Lee High School - Huntsville Alabama Alumni

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Barb Biggs Knott, Class of '66

Boy, do I remember those characters! In the first grade I used the pink workbooks that had Dick (1), Jane (2), Sally (3), Spot (4) and I believe it was Puff (5). Thanks for another great issue, Tommy.

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Sally Dawley Stroud, Class of '65

The names of the"friends" in this week's Traveller are: Dick, Jane, Sally, Spot (Dog) and Puff (Cat). They were in the first grade reader I used in the Catholic school I attended in Seattle. I liked seeing my name being in the book, but I didn't like the fact that she was "Baby Sally". I have these magnets on my file cabinet in my office and they are a very fond reminder of my early grade school days.

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Escoe German Beatty, Class of '65

We knew them all well...1. Dick, 2. Jane, 3. Sally, 4. Spot,& 5. Puff. I can't imagine that any of us will ever forget this famous family!!

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Linda Isbell Creek, Class of '64

It's funny how we remember some things and can't remember others. I remember learning to read using the Dick and Jane books. I've seen them recently in the book store. Apparently, some teachers are using them again in the classroom. I can't see anything wrong with that. We seem to have managed well!

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Don Blaise, Class of '64

I will never forget those characters in our Dick and Jane reader. When I was in the first grade at East Clinton Elementary we had a big D&J book on an easel in the front of the classroom and from time to time were called on to go up front and read the our last night's homework assignment. I did not like having to do that. For the life of me I don't recall a Cat in the readers. Could be because I don't like cats?

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Barbara Wilkerson Donnelly, Class of '64

The mystery items from last week came from our first-grade reader. It was so incredibly BORING, that I'm surprised anyone ever learned anything. I guess it worked though to hear: 1) See Dick run. Run, Dick, run. 2) See Sally run. Run, Sally, run. 3) See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. 4) See Puff run. Run, Puff, run, or the damn dog will eat you! Well that's not exactly right, but you get my point, Maybe that's why people have nightmares that they're running from someone or something, such as . . . a werewolf!

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Susie Wohlschlaeger Schlette, Class of '66

Thanks for coming up with something that I actually still remember - our old friends Dick, Jane and Sally

with their pets Spot and Puff. Still enjoying the Traveller and all your hard work.

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Ethel Sullivan Roden and Tommy Towery, in front of the window of Tommy's room.

In My Room

by Tommy Towery

Class of '64

In My Room

There's a world where I can go and tell my secrets to

In my room, in my room

In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears

In my room, in my room

Do my dreaming and my scheming

Lie awake and pray

Do my crying and my sighing

Laugh at yesterday

Now it's dark and I'm alone

But I won't be afraid

In my room, in my room

In 1963 the Beach Boys released “In My Room,” a tune that made it to # 23 on the popular music charts. It was a poignant slow ballad, not about hot rods, girls, beaches or surfing, but about something that all teenagers could relate to, even those in Alabama. It glorified that solitude place in each of our houses where we felt safe and secure - our own bedroom.

Although each of us had rooms that were as different as the genes in our bodies, we each still had some place that we could claim as our own, even if we had to share it. Personally, I did not get my own room until I was 17, in the summer of 1963. That was the year that my older brother Don joined the Navy and I was left as the sole survivor of the room that we shared. Until that period, Don and I had shared twin beds in every house I can remember. I even remember the Roy Rogers bedspreads that were on those beds in the early days. The other key memory of my twin bed was that it had a set of springs and a matress. They were not box springs, just metal ones and were laid on top of a set of boards called slats to hold them up. Many a night one of the slats slipped off the rail, and the matress and springs, with me on it, went crashing to the floor. I’d have to get out of bed and get someone to help me hold the springs and matress up while I slide the wooden slats back onto the bed rails. I doubt if that has happened to many teenagers in their own rooms today. Slats were low tech!

When I finally got my own private room, I was living at 904c Webster Drive in Lincoln Park and going to Lee High School. Today, that area could be classified as “the projects” and probably was back then too, but I did not know what “the projects” were when I was growing up, and my friends didn’t care. I knew that we lived in government subsidized housing. I knew that we lived there because we could not afford much else, but the house that we moved into was the newest building in which I had ever lived. It was all brick, and was one end of a three-unit apartment type building. It had three bedrooms, but my mother had one, my grandmother had another, and so when we moved in, Don and I had to share the third one.

It really wasn’t much of a personal room, even after Don moved out and it became mine alone. Before we put the furniture in, it would have made a great handball court, because of the concrete walls, ceiling and floor. The room was off of a central hall, right across from the bathroom – which was a plus. It had a metal door I believe, or at least a very sturdy wooden one. As I mentioned, the walls were concrete, with little sticky-out pointy places that would scratch like crazy and bring blood when you accidentally knocked your elbow or knucles against them. It had one window, which faced the front of the house and so looked out at Webster Drive, but the only sight was an identical building across the street facing us. The floor was tile – very hard and very cold in the winter. It was fun to slide on in sockfeet. There was no air conditioning in the house so we tried to stay cool in Huntsville’s hot summers with a window fan in the dining room. It was set to blow hot air out of the house, so if we left the windows a little cracked in the bedrooms; it sucked air in through them.

What can I say about my room? It was not much by today’s standards. It was not very wide, maybe nine feet. We had a twin bed on each side of the room, and that only left about a three-foot walkway between them. The heads of the beds were on the street side of the building, and there was a single table under the window between them. On that table sat a lamp, and an alarm clock, and not much more. At the end of the bed in which I slept was a chest of drawers, and there was nothing at the foot of the other bed, since the door opened into that space. On the hallway side of the room was a closet, which had no doors. It was just open, with a clothes rod and a shelf at the top to put things on. Usually it was junked up with Scout stuff and books and papers. When I first started writing this, I could not remember anything that hung on the walls, but in thinking harder I do remember some pictures. I had three or four eight by ten black and white photos of the 1960 National Boy Scout Jamboree framed in black frames with glass that I was allowed to hang. I could not drive nails into the concrete walls (against the housing project rules) so I hung them up with those licky-sticky white picture hangers. The weight they would hold, especially on that pointy type wall, limited the decor.

The floor was brown tile, the walls were tan. They were that way when we moved in and they were that way when we moved out. We had a pull down shade on the window – you know, the kind with the little string and the doily lacey circle to pull it up and down with? The kind that also had the ability to go rolling up on its own whever it took the notion and made a “zap…flap…flap…flap” noise in the process. The window itself was fancy at the time. It was a three paned roll out one that was controlled with a crank on the inside and you rolled the widow open and shut the way you did a car window. There was no way to crawl out or in them, so sneaking out at night or back in early in the morning through my window was not an option.

The technology in my room was very low tech – almost primitive. There was the bedside lamp and a wind up, black, square, “Big Ben” type alarm clock on the table, and the ceiling light…yep, that’s it. The alarm clock had luminious dials so I could see what time it was for a little while after I turned out the lights, but the glow faded quickly and if I woke up in the middle of the night, I could not focus enough to read the dull green hands of the clock. I had no radio, no television, no record player, and no phone. Come to think of it, it sounds more like a prison cell today, except that I did not have the toilet in the room nor bars on the door. It didn’t matter, it was my room.

It was in that room that I started and wrote in the journal that eventually became “A Million Tomorrows…Memories of the Class of ‘64”. It was there that I said my prayers each night, and had trouble getting up to go to school when my grandmother woke me up each morning. I had jury-rigged a long chord onto the only telephone in the house, and I could run it down the hall from the living room and it would reach the bed where I could lie in my room and talk on the phone. I did that a lot. Although I spent many hours home alone at night, it was still neat to lie in bed and talk to Ginger and Dianne, and Bob and Lewis. There was not a desk in the room, so most of my homework was done on the dinette except for the reading which I could do in bed.

It was to that room that I returned the day that Bob Ramsey broke my collar bone while tackling me during a football game with the Scouts up at Monte Sano State Park, and ruined my professional football career. Well, maybe I really wasn’t going to go pro anyway, since I had never even tried out for the General’s team. I came home from the hospital and carefully laid in the bed and drifted off to sleep, my shoulder held in place with the figure eight strap that I had to wear for about six weeks. After all the pain, that was some of the best sleep in my life. It was good to be in my own room in my own bed. It was also from that room that I finally had to throw away the treasures that I had kept for years when I got ready for my move. I could buy a new Mustang today if only I had those things to sell on e-Bay.

I did not have many friends spend the night with me when I was in high school but I remember spending the night at other people's houses, especially Bob Walker's. Pete Goodwin from Huntsville High is the last one that I remember staying with me. Now when I lived on East Clinton Street, there were lots of nights that I had friends stay, especially on Saturday nights so we could watch "Shock Theater."

One other memory entered my mind when thinking about that room. My mother used to place a glass of water on the bedside table for me many nights, in case I got thirsty during the night. I never drank it, because it used to go flat, and got hot and so just about every morning I’d get up and pour the water our in the sink, but the next night, another glassful would be right there again. I never asked her not to, and never told her that I did not drink it, so that ritual continued until Mother remarried and moved to Memphis, leaving me and my grandmother alone in the house. If the project manager ever found out that just the two of us were there, we would have had to move into a two-bedroom apartment, so we never told them. Finally when I moved to Memphis to go to college, Grandmother had to move into a one-bedroom because she was not elgible for the three-bedroom unit.

Odd as it may seem today, I have no photos of that room. I do not have any interior photos of the house/apartment at 904c Webster Drive at all. I do have some pictures of the house on East Clinton Street, but not that one. One of the rare photos that I have, even of the outside, is a picture taken of me wearing my cap and gown for graduation and my grandmother sitting beside me. It was in that room that I got dressed for graduation. It was in that room that I stumbled in around 5am on the morning after graduation, and it was in that room that I packed my bags and closed the door a few hours later and moved away from Huntsville for what now seems forever.

The room I moved into in Memphis had the clock radio my other grandmother gave me for graduation. It had a televison and stereo turntable that I took with me when my grandmother had to move to the smaller apartment. I had closets with doors, and central heat, but still no air conditioning. I had posters on the wall of Ursula Andress as Honey Rider in her “Dr. No” swimsuit outfit. I also had my own telephone sitting beside my bed. What I did not have was Ginger, Dianne, Bob, Lewis, or any of my other friends to call me on it. Often I laid on the bed in the new high-tech house, listening to records on the stereo and pining for the plain room and the friends that I had left behind, and the 25-foot cord on the telephone that I could run down the hall and use to talk to them. It was a different work in the days when long distance calls were so expensive that we rarely made them and computer e-mail had never been dreamed of. But in my room, I could dream and scheme and do my crying and my sighing and laugh at yesterday.

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I would be interested in hearing from other Classmate that lived in Lincoln Park and what they thought about it - TT

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Subject:Urban Legend

Dianne Ralston Lashbrook

Class of '64

Thanks to Mike Griffith and wife Sue for verifying the urban legend. That story had such an impact on my very young mind. As a teenager behind the wheel of my families car I never drag raced or did dangerous stunts for fear of losing my head! To this day I have never been in a wreck and pray I never have one.

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Escoe German Beaatty, Class of '65

Re. Dress Code...Bravo Lynn...It couldn't have been said better or more cleaverly!!

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Linda Kinkle Cianci, Class of ’66

Tommy, great newsletter this week! I’ve attached two photos taken during my last visit to East Clinton School in 1983, when I took our boys and niece, Mary Beth Butler (’88), to show them where I went to elementary school. That one hanging upside down is me, at age 35 - showing them how we did things when I was a kid. How I ever got up there I don’t know, but I’d love to try it again at 56.

Since girls were required to wear dresses back then, any females remember how we conquered that dilemma while hanging upside down? The second photo is of our oldest son and niece on the jungle gym - better known nowadays as monkey bars. Monkey bars were removed two or three years ago from the playground of the elementary school our boys attended - declared too dangerous. Hope there aren’t any trees that might invite curious climbers on those playgrounds.

Funny thing is that at East Clinton, this play equipment was located on the side of the playground designated for the “younger” grade children. Recess was a time to get out and whoop and holler and get rid of all that pent-up energy, learn to get along on teams, and just have some fun. I learned recently that some schools are no longer even having recess nor is PE required - a tragic mistake schools are making for the physical and mental health of today’s students. Speaking of physical education - time to go walk and swim a few laps (for my physical and mental well-being). I’m glad I never got into diving, because diving boards have been removed from most pools - declared too dangerous!

Tommy, glad you enjoyed the ice cream recipe.

(Editor's Note: Linda, a memory crawed out of the depths of my brain when I read your question, "Since girls were required to wear dresses back then, any females remember how we conquered that dilemma while hanging upside down?" I started laughing about something I haven't thought of in probably 50 years. It was probably one of the first risque jokes I ever learned and goes like this.

Mother: Sally, what did you do at school today?

Sally: A boy taught me how to hang upside down on the monkey bar.

Mother: Sally, you shouldn't be doing that. He was just trying to trick you so that he could see your panties.

Sally: Oh, that's okay Mother...I knew that and tricked him instead. He didn't see my panties....I took them off!

Oh, the jokes we learned in school! Next thing you know someone will write in about dropping pencils in the floor so they had an excuse to look under the library table for them.)

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How Old is Grandma?

One evening a grandson was talking to his grandmother about current events. The grandson asked his grandmother what she thought about the shootings at schools, the computer age, and just things in general.

The Grandma replied, "Well, let me think a minute......... I was born before

television, penicillin, polio shots, frozen foods, Xerox, contact lenses,

Frisbees and the pill.

There were no credit cards, laser beams or ball-point pens. Man had not

invented pantyhose, air conditioners, dishwashers, clothes dryers, and the

clothes were hung out to dry in the fresh air and man had yet to walk on

the moon.

Your Grandfather and I got married first and then lived together. Every

family had a father and a mother. Until I was 25, I called every man older

than I, "Sir"- - and after I turned 25, I still called policemen and every

man with a title, "Sir".

We were before computer-dating, gay-rights, dual careers, daycare centers, and group therapy. Our lives were governed by the Ten Commandments, good judgment, and common sense. We were taught to know the difference between right and wrong and to stand up and take responsibility for our actions.

Serving your country was a privilege; living in this country was a bigger

privilege. We thought fast food was what people ate during Lent. Having a

meaningful relationship meant getting along with your cousins. Draft

dodgers were people who closed their front doors when the evening breeze

started.

Time-sharing meant time the family spent together in the evenings and

weekends - not purchasing condominiums.

We never heard of FM radios, tape decks, CDs, electric typewriters, yogurt, or guys wearing earrings. We listened to some Big Bands, Jack Benny, and the President's speeches on our radios. And I don't ever remember any kid blowing his brains out listening to Tommy Dorsey. If you saw anything with 'Made in Japan' on it, it was junk. The term 'making out' referred to how you did on your school exam.

Pizza Hut, McDonald's, and instant coffee were unheard of. We had 5 &

10-cent stores where you could actually buy things for 5 and 10 cents.

Ice-cream cones, phone calls, rides on a streetcar, and a Pepsi were all a

nickel. And if you didn't want to splurge, you could spend your nickel on

enough stamps to mail one letter and two postcards.

You could buy a new Chevy Coupe for $600, but who could afford one? Too bad, because gas was 11 cents a gallon. In my day, "grass" was mowed, "coke" was a cold drink, "pot" was something your mother cooked in, and "rock music" was your grandmother's lullaby .

"Aids" were helpers in the Principal's office, "chip" meant a piece of

wood, "hardware" was found in a hardware store, and "software" wasn't even a word.

And we were the last generation to actually believe that a lady needed a

husband to have a baby. No wonder people call us "old and confused" and say there is a generation gap..... and how old do you think I am ???.....

Read on to see -- pretty scary if you think about it and pretty sad at the

same time.

Grandma is only 58!

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