"You made Christmas such a magical part of our growing-up years . . .

. . . I carry all those times with me still,
               no matter where I go--
        they're in my heart . . . ."

Mam,
     You did make Christmas such a magical part of our growing-up years.  Through the years we had a succession of trees--aluminum, artificial (including the tabletop tree that came all the way from England on the Queen Mary) and occasionally a real one.
















     Often our tree was decorated with ornaments that you helped Maureen, me, and Darryl make.  I remember bells made from egg cartons, covered in glitter, blown egg ornaments with little windows cut to show holiday scenes, and baker's dough cookie cutter ornaments.


     We made carolers and angels out of magazines and styrofoam balls and dolls out of toilet paper rolls and crepe paper.  Whatever decorations were on it, the tree was always lovely; you made that happen.

   
     Some years you strung swags from the ceiling, corner to corner, with a large fluted shiny paper ball or bell in the center.  One year you decorated the farmhouse door at Farley Drive in Huntsville with little drummer boy decorations, dressed in green and red.  A little German Putz glitter village was set up on one end table, a nativity on the other.  You taped Christmas cards around the inside of the front door (I still do that)! The house was always lovely and festive; you made that happen.

      The holiday food was delicious and always included my personal favorite, mince pies with white icing, decorated with green and red candied peel.  Once or twice there was even another favorite, a pork pie.  I must've been very good those years!








      You made trifle (alternating layers of sponge cake soaked in sherry or brandy, fruit suspended in jello, a layer of custard, and then whipped cream), and a Christmas Cale--a rich English fruitcake covered with marzipan and white royal icing and topped with Christmas themed decorations like a sprig of holly.  You stuffed stocking with silver dollars, fruit, and candy.  Nothing was missed; you made that happen.
 

"I know a girl, she puts the color inside of my world." --John Mayer

Barbara remembers,

     "When I was 10, in fifth grade, we moved to Cary, North Carolina.  I attended Cary Elementary School, a beautiful, old, red brick building on South Academy Street.  You could look down South Academy Street since 1879 and see a school.
     I remember two teachers from that school--Mrs. Loretta Banner and Mrs. Hortense B. Bullock.  Being a bit of a precocious reader, Mrs. Banner, my 5th grade teacher from 1965-1966, allowed me to read Gone With the Wind and complete a project on it.  Mrs. Bullock, my sixth grade teacher from 1966-1967, loved to sing as did I, so we started each day standing by our desks, singing from a children's hardcover songbook.  I loved it!
     While I was good at reading and writing, I was terrible at math.  I went to another teacher for math, but I've blocked her name from my memory because she made me write 100 times, 'The properties of mathematics are addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.'  Really didn't help me become a better math student; in fact, quite the opposite.  I think I remember Mam taking pity, writing some of the lines for me.
     I completed grades 5-8 at Cary Elementary School, then transferred to West Cary Middle School for part of 9th grade, before moving to Huntsville, Alabama for the remainder of 9th grade and all of 10th. grade.  I finished high school, grades 11 and 12 in San Jose, California."

     "Cary was once the Gourd Capital of the World.  I remember going to the exhibit hall which was, I think, in the elementary school.  How it became the Gourd Capital of the World is really quite interesting."

A bit of history:

     "This 'road to fame' began in 1934 when a group of local ladies bought a packet of mixed ornamental seeds and divided the contents to see what would grow.  The ladies, who had read several magazine articles about gourds, were shocked at the success of their experiment.  They contacted the International Gourd Society to obtain more exotic seed and went on to exhibit their gourds at the 1937 NC State Fair.  The exhibit generated so much excitement that they organized a club on December 27, 1937 and called themselves the 'Gourd Gardeners.'

     Cary’s rise to fame as the Gourd Capital of the World didn’t stop there.  By 1938, the Gourd Gardeners had started making all sorts of crafts out of their gourds – lamps, baskets, doorstops, bird houses, rings and even toys.  This was what started Cary’s famous, annual Gourd Festival.  The Cary Gourd Festival came to be known as 'Cary’s longest running annual celebration.'  The following excerpt was found in a 1990 issue of The Gourd:

The 49th annual Cary Gourd Festival theme will be gourds as holiday decorations, from January snowmen through Christmas gourds of all kinds.  Making a return appearance from our 1952 festival, whose theme was “The Calendar with Gourds,” will be Mary and her little luffa lamb starting back to school in a gourd schoolhouse….  The Cary Festival is a free show of gourds and gourd crafts.  Crafters will demonstrate how to prepare gourds to work on, burning and cutting techniques, making and siting birdhouses and much more…"

                                                                                      from CaryCitizen.com

Cary's Gourd Festival from the 1950's

    "I had a friend, Debbie Smith; she and I roamed all over Cary which was, in 1965, still quite small with a population of about 3,500.  We were fifth or sixth graders, and in those days kids had a lot more freedom to play and take risks.

     On Halloween we would walk all over Cary collecting candy.  I wore a series of creative costumes made by Mam and Dad.  Mam, a seamstress, would buy a package of black crepe paper, sew it into a long skirt and a peasant blouse, and fashion a wig out of strips of twisted paper.  She made a pointed hat, applied a little make-up, and off I went.
     One year Dad made a torch out of a margarine tub screwed onto a wooden dowel with a cardboard 'flame' coming out of the tub.  He  spray painted the torch and a makeshift crown a turquoise color, draped a green sheet over me like a toga, and I was the Statue of Liberty.
     Another year, I wore my black dance leotard and tights, flippers on my feet, a scuba mask, and a pair of oatmeal boxes covered in tin foil for air tanks.  I must've looked a fright because I was terribly thin; kids at school called me barbwire or skeleton (my maiden name is Shelton).


 
 

     I think I was at various times also a hobo and a pirate.  Mam and I continued this tradition by making some great costumes for Erik when he was little--Robin Hood, Daniel Boone, a skeleton, Zorro, a pirate, a clown . . . .

     I had a bike with a basket on the front, and Mam says I rode all over Cary on that thing, especially to the local library which was on South Academy Street in a small white frame house behind Ashworth Drugs.  I'd fill the basket with books!  One of my favorites was Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy.  I told you I was a precocious reader.

"Thank Heaven for Little Boys" --by Lerner and Loewe, 1957

Darryl remembers,

     "I was quite young when we lived in Cary, so my memories are mostly about playing with friends.  I had four neighborhood friends--Larry Yarborough (next door), Steven Paste (across the street to the left), Jay Lawrence (a red-head) and Dee Dunne (a girl, up the street at the last house.)
     The four of us spent a lot of time in the creek behind Steven’s house, where we often pretended we were Daniel Boone and other frontiersmen fighting off Indians.  Probably the Daniel Boone series on TV along with a Daniel Boone outfit Mam made me, complete with a coon skin hat, sparked my imagination.  We also spent hours chipping away at a large quartz like stone near the creek that we believed contained hidden gems."


Bit of history:

     "In 1775 Daniel Boone blazed his Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains from North Carolina and Tennessee into Kentucky.  It was the principal route used by settlers to reach Kentucky from the East.
     The Wilderness Road was steep, rough, narrow, and it could only be traversed on foot or horseback.  Despite the adverse conditions, thousands of people used it.  In 1792, the new Kentucky legislature provided money to upgrade the road.  In 1796, an improved all-weather road was opened for wagon and carriage travel.  The road was abandoned around 1840, although modern highways follow much of its route."


     "At the end of our street past a tall barbed wire fence, a handful of abandoned shacks stood in waist high grass; we pretended that a dead man lived under the porch of one of the houses, and if you stepped on the porch the boards would pop open and out he would come. We were fascinated by the houses and would spend time a lot of time there egging each other to step on the porch.

     My fondest childhood memory is of the "fog truck" that would traverse the roads on summer evenings, spraying DDT to kill mosquitoes.  Once we knew it was coming we would jump on our bikes, wait at the end of the road, and follow it around the neighborhood, inhaling the fumes. I'm sure it killed most of the mosquitos, and, years later, many of the people, too.  Is that why I twitch so much?


 In by Andrew Hudgins
 

When we first heard from blocks away
the fog truck’s blustery roar,
we dropped our toys, leapt from our meals,
and scrambled out the door

into an evening briefly fuzzy.
We yearned to be transformed—
translated past confining flesh
to disembodied spirit. We swarmed

in thick smoke, taking human form
before we blurred again,
turned vague and then invisible,
in temporary heaven.

Freed of bodies by the fog,
we laughed, we sang, we shouted.
We were our voices, nothing else.
Voice was all we wanted.

The white clouds tumbled down our streets
pursued by spellbound children
who chased the most distorting clouds,
ecstatic in the poison.


 

     I used to create vignettes on my bedroom window sill with rocks and plastic dinosaurs.  I constantly rearranged them.  As a child I liked to pretend--I had a vivid imagination and seldom lived in reality.  Life was pretending.

     I don’t remember much about school, other than I didn't like it.  As an adult when I look back over my educational experiences,  I wasn’t thrilled.  I think that for someone as creative as me, school was nowhere near as interesting as my imagination.  I struggled to read and comprehend and so never felt comfortable in class. 
     Nor did I like rest time when you had to put your head down or lay on a mat.   I remember when we went to church, I would be dropped off at Sunday School--I hated that, being away from Mam and Dad.  I cried and cried.  What I did like about school was drawing and creating artwork.  Only then, I felt confident. Still do! 

Darryl, around 5 years old

Larry, Darryl, and Barbara

Darryl and Mam in our backyard pool

"Comparison is the thief of joy." --Theodore Roosevelt

Momma remembers,

     "In 1965 IBM built a new plant in the Research Triangle Park near Raleigh, North Carolina.  Frank requested a transfer to move back to the South; we did not like the excessive snow in Poughkeepsie, New York.  He was hired, and we bought a brand new house, our first new home, in Cary, North Carolina, outside of Raleigh.  We had to stay in a motel until the house on Meadow Drive, a split-level, was ready.  It was beautiful, my favorite house.



     Cary was a great place for Darryl.  He and his three friends spent summer days at the creek across the road catching crayfish, wading, and exploring.  Immediately after breakfast, Darryl would go out to play and come home only when he was hungry.  It was an idyllic place to grow up.

Darryl, age 5

     He went to kindergarten at the local Lutheran church; there his artistic talent was first noticed.  The teacher called me in to show me his painting of a daffodil in blue water, painted from a still life.  She raved about it because the daffodil had drawn up the blue water, the edges of its petals tinged with blue-green, and Darryl had captured that so well in his painting.           

Darryl and Dad

     Barbara started at Cary Elementary School on South Academy Street, and then attended junior high at West Cary Middle School.
     Unlike Poughkeepsie, we settled easily into life in Cary.  It was a happy time."

Cary  Elementary School on South Academy Street, Cary, NC
There has  been a school at this site since 1879.

Maureen remembers,

     "In 1967 we moved to Cary, NC, just as I was going into 10th grade; I graduated from Cary High School and then went to college in the Fall at the University of Virginia, Richmond.  When we first arrived in Cary, we stayed in a motel on Main Street and ate in a little restaurant near the motel.  That was probably where and when I developed my love of chef salad.  I had one often, minus the hard
boiled egg.

Maureen, age 16

     From Meadow Drive where we lived, I walked to the elementary school and caught a school bus out to Cary High School.  My favorite class was art;  I remember doing a tissue paper collage which was put in a glass cabinet near the school office.  A community member came through one day,  liked it, and bought it for $10.  One Christmas, two classmates and I were invited to paint store windows in Raleigh.


     I learned to drive in Cary; I took Driver's Education at high school, but I really learned to drive at Frank Shelton's School of Driving where Dad fine tuned my driving--I recall coming down a hill in Cary and having him suddenly scream, 'STOP!'  I, of course, slammed on the brakes.  He said he yelled 'stop' in case a child had been running out of the driveway into the road.  I went with him to Raleigh to get my license; his office at IBM was near the DMV, so after getting my license, my first test was to drop him off at work and drive myself home.  It was a 10-15 mile trip, and I did it!

 
     During my senior year of high school, I got a job in nearby Raleigh at a bakery at Cameron Village, the first outdoor shopping center between Washington, D.C., and Atlanta.  I made (wait for it) $1. an hour!  Talk about a minimum wage!  I wore a white uniform, and part of my job was scooping frosting out of a big plastic bucket, slathering it onto big metal trays of brownies and cutting them into rectangles before sliding the trays into a glass cabinet."

Cameron Village, opened in 1949

 FYI:  Not sure Maureen knows this but Cameron Village, where she got her first job, is famous but not only as the first shopping center between Washington, D.C. and Atlanta.  During the 60's, when Maureen worked at a bakery there, it was part of the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968)--





February 10, 1960. "Inspired by the Greensboro sit-in earlier that month, students from Shaw University and St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh planned a sit-in at Woolworth’s in Cameron Village to protest segregation at lunch counters.  With protests arising throughout the state, Woolworth’s had closed before they arrived.  Students began picketing outside the restaurant’s doors,  and after repeated warnings from the manager, 41 students were arrested for trespassing.  Despite these arrests, these and other local activists helped push civil rights forward.  By 1964 most businesses in Raleigh had desegregated."



     "Cary was idyllic in many ways.  In the 60's it was a small Southern town, with a population of about 3,500.  The library was in a tiny, white frame house on South Academy Street.  On the corner of South Academy and Main Street was Ashworth Drugs, where Barbara and I enjoyed the hamburgers, hot dogs and Cherry Crush at a soda fountain counter. They had a special way of making the burgers and dogs, piling slaw & chili on top.  I can still smell them today.
     Our split level home had a downstairs den; I remember sitting there in front of the tv watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.  'Peyton Place,' a weekly serial show with Mia Farrow, was running while I was in high school, so that was a weekly watch, as well as some of the music-performance shows like American Bandstand.
     We used to visit Aunty Gladys (Dad's sister) in Lenoir, NC, now and again, and her girls, Susan & Karen, spent time with us in the summer.  Mam taught them how to sew.  We had a little trailer that we would take up towards the mountains near Blowing Rock on a Friday after Dad got home from work.  Sometimes we'd take it down to the beach, too."

Ashworth Drugs, on the corner of South Academy and Main

Our little trailer, Dad, and Mitzi