A birthday

I see I failed to mark Carl's birthday in February:

Shoeless

Summer vacation begins for my children next week, which prompted this conversation.

Carl: You know how you knew it was summer when I was a kid? Shoes. You took them off when school ended, and you didn't put them on again, except to go into town or to Sunday school. We ran around barefoot all summer.

Ellen: Ugh. I bet you all had worms.

Carl: Probably had all sorts of stuff. But that's how it was, all summer long.

Ellen: I suppose there weren't any cheap shoe stores back then.

Carl: Right, the only shoe store was Hofheimer's, downtown. And shoes were expensive. So in the summer... *makes expansive gesture and quotes John Greenleaf Whittier wryly* "Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan."

The Portsmouth ferry

Carl, while traveling through the Downtown Tunnel (which goes from Norfolk to Portsmouth): I remember when this went in. It'll never work, they said. Portsmouthers love their ferry. Three months later... (He laughs).

Ellen: It's a lot quicker than a ferry.

Carl: Well, not really. I mean, if you were driving a car you had to line up. But if you were a pedestrian, you just paid your ten cents and walked right on.

Ellen: But this was built when the car was becoming the major source of transportation, right? In the fifties sometime?

Carl: Yeah. Before the war, most people didn't have cars. They took buses or streetcars, or just walked everywhere. But in the fifties... that was really the first era when everyone had cars.

Learning to love jazz

Carl: I guess I got into jazz because of WTAR. You know, "we'll try another record." They meant it. Back then jazz was an integral part of popular music, and they might just as well play a Red Nichols record as a Guy Lombardo record. I started to figure out what I liked.

Carl's childhood home in Park View

Carl and I drove through Park View in Portsmouth today:

Much of the area was clearly razed in the sixties to make way for brick ranches, but a good many older houses remain, including the one Carl grew up in:

In this post, he related his first glimpse of a truck. He recalls sitting in the bay window (visible at the right of the house) when he saw it.

While driving around Portsmouth, we also saw Norcom High School. Carl relates:

I went to Wilson. That was the white school. Norcom was right next to it, but it was the black school. Totally separate. They both had football teams, but they never played each other, because white teams didn't play black teams. You really can't believe how... profound the separation was if you didn't grow up with segregation.