Summer of ‘59

June of 1959 marked the end of my elementary school years. Back then, there were no “graduation” ceremonies until you actually finished High School. The first was actually a near highlight. I had perfect spelling on my Friday spelling tests with only about six weeks to go, tied with the cute little blonde on the other side of class, until I misspelled “tomorrow”. I had two mm’s and one r. So I finished as the second best speller in third grade. I remember it now as TOM OR ROW. The second was in the fifth grade when the DAR sponsored a history exam for the 5th and 6th graders. This one I actually won, smartest history kid in the school. I included that achievement on my resume for years!

My folks sent me off to spend the summer with my grandparents in Port Arthur, Texas. That nearly three months with my grandparents were perhaps the best summer of my life. They had a snack cupboard requiring no permission for me to take a cookie or candy or anything I wanted - I did gain considerable weight that summer. I had a bike to ride the neighborhood, and the folks across the street took me along with their kids to the country club pool several times a week. I learned to catch crabs in the bayous (you tie a string around a hunk of meat and float it in the water, with a net in your other hand to scoop the crabs into a bucket. We spent Sundays on the Gulf of Mexico near Galveston with Grandad’s coworkers from Gulf Oil. However, one memory sticks with me vividly. One day my Grandmother took me grocery shopping, This was the first time I saw a water fountain labeled “colored”. Thinking it was some brand of Kool Aid, I went and took a big drink which caused quite a stir. To think in my lifetime, we still had stuff like this in our country is disappointing.

Back then, we wrote letters, and I wrote home weekly. I received letters from my Mom and Grandma Gracie. Imagine all the 4 cent stamps my grandparents had to buy, but this was cheaper than making a long distance call back home. As the summer ended, my Grandparents drove back to Pittsburgh to deliver me home. We stopped at those old roadside Motels, visited Mammoth Cave, read all the Burma Shave signs as Grandad motored his new Buick along those single lane highways. We arrived back at my home a week before school began in September, me 35 pounds heavier than when I left! I had assembled a memory album with assorted phots I took with my Brownie Camera. I cut out letters to form “TEXAS” for the cover. That aged album remains in my library to this day, replete with most of the letters.

The summer of 1959 became the demarcation of my whimsical youth from my more rebellious period to follow. I never played organized baseball again, had given up my paper route, and began wearing my Dad’s clothes. It was quite the transition!

Submitted by Michael Roberts, Estrella resident