"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