My Dad was the most easygoing person you’ve ever known.  He never raised his voice.  I only remember him spanking me one time.  Boy, that time, I knew I’d been spanked though.

I don’t remember.  I’d done something I wasn’t supposed to and he really spanked me, and that was the only time he ever hit me, the only time he ever raised his voice at me. 

It didn’t take long for me to learn that when I wanted to go somewhere in town and mother would say no, to go over to the store and say, “Father, can I go so-and-so?” “Did you ask your mother?” “Yeah, but she didn’t think much of it.”  “Well, I guess you can.  Go ahead and go. Be back here by so-and-so.”   So that’s what I would do. 

And then I learned, instead of asking Mother, just to go to him and ask if I could go somewhere, because he would ask me about it.  “What are you going to do?  Where are you going?  Okay, behave yourself and be back here by so-and so.”  

Everybody walked. I walked all over town, all over Garner. When we went to Landrum we walked all over the place.

Nobody had cars except the grownups. I never got a bicycle.  I just walked everywhere.

My father was such an easygoing man, and I never in all my life heard him say a cuss word.  He was just that easy calm person.  He used to call me Switch Dodger, and my brother’s nickname was Scoot-n-Duck.  Now, I don’t know why that was be it probably had to do with some spanking incident some time.  

My favorite books were Little Women and Little Men by Alcott.  I have a lot of the books that I had when I was a kid still and I loved all of them.  When I’d go back home and visit, I would always pull the books out and read them again.  I must have read each story twenty times over the years.  They were in the bedroom in the bookcase.  I’ve always liked to read.  Mother took us over to Raleigh when I was young and I joined a book club over there.  Every week we’d get to go back and forth and get me books. 

I had a teacher named Miss Guyver and I really liked her.  She taught the business courses.  My favorite teacher was Miss Lerner, who was my fifth grade teacher.   We built a pottery shed in her class with a pottery wheel and we made pottery.  People from up at Columbia University came down to observe us with our pottery outfit, and they bought some of the pottery.  She was my favorite teacher all the way through school even though it was just fifth grade.  We made a building, just a regular building out in the yard, and put the pottery wheel in it.  Then, we built a kiln and baked pottery in the kiln.

I played basketball from the time I was in eighth grade.  I played for five years, and the fifth year we won one sportsmanship trophy and two regular trophies for winning the tournament.  I was a guard.  In that day and age they didn’t play from one end to the other, they played halfway, and I was the guard.  I wasn’t very good at shooting baskets so Mr. Umstead, the principal, came out and started having me guard him before we got into the tournaments.  He was six foot seven or something, way up there.  He would be playing and I had to guard him and keep him from getting a basket.  He worked with me for a couple of weeks before the tournament and when we got in the tournament, we won it. 

In one of the tournaments a girl from the opposite team came down on each side of my ankle and swung my foot around and sprained my ankle.  It swelled up like you wouldn’t believe.  Before it was over with, I went back up to her and says, “I enjoyed playing with you today.  I’m sorry we won but I enjoyed playing with you.”  They ended up giving us special treatment because I’d been good enough to go tell her I enjoyed playing, even though she wrecked my ankle.

I left and went to work when I graduated from high school.  I went to school through the twelfth grade.  The school only had eleven grades until the last year when I was supposed to graduate.  That year, they added a twelfth grade and asked the top twenty-five people in the class if they wanted to come back to school for another year.  So I ended up back in school again.  I was taking secretarial courses, and I had bookkeeping, shorthand, typing, business English.  Anyway, I took all those courses but I never got around to taking a foreign language.   When it came time for me to graduate, Mr. Umstead, who was the principal, says, “I don’t know what to do with you.  You can’t graduate without a foreign language.”  And I said, “Well, isn’t shorthand a language?”  And I said, “I’ve been in that for three years now.  How about that?”  Well, he thought it over for a while and he let me graduate.  I was probably the first one to graduate from Garner High School without a foreign language.  He let me graduate on the shorthand course I had taken.

My brother was at home until he was sixteen and he graduated from school and joined the Navy.  He was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, and he bought himself a car.   After he was put on a ship and he wasn’t driving the car, I talked him into leaving it at home for me. 

While I was working, I’d take it down and get it repaired and get the gas and the oil and everything it needed and the next weekend he’d come home and take it back with him for another month.  Then he’d bring it home to me again.   That was the only car I would ever get back then.

Marshall was in the Navy for eighteen years before he finally got out.  He traveled on the ship back and forth during the War, and he managed to stay safe and the ship managed to stay safe.  He was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia most of the time and then he was in somewhere in Maryland.  The whole time he was in the Navy he was in the Atlantic.  He loved it.  And the only reason he got out is because he got tuberculosis (TB) and he was in the hospital for a year.

He was released and he was supposed to go up and study to be an Ensign or an officer and they fouled it up and didn’t let him make the school on time.   He decided if they were going to be like that he’d just get out.   He left the Navy and went into business in Greensboro, North Carolina.  He had a laundry there for a long time, and then he started traveling—and I don’t know what he was selling, some kind of business machines, copiers—and that’s what he did until he retired.