Summertime @ MindSay

My adopted grandparents, my sister and I head to Mississippi in June for a couple of weeks like we usually do. Billy and I pick up where we left off. Seeing each other as much as we can. Sitting at the Colonel Dixie hamburger stand, going to the movies, indoor and drive-in. Going for drives and talking. The 4th of July we tell my family we are going to the movies but we head to Biloxi to watch the fireworks. Billy drove a gold 55 Chevy that was easy to spot anywhere. We were caught parked on the beach by an aunt headed to see the family but we didn't know it. When we got home a little later than the movie would have been over, they were waiting for us. We had to fess up to being about 30 miles from where we said we would be. We got the lecture about what if the theater had caught on fire and they would have thought we were there. What if we had a car accident, I didn't have any ID because I didn't drive yet. I wanted to be mad at Aunt B for telling on us but she was one of my favorite aunts and I was crazy about her youngest son, E.J. who taught me how to dance. He was seven years older and in the Navy. He was tall and thin and good looking like Billy and my sister was crazy about him too. We headed back to California a couple days later and Billy and I wrote almost every day. Summer ended and it was time for me to start 10th grade at the high school. I went to a high school that was always having TV shows and movies filmed there because it was right outside Hollywood. High school was so different from junior high. I had been queen bee in junior high. My algebra teacher called me a social butterfly. High school had about 1500 students and I didn't know even half the kids in my class. Lunch time had me walking around looking for old friends from junior high. We soon decided our spot was near the steps of the cafeteria and we hung out there. Every group had their spots to hang out on the campus during lunch. Some kids would walk around to be seen by all the other groups. The high school was three stories and junior high was only two stories tall. They gave us and extra minute to get to classes. They had dances on Friday nights after the football games. Fall of 64 was quite an experience. We still had to wear dresses that touched our knees to school but they would allow us to wear pants to some of the dances. They called those "sports nights." Keeping a long distance relationship with Billy was hard when there were so many cute guys to dance with that loved to slow dance and hold you tight. I have to admit to a few stolen kisses outside the gym. It was hard to be faithful at 14 and 15 when I only got to see Billy for a couple weeks in the summer and at Christmas time. I believe Billy was always faithful to me in those early years when I was having so much fun being a teenager. There were some girls in his yearbook that I was jealous of because they were so pretty but Billy was trustworthy. After fall came Christmas and we took the train to Mississippi for the holidays. Billy and I were falling deeply in love and I had bought him a nice intial ring for Christmas. He bought me a beautiful angora sweater. Saying good bye was harder this time but back to California and palm trees we went on a train. Come spring time, grandpa decided to retire from his job with the City of Los Angeles. We began to make plans to move to Mississippi and build a house. I told my friends goodbye and decided to make a new life in Mississippi with Billy and my cousin Buck and their friends. Billy was a senior and he would show me around school. My Uncle George took care of the building plans after we bought the corner lot next to his new home. We bought a brick home for $8000 that summer. We had our furniture moved by a moving company and we headed out in our Pontiac Bonneville. I painted my room lavender and bought new white bedroom furniture with a purple flowered bed spread and lavender throw rugs. Billy and I helped paint the addition that they added on the back of the house and we wrote our names in the sidewalk they poured between Uncle George's house and ours. Having a boyfriend, a new house and new school was going to be great. Billy and got very close that summer and began to talk about marriage. It must have been those warm summer nights sitting by the river in his 55 Chevy. Sometimes we did a little more than sit. Billy was a gentleman but we started kissing alot. My sister and I registered for school but just before it started, Papa got a phone call to come back to his old job. I never understood it, something about training his replacement and an outstanding loan he had with the city. We called a moving company and moved back to Los Angeles. We didn't sell the house because we would be back in a year. I started 11th grade and Billy started junior college 2000 miles apart. He wanted to be an electical engineer.

 For my 16th birthday, my grandparents bought me a car. I hated it! It was a pale green 1960 Ford Falcon. I don't know what was worst, that or my 1974 Pinto I had when I was older. Come Christmas 1965, we didn't go to Mississippi that year. Billy and I were heartbroken. Could we go almost a year without seeing each other? Billy decided to take a train out to California since he had never been there. Over the holidays, he decides to stay and go to college there. We head over to LACC to register him for classes and he discovers that there is a big out of state fee. I read the fine print and it said, "except for married students." In the middle of Los Angeles City College, I proposed marriage to save money. Our families thought we were nuts. When we convinced them how practical it really was, they signed for us to get a license. The girl had to be 18 and the boy 21 in California. Billy rented a little apartment down the street from us for $40 a month. We got married January 22nd. The night before our wedding, I took some of my clothes down the street to the apartment. Billy and I started making out really heavy. Being the gentleman that he was, he insisted that we wait til we were married the next day. Our first aparment was really cute. We lived in the back of an old ladies house. She had built an apartment on the back of her house for her grandson. It was completely furnished!! We had an old Murphy bed that folded down out of the wall. Billy found a job making $50 a week and he went to school nights. Sometimes I would drive my car to school and sometimes he would drop me off. I only told one girlfriend at school and she was at the little wedding ceremony we had. We had to keep things quiet if I wanted to finish school. They really frowned on those kind of things in the 60's.