B and were great. They performed next to us in the show and it was such a great time. I also learned things that were perhaps a bit shady too. One of the black girls was a brassy young thing who got pregnant and came to school one Monday morning with a story to tell. She went somewhere and got an abortion. It was illegal then, mind you. I remember her commenting on how sore she was and it was making it difficult to climb stairs.
This year made the past two years more memorable. The adults thought the Junior/Senior banquet and prom who be a source for trouble, so they cancelled it. What a big letdown. But not to be letdown too much the white’s put together a banquet for ourselves at the Berne Restaurant in New Bern. We all got together and shared our stories of our twelve years with one another over a nice dinner. That, I can’t blame anyone for. After all, I feel it transcended the race issue. It was more of the idea that we had endured 12 years together and had become somewhat of a family. We wanted to celebrate being able to travel those years together and come to the end of it intact. I say that because during those years we had lost some of our class mates, although none from our class. There was Aurelia Rowe. She died from CF. Most kids during this time were fortunate to live past seventeen or eighteen years old. She died at sixteen. Of course there was Terry Jones, from my earlier story. Life did seem to be cruel at times, so for our class to making it like we had was worth the party.
We reached the end of the school year and graduated with pride. I was most appreciative of being able to graduate with my class. It was a hard road, much of what I created myself, but was able to overcome. My mom and dad were proud. I was their first to graduate from high school. Danny didn’t graduate from high school. He quit school. I’ll have to get back to you on Mike and Timmy. Tad did graduate. See I have trouble remembering these events as I had married by this time and was living well over a hundred miles away. Figuratively I was living further away.
