"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