Not Bubba's list: Golden groves and crystal waters
1. After I wrote down and posted here on my +Time blog, some rambling memories about life, Time, and ministry at Trinity Episcopal Church, Apalachicola, Florida, I was invited by Amy Moody to do something similar remembering my years at Cove School, 1941-1949. So, I'm starting that project this morning, thinking to begin with memories from first grade forward, first through eighth grades, then maybe skip half a century or so and pick up again remembering my extraordinarily happy Time with Holy Nativity Episcopal School. This was a nice idea, and I look forward to stirring the memories!
2. As I begin, today is Tuesday, June 23, 2026. A retired US Navy commander (retired 1978) and retired Episcopal priest (retired 1998), I am Thomas Carroll Weller, Jr., the oldest brother, from very early in life called "Bubba" by my family and friends before I started first grade at Cove School. I'm ninety years old, soon coming up on ninety-one: when you get to this age, you'll find out, as I am finding out, that on some days, ninety is just as old as you always thought it was. As I draft this nonsense I'm getting closer and closer to turning ninety-one and hoping it will be easier than ninety has been.
3. Time, Time, Time and today is Saturday, July 25, 2026. I'm finishing up, and now going back to sort of but not really edit, AND to add paragraph numbers that mean NOTHING except as a point of reference for any questions, corrections, or discussion that ensues. The numbers are just wherever I happened to insert them. You will kindly overlook my carelessness about commas, not always putting them.
4. With me being a "Junior," it's obvious that my father's name was Thomas Carroll Weller - -((NOT Senior. - - my father told me sternly that he would NEVER be "Carroll Weller, Sr," saying that adding "Senior" to one's name was not something White men did (apologies, but I grew up in a South that was only two generations out of the Confederacy; in my family nothing was forgotten about "The Cause," and our heroes were the Confederate veterans in their gray uniforms who rode in open touring cars at the end of every parade up or down Harrison Avenue downtown)) - - he was named after an "uncle," his father's sister's husband, John Thomas Carroll, and for some reason, my father was called Carroll all his life.
5. There is a story, remotely relevant but nevertheless - - many years ago I had a new belt, and my father gave me a silver buckle for it, an engraved buckle that his mother had given him years earlier. I asked, "Why is it initialed CTW?" and was told that when my grandmother was having it engraved with his initials she could not remember whether his name was Carroll Thomas Weller or Thomas Carroll Weller, so decided that since he was always called "Carroll," it must be CTW.
6. For all that, my family is probably no goofier than yours, nomesane?!
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7. In my childhood, the Bay District's regular Fall Semester started the day after Labor Day, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in September each year. Just so, two weeks before my sixth birthday, after supper that Labor Day evening Monday, September 1, 1941, my mother called me into the dining room, where I sat down in the chair opposite her.
8. In a story that I've told and retold any number of Times, Mama said, "Bubba, you're starting school tomorrow: what do you want them to call you?" I remember thinking a moment, then saying, "Not Bubba. How about Tom?" Mama said, "No, it can't be Tom. In high school I had a boyfriend named Tom, and your daddy still hates him." That came as news to me, a case of someone else's "hatred" setting my destiny!
Finding myself in a corner that I can still feel to this day eighty-five years later, I briefly reconsidered Bubba, based on my father's high school classmate, teammate, and friend Bubber Nelson, but decided Not Bubba but Carroll, my father's middle name, which he had been called all his life. Mama then said, "So, you'll be Carroll Weller, Jr.," and I was stuck with being Johnny Cash's A Boy Named Sue for the next twelve, formative, years of my life, until my eighteenth birthday, a story beyond the loose bounds of this one.
8. The next morning, in our car, a black 1935 Chevrolet Master Deluxe with yellow wire wheels and white sidewall tires,
9. Mama drove us a couple of dusty, rutted, deep dirt road blocks south to Cove School. Facing Hamilton Avenue, it was a small school building with about six classrooms, a boys' restroom, a girl's restroom, and probably a small office for admin and the principal. Classrooms were lighted by the single-bulb lamps hanging down from the ceiling on rods. For heating, each classroom had a potbelly stove type space heater, fired, I reckon by coal, with the flue pipe going to a higher spot on the wall. My recollection, some of the oldest classrooms still have that flue cover.
10. We went inside to the first grade classroom, first room on the right, front of the building, and met my teacher, Ms Violet Heyward. Her greeting to me was to hold out a yardstick and tell me to kick at it. As I found out later, whichever leg and foot I kicked with told her whether I would be trained and molded, formed, as being right-handed or left-handed. I kicked with my right foot. Up until then I had drawn or scribbled with either hand, and noticed no difference, my mother called me ambidextrous, but thereafter, any Time Ms Heyward caught me writing at my desk or at the blackboard with my left hand, she took the chalk or pencil and moved it to my right hand. To my recollection, the only left-handed student in our first grade class was Warren Middlemas.
Ms Heyward then led me to my desk, right behind my first cousin Ann Weller.
Ann had been adopted by our grandparents after her mother was divorced, and her name changed from Williams to Weller. At the Time, she was living with her mother, my father's sister Marguerite, in a garage apartment on Linda Avenue in the block just south of Cove School. I remember their lot/yard had large magnolia trees, which may still be there. A new first grade classmate and friend, Tommy Fidler, lived next door with his parents.
11. Eight years later, Tommy and I were snare drum students together in the band at Bay High School. Then he went off to the Bowles School, a military high school in Jacksonville, Florida, and thereafter to The Citadel, where his roommate was Charles Duvall, later our bishop.
Anyway - - my cousin Ann and I were close during our early years, and I remember being happy that Ann was there; but then I looked around the room and discovered that Mama was gone. I was panicked - - it was my terrifying first instance of trust-busting, that my mother would leave me somewhere without telling me. To this day, I know how abandoned a tiny child feels on first being left "alone" in the presence and care of strangers.
12. I will wander enough to say that, as a Southern boy with a slower drawl and Southern accent than I could imagine today, I never knew her name was Heyward, and I called her "Miz Haywood."
Who your teacher was, and her personality, patience and kindness, may be the most important thing in setting a little child's feelings about school for the rest of their schooldays and years. "Ms Haywood," a high school teacher translated to first grade, was my shift to authority. Turning six years old two weeks after starting first grade, I was young and unready for anything other than being adored!
13. That first day, or a day or so later, Ms Heyward handed back to me my first schoolwork paper that was graded: a big red X across it. On entering first grade I did not read, had never been to kindergarten - - which was the case with most of my classmates, as kindergarten was not part of the public school system in those days; so I hadn't noticed, much less read, the instructions on the paper: "Color the boy blue. Color the girl red." I colored the boy black and the girl yellow. My first cousin Ann Weller was sitting at the desk in front of me, and she showed me her paper with a big red check or "A" - - Ann and I were close all our years until high school, but I never knew she could read when we started first grade. Our grandfather Pop doted on her and must have helped her learn to read early, I remember that he read Christopher Robin stories to her, and Red Ryder in the daily newspaper comics. Getting the school work paper with the big red "X" was a startling and memorable negative experience in beginning my schooldays.
14. My early school recollection includes having about an hour around noon to go home for dinner (breakfast, dinner, supper, this was the South, to call the noonday meal, the main meal of the day, "lunch" would have marked a child as a Damyankee). Not sure, but I reckon mama drove and picked me up and drove me back to school after dinner. I don't remember any lunchroom at school, or classmates bringing a lunchbox; my going to school with a brown sack of lunch that my mother had packed for me came a year or so later. As did the establishment of a "lunch room" serving the noon meal to Cove School students.
15. Mama always prepared and packed our school lunches, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or ham, cheese, cut across, never diagonal as some other mothers packed classmates. Once I asked for a slice of Dole pineapple sandwich like Georgia Ann had, and Mama exclaimed that she'd never pack me a sandwich with no nutrition.
16. Even though we lived just a few blocks down the dirt roads Hamilton Avenue and Massalina Drive from Cove School, at first I was not allowed to walk to or from school, mama always drove me in the car and picked me up after school. Just so, I always came out the north end school door and looked to the right, where the car would be parked and waiting, with mama, Gina and Walt. Gina was nearly two and a half years younger than I, Walt is nearly four years younger.
17. On one occasion, it would have been soon after Pearl Harbor Day, I reckon, maybe late December 1941 or January 1942, when automobile production had ceased and industry across America was shifting to war production only, I came out of the school and panicked: the car wasn't there. Then I heard Gina calling, "Bubba! Bubba!" She was waving out the window of a strange car. Mama, Gina, Walt, and Mom, my beloved grandmother, my father's mother, were there waiting in a brand new car, a dark blue 1942 Chevrolet Fleetline Aerosedan.
Our father was school classmates, friends, and a customer client with Bubber Nelson of Nelson Chevrolet, and had been able to buy one of the last two new Chevrolets shipped to Panama City until after World War Two (Mr Nelson himself got the other car, which he drove through the war years, a two-tone brown and cream Aerosedan). I remember my delight: a car with that "new car smell," and instead of plain gray, the seats were upholstered in a striped cloth that reminded me of caramel candy. Six years later, on the Sunday nearest my twelfth birthday, it was the car I learned to drive in. Three-speed manual transmission with the shifter on the steering column, black tires, no radio, no heater. Decades before cars had power steering and air conditioning.
17.1. I have no memory of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attack, but Robert did. He remembered hearing his parents exclaiming that the Japs were attacking the harbor, and, at age six thinking they meant our harbor here on St Andrews Bay, Robert said he ran panicked and dove under his bed.
17.2. When I was in first grade, both my parents were working at Black Insurance on Harrison Avenue, where Warren Middlemas also worked (and later owned the agency). Through that work association I came to know the Middlemas family, and at least into our first year of high school, I enjoyed a close friendship with my Cove School classmate Warren Middlemas, Jr.
Encouraged in reading by his mother, Warren was, all our Cove School years together, the smartest kid in the class. Opposite to the total klutz that I was, Warren was also strong at sports. He was left-handed, batted left-handed, had a powerful swing. When he was at bat, right field had to be covered. From a sickness, possibly polio, I don't recall, Warren always had a slight limp, but it never slowed him down in sports.
What I remember more than anything about Warren, though, may be his sweaters, his pullover sweaters. I remember over the years, a sweater with a zigzag pattern knitted into it, and a sweater in which the primary color was maroon. We played together after school, my memory is of being at his house on Bunkers Cove Road, about just across the street from where Tom Sale lived. An Episcopalian whom I knew all my life, Tom was a year ahead of me at Cove School. Friend and fellow sufferer in Sunday school, and our years in high school Tom and I were the two main acolytes for Fr Tom Byrne at St Andrew's Episcopal Church.
18. First grade was my first experience of having a crush on a girl. At some point our desks were shifted so we were no longer sitting in alphabetical order. Instead of sitting behind my cousin Ann, I was now sitting behind a girl with sandy blond hair, Georgia Ann Cruce. I was smitten! Having a crush was a strange and unnerving thing to hit a six-year-old boy. That crush lasted until I got my eye on the next blond girl, Margaret Carmichael. Decades later, at a Cove School anniversary celebration, when we were in our sixties or seventies, I told Georgia Ann about her being my first crush. We laughed, she grabbed my arm and I escorted her up the school steps and into the building, now the Bill Lloyd Building, for the anniversary celebration. Ann (she dropped the Georgia, but that really never took, she was always "GeorgeAnn" to us) died several years ago now.
19. As I write this now, July 21, 2026, a few weeks from turning ninety-one, I am not sure how many of our Cove School classmates are still living. In recent years, Robert tried to keep track of everyone, and when we learned of a death we told each other.
Second grade, school year 1942-1943
20. Starting in second grade, our class was joined by new students Robert Padgett (from Panama Grammar), and Bill Bailey and Philip Johnson (from Lynn Haven Elementary School). Later, and into highschool my best friends were Philip Johnson and Parker Reynolds. Parker's father was a liquor distributor, but his avocation, and once vocation apparently was stunt pilot. Parker and his brother Kenny and sister called their father by his first name, Harry.
21. Harry always owned a single-wing, high-wing airplane. Sometimes the plane was sitting disassembled beside their house, other Times it was operable, and in fact my first plane ride was the Sunday afternoon that Harry and Parker flew me along up to Hosford; Harry landed in a farm's field, and Parker and I waited while he walked into town to ask around if anyone wanted to go up for a "hop," a short ride up and around for a few minutes, for a fee, which was a dollar or two, maybe five dollars. Here in town, Harry tied his plane down at the landing strip that was up Lynn Haven Highway, Route 77, about halfway, on the west side of the highway, which at the Time was an unpaved road with four ruts running through the Bermuda grass. Harry also once drove us, as Boy Scouts, to the Scout Circus in Pensacola or Mobile, a green Nash car with five or six boys, listening as Harry sang and taught us dirty songs.
22. Our second grade teacher was Mrs Rigell, I'd have to do a little research, but her first name may have been Bessie, I'm not sure. She was a wonderful teacher for me, kind and gentle, always patient, which for me was important in our study of arithmetic, adding and subtracting, more than just ten fingers, and because I only was allowed to go barefoot all summers, my toes were not available for the sums, which we had to memorize.
Kind, as I say, a gentle, grandmotherly person, Mrs Rigell was one of my two favorite teachers at Cove School. Mornings, she walked to school up Hamilton Avenue. Starting in second grade, or maybe late in first grade, I was allowed to walk to and from school provided I did not accept a ride from anyone, not even someone I knew.
SomeTimes our Timing was the same and I walked to school with Mrs Rigell. In fact, I remember the morning a year later, when I was in third grade, walking to school alongside Mrs Rigell, and telling her, "We're doing something new!" She said, "What's that, multiplication?" Never having heard that term, I said, "No, mam, multiply." That's a third grade story, but my heart ties it to my second grade teacher.
22.1 Maybe by second or third grade I was allowed to ride a bike to school. My grandparents had given me a bicycle, a mid-size boy's bike, used and faded from red to orange in his Pensacola shop, Gentry Bros. Loans and Pawns. At first it lay out of doors on the school playground. Soon we had a bike rack at school, where we bike riders could chain and lock them for the school day. There were no fences around local schools, including Cove School, in those years. A junior boy's bike, mine was special. I remember that Bill Bailey, whose bike I rode and liked more than mine, liked my bike better and kept begging me to trade with him: I would not trade, simply because mine was a Christmas gift from my grandparents.
Cove School third grade, 1943-1944
23. During the years of World War Two, we had all manner of government propaganda about the Germans and the Japs, stirring hatred so deep-seated in me that in my middle and older age I took on a semi-spiritual task of consciously driving out such raging anger. Those years, we had cards with sketches of American, British, German, and Japanese warplanes, that every boy, at least every boy I knew, memorized and expected one day to need to identify them in the sky.
24. My two favorite Times of the year were Summer Vacation and Christmas Vacation anyway, but for me, third grade was a nightmare year that made me dread school. Well, WTH, I'm ninety years old, it was 90 - 8 = 82 years ago, everybody's dead, and I can DW tell it like it was, nomesane? Take it or leave it!!
The reason was the combination of my preference to be outside playing, my laziness about homework, and our third grade teacher, Miss Ruth Martin. Episcopalians whom we knew and spoke to in church every Sunday, long years friends with my Weller grandparents in St Andrews, the Will Martin family were prominent residents of Bay Harbor. Mr Will lived with two or three of his sisters, including Miss Ruth, in the old Martin House on Martin Bayou just by the old paper mill. The house is still there and is part of my stories here.
Miss Ruth Martin drove a black 1941 Chevrolet club-coupe to school everyday. I admired the car, but I was terrified of Miss Martin, whose patience with me was very short. Especially when it came to Math, which for me in those years was not Fun and Good.
25. Learning "multiply" - - which I soon learned was multiplication, we had to memorize the multiplication tables through the nines. There were a lot of numbers, and for me, getting to 9 X 9 = 81 was a challenge that seemed to take me forever. Miss Martin used cards with the problem (e.g., 6 X 7) on the front and the product (42) (you'd better not say "sum," either) on the back. Each student was called up front individually in turn and Miss Martin drilled us daily in class with the cards, both for multiplication through the nines, and for division. My parents, on learning about my trouble with math, drilled me at home, including mama or my father made the same cards.
26. When Miss Martin asked a question, about a homework assignment or whatever, the students who knew the answer would jump up at their desk waving their arms in what resembled the fascist salute, and call, "Miss Martin, Miss Martin," to be called on. I was one, sometimes the only one, sitting at my desk dreading the inevitable "CARROLL WELLER?" and I didn't know the answer. It was often enough Times, and I was embarrassed and humiliated enough by my own ignorance or lack of preparation, that it became clear Miss Martin was doing it to me on purpose, as a torment.
27. My parents helped me, though, and eventually I got it. At least once in third grade, and again later in fifth grade, I had my vengeance. When I knew the answer to Miss Martin's question, I'd continue to sit at my desk, waiting. Sho 'nuff: "CARROLL WELLER?" and I quietly gave the correct answer. The first Time it happened was about our study of Lapland and their reindeer, and that the main export industry of Lapland was seafood, fish. I was ready, my parents had made sure in drilling me the prior evening. Miss Martin asked, "What is the main export industry of Lapland?" I sat still while even my best friends leapt and waved arms with hands up in the air. "CARROLL WELLER?" she said. "Fish," I answered quietly. It happened more than once, and each Time, Miss Martin looked surprised and disappointed. I had tricked her into leaving me alone. I will say that my sister Gina also had Miss Martin at Cove School, and adored her.
Anyway, in a short Time, she stopped calling on me. Taking the risk, if I didn't know the answer to her question, I'd raise my hand and arm and wave it like the legitimate eager beavers. It was a terrible risk, but when I raised my hand she never called on me.
28. I will say that, in later years at Cove School reunions organized and hosted by Robert Padgett, when we classmates discussed schooldays, Miss Martin often came up, and any number of classmates said, "I was terrified of her." Telling tales out of school, I even remember, decades later as an Episcopal parish priest, I visited our eighth grade teacher, Miss Virginia Parker, in hospital and later when she was dying at home. Again remembering schooldays, I told Miss Parker that we were terrified of Miss Martin. Virginia Parker, who came to Cove School as a young teacher in her twenties (she was thirteen years older than we were), exclaimed, "I was terrified of her myself. She should never have been a teacher." So, I'm not alone here, and instead of a full stop period, I'll close this sentence with exclamation points to show "no hard feelings"!!
29. Those were years of World War Two. In class every morning, every grade, every classroom opened the schoolday with a devotional, usually as I recall, led by students who volunteered. I was not a volunteer then or later during my Navy years. Daily devotional opened (I could have the order reversed, no matter) with a patriotic song and the pledge of allegiance to the flag.
At first in the pledge, we saluted military style, right hand to right eyebrow or over your heart, "I pledge allegiance to the (now extend your arm, right hand up, and point at the flag) to the flag of the United ... ." Once the authorities saw the similarity to the Nazi salute, we said the pledge only with hand over heart.
But the devotional. Patriotic song, pledge, then a Bible reading, someone might say their memorized Bible verse, sing a religious song, and that was it.
That was before the US Supreme Court curbed religious expression in public schools, especially mandatory religious devotionals where every child was required to participate.
I'm thinking of the songs we sang.
God bless America.
There's a church in the valley by the wildwood, no lovelier church in the dale. No place is so dear to my childhood as the little brown church in the vale.
My country 'tis of thee.
Over there, over there (actually a WWI song, but we sang it).
Let's remember Pearl Harbor.
My gal's a corker, she's a New Yorker, I buy her everything to keep her in style. She drives a Buick Six, I ride a mule that kicks, yes, boys, that's where my money goes.
Song of the Volga Boatmen. Yo yo, heave ho. Oh yo yo heave ho ...
Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile. What's the use of worrying, it never was worthwhile, so ... .
I been workin' on the railroad, all the live-long day. ... Can't you hear the whistle blowin' ...
30. Those were our songs, did you have others, Buddy and Carl? Robert remembered more than I could, but Robert died last month, June 2026. Religious songs, and others.
31. At some point, the school system started offering a mid-morning snack of a saltine cracker and a half-pint of cold white milk, for ten cents, a dime. Among first things in the classroom morning, the teacher would take up the dimes and make the list. Seems like everyone else did, but I never once had the drool-worthy milk and cracker. I never brought the dime. Those were years in my family when I would never have dared ask for a dime for a treat at school.
32. This is turning into a "mind dump," but I remember the ONE Time my father handed me a quarter to go to the picture show at Ritz Theatre (now the Martin) downtown. For children under twelve, admission was eleven cents. I was handed fourteen cents change, and spent it on popcorn and a coke (popcorn was a dime, a coke was a nickel: IDK, I must have had an extra penny in my pocket. When I got home, my father asked for his fourteen cents change. When I said I'd spent it, he tore into me angrily and harshly. More than a lesson in integrity, it was a lesson in fear. This is a memory of my schooldays.
33. In those years, one of the first things a student saw in class the first day of school the day after Labor Day, was a large poster on the wall, lined and columned off. Down the leftmost column was a list with each student's name in alphabetical order. Across the top, each column was headed by a Bible verse or passage to be memorized by each student and recited by memory in class. When you were ready to recite a memory verse or passage, you told the teacher you were ready (we did it every year), and she (my Cove School teachers were all women) would make Time for you to stand up and recite it in front of the class, during the morning devotional. There were probably ten or a dozen to Bible passages to memorize and recite; I don't remember them all, but some were The Beatitudes, maybe The Lord's Prayer, always the 23rd Psalm, Psalm One - - all of which my mother, raised a Baptist, had helped me memorize years early in my life. Once you recited a Bible passage, the teacher put a red or gold or silver star in that space on the poster.
34. War years we had war bond savings bond drives at school to help finance the war effort. Little books for ten-cent savings stamps. Something else to mark the purchase of a savings bond. The big deal was a seventy-five dollar purchase of a war bond that paid you one hundred dollars at the end of ten years. The biggest deal was when Scotty Fraser's parents bought a thousand dollar war bond for the unimaginable cost of seven hundred fifty dollars.
35. There were national and local health issues, people fearing polio and tuberculosis. You had to have a smallpox innoculation before starting first grade: it left a nickel-size scar on your upper arm, mine was still visible twenty or thirty years later. There were measles and chickenpox and mumps epidemics when every child came down with whatever disease the first child with it brought to the classroom. For me, the itching of the disease was well worth it for the two full weeks you had to stay out of school. For chickenpox, Mama gave me a towel to rub the itching sores so I didn't infect them or create permanent scars.
37. One school year, a local woman had tuberculosis, and our class was chosen to interview her live on WDLP, our local radio station. The whole class was there, as I recall, with Linne' Hall doing the interview. The sanatoriums where people went to distance themselves and for treatment were known for healthy diets that made people gain weight. I remember the practiced line, which Linne' then carried off perfectly. Linne' speaking to the tuberculosis patient: "Everyone thinks the treatment for tuberculosis makes you fat, but you're not fat, you're just pleasingly plump."
38. War years: the school building was too small to accommodate population growth. When I began Cove School, the building was less than half as long as it is today. One year we returned to school in the fall to find the building doubled in size. You can tell where the additions were put on both by a scoop in the roofline as viewed from the Hamilton Avenue front, plus, the old original schoolrooms had five windows: the new schoolrooms have six windows plus a separate small window for a cloakroom.
39.The autumn that we returned to school after the expansion construction was finished, we came in to everything bright and new. Instead of individual desks, we had brand new table-type desks for two students, and a real chair instead of the desk-chair unit. More, throughout the building, old classrooms as well as new, instead of the old pot-belly stove heaters, there were steam radiators along the wall under the windows; water for the steam radiator system was heated by a furnace in a new furnace room on the Linda Avenue side of the building, and I remember that the steam radiator system kept the classrooms way too dry. Also, under two or three windows in each classroom was a slant thick glass, there to route air breeze coming in the open windows upward instead of blowing right on the students. A cross-breeze was possible because each classroom had transom windows high on the hall-side wall, opening into the hall; and each classroom had a long rod with a knob at the end for pulling the transom windows open and down so air could circulate.
40. As well as regular Fire Drills, when the bell rang and each class filed out and lined up on Hamilton Avenue until the return bell rang. We had air raid drills during WW2. Long tables lined the main hall at Cove School; when the air raid bell sounded, we, each class, filed out into the hallway and we students got under the tables to take shelter.
41. Facts keep popping into my head. This was during WW2 when Cove School was overcrowded, and probably before the building addition mentioned above. One year, we went to school half a day for either a semester or the entire school year. One group of students went in the morning, a different group of students went to school in the afternoon. So as to be fair, we went (my recollection) six weeks in the morning, then switched with the other group and went six weeks in the afternoon. Gettin up mornings was great when we went to school afternoons; the long afternoons to play outside were wonderful when we went to school mornings.
Cove School fourth grade 1944-1945
42. Fourth grade was a return to normalcy and happiness for me. Our teacher was Ms Ruth Watson, a large, round, heavy, happy woman with white hair that she wore in a boy's short page-cut. She was infinitely kind. She lived with her family in one of the new small wooden houses that were built on Linda Avenue during the War. A year or two later Ms Watson had a heart attack, could no longer teach, and convalesced at home. Several Times on my way home, instead of walking down Hamilton Avenue, I walked home the back way via Linda Avenue to stop and visit with Ms Watson for a bit.
43. Risking a detour, I'll note that all the roads in The Cove were dirt roads in those years. The exceptions were Cove Boulevard, Bunkers Cove Road as far as the house that was later owned by Dr and Mrs Traxler, next to a little bayside park there, after which was dense woods inhabited by, to us, scary people, and the wafting smell of whiskey from moonshiners' stills. Beach Drive was concrete paved, Cherry Street from the Bay to where Cove Shopping Center is now; plus a small area that was concrete paved in the 1920s as part of a real estate marketing campaign: Harmon Avenue north and south from Cherry Street to E 2nd Place, and E. 2nd Place, E. 2nd Street; and E 1st Court from Harmon to E Beach Drive. Those roads still show the original concrete pavement from the nineteen-twenties. The paving may have gone as far east as to include Wilson Avenue but I'm not close enough right now to go check where the pavement is old concrete or newer blacktop.
44. The dirt roads throughout The Cove, and all over town, required constant maintenance by the city. We had huge yellow caterpillar road graders, we called them "the tractor,"
that came rumbling through neighborhoods every week or few days, to grade the road back to smooth. The dirt roads were always a threat for getting the car stuck in deep sand or mud. Rainy weather left washboard roads that were a danger to automobile springs, and had to be graded out smooth often. Hamilton Avenue in front of Cove School was a huge pile of sandy dirt with two deep ruts going each way, north and south: a car roaring down Hamilton Avenue in front of Cove School raised a huge cloud of dust that drifted into the frontside classrooms in those years of open windows before air conditioning.
45. One day while we were in fourth grade, President Franklin D Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage while at his vacation cottage at Warm Springs, Georgia. I remember the shock: FDR had been president all my life, was early in his fourth term as president, and that he could die was unbelievable to me at first. He was a warTime hero. I remember that Harry Truman was now president, and I'd never heard of him.
46. About fourth grade, we had a science segment on the solar system, sun, moon, and memorizing the nine planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto. I remember reciting them to Pop, my paternal grandfather, and Pop telling me that in his day there were eight planets, not Pluto. Someone knew someone with a small telescope, who brought it to school one evening. Out on the basketball court, he set up his telescope and everyone who was there, parents and students, each got a look at the moon, at Jupiter, and at Saturn. I think it was our fourth grade year, 1944-1945, an astronomer could figure about when that viewing would have been possible. Anyway, it was fascinating, Jupiter and Saturn with its rings were overwhelmingly beautiful to me. The evening planted a love for astronomy that lasted nearly all my life, including years later living on a hilltop in Yokohama and owning a telescope for that started evenings and hours and years of stargazing. Introducing my children to Jupiter with its large spot, and charting the night to night movement and positioning of its four largest moons was a science project I shared with them.
Cove School fifth grade, 1945-1946
47. The horror of my young life occurred when I walked into my fifth grade classroom on the day after Labor Day, Tuesday, September 4, 1945, to see Miss Ruth Martin sitting at the teacher's desk. The school year plummeted, but I was better prepared to be bullied, and set to my studies with more dedication.
48. That year, fifth grade was too large for one classroom, and Mr Sandilos came to teach the other fifth grade. My friend Robert Padgett got assigned to his class, and loved it. Including the story of the day Mr Sandilos took his fifth grade class out deep sea fishing, and Robert caught a sizable fish, about a five pound red snapper as I recall.
49. A couple of memories. I have told this first one in sermons now and then over the years. Miss Martin loved animals, dogs. Our family dog Happy, whom my brother Walt named Happy Birthday because the tiny puppy later huge dog was specifically our parents' gift to Walt on his third birthday, July 24, 1942. We doted on Happy, and he never let us down. I wish, but do not have a photograph of Happy, or of his Blue Ribbons, or the framed and color tinted photo we had of Happy laying on the grass in our backyard, asleep with our cat lying asleep on top of the sleeping Happy.
50. There were no fences at home or around school grounds in those days, and Happy followed us to school every day, someTimes staying around all day, someTimes returning home only to return for us and be there waiting when school let out for the day. But the City of Panama City began to take a dim view of loose and wandering dogs, so passed a fence ordinance, plus hired a dogcatcher officer with a huge net and driving a pickup chassis truck with a large cage on the back in place of a pickup truck bed. A cage closed in with chickenwire fencing. The dogcatcher would appear here and there at will, looking for loose dogs, with the assignment to catch them and deliver them to the city dog pound. The dogcatcher's truck made a particular sound, and with schoolroom windows open we could hear when he was in the neighborhood. Any number of Times, our dog Happy was on the Cove School grounds waiting for us. Miss Martin would tell me, "Carroll, go get Happy and bring him in to the cloak room." In my sermon use of this story in later years of life, I always closed with the word that I told the story to help Miss Martin get out of Purgatory sooner.
51. I mentioned the huge old Martin House where their family lived, on Lake Martin in Bay Harbor. The yard property was immense, stretching from Highway US98 to way back on the far side where the lake curved around. Shady oak trees with Spanish moss, high ground sloping down to the lake. In those years, Miss Martin always had at least one class party at her house, actually, in her yard, so I was there for at least two class parties, third grade and fifth grade, I think they were end-of-school-year parties, which every class always had in that day and Time. We were not allowed inside, no student could come into the house for any reason. I don't know how the girls dealt with it, but with all the large trees to get behind, it was no problem for us boys.
52. One short half-story that Robert loved telling. Largely unsupervised, we were instructed to stay away from the lake. Unsupervised, we did as we pleased. One group of boys, that included Robert Padgett, Bill Bailey, and James Marshall Creary, were swinging from tree limbs that stretched out over the lake edge. Either Bill or James Marshall, I forget which, slipped his grip and fell into the lake in water that was over his head. He could not swim and began to struggle in panic. Robert and the other boy rushed in and pulled him out. They had the rest of the hot, muggy day for their clothes to dry off, and I don't recall that anything came of it from Miss Martin, who probably never knew. Robert enjoyed repeating that story even into our nineties! This must have happened in third grade because, as I said, Robert was in Mr Sandilos' class for fifth grade.
53. This may be duplicated elsewhere in this writing, but I'll say it now lest I miss the memories. Once a week we used to go to the school library to check out books, it was a happiness that helped many, me included to love books and reading. Access to The Britannica Encyclopedia and others (at home we had The Book of Knowledge, not as good and certainly not as expensive as Britannica). And I had dozens of books at home, a Dr Doolittle series, the Nancy Drew books, a series of books, The Hardy Boys, of two young brothers who, like Nancy Drew, were detectives solving mysteries in their town.
Some years in the classroom, Reader's Digest was handed out to each student once a month, and we got to read it in class. Then, as I recall, not take it home, but turn it back in so it could be shared with another classroom.
54. The Martin family must have moved their church membership from St Andrew's Episcopal to Holy Nativity in my Navy years. I don't remember that, but there is a small baptismal font, back in the children's Sunday school area of the present two-story building, that has a plaque dedicating it to Ruth Martin, and showing the dates of her birth and death.
55. I'm going to sixth grade now, but first a couple of other memories. With noted exceptions, our days at Cove School were blessed with happiness, friendships, and teachers we loved. We were a class in which everyone knew everyone else's home, family, siblings, birthday.
Those were years when we celebrated holidays with decorations we made in class. Here are a few.
Preparing for Thanksgiving, we cut out turkeys and Indian feathers, and stuff.
In the days leading up to Christmas Vacation, we made decorations of heavy paper, mostly red and green, and decorated the room. In every class year we had a drawing for gift-giving and each student gave another student a gift, plus a gift for the teacher. Teachers in those day had plenty of handkerchiefs.
February was rich with holidays. For Lincoln's Birthday we cut out silhouettes of Abraham Lincoln, thumbtacked to the wall above the blackboards.
Same for Washington's Birthday, we cut out hatchets, cherry trees, and George Washington's silhouette, again thumbtacked around the walls.
Valentine's Day was BIG. A week or two beforehand, we decorated a huge box all lacy, and with a large slot in the top. Day by day, we brought our valentines and dropped them in the box. Some of us brought little valentine cards that were a dime a dozen; most of us, like me, I think made our own valentines. The idea was to give everyone a valentine, but I don't think that truly happened. On February 14, Valentine's Day, we elected a "postman" to take the valentine cards out of the box and deliver them. By that Time, one idea was to count your valentines and hope you had a lot; another idea was to watch and see what boy's poor judgment revealed what girl he had a crush on by giving her a really special valentine; I was never caught in that trap.
Halloween was also a big celebration, with the whole school turned into a house of horrors and parents bringing even little children into the scary creepiness! In the house of horrors one year, my assignment was, dressed and speaking spookily, to present a bowl of warm spaghetti as brains and dip visitors' hand into it. I lost my taste for it when the parents of one terrified, screaming little girl made her run her hand through the warm bowl.
There's more, but it slips my mind. Getting late afternoon, I'm stopping for the day. Another day, sixth grade and onward.
Cove School sixth grade, 1946-1947
56. What do I remember about sixth grade at Cove School? Our teacher was Mrs Ruth Bowen, mother of Dot Bowen, a girl who, with dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, and a huge smile, was the star of every boy's heart. I once confessed to Robert that I'd had a crush on Dot Bowen, and his response was, "WHO DIDN'T?!!"
57. Some of my memories are colorized by exchanging stories in much later decades, with friend and classmate Robert Padgett as we organized class reunions together, with Robert doing all the correspondence and meal arrangements and refusing help with the financing, and me organizing our use of Holy Nativity Episcopal School, our former Cove School facility, where I was variously on boards, staff and faculty as priest, chaplain, school board member, and member of the Holy Nativity School Foundation board of directors - - and from the years in our seventies and eighties that Robert and I met at Cove School for storied walks around The Cove and occasional visits inside the Cove School building because I had gate keys, exterior door keys, alarm passwords, and classroom keys. Robert loved our Cove School days even passionately, and always remembered which classrooms we were in for which classes, and stories about various events, including the afternoon most of the class bailed out the cloakroom window on the south end of the building and headed for a time of playing hookey at the Yacht Club.
58. I wanted to remember more names who came and went, or who stayed with us from beginning to end. The years of WW2 brought military family classmates who may have been with us only a year or two. Cynthia Anne Draughan. Molly Turner, brown hair, brown eyes, her father was a doctor in the Army Air Corps, and her family drove a two-toned green 1941 Chrysler sedan. Max Treadway, who liked to boast that he was "the Champ." Margaret Carmichael, Mary Sam (probably Samantha) Bridges. Adostus Ellenburg, Cressie Royer, the Jones twins, Eleanor tall with red hair and Elaine short with brown hair. Ernestine Cellars. Nan Brandt. Tommy Fidler. Jackie Sikes, Shirley Yates, Parker Reynolds. Bill Ross, Herbert Grimsley, Marilyn Johnson. Barbara James. Gwen Adair. Shirley Landrum. Linne' Hall. Georgia Ann Cruce. Herbert French, Carolyn Daffin. Frank Mustoe, Wade Swicord. Jimmy Hartsfield, who lived in a house down 2nd Court, less than a block from Cove School, and whose father, later when we were in high school, bought him the light green 1927 Model T Ford sedan with wire wheels, that W&W Dodge Plymouth had on their showroom floor for sale, $90. Jimmy was in the Bay High band with us.
59. In sixth grade I had my first and only experience of being sent to the principal's office. Mrs Bowen finally wearied of frowning then scolding me every single morning without fail for coming into the classroom late. She sent me to tell Mrs Bridges (mother of student Martha Lee who later was Mrs Traxler, wife of Dr Traxler). Mrs Bridges was too kind to know what to do with me when I told her why I was standing in front of her: she said, "Well, Carroll, I know you won't be late again, will you?" and I said, "No, ma'am," and, strangely enough, I never was late again,.
60. A similar memory is also from sixth grade. Robert Padgett also had the habit of arriving late. But he ran down the back side of the school building to the back door where the boys' restroom door opened to the outside. There was, maybe it's still there, I'd have to look and see, a long iron bar at the little "stoop" outside the restroom door. Arriving at speed, Robert would grab that iron bar, swing under it and grab the restroom door, open the door and with almost a single leap be at the restroom hall door, swing it open, dash across the hall to our sixth grade classroom, and be inside and at his desk before Mrs Bowen ever noticed.
61. Another memory, Robert's - - Robert loved basketball, more than anything else about school, Robert loved basketball, and he was good! He was our star basketball player our years at Cove School, and later our years at Bay High. Once he got on the basketball court with a ball in his hands, he was impossible to distract, it was impossible to get his attention. Robert loved to tell the story of the day during either recess or phys-ed, when the bell rang to return to class and Robert was on the basketball court shooting baskets, jumping and sinking baskets. Simultaneously, it started raining and everyone but Robert ran inside. The rain increased and Robert jumped and shot baskets. Seeing that one student had not returned, our teacher Mrs Bowen went to the school door, and opened it to see Robert Padgett shooting baskets in the rain. Shouting and shouting, she finally got his attention and he headed for the door. Robert loved remembering Mrs Bowen saying to him as he entered the door, "Robert, don't you have sense enough to come in out of the rain?!!"
62. Sports we played at phys-ed, boys and girls were always separated except for the early years of dodge ball and Red Rover, Red Rover, let XXX come over and the named student had to run fast and try to break through the line of students holding hands tightly.
And bum, bum, bum, here we come. Where you from? New York. What's your trade? Lemondade. So get to work and get it made. I think it was a charades sort of game. Boys only, we played basketball, softball (underhand, large softer ball), touch football, soccer, volleyball. A total uncoordinated, awkward mess, the only sport I ever felt reasonably competent in was soccer, where the only skill I had to do was run and kick at the ball.
64. Another memory was the year we were in the classroom on the back side of the building, at the southernmost end of the building. Rooms in the newer, WW2 addition, had six windows (five windows in the original section), plus a new feature, a cloakroom with a narrow exterior window.
Robert remembered, but I do not recall for sure, which year we were in that southernmost, west side classroom. But one day when we had a substitute teacher, most of us, I'll say half the class anyway, sneaked out that back window
and disappeared into the crime of hooky; I went home, most everybody else walked down to the yacht club. I do not remember the nature of it, but later there was hell to pay; but it was an adventure that no schoolchild should miss.
[[The photo above must be our fifth grade class (1945-1946) because I don't see Robert in it. Carroll Weller, Jr is in the second row from the front, third person from the left, the bozo looking down to avoid the blinding sunlight; the boy behind me in the scout uniform with neckerchief is Scotty Fraser; in the white sweater, the boy in front of me is Herbert French]]
65. My other memory of sixth grade is coming home from school on January 23, 1947, to be told by our maid, whom my mother had forbidden to mention it to me, that my grandmother had died. Mom, we called her. She was sixty-nine years old, died of heart failure after having lived long with angina. My father had told me months earlier, that in Time, one of Mom's "heart spells" we called them, would kill her. I had taken the news with such horror that it vanished from my mind until that day. Mom's funeral was at the Wilson Funeral Home chapel that was a two story brick building across the street from the Bay County Courthouse, I remember that my teacher Miss Martin and her sisters were there. Then we followed Wilson's hearse (that doubled as an ambulance), a white 1941 Buick with, as I recall, a "Superior" company marker in a side window, followed it to St John Cemetery in Pensacola, where I first remember seeing the gravestones for my father's sister Carrie, who'd died before her second birthday in 1898; and my father's brother Alfred, who'd died at age eighteen in January 1918. I remember the trip over and back, Gina and Walt had stayed at home in Panama City, it was just my father driving, mama up from with him, and me sitting in the back seat taking in everything that was being said, including inviting Pop and my cousin Ann, to come live with us. Pop was seventy-five, Ann had turned twelve in January 11, and I was eleven. Up to then, my only experience of death had been standing with my mother at the back door of our house and watching as my father and an old Black man named Dave carried Patsy, our dog by the legs far up in the back yard to bury her. She had been poisoned. I was maybe three, I don't think four years old. I asked my mother, "What's wrong with Patsy?" Mama answered, "She's dead." I asked, "When will she be alive again?" Mama said, "Never." The death of my grandmother, maybe the most beloved person in my life, brought a terrible swelling pain in my throat and chest that lasted for months, and that I've never experienced since.
66. I'm inviting any reader to remember that this is my story of part of my life, that captures all sorts of memories, not just those at Cove School.
66.1. Those years we had poems to memorize, and some girls had songs to sing. We were in love with one of our classmates, a tiny girl named Gail Obert, as she sang, again and again for us, the dearest of songs, "My Sweet Little Alice Blue Gown."
Cove School seventh grade, 1947-1948
67. Something internal has made me cut off writing this "memoir" for several weeks before starting to write about seventh and eighth grades. I'm guessing it's this sadness I'm feeling, even now, at ending my Cove School memories and going on with the rest of my life, as though the whole thing is actually happening again and now ending my Cove School Days again. That sounds like a load of rubbish, but wait till you experience it yourself when you're ninety going on ninety-one, and everyone you've held in your mind for memory stirring is dead and you may be the only one left from those years of life with them!
68. Anyway. Our seventh grade teacher was Miss Edwina Parker. She was average height, with black hair and, my memory, piercing black-brown eyes. Her hair was so dark that over her upper lip she had about the same moustache that I had when I was thirteen and my father suddenly ordered me, "Boy: go shave off that moustache." My father was not to be trifled with, was my experience, and my brother's experience, our growing up years.
69. A diversion. Not one memory of seventh grade comes to mind except that my parents were talking about replacing our 1942 Chevrolet, now six years old. The candidates were a new 1948 Buick Super sedan, which was my favorite, and my mother's favorite; and a new 1948 Dodge sedan. The Dodge car was on the short list because, my father needing a truck to reopen his seafood business after WW2, in the extreme national shortage of new cars and trucks, had not been able to get one from Nelson Chevrolet and had started using surplus Chevrolet and GMC army ambulances converted and insulated for hauling iced-down fish to customers in southern Alabama and southern Georgia. Waiting for a new truck from Nelsons, in Time my father had given up and checked with W&W Motors, the Dodge-Plymouth dealer, and they had come through almost immediately with a new Dodge truck for him - - and several more Dodge trucks as he'd needed them, So, he had decided in gratitude to consider the Dodge car. had not been able to and do not remember anything at all specifically about seventh grade, what happened.
70. No, one event. Our Cove School team was playing St Andrews School team in some sport, at the St Andrews School campus. Our teacher was not there, but Mrs Thomas, a Cove School teacher was there. In a crowd of boys, I did or said something for which Mrs Thomas scolded me. I retorted, "You're not our teacher," at which I learned that authority was more general than I had assumed.
Some years later, my brother Walt made the identical mistake, at some event telling Joe Chapman's mother Margaret Chapman, who was a teacher when he was a student at Cove School, "You're not our teacher, we don't have to do what you say," and Mrs Chapman snatching him up for a few whacks on the butt.
71. No, there's another memory. When I was in seventh grade, 1947-1948, my family got a new car, the green 1948 Dodge sedan, and the year ahead of us, in eighth grade, Powell Brewton's mother got a new car, a red 1948 Oldsmobile convertible. My memory is of Powell's mother speeding south on Hamilton Avenue up to the front of Cove School, with the convertible top down and Powell standing up in the front seat shouting, "Whoa, mare!" as the the car braked to a stop and dust raised from dirt road poured up and over the car and drifted into the front windows of the Cove School building.
For one thing, that memory will "date" when Hamilton Avenue was finally paved with black asphalt as "not earlier than."
72. From sixth or seventh grade I have a story of embarrassment and humiliation that I've never told before except to Linda. It has to do with the fact that I've never been willing to take the risk of allowing myself to be nominated for anything that involved voting competition. Every year at Cove School, our class nominated and elected our Student Council representative. In sixth or seventh grade, the floor was opened for nominations. Nobody spoke. Then someone, I don't remember who but it was not one of my regular close friends, raised their hand and said, "I nominate Carroll."
Quiet, reserved, shy to be honest, I had never been nominated for anything. I was startled, but said nothing and let it stand. I was the only nominee until someone else raised their hand and said, "I nominate Wade." Tall, blonde, handsome, outgoing, the most popular boy in the class, Wade Swicord had come into our Cove School class a year or so earlier with his family, his father Dr Swicord, a Lutheran minister who had been a missionary in Korea, their mother, and three boys, look-alike brothers all of whom were in Cove School with us - - Donald, a class or two above us, Wade in our class, and Mays, a few years younger and in my sister Gina's class. At any event, when Wade was nominated, I anticipated what was going to happen, but I was too shaken to speak up and withdraw, which I could have done. The rules in our class were that if you nominated someone for something, you had to vote for them. Wade and I were sent out of the classroom for the vote, and waiting in the hall a titter of laughter came from the classroom. We were called back in, either the teacher or out class president announced that Wade had been elected, and we took our seats. Later, at recess, my friend Philip Johnson laughingly told me, "You got one vote."
73. Only the person who nominated me, not even just one of my friends had voted for me. Some truths don't need to be told. A few negative experiences touch and affect a person for a lifeTime. That was one of mine.
74. At a diocesan convention years later, someone from the Diocesan Standing Committee sought me out and asked that I allow my name to be put in nomination for the upcoming term on the Standing Committee. I declined. The person argued to persuade me, and it would have been an honor and privilege, but I refused. Only I knew why.
75. A digression, Dr Swicord was a stern minister of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, "LCMS" as Wade put it, evidently as stern at home as his LCMS denomination holds its faith. Our class knew Dr Swicord, because he was a father who was frequently invited and involved in the religious aspect of our schooldays. Many decades later, Robert Padgett hosted a reunion of our Cove School Class of 1949, and many people came, including Wade Swicord. I remember greeting Wade and asking about his family. He said his parents were long dead. I asked about each brother. Wade said that Mays was fine and living somewhere (he told me). Their older brother Donald had committed suicide in despair over his lifetime of critical treatment by their father.
There's a lesson there, again about the absolute, incontestable evils of religious certainty. Religion is faith (hope) not knowledge. But we tend to believe that the religious views that we hold are certainties that should bind everyone else as well. It's an ugliness that is imprinted in America's political scene today.
76. The Seventh and eighth grades were a Time when I fancied myself a car designer. It started as I recall, with Tommy Fidler drawing pictures of cars of all different sorts and me picking it up. We drew cars with long hoods drawn straight with a ruler, limousines, sedans, station wagons and convertibles. The long wheelbase touring cars with four doors and the tops both up and down. Many hours spend in class sketching, drawing pictures of cars, the modern cars of the thirties and forties, and our drawings got passed around the classroom. I had long forgotten that, but Robert remembered it long decades later and suggested that I had missed my calling as a car designer! One of the kindest people I ever knew, Robert could always find a compliment for you, no matter what.
77. In those days at Cove School we had a "School Boy Patrol." Eight or ten boys, volunteers, were designated Patrol Boys (no girls). In eighth grade, and maybe the year before in seventh grade, I was a Patrol Boy. We had a uniform that consisted of a belt strap with badge, and (as I recall) a table-tennis size paddle with a stop sign for stopping traffic. My recollection, fifteen minutes before school let out for the day, we Patrol Boys left our classrooms and met with the Senior Patrol Boy to make get our assignments for that day, which was to go to a designated intersection and be there to stop traffic so students could safely cross the street. There was a prestige element to being a Patrol Boy, but I was a volunteer (1) because of being able to leave class fifteen minutes early, and (2) because my assigned station was almost always the intersection of Hamilton Avenue and Third Street, which put me already just a block from home.
78. You know, today, Saturday, July 25, 2026 as I rush to finish up this jumbled mass of thoughts, another memory from seventh grade does come to mind. That school year, the Peters family came into our parish, St Andrew's Episcopal Church: UJW Peters, Lucile (one "l") Peters, and their daughter Linda Noble Peters. From Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, they arrived from Mobile, where Mr Peters had managed a real estate development, for him to manage the recently acquired development Drummond Park, that had been constructed during World War Two to help house the thousands of shipyard workers and military families who came here as part of the war effort.
A year younger than I, Linda was noticeable as a new girl, both at church and as a new student at Cove School, where she was in sixth grade when I was in seventh grade. In those days, it never occurred to me that God or anybody else had destinies in mind. We were in the same Sunday school class at church, and a year apart at Cove School, then for ninth grade Linda was at the Annie B Sale housing project of Jinks Junior High School for a year,
[[that photo is of, from the left Linda Peters, an unidentified girl behind her, then standing stretching to step across the ditch, Eleanor Ann Sale, then Phyllis Roll. Ninth grade, school year 1950-1951, they would have been fourteen years old]]
and through Bay High, and in May 1952 she signed my junior year high school annual, "Best wishes to a swell guy. Linda." She had been in the carpool of eight or so church young people whom I picked up every Sunday evening to take to our youth group meeting, ride around afterwards, and deliver home later, but in my mother's car, the nine passenger Plymouth station wagon,
she was sitting in the middle seat with another boy, Philip, my best friend at the Time and my roommate our freshman year at Univ of Florida. A photograph around here somewhere pictures Linda & Philip, Eleanor Ann & Mandeville, and Phyllis Roll & me as dates at the 1951 Bay High Christmas Ball or 1952 Spring Prom.
79. I'm telling our story now, and, true facts, it's nobody else's business but ours. As school started the fall of 1952, me as a senior at Bay High, Linda a junior, the dynamic shifted. My/our friend Philip showed up with a different girl, LaVerne Craig. Nobody was sitting next to me in the front seat center, so I started driving to Linda's house and picking her up first. In Time it became a pairing: she was my date for the 1952 Christmas Ball at Bay High, and for the Junior Yacht Club Christmas Ball
and later for the Spring 1953 Bay High Prom.
79. In the picture from the PCNH the next day, the couple dancing at the left are Wilton Duncan and Georgia Ann Cruce. Carl Melvin Bennett is behind them looking our way. The couple on the right is Linda (16) and me (17).
80. Now, a story memory I've already told here at least once, but here's one last Time for posterity. Before the Christmas Ball, I decided it was Time for First Kiss, and so to get ready. I practiced, so as to avoid kissing an ear or a cheek instead of lips, so practiced on a pillow, kissing a pillow. Perfecting it, with confidence, I kissed Linda for the first Time that cold winter night when I took her home after the 1952 Bay High Christmas Ball. There's been lots of water under the bridge since Fall 1952, but here we still are seventy-four years later.
Eighth Grade, Cove School, 1948-1949
81. Eighth grade at Cove School was indescribably the best year ever. We had all the usual super-celebrative grade-school events, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas vacation, Washington's Birthday, Lincoln's Birthday, Valentine's Day, but we had Miss Virginia Parker. Virginia Parker was our teacher. We were thirteen years old. Miss Parker was a twenty-six year old Alabama native with long blonde hair, and some acne scars from teenage years on her face. We adored her. She loved every one of us, and we worshiped her. She was kind in a way that we'd never known a teacher before. We learned easily, and fun.
82. Every day after the lunch period, Miss Parker opened a book and read us a chapter. If she closed the book on a chapter that ended in unbearable suspense and we begged and pleaded, "Please, Miss Parker, just one more chapter," she opened the book, and we cheered, and she read another chapter. Remembering our school year with her brings happiness and tears to my eyes.
83. One she read was the 1941 book "Parasols is for Ladies," which now would be banned because of its setting of Black people speaking a barely understandable Black dialect, which, in our Time, gave us fits of laughter, "knowing laughter" at the ignorant innocence as we imagined it, of Black folk. Three little Black girls Genesis (Gennie), Magnolia (Nolie), and Israella (Rellie) in a little country family. Their cow was named Betsy (as I recall) but they nicknamed her "Bessie," and in their cute Black culture innocence as we imagined it, and as the author presented it, the little girls called the cow, "Bessie-for-Short." Their dog was named Flea-Bite.
Their mother made them each Sunday dresses, with matching parasols (little cloth umbrellas to shield from the sun, and especially for stylish fashion.
84. She read several that year, including Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries; but another book that Miss Parker read to us was "Gone With The Wind," Margaret Mitchell's novel setting a Southern family and their Black slaves at Tara, their plantation mansion during The War Between The States. At the Ritz Theatre we'd seen the movie, with Scarlet, after having waited unendingly for Prissy to bring the help that Scarlet had sent her to fetch, when she hears a squeaking, creaking sound coming in the open window from out of doors: to her rage and frustration, it's the slave girl Prissy swinging on the front gate, and telling her, "Oh, Miss Scarlet, I'd scared." Prissy had never left to get help. I remember Scarlet slapping her. Then the novel's closing, in which Clark Gable as Rhett Butler leaves Scarlet with the unbelievably scandalous line, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." She may have skipped some juicy parts, but so far as I know, Miss Parker read the entire novel to us, and I remember our class' anticipation as we finally finished the last chapter, wondering whether Miss Parker would read the line and say the "damn." When she got there, she read, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a - - - hmmmph!" We protested long and loud until she relented, opened the book to the end and read it. "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" and there was our gasp, the shock of the innocents.
We were ignorant and innocent in so many ways and certainties.
85. One such was the "Minstrels" we loved to do. I was never in one, but several of the boy were, I remember Scotty Fraser, and maybe Bill Bailey were. I do not remember the story lines, which ridiculed the ignorant naïveté that we attributed to the Black race, but we always loved Wade Swicord in Black-Face stirring our roaring laughter with his imitation of Southern Black dialect.
86. Our classroom had the table-desks for two students to sit side by side. In Miss Parker's classroom, we gathered four desks in each group, and from Time to Time she had us shuffle the desks around into new groups of four, eight students. My favorite group companion was Warren Middlemas, who was fun to sit with, and the two of us always managed to get our desks in the same group. Warren's sense of humor made him a trip in class.
It was Miss Parker's practice at the end of each school day, when the bell rang, to dismiss us one at a Time, student by student, apparently depending on whose desk was clear and who looked most ready to leave. Warren and I would sit staring at Miss Parker with huge fake smiles on our faces, and she would collapse in fits of laughter and call our names next. It is a holy and sacred memory of my life in her class, a year of happiness.
86. Our eighth grade graduation ceremony was at the Civic Center. Now converted for general community use, it was a building just off the turnaround circle that was on the Bay at the southern tip of Harrison Avenue downtown. The building had been put up during World War Two as a USO (United Services Organization), where military service members could come to socialize and meet local folks. We had airmen from Tyndall Field, sailors from the Coast Guard station that was at Tarpon Dock, sailors from the Mine Defense Lab that is now the Navy base. More than one Panama City girl danced with her destiny there, and left Panama City for married life with him back home, wherever he was from.
87. Years, decades, my high school years, my college years, my years in the Navy, my years as an Episcopal parish priest. My last church was St Thomas by the Sea Episcopal Church, Laguna Beach, Florida - - at Panama City Beach. Miss Virginia Parker came into my life again. First, hosting our Cove School Class of 1949 reunions, of which Robert Padgett organized and hosted several, all of them at Cove School Holy Nativity with my helping as a faculty member, school board member and member of the Holy Nativity School Foundation that owns the school campus - - we wondered if Miss Parker was still living, and Robert found her and brought her to one of our class reunions. There's a picture of that around here somewhere, taken in her old classroom with old students,
88. While I was the priest at St Thomas, I was asked to call on Miss Parker in hospital and at home. A story told before, the first Time that I, in my late sixties or early seventies, white hair, clothed as a priest, visited her in hospital and told her who I was, she exclaimed, "Why Carroll Weller! You had the most beautiful black hair!" Then my moment of being humbled: Miss Parker said, "You were the smartest student I ever had." I responded, "No, Miss Parker, don't you remember, Warren Middlemas was in my class." And she corrected her thought, "Oh, that's right."
89. While at St Thomas Church, I found out that early in the history of St Thomas she had been the church pianist, and was remembered by some of the oldest parishioners.
90. Miss Parker died at her home in Laguna Beach while I was at St Thomas, and I officiated her funeral, with several folks present who had been her students. Then, as I've told before, a short Time afterward, her niece and I met early one morning, waded out into the Gulf waters, and spread her ashes on the sea. As we scattered her ashes that morning, my scripture was, from the portion in our Book of Common Prayer liturgy for burial of the dead,
Psalm 139
O LORD, thou hast searched me out, and known me. Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising; thou understandest my thoughts long before.
Thou art about my path, and about my bed, and art acquainted with all my ways.
For lo, there is not a word in my tongue, but thou, O LORD, knowest it altogether.
Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me; I cannot attain unto it.
Whither shall I go then from thy Spirit? or whither shall I go then from thy presence?
If I climb up into heaven, thou art there; if I go down to hell, thou art there also.
If I take the wings of the morning, and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea
Even there also shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
If I say, Peradventure the darkness shall cover me, then shall my night be turned to day.
Yea, the darkness is no darkness with thee, but the night is as clear as day; the darkness and light to thee are both alike.
I leave her in love and peace. Years ago, Robert and I posted a picture of her on the wall just outside her Cove School classroom door: it was still there the last Time I was in the building.
++++++
91. This is Not Bubba's list of Cove School memories. It had been my original intent to bring memories forward into the Time I served at the Cove School and Holy Nativity Episcopal School campus as renovator/helper to Bill Lloyd, for whom the building is now named, and my years as HNES chaplain, faculty member, school board officer, Foundation Board member, and ancient lover; but the project is long, and I am not tired of it, but weary. So, I'm stopping to leave it alone where it is this afternoon, and post it on +Time.
Some dimly recalled, no doubt some untrue facts, all rattled off disorganized and cluttered, many out of synch with the calendar. Some thoughts I just jotted down as they came to me regardless of when they happened. Some thoughts I went back and tried to insert them in the correct school year. Writing over the course of a month in June and July 2026, some thoughts I wasn't sure I'd already included, so they may be duplicated.
92. My suggestion is to ignore the incompetencies and maybe try to get into my mind as I wandered through the early Cove of the 1940s, a place of dirt roads, few paved streets, and huge forested sections that were still only unbuilt future neighborhoods. We had thick woods and dangerous sections, especially at the far end of the Bunkers Cove area, of squatters in tarpaper shacks, moonshine stills that you could smell a mile away but stayed away from for fear of being shot by the bootleggers. Oh, and ancient mounds of oyster shells, scallop shells, and dirt that were Indian Mounds where we could dig up bits and pieces of pottery, and the occasional, highly desirable flint arrow head.
93. Ending my story here. If we were a year ago, I'd have asked Robert Padgett, elected President for Life of our Cove School Class of 1949 alumni group, to read through it for me. Not to edit, but to factcheck me and to call up any significant memories I've left behind. But Robert died last month, a month after his ninety-first birthday, when I last visited him, and when Amy Moody brought her seventh grade math class from Holy Nativity Episcopal School to meet Robert and to bless him with our school's Happy Birthday song
Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday Mr. Robert, happy birthday to you.
May the good Lord + bless you. May the good Lord bless you. May the good Lord bless you. May the good Lord bless you.
So, with all it's rambling and personal, non-Cove School-related memories and stories, I dedicate this unedited collection to Robert Padgett.
RSF&PTL
T90
Golden groves and crystal waters
with their waves so blue,
stands alone our Alma Mater
Hail to our dear school.
Cove, Cove, dear old Cove,
thee we'll never fail.
Hail to thee, our Alma Mater,
hail to Cove, all hail.