Established March 31, 2000   165,238 Previous Hits      Monday - February 15, 2010

Editor:Tommy Towery                                                     http://www.leestraveller.com
Class of 1964                           Page Hits This Issue     e-mail ttowery@memphis.edu
Adivsory Board: Barbara Wilkerson Donnelly, George Lehman Williams, Patsy Hughes Oldroyd
Contributors: The Members of Lee High School Classes of 64-65-66 and Others
Hits this issue!
Memphis, TN. - Even in Memphis we heard the tragic news of the shooting at UAH. I hope none of you had family or friends who were directly connected.

Please include your class year with your e-mails.
T. Tommy
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Last Week's
Mystery Photo
This Week's
Mystery Photo
This picture is of a menu from an establishment in Huntsville in the Late Fifties/Early Sixties. You can click on the picture to get a bigger one. The name has been whited out. Can you tell me the name of the establishment? School and class year with answer please.

We had one correct guess. Jim Butts, Class of '64 -   I think that menu is from the Walgreens at the mall. If I remember right, there was also a “sit-in” A bunch of black demonstrators were bused in to Huntsville to do that demonstration.
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It Happened This Week in 1964 -
An Extract from
"A Million Tomorrows...
Memories of the Class of '64"

(Editor's Note: This week I shall share with you an extract from my first book. The italic text is my journal entry back in 1964 and the observations were made in 1989 when I wrote the book. I'll be posting more info on the book next week. I hope you enjoy.)

Friday, February 14, 1964
45th Day   321 days to follow
Clear

Went back to school today with a 1X excuse.  Worked on my letter project during study hall.  I don't have but about twenty letters to do now.  Rode to Mullin's with Paul then missed the bus so I started walking to town.  Ronald H. came back and gave me a lift.

Ate supper and watched T.V.  Took a ten minute cat nap at 6:00 P.M.  At 7:30 P.M. I "hoofed it" to the dance at Bradley's where the "Continentals" played.  It was more crowded tonight than it's been in ages.

After the dance Bob and I went riding around.  I drug in at 1:00 A.M.  Had a piece of cake and at 1:30 A.M. checked into bed.


Holidays come and go and some have no meaning at all if you can't relate to them.  For the longest time, the only meaning I gave to Valentine's Day was that it was my father's mother's birthday.  I always gave her a combination Valentine and birthday present.  She was 65 on that birthday.

In 1964, that was about the only way I could relate to Valentine's Day.  It was just another day to someone who didn't have anyone special to share it with.  Such a holiday was probably the reason for the large crowd at the dance at Bradley's that night.  It's on nights like that when young lovers want to be out dancing together.  Perhaps if I had paid any attention I would have noticed a lot of red outfits, flowers, and hearts decorating the place.  I didn't have anyone to take to the dance with me so the decorations meant nothing special.

Even at the young age of seventeen, I already had old memories of that holiday.  My first real date was on Valentine's Day, a few years earlier, in 1961.  It was through one of those twisted webs of relationships that I was invited to go to a dance on Valentine's Day.  The web was a long and complicated one.  Joyce Ann was the daughter of the lady from whom my Valentine grandmother rented an apartment.

Joyce Ann was seventeen and was going steady with a boy who was taking her to a dance at Huntsville High School.  She invited her younger cousin, Connie, to go along.  Why she wanted to do that is unknown, but Connie didn't have anyone to go with.  Through some scheme, known only to Venus or Cupid, I was the one invited to go to the dance with Connie.

That was my first real date, and I didn't even initiate it.  I was the one who was asked for the date, and even then I wasn't asked by the girl.  It was through an arrangement made by the cousins, and parents, and aunts and uncles, and grandmothers and who knows who else.  Maybe the milkman was in on it for all I knew.  If I hadn't known better I would have thought that it was an old-world arrangement.  How such a date was settled is beyond belief, but it was and I was invited to go to the Valentine's Dance with Connie.

It was 1961.  I was fifteen at the time; she was twelve, almost thirteen.  I bought flowers and everything and even wore a suit and tie.  I lived across the street from the cousin, so when the time came, I took the flowers out of the refrigerator, tried to get the butterflies out of my stomach, and walked across the street to meet my date.  It looked like the Academy Awards show when I arrived at the door.  There were people and cameras and flowers and me.  There, behind the crowd, was Connie in her nice party dress.

When I gave her the flowers she opened them and handed the corsage back for me to pin on her.
That posed the first problem of the night.  Just how do you go about pinning a flower on a girl's shoulder, or lower, without touching something you were not supposed to touch?  The older cousin, her date, the aunt and uncle and her parents got quite a giggle out of watching me struggle with embarrassment.  The obvious way to do it was to scoop your hand down inside the front of the dress to hold it steady while you pinned it on her.  Obviously what was practical was not the proper way to do it.  After a few seconds, which seemed like hours, of fidgeting and trying to pin it on without touching anything, and after the adults had all the giggles they could get out of watching me, I was rescued by the cousin who completed the task.  A smart fellow would have taken that as a hint and left and waited until he could date a girl without an audience.  That was not to be on that night.  I was committed to the date.

We rode in the cousin's date's car to the dance, hardly speaking on the way.  I just barely knew the girl sitting beside me in the back seat of the car.  We had met once before when she was eight and it never entered my mind that someday I would be sitting in the back of a car on the way to a dance with her.  We sat in silence, glancing ever so often at one another and then out of the windows to watch the street lights go by.  The dance went rather well, except that at the time, neither I nor Connie knew how to dance, and we spent most of the time sitting and making busy talk or not talking at all.  When we did try to dance, all that I knew how to do was the two step, and I spent most of the time on the floor saying "one two one, one two one" to myself as I counted the steps needed for the dance.  When the dance was over we all went to Jerry's.  It was my first time to visit that establishment with a girl.  We had Cokes and then went riding in the country.

The older cousin and her escort knew what you were supposed to do on a date when you go riding around on dark country roads.  I didn't.  If Connie did, she didn't tell me.  For almost an hour, we rode around in the dark countryside, with me sitting straight-backed, with my arm and her's just barely touching.  I couldn't have gotten any closer to the door if they had added me to the plans at Detroit.  About ten minutes before we got back to the house, my or her hand moved enough that they touched, and we held hands for the rest of the trip.  That was the whole extent of affection for the evening.

Thus ended my first date.  Scared to death of the girl and not knowing what to do, I decided that I needed to understand the male-female relationship a lot more before I ever went on another one.  Later, Connie and I would discover what dating was all about, but it would take time, and it would be another year or so before I ever went out with her again.
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The Story Behind the Book
by Tommy Towery
Class of '64

I always wanted to write a book and one day I finally did.

Many times I make reference in Lee's Traveller to what I call my first book. It took me 25 years to write my version of the great American novel, completing and self-publishing it in 1989. I don’t know if I have ever explained the concept of the book in public, so I guess it is time to do that for those that care.

I was a 17-year-old Lee High School senior in 1963 when I started writing the journal which was the seed of “A Million Tomorrows … Memories of the Class of ‘64.” As the editor of my high school newspaper, I documented the activities of my fellow classmates and impressions of our surroundings. Starting with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, through the introduction of integration in Alabama and the “British Invasion”, and continuing on until graduation night, my writings detailed the daily lives of the teenagers growing up in the emerging South.

The journal did not end when I left Huntsville the day after graduation, but the day-to-day interaction with my friends and classmates did. Eventually the journal entries ceased and the book was stored away in a safe place. In the next 25 years it survived 13 moves to five different states and one foreign country. On the night of the 25th anniversary of the first entry in the journal, I took the book from its safe place and copied into my word processor the entry that I had made in it 25 years before. I then thought about what I had written and then wrote my reflections of the documented events and the activities and my understanding of the impact that they made upon me after those 25 years. I only did one day at a time, and always exactly to-the-day of the 25th anniversary of each entry. Each day I would copy the old entry for that date, and then I would write my reflections of the events. I did that up to the day after I graduated and moved to Huntsville. On June 2nd, 1989 I made the last reflection - 25 years to the day after June 2nd, 1964.

At first I wrote the book in third person, with me looking upon and calling the main character “the seventeen-year-old”. The completed work was over 350 pages of typed text. After a couple of reviews by friends, I took their suggestion and went back and changed the case to first person and eliminated almost 100 pages, reducing it to its final size of 279 pages. On-demand and online publishing were not available in 1990 when I was ready to publish it. I submitted it to several publishing companies and the book was rejected by all of them because it was too localized to Huntsville. It was then that I decided to self-publish and found a printing company that could do it for a price I could afford. A friend repaid an old debt and that money allowed me to get the project of 500 copies finished.

I tried to sell them to book dealers in Huntsville and a couple of local books stores like Shaver's Books and Books-A-Million sold a few for me, but most of my sales were via word of mouth between friends. I once tried to sell them via the Lee’s Traveller web site when I opened an online souvenir shop with pictures and audio CDs and other things, but finally gave up on that. I decided it was not fun to try to make money with Lee’s Traveller, even though I pay all the expenses to do it each week.

I have sold a few more at the reunions we have had since it was published, but most sales today are made when someone sees a copy and contacts me.

Below is the explanation of the journal, as it appears in the prologue of the book.

THE JOURNAL
My Thoughts and My Memories

I guess it was the feeling that I had witnessed a true piece of American history that made me start a journal of my life on the day that President Kennedy was shot.  It had to be a journal because boys did not keep diaries.  Girls kept diaries in which they committed to paper their innermost thoughts and secret loves.  On the other hand, it wasn't manly for boys to do that type of thing.  If you were a boy and kept a diary, everyone would have thought you were a little funny.  Our label for funny people back then was "fruit."  I know I didn't have to keep it a secret, but I did.  I kept my journal hidden and told no one about it, not even my closest friends.

My journal was a very personal thing.  In it I recorded my daily activities and thoughts.  I wrote in it each night before I went to bed and kept it in a cedar box secured with a lock without a key.  The lack of the key was part of my security plan to make sure that no one read it.  I found that if I bent a paper clip just right I could easily pick the lock.  That left me alone with the ability to get into the box and to the journal.  I never had any future plans for the journal except to keep it for my own memories.  I had no idea that one day I would share it with the world.

My high school days have always had a special place in my heart.  I don't think I am unusual to feel that way.  The boy who wrote the journal, the seventeen-year-old editor of the high school newspaper, is the person that lives inside my body today.  He is the person who is most shocked in the morning to see an old man looking back at him in the mirror.

Many times I have wished that I had started the journal on the first day of class of my senior year.  I could have written in it that I wore the new pair of stiff-starched blue jeans and white shirt to school on the first day and could have carried the writings throughout the full nine months of that year.

Regretfully, the recording of events from the first day of school, shortly after Labor Day, until the 22nd of November, 1963, was never accomplished.  My memories of those days will live as most other people's memories live, in the slowly dying parts of the mind.  They are tucked away with other things, where names and faces, dates and times, the good and bad are slowly blending from blacks and whites to grays in our aging memories.

In the chapters of this book, the original journal entries, complete with bad grammar, incomplete sentences, secret codes and the misspelled words of the seventeen-year-old writer are included at the beginning of each section.  I believe that it is important to leave them as intact as possible to help preserve the authenticity of the work. 
The first few weeks' comments were very short and contained little information compared to the later entries.  Perhaps this showed my maturing and the emerging of my writing skills.

"The names have been changed to protect the innocent" was a common statement during my high school period.  We heard it each week on "Dragnet."  It made sense for them and for me.  Certain people would not care to have their high school activities revealed today.  How would they explain them to their own kids?  They all swear that they didn't do stupid things when they were in high school.  In truth, they did, just as our parents did and our grandchildren will do when they get to school.  They won't be the same stupid things of course.  Each generation finds their own stupid things to do, but they are all related.

My journal started its life on some small yellow slips of paper that I obtained from the printing shop that printed the school paper.  I swear that all these years I remembered starting the journal on the day that Kennedy was shot, November 22, 1963.  It was much to my surprise that, in reality, when I looked at the yellow pages of the journal, it was actually started on November 25, 1963.  I finally remembered that the original entries of that particular day in history were actually recorded in the margin of my twelfth grade English book and were never transferred to the journal.

I did miss out on a lot by not starting the journal on the first day of school.  I missed the fall activities such as the football games and the dances earlier in the year.  I missed the governor's visit to our school.  The stories of many of those events were recorded in the school papers, but that was not the same type of information as was recorded in the journal.  The school paper was public and not personal like a journal or diary.  Little personal secrets shared by the crowd were not allowed in the school's paper.

Some things that happened during those lost days would have made interesting tales.  A whole book could be written about Halloween night alone.  It was a night of 29-cents-a-dozen eggs, water balloons, and nickel cherry bombs obtained across the Tennessee state line.  Cherry bombs made a lot of Halloween tricks interesting.  Mailboxes didn't hold up well to cherry bombs and the reaction to a cherry bomb by a couple parked on a lonely spot is indescribable.

In the school paper's editorial and in the margin of my English book I recorded my association with that day in history when the shots rang out in Dallas.  It is the day that I look back upon as the start of the end of my childhood and the beginning of my adulthood.  For my generation, the shots in Dallas killed not only our President, but also the innocence of our childhood.  It made us look reality in the face and see that everything was not milk and cookies but that real things happened in a real world and those things could affect our lives.  Our neighborhood was no longer secure from outside forces.  We were vulnerable and uncertain.

For years to come members of my generation would be asked "What were you doing on the day Kennedy was shot?"  It is a day that no one who was old enough to remember will ever be able to forget.
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We'll make this week a question with a bonus question. What year's telephone directory is pictured above? The bonus question is  where was the phone company located? School and class year with answers please.
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      From Our
      Mailbox
Cheryl Gallagher
Class of '66
Died Feb. 3, 2010
(From The Huntsville Times)

Cheryl Ann Gallagher, 61, went home to be with the Lord on Wednesday.She was the daughter of the late Daphna and Arthur J. Gallagher Jr.

A memorial service will be held at 7 p.m. Friday at Grace Baptist Church, 2611 Pulaski Pike, Huntsville. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in honor of Cheryl to Compassion International, ATTN: Haiti Fund, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80997-0002 or at Compassion.com. Inurnment at Memory Gardens in Huntsville will be in the spring with Berryhill Funeral Home assisting.
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Subject:In Memory
Jim Butts
Class of '64

Is there a place we can go to find out what happen to those of our classmates that are listed as gone? Several I recall better than others & some were in my home room.

(Editor's Note: I do not believe there is. Perhaps we could work on that idea while we are working on the reunion plans this year.)
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