I was born in Watts Hospital in Durham, N.C., in April 1930. My mother had attended Trinity College, later Duke University, and dropped out to work at Liggett & Meyers, makers of Chesterfield cigarettes. My father had returned to Durham from his travels as a young soldier of fortune. They were married after helping to make the Roaring Twenties roar. He was selected to be a Lieutenant on the new Highway Patrol. So my life began as the center of attention in a family that was comfortably well off for the time.

Dad was later transferred to Rockingham, N.C. There my younger brother Bill was born, an event that changed my life forever. Everyone who came wanted to see “the baby,” not me, and Mother devoted nearly all of her time to him. The Highway Patrol was heavily downsized, and we moved to Lynn to live with Mother’s parents, Tom and Mattie Rippy. Dad worked at anything he could find, including landscaping with John Vollmer for the big estate now known as Stonehedge. He and Uncle Pete Gaines also cleared a good bit of Rippy Hill land for pastures.

Soon Uncle Charlie Harrill invited us to Wateree, S.C., where Dad could work in the huge gravel pit where Charlie was the mechanic who kept everything running. There I enjoyed playing with my much older cousin Bryant and going off to sleep to the tune of the Delco hit and miss engine that charged up a bank of batteries that provided electric lights for Uncle Charlie’s house.

Then we came back to Rippy Hill when the tenant house became vacant. Bill became hopelessly ill and Dr. Lesesne Smith at his Saluda Baby Hospital saved his life. Dr. Smith gave the babies Coca Cola and Mother’s favorite beverage, after coffee, became “Co-Cola.” Dr. Jervey set my arm after I broke it in a jump off the back porch. I soon joined Mrs. Kittrell’s first grade at Tryon School, and was promptly put in Mrs. Jervey’s second grade. I already knew all that she planned to teach me, so Mrs. Kittrell got rid of her troublemaker the best way she knew.

Dad found a job as Purchasing Agent at Mooresville Cotton Mills, coming home to visit at Thanksgiving. He asked me how I liked school, and I told him it was no fun and I did not like it, so he let me quit. We moved to Mooresville over the Christmas holidays, and I started back to school in the first grade. Things went well again as I learned to build a fire in the hot water jack, clean the bathroom, and mow the grass. Dad’s brother Wallace was on the pro baseball team there and lived with us for a while.

Bill and I got to spend the summers on Uncle Pete’s farm. Lightning struck a big maple and burned the Rippy’s house to the ground and they moved into the tenant house. My Dad went fishing the following year with a friend, and the car tumbled and landed on top of my Dad after a front tire blew out. My Dad died from his injuries, and Mother then moved us to Durham and started taking a business course. There my Dad’s cousin Bruce taught me how to use tools and how to tune up his Buick’s engine.

Mother was going through Dad’s life insurance money pretty fast, so Papa Rippy suggested that she use what was left to build us a house on the foundation of their former house. John Moore built it during the winter of 1939-40 to keep his crew together; Uncle Wallace worked on it before he joined the Navy when we got into WWII. Mother worked for John Cowan for a while, then Uncle Pete got her a job at Adams-Millis. George Comer was the Superintendent, Aunt Mildred was his office manager, and he brought his family over to Mama Rippy’s on many Sunday afternoons to join our extended families in making a freezer or two of ice cream while all the kids played in the woods.

I mention so many relatives and friends because I want to show that we all pulled together to get through those seriously bad economic times. My Mother was in the first graduating class at Stearns School in 1918. My Dad left home as a young teen with only a fifth grade education, toured Central America and the south Pacific, joined the Army in Hawaii, and had to pay his own way back to Durham. After he died, the Goodwins wanted Mother to put Bill and me in the orphanage at Oxford; Papa Rippy invited us to his home instead. Bill grew up to be a head taller than I, so he often introduced me as his “Little brother.” He brightened many dark days with his everlasting good humor.

All of my columns are really about the wonderful people who have enriched my life over the years. I’m not much of a singer, but I want you to know about those otherwise unsung heroes and heroines.