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The vacation that stands out most
clearly in my mind is the trip my family and I made during
the summer of 1977 to Niagara Falls, Canada. I was between
my freshman and sophomore years of high school, and didn't
yet have my driver's license. I was fifteen years old with
my entire future still lying before me.
We drove to my Aunt Mildred Jackson's home in Charlotte,
NC, and spent the night with her. The next morning we loaded
up the car and she accompanied us on our trip. Her cousins,
Lenore and Walter Davis, who lived in Corning, New York,
invited us to stay with them during our trip.
Aunt Mildred worked at the Holiday Inn located on
Independence Blvd. in Charlotte. One of her friends from
work, someone she called "Uncle Stinky" gave her some
directions for us to use that included a lot of back roads
through small towns, instead of us strictly sticking to the
Interstate highway system.
The back roads we traveled on were awesome.
Everywhere we looked, there were lush green fields of corn
and vegetables, whereas, when we left home, everything had
pretty much died from the excessive heat that summer. We got
to see some of the Pennsylvania Dutch Amish countryside we
would have missed otherwise. We also stopped at the Civil
War Memorial at the Gettysburg Battlefield.
There was one gas station we stopped at in rural
Pennsylvania, where the attendant made my mother go to his
house and speak to his wife. They had never seen or heard
anyone from South Carolina before and he brought the entire
family out to the car and made us all say "Ya'll come"
before he would allow us to continue on our trip.
We spent two weeks up in New York State, touring the
Corning Glass Factory, several dairy farms where we saw
cheese made, and we spent an entire day at Niagara Falls,
Canada, with Lenore and one of her friends as our guides.
While we were there, my sister, Edie celebrated her 8th
birthday at Walt and Lenore's house. They threw her a party,
complete with presents, money, a birthday cake, and a
cookout by their pool.
When we returned to South Carolina, it was between the late
evening hours of August 15th and the predawn hours of August
16th, 1977. Later that day, while we were shopping at the
local Kress Department Store, we heard it announced over the
store's loudspeaker by the local radio station's ("WBSC 1550
on your AM dial") on-air personality, that Elvis Presley had
been found dead at Graceland earlier that day.
This is what I have always considered to have been the end
of my "formal" childhood and my "initiation" to maturity. We
all stood in the middle of that store and cried after the
announcement had been made. I don't remember anyone leaving
that store without tears running down their faces. That was
one of the few times in his life that my Dad has actually
cried in front of me and made no attempt to hide it. ("Hound
Dog" was the very first record my Dad bought me when I was 3
years old and he never has let me forget it).
(c) 2004 by Lynne Stevenson
All Rights Reserved |
