I just noticed an article I wrote back in 2010 entitled: “40 Years Ago, I was 16 Years Old.” I don’t know what I will write for this article, but realize that I’ve recently rewatched the videos I made, in 1984, when I was living down in Alabama at S.I.F.A.T. S.I.F.A.T. was an acronym that had a double meaning. One was for the “faith” crowd, “Servants In Faith And Technology,” and the other was for the heathen crowd (heathen my term) “Southern Institute for Appropriate Technology.” I just googled and see that the official name is “Southern Institute for Appropriate Technology,” but it IS a Christian service organization.
At 30 years old I had just ended my seminary education, short of a degree and had come to live for almost a year in rural Alabama, at a couple of locations between Wedowee and Lineville.
There was no TV at the house which meant that I completely missed the 1984 summer Olympics. Not sure if they played tennis in the Olympics at that time, but after I returned to the Hubert/Jacksonville, NC area from my stay in Alabama, when I played tennis some of the other players had picked up a saying, “my bad,” for when they made a mistake on court. I recall that I thought that was stupid sounding, so I never said, “my bad.” Not sure, but it was probably some well known tennis player, on TV, that had used that phrase and brought it into our society.
*Oh, and I am usually a stickler for using adverbs and prepositions. But, much of current society has dropped adding an “ly” to their adverbs and will say something like, “I drove quick to the store,” instead of “quickly.” And the one I really hate is, “I shit my pants.” If I am going to shit, while I’m wearing pants, and I want to tell you about it, I am going to say, “I shit in my pants,” and I’m not going to say, “I shit my pants.” And if you say the abbreviated version, I’m going to think that not only have you soiled your pants, but you also missed the English class that taught you about adverbs and adding the “ly” to the qualifying word.
I recall that one night I was playing tennis on a public tennis court in Lineville and happened to look up and between two power/light poles and there was a LINEVILLE town sign on a post, but what I could see highlighted between the posts was the word “EVIL”.
Please forgive the graininess of this image. I copied it from one of the VHS videos I made in my 1984 tour of the S.I.F.A.T. farm. This is the working part of a Water Ram Pump. Water falls over a distance (maybe falling four feet) coming in from the right (in this picture). The check valve keeps the water from returning back the way it came, and a small amount of water continues under a small amount of pressure (able to lift the water several times higher than the original fall of water. So, if the water is falling 4 feet to this pump, the pump will be able to move a small amount of water maybe up sixteen feet. But, there is a good portion of water that is wasted (a Waste Water Valve), but since you have an unlimited supply of water, it doesn’t cost any extra to waste some of it since you aren’t having to fill a bucket and walk it up the hill.
I think I have a picture of myself when I was in Seminary. I was leaning against my car, and had a brightly colored 1980s styled shirt… and I was much, much thinner than I have been for quite some time. I will try to track down that picture and include it here. *Oh, I just thought, I also have a black & white picture of me in a suit on the Southern Seminary Campus in Louisville, KY which would have been sometime between 1982 and 1984. I’ve always liked that image because there was a large tree, with no leaves on it (during a winter month) and the tree trunk is severely bent which made the tree look like it was lightening coming out of the top of my heard.
**When I first arrived at Southern Seminary, I had brought my bedroom suit. It was a nice cherry wood suite, with a full sized bed, a mirrored vanity and a taller dresser. At some point I gave this bedroom suit to an inner city family. I hope they got good use out of it, but would not be surprised if they sold it, or burned it for firewood. I say burned it, because when I returned to Jacksonville, NC after living in Alabama, I had a family living in my 204 Johnson Boulevard house. I had to stay in a mobile home that Mary Ann owned briefly until the family moved out of 204 Johnson Blvd. But, when I moved back into my house in Jacksonville, I happened to be in the back yard and saw a “burn pit” near the rear kitchen door. When I looked into the ashes I recognized the metal hinges that I had used to build a sturdy set of wooden shelving that had been on the side porch. I realized that the renting family had broken the shelving apart and used it for firewood to keep warm. I didn’t think too unkindly of this, but it did seem a little cannibalistic to me. Burning perfectly good shelving to keep warm. When do you stop? When you burn your last shred of clothing?
Things I haven’t thought about in years… When I first moved back into my house at 204 Johnson Blvd., there were many, many roaches scurrying about the place. It might have been the first night I slept in my bed there, that I was awakened by a roach running across my front teeth. Apparently, my mouth was open while I was sleeping. That’s definitely not an experience that you want repeated so the next day I went to the FCX (Farmer’s Cooperative Exchange was absorbed in 1986 into the Southern States Cooperative) and asked them what I might use to get rid of a bunch of roaches. They sold me a white powder than came in a black cardboard canister. It had a little plastic tube that you could stick down into the container and then all you did was go about squeezing the canister and little puffs of white powder would spew out onto the floor or some other area you were pointing at. I went around the house making an almost continuous stream of the white powder running along the “baseboard” of each room. It worked! I’m not sure I’ve ever killed so many bugs, so quickly, and they didn’t come back… well, until I let “Red” Reid, a homeless person, stay in my house for a few nights. This was years later, and the box of his “stuff” that he brought in with him had one roach scurry out of the box. The thing is, that white powder may have still been working because I never saw him, the roach, again.
One other thing I never saw again was my gold colored Trek bicycle that “Red” stole when he left. Unlike the roach, that was more of a “kick in the teeth” for me trying to be generous and help the guy out. There was a legal notice that came to my house, for him, some time later and it had the date & time of a court date that he was required to appear at. I made a note of this scheduled event and “just happened” to be in that courtroom on that date & time, and sure enough, “Red” came through the courtroom door and was surprised to see me. I think I only said a few words to him, something to the effect that… You did wrong and God will reward you appropriately, and I left the room never to see him again. “Red” had red hair.
I left a Global Stamp Album in the attic at 204 Johnson Blvd. when I went off to Seminary in 1981. I had collected stamps since I was in high school. The album was probably 5 or 6 inches thick. Each page was double sided and included several black & white images of the stamps on each page. The images were the size of the actual stamps so all you did when you got that stamp was to paste it over the B&W image on the page. I probably didn’t have any really expensive stamps, but I had quite a few. When I came back to live at 204 Johnson Blvd., this album was gone. I should have known that you just couldn’t leave something like that in a house that you were going to rent out.
And another thing. I had a working, floor model, hand cranked phonograph that sat on four legs, and had a place to store some records and a door that opened to the speaker (this had no electrical working parts). The lid lifted so that you could put a record on the turn table. I think I had paid about $50 for it. I bought it because I had gotten a bunch of old 33 1/3 records when I was staying with my mother up in Portsmouth, VA. She was renting a small apartment with bathroom in a sprawling old house that had formerly been owned by either a Governor of Virginia, or important politician. One day the owner of the house had me help him start to clean the attic. He started to throw out a bunch of these old records that were stored in boxes. There was a window in the attic, and he opened it and threw a box down about 3 flights onto the alleyway. I stopped him and said I wanted them if he would, and he let me have them.
So now I had over a hundred old 33 1/3 records of people and bands like Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller and others, but nothing to play them on. That’s when I found an old hand crank, console and bought it.
At some point I bought a special record. It was much thicker that all the other records I had. Maybe about three times as thick, and it had a special engraved image of Thomas Edison (embossed?). This was a special record that required a diamond tipped needle to play, a diamond disc.
What happened to this phonograph and the records. Well, when I went off to Southern Seminary, I asked a friend if he would keep the boxes of records and he kept some under his bed. But, at some point his mom wanted to clean out the house and I told him to go ahead and get rid of them. But the phonograph? I also asked a former pastor of mine, Rev. Fred High (at New River Baptist Church), if he would keep this antique for me. I had a few records in it, and the Woodrow Wilson campaign button and a copy of the Daily News that had my mother’s obituary in it, all stored together. Well, when I came back to Jacksonville after seminary and my time in Alabama, I came over to get the phonograph. And what? Well Fred said something like, “When I look at it, I think of your mother,” and I realized that he didn’t want to give it back. I made a quick decision that if he wanted it more than me, he could have it. Not that he deserved it any more than me, or that I had ever told him, “I’m giving this to you.” No, just one of those things not worth trying to hold onto… *I just googled and see that Fred died in Bessemer City, NC in January of 2018. I hadn’t heard the names Lora, Missy and Angie in a long time but saw them mentioned in his guestbook.
Back to Dinwiddie Street, Portsmouth, VA and cleaning the attic: *There was also a table top or box that had a bunch of old campaign buttons on it. They were for Woodrow Wilson. Little round buttons about an inch in diameter with his face and name on them. The owner was going to throw those out and I asked if I could have them. He must have seen my eyes light up because he changed his mind and said just take a couple. There were probably fifty of them. I never sold the one I got, but they could have easily been worth $500. **I just saw that one special button (not shown here) was being offered for $149. I don’t think I would have been savvy enough to make $2,500 by selling all of those buttons, but they would have been worth it.
We, my mother and me, had something like this. A Sears Silvertone record player & radio combination console. It was fake wood. No telling what I would have played on this but probably a 45 of “Red Rubber Ball” by the Cyrkle, or “Last Train to Clarksville” by the Monkees. I now remember, I listened to Shirley Bassey sing “Goldfinger” and cranked it up.
I might have listened to WMBL in Morehead City on the radio although that would probably have been more on the car radio.
The TV was in the front corner of the living room, and the phonograph console was to the left of the TV. I think this was the TV that I watched “Sunrise Theater” from WRAL5 TV on Saturday mornings. In those days there was no “cable TV” and all the television stations went off the air at 12 midnight. They only displayed a “test pattern” from midnight until 6am the next morning and then they came back on. “Sunrise Theater” included two sci-fi/monster/horror movies back to back and they ran from 6 am until 9 am. There was a TV antenna just outside at the end of the front porch and a coaxial cable (flat plastic with wires inside) ran between the TV and the antenna. Our antenna was on an aluminum pole and you could rotate it for better reception sometimes. Each Saturday morning I would finish watching the first movie, but just about 15 minutes before the second film finished the sun began to reach high enough in the sky to affect the TV reception. There were many of these mornings that I would run outside and rotate the antenna to get better reception, but quite a few mornings the sun would win and I wouldn’t know how the second movie ended. Two scarry movies that I recall watching on Saturday mornings were “Invisible Invaders” and “From Hell It Came.”
“Invisible Invaders” involved invisible aliens that inhabited the bodies of dead Earthlings, but were finally conquered by sonic weapons (John Agar, John Carradine and Jean Byron before she became Patty Duke’s TV mom). “From Hell It Came” had to do with VooDoo, and a man came back from the dead and inhabited a tree. The tree killed people, mostly women I think, but the creature had a knife embedded near it’s heart and finally someone shot the knife handle driving the blade into the creature’s heart and killing it.
After this black & white console TV shown above, we had a Zenith B&W portable TV. It was portable by the standards of that day, but I find my 40 inches TV today to be not as heavy as that old Zenith. I’m not sure if the portable Zenith we had was exactly like the one show here, but it was narrower at the top, front to back, than at the bottom, and the carrying handle was exactly the same. I probably would have watched “The Time Tunnel” or “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” on it. And I guess I was still watching “The Wizard of Oz,” and “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” every year, along with “Rocky & Bullwinkle,” “Yogi Bear,” and “Mutual of Omahas Wild Kingdom” with Jim and Marlin Perkins.
Sunday nights were special because the “Wonderful World of Disney” and Walt Disney almost always had a movie to show us. Might have been “Old Yeller” or “Treasure Island.” What was that Disney movie about the little boy who runs off to the circus? Or maybe “Daniel Boone.”
A day or so later from writing the above, I’m watching a rerun of “Banacek.” The one where a full sized commercial jet has disappeared from a small airport. Victoria Principal is playing the character of a young, good looking flight attendant, and she mentions to Banacek as they are riding in a jeep, that the poor local TV fare includes “The Farm Report,” and a rerun of “Circus Boy.”
in Toby Tyler
in Toby Tyler
in Zorro
My mind immediately catches on the reference to “Circus Boy” and I do a quick google. Mickey Dolenz, who would later become one of the Monkees Band, plays a young boy who runs off to join the circus. He wasn’t the boy I had in mind, so I’m going to look for another “boy runs off to the circus” movie about that time. Ahh, “Circus Boy” was the TV show, and “Toby Tyler: Or Ten Weeks with a Circus” was the Disney movie and Kevin Corcoran played the young boy in the movie. Henry Calvin would have been the iconic actor that befriends the young boy. Calvin was also in “Zorro.”
There were no children that lived close to where I lived and my mom was at work from about 7:30 am to 5:00 pm so I entertained myself with television programs. I grew up in the country, but I wasn’t a country boy. I watched Sci-Fi, horror and monsters. The Wolfman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon (Julie Adams wow!), Dracula (Hammer Films: Peter Cushing & Christopher Lee). I guess if my mom had listened to country music or played it some or a lot, I might have gravitated toward that, but she didn’t so I watched “American Bandstand” with Dick Clark, or later “Soul Train” with Don Cornelius. And every year I would stay up late on New Year’s Eve to celebrate the new year. I just thought, I was never able to kiss a girl/woman when the new year arrived. Even when I was dating Debbie Sutton, we were never together for New Years Eve.
By 1973 when the Miami Dolphins went undefeated and won the Super Bowl I was watching on a color TV. I don’t recall what company made it, but I do recall that it sat on top of a dresser in my bedroom in my Aunt Sis’s house in Hubert. I recall me standing right in front of it one day, and a very young Jaime looked up at me and asked, “Your Ami.” To which I had to try and explain that it wasn’t My Ami Dolphins, as in they belonged to me, but it was the Miami Dolphins. Not an idiotic question at all.
Mom bought me a 1971 Pontiac LeMans, blue with a white vinyl top, for my high school senior year. What a mom!!! She may have “done without,” but she made sure I had.
There was a black teacher who had a blue & white car that looked like mine, but it wasn’t a Pontiac LeMans. I recall one time that I was behind her one morning as we were in front of the Swansboro High School, and she turned in front of a vehicle which hit her. *Okay, I would have been living with my Aunt Sis in Hubert my senior year, so I would have been parking my car at the high school on most school days.
I also recall when I was dating Debbie, that I drove from Hubert down to Cape Carteret where she lived and picked her up. We drove all the way back to Jacksonville, past Aunt Sis’s house in Hubert, to see what movies were playing. Not seeing anything we liked, we drove all the way back down Highway 24, past Sis’s house again, through Cape Carteret and on to Morehead City to see what movies were playing down there. I don’t actually recall if we went to a movie anywhere that day. But I still had to come from Morehead City, back to Cape Carteret to drop Debbie off, and then drive back to Hubert. Now that’s a bunch of miles on the highway, but that’s love. I think Debbie and I saw Barbara Streisand in “Funny Girl” at the theater in Morehead City. That was with Omar Shariff? Later Dr. Zhivago.
My Freshman year at UNC-Chapel Hill I wasn’t allowed to have a car, so my mom took the two year old Pontiac LeMans to drive to/from work and I got a bicycle (from Woolworths in Chapel Hill) which I almost never rode. The 1964 1/2 Prairie Bronze Ford Mustang 2+2 had finally succumbed to the ravages of time. Recall that the first year, or few months we had it, a couple of young Marines had broken into our garage and stolen the Mustang for a “joy ride.” They had wrecked the car at Stella (a place not a person), and while on it’s side, battery acid had leaked across the engine. Mom never thought the car rode as well after the theft/accident. *And the Prairie Bronze color was changed in 1971 to a powder blue with flecks of sand in the paint because the paint had not had time to dry before mom had to bring it down to Hubert for me to drive to my prom. She had been taking the Mustang to the Portsmouth Ford dealer to have it serviced in anticipation of me using it for my prom. Someone had motioned her across traffic, and “surprise” someone was coming and hit her. I’ve never seen a larger bruise on anyone than the almost solid bruise my mom had on the left side of her body. When the other car had hit she was probably thrown severely against the driver’s side door. When she drove up into Sis’s front yard in a powder blue Mustang it was still missing two hub caps. The next day we went to a junk yard and bought two replacement hubcaps. ’71 would have been Debbie, and ’72 would have been Rida Ring. **As I re-read this posting again, I realized that since I had the 1971 Pontiac LeMans all of 1972, that I must have had the Mustang for the 1971 Prom.
I leave this section to try and help me determine the timeline for the Proms I attended and which cars I drove during those times. The Embers were scheduled one year to play at our Swansboro High School Prom, but they came out with a hit in 1970, “Far Away Places” and they backed out of performing for us. I don’t recall who we got to play that year. If I graduated in 1972 and started college classes at Carolina that August, then I would have attended my last prom in the spring of ’72.
My mother worked as a Civil Service “Clerk Typist” for over 40 years, mostly aboard Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base. She worked with Betty Brainerd, Robin Short and Rip Jackson (who lived in Sneads Ferry, I think) at Building 66, the Naval Medical Field Research Unit. This unit was where they tested out things like putting a human cadaver’s foot inside a boot and blowing it up to see the effects of a bomb blast on the human body. And, Rip Jackson got me my dog, Lassie, from the test animals. I recall that mom was rated as a GS-4 along with the other women she worked with, but at some point all but her got a promotion to GS-5s. I wonder why? She was a fast reader and a quick typist, and quiet.
Several years later he, Rip Jackson, also took the money my mom provided and bought me a fishing rod & reel (Penn Peerless No. 9 – which I still have, but not in working condition), and a fake copper colored tackle box. I recall there was a pearly white shrimp lure with the multi-hooks hanging down from it. I think it probably scared more fish away than attracted them. There was also a small vial of scent meant to attract fish. It had an almond/cherry scent so was pleasant for humans to smell. The Christmas I got the fishing gear, mom went out with me to the Bogue Pier. It was extremely cold that morning but there were a few fishermen on the pier.
One old, seasoned fisherman was fishing near where the waves broke, and he was pulling in fish, one after another. I wasn’t catching anything, so after a while mom suggested that we move down next to him. We did and I still didn’t catch anything, but we did make him move away from us… twice I think;-)
Regarding the picture with the fishing reel and the the little colorful wooden carved characters of fishermen & sea folk/ I’ve had them for years. I bought them for a dollar each. Repeatedly I have thought that I would like to create a chess set using these characters, but I don’t have enough of them, and I never came up with all the distinct pieces. One idea was to have the rooks be made of mooring posts maybe with one or more seagulls sitting on a post. And unlike several images on this page, this is a picture of the actual Penn reel that I got as a Christmas present many, many, many years ago. Possibly 55 years ago.
Several years later when mom was living with Aunt Pete (Zeta Littleton) in Portsmouth, Virginia, Aunt Pete’s boyfriend, Irvin Wilkins, took pity on a fatherless boy and took me out fishing on his small boat. Is that the Elizabeth River? Aunt Pete allowed him to keep his boat tied up at her dock which was in front of her home at 521 Riverside Drive. One morning the tide had already started to go out, and we had started late. When the tide was completely out, the little bay in front of her house would be just mud. We pushed off from her dock and maybe got out about 10 yards before the boat became stuck in the mud. The little channel of water was quickly disappearing with the tide, but Irvin finally got us out into deeper water and on to fishing. Not sure if we would have had to stay in the boat until the tide came back in, several hours later, or if we would have tried to get out of the boat and walk back to the dock. No telling how far down you might sink in that mud.
On another fishing excursion into the Elizabeth River, we made it out and both of us threw our fishing lines out into the River on different sides of the boat. At some point we both got a nibble and both started reeling in our catch, but at some point my line began to go around under the boat and then it became obvious that our fishing lines had become entangled. I don’t recall if there were two fish, but I recall the one fish, an ugly Toadfish, and that Irvin had to take his pliers out and cut the hook from it’s mouth. That was easier than trying to fight the fish for the hook and the tangled lines.
Aunt Pete must have died my Freshman year at Carolina (1972 Chapel Hill). I came home on Thanksgiving and went back until Christmas break (less than a month I guess) and when I got back at Christmas they told me Aunt Pete was dead. I said, “Why didn’t anyone tell me she had died.” By the time of her death, Aunt Pete and I were not close. In fact, she hated me, and that hate had caused my mother to move out of Pete’s house and take an apartment. I think the body language, Pete with her arms folded, sitting on Irvin’s boat, says it all. She didn’t want to be there with me taking a picture.
I think mom lived in two different places before she came back to Jacksonville, NC to live and work on Base again. She lived for a short time with an old woman in Craddock. Later she moved to Dinwiddie Street and had a larger bedroom and a private bathroom (that was probably opulent in prior days).
But, I heard that Irvin lived another couple of years and then one day they found him dead in an alleyway in Norfolk (just across the river from Portsmouth). The alleyway was so narrow that he had died standing up. Norfolk, like Chicago is famous for it’s frigid downtown weather. Irvin was an alcoholic, and I guess the loss of Aunt Pete had left him all alone. But, I loved the man and have visited his grave in the Olive Branch Cemetery a short distance from 521 Riverside Drive.
*Some years ago I went looking for Aunt Pete’s grave. I recalled that I had visited it many years previously, probably shortly after she died. But, I couldn’t find her grave and the caretaker, with his thick book of the recorded graves couldn’t find her either. Only later when I came back home and googled for it, I found that she was buried in a different cemetery. Irvin is in the same cemetery as Anna Kathleen Morton Hughes (d.12/54). She was married to Earl Booker Hughes. They have a double headstone. I’ve seen it. Pete was married to Everett Littleton briefly. ***It was Lyde and Hurley Jones that were married.
I have a picture of Lawrence and Thalia Morton when they were visiting in Virginia. They are standing in front of an automobile and the passenger side door is open. If you look through the door window, you can see Hurley Jones looking at the camera.
It was from this picture of Lawrence and Thalia that I got the image of “the Poor Farmer.” I never thought of him as a poor farmer. I knew how much he was loved by the way all his children, and Mary Ann, talked about him. I had cut his image out and printed it on several envelopes. I happened to show my waitress the envelope and to my surprise she made the comment, “that poor old farmer.” I had to take a second look, and yes, I guess he was a poor old farmer, but I never knew the man, and that appendage would never stick with me.
Irony? Well, recall that I said that my family did not tell me when my Aunt Pete died, in 1972, while I was away at school. Now many years later, and I find from Mary Ann earlier this year that Dot Pefley, the daughter of Aunt Pete died in March of 2012. That was forty years between the two deaths, and 12 years ago. She had a living son, Charles, who never contacted us to let us know. I find that rather “rude.”
Dorothy “Dot” Littleton Pefley was married to Bill. She and her husband were both successful realtors in Virginia (Virginia Beach) and North Carolina (Elizabeth City). They lived at Munden Point, and at some point even donated the property which became Munden Point Park and Pefley Lane runs through this area.
Where Dot and Bill Pefley lived, and just up this path is Munden Point Park.
Bill Gibson, II 