Happy Birthday, High School Sweetheart!!

Linda is seventy-six right now, but when she wakes up this morning she will be seventy-seven. Today is her birthday, July 10. Ten months younger than I, every year at this time she catches up with me. 

We've been together sixty years. Sixty and a half actually, she was sixteen when we started dating, a junior at Bay High. Somewhere around here there's a picture of us at the 1952 Christmas Ball. It would have been either at the Armory, on 6th Street, which is now owned by First Baptist Church in their expansion north and west, or at the Dixie Sherman Hotel in the ballroom, which as I recall was on the mezzanine floor. The combo was George Gore's group, which included our band director Orin Whitley. Seems to me that Mr. Whitley played bass. For that first major date, my mother made Linda a corsage of camellias fresh cut from our yard. Some of those camellias still bloom for us every December. We triple dated with Mandeville and Eleanor Ann and Philip and LaVerne, in our station wagon, the 1949 Plymouth woody.

Our main social activity was YPSL, the youth group at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church. Young People's Service League, we called it "league," as in "Are you going to league tonight?" and it met every Sunday evening at the church. We always started with supper, various adults volunteered to fix supper for us, then we had a convening prayer and our youth meeting. Our rector, Father Tom Byrne, was always there. One evening a kind church member who was not a parent fixed supper for us. I remember Philip looking at the meat on his plate and saying with horror in a whisper that could have been heard in hell, "Oh my God, this meat has tastebuds. This is tongue." Don't ever serve tastebuds to teenagers.

We hurried through our league meeting because the main purpose of our being out on Sunday evening was the ride after, ten or so teenagers crowded into my station wagon riding around. Where did we ride? Mostly all over St. Andrews. If we wanted to be spooky we might drive slowly through Greenwood Cemetery. We stopped that the evening Bill Guy said, "Oh, there's my mother's grave," and shamed us all into never doing that again. A cemetery is a holy place. In fact, I'll be spending some time there this Friday, July 12th, time that will once again stir my rage at the Creator.

Even though we'd had supper at the church, we were often good for a stop at one of the drive-ins here in town. The Chicken Box in Little Dothan on Highway 98 was closest. Someone will remember exactly where it was, but I'm saying it was between the Kaiser-Frazer dealership and where McDonalds is now. Linda and I were abruptly dismissed from the Chicken Box one evening because we were smooching in the car until the car-hop came out and took our window tray and said, "Goodnight." Don't tell that, please. 

Our other popular drive-ins were Jimmy's (or was it Jimmie's?) on 6th Street, and Tally Ho all the way out at the far north end of Harrison Avenue. Tally Ho is still there. How far out is Tally Ho? Well, several blocks north of Bay High, which stands "On our city's northern border, reared against the sky." And beyond Tally Ho there was nothing but woods. 

This blog post is Linda's birthday card, but it's also my confession. I learned a lot from Father Tom, the Rev. Thomas Dorgan Byrne, our priest. When he found out that one of our favorite Sunday evening after-league activities was driving around with our carload of teenagers until we found a holy-roller church in full screaming, shouting, rolling, tambourine session, he chastised me. "You need to learn to be more tolerant." And I never did that again either. Father Tom was one of my heroes.

Linda and I started going steady while we were at Bay High, one reason being because I didn't want anyone else coming round while I was away at the University of Florida the next year. Her father, Urban Peters, whom I started calling Pete after Malinda was born, was another of my heroes. 

Happy birthday!!
C+