More bio.... after a bit of hiatus ........

Education Book Cases Books and magazines were all over the place, when I was little. My early memories were sitting on somebody's lap and looking at pictures from an open book. Pa, my Grandfather, who lived downstairs with Nana, was always reading the Charlotte Observer, or playing solitaire. I especially remember him in his favorite chair as the Sunday morning light poured into the living room through the glass doors that opened out onto the tile terrace. The big chair with wings, scroll work arms, wicker work and all from another era, was big enough for his lean frame and a wiggle worm three-something boy. His legs were not so good anymore, and I think it hurt him to be on his lap. One of his favorite comic in the paper was "Bringing Up Father", in vivid color every Sunday. While everybody else in the house was busy getting ready for church, I would pester Pa to read it to me. He always obliged, explaining the humor patiently, as I squirmed. I was amused at the surrealism of the strip. The funny way Jiggs was drawn with his hair a constant red cowlick, Bart Simpson for the 30's, and Maggie with her airs and aquiline neck and nose. Jiggs and Maggie, their constant battles, the Irish nouveau riche, a Beverly Hillbillies precursor. I was fascinated the way the people and objects depicted in the pictures on the wall Pictures on the walls would not stay in the frames, but became part of the living space. There was a juggler whose ten-pins invaded the space of the entire cartoon frame, going outside, the pins going to the ceiling. Things like that. A child picks up the details. I think that I became a bit of a rebel artist, exposed to comic drawing like that. I did not want my crayon drawings to "stay in the lines!" My crayons would bounce all over the paper, and the outlines did not seem to be the point. The wonderful color that my waxy thrusting, jabbing marker was laying on the page, the life that was being created right there, from my own hand and arm-motion, was the whole reason for this scribble. Pa also taught me about the playing cards. and about Solitaire, the seven-card spread and the nine card spread. Ace King Queen Jack. There was a lot of card playing in those pre-TV days everywhere. His friends would come over often. Mama would always be going out for a bridge game somewhere, or her friends would come over for games at the house. (I well remember being in my high sided crib, screaming because Mom and her girl friends were playing bridge in the next room. I got a spanking. I could only lie there and listen to the bidding. "One heart." "Two clubs". "Two no-trumps". My vocabulary grew.) In earlier days, before the War (World War 2): Often, Pa would have someone, almost always Mama, drive him in his big Hudson to the M & M Men's Club, on Union Street just north of the business district for a card game with his buddies. (I cannot remember what the initials stood for. "Men and Machines?") Decorated in heavy, dark, very masculine furniture. The place smelled of good cigars and leather. Set back from the North Union Street, beside the august Victorian Central Methodist Church, the municipal building was simple art deco in design, Bauhaus influenced. Down stairs was the Public Library. At the back, there was a big meeting space with a grand mural spanning the entire length of the room. An artist had been commissioned to do it during the WPA era, probably paid in part by New Deal Federal Funds, The artist and his wife came to town, creating much excitement, painting the history of the county in big impressionist strokes. The most attractive part was the ante-bellum era, with women, the artist's wife as model for most, dolled up like Scarlet O'Hera, and men like Rhet Butler. "Gone with the Wind" was soon to be released. The scenes depicted were framed in cumulous clouds. I do not know his name, but he was no Thomas Hart Benton, but it was quite grand for Concord. Outside the big windows, was the YMCA Public Swimming Pool, full of kids splashing the summer away. White folks only. It cost the same as the movie theaters, and I would later spend many summer afternoons splashing in the chlorine laced waters. Older kids and adults came at night. It was about all there was to do in Concord in those days. One terrible summer, a polio epidemic gripped the country, a desease that left the victim crippled someway for life.... and the pool closed and I could not play with friends across town... People with this Polio were put in “iron lungs” for breathing.... soon after, Dr. Salk discovered the vaxine and nobody had Polio anymore... While Pa played bridge and poker with his friends at the M & M, Mama and I would go "shopping" : walking past Belk's Department Store, the A & P, Mr. Gruber's meat market, Sappenfield’s Bar, another drug store, down to Uncle George's and Uncle Maury's Richmond-Flowe. I would get a cookie from Uncle George's glass cookie case, (an Oreo, or a fig newton. I was not allowed a Malimar, for some reason, but I could have a raison square, do not remember the name. It had a dark sweetness with a bit of bitter mixed in I came to love,) and go next door to Uncle Maury's haberdashery. (We never bought any groceries there, since the store made deliveries. Nana would order what she wanted every morning by telephone, and Shirley, a man!, would bring it early enough for Non to cook a great dinner for all. Pa would complain that his Brother-in-law was sending them all his over-ripe tomatoes) I loved the smell of the shoes. He had the best selection of everything in town. Shirts and suites. Socks and ties. (whenever I outgrew my shoes, Uncle Maury always had a nice pair of new ones for me.) Then we would repair to Gibson'

s Drug Store on the square, where Daddy worked, for a soda. Only I was not allowed to have cokes. They were still called "dopes", and were thought to contain cocaine. (I do not know to this day if they did. The formula is held under armed guard in Atlanta somewhere, in some vaulted dungeon. At least that is what we were told.) The tables were high for a yard ape like me, and I enjoyed scraping the chewing gum off from under the tables, which were about over my head. I crawled a lot anyway. Until I got caught, I would put the stuff in my mouth. Then I would get a spanking of sorts. She would meet her friends, Inez Eifford White, wife of our cousin Stokes, Miriam Coltraine, from the banking family, owners of Concord Telephone, Winnie Pegram Morris, Aunt Craig's sister. They did not work, I guess. Mom had quit her school job when she got married. Daddy made twenty-nine dollars a week at the drug store in those depression days. He had worked at Gibson's since high school, taking off a year to attend Davidson College, at 16, in 1924, just making it through his Freshman year! (But then a year later, went back for a second year....) meanwhile, Gibson’s waited... When the Great Depression hit, he still had a job... The Lafferty famly, present owners then, kept things going, and Daddy was very close friends with them. Plus! Eggs were a dime a dozen. A loaf of bread was a nickel. A quarter would get you into a movie. (Nine cents for kids under 12.) Back home, dinner would be set up in the breakfast room, between the kitchen and the dining room. Non would have a full meal ready. Nana would complain that the vegetables had too much salt and pork fat in them, but she could never break Non of the southern seasoning. Nana ate like a bird, a bite here and there, would take a spoonful of sugar raw for energy, and was quite thin, as were all her children. Pa liked hearty food, and would bring in hams, his one of his favorite meats. Steak, also, and would eat the fat, claiming it was the flavor of the meat. Hams, Nana would serve disparagingly. We always had fresh rolls. Nana did not approve of biscuits, since they were made with lots of lard. And store bought "light bread", was looked down on for its instability. Daddy would get a ride home at noon from one of his fellow workers, Pee Wee Bourage or Charlie Short, who had a plate in his head from an accident or war injury, I did not know which, or which war? "Much obliged", was Daddy's thank you call, as he got out, coming up the walkway. Bobu, Aunt Ellen, was still living at home, as my memories began. Before she married Uncle Laurin, she would walk home at lunch from Penn- Carrol Hosery, where she was secretary, or some other office job. She forbade me going into her room, next to the bathroom upstairs where we our rooms were also. After she and Lauren got married, that room became mind for several years. We all ate dinner together, and then Nana and Pa would take a nap for awhile, and Mama would try to, but she would have to read to me. I loved getting read to. Of course, Nana and Pa, and Boo, next door, would do it too. My first absolute favorite book was "Clementina, the Flying Pig" I had it memorized.... and if whoever was reading made a mistake, I would correct them....I could quote it verbatim. "Clementina was darling little pig. She was round and rosy, and had the curliest little tail you ever saw. No one ever ever paid much attention to Clementina, until one day, the horse looked at the cow in surprise and said: "What could that be growing out of Clementina's back?" "Its wings", said the cow. "Sure enough", said the horse!!!" Another book I loved was Peter Pan. It was much richer and more complicated. But Peter Pan really became a life favorite for me, since I hated the idea of "growing up". Arthor James Matthew Barry sure hit on a good note there, and I loved it. Before I was reading "Tom Sawyer" and "Huck Finn", there was Peter Pan. Before "Catcher in the Rye" and "Of Mice and Men", there was Peter Pan. I never forgave them for letting a girl play the role in the movie. (I later learned, Barry wrote the part in this play for to be played by a female!) Suggesting that any girl would ever have the bravery, the charisma, the intelligence of PETER PAN. I never forgave Broadway and Hollywood for that. Actually, the cartoon version was not bad, but I refused to see it for a long time, because I was sure they would get it wrong. The story was already a movie in my mind, and I did not want to see any revisionist version of my private fantasy. Mary Martin was OK as Nellie Forbush in "South Pacific", but as Peter Pan? NO WAY!!!! If I could, I would prefer to live in Never Never Land with Windy and have fun with the Lost Boys and Tiger Lilly and the fairy Tinka Bell. About that time, Daddy bought the Harvard Classics, on some sort of inspired whim. This big box of blue books arrived at 25 Georgia Avenue one day. I must have been 4 or 5 by then. A six foot shelf of books containing the greatest writings of all times, as judged by professors at Harvard. All subjects were included. Daddy said if you read all the books, it would be the equivalent of a college education at an Ivy League University! Science was well covered with both "The Origin of Species" and "The Voyage of the Beagle". Essays by Faraday and Heimholtz, Kelvin and Newton. William Henry Huxley. Philosophy: Descartes, Socrates, Hume. And much much more. Literature was especially well represented: every thing from the Bible to I Promissi Sposi. The divine Comedy, Paradise Lost. Religion. Shakespeare. Mama read to me from"Folklore and Fable". Fontaine, to whom we were supposedly kin, Grimm and Anderson. Aesop. The stories were bloody and brutal. But I loved them. Mama liked to read these lying on the bed after lunch, begging me not to wiggle and squirm so much. Snow White and Rose Red. Strange beings with strange names. Rumplestilskin! Repunsel. Cyclops. Billy Goats Gruff. Boo was the best reader. Every Sunday, especially, after church, on her front porch in warm weather. Roses bloomed on an trellis over the end of this porch every spring. We sat in big green rockers, or on the floor, leaning against the bannisters. She wore these wire rimmed reading glasses, and made the stories so interesting. We would always start out with the Bible. We read through the Old Testament. She abridged a bit, leaving out the confusing and monotonous genealogies, the "begets". And the laws in Leviticus and Numbers and all. But I was quite familiar with Noah, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and the magic ladder and wrestling with the Angel. Joseph and his many colored coat, and Potophor and Potaphor's lecherous wife. Samuel. David and Jonathan and Saul. Absolom and Soloman. After the Bible, came the secular. Twain's "Tom Sawyer" or "Huck Finn". Hardy Boys, I loved, and dog books like "Bob, Son of Battle". She read one called "Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks With the Circus", which described its characters so vividly, I still remember them. Also "Alice in Wonderland". Every Christmas, she would read Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". I delighted in Scrooge and Marley and the vivid depiction of the ghosts. Quite a stretching for a child to grasp the rich language and illusions of Dickens Victorian rhetoric. I liked Scrooge and his gruffness. He was like all the men I knew. Uncle George and Uncle Maury. Daddy, even. Self-righteous, intolerant, self assured. They tended to look down on the Bob Cratchet's and Tiny Tim's that were abroad as always. The opposite of Boo, who was as tolerant and giving, as loving as Jesus, Himself, or any saint you could name. The care-giver. Too bad, their was no one to be her care-giver, and she died in the State Hospital for the Indigent, alone, abandoned by all those she had cared for in her life. Family love as its limits, sad to say. Such is the nature of modern American reality. Boo was such a great reader, and this custom continued a while after I learned to read myself. Maury and Chal were read to up into there teens, it seems, for one Sunday, they had her reading "Of Mice and Men." Things were going along OK until some of the working class language Steinbeck did not hesitate to use, came out. A few "bastards" and a "son of a bitch", had Uncle Maury shouting from the next room: "Willy Willy, don't read that to them!!!" That just about ended the readings. The boys long since should have been reading it themselves. In fact, I think they had. But books were everywhere in the two houses. At Boo's, my great grandfather's library, mostly in a tall oak case with glass door, contained some complete editions of Dickens and Walter Scott. George Hazzard Richmond had entered Lees Mcrae College just as the Civil War began. His brothers left home to serve, but our Great Grandfather, the youngest, got to stay home at Woodside and tend the farm. Wish I still had all those books, and the case, but Mama gave most of them away when she and Dad moved to the coast in 1969. There was Robert Browning and Longfellow and Bobby Burns, and Lord Byron and Shelley and Keats. There was Shakespeare complete. Alas. When Uncle Maury became so senile and had to go to an institution in Pinehurst, I spent many many hours over there, going through the collection, books from the 1800’s, Dickens and Walter Scott, Tenneyson and Robert Browning... It was my favorite hangout in High School, too, and I read "Catcher in the Rye", a bunch of Faulkner and Hemingway over there. In a platform rocker, in front of the gothic window radio. On saturday's, the Metropolitan Opera. In 1948, the Democratic convention. I learn about life and politics. How fortunate I was with many places to hang out. There was peace and quite at Boos... our house was becoming a zoo... Even the basement, my science lab, project emporium space, sometime theater, y (yes, Hugh Craig and I put on a Christmas play down there once) was not safe any more! Family gets larger: In 1941, I was 5, not old enough to start school... but since I seemed smart enough to handle it, they enrolled me in a private school: Miss Mary Probst set up a kindergarden in her house on East Corbin St. She then offered a class for those like me with birthdays after January, for first grade education... so we could start public school in the second grade. Then began my first love affair. Jenny Lou Gillon, a distant cousin, Daddy said, became the main focus of my mind... I sat next to her. I kept my arm drapped around her for some time as we learned the A B C’s.... and our reading book: See Spot Run... I was an unruly brat, and one time was sent into the hall for bad behavior, when who came up the steps but Winnie, Aunt Craig’s sister and Mom’s close friend! I knew dad would give me a belting when she told him I had gotten in trouble.... Winnie’s daughter, Mason Morris, a year younger then I, was in Miss Mary’s kindergarden... I tried to hide under the hall table, but it was not big enough.... In December that year of learning, a new term came to light: Pearl Harber... and we were suddenly at war... News on the big radio became important... and names like Roosevelt, Churchhill, Adolph Hitler, Benito Musselini, plus words like Nazi’s Fasciasts Japs... bumbers bumbs.. ration cards... we listended as a family in the “Back Sitting Room” as scratchy reports came in of manoevers, armed forces, all sorts of new words... squadrons, black-outs, bunkers... When it came September 1942, I started 2nd grade. The Saunder’s family had moved in behind us, and I became best bud’s with Conway: James Conway Sanders... whose father, James Partee, and mother Frieda, lived in a small rent house, with an outhouse for a bathroom... a wood stove in the kitchen where these great looking biscuits and veggies were cooked daily.. and a lunchbucket taken down to the mill some blocks south where Partee worked. Dollimae,(Dolly May?) Conway’s older sister was very beautiful, and I forgot about Jenny Lou. Conway by the way, explained to me why Mama was getting so fat! In a little shack he had built out back he drew anatomical pictures illustrating the birds and the bees.... as it was referred to.... replacing in my mind the fact that it was a stork that brough babies into the family. Conway told me all this after our first day in the second grade... he was put in a different room from me.... Mom knew all the teachers since she tought there before getting married. It was explained that Miss Annie Hoover was a better teacher for Conway, from a working class family, and I, an undisciplined brat from the bourgiousee, would be better off with Mrs Cassel, a must stricter and no-nonsense type of gal, and we went round and round for a while... she kept me in after the first day to tame down my way-ward antics...I did not want to write down every number from one to fifty!!! and I made the mistake of refusing. Boo and Nana and Uncle Maury were down the street to where I would be crossing Georgia Avenue after the short walk down Grove Street.... I was forbidden to cross the street by myself ... and very conserned about my safety. And I was yelling that I wanted to be with Conway in Miss Annie’s room. That afternoon, back home at last, was when I got my introduction to the male-female responsibility for human reproduction.... A week Later, I had a brother... and Mrs Cassel let me go to all the rooms and tell the teachers that Mama had a boy, weighing 6 pounds, and 18 inches long... Miss Bell Means, across the hall, Miss Annie down at the sunny end, where Conway got to attend, Miss Ruby Raeford, some others I cannot remember, and last, the dreaded Principal, Miss Ora Hill! , When Maury was born, three days after cousin Lindly, that September, 1942, as a sickly baby, could not drink Mama's milk, but had to have expensive formulas, I was no longer the center of her life. This little crushing event was not unnoticed by Daddy. He roared with laughter telling the story for years: Mama, lying in bed, saying "Bring me my little darling." I said, according to Daddy, in all innocence, "Do you mean me, Mama?". But I did not mourn my loss for long. I moved next door to the indulgent comfort of Boo and Uncle Maury. Uncle Jack was in the army then, and Aunt Craig was staying with us during those terrible days... and was also nine months pregnant that September. On the 9th, there was a carnival in town, and the two couples enjoyed rides on the Ferris Wheel..... later, Craig’s labor began, and Mama went along to the hospital with her... and the nurse had to ask which one was having the baby! That night it was Craig, and she gave birth to a boy, cousin Lindley, Chalmers Lindley White.... His crib was in the big room upstairs... Three days later, Maury Richmond was born! Another crib! Our dog, Spot, slept under his crib, and Jack and Craig’s spaniel Roxie, under Lindley’s! Maury was sickly and as mentioned before, had to have special formulars. But after a few months, Mom found herself pregnant again. Aunt Ellen, “Bobu”, found her crying.... in fear and frustration over a second child coming so close on... and family income so small! The next year, in October 1943, Chalmers White was born... a very healthy and robust baby.... Daddy had to change jobs to make more money for the growing family. He started working with Life of Virginia Insurance Company. He bough a car.. a 1935 A-model Ford. One seater. a bit small for the big family, but Pa’s big Hudson was still going.....But, still, all our friends had bright shiney new post war slickies... I became quite embarrased by our poverty.... *