Chapter 4: Mildred Ave.
My grandfather lent my father enough money to buy a lot and build a home at 34 Mildred Ave. in West Asheville. It was a large lot that eventually had a big garden and parking area behind the three-bedroom house with a full basement. He later finished most of the basement so my mother could start her own beauty salon.
We moved in as I entered the ninth grade at Hall Fletcher Junior High. I took a music class that taught me to read drum sheet music. Once I became proficient, I joined the school marching band as a drummer.
I enjoyed playing the drums so much that I purchased a secondhand trap set: a floor bass drum with a foot pedal, a snare drum, a tom-tom drum, and two cymbals. I would practice in our basement for hours after school and on the weekends until my mother would scream from upstairs, “Stop!” I was good enough that at parties with a live band, I was often given the chance to play a drum solo during the band’s break.
I was elected to the Student Council. My duty on the council was to oversee “Lost & Found,” which was not particularly difficult. At the end of the year, I was presented with a lapel pin in recognition of my service, which I still have.
One day after school, while waiting for the bus to take us home, a small group of boys surrounded my eighth-grade brother and started pushing him around. I stepped in, again as instinct dictates for any older brother, and pushed my brother out, and said, “Okay, I’ll take one of you at a time. Who wants to go first?” No one stepped forward. I looked behind for my brother, but he was nowhere to be found. Then I saw him running back from across the street, and when I asked where he had gone, he said he had called the police. And sure enough, a police car pulled up, and out stepped my father in his uniform, with badge, gun, & nightstick. My brother explained why he had called. As the bus pulled up, my father told us to walk home, then motioned for the other students to board.
Months later, the bully, who with his small gang had surrounded my younger brother at the school bus stop, never got over my stepping in and saying, “Okay, I’ll take you one at a time, who wants to go first?” I think he regretted not stepping forward, especially since he was the quarterback of the school’s football team and his teammates looked up to him. He could no longer bear the idea that he had not lived up to his own idea of the Alpha male image of a bully who never backs down. Even though he was smaller than me, he figured that his speed, agility, and aggressive fearlessness would easily overcome the difference in size. So, as the usual large group of us got off the bus at Ideal Drugstore, he at once, in a loud voice, challenged me to a fight in the parking lot. Everyone crowded around as I explained to him that he would have to throw the first punch as the aggressor, but I would defend myself. This was something my father taught me early on as a matter of law: the instigator of a fight is always in the wrong, and you are within your rights to defend yourself
He did not hesitate as he moved towards me, swinging with the rage of a wild animal. Any skills with a football did not carry over into hand-to-hand combat. He was unable to make any contact with my face or body, as I blocked all his wild swings. I imagine that my many hours of practice playing a drum set contributed to my hand and arm speed.
Men came out of the next door barber shop, hearing all the commotion. I overheard one say, “That boy knows how to fight!” referring to my ability to block every punch. This violent exchange continued for quite a while since the quarterback bully was in great shape and endurance. I rarely get angry, even in a fight, unless someone can inflict enough pain that I turn into something I don’t want to be. It didn’t happen that day, he never hurt me, so I had no reason to hurt him. I just let him exhaust himself in his desperate attempt to regain his Alpha status. Finally, his energy exhausted, he stopped, bent over with hands on knees, and reached up with an outstretched hand, saying, “I’ve had enough.” I shook his hand, turned, and walked away.
One summer in West Asheville, I had a run-in with a bully at Melvin Hills community swimming pool. He wanted to fight me, and I told him he would have to throw the first blow. I wouldn't start a fight, but I would defend myself. The bully began the fight by kneeing me in the stomach, but a large lifeguard broke it up because he considered it dirty fighting.
We rescheduled the fight for the next day in the woods next to the pool. Knowing how this bully liked to fight dirty, I carried a small piece of metal in my pocket, smaller than a roll of pennies, which I would clinch inside my fist to make it harder. I only plan to use it if I find that he is bringing something extra to the fight. And sure enough, when we met, he had something in his hand. I asked what it was, and he said it was his little equalizer. I pulled mine out of my pocket and said I have one too. His eyes widened as he threw his equalizer at me and tackled me to the ground. He began crawling up on me. I could have easily hit him, but that would have been the first blow. He pinned my arms with his legs and hit me in the eye as hard as he could. He awakened a power of anger I had never felt before as I lifted his entire body off me. I jumped to my feet as he backed up, yelling that he would never bother me again if I would stop. Hearing these words, I returned to my senses and calmly replied, “That’s all I ever wanted.” As I walked back to the street, I saw a police car with my father in it. When I got closer, he noticed my eye and asked what had happened. I explained that I had gotten into a fight with a bully, but it’s over now. I walked home and placed the unused piece of metal on the shelf in my closet. The next morning, as I was getting dressed for school, I noticed the piece of metal was gone. I knew then that my father had taken it. He had found the bully, who then told him about the piece of metal. I can only imagine the conversation between the bully and my father. Probably along the lines of the illegality of assaulting an individual, and that charges could be brought that could cause fines and even incarceration. Believe it or not, I never laid eyes on that bully again.
On the first day of tryouts for the high school football team, the coach looked down at his clipboard and read off the first name on the list.
“ Allison show the boys how to get tackled.” I stood still as another player rammed into my legs, causing a whiplash effect on my helmet-covered head. As I picked myself up, I heard the coach saying, “Now, boys, Allison probably experienced a slight concussion from that tackle, so you want to avoid that.” A slight concussion was putting it mildly. I did not remember coming to practice that day! Most memory of that day, prior to the tackle, was lost forever. I got over it and learned never to allow that sort of thing happen again.
Football tryouts take place weeks before school opens in the fall, so we were still on summer break. It was a rare occurrence, but my father decided that we would take a weekend vacation before school started. I forgot where we went, only that it was a really cheap, rundown motel somewhere along the road. Its only redeeming feature was a swimming pool with a diving board. My first dive off the board proved that the pool was not deep enough to have a diving board, as the top of my foot scraped the bottom of the pool. I washed the blood off and applied a band-aid, thinking it would be fine. Instead, within a few days, it became infected with an aggressive bacterium, according to the doctor, who scheduled surgery for the next day to remove the infected area. My father dropped me off at the doctor’s office and then quietly left. The doctor instructed me to lie down on a strecher in his office. He then injected shots into my foot to reduce the pain of the surgery. After he had finished sewing me up, I raised up to see a lot of my blood all over the table and on the floor. The sight made me lightheaded, so I laid back down. I often wondered why my father simply dropped me off and left
before the surgery knowing what I was about to endure. I knew he was a strong man, able to kill and gut large deer to such a degree that he had his picture in the paper more than once with his trophy kills. And of course, as a policeman, he had seen it all, so to witness my small surgery would not have been a big deal. At least that’s what I thought until many years later, after I had two children of my own. My son Ben let a small trash can slide down the steps for his younger brother, Brian, to catch. Unfortunately, it hit Brian in the forehead, causing a gash that needed to be looked at by a doctor. Ben and I stood in the doctor’s office as he began to sew stitches into Brian’s head. Before the doctor could finish, both Ben and I were on the floor, fainted, or were too lightheaded to stand. All the blood I had witnessed in my ambulance job never bothered me, but this was my son. It was at that point that I understood why my father could not be with me: it was not for me to be strong and face fear; he did not want to appear weak around me.
I was limping with a cane down the sidewalk on Haywood Road when a pickup truck with some football players drove past. One would think a guy with a cane limping would tell you something about his physical condition but when they saw me, they began to yell, Quieter! Quieter! Because I never came back to football tryouts. I began to think that perhaps I’m not mentally attuned to such a sport, perhaps those fellows have experienced slight concussions numerous times, and perhaps this all happened for the best. (Statistically, one in five high school football players lives with chronic problems.)
I joined the track team in high school. I was not fast enough for the 100-yard dash, nor did I have the lungs for the 440-yard race. So I was a 220 man. In several track meets, I came close to winning, but like the old saying goes, “close only counts in horseshoes and granades.”
It was the last track meet of the year and the only one my mother ever attended. As usual in the 220-yard race, I was close but not the winner.
There was only one race left in the meet, and it was the 440-yard. I asked my coach if I could run in this last event. He felt my desperation and said, "Sure, go for it.” As we adjusted our starting blocks and positioned our spiked running shoes, I casually told the other runners I was a 220 man, so don’t be surprised if I outrun you for the first half of the race. A
moment later, the gun fired as I shot out of the starting blocks. As predicted, I was the leader for the first half of the race, but then the unexpected happened. I kept the lead to the finish line, and even though I could hear their footsteps behind me, I crossed the line before they could catch me. I had won the race out of sheer willpower and to make my mother proud of me. My mom and I had always shared a special bond of closeness that went beyond the love we felt for the rest of the family.
Being the son of a small-town policeman had its challenges. The police were a close-knit group of men who enjoyed deer hunting with my father. I was occasionally part of the hunting party, even though I never killed anything, because the idea did not appeal to me, unlike my father, who learned at an early age that it was part of survival. As a teenager, I felt like an escaped convict on the run more than once. Like leaving the drive-in movies on a Saturday night, I would drive as straight as possible upon leaving. However, I would be pulled over by a police car on numerous occasions, the officer would claim he had stopped me for weaving in the road. Once he did not smell alcohol or see empty beer bottles, he would let us go. The point was that if you were the teenage son of a policeman in Asheville, every police officer knew your car and license number, and they all had their eye on you. You were always going to be good and paranoid.
Unlike some of my friends, I never had a steady girlfriend in high school. I enjoyed dating girls from Meridith College, which at the time was an all-girls school. They seem to appreciate male attention more than girls in high school did. At 17, I would walk into an ABC store and pick up a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey with such confidence that no one ever asked to see my ID to prove I was over 18, the age needed to make a legal purchase of alcohol.
We would go to Royal Pines nightclub, with its lively dance floor, featuring amazing popular bands like "Dave Clark and the Hot Nuts”, a favorite for the girls, as they would all crowd around the bandstand screeming with delight to songs with lyrics like “See that girl all dressed in red, makes her living in the bed!”
We would bring whiskey in a brown bag and order Cokes for mixed drinks. The amount of alcohol I consumed was canceled out by the highly physical form of dancing at that age. Additionally, I was cautious about how much I consumed, knowing the police were always keeping an eye on me.
In 1961, Lee Edward’s High school had a dance in the cafeteria. My date and I had both taken dancing lessons and decided to try an old swing step from our parents' era. It was called the “pendulum swing”. It involved the girl locking her hands around the boy’s neck as he held her waist. She would jump up and swing to the boy’s right hip and then to his left hip, then between his legs and back to her feet. We felt that our reenactment of this bygone dance step was spot on. That is, until the Principal ran up to us, telling us it was inappropriate and that we were to leave the dance immediately. By kicking us out of the dance, he was sending a message to everyone that that kind of dancing would not
be tolerated. We later learned he was a deacon at a Baptist Church, which explained a lot.
My date and I decided we would throw our own party and invite the entire school. We worked out an agreement with the owner of Chuck Wagon Swimming Pool for a large private party at a reduced price for a Saturday evening. We had to charge everyone a small fee to cover the rental. The party was a big success.
In high school, most of us were from the Blue Collar areas of town, like West Asheville. There were also the students from the wealthier parts of town, like Biltmore Forest. Every year, there were several dances at the Country Club, just for high school students who were the children of club members. On several occasions during my high school years, different girls asked me to be their escort to the dance. These were not girls that I dated or even socialised with, even though they were attractive; no boy had offered to escort them to the dance. It was difficult enough as a boy to ask a girl out on a date, knowing that being turned down would hurt. For these girls to take such a risk was admirable in my eyes; there was no way I could refuse, even knowing that I was only an escort, so it was not like a date. My biggest problem was having to rent a tuxedo for each dance, which was expensive for a drugstore soda jerk & delivery boy’s income. More than once, the girls offered to pay for the tuxedo, but I would always decline. I recall, during my senior year, a magazine photo of a Madras Tuxedo Jacket inspired me to purchase a regular Madras jacket and then have my grandmother sew satin over the lapels, turning it into the latest fashion twist of the 1960s. With the addition of a satin cummerbund, a formal dress shirt, and a tie, the total cost was less than two tux rentals. I really stood out at the dance as a splash of color in a sea of black. Since it had just come out in magazines, it looked like I was taking a bold step into a formal fashion world that would raise eyebrows at its irreverence. It was a short-lived phase that was eventually considered inappropriate, like wearing a Hawaiian shirt to a funeral.
One night, a friend drove me to a party we had both been invited to. At that party, an attractive young girl bounced up to me and said, “Hi, my name is Becky Smith, would you like to dance?” I was impressed with her bold confidence and the fact that she had identified something she liked and was pursuing it. Much later, she confessed that she had just broken up with her boyfriend, who left her at the party with no ride home. She recognized me from having her hair done in my mother’s home beauty shop located in our basement. Her home was only a block away from mine. So it was not my good looks but her desperate need for a ride home that made her so bold. Of course, I asked her out on a date, and she agreed. At the end of the date, when I tried to kiss her, she told me she didn't kiss on the first date. On the second date, I refrained from attempting to kiss her. As I did for the third and fourth dates, to the point where her girlfriend called me one day to inform me that if I didn't kiss her on the next date, she wouldn't date me anymore! We went on a date again, and I kissed her. I always felt she was special, so I made a point to stay in contact with her, even if it was just once a year around Christmas.
Actually, my first theatre performance came about because of Becky. After we had started dating, I saw her one day waiting at a bus stop and asked where she was going. She said that she was on her way downtown to try out for the play, Mr. Popper’s Penguins. I had a friend with me, and I told her I would go home, get my father’s car, and take her to the tryouts. She said that if I got back before the bus, she would go with me; otherwise, she would ride the bus. The bus beat me, but my friend and I still made it to the tryouts. He got the lead in the play, I got the part of the policeman, and Becky ended up as an offstage voice. Instead of a costume, I wore my father’s police uniform for the play.
My next performance was in the senior class play, where I played a set of bongo drums as a Beatnik character.
My grades in high school were nothing to brag about; shameful comes to mind. My adviser recommended that I take Latin as my foreign language to help with my poor English grades. After I failed Latin, my adviser recommended Spanish, as it was considered an easier language. I didn’t find it any easier, so, of course, I failed Spanish. In 1961, to graduate from high school, one had to pass a foreign language course. Since I had not, I was set back a year to try again to pass the Spanish course. Ultimately, my Spanish teacher said she would give me a D in Spanish if I promised never to retake her Spanish class. I promised and finally graduated.
Based on my poor high school grades alone, I would have never been admitted to college, but my SAT score was high enough to gain admission to Western Carolina College.
The summer before I started college, I worked at the Grove Park Inn as a busboy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I had never interacted with a black person since none were in my schools or neighborhood, but here at the Inn, there were black waiters. I witnessed one of them drop a steak off a plate, pick it up off the floor, and proceed to serve it to an unsuspecting customer. I brought it to his attention that such actions could get him into trouble. His eyes flashed with anger as he grabbed an empty water glass and then grabbed the back of my neck. Holding the glass only inches from my face, he threatened to smash the glass into my face if I ever said anything to anyone about the incident. The man was obviously angry and capable of violence. I was in a state of shock at this incident. I was not sure if I could continue to work alongside this type of individual. The next day, when he did not show up to work, I was relieved. No one ever saw him again after that. I considered that something must have caused him to leave. Did someone see his threat against me and report him? It seems like I would have been called in to verify the threat if that had been the case. Another possibility was that someone on the staff told him that I was the son of an Asheville police officer. It would be understandable that in 1961, if an angry black man physically threatened the son of a police office it could have serious repercusions especially if said black man had previous run-ins with the law. I never mentioned it to my father, and I never felt that a man’s skin color reflected what kind of man he was.
The job came with a small dorm room for the help nearby. We had only a few hours free between the three daily meals and only one day off a week. I made a total of $500 for the summer. Some fifty years later, I returned and spent $300 on a dinner for four.
Before leaving for college, I bought a Vespa motor scooter that could reach speeds of 65 MPH if I leaned forward to reduce wind resistance. I could ride it to college from Asheville in an hour unless I got trapped behind a slow tractor-trailer. The winding mountain road made it impossible to pass a tractor-trailer except at one place with a long straight stretch, where I could pass a 60 MPH tractor-trailer as I leaned forward to reach 65 MPH. My blood runs cold today as I think back to the times when I was passing a tractor-trailer, and the approach of another one from the opposite direction forced me to ride the white line between the two.
I went by Becky’s house to take her for a ride on my new Vespa. She refused, saying it looked unsafe to her. Her mother, however, enthusiastically jumped at the idea and hopped on, directing me to a nunnery, where the nuns had to convince her that they were not inclined to have male visitors come inside. (Fifty-five years later, when I bought a Vespa in Cuenca, Ecuador, Becky would ride with me in the Andes mountains.)
During my freshman year in college, I tried to catch up with old friends when I rode my Vespa to another dance in Lee Edwards's cafeteria. I was stopped at the door by the principal, who informed me I was not allowed in because I was no longer a student there. Other than being thrown out last year because my old-fashioned swing dance was considered inappropriate according to his high Baptist morals, I had no record of inappropriate behavior. I was a member of the track team and was involved with the school play. I was also active in Young Life, a nondenominational high school group that met every few weeks. They voted me secretary since I would write short comic skits for each meeting. As the son of a policeman, I was better behaved than most, but this principal treated me like I was a troublemaker. I was unwilling at this point to slip quietly into the night. So I rode my Vespa up to an open cafeteria window and revved the engine so loudly that the band stopped playing. At that point, the principal came running out of the cafeteria, waving his arms in an attempt to stop me from leaving. I popped the clutch, which reared up the front wheel into a menacing wheelie that streaked by him, roaring into the night! When I arrived home, my father asked what I had done and said the police were looking for me after a call from the school principal. After hearing my side of the story, my father agreed that the principal had overreacted.
