The Early Years

The Early Years

I was born a couple of years after World War II had ended, during the big “baby Boom”, on August 4^th, 1947 in the small southern town of Leakesville, North Carolina. It’s a picturesque little mill town sitting on the banks of the “Dan River” in the northern part of North Carolina. Almost all of my mother’s relatives still live in Leakesville, but a few years ago they changed the town’s name to Eden. Doctor Frank King, my great grandfather on my mother’s side, started the first bank in town over one hundred years ago and his large Victorian house on South Bridge Street was the first one to have indoor plumbing and electricity. He evidently was a big fish in a little pond. I think he pretty much owned the whole town. What he didn’t own he controlled through his bank. He was given the name Doctor, because he was the seventh son of a seventh son. That’s some kind of a tradition. When he died of old age, the in-laws, the dreaded Barker family, stole all of the inheritance from the rightful heirs. That is why we were so poor when I was growing up. At least that’s what I’ve been told since childhood. All my older relatives still act like they are “Old Rich” without the rich part. They look down their noses at anyone that is “Nuevo Rich”.

Little boys don’t think about rich or poor. I never really thought about how poor we were or all the problems mom had to overcome until many years later.  Like all little boys, I was too busy playing and having fun to think deeply about things. When I reminisce about my childhood, now that I am older, all of the characters of my youth and their motives seem quite obvious to me.

When I was two or three years old we moved to Greensboro, North Carolina and lived in a government assisted housing project called “Morningside Homes”. My very first memory is sitting under the outside stairs in the housing project, dressed only in a cloth diaper and eating handfuls of dirt.  I remember marveling at how it ground between my teeth. This was evidently right after my father had abandoned us and taken off to Panama.  He supposedly left to find work as an electrician and we never heard from him again.  I suspect living with mom was pretty difficult and my brother being born with serious birth defects was too hard for a weak guy like him to tough it out.  The child support law back then must have been pretty slack.  Even if my mom had known where dear old dad was, I doubt that he would have helped us out.  So she had to struggle to earn a living and to rely on the State of North Carolina and on generous relatives to survive. That is why we were living in the “Housing Project”.

When I got older, I learned that my father was a bigamist, as well as an asshole. He had been married twice before he married my mother, unknown to her, and had a son with each wife. He never bothered to divorce any of his wives.

Mom and dad met at the end of WWII, when my dear old dad was in the hospital where my mom was volunteering.  Everyone was doing their part back then. My father was in the 82^nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army and saw a lot of action in the Pacific theater of war. The only thing I have from him is a Samurai sword he brought back from the war that he forgot to take with him when he left us.

He had been injured during a training exercise after the war had ended. He was stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina waiting to be discharged. When on a training parachute jump, his main parachute did not open and he had to use his reserve parachute.  Evidently he waited a little to long before opening the reserve. He hit a tree top and suffered some serious injuries. Well, he and mom fell in love and got married. I was born about a year later and my little brother Jimmy was born a year and a half after I was born.  Jimmy had some major birth defects and went through a dozen operations before he was one year old.

After he abandoned us, dad went to Panama to work as a power linesman and married a woman there named Lea.  They eventually moved to Las Vegas and had a son named Billy and a daughter named Yolanda.  Billy died in an accident at a service station where he worked part time when he was sixteen years old. I have no idea what happened to my half sister Yolanda. He died of a heart attack in Las Vegas when he was in his fifties.  I have never met any of my half brothers or my half sister.

Morningside Homes was a large apartment complex that housed many “down on their luck” families getting government assistance like us.  The residents back then in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s were about equally split between black families and white families.

I remember that my mother worked part time at two different jobs and had a vast array of baby sitters that would come in and watch us while she was gone.  Thinking back now, I can recall that it was pretty dangerous living in the project.  This was something I did not grasp as a kid. My brother and I ran around the project all day barefooted and I can remember him cutting his foot pretty bad on a broken beer bottle one day.  It sure was a different time back then.

One day I remember vividly that there was a knock on the apartment door and I toddled over with my favorite little toy truck in my hand and opened the door. An older kid was standing there and he grabbed my favorite little toy truck out of my hands and ran away with it.  I can still remember standing there, looking out in disbelief, as he disappeared around the corner, my little toy truck clutched in his grimy hands.  I never forgot that experience and to this day I am very suspicious of all five and six year old kids.

I realize now that my Aunt Eliza and Uncle Bing were responsible for rescuing us from the housing project. Aunt Eliza was my mom’s sister. When she and her husband Bing, a retired Army Colonel, returned from Formosa, now called Taiwan, where he had been stationed since the end of World War II, they bought a very large house in a nice quiet neighborhood.  The next thing I know, we moved out of the project and in with them.

Aunt Eliza was a stout woman with knee high stockings that always seemed to have falling down.  She loved my little brother Jimmy like he was her own child. I had the feeling that the only reason we were allowed to move in with them was because of my little brother.  Jimmy was born with serious birth defects and he had already survived about twelve operations before he was two years old.  All the operations were paid for by the “March of Dimes”, they are a great charity. 

The doctors told mom, when Jimmy was born, that he would not live for a month.  When he lived past a month they said he would not live past two years. When he did, they said he would never walk. When he did, she quit listening to them....

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