Terry’s Run: An American Life 1923 …

By Terrell Greene

This book gives a view of nearly a century of American life—a century of astounding changes in technology and upheavals in social values starting in the 1920s. The story is seen through the eyes of one individual: first, a boy growing up in the South during the depths of the Great Depression, then a young man working his way through college, serving in World War II, and launching into a career of astonishing variety. Episodes range from boyhood and wartime adventures to scenes in academia and events at the top levels of government in technical work for the United States Department of Defense and the White House. Owning and managing a factory, designing contemporary houses, playing a role in management of symphony orchestras, sailing to the South Pacific, winning highly competitive ocean races—all these are elements of a life reported with keen observation and humor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796032741

Terrell Greene

Terrell Greene, Terry to friends and co-workers, was raised in the southern US, grew up during the Depression years, and served abroad during World War II. During the nearly hundred years of his life he has been a critical observer of the changes in technology and cultural values that have occurred in this extraordinary period. Educated in technology (Ga Tech and UCLA) and in the liberal arts (Columbia and USC), he has worked in academia, the business world, and as a scientific advisor at top levels of the Air Force and the Office of the President. Along the way he has found time for adventures in long-distance ocean cruising, for highly competitive ocean racing, and for roles in the management of two symphony orchestras. He has lived in Virginia on the Chesapeake Bay with Nancy his wife of 56 years, the former Nancy Gibson.

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Copyright © 2019 by Terrell Greene.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2019906118

ISBN:              Hardcover              978-1-7960-3270-3

                        Softcover                978-1-7960-3269-7

                        eBook                     978-1-7960-3274-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 06/11/2019

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Contents

for Nancy

What the sundial said

Preface

PART I:   WARMING UP

1.     Turl

The Tree with Silver Leaves

Midnight Ride

2.     Terrell

Atlanta

The Ravine

Atlanta Neighborhood, 1932

Knives in the Schoolyard

The Sport of Kings

April Fools’ Day 1934

Johnny, Me, and the Seaboard Airline

Hoboes and the Monkey Man

Away at School

An Evening With Miss Thalia

The Women

Elfrida Keller Everhart

Grandma

Ethel Everhart Greene

Mother

Elfrida Van Wormer

Elfie

Aunt Addie

Ah, Suzy, Suzy …

The Men

Grandpa

Francis Terrell Green

Uncle Edgar and the Cousins

Marlowe

Ramblin’ Wreck

3.     Terry

The Army Air Corps

Greetings!!

From SOS to the First Salute

The Weatherman

Over There

You Will Proceed

Troopship

Lacrima Christi

Come Home, Rosie, Come Home!

Sometimes They All Came Home

Casablanca

No Ingrid

Dutch, Danes, the Jews of France and Spain

Potholes and the Naked Lady

Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair

Interesting Flights

The Bridges of Lyons

Turning Pages for Amparo

The Tom Mix Bomb

A World of Islam and Animosity

Dhahran

Cairo

Neat Wheels

Ticket to Uncle Sugar Able

A Near Thing. Twice

Let Slip the Dogs of War

Shoeshine in Cairo

All’s Well that Ends Well

Hail, Columbia!

Teaching the Chemists to Write

English at a Trade School

Blundering Into and Out of USC

PART II:   SECOND WIND

1.     A Modest Success Story

What Caused the Fatal Crashes?

A Special Place

Wars with Report Cards

Assignment in Nam

Protecting the Airplanes

The Guided Gun

Three Great Fighters

Cold Warriors

Rand, White House, Scientific Advisory Board

Rda

Coda

2.     Forty Thousand Leagues

Salt Water

Teaching Nancy to Run The Boat

3.     To the South Pacific

Getting Ready

Twenty-Three Days to Nuku Hiva

The Reef

Nuku Hiva and the Small World of Ua Pou

Picnic at Hana Menou

North and East: The Voyage Home

4.     Racing

How Much Fun Can You Stand?

5.     Cruising Under Sail

6.     Cruising Under Power

The Last of the Mercruisers

7.     Landfall

8.     Millions of Bottles

9.     Beautiful Houses

10.   Guarded by Angels

The Snake in the Dishwasher

Wrong Number

The Refrigerator

11.   Music, Music, Music

12.   Dogs

Appendix I:   More Sailing

Escape from the Abacos

Rescues

Appendix II:   Another Time, Another World

Appendix III:   Chronology

for Nancy

July 7, 1932 — March 24, 2019

She was as in a field a silken tent

At midday when the sunny summer breeze

Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,

So that in guys it gently sways at ease,

loosely bound

By countless silken ties of love and thought

To every thing on earth the compass round.

From The Silken Tent, Robert Frost

WHAT THE SUNDIAL SAID

Serene I stand among the flowers

I care not for the clouds and mist

I only count life’s sunny hours

I’m a brazen-faced old optimist

I found this inscription on a sundial in the garden of an Anglican church in Morocco.

What follows will tell you more of my sunny hours than of my dark ones. The dark ones we may all be wise to forget. If I talk about them, it will be elsewhere.

PREFACE

An implacable destiny glares down upon us. Our only recourse is to paint a picture of it.

—Gustave Doré

Our names are writ on water. But as we make our way toward the inevitable end, gaudeamus , carpe vitam.

I will try to paint a picture.

——————

T his document consists of notes I have written for my own entertainment from time to time in no chronological order. They are repetitive, and they leave gaps. Here, I have arranged them in a rough sort of topic and time sequence. I may try eventually to make them into a coherent statement. Or not.

Appendix II gives a brief catalog of changes in culture over the past nine and a half decades. .

These notes may be interesting in part because they extend over nearly a century of an American life viewed by one person. And what a century this has been! Today’s technology absolutely incredible, viewed from the 1920s. More profound than the technological differences are changes in social values— acceptable behavior, moral judgments.

In the early pages, I tell it like it was in the 1920s and 1930s, not as those days are seen looking back from the twenty-first century. I try to depict the world through the eyes and in the vocabulary of a boy born in 1923, an inquisitive kid with an early start in book learning and some problems in growing up. I tell what the boy saw as he saw it.

I have had a wide range of experience. My education and career were not an orderly line of events. I zigzagged between technology and the arts, between academia and upper levels of the military and the government, between technical research and commercial enterprise.

I did my bit in as a weather officer in WW II with a B-17 Group in Italy and at transport bases in Africa and the Middle East. In my working days, I had some interesting assignments, like diagnosing the control problem that caused a series of fighter airplane crashes, and how to best protect airplanes on overseas bases from enemy attack.

I met and worked with some truly great people in the sciences and in the arts. Along the way, I blundered into and escaped from some extraordinarily dangerous encounters. A couple of these are interesting enough to be included here.

My wife Nancy and I, with a business partner, built, owned and ran a manufacturing plant in California, where we made lots of plastic bottles. Years later, in northern Virginia, with her help I designed and built large contemporary homes. During my retirement years, I have been involved in the affairs of two remarkable symphony orchestras.

And I have had a lot of fun. In my delayed teenage—I didn’t have time or opportunity for this sort of thing until I was in my forties—I learned to ski passably well and to sail actually quite well. Racing and cruising under sail and power, including an eight-thousand-mile sailing voyage to the South Pacific with the whole family, have been a big part of my life.

For nearly sixty years, I lived with a wonderful wife. We had a houseful of lovely children. This is not a record of family life, but if you read between the lines, you will find much of that story.

___________________

Part I of this book tells about times up through WWII and university days. Part II tells about work on aspects of US national defense and in other fields and about adventures when I and the rest of the family could take time off from work

The Chronology Appendix may help tie this disjointed narrative together.

PART I

WARMING UP

1

TURL

THE TREE WITH SILVER LEAVES

M y name was Turl. My mammy was Georgia. She was big and tall. Her skin was brown. She took me to the corner in the hot afternoons where the other mammies were there with their chirren.

image001.jpg

Fort Benning, 1923

Georgia was proud of me. She told the other mammies that I could read. Turl, he kin read outa de book, and he jes three years old. The other mammies bragged about their chirren.

Georgia made lye soap in the backyard. She collected scraps of fat and this and that and cooked it in a big black kettle over a fire of sticks and twigs. I helped pick up sticks for the fire.

Mother thought my name was Terrell. Georgia said my name was Turl. Georgia was my mammy.

My big sister, Elfie, taught me the alphabet. Then she taught me to read. She read Dick and Jane to me. After a while, I read it back to her. When I was old enough, I went to kindergarten. We made towers with the blocks, and we made bridges to push cars across and under. We played The Farmer in the Dell and we all fell down. I read The Little Red Hen and See Spot Run. That was supposed to be first grade, but the books were in the kindergarten room.

My daddy was a major. He wore boots and a Sam Browne belt, and he smelled like tobacco and leather. He said Good Bicycles when I went to bed. He said Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite. Mother played the piano after supper and read to Elfie and me, and then I had to go to bed. Elfie was big and could stay up.

Our house was on a road that led up to the general’s house. Every evening, the Calvary came by. I knew that Jesus was on Calvary and that the Calvary would protect me. I could hear the soft clippety-clop on the dirt road as the guard rode by. I fell asleep protected by the Calvary.

Photos in the Library of Congress of the bridge over Upatoi Creek (Historic American Engineering Record GA-143) show the creek at normal flow, far below the bridge.

It rained a long time. It was too wet to go outside, so Elfie and I played inside every day. We played games that she won. It kept on raining. Upatoi Creek flooded, and Daddy was in charge. He was the Red Cross. That was why he was a major. He took me down the hill to the bridge, where the creek was running fast just a little way below the bridge. You couldn’t go out on the bridge. It will wash away, Daddy said. I was up on his shoulders. It was past my bedtime; I hoped he wouldn’t notice. The water was brown and fast. It was a flood, and they had floodlights.

The boys were correct. My father was head of the Red Cross at the army base. A civilian, he had the honorary rank of major.

The other boys and I played soldiers and Germans. The Germans always lost. The other boys said my daddy was not really a major but a civilian, so I was a civilian and had to be a German. I fought them, and they said I could be a soldier or a German, whichever I wanted.

One of the boys had an uncle from Canvas, who flew his airplane all the way from Canvas to Fort Benning. He hung it up on a hanger in a building behind the house.

Sometimes Georgia made hominy instead of soap in a big kettle. She shelled corn and threw the yellow kernels into the kettle, and they got big and round and turned white. She dipped them out with a strainer and washed the lye off. That was hominy. It didn’t taste like anything.

Georgia showed us how to make things with toothpicks stuck into the green berries that we picked off the chinaberry tree. Elfie and I made chairs, boxes, and houses out of chinaberries and toothpicks. In the afternoon, everybody played hide-and-seek or Mother May I.

In the evening, we caught lightning bugs and put them in Coca-Cola bottles. I had to go to bed at eight whether I was sleepy or not. My bed had sides on it. I could stand and look out at the backyard, where the moonlight shone on the trees and where the grass disappeared into the ravine, which was dark and deep, and I was not allowed to go down in it. There were snakes, Mother said.

When I grew up, Mother took the sides of my bed away, and I could stand by the window and look out at the fireflies and the stars. The soft night hummed and buzzed.

Flivver: a cheap little car; a rattletrap. My mother’s flivver was a Model T Coupe.

Grandpa gave Mother a flivver. She drove it out onto a road by the Parade Ground one day when it was raining, and after a while, we stopped. There was a lot of water. A fireman in hip boots came and picked Mother up in his arms and carried her back to where it was dry. Then he came and carried Elfie and me to where Mother was. Mother was laughing. She thought it was fun. Mother was Buttercup in the opera.

Some afternoons, Mother took us with her when she went to see her friends Mrs. and Captain Hurl in Columbus. When we went to the city, we would go to the library, and while Mother looked for books to take home, I read about The Little Engine That Could.

I liked Mrs. Hurl. She was from England. Captain Hurl was from England also, and he had whippets. They were skinny dogs. He said they were almost as fast as greyhounds. Captain Hurl had a Willys-Knight that he said could go up the long hill in third gear.

Across from our house, across the dirt road that led up to the general’s house, was a big open area where we played in the afternoons and evenings. One windy afternoon, as I stood by myself on the grassy field, a wonderful thing happened. Way at the far end of the field, I saw a tree with leaves of pure silver shining in the wind and bright sun. I ran across the field to gather the leaves, but I could not find the tree.

MIDNIGHT RIDE

I t was dark. Mother woke us up and told us to get up and not make any noise. We dressed, crept through dark rooms, and climbed into the flivver. Mother drove out into the night and down the hill and across the river.

Hampton was from Gen. Wade Hampton, CSA, a distant relative, and Terrell from my father’s family. Everhart was to please my grandmother, and the added e was to make the name more refined.

We went on fast into the light in front of the car. The road disappeared in dark pools ahead of us. The flivver didn’t have real windows, and it was cold. Rain came in. Mother drove over Pine Mountain. I slept. We stopped in front of Grandpa’s in the morning. We had been there before. It was Atlanta. I was six years old. I did not see Georgia again.

Mother changed my name from Hampton Terrell Green to Terrell Everhart Greene. The change didn’t make much sense. Nothing about Atlanta made much sense, but a six-year-old takes things as they are. He is an existentialist.

2

TERRELL

ATLANTA

THE RAVINE

O n one of those days now folded randomly together, Mother drove me to Spring Street School. I was put into Miss Wall’s class, second and third grades in one room. After some indeterminate time had passed, maybe a few days, Miss Wall, who was beautiful, told me to move over to the third-grade side.

None of this seemed important. What was important was that I was six years old and the other boys in third grade were eight. Also important was that I was short for my age and skinny. The school nurse sent me home with a letter saying that I was suffering from malnutrition. My grandmother was furious with the nurse, with the school, and especially with me. God knows we never went hungry in her house. Grandma stuffed more food into me, but I stayed skinny as a matchstick. I didn’t get to normal size until beyond the next decade.

The other kids did not like that I showed them up in the schoolroom. I was younger, smaller, ahead in reading and arithmetic, and a loudmouth. My hand went up instantly to answer any question; I knew all the answers, and Miss Wall liked me. By now, I was reading Treasure Island and didn’t mind showing how much smarter I was than everybody else. If I wasn’t called on, I made sure to correct the dumbbell who gave the wrong answer.

I knew all the answers. This didn’t carry over well into the playground. The larger boys shoved me around. I got frapped on the head and scrubbed. This began to build.

Things were all right with the boys and girls who lived in my neighborhood, but I occasionally heard the word divorce that somehow applied to me or to my mother, which was the same thing. I could tell that divorce was unpleasant and eventually got its meaning when Grandma explained how bad my daddy was and why Elfie and I and Mother were in Atlanta. That all went away after a while. The children in our neighborhood were friendly.

In 1929, school buses had not been invented, at least not in Atlanta, or if there were school buses, they were for the Fulton County schools.

But at school, things deteriorated, especially after school. Everybody walked home. Spring Street School was a block west of West Peachtree, which, in turn, was a block west of Peachtree Street. It’s probably all covered up by freeway now. My walk home took me up to and across Peachtree Street, and then along the winding streets of Ansley Park, past the Governor’s Mansion, down the steep incline of Maddox Drive, past McClatchey Park, and into Avery Drive. How far was it? Two miles? Three? It didn’t matter. Everybody walked home from school.

The problem was that I was followed. Half a block behind, three boys were following. I heard catcalls. We’re going to get you, one of them said, and the other two hooted. Where Peachtree Circle turned off to the right and my route veered left, just before Henry Troutman’s house, there was a vacant lot with a steep drop-off from the sidewalk into a tangle of vines and bushes. That was where they caught me one afternoon and threw me down the slope. I was scratched a bit but mostly terrified. Eventually, I scrambled back to the road, taking a wide detour through backyards to avoid coming into sight as long as I could.

The next day was the same except that the boys were closer behind. On a driveway that circled the hill above, on the other side of the street from the ravine, a man was washing his car. I ran up the slope with the others following. They stood back.

Mister, make them go away.

What do you mean? They’re not doing anything?

Please help me. They’re going to throw me into the ravine.

Oh, buck up. They’ve just got you buffaloed.

He turned back to washing the car. Buffaloed was a new word for me, but I got its meaning: there was no help. Back down to the sidewalk, back into the ravine.

When I reached home, I told Grandma. She said, You’d better be careful. Those boys will knock your teeth down your throat.

Those dreadful words hovered over me. Knock your teeth down your throat. They’ll knock your teeth down your throat. My throat tightened. I felt smashed lips and broken teeth. Years later, I read a Freudian explanation of the fear of smashed teeth. I would not have understood what the Viennese doctor said, but when I was six years old, that image bothered me. It bothered me a lot. I was afraid of those boys and afraid of the ravine, afraid of having my teeth knocked down my throat.

Those weeks—or were they months?—at Spring Street School were my only experience with bullies. It was not entirely their fault; those boys were not unprovoked.

I never saw them after that second time in the ravine. I told Mother when she came home from work. She took the next morning off from work and enrolled me in Tenth Street School, which was about the same distance from home as Spring Street. Miss Moore was my new teacher.

I was friends with the boys at Tenth Street. I didn’t act like an idiot the way I had at Spring Street. I carried Susan Andern’s books home; she was pretty and had chubby legs. I would stop by Dudley Thompson’s house, and we would play toy soldiers or something. Then I walked home, down Piedmont Avenue, past Piedmont Park, past the Piedmont Driving Club, down the long hill to Avery Drive, and home, where Ida would give me graham crackers and milk.

Ida was big and tall but not as tall as Georgia. She would tell me stories about how the patterollers had chased her when she was a little girl living out in the country and borrowed watermelons from the farmer’s field. I gave her lessons; I taught her how to read.

ATLANTA NEIGHBORHOOD, 1932

I n a word, life in the 1930s was not all that bad. There were ups and downs, but I wouldn’t trade those days for another time past or present. Or future, as well as I can read it.

The family lived by rules of etiquette that were quaint even for that time. When I was old enough for long pants, I was provided with engraved calling cards: Master Terrell Everhart Greene.

My family lived in what was known in those days as genteel poverty. The genteel part was the lace doilies, the crystal and the silver service, the books, the music, and of course, the good manners. The poverty part was every day and all day.

We lived on Avery Drive in Ansley Park, a genteel part of town, not rich like Paces Ferry Road but not poor except for us. I only gradually became aware that we did not have money as the Depression settled in.

My grandfather was the state chemist of Georgia. His PhD was from a German university—Freiburg, I think. He had founded the Department of Chemistry at the University of Texas and left that post to head the Department of Chemistry at Emory. According to Grandma, he had been euchred out of the job at Emory by the underhanded trickery of the Candler family, those Coca-Cola people, who installed their candidate in his place. Coca-Cola was not allowed in her house.

After school, I could walk to Grandpa’s laboratory across from the capitol. He heated milk in a beaker over a Bunsen burner and made cocoa for me. In the evenings, Grandpa and I sat out on the porch. He sang songs that he had learned in Germany. We counted the stars or played animal, vegetable, or mineral.

But one summer, when I was staying with Aunt Elfrida on Staten Island, Grandpa died. Grandma said that just after he died, the stocks and Strauss bonds he had accumulated became worth ten cents on the dollar. I didn’t know what stocks and bonds were or what ten cents on the dollar meant.

Grandma rented out half of the house. The Murrays moved in across the hall. They were Mr. and Mrs. Murray and their grown-up son. We could hear the Murrays talking; their voices came up through the furnace vents. I knew they could hear us when Grandma said mean things to Mother and me. Sometimes she made Mother cry. Grandma could say things that made you want to die. She had thin lips and eyes like a, like a, like I don’t know what, some kind of a bird that wanted to tear you apart.

My mother worked for Uncle Lawrence, my great-uncle, my grandfather’s younger brother. I heard that he had studied to become a doctor and had been thrown out of one medical college after another until there were no more medical schools in the South to be thrown out of. I did not hear why. By the time he ran out of schools to be thrown out of, he knew every rising doctor in the South. He had been in school with them, and I would guess he had partied and drunk with them as behooved a young Southern gentleman. His father, the Reverend George Marlow Everhart, undoubtedly disapproved. But Uncle Lawrence went into business and sold medical goods to all his former classmates. Everhart Surgical Supply made Uncle Lawrence a wealthy man.

Mother had gone to library school, a proper educational path for a young lady before World War I. When she was living in Manhattan, she had been head of the children’s section at the New York Public Library. But being a librarian didn’t get her a job in Atlanta in the early thirties. They already had librarians. To get a job working for Uncle Lawrence, she had to go to school again to learn bookkeeping and shorthand. When she started work, her pay at Everhart Surgical was $75 a month. Her pay stayed at that level.

We planted vegetables in the backyard—tomatoes, beans, peas, okra, corn—and also zinnias, larkspur, pinks, coreopsis, snapdragons, anything that would bear fruit or bloom. We read in the evening by a single overhead light in the dining room, which was now the living room. Mother played the piano, and we sang songs from the Heart Songs book. We listened to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio on Saturdays and to the Sousa Band or the Navy Band on Sundays.

Sometimes I listened to Little Orphan Annie or the Lone Ranger. Grandma did not want me to listen to those programs. They are rot, she said. They are a delusion and a snare. I had a Little Orphan Annie sundial bracelet that would tell time if you followed the directions.

Some evenings we played Parcheesi or pick-up sticks. I always won at pick-up sticks. Elfie or Mother always won when we played Parcheesi or cribbage or Muggins. Just when I was about to win, one of them would say, Flip, flop, flippity-flop MUGGINS!

Gone with the Wind had not yet been published. When it came out, Mother told me that her attorney, Mr. Patterson, was Mrs. Mitchell’s great uncle or something and that he had told her all those stories about the War Between the States.

On Saturday mornings, I would pick up a sack of Ladies’ Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s and deliver magazines around Ansley Park. I sold them to Mrs. Eugene Talmadge up in the Governor’s Mansion. Mother and Grandma disapproved of Mr. Talmadge. They said he was a redneck and a rabble-rouser. I never saw Governor Talmadge, but Mrs. Talmadge was nice. I sold magazines to Mrs. Margaret Mitchell at the other end of my route. I sold them at places in between, and I made a few dollars a week, plus Brownie and Greenie points that I could someday trade in for roller skates or even maybe a bicycle. Mrs. Talmadge tipped me a nickel. Mrs. Mitchell smiled at me.

Dr. Tillotson lived a few doors down the street. For me, living in a house run by women, all of them remnants of the nineteenth, if not the eighteenth, century, a real grown-up man was everything. Dr. Tillotson’s house was always open. I went on calls with him. He probably saved my life one night when my appendix swelled up, and he told my mother that I should go to the hospital in the near future. Do you mean tomorrow? she asked. Call the ambulance, he said. And call Dr. Boland and ask him to meet me in surgery.

But saving my life was not the important thing; the important thing was that Dr. Warren Wilson Tillotson liked to have me around.

The depression was a dark cloud in the background. I don’t remember hearing the word until years later, Billy and I knew that something had happened to Henry Stockard’s dad, that he had lost his money. We knew that he had killed himself. No one ever said so.

The Codingtons arrived one summer day in two big Model Ts with their belongings strapped on top and a swarm of children—Arthur, John, Mary, Emma, and two older girls who didn’t count. They moved into the vacant house next to the Tillotsons. Thalia Tillotson was not amused by this horde of noisy children and their unpromising parents. But what fun the Codingtons were! After supper and dishes and homework, we crowded onto their lawn and played Mother May I and Simon Says. Then we played Kick the Can and, for the littlies.. Hide-and-Seek until dark overtook our world and we had to go inside to our various beds.

Mrs. Codington made all the kids in the neighborhood come to French lessons during summer vacation. We sat on her side porch and learned to sing Frère Jacques and Je vais au Paris and to say Come on talley voo. After the lessons, we played Up Jinks.

There were woods behind our houses, and we had secret places and a tree house. Girls were not allowed. I bought a Remington .22 pump-action rifle with my magazine-route savings. Johnny Codington and I hunted squirrels and rabbits. We shot the middles out of paper targets. We blasted tin cans and occasional glass bottles. It was a fine gun; I still have it.

We dared each other and walked across the railing of the railroad bridge on Piedmont Avenue. The railing was maybe six or eight inches wide, and the tracks were a long way down. Walking across the bridge on the railing was easy after the first or second time, but when a train was going under the bridge, walking the railing was something else. Not everybody would do that. We climbed the high-tension towers and walked from one leg to another on the metal strips two or three inches wide. The lowest story in the towers was the scariest because the legs were farther apart. The upper stories were shorter.

Our friends who lived in a brick house across from Emory University stood on the sidewalk with luggage and furniture in piles around them. They have lost their house, Mother said. But I could see the house just where it always was.

The only time it was important that we had no money was around Christmas. You might have guessed that our neighbors were more affluent. They were. Frank Davis had an electric train. So did Billy Tillotson. Billy and Frank had bicycles and Erector Sets. I hoped Santa would bring me an Erector Set. Instead, he brought me a cardboard box of Tinker Toys. Next year, I hoped he’d bring a bicycle. Instead, he brought a scooter. I was ashamed to take it onto the sidewalk.

Can you imagine my mother’s quandary: Christmas gifts for a son and a daughter on $75 a month? How she must have scrimped and saved to buy me that scooter. Maybe she even thought a scooter was about the same as a bicycle; it had wheels, didn’t it?

Riding a scooter? The very thought was mortifying. I am ashamed of myself to this day for the disappointment I displayed when I saw that scooter.

Every Christmas, Mrs. Hurl sent me a book with stories about British schoolboys, about pluck and doing the right thing and winning against odds. I grew up learning how to behave at a British public (which means private) school.

KNIVES IN THE SCHOOLYARD

W hen I graduated from Tenth Street and went to O’Keefe Junior High, I was enrolled in the accelerated program. That meant that I would finish junior high in two years instead of three. I liked O’Keefe. The classes were easy, except algebra, and interesting, especially Latin.

A boy could not get along without a pocketknife in those days. Can you take a jackknife to school today? I don’t think so.

At recess, we would take out our pocket knives and play Territory. That was a game that required skill not only where you threw your knife but also how the blade was facing where it stuck in the ground. When we weren’t playing Territory, we used our knives to dig minnie balls, white misshapen lumps of lead, out of oak trees on the playground, relics of the Battle of Atlanta during the War immeasurable years ago.

Minnie balls: lead bullets fired during the Battle of Atlanta, waiting seventy years to be dug out from behind the bark of an oak tree by a ten-year-old boy.

We shot marbles; I had a steel taw that was as good a shooter as any you could find. We had spinning tops that we launched with strings, and we had yo-yos. Every year a man came from the Duncan YoYo Company and showed us how to do new tricks, along with drumming up enthusiasm to buy the latest Duncan. I could do around the world, walk the dog, rock the cradle, and other tricks.

Algebra completely stumped me. I just couldn’t get it, couldn’t understand anything in the textbook, and had no idea how to figure out the value of X, let alone the values of both X and Y, or how to get started on word problems. I fell into a deep gloom. I knew that if I flunked the course, I would be dropped from the accelerated program.

Getting into the regular three-year program would have been a good thing, considering that I was already two years younger than my classmates. But the disgrace of flunking was all I cared about.

One day as class was ending, Miss Teague asked me if I wanted to stay after school and work on some problems. You don’t have to stay, she said, but I think I can help you. I can still see Miss Teague: a small, slight woman with wispy graying hair. She was a fine teacher and a lovely person. How she managed to do it I cannot remember and surely did not know at the time. But after two or three after-school sessions, the light suddenly dawned. I grasped that strange elusive mathematical language; I knew what to do with the word problems.

We’ll just throw away the test scores up ’til now, Miss Teague said, and start all over with your grades. I finished that course with an A and never again in any math course, high school or college, made less than an A.