Month: October 2017

You Parked Where?!

My wife, Donna Joy Hyland, and I began dating in 1959, when we were seniors at Garinger High School in Charlotte.  Sometimes –OK, pretty often– we parked on some quiet residential street after the movie, held hands, and counted stars.

Our senior year, 1960.
Our senior year, 1960.

Sometimes we dated in a 1951 Plymouth named “Suzie” that Dad drove back and forth to work. Sometimes we went out in her car, a heavier than lead ’49 Chevrolet she called the “Gray Ghost.”

One evening, after we had finished counting, her car wouldn’t start.

This was a problem, not because we were so far from her house —  we were only a mile, mile and a half away. It was a problem because of where we were parked. How was I going to explain that to her father, who had greeted me after one date holding a shotgun — Donna said he was just teasing.

The "Grey Ghost" looked like this '49 Chevy, but not nearly so shiny.
The “Grey Ghost” looked like this ’49 Chevy, but not nearly so shiny.

What I had to do, I decided, was push the “Gray Ghost” to a commercial area.

So I started pushing. Donna steered.

When we finally got to The Plaza, I thought, heck fire, why not push it on across Independence Boulevard?

And I did. And, by then, we were only two blocks from her street, Chesterfield Avenue.  And from there it was downhill most of the way. So I pushed her car all the way back home.

No explanation required.

Coming Monday: Jail Party

BB Battles

I couldn’t go home because there was a quarter inch high lump on my forehead where I had been hit with a BB. It wasn’t an accident. We shot at each other playing war, Brother Dave, me, and our new friends in town.

[After Dad was forced to sell the farm we moved to an apartment in Gadsden, AL, in December, 1951, when I was nine years old, and lived there a year and a half before moving to Charlotte.]

Sometimes we fought in the woods next to the apartments, sometimes we fought in an old barn and horse stalls across the street. That’s where we had been playing that day, pretending we were fighting house to house. I had been hit in the head at point blank range.

The Red Rider lever action gun were cooler but we thought the pumps were more powerful. This is a 1951 advertisement.
The Red Ryder lever action guns were cooler but we thought the pumps were more powerful. This is a 1951 advertisement.

Brother Dave and I had our own BB guns, bought with money from our paper routes, but we couldn’t take them home. We hid them in the barn across the street because we knew Dad wouldn’t let us have BB guns, much less let us shoot at each other.

Lucky for me he was late coming home again that night. I waited as long as I could before I went home myself, to give the swelling time to go down some. When I came in, I waved to Mother, said I didn’t feel good, went directly upstairs to my room, got in bed, and stayed there.

It worked. They never found out about the BB battles.

Postscript: We finally quit shooting at each other after a BB hit one of my friends in the soft, meaty place between his eye and nose. No real harm done, but it scared all of us.

Coming Friday: You Parked Where?!