My Father (cont.)

My father did not have a degree in industrial engineer and was self-taught. It could not have been easy earning a living back in the 50’s working as a draftsman or an industrial engineer. Back then I think a weekly salary would have been $75 a week.

In Atlanta we lived in Decatur on Conway Road. I do remember some things about the house. It had a furnace in the floor, and no AC. The house had a detached garage and a screened in front porch. My mother would site on the porch sipping lemonade and one day ask our maid if she wanted to take a break and have some lemonade. It must have been one of those hotlanta days because Gussie May said, “Yes.” A few minutes later the phone rang, and it was an unidentified neighbor said, “I do not know where you are from but here in the South we do not sit on the porch drinking with our help.”

My mother told me that none of the Baptist children could play with my sister and I because we were Catholic. When I was a baby and growing up in Atlanta I was fat, did not start walking till late in my twos, and did not speak. My mother was worried there was something wrong with me. She took me to a speech doctor to see if there was a reason for my tardiness in speaking. At one of the visits to the doctor, he noticed that my sister would cater to my needs. He would ask me a question and my sister would answer. When I wanted something, I would point to it and say, “augh”, and my sister would get want I wanted. I did not need to talk with my sister being around and being my “go for”.

Due to my late speech development, I was sent to speech school before I was in kindergarten, I was perhaps four years old. At this school I was Phonics to help me speak. At this age, I developed a studded when I did talk. Phonics helped me a lot to talk and to not studded. Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing of the English language by developing learners' phonemic awareness—the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes—in order to teach the correspondence between these sounds and the spelling patterns (graphemes) that represent them. In a few months I was talking, reading and spelling all before first grade. I remember one day, Cheryl was trying to memorize her spelling words for that week. I was reading them faster than she could spell them, she got angry and yelled at me to stop.

In first and second grade the Catholic school taught Phonics and so I did not have problems starting off school

When we moved to St. Simons Island, when I was in the second grade, the Nuns at St. Francis taught Rote learning which is a memorization technique based on repetition. The idea is that one will be able to quickly recall the meaning of the material the more one repeats it. Some of the alternatives to rote learning include meaningful learning, associative learning, and active learning.

When we moved to Saint Simons Island, we lived in a two-bedroom tabby house at 616 Brown Drive. I attended the catholic school in Brunswick, Saint Francis Xavier School. in Brunswick. I would ride the bus or ride with one of the families that would drive their children to school

I switch from Catholic School to public school in the second grade. It seems that I was not the perfect child and was always in trouble with the nuns. When I was in the second grade, 1956 it was it was a long-distance call from Brunswick to St. Simons. The nuns would send a note home with my sister asking my mother to call regarding my disruption to the class. My mother was working for Palmers Five and Dime making a dime an hour. The phone calls cost a dime, my mother could not afford keeping me in Catholic School.

It was decided that I would be better off attending Saint Simons Elementary School. The school was within walking distance or bike distance of Brown Drive. Our next-door neighbor was the Flanders, my mother’s best friend. Lloyd. Flanders was a school teacher at Saint Simons Elementary School and Dyson Flanders was a horticulturist for Sea Island.

Public school was teaching Rote learning. When I tried to sound out words and use Phonics I was discourage by my teachers. They wanted you to memorize ten spelling words a week where I was using to sounding out how to spell the words using proper English rules, I was forced to learn a different way.

My mother, sister and I moved to California in the summer of 1959. My father remained in Georgia to sell out house and would join us. At least this is what we were told. The truth was that my mother and father were having marriage problems caused by my father’s drinking to excess. My father started his own business when we moved to St. Simons Island, he sold spare parts to the two largest companies, the pulp mill and Concrete Products. They always needed belts, bearings, rollers and other machinery parts that would need to be replaced. This was a good business until someone else decided to do the same thing. There was not enough business for two suppliers and soon thereafter my father started a company to supply pre-engineered steel. This was a booming business until there was a steel strike a forced my father to close his shop.

The steel strike of 1959 was a 116-day labor union strike (July 15 – November 7, 1959) by members of the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) that idled the steel industry throughout the United States. The strike occurred over management's demand that the union give up a contract clause which limited management's ability to change the number of workers assigned to a task or to introduce new work rules or machinery which would result in reduced hours or numbers of employees. The strike's effects persuaded President Dwight D. Eisenhower to invoke the back-to-work provisions of the Taft-Hardy Act. The union sued to have the Act declared unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court upheld the law.



My mother, sister and I moved to California to live with my grandparents in Castro Valley, near Walnut Creek, California.

California was a little more advance in education and was teaching Phonics. After a year in third grade without Phonics, when I was tested in California, I tested low and it was determined I was not ready for the fourth grade. I repeated the third grade in California.



California was a great place. We lived in Castro Valley with my Grandparents in a house they built. It was a large house, with a basement, a second floor for the bedrooms, a true split lever ranch home. The house was on four to five acres with a fruit tree orchard, cherry, apricots, and walnuts. Also on the property were 20,000 pairs of pigeons the main source of income for my Grandparents. The sold the young birds called “Squabs” and the pigeon’s eggs. There was a large Chinese and Japanese population in the area that created a demand for their products.

I have good memories of being in California currently and only one bad memory which was poison ivy. There was a creek not far which I would play and on the banks, grew this non-descript green leafy plant that really got me good a few times.



After a year in California my mother could not live in the same house with her father. She had a job working for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), an American federal research facility in Livermore, California. While she had a good job, it was not sufficient for her to be truly independent and not live at home with her parents. It is for this reason we moved back to St. Simons Island.



When I started the fourth grade in the fall of 1960 I was seated in the back row, maybe because of my size, I was a year older and maybe other kids could not see over or around me. Sitting in the back of the room my teacher discovered that I was near sighted and need to ware classes full time. This help my grades improved but I lost my penmanship book sometime that year, or so I have been told, and my penmanship has never improved. When we moved back to Saint Simons Island we live on Peachtree Road, not far from the Crab Shack. A year later we lived at 1009 Marigold Court. This house was near Saint Simons Elementary that I could hear the first bell ring and arrive by the second bell and not be late. Apparently, there was a hole in the fence where I could slip through and save minutes off my travel to school.