Earliest Memories
-the family all sitting in the living room around the fireplace in winter
-stepping on a honeybee while barefoot in the yard
-running barefoot down gravel roads
-watching my father milk the cow
-picking in the garden
-playing in the nearby cemetery, or watching a funeral from the barn loft
-being traumatized by a snake crawling right by my foot
-the first sonic boom I ever heard
-Christmas mornings, when really neat toys were made of stamped and painted sheet metal (edges rolled for safety), like the toy service station with a parking garage for toy cars over it, or the toy wind-up clock that played Hickory Dickory Dock.
-any holiday when the family got together and ate a big dinner together.
-the first TV we got. My brothers watching westerns or Victory at Sea. Watching Superman or Sea Hunt in the afternoons.
-the first joke I remember, from a time when we didn’t know any mentally handicapped people, so Little Moron jokes didn’t seem harmful: “Why did the little moron put a bucket under the TV?” “So he could watch Wyatt Earp and Howdy Doody.”
-living with brothers and a sister who were athletes, and believing that athletes foot was a normal condition for human toes.
-going to basketball games, and being so nearsighted that I didn’t realize you were supposed to be able to recognize individual players on the court.
–
Hardison School
– singing in the auditorium
– 2 cent half-pint cartons of milk
– rolling hedgeapples down the rain gutters on the playground
McCord School
– the ramps in the hallways
– 6 cent Cokes in small bottles
– playing baseball on the playground
– the hall outside the gym where you could reach the ceiling and poke a hole in it
Connelly Junior High
– the smell of sweat in the locker rooms
– the concrete bleachers at the football field
– the echoing sound made when walking in the connector between the library and the second floor
Marshall County Senior High
– the parking lot full of SunDrop bottles
– the election of 1968 when racial tensions were elevated
– playing Frisbee on the sidewalk in front of the school