Author: ocracokewaves

We all grow up in something of a bubble of our parents’ opinions and the ideas that surround us. I am grateful that I had Chet Huntley and David Brinkley instead of FOX News. I am also pleased that my mother would often take the opposite side or opposing candidate just so we could debate. Still race was something of mystery until I was well into my teenage years.
As an elementary school student I once rode the bus to Winston-Salem. When I got on the bus, I ran to the back of the bus to sit in the back seat only to be told I couldn’t sit there because I wasn’t black.
I can remember when I was fourteen flying back from my all-white male boarding school in Tennessee. It was the first time that I would be heading back to my dad’s big house in Mt. Airy instead of my mother’s small ranch in Lewisville. Alfred, the husband of dad’s maid, Mertha, had driven my mom to the airport. We stopped in Winston-Salem for lunch at the K&W Cafeteria.
As my mother and I were starting to enter K&W, Alfred, who was black, turned and started to leave. I asked him why he wasn’t joining us for lunch. He said he was not allowed to eat there. I was floored.
Over the next week, Alfred, his wife, Mertha, my mom and I had most of our meals together at the kitchen table. Obviously, I was still clueless about race with one set of rules at home and another out in the world of 1963.
Three years later I took my first trip around the country. The first trip taught me more than you could eat ketchup with eggs. It was a big country with lots of different people but it was unlikely that I was going to meet any of the different ones at McCallie, the all white military prep school my parents had shipped me off to in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
I would, however, meet some at Harvard.
There was probably not a more privileged place to be in 1967 than Harvard. We figured it out pretty quickly. Someone would ask where you went to school and you would say Cambridge. Most times it didn’t work and people still knew immediately where you went to college. Still Harvard was a very different world than McCallie, beyond the sprinkling of different races, we went to school with Radcliffe ladies. Boston and Cambridge were a different world than Chattanooga which was decades from its rejuvenation. McCallie was on Missionary Ridge just a few miles from downtown, but downtown was often hidden in smog and smoke from the factories.
At McCallie the only way to get from one stop to another was to hitchhike. At Harvard, I had my car for longer trips but the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) subway was a revolution. You could go downtown, to the airport, and all sorts of places for little money. Being on the Red Line even though it rattled our room in Wigglesworth freshman year was still eye-opening. Just walking through Harvard Square exposed you to more diversity than some see in a lifetime.
There were three things that really opened my eyes once I got settled in Cambridge. The first was having a car to go places in New England. My sophomore year, I came back with an original Ford Bronco that my uncle had helped me buy secondhand from a vet in Michigan. I had gone with him to Michigan to buy it and drive it back. Traveling with my uncle Henry was almost as eye-opening as a couple days in Harvard Square. He didn’t believe in motels and had private homes where he could rent a room when passing. We stayed in one on the way up. I came close to freezing that night. Still once the old Bronco got to Cambridge in the fall of 1968, it and some stop-leak for the radiator were to be the keys to exploring a lot of places including Nova Scotia, Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts even where there were not roads.
The second thing was going from being a barely politically interested student to one who felt like politics had the potential to save us or destroy us. The anti-war unrest kicked off at Harvard in the spring of 1969. As kids of the sixties we had already been through more heartache than some could take.
Still in the days before cell phones and social media, we were oblivious to what was happening locally when University Hall was seized by around fifty students. University Hall is in Harvard Yard. Only freshman live in the Yard. Upper class students live in Houses or dorm complexes sprinkled around the area between Harvard Yard and the Charles River. That evening the students took over University Hall, four of us were walking from Quincy House up Plympton Street towards Massachusetts Ave. with the plan that we would go to Barley’s Burger Cottage. As we turned right, our peripheral vision caught a line of charging Massachusetts State Police with riot shields and billy clubs. We were obviously in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I was chased into the doorway of a nearby bookstore where I got a couple of whacks on the back before I escaped and started running back to Quincy House. We all got back to the dorm with the police not far behind us. They tear gassed our dorm’s courtyard. We were fortunate to have a fourth floor room. It was chilling to hear the sound that we all know, shotguns with shells being chambered. We’re lucky no one died that night. The campus was energized with anti-war/anti-administration sentiment. People could not forgive the college administrators for turning the police loose on students who had done nothing. It was a lesson in how it feels to be attacked when you have done nothing wrong. I haven’t looked at peaceful demonstrations the same way since then.
The third change happened my senior year when my roommates and I became part of Harvard’s coed experiment. Fifty male Harvard students were moved to Radcliffe. Our dorm was the brand new Currier House which housed 275 Radcliffe students. We were spread out throughout the dorm. One roommate and I had single rooms sharing a bathroom. Adjoining rooms housed Radcliffe students. Our floor had everything from first year students to juniors. It was a wonderful experience, I met more people who have become life-long friends there than in any other similar timeframe. I have more female friends from Currier House that I keep up with fifty-three years later than I do male Harvard friends.
The next year, my junior year, with the invasion of Cambodia, the campus exploded again and classes were canceled for the rest of the semester. We went home hoping to convince people the war had to end. People in North Carolina didn’t want to hear it from us. They had already seen enough on the nightly news. By mid-June, I was packing my Dodge PowerWagon for a trip to Alaska. The PowerWagon would also change me.

Full article also available on Medium.

We all go through life differently. That much I know from being around this long. I have known people who could hardly use a screwdriver. I have also known some who could do almost anything with nothing. Human society is trending towards those who might not even recognize a screwdriver unless their smartphone can show them a picture.
Last summer finally convinced me that most people would rather have food out of a grocery store than a garden. That comes after many years of giving away produce from our garden. Giving away produce is not just picking it from the garden and handing it over to someone.
Often you have to clean it up, sort it, wash it multiple times and sometimes even prepare for the table. You have to make it look like it came from the produce aisle. There are not many people I could tell, “Just go cut whatever head of lettuce you want.”
There are even fewer people you hand over a plot of land and have them successfully plant a garden and harvest food from it. In a little over a hundred years, most of the people in the country have gone from living close to the land to living in the city or the suburbs and divorced from everything but their yard.
Of course it is not just gardening. There are plenty of things that people used to do for themselves that they cannot or choose not to for themselves. There are a lot of professionals out there who make a living filling in the gaps.
At a certain age there are things that you are better off not doing. Just before I turned seventy, I quit using the push mower to mow my yard. It was a two-mile walk and a couple of hours of hard work in the coastal heat. We hired someone to do it but I continued to do some of the fussy mowing. I would probably still be doing that if we had not moved.
I am one of those people who went back to land after college. I did not become a back to the land hippie, I became a farmer or actually a cattleman with two hundred head of Angus. During the decade after college I learned everything from doing copper sweat joints, making cabinets, welding and wiring a house to building barns and growing all the food we needed. We had a milk cow, chickens, and even pigs once. I know where and how meat gets from the pasture to the table. In 1972, two of us killed a steer and hung it in our root cellar with the salt pork from our pig while we cut the steer up by hand meatsaw. It was a lot of work. We went with the butcher the next time.
I have managed to build a few things over the last years including the desk in my office. I know there are still people out there who build things with their hands but I also know their number is shrinking. When we moved in 2012, I had to pay someone to take my radial arm saw.
A lot of the things you learn long the way lose their significance. Very few people probably even remember what a distributor did much less how to make sure it is set to specifications. Points/distributors are no longer in cars. A car today is much more likely to have a computer problem than something feeding electricity to the spark plugs.
Even with computers, a lot of what I have learned is worthless today even though it was critical knowledge at the time. I still remember how to make an Apple III work. That has to be high on the list of useless things to know.
There are thousands of people who know how do things who had different life paths than me. Each one of those people picked up unique skills that may or may not be relevant today. There are a lot of stories there worth telling- maybe a new Foxfire series. I would read it.
As people recede further and further into their cocoons insulated from the real world by today’s service economy, those of us that remember how to do all those things can often no longer do them ourselves so it is good the service economy is there. Maybe I will hang on long enough to remind some of the more able people what they could do if they would.

My mother wanted to be independent so as soon as she could she bought a lot in Lewisville and built a house with an attached beauty shop. She bought the lot from Uncle Joe Styers. We were a Styers family living on Styers Street no far from Styers Ferry Road which was named after the ferry across the river run by my great grandfather Abe Styers. While Abe was gone, his wife Millie lived next door to us. One of my jobs was to run over and peak in the window of her little house to see if she was still alive. Every time I looked she was sitting in her rocking chair next to her wood stove with the newspaper in her lap. She died a year or so after we moved. In those days, the viewing was help in the home. Great grandmother Millie was viewed in Uncle Joe’s house. She was the first dead person I had seen.

Lewisville was my first experience with school. Not many people have the privilege of going to first grade and finding out their teacher is a first cousin who has been teaching first grade for longer than anyone can imagine.  Miss Conrad was my first grade teacher, and she was as tough as they come.  I had no choice but to shape up and be a good student even as a first grader.  I think my mother got daily reports or at least it seemed that way.

My first year in the Lewisville School was the last year that the school was a complete grade one to grade twelve school.  The first and second grades were isolated on the bottom floor of the school near the cafeteria.  I guess that protected us from all the high school students, but I seriously doubt that anyone would have messed with one of Miss Conrad’s charges.

I remember surprisingly little about my elementary years.  I guess time mellows those memories.  I can remember the “ah hah” moment of learning to add two columns of numbers in the second grade.  I think we played a lot of dodge ball and kick ball during recess.  I can remember some school plays where I had to memorize lots of lines, but most of it is sort of a blur.   A few teacher names spring to memory, O’Daniels, Jenkins, and Greer.  I remember Mrs. Greer because I had a crush on her.  She was the youngest of the teachers that I had.  I can remember baby sitting for her.  I suspect that was my only baby sitting job ever.  I can still remember the old white Volvo that she drove.  

I had only one male teacher in my seven years at Lewisville. His name was something like Lasley, and I do remember that he used to drive the activity bus in the summer for those two wonderful weeks when we got to go to school sponsored swimming lessons at Tanglewood Park.  That was truly a dream since we would go to one hour of swimming lessons in the morning, swim the rest of the morning, have a hot dog at the snack bar, and then play putt-putt until the bus took us home in the afternoon.

It did not take long to get through all the swimming classes, but we kept going because it was such a treat.  Swimming pools were rare commodities in the fifties in North Carolina where almost no one had an air conditioner much less a swimming pool.

I must have been almost ten years old when we finally got an air conditioner that handled one room.  We choose the living room.  When it was hot, I would sneak in there and sleep on the sofa.

Television came to our neighborhood when I was six or seven, but I think I was more like eight by the time we got a TV.  We would have been classed as media novices since the color film strips and the old reels of movies at school were a true wonder to us.  Beyond those few enhancements, books and the blackboard served us well.  In the end I think we mostly had to learn on our own.

Going to the movies required going to Winston-Salem which was a rare treat. I can remember the long winding two lane road which got replaced with a four lane road by the time I was a teenager.  When finally there was a Saturday night at the movies on television, we were enthralled.  A color television did not make it into our home until I was a teenager.

I do not remember homework being a burden during elementary school.  In fact I can remember going home most days and playing outside until dark and finishing my homework after dinner. We had a huge cedar tree, a cherry tree, a plum tree, a persimmon tree, and a row of new planted white pines. Mother also planted some Japanese Weeping Cherry trees. There is a picture of me standing by a newly planted cherry tree. In summer of 2023 I took a picture of the same trees over 67 years later. They are pretty gnarly at this point.

I often rode my bicycle to school. When I got older, I got to be a member of the safety patrol and eventually was the Captain in the sixth and seventh grades.  There were actually a couple of ways that I could get home from school.  One took me through the back of our church and the other took me by the general store which other than the dry cleaners and furniture store was the only commercial entity in our end of town.

There was a great mysterious grove of tall bamboo growing behind the general store in a marshy area.  It was a little scarier than the big woods where we often played.  It was scarier mostly because it was nearly impossible to penetrate the center of the bamboo grove because it grew so close together.

Towards the other end of Lewisville there was a feed mill, another general store, two gas stations, a hardware store, the fire department, and eventually what passed as a grocery store and a small snack bar which kept going out of business.

The hardware store was my favorite place in town because they sold fishing tackle.  I loved to fish and probably drove my mother crazy asking her to take my friend, Mike, and me fishing.  My Uncle Henry had fishing ponds ten to fifteen miles away in Yadkin County.  We eventually got to the age probably around ten that we could be left there.  We spent many a day fishing those ponds.  We caught everything from bream to bass.

I can remember learning how to run electrical current with two screw drivers through my mother’s flower beds so that the worms would crawl to the surface.  Fishing was my favorite thing to do, but there were few other things that Lewisville had to offer.  You could go watch softball games in the evening during the summer at the school for twenty-five cents.  There was small parade on the Fourth of July.  Other than that, you were on your own with your imagination.  We lived in the world of forts we built and dams that we created.  Eventually we got to the age that we could hunt. We would sometimes wander the woods with shotguns looking for squirrels, rabbits or quail.  In those long ago days, deer were hardly known in the area.

We might have ended up more committed hunters if deer had been around, but as it was, we did  better fishing so hunting mostly dropped off the radar. I think that by the time I was fourteen I had given up hunting.

When we were about eleven or twelve years old, a few of the parents got together and started taking us to a  Boy Scout troop in a nearby town.  I think there were five us, Mike, Skip, Russ, Cary, and me.  After a year, we splintered off and formed Troop 752 in Lewisville.

Troop 752 became the focus of most of what we did.  We were lucky to have a troop campground at the far end of town.  Often we would plan a trip on Thursday and spend Friday and Saturday nights in tents.  It was a great way to learn about camping and leadership.  I became a Patrol leader and then the Senior Patrol leader for the troop.

In the summers we enjoyed Camp Raven Knob and Lake Sobotta which happened to be named after my father who still was only in my life a Saturday once a month or so. Every time he visited Lewisville, he would stop at one of the general stores and get a pound of sliced boiled ham. I still associate boiled ham with him  I think it was in the Boy Scouts when they started father-son camp outs, that I first really missed having a father.

Still the Boy Scouts was a great organization to be part of in the fifties.  I became a member of the Order of the Arrow and the next level Brotherhood. I lacked only a couple of merit badges in chasing the Eagle Scout award until I got shipped away to military school.

But before military school, I had one more educational experience that had a huge impact on me.  I was selected to be one of thirty gifted  seventh grade students out of Forsyth County to go to a summer school program at the Graylyn Estate in Winston-Salem.  That summer they taught us how to type among other things and the next year I joined the other students in a special class at the Old Town School.  My mother had to drive me there every day before her work.  It was exciting being with people as smart or smarter than me.  I enjoyed the year immensely, but there was even more challenge in the wind.

My mother was an amazing lady, she worked harder to keep us going than could be imagined, and I never heard her complain.  She often worked so late that I had to start supper or fix something for myself.  How she managed the burden of forty minutes of driving morning and afternoon that year I was in the eighth grade, I will never know.  She was also always ready to a haul a car load of Boy Scouts anywhere.  She was a great driver, and she took us to many camping spots. Most of my friends in Scouts considered my mother a better driver than the men.  There was always competition to ride with her.

In September 1963, back when President Kennedy was touting hiking as good for your fitness, our troop decided to hike the 20.3 miles of Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap. We did a number of five mile hikes to prepare us, but only our youth saved us.  We should have done a couple of ten mile hikes first.  We hiked all 20.3 miles in a day. I know that I was never that tired again until I farmed. I was lucky because instead of spending the night after the hike in a tent, mother hauled me back to a motel where I got to soak in a tub. It was the last spoiling that I would get for a while.

It had been decided that I needed more of a manly influence in my life, so my mother and father apparently picked McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee to be the school where I would get my high school education. Not long after the Wilderness Road hike, I was in the car headed for Chattanooga, Tennessee.  The first trip to Chattanooga we picked absolutely the worst way to get there going all the way through Murphy and emerging into Tennessee at Ducktown.  That route took us through a mining area which had lost all vegetation. We quickly learned that it was best to go north into Virginia and then follow the valleys down to Chattanooga.

There are few pictures of me from this period.

Next Chapter, McCallie, “Honor, Truth, and Duty”