Lee High School - Huntsville Alabama Alumni

Looking Back At This Week in 1964

The Road Wisely Not Taken

by Tommy Towery

Class of '64

Saturday, March 7, 1964

67th Day 299 days to follow

Clear

Paul aroused me from my sleep at 10:00 A.M. We went and saw a car that had been wrecked earlier today then went riding around. We goofed off all afternoon and I came home around 5:00 P.M.

He came back over at 7:30 P.M.; we went and picked Brenda and Betty up, then Pat and then went down to Bradley's. We danced to the music of "The Continentals." I danced to every song they played while I was there, from 8:05 P.M. to 11:15 P.M. Saw an old friend named Benny P.

Memories brought back by this date centered on running into Benny at the dance. Benny was another friend from my past, and perhaps represented the best chance I ever had to go bad. Benny was not one of the church or Scout crowd. Given the chance, Benny could have been a hoodlum, and in reality, probably was. We first met two years earlier, when I lived on Clinton and Benny lived a couple of blocks away, up on Wells Avenue by Maple Hill Cemetery. Benny had moved to Huntsville from Gadsden, and was on the verge of being a little wild. Benny liked to do a lot of things that were foreign to the normal activities of my other friends. He liked doing things like stealing hubcaps and siphoning gas from cars parked on dark streets.

One night Benny came over and wanted me to drive him to neighborhood so he could steal a car. He also had a wild desire to rob a gas station. There were other little things like that which made me wonder about him. I was fifteen years old and he presented a mystery to me. He represented a kind of wild excitement, a part of the dark side. I had seen movies about people like him but I had never before been exposed first-hand to anyone such as his type. Soon after we met, Benny offered me $50 to tell him what kind of car my Scoutmaster drove and where he parked it. That was because I had once mentioned that my Scoutmaster let me shoot a 45-caliber Colt automatic pistol that he always kept under the front seat of his car. Benny wanted the pistol so he could rob the gas station. I declined his offer.

Benny came into my life one day when I was visiting Benny's next door neighbor Randy. Randy was a former boyfriend of Connie's and was still considered a rival. One afternoon, Randy and I got into a heated argument on Randy's front porch. That was the first time I had met Benny, who was just standing there listening to me argue with the considerably larger rival.

We were arguing about Connie and things were getting heated when, for no apparent reason, Benny joined in and took a wild swing aimed at Randy's jaw. He missed Randy's face but smashed his arm full force into the porch banister. He fell in pain with a broken arm. I rode to the hospital with my new-found friend, Benny, and waited while they put the cast on his arm. This incident left me owing Benny an unpaid debt of honor. If Benny hadn't have taken up for me then he wouldn't have broken his arm. Thus, that uneasy debt had a strange hold on my young mind.

A month later, after Benny got his cast off, he and I rode our bicycles ten miles across town to see Connie one night. That was Benny's idea, as he wanted to see the girl whose honor he had defended at the cost of a broken arm. Connie wanted to meet him as well. In retrospect, that turned out to be a big mistake in many ways and was the beginning of the end of our friendship. About a month later Benny got a car, a green Studebaker which was probably the last one I ever rode in. By then I had turned sixteen and was going steady with the fourteen-year-old Connie.

I tried playing the matchmaker role and fixed Janice up with Benny so the four of us could go places together. I did that to help Janice find a boyfriend and because Connie couldn't go out on single dates yet, only double dates. In reality, those also had to be double dates with Janice since she was the only girl Connie's mother trusted. The trust might have been a little misguided, for Janice didn't really care what Connie and her date did in the back seat of the car while she was in the front seat with her own date. For a month or so, the four of us ran around together. I failed to notice that a strong attraction was building not between Janice and Benny, but between Connie and Benny.

That was nothing new though. Connie had always been attracted by many different boys, and usually only went with one for about two or three months before moving on to another. Janice and Benny never really seemed to hit it off and by the fall they had quit seeing each other. Janice later confided that Benny was too wild and that he was after more than just a casual relationship with a girl. She thought he was part octopus. Even though Benny didn't date Janice any more, he was still around.

My suspicions followed. Benny's phone and Connie's phone were busy at the same time for long periods of time. At parties and dances, they seemed to spend a lot of time together. They accidentally bumped into each other and traded strange glances. Jealousy began to rear it's ugly head in my mind but cunning movements by the friend and the lover kept my suspicions unconfirmed. Ultimately, the truth could no longer be hidden.

One night, at a Lee and a somebody-else football game at Goldsmith Shiffman field, Connie and I were sitting in the stands watching the game. Right in the middle of the game, for some unknown reason, Connie jumped up, said she'd be back in a second, and ran off. Fifteen minutes passed and she was not back. Finally, I got worried and started looking for her. I walked around the field several times, to the snack bar, to the rest rooms, but could not find her anywhere.

Goldsmith Schiffman field was an old ball field. It was old and it was small. It had a ten-foot rock wall that surrounded the field and blocked the view of the street outside. I finally went outside the gate to see if she was there. As I looked up the street, I saw Benny and Connie walking toward me holding hands. Not knowing I was there, they stopped, put their arms around each other and engaged in a passionate kiss. I turned and walked back inside, alone and crushed.

A few minutes later Connie came running in, by herself and returned to her place in the bleachers. She acted as if nothing had happened. When I asked where she had been, she said she was in the girl's room talking to a friend in trouble who needed someone to talk to. She stayed with that story for the longest, until I finally confronted her with what I had witnessed. A few days later, with me hurt, jealous, and unable to forget or forgive, the relationship between Connie and me came to an end for the first time. She was the first girl I had ever gone steady with and that was the first time I had ever broken up with a girl. It hurt. She later apologized for the event, but I had lost all trust in her and there would never again be a time that I ever felt I could completely trust her.

Something good did come out of that event. It brought to an end the friendship and association I had with Benny. My debt was wiped clean. It had been paid by the violation of a trust and the breaking of an unwritten code: "You don't mess with your best friend's girl." Perhaps it was the best thing that could have happened. It did get me away from Benny, and his wild ideas about what to do at night. Had the relationship continued, I only could have ended up in trouble. So, I called off the friendship and went back to my other, less wild, church and Scout friends. After that I only saw him rarely and knew we could never be real friends again. Benny moved back to Gadsden, and later joined the Air Force.

I don't know if he ever got to rob the gas station or not.

Looking Back

This incident is being retold not to reflect upon the hurt of the lost love, but to reflect upon the threat posed to me by the debt of honor that I felt I owed to someone. This turned out to be a someone who came closer to screwing up my life forever than anyone else I would ever meet.

I previously noted that most of the names in my journal memories were changed "to protect the innocent." Benny's was not - he was not innocent.

It is scary now to look back and see how some bad choices during those days could have changed my life forever. Had Benny succeeded in winning me over to the dark side, I would never be what I am today. I am lucky that did not happen. The "force" that protected me that time was my Boy Scout honor code (the 12 points of the Scout Law) that had been instilled in me since I was 11 years old that made me feel so uneasy about my relationship with him. A police record, even a small one, would have jepordized my ability to pass the multiple background checks done on me for the Air Force top-secret clearances needed for my successful Air Force career.

Instead of robbing gas stations and stealing hub caps, I found life much better by going to the dances at Bradley's and listening to the "Continentals" and dancing every dance. My thanks to all of you girls that accepted my offers.

I don't have a photo of Benny, and would not recognize him if I met him on the street. I have erased him from my memory bank. Several others in this tale's cast are still a part of my life. One is considered a dear friend still. Randy and Mike have come back into my life in the last few years and old teenager feeling of jealosy and competition for affections have long ago been put aside and replaced by more mature feelings and logic.

Now I look back at the 17-year-old I was at the time and his choice of not allowing himself to be led astray and say those immortal words from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade "You have chosen...wisely."

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