Chapter 14
It was early in January 1964 that Jesse began looking for an apartment for us that was away from his mother. She was always getting mad at him and threatening to make us move, so he thought we should get out of there as soon as possible. I admit to being a bit afraid of her. Late at night when we were sleeping, I would wake up and find her standing beside our bed without any clothes on just staring at us. I would not let her know I was awake but would lie there until she left. When I told Jesse about this, he put a latch lock on the door separating our rooms from the main part of the house and when she discovered that, she got mad again.
He looked at the "for rent" ads in the newspaper and found a tiny one-room efficiency apartment on Haskell Avenue. We went to look at it and rented it then and there for $12 a week. It was a tiny little house with a bed, an old loveseat, a kitchen table and four chairs, a small refrigerator and an even smaller stove with a bathroom the size of a closet. But it looked wonderful to us! As small as it was, there was enough room for Summer’s baby bed. We had just bought one for her at the unclaimed freight warehouse where you could buy things cheaper than in regular stores.
The small house was located behind a huge old two-story home that had been turned into apartments. The houses on Haskell had once been large mansion-style homes with grand entrances and winding staircases spiraling up to the second floor. We were happy to find our own place and moved in the next day.
Mother would bring Lanita over on occasion to spend the weekend with me. Lanita was a big help with Summer when she would wake up at night and cry for her bottle. I loved having my sister stay and keep me company and I think she enjoyed getting away from Clayton and all the drama.
There wasn't a grocery store within walking distance of our tiny apartment, so Jesse and I drove around one day to scope out the best place to buy our groceries and do our laundry. We found a couple of places and would alternate going to one and the next week to the other. We set aside our grocery money, rent money and gas money in envelopes every payday. We had another envelope for doctor bill and one for miscellaneous expenses. If we had extra, it would go in the miscellaneous and we could use it to buy clothes, medicine or even go out to eat a hamburger every once in awhile.
Jesse had paid his mother everything he had borrowed. That helped their relationship some.
We visited over there a few times after we moved but not very often. I missed seeing his sisters.
We had a small television and, besides my avid reading, that was what kept me company when Jesse was working. We had our favorite TV programs – The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Gomer Pyle: USMC, The Adams Family and a few others.
On Sunday nights we would watch several hours of programming on CBS, beginning with Lassie, My Favorite Martian and our very favorite, The Ed Sullivan Show. On February 9, the Beatles made their first U.S television debut and performed five songs. The audience went wild. I liked the band and their music. It was different, all right, but I had no idea why the girls were screaming and carrying on so. After the Beatles performed and a commercial was played, a magician named Fred Kaps came out to do his act. I felt kind of sorry for him, having to follow the Beatles.
I watched The Judy Garland Show next followed by Candid Camera and What’s My Line? By then it was 10:30 PM and Jesse had been asleep for several hours. He wasn’t even awake to see the Beatles. I told him all about it the next day but he wasn’t impressed.
The routine of my days didn’t vary much. I would mix up tuna salad at night and fill a jar with it, wrap up at least 4 slices of bread, put it all in a brown paper bag and set it in the fridge for Jesse to take to work with him the next morning. Since I got up in the night whenever the baby cried, he didn’t wake me in the mornings. Instead, he quietly got a breakfast of cereal and milk and was gone by the time the sun came up.
When I woke up for the day, I would feed Summer, give her a bath and then I would get dressed. I kept the tiny efficiency as clean as possible wiping off the counters, table, inside and outside of the refrigerator and the stove. I mopped the old cracked linoleum floor every morning and made the bed every single day. I did some laundry in the bathtub since we didn’t have many clothes. Mostly I washed mine by hand in the tub because Jesse’s were too dirty to get clean and needed a real washing machine. And, of course, Summer’s little dresses and gowns and booties were easy to wash. I was young and leaning over the bathtub didn’t bother me. After all those years of not having access to a bathroom all the time, I was truly grateful for the one I had now. I tried to stay busy and would read when there wasn’t anything else to do. As a last resort, I could always watch TV.
One Friday evening in late February, I was standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes and looking out the window when I saw a young couple with a baby get out of their car. They took their groceries up the rickety looking stairs to an apartment building of the main house. I watched as a light came on in the window.
It was at that moment I realized how desperately lonely I was. At just 15 years old, I was married to a husband who was only home on rainy days, with a five-month-old baby and not a friend in sight. I can’t tell you the tremendous relief and joy I felt when I saw another young couple that seemed to be a mirror image of us!
One Monday morning after feeding and bathing the baby, I gathered up my courage and dressed Summer and myself as nicely as possible and walked to the house next door. I had no idea what I was going to say but I was determined to meet that other couple.
As it turned out, there was a sign on the front door that read "Apartment for Rent."
I pushed open the big, old-fashioned front double door and found myself in what used to be a huge mansion-style home. The foyer was large and open and you could look up at the second floor with a landing with an elegant railing.
There on the first floor to my right was a closed apartment door and a small "Apartment One" sign to the left of it.
To my left was a door marked "Apartment Two" and below that a sign that said, "Knock for Assistance." I did. An elderly lady came to the door and introduced herself as Hallie Morrison. I inquired about the apartment for rent and she took me right up to see it. It was much bigger than where we were living. This one had two large rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom, plus a full-sized bathroom. The rent was $15 a week. The extra room would be well worth the additional $3!
I was already so excited and then Mrs. Morrison told me another young couple lived just across the hall. They had three rooms but had to share the bathroom with a tenant named Bill, who lived in the third apartment on that second floor. He only had one room but lived alone so I guess that was all he needed.
I felt sure Jesse would agree to move to a better place nearby and since we had not signed a lease or anything, we simply paid rent by the week, we could move in on the next Saturday. Mrs. Morrison said she would hold the apartment for us while I checked with Jesse when he got home from work.
We had been in our one-room efficiency for one month, and Jesse was all for us upgrading our living arrangements. I spent the following days anxiously waiting for Saturday to arrive! Jesse had to work, but he promised to get home as early as he could. Mother had brought Lanita over to spend the weekend and between the three of us, we were able to move our clothes and things pretty quickly. There wasn't much food to transport since we decided we wouldn’t buy groceries until after we moved. I was dancing around playing house in the new apartment when Jesse brought in the baby bed.
The new apartment was furnished and with much nicer things than our last one. The kitchen had a full-size stove, and a large cast iron and enamel sink with a ribbed drainboard. There was also a full-size refrigerator and an old white Hoosier cabinet with an enamel work surface and tilt-out drawers for flour and sugar. The walls were papered with a wild flower design and there were three windows for natural light at the far end where the table and four chairs sat. It was nicer than anything I could have even imagined!
The room that served as both the bedroom and living room, had a slightly sagging couch and an old coffee table, a vanity dresser with a mirror and a tall matching bureau, a full-sized bed and a small bedside table. The walls were covered in a beautiful wallpaper with blue- and burgundy-colored flowers and huge green leaves and vines on a white background.
The bathroom had a white sink and a deep, white claw footed bathtub. All the floors were linoleum and had worn places but not cracked. I loved every bit of it!
There was a door in both the kitchen and the bedroom but the front door was to the bedroom. I knew it was the front door because it had a little sign to the left of it saying "Apartment #4."
Lanita stayed with me the whole weekend and Mother came back to pick her up on Sunday. I was so proud of where we lived and felt like an honest-to-goodness grown up.
We now had $12 for groceries instead of the usual $15, but we made do. The important thing was to buy formula for the baby and inexpensive food to feed us. I wasn’t much of a cook but I knew how to cook a good pot of beans. We bought packages of macaroni and cheese along with Chef Boyardee spaghetti. These came in a package similar to the mac and cheese except, along with the box of dry spaghetti, it also included a tall skinny can of meat sauce and a small can of dry grated cheese. Bread, milk, dry cereal, a little bit of fruit, a dozen eggs and several cans of tuna fish rounded out our grocery list. We later added baby food to our purchases but also fed Summer spaghetti and scrambled eggs as she got a little older.
With every purchase at the grocery store, we earned S&H Green Stamps, trading stamps with a reward program where you could purchase things. After we put up the groceries, Jesse and I would paste the new stamps in the booklets and browse through the Redemption catalog to see what we wanted to get when we redeemed our stamps.
The first thing we got was a ceramic lamp to sit on top of the television set. It was shaped like a pair of Siamese cats and you used a yellow light bulb so when it was turned on, the cats eyes shone. We thought it was beautiful!
Jesse and I loved our apartment and I loved our landlady even more. She invited me to church with her and I jumped at the chance. I couldn’t drive yet so I was limited to where I could go. Only a drugstore on the corner was within walking distance. Mrs. Morrison didn’t drive either, but she rode the bus downtown to do her shopping. And every week either her daughter or one of her sons would pick her up and take her to the grocery store. Then every Sunday, a big car would pull wildly up to the curb in front of the house and Mrs. Morrison's best friend, Mrs. Reed, would toot her horn for Mrs. Morrison to come out. I started going with the two of them every week and then began to join her on Tuesdays for WMU, as well. That stands for Women’s Mission Union. They had a lesson and a pot luck lunch that was always a feast!
Oh, the memories of all that food! I didn’t bring anything to contribute that first year I attended. Mrs. Morrison always told me, “Just bring yourself, little sweetie! I have more than enough for both of us.” One of her specialties was squash casserole and another was chocolate cream pie, or something she called burnt sugar pie. Whatever Mrs. Morrison made was always delicious. I learned a lot from her.
There was a nursery at the WMU and the lady who oversaw it loved babies and children in general, and would always make such a fuss over Summer Dee. I was the youngest lady there, naturally. Most of the ladies were middle age to elderly and some were just flat out old. Mrs. Morrison was 63 when I met her and I thought of her as old then. Little did I know that she would live for more than 30 years from then and be an important part of my life and in the lives of all my children.
The memories of all those church experiences when I attended as a child with my siblings where the congregation ignored us and even scorned us at times began to fade under the care and kindness of the good people at Mrs. Morrison's church.
I invited Jesse to go to church with us but he didn’t want to. Instead, he started going out every other Saturday night with "the boys." I had no idea who he was talking about because the only friends we had were our neighbors that loved across the hall, Gloria and Joe Paul
On some late Saturday afternoons, they would come over to our apartment and we would gather around the kitchen table and play board games. Among the four of us we had four games --Sorry, Scrabble, Easy Money and Monopoly. Their little boy was just slightly older than our little girl so the children would crawl around together on the floor and play. I loved these get-togethers. Gloria and Joe Paul were young but not as young as we were. They would joke and cut up with each other and I noticed how they acted toward one another. I was just as concerned about whether Jesse and I were a "normal couple" every bit as much as I had been concerned with whether we were a "normal family" when I lived at home with my siblings.
I realized that I did not have a good idea of what a real marriage looked like. Was it supposed to be like Mother and Daddy’s? No. Nor did I know any one other than my Aunt Ruby and Uncle Humey that were married and acted nice to each other as well as to other people including their children. Not my Aunt Irene and Uncle PR. They seemed to stay irritated with each other. Maybe Granny and Granddad but they were old. Aunt Alice and Uncle Truman were most likely a happy couple, but I hadn’t been around them much since Mother left Daddy and married Clayton.
Something else had been bothering me about being married from the very beginning. Jesse had been interested in sex before we got married, but he seemed to have lost interest afterwards. I could not figure it out. At first, I thought it was because he worked so hard. But even when he wasn’t working long hours and had some free time, he still wasn’t interested in me.
One day I was playing on the floor with Summer in the living room area, which was just across from the bathroom. As I was lying on the floor, I noticed a stack of magazines under the claw foot bathtub. I was curious about what they might be and who may have left them there. I was shocked to discover they were magazines full of naked women in all sorts of unbelievable poses. I felt sick to my stomach when I realized they were Jesse’s and were likely the reason he stayed in the bathroom so long in the evenings.
I didn’t know what to do, so I put them back. Later I mentioned to Jesse that I thought I saw something under the old bathtub and was going to try and pull it out. The next time I looked under there, the magazines were gone.
I did not get to see much of my siblings and mother after I left home. It was long distance to call between Fort Worth and Dallas at that time. My Aunt Alice worked in an office that had a direct line that wasn’t long distance, so I communicated to my family via messages to her. I was so appreciative that Mrs. Morrison let us use her phone when we needed.
Granddad, Mother’s father, had been sick for over a year and early in May, Aunt Alice called to tell me he had passed away. She told me when and where the funeral would be and I said I would be there if Jesse could get off work and take me.
He was still driving his 1957 Mercury and, as it turned out, he wasn’t working for a few days. His next job wasn’t quite ready yet so he was able to take me to the funeral. We were late getting there, though. Jesse ran a stop sign and we were hit by another vehicle. It wasn’t a bad wreck but it scared me. It was the first wreck I had ever been in. I had wrapped Summer up in a blanket and put her on the floorboard by my feet on another blanket. She was just six months old so she was asleep when the car hit us. Thankfully she was not hurt. None of us were. The car was damaged but still drivable. Everyone had gone to the cemetery for the burial and that’s where we went, having missed the service entirely.
Everyone was sad about losing Granddad. He was loved by everyone and my siblings and I felt like he loved us. Our Granny seemed to only love Lloydine out of the four of us.
Jesse and I stayed as long as we could visiting with my siblings afterwards. We had missed the meal for the family that was served before the funeral and I wasn’t allowed to go to the house since Clayton was still in the picture. And I was still shaken up from being in that wreck so we drove back home. Jesse was in a bad mood and was complaining about getting hit and the damage done to his car, even though the accident was his fault.
Granddad’s funeral had been on a Friday so Jesse left early Saturday morning to go look at cars. He found a 1962 green Catalina Pontiac he liked. He came back to the apartment and picked Summer and me up and said we were going to go over and see his mother. He told her by trading in his Mercury, he could buy the car he had found. He said he could afford the car payments and they would accept his trade-in as a down payment. He just needed her to co-sign the loan. After a lot of talking, he convinced her to do it and Monday morning he told his boss, Kenneth, he would be at work a little late. He went to the dealership and picked up the papers for his mother to sign, took them to her while she was at work and then returned them to the dealership.
Jesse was true to his word and never missed a single car payment. However, his mother never let him forget she had co-signed for him, but that was the last time he asked her to do that. By the time he was ready to buy another vehicle, he had built up enough credit of his own to purchase one.
At 15, I was still too young for a license but I would be turning 16 in less than six months, so Jesse began to teach me. The fact that the car had an automatic transmission made it so much easier for me to learn. He would take me to some backroad areas or to a big vacant parking lot. It was scary but if none of my younger siblings were afraid to drive, then I needed to be brave and learn to do it.
Now that I wasn’t at home with my siblings anymore, they had learned to take care of themselves and that included doing the laundry. While we had often lived close enough to a washeteria to walk when I was home, now they lived over two miles away from one.
Mother would get off work and Lloydine would have the dirty clothes all tied up in bedsheets. Mother would give her the keys to the car and Lloydine and Lonnie would go to the washeteria. Lloydine would drive there and back. She was just 12 years old. Mother's boyfriend, Benny, had either taught all three of them how to drive or they all had to learn on their own when he got too drunk to get them home, but they all knew how to drive long before I did.
Lonnie was driving before he was even in the third grade. He had a friend who had a paper route. The friend's name was Zach and his father worked as a disc jockey for KFJZ radio station. He had a 1963 Chevy Super Sport in maroon with a black interior and bucket seats. Zach was a little older than Lonnie and his dad allowed Zach to use the car for his paper route. Lonnie loved cars and offered to help Zach throw the afternoon papers and, in return, Zach would buy Lonnie a cherry Coke and go to Forest Park where he would let Lonnie drive his car.
Zach and his family lived just a few streets over from Bewick where Lonnie lived. One Sunday morning, Lonnie recalled walking over to Zach’s house to help him throw the morning paper and found his friend drunk. Zach asked Lonnie to do the paper route so my brother grabbed the keys and did just that. Lonnie was just nine years old.
From then on, anytime Zach needed Lonnie to do the route, Lonnie did it. Mrs. Hurt was Zach’s mother's name and she was such a sweet lady. Lonnie loved her and she loved Lonnie and always made sure Lonnie had a good meal to eat every time he came over. Lonnie and Zach remained friends and by the time Lonnie was in the 5th and 6th grades, Mrs. Hurt ensured he had nice blue jeans and shirts to wear to school. She would wash, starch and iron them. From that time on and even into adulthood, Lonnie always wore his clothes all starched and his jeans sharply creased. Lonnie never forgot her kindness to him. In later years, Lonnie and another of his friends, Little Joe, would see Mrs. Hurt out in her car just stopped somewhere, like she had just pulled over and fallen to sleep. Lonnie would hop out and drive her home with Little Joe following behind in his car. For a long time, they thought she was senile. Then they discovered she was drinking too much bourbon. Her son, Zach, died young and her husband had left and she was all alone. Lonnie and Little Joe watched out for her as long as she lived.
Back in the mid '60s, you could get a hardship license at 14, so young drivers were not unheard of at the time. But I don’t think any of us got our licenses until we were 16. And none of us ever had a serious wreck or got in trouble for driving.
