The "B" in B.E.L.L.S.

By Dixie Lastname Subject2change

Do you want to get out of a bad situation?  Read this book to see how Dixie did it.  It isn't easy to end a relationship.  Especially the first time is the hardest.  But it can be done.

Over the years when talking about myself to those who ask, several of those people have said, “You ought to write a book!” I already wrote Too Many Husbands, What Doesn’t Work in Love and Marriage. I went to counseling before I divorced all my husbands and I learned a lot. That book references all the books that helped me. If you want to get that help without going to a counselor, that is the book for you. 

This is my second book with the rest of the letters in BELLS to be written.  

I was never valued by my mother unless I had a boyfriend or a husband. Therefore, I always thought of myself with the different males in my life. I thought of them as just people who wanted sex from me such as my first steady, Rick; my first husband, Don Born; the boyfriends and upcoming husbands. You get the idea. But now, I think of them, both men and women, as friends I have had also.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thompson Books
• Release date: Jan 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9781977272010

Dixie Lastname Subject2change

I am over seventy-five years young and my first husband and most of the people mentioned are deceased, so before I kick the bucket, I want others to learn from my mistakes.No one could tell me how to gain self confidence.Maybe this book will help others gather some courage to do what I did and got out of a destructive marriage.       I am now happily married to my sixth husband with over twenty years together. Most people say, “The Third Time is the Charm”. Well, I am a slow learner in that way so it took me twice as long to get my Charm. And it is my Prince Charming! 

Book preview

Prologue

The B in BELLS is about me before I met my first husband, Don, in 1962 to our divorce in 1968. The B part of the story is explained below.

Sometime in the 1990s, I was talking on the phone to one of the Toastmasters from our club. She was going to be the Toastmaster for the next meeting. The Toastmaster gets to pick the theme of the meeting. This gal picked Relationships for her theme. She had to introduce me, so she called to find out a little about me and my relationships.

I said, I know all about relationships. I have been married five times and…

Five times! she exclaimed, interrupting me.

That is the usual response when I say that. I am not proud of the fact that I had that many husbands, but I like to get that out in the open right away. By saying it first, it is over with, and people who disapprove or sit in judgment can leave, or I can leave.

Those who are curious about me or are not judgmental and are polite can get on with whatever business we are together about.

Yes, I responded laughingly. I’m working my way through the alphabet. My first husband’s last name started with a B, the second with an E, the next two with L, and the last with an S.

BELLS! she exclaimed.

What? I didn’t know what she was talking about.

It spells Bells. she replied, laughing, They must be wedding bells.

Gee, I never thought of that. Maybe because I am a ding-a-ling! I responded, laughing.

And so, the books I am writing are the letters of the BELLS books. This is the B in BELLS.

Over the years when talking about myself to those who asked, several of those people said, You ought to write a book! I already wrote Too Many Husbands, What Doesn’t Work in Love and Marriage. I went to counseling before I divorced all my husbands and I learned a lot. That book references all the books that helped me. If you want to get that help without going to a counselor, that is the book for you.

This is my second book with the rest of the letters in BELLS to be written.

I was never valued by my mother unless I had a boyfriend or a husband. Therefore, I always thought of myself with the different males in my life. I thought of them as just people who wanted sex from me such as my first steady, Rick; my first husband, Don Born; the boyfriends and upcoming husbands. You get the idea. But now, I think of them, both men and women, as friends I have had also.

Chapter 1

Chapman College - 1962

After graduation from high school, Mother tried to make me read some books over the summer so I would have some titles to legitimately put on my entry form for Chapman College. I never was much of a reader. I am probably dyslexic because bs and ds, the ps and qs and the ws and ms look so similar that I have to concentrate to keep them from flipping around. So reading was difficult and slow for me.

I still read slowly and get mixed up if the characters in the book have names that start with the same letter such as Mark and Mike. I take notes like Mike is the hero and Mark is Mike’s brother. I type them up when I get too many comments to figure out my scratchy notes.

I think I read two out of the six books Mother got from the library. If I had been able to go to the library and get help from the librarian to select books with me, I might have read more. But Mother had picked them out. Those books were too much like homework.

Mother was like that. I was never able to be on my own or make my own choices. She always picked out things for me. I never had choices except from my father. He prepared me for life more than Mother did. But then, he had his own problems.

Godmother Oba paid for my college. If Sissy, my older sister, had graduated from a four-year college when I graduated from high school, Daddy might have let me go to a college of my choice. But he didn’t have the money to put two daughters through college. So Godmother Oba saved the day for Daddy. She cared about him as a mother cares about a son. I think he appreciated her too.

Sissy is four years older than I am. She was a freshman in college when I was a freshman in high school. She went to San Francisco State for the first year, then to Fresno State for her second year, then to UCLA (University of California in Los Angeles) for all the rest of the years. Not all her credits transferred from one college to the next. And, she went to college for two more years after the expected four years before she got her BA!

I was an artist. I received all As in high school in that subject. I got the Bank of America award for the highest sustained grades in the field of Art. I didn’t want to go to this liberal arts college so far away from home. If I had to go to college, I wanted to go to an art school. There were a few in the Bay Area.

All I wanted to do, if I couldn’t go to art school, was get married and have babies. But Rick, my high school sweetheart, and I broke up that summer. The boy I thought I was to marry was gone. I had no man in my future. No one ever asked me what I wanted to do. It was just expected that I would follow my parents and Godmother Oba’s plan. All I had to do was take tests and follow what they had arranged.

Since I had an IQ of 140, getting good grades was fairly easy for me. Mother let everyone in the house know what each of us had. Mother was 120, Sissy was 125, Linny was 132, and Daddy was 142. So there was more expected of me than I wanted to do. The only problem was the reading. I was an undiagnosed dyslectic. I was an audio learner. When I heard the lecture, I remembered enough to at least get a B and sometimes an A, but not always.

Mother told me to write to my roommate-to-be, Betty Overstreet. I got a letter from her soon after I sent mine. She seemed to be well read. As it turned out, she was. She was at Chapman on a full scholarship just as I was. But hers was because she was well read. I was being gifted the scholarship from Godmother Oba. My conditions were:

I had to carry a full load, which means twelve credits or more;

I had to stay single; and

I had to maintain at least a C average.

As I said before, these conditions seemed easy for me. But I never wanted to grow up. Each step in my life was full of uncertainty and insecurity. When I graduated from eighth grade, I was afraid of going to high school and I cried. Only the other girls sympathized with me. No one at home understood.

I was nervous every summer when Godmother Oba sent me to summer camp away from home. But packing to stay months, instead of just weeks, away from home was even scarier. Now I was going over 400 miles away. I wouldn’t know anyone, which was the same as going to camp. This was worse because of the distance.

It looked like I was finally through wetting my bed, but I had periods of insecurity such as when I went to camp. Sometimes it brought it back. It was so humiliating. I was afraid I would do that again in college.

The whole family drove down to the colleges. We dropped off Sissy first at UCLA with all her luggage. I helped bring in the bags. Since I was a tomboy, I was always the workhorse. When I came in with a box of her things, Sissy and her new roommates were cussing and I said, I don’t like to hear profound things. They all laughed. I stood there stupidly confused.

Sissy corrected me in a nasty, authoritative voice, You used the wrong word! You want to use the word ‘profanity,’ not profound. And she is going to go to college! They all laughed again.

I was so embarrassed. The put-downs from Sissy were common. She always bullied me. But this was in front of others! Red-faced, I left the room. I didn’t say another word as I finished getting the rest of her things. I didn’t even say goodbye. But she didn’t notice.

Soon we were on the road again going south to Orange, California. It was after lunch when we arrived. We had stopped on the way at a hamburger place. Daddy and I loved hamburgers. I could eat them every day. They usually came with French fries. I think God made French fries so we could use them to pick up the catsup. Daddy and I loved catsup too.

We arrived at a dorm building that was a large square with the parking lot on the side. On the other side of the large parking lot was a similar building, which was the boys’ dormitory. The entrances of both buildings were next to the dorm supervisors’ living quarters. In that way, with the supervisors’ prying eyes, the girls and boys would be protected from the outside world.

The gates were open during certain hours when the dorm supervisors were manning the window at the entrances. They could stop people who were not allowed in by flipping a switch and locking the gate. The gates were locked at specific times at night.

The dorm mother took us all through the gate and showed us to my living quarters for the year. We walked out to an open area with a lawn and some garden areas. The dorm mother told us it was called The Green. I was going to be on the ground floor.

Mother always took pictures. She took a picture of me outside my room. I know it is too small and dark to see in the room, but I can see that Godmother Oba was sitting just inside the door.

I had forgotten that she was there. But it makes sense since I wouldn’t be there without her paying for everything. Even though she was eighty-nine years old, she was still driving. So she probably drove down by herself.

There were two stories of suites. Each suite had a large bathroom in the middle with four sinks and a couple of shower stalls as well as a few toilets.

On each side of the bathroom was one large room divided into two areas by a separating closet-cabinet in the middle of the side wall for two different people. All sides had a bed, a chair, and a desk with some shelves.

Each side of the closet-cabinet had a four-foot closet with sliding doors and built-in drawers and a counter area on top. Inside the counter area, there was a lighted mirror. That closet-cabinet gave some privacy to each person. I chose the bed in the back, away from the door and closest to the bathroom’s sliding pocket door. I wanted to be close to the bathroom in case I had to change my sheets or get to the bathroom in a hurry.

The upstairs room’s doors opened to a veranda that went around the entire square. There were stairs on every corner of the building.

One of the things I was able to bring with me was my stereo record player. It had two speakers that were removable from the main player, still attached by a wire. All of us enjoyed the music I played. None of us had a radio. I was on a mailing membership of music. They sent me a few LPs (long playing records) after I sent back my choices.

After all my things were unloaded and brought to my room, my parents said goodbye and left. I’ll never forget my feelings of abandonment when my mother left me there in my dorm room all alone. I was the first one in that dorm suite.

I know my father was there because he was always the one who drove. But I only felt the abandonment from my mother. It was the same feeling I had when I was being dropped off for camp. I only felt abandonment from her, not him. I think that was because he always went to work, then came home at the end of the day. Mother started working when I was in fifth grade, but that was part time. The next year she worked full time from then on.

Later in life, I found out that she had left me several times at a very young age due to my younger sister’s birth defect. My little sister was born just eighteen months after I was. She had to go to San Francisco to the UC Hospital for checkups and operations with the financial help of the March of Dimes.

To not be a burden to her friends and relatives, she had Sissy stay with one set of people and me with another. Sissy was five and a half when that happened and was used to the people. I was only one and a half and didn’t know anyone. I suspect that I didn’t stay with the same people each time. It probably exacerbated my lifetime insecurities.

As I sat in the college dorm room, tears welled up in my eyes. I was alone. I felt alone. I didn’t really want to go to college. But I was too scared to get a job and I didn’t want to stay at home. As I was unpacking my things, tears started running faster and soon I was sobbing. I didn’t want to grow up. I sat down on the bed and cried into my pillow.

My college grant also paid for me to stay in the dorm. Daddy was giving me a cash allowance every month for books and other necessities. I didn’t really appreciate the opportunity Godmother Oba gave me. I didn’t want to be so far away from my friends. And I really, really didn’t want to go to a liberal arts college. I wanted to attend a commercial arts school. Art was my life in those days.

After a while, Betty Overstreet and her mother came in. I straightened up and tried to hide my tears. Betty’s mother could tell that I had been crying and came over and sat with me and comforted me.

She was a big woman, so she gave me a very comfortable hug. That made me start bawling in earnest. I didn’t really know what I was crying about. But I was relieved to have those arms around me.

After my crying subsided, she got me to talk about myself. Betty and she chatted cheerfully about themselves. Betty thought I would be a Negro girl because where they came from, that ethnic group called their family members by their nicknames as my family had.

My older sister was Sissy, which was for Leonamary. Her name was hard for a baby, so my parents said, Sister or Sissy, and the Sissy name stuck. Linny was my younger sister’s nickname from Melinda. My nickname was Deecie from the initials of my given name, Dorothy Carol. Betty and her family lived in a neighborhood with many Negros as friends. After they told me that, we all laughed.

I didn’t know that Negro people used names like that. I never knew any Negros as I was growing up. And I didn’t know anything about their struggle for equality. I never read the news, just the Dear Abby column and the comics. I never watched the news on TV or heard any discussion about it.

Betty was a ray of sunshine. She wasn’t really a pretty girl, but nice-looking with pretty blue eyes and a big nose. But she is one of the sweetest people I have ever met in my life. This is her college picture. I had my picture taken too. That is me in color from my 8 X 10.

She became my best and closest friend and confidant. I really liked this well-adjusted girl and her mother. They took me under their wings. I didn’t feel abandoned anymore.

Betty and I went to all the orientation activities for the next two weeks together. I was happier than I had been in a long time. Within those two weeks, our other suite mates came in and got settled.

Lea Moon and Cora Hoffmeister were on the other side of the bathroom partitions. This is a picture of Cora with Lea on her lap. Cora was as tall and athletic as I was. She had dark curly hair. I wasn’t as close to her as I was to Lea and Betty.

Lea Moon was a very pretty girl who was just over five feet tall. She was fun and silly. We all loved her antics. She had a loving, overprotective mother. Her mother sent her to college with daily vitamin pills. She didn’t want to take them. They were very large pills.

During the first week we had freshmen orientation. We were given tours of the campus and where the different subjects were taught. I paid attention to where the art classes took place. I would be going there a lot.

One building had the biology and chemistry classes. Another building was where English and History were taught. I didn’t want to go there, but it was in my curriculum for a liberal arts degree.

This picture is Gail Richardson with Betty. Betty wore that bonnet every time she had curlers in her hair. Gail had short, blonde, curly hair and was best friends with Cora. You can see in the picture they were next to one of the concrete block walls. Only the walls facing the Green were made of another product.

I have always been pretty much directionally challenged and easily lost. But I figured out how to get from the dorms to the school buildings and which buildings had which classes. I had my bike at the school and was able to cut my time from the dorm to the campus in that way. I rode my bike so much that I could ride without using my handlebars and even turn corners.

The third week was registration. I don’t recall selecting my classes. I think my mother did it because I wouldn’t have had so many classes that required so much reading. She did that to me in my first year in high school too. Too bad she didn’t understand that by my not being able to choose things, it hurt my ability to break the apron strings from her and to be an independent adult. I really hated not being able to be the captain of my destiny.

In high school she had me take biology, her favorite subject, and history together. I had to drop biology and take it in my sophomore year because of my poor grades. She knew I had a high IQ but didn’t seem to realize I was dyslexic and a very poor and slow reader. She didn’t understand that part because she was a lifelong reader as my sisters and dad were.

Since I had to drop biology, and since it was her favorite subject, when I took that class the next year, she had me read the text to her while she cooked or did the dishes. That was the only way I got a B+ in the class. Reading aloud burned it into my brain.

I have a very good memory and remember things that are either told to me or that I read aloud. If I read to myself and don’t concentrate and hear the words in my mind, I won’t be able to tell you what I read.

My strong areas were spatial thinking, which made math easy for me. But I loved to draw, which was my specialty in art. My weakness, in fact below average in the SAT scores, was spelling. Reading comprehension was just above the line for average, but not far above.

The registration line was in alphabetic order, so I wasn’t in line with Betty. I was in line with the Js and Ks. I found out that the good-looking guy in front of me was also an art major. I tried to keep him talking to me, but he just kept answering my questions as quickly as possible, then turning his back to me. He was a junior or senior and didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with a freshman.

The guy in back of me kept making comments, however. He was trying to talk to me. Giving up on the cute guy, I turned around and talked to the one behind me. His name was Don Born. He wasn’t bad-looking, but not exactly what I was looking for.

Don asked me where I was staying. I told him about the dorm and my roommates. He was a freshman just as I was, even though he was four years older. He had been in the Army and was getting his education now that he was back. I later learned that he had tried to get into a Long Beach Junior College but didn’t qualify because of his grades in high school. If he could make it at this private college, he could go on to a university.

I had fifteen credits. I didn’t know what a big load that was. I had World History, Sociology, English, Clay class, Art History, and others I can’t recall. I ended up dropping World History since I was failing it. In fact, my first failing grade in my life was on my birthday in that class’s first test at the end of September.

College is so much different than high school. In high school, the teacher goes over what they want you to learn. At college, they expect you to know what they will be testing you on and expect you to be a self-starter on the reading and outside supplementary reading.

After the classes began, I started staying in the Student Union between classes rather than going the distance of the dorm and back to class. Sometimes I did homework, sometimes I played solitaire. I always had a deck of cards with me. When others came to my table, sometimes we played a game of Crazy Eight. There was a jukebox, and sometimes people put money in and selected some songs. Sometimes there were kids dancing.

One day, a Negro boy asked me to dance. I love to dance, so I accepted. We didn’t have any Negros in the towns where I grew up, and my parents were not prejudiced, so I had no idea that I was doing something wrong.

When the dance was over, some boys and a girl came over to my table and said, If you dance with that Negro boy again, no one will have anything to do with you. Shortly after that, the boy came over again. I told him what they said and that I wouldn’t dance with him again. I was a coward. I didn’t think it was right to judge him by his skin, but I also didn’t want to be rejected either.

Many years later, I read the book Clan of the Cave Bear by Jane Auel. In that book, the girl was different than the people who took her in as a child. She was treated very differently and eventually was shunned. That is what happened to that boy. I still feel bad for him and wonder what happened to him.

I was so very insecure. I don’t think I could have taken being treated as the