![]() As soon as the Kisers moved out of the Craig house into their new house, we moved in. Jimmy Lee died (I think he drowned in the Aleutian Islands) during WWII and Shank was getting ready to marry LaMarr Garland and wanted to move into his house, so we had to go. We were living “down in the country” (the title of one of my previous stories) in the white frame house at the corner of the Matthews-Weddington and Simfield Church Rds, which I think is the house Grandma Caldwell was raised in and which had been owned by her brother, Jim Shannon, who had left it to his grandsons, Jimmy Lee and Shannon (“Shank”) Forbis, two of the four children of his only child, Eunice, who married Sanford Forbis, Charlton’s brother, and who helped Charlton with the carpentry on our Rama Rd house. Aunt Verla took the $5K and built what I remember as a white asbestos sided story and a half house on Windermere Lane, several blocks from the Craig house. ![]() ![]() Dad’s 2 nd or 3 rd sibling, I’m not sure which as she was a twin with Aunt Vernon, my Aunt Verla and her husband Wilkes Kiser, and their 5 children, Gene, Sid, Mickey, Mary Lou and Frankie were living in the house when Uncle Wilkes, who I never knew, a life insurance salesman after he married Aunt Verla and dropped out of Davidson College where he had been pre-med, took his life in the garage beside the house shortly after the suicide period expired on a $5,000 life insurance policy he had purchased on his life. The house we rented was one house toward the RR from Craig Ave. The Craig family owned a lot of land on and near SA. I’ve written in some of my earlier stories about living on Sharon Amity Rd (hereinafter “SA”) in Charlotte from about 1948 until Christmas, 1955 when we moved into the new brick ranch style house Dad built (I say Dad built it because he hired Charlton Forbis, who Dad had worked for as a carpenter for a year or so when he got out of the Navy and moved Mom and Billy from Norfolk to Charlotte after WWII ended in August, 1945, as the lead carpenter, while Dad subbed out all of the other work ) I was able to construct (how’s that for using the same word as a noun, then a verb?), is that Mary graduated from Matthews High School, from which both Dad and Mom had graduated earlier, with Dad’s brother, Irvin. Naaah, I don’t think that I really thought that, but if I had, brother, Billy would have straightened me out. I may have thought TV cowboy Hopalong Cassidy was football player Cassady’s job in the off season. Howard “Hopalong” Cassady, who won the Heisman Trophy in 1955, his senior year at Ohio State was my first sports hero. For some reason, I still had mine and she copied it verbatim (Davidson had an honor code that made plagiarism a getting kicked out of school offense, but I guess I reasoned, that is, if I even thought about it at all, that aiding and abetting plagiarism with a girlfriend, particularly a girlfriend from another college, especially a secular college with no Honor Code, didn’t violate my honor or Janet’s. Her lit professor had assigned an essay on Prufrock. My junior year at Davidson College, my girlfriend, Janet Tweed, who for almost 55 years now has gone by Janet Tweed Caldwell, was a sophomore at WC, as we called it then, short for Woman’s College, now UNC-Greensboro, was spending entirely too much time at Davidson, waiting for me to finish football or track practice or watch me play in a game or run in a meet. I got no better than a B, more likely a C+ or C. He loved the poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot (“should I eat a peach…dare I walk along the beach…in the room the women come and go, speaking of Michelangelo…”) and, to see if we’d been paying attention, he assigned us an essay on it. One of, if not the best teachers (or professors) I ever had was Charles Davis, a West Virginian and Davidson College graduate, circa ’58, who taught me English in the 11 th grade at East Mecklenburg Hi in Charlotte, ’62-’63 and who also coached the tennis team (boys’-can you believe that there were no interscholastic sports for girls in Mecklenburg Co, only intramural, in those days). If you’ve read any of my rambling stories, you know I can’t resist an aside (I’m not sure that word is completely appropriate here but it popped into my brain, and, since I don’t remember ever having used it before either verbally or in type, I decided to throw it in, appropriate or not), or, more colloquially, chasing a rabbit. Maybe mathematicians and chemists say as much about numbers and molecules, and poets about their rhyme and meter, or whatever it is that makes modern poetry. ![]() Artists and musicians would probably say the same thing about their art and music. Growing up, I don’t know what I would have done and who I would have become without sports.
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