Day 6: Happy Days…
The majority of my childhood was a fun and blessed time. One Christmas, Debby and I both got bikes. Debby got a normal girl’s bike, and I got a J.C. Higgins 3-speed English bike with hand breaks. I can’t imagine anyone else in the entire city of Greenville with a 3-speed English bike, but that was Daddy…had to be different.
I didn’t know enough in those days to think it was weird, it was just a bike, but being different in the 50s was not a good thing. Regardless, I now had “wheels” and I could go anywhere…and I did. I don’t think I ever used any other gears besides the middle one, but it was still fun.
I’m not sure how he did it, but Daddy tied a rope in one of the Pecan Trees (pronounced PEE-can to those of you, not from North Carolina. Pee-CON is for the snooty people). It was a long rope that hung down at least 20 feet with a few knots in the end so you could grip it and swing…and swing we did.
This started a whole new set of games for us…none of which would be considered “safe” these days. Let me see if I can describe how it went. You would hold on to the rope and run as fast as you could and then in midair, turn your body around before you came down. When you came back to the ground, you would run again to get more height on the second run. Then turn your body in midair again and run as fast as you could when you could touch the ground to get even higher…then at the peak…you let go and see how far you could fly through the air and land. Once you hit the ground, you would mark your spot and the next person would try to beat you. I spent hours on this rope, with or without friends to play with. Obviously, it built strong stomach muscles, strong arms and strong legs, but I was just having the time of my life.
I’m not sure how long the rope lasted, but it was great while we had it. It was never replaced, so at some point, I’m sure it rotted, and we moved on to other games and adventures.
We lived at 1101 Colonial Ave. Greenville, NC. I have recently pulled it up on Google Maps and the same house is still there on the corner, three blocks from what used to be Third Street Elementary School where Debby and I went from first to sixth grades. You can see the sidewalks where we played Snake in the Gutter as I talked about a few days ago.
Every fall we had Hurricane season, which to us kids didn’t mean much. Sometimes we would lose electricity, but then we would just light a lantern and sit by the front door and watch the lightning and the wind blow. One year, we lost one of the three Pecan trees in the backyard, but it never hit the house or did any damage, just another adventure.
Every year the hurricanes line up in the Atlantic taking turns to follow the Gulf Stream up the coast to North Carolina and pick a place to come on shore. The graveyard of the Atlantic is just off Nags Head, NC where ships were either driven on sandbars of the Outer Banks by hurricanes or by following what they thought was a lighthouse light. The ships were lured in by pirates hanging a lantern around a “Nags Head” and walking the horse up the shore until the ships hit sandbars and then, the pirates would go out and raid the ships or wait for the goods to wash up on shore. North Carolina was loaded with pirates, Black Beard being the most famous hiding out in Bath, NC.
Hurricanes Hazel and Donna were two bad ones for us in the Greenville area at that time, but we got so used to them, it wasn’t a big deal. It’s not good to be causal about anything as bad as a hurricane, but that’s just what happens. The Outer Banks was always the worst place, some years they could lose 50 yards of beach and some years they might gain 20-30 yards of beach…you just don’t know. It is all just became part of life in the Carolinas.
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