From Poverty to History Maker: An Autobiography

autobiography.

CHAPTER 1

THE EARLY CHILDHOOD AND FORMATIVE YEARS: POVERTY AND SEGREGATION

EARLY CHILDHOOD

Shepherdstown is a small, rural, town with no stop light and about 800 residents. It is located in Jefferson County, which is in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, adjacent to the Maryland border. I was born in a shotgun house on July 13, 1943. I was delivered by Mrs. Azzie Harris, a midwife and the mother of the town’s black elementary school principal. I was born during World War II. And my father, Clarence A. Holmes, was not present at my birth as he was away in the U.S. Army serving in the European theater. My father’s absence at my birth was a precursor of things to come as he would be permanently absent in my life before my sixth birthday and that of my brother Clarence before his eighth birthday. My mother, Priscilla, was left to raise us without our father’s presence. She earned money by cleaning homes, cooking meals, babysitting and washing clothes for white families in Shepherdstown. Most African-Americans in Shepherdstown lived in three neighborhoods: Angel Hill, Back Street and Uptown.¹

I was born into a loving, sharing and caring family in Angel Hill where the adults truly believed in the African adage that it takes a village to raise a child. While my father was in the military, my mother, my brother, and I lived with my aunt Genevieve Monroe and grandmother, Marstella Washington, the matriarch of a family of 13 children of which my mother was the second youngest. Unfortunately, my maternal grandfather died before I was born and neither my paternal grandfather nor my father’s mother ever had a close relationship with us. Shortly after my father returned to Shepherdstown after World War II, he moved to the Uptown neighborhood to live with his mother. Then in 1948, my mother decided to move to New York City to find employment, and my brother and I remained in Shepherdstown.

Grandmother Marstella, her daughters and neighbors helped to rear my brother and me after my mother moved to New York when I was five years old and my brother was seven. The closeness of our family was reflected in the fact that our first family reunion was held in 1947 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For several years after that, there were periodic reunions which became regular biennial events beginning in 1988. The family reunions were held on even years with as many as 200 relatives attending. The event has been held in Shepherdstown and Martinsburg, West Virginia; Atlanta, Georgia; Charlotte, North Carolina; Erie, Pennsylvania and Hagerstown, Maryland.²

Three of my mother’s older sisters and her brother had moved to New York and Connecticut. Her other living sisters remained in Shepherdstown: Charity Cook, Genevieve Monroe, and baby sister Dora Washington. We moved into the home of Aunt Genevieve and Uncle Jake Monroe. We had little contact with my father as he remarried and had seven children. I was very disappointed that I never had any kind of relationship with my father. He was a member of the Shepherdstown Red Sox Baseball team, but he never played baseball with my brother or me. He did not attend a single basketball or football game during our high school years. And we never received any presents from him for either our birthdays or Christmas.³ This experience with my father was a major factor in my determination as a father to be very close to my children and to be involved in all of their activities.

According to my mother, after my father left our house, Grandmother Marstella met with her, Aunt Charity and Aunt Genevieve and told tell them what to do. My grandmother was only five feet tall and never attended a public school, but she was a very wise individual who commanded the attention and respect of all her children as well as most residents of Shepherdstown. Practically everyone called her Aunt Marstella and when she spoke, everyone listened and usually did what she asked them to do. She told Genevieve and Charity that Priscilla would be leaving for New York City to find work. She said my brother and I would live with Aunt Charity because her home was closest to the three room, eight grade Eastside Elementary School, the school for African-American children in Shepherdstown and the environs.⁴ The three teachers made an indelible impression on me and were among the best teachers I have ever encountered. Mrs. Marian Reeler taught grades one, two and three; Mr. Ernest Green’s room had grades four, five and six; and the principal, Mr. John Wesley Harris, taught grades seven and eight. They were like surrogate uncles and aunts who were very caring and concerned individuals, and encouraged and nurtured students. They worked many extra hours after school with the children, met with parents regularly, even stopping by the homes of the students to talk with their parents or guardians. They truly believed that every child could learn and be successful. The Eastside School teachers kept in touch with students long after they graduated and continued to support and encourage us. Just as important as the teachers were the extended family of play aunts and uncles who treated my brother and me like family. Among them were Mr. Ed and Ms. Emma (Kidrick) and Mr. Russell and Ms. Dorothy (Stevens), Mr. Jimmy and Ms. Hilda Mae (Brown), and Mr. Buster and Ms. Kitty (Creamer). Many had sons close to our ages with whom we played games, ranging from baseball and marbles to hide-and-seek, and we often ate dinner at their homes. Their older children often babysat my brother and me. There was even a white couple, Mr. Dagwood and Ms. Jane (May), who lived on Angel Hill whose son, Herbert Porky, and I were friends who played together for several years before we could attend the same school.⁵ From this experience, I realized the absurdity of segregation and this was one reason why I decided to integrate the high school a few years later.

Shepherdstown was about a mile long. Everyone knew each other, and probably one-third of its African-American residents were my cousins. We played with the children who went to Eastside Elementary and others who attended the two black churches, Asbury Methodist and St. John’s Baptist. Many surrogate aunts and uncles who, lived in Uptown as well as many cousins like Danny Stubbs who lived in New York, helped us immensely during our youth. The adults’ mantra was mi casa su casa — my home is your home.

On Saturdays, our cousins, friends, my brother and I would go fishing in the Potomac River about two miles from Aunt Charity’s house. On the way back home, we would often pick wild blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries and sell them for 35 cents a quart. We made enough money from selling our berries and from soda pop bottle deposits to go to the Saturday matinees movies. The theater owner, Mr. Charles Musser, also published the Shepherdstown Register Weekly newspaper. As was the custom in many small towns, African-Americans sat in the balcony of the theater. At Betty’s Restaurant, blacks could only purchase takeout food. Kave’s Grocery was where we bought basic food items, and our aunts went to Martinsburg to do their weekly shopping at the A&P store on Saturdays.

Our family was divided in terms of religious affiliation: about 60% attended Asbury Methodist Church and 40% were members of St. John’s Baptist Church. However, this never had any impact on the closeness of our family. When my mother left for New York in 1948 to seek employment, she ended up working as a housekeeper for a white Jewish female attorney and her husband, a businessman. She made beds, cooked meals and cleaned up their condominium in New York City on Broadway. However, because my mother’s salary was so low, during the four years that we lived with Aunt Charity, she never visited us. She told me that she had wanted to come to Shepherdstown to visit us periodically, but she could not afford the Greyhound bus fare from New York or take off a week from her job. Fortunately, the two black churches collaborated on an annual summer bus excursion to Coney Island, New York. My mother would take the subway to Coney Island and spend a Saturday with my brother and me, other family members and her childhood friends.

In 1952, four years after my mom had moved to New York, two important things happened. One, Uncle Danny Stubbs, my grandmother’s sister-in-law’s oldest son, gave my mother his rent controlled apartment at 250 West 112th Street between 7th and 8th A venues in Harlem. This enabled my brother and me to move to New York to live with our mother. I was nine years old and in the fourth grade, and my brother was eleven. My mother came down to Shepherdstown on a Greyhound Bus, picked us up and took us back to New York.⁶

We attended school across the street at P.S. 113, and became latchkey kids. After our mother left for work about 6:30 A.M., we got out of bed, prepared breakfast and walked about 200 yards to school. We made new friends among children in our apartment building, on the block and at school. The black top, asphalt school yard became our main playground. We spent many hours playing with our friends and occupying ourselves with basketball, handball, roller-skating and stick ball. The name of the stickball team was The Vultures.

Since we did not have a television set, we sometimes walked up to 116th Street to watch television through the window of a furniture store. However, we were much more interested in going to Central and Morningside Parks, and to the school yard to play.

Our cousin, Uncle Danny was a 1931 graduate of Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia and a World War II veteran. However, like most college-educated black men of his generation, he was limited to working in blue collar jobs, such as in the post office or mass transit systems. He was drafted into the army during World War II and served in the European theatre. He worked for the Boston transit system and later the New York City Transit Authority during his entire professional career.

Uncle Danny had played two sports in college and was an avid baseball, basketball and track fan. He took my brother and me to our first baseball game at Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers until 1960 when they left for Los Angeles. He took us to the Polo Grounds, home of the New York Giants until the team later moved to San Francisco. We also attended a few National Basketball Association (NBA) games at Madison Square Garden, home of the New York Knickerbockers. Danny did not like the New York Yankees because the team only had one African-American player, Elston Howard, a catcher; however, the Giants and the Dodgers had many players who were trail blazers and national heroes to many African-Americans, such as Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella of the Dodgers and Willie Mays of the New York Giants who became all-stars and hall of famers. The Knicks were also pioneers and had the second African-American NBA player (Early Lloyd was the first), Nathaniel Sweetwater Clifton, who had briefly played for the Harlem Globetrotters before becoming an outstanding NBA player. I collected baseball cards from bubble gum packages, and accumulated hundreds of cards. We often traded and flipped cards, a form of childhood gambling, where you called heads or tails and matches. However, my card collection was left behind four years later when my mother sent us back to West Virginia. (Today the cards would be worth tens of thousands of dollars.) I memorized batting averages and home runs hit by my favorite baseball players. Danny also took us to the Knights of Columbus and New York Athletic Club track meets at the New York Armory and we saw some exciting college indoor track competitions. It was great to see future and former Olympians compete in many events. This was the beginning of my love affair with athletics and sports, which has continued until this day. My attendance at these events led me to participate in sports in high school and other fitness activities throughout my adult life.

Cousin Danny became a surrogate father to us. He didn’t have any children and had been a widower after his wife died at an early age. He tried to keep my brother and me on the straight and narrow path, but had somewhat limited success. We often played pick-up games of basketball in the P.S. 113 school yard, and baseball in the two parks a few blocks from neighborhood—Central Park and Morningside Park. However, in school, neither my brother nor I focused on academics and we made average grades. I had a lot of fun hanging out with schoolmates and friends. My brother Clarence began to hang out with older guys and became involved in gang-related activities.

My best friend was Melvin Boyd who at age 12 was already over six feet tall, and lived on the second floor of the adjacent building, 248 West 112th Street. We both lived on the second floors and since the buildings were only five feet apart, we set up our own phone system! I threw a tin can attached to a string through Melvin’s open window and we talked to each other like we were using real phones. Richard and Leslie Yearwood lived in our apartment building on the floor above us. Their father was a musician, and they also played instruments. Two buildings down the street at 246 West 112th Street were the Talbot brothers, Calvin and Bobby. We spent many hours with these buddies in the school yard playing handball, stick ball, roller skating, basketball and stoop ball in the street. (Stoop ball involves throwing a rubber ball against the steps of an apartment building and using the sewer tops as bases.) We ran and touched the bases and tried to score before the other team’s players retrieved the ball, and tagged us out.

We used the 10-foot high wall that separated the school yard from the adjacent apartment buildings to play handball. Some other close friends with whom we often played were Bruce, who lived in the building next to the school yard, and Hector Lopez, Freddy and Clinton, my homeroom classmates at P.S. 113. We often went to nearby Morningside Park and played on the swings, monkey bars, see-saws and climbed the rocks. Also, we made fishing hooks, bought a few lures for bait and went fishing in the Central Park Lake. The ten of us were a band of brothers who were practically inseparable. Bruce and I even discussed becoming entrepreneurs and raising guppies to sell to the pet shop on 114th Street.

One of the things that we enjoyed most, because we did not have bicycles, was to de-couple our roller-skates and make scooters. This was done by separating the front and back of the roller skates, nailing them to a two-by-four and then nailing everything to a wooden soda pop case (Pepsi or Coke). And voilà, we had a scooter. We would push ourselves on the smooth asphalt pavement in the schoolyard and even had friendly competitive races among ourselves. We also challenged other teams of kids in the schoolyard which sometimes led to fights and injuries.

We attended Salem Methodist Church at 129th Street at 7th Avenue. I was in the Cub Scouts and Clarence joined the Boy Scouts. We had some good times in scouting and we particularly enjoyed camping trips. Our mother’s brother, Uncle Robert Washington, periodically took us fishing in a boat on the Long Island Sound. Cousin Andrew Stubbs worked at an ice cream parlor in Brooklyn, and after church on many Sundays, we took the subway to the ice cream parlor and indulged ourselves by eating several flavors of ice cream.

Another favorite past time was going to the Morningside Movie Theater on 116th Street and 8th Avenue and spending the entire day. During the week, we would collect soda bottles and take them to the grocery stores to get the two-cent deposits. Admission to Morningside Theater was 18 cents and we could see two cartoons, two serials, and two movies featuring Tarzan, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, Lash LaRue, Flash Gordon, and others. Sometimes we would splurge and pay 25 cents at the more expensive chain theaters, such as the Loews and RKO. On one occasion, my brother and I watched one movie four times. We forgot about the time and before we knew it, it was about 7 p.m. My mother had become very worried, so she called Uncle Danny who came to the movie theaters to search for us. He found us at the RKO and asked the ushers to escort us out to the lobby where he was waiting. He was very upset and on the five block walk back to the apartment, he severely castigated us because my mother thought something bad had happened to us. When we got home, he spanked us, grounded us for a month from playing with our friends after school and on Saturdays, and we were not allowed to go to the park or the movies.

During our four years in New York we spent the summer weekdays living with Mrs. Elizabeth Bray, whom my mother paid, in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. We stayed with our mother on weekends.⁷ Also, we became interested in swimming and learned to swim at the Boys Club. Unfortunately, there were no public swimming pools in our neighborhood so we had to go further uptown to Colonial Pool at 145th Street and High Bridge at 172nd Street. And since we did not always have money for subway or bus fare to get to these pools, we sometimes jumped on the back of the public transit buses or ran through the open passenger exit gates into the subway car as the people were coming off just before the doors closed.

We became involved in some activities and incidents that were part of the culture of Harlem. I was relatively small in stature because my growth spurt did not occur until my sophomore and junior years in high school. However, I was quick-tempered and never backed down from a fight. Uncle Danny taught me to never start a fight, but to always defend myself. My brother reminded me of two examples. When I was in the 6th grade, my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Rosenthal, decided that our class play would be about an Italian violin maker, Antonio Stradivarius. She selected me for the lead role, perhaps because I was so loquacious in homeroom. To this day I have wondered why Mrs. Rosenthal selected this play when 90 percent of the students at P.S. 113 were African-American, about 8 percent were Hispanic and perhaps 2 percent were Caucasian. I agreed to play the role; however, I did not get along with all the other student actors. During one rehearsal, I got into a heated argument with one student and hit him with the violin. Mrs. Rosenthal decided to kick me out of the play and also sent me to after-school detention for a week. Thus, my acting career ended before it ever got started. However, since my mother didn’t get home until 5 o’clock, she never found out about the incident or the detention penalty.

The second example involved a school-yard bully. We were playing basketball against a team from 113th Street. Even at age 11, there were fierce rivalries and competition on the basketball court. A general rule was no blood, no foul with a lot of physical contact, pushing and shoving among the players. One player shot the basketball and it became lodged between the backboard and the goal. I was closest to the backboard so I climbed up the pole to dislodge the ball. As I hung on the rim with one hand, and punched the ball away from the backboard with the other, the schoolyard bully, Elliott Kelly (EK), pulled my leg. I lost my grip, fell to the schoolyard and broke my left wrist. I was taken to Sydenham Hospital where the doctors put my wrist in a cast for almost three months. I thought about EK every day that I was in the cast. He was about 50 pounds heavier and six inches taller than I, but I was determined to have my revenge. One day I was back in the school yard playing a game of stickball with Bruce. I saw EK riding his bicycle and I decided it was payback time. As he came towards me, I side-stepped him and stuck my (stickball bat) broomstick into the spokes of his front tire and he went flying over the handle bars of the bike which also landed on him. He suffered a broken arm and shoulder. I hit him with my bat and told him, as he was writhing in pain, that if he ever messed with me again, I would hit him in the face with the 2-by-4 from my scooter. According to my brother, after that incident, Elliott never bothered me again.⁸

After graduating from the 6th grade at P.S. 113, I joined my brother at Galvani Junior High School in Spanish Harlem. The school was huge with 14 sections in grades 7, 8 and 9. It was a new and very hostile environment. My brother warned me about the dangers that I would face and told me about his bad experience during his first week at Galvani. There were ethnic gangs—Puerto Rican, African-American, Irish, and Italian street-based gangs. There were individual bullies who took lunch money from students. Some students formed groups from their elementary schools and would take students’ sneakers, book bags, money, jackets and other personal items. Clarence told me that because of this situation he had joined a gang not only for his own protection, but also so he could protect me when I arrived at Galvani. His description of the school environment was not an exaggeration. He suggested that I never walk alone even to the bus stop to catch the crosstown bus if he decided to stay after school and hang out with his friends. My brother said he and his buddies would walk me to the bus stop and wait until I got on the bus to go back to our apartment on the west side. (We had passes to ride the transit system during school hours to and from school.) He told me about one incident during his first year at Galvani in which four Puerto Rican students had pushed him into the bathroom at school and took the vest that he had gotten for his birthday.

My brother and his best friend Melvin joined the Copians gang. Its members made zip guns, a homemade single shot pistol. And my brother kept some of their zip guns in the false fireplace in the hallway of our apartment building. I began to hang out with my brother, who also hung out with the older guys on our block. I started spending less time with friends my age and more activities with my brother. One day, we rode on the subway to Coney Island and one of the older guys bought several bottles of orange and grape vodka. I drank a pint of grape vodka while we were in Coney Island, blacked out and to this day I have no recollection of how I got back home on the subway. However, I remember getting sick and regurgitating a few times. I was 12 years old when this happened.⁹

There were several other developments that frightened my mother. First, my friend Freddy died from an overdose of heroin on the roof of our apartment building. He was 14 years old. My mother feared that Clarence and I might begin to use drugs. Some older guys on the block were drug users and also sold drugs to take care of their own habits. Second, she found out about the vest incident at Galvani and feared that a rival gang of Puerto Rican students might seek revenge and use weapons. Third, Mr. Yearwood, a resident of our apartment building, saw my brother hiding some zip guns in the false fireplace of our building that he had made for his gang and informed my mother. She thought Clarence’s gang might use these guns to fight other gangs and that he might get shot or killed in a gang war. These three incidents occurred when I was in the 7th grade¹⁰

There were many unsavory activities on 112th Street. Pimps had prostitutes who worked openly, and police officers were paid off to protect their stable of girls who had no fear of being arrested. Two police officers, Digger Jones and Tombstone Johnson, had well deserved reputations for kicking ass and shooting people. They extorted money from small store owners in the neighborhood. Also, some of the small retail stores, such as drug stores, shoe shine shops and liquor stores paid protection money to gangs to watch their windows at nights and on Sundays when they were closed so that they would not be broken. The gang members would break their windows unless they were paid not to do so.¹¹

The growing drug trade and the increase in drug addicts on the street resulted in several shootings, a rash of burglaries and periodic gang-related incidents. Given these activities, my mother decided she had to get us out of the Harlem environment and send us back to Shepherdstown. She feared either we might kill someone or someone might kill us. Several young men on the block had been sent to reform school for crimes ranging from burglaries to purse snatchings to armed robberies. After talking with Uncle Danny and contacting my grandmother and aunts in West Virginia during the Christmas holiday season in 1955, she packed our clothes and put us on a bus to Martinsburg, West Virginia, where Aunt Genevieve picked us up at the bus terminal.¹² My brother wanted to move to Shepherdstown so he could play football as a linebacker and tackle other players. However, I had mixed feelings because it would mean leaving behind many friends and starting all over again.

Back in West Virginia, Clarence and I enrolled at Eastside Elementary School where Mr. Harris was still the principal, and Mrs. Reeler and Mr. Green were the teachers. A rather tumultuous era in my childhood had come to an end, but it was just the beginning of what would be an even more exciting and interesting new period in my young life.

I learned many valuable lessons from my early childhood experiences in Shepherdstown and Harlem. I discovered that family and friends are vital blessings in that they are critical support units of society, particularly to fatherless children who need guidance, love and mentoring to become productive citizens. That is why I decided that I would never be like my biological father who simply ignored his two sons. Instead I would become a soccer dad to my children and a mentor and supporter of young black males growing up in households headed by single moms.

During my formative years, I often felt depressed because my father acted like my brother and I did not exist, but Uncle Danny was a father figure and a role model. I would later become involved in all of my children’s activities and take them to swimming lessons and attend their swim meets, drive the girls to piano and dance lessons and the children’s church chorus, and attend their track meets. Because many adults in Shepherdstown were so loving, caring and sharing, I later became a Big Brother to Sam Sessions, a young male who lived in the Atlanta Harris Homes public housing project, served on the Board of the YMCA and became a major fund-raiser for the Partners With Youth Program that provided scholarships for poor children to participate in swim lessons, soccer, basketball and other Y activities. And because my extended family was so essential to my well-being, I became involved in organizing many of the biennial family reunions and established college scholarships in the names of my grandmother, mother, Aunt Genevieve and Uncle Danny for children of the Washington, Stubbs and Branson family.

While my brother and I were unable to spend many years living with our mother during our youth, we understood why this happened. We knew that she loved us and was doing all that she could to ensure that we would have the best chance possible to grow up in an environment that would provide us with a greater opportunity to succeed in life. And obviously Shepherdstown, not New York City, was the best option. And that is why we retired my mother at age 56 from her job as a hotel maid. She went to live with my brother and his family in Seoul, Korea for two years and then lived with me and my family in Atlanta beginning in 1981.

Finally, at an early age, I became convinced that segregation was evil and wrong, and I would make every effort to eliminate it from American society. As a teenager I had the opportunity to strike a blow to end segregation in Shepherdstown and in the Jefferson County school system in 1957.

Formative Years

My brother and I quickly became reacquainted with our cousins and friends in Shepherdstown after almost four years of living in New York City. Were-turned during the Christmas holidays and started school in January, 1956. My mother talked with the school principal, Mr. Harris, about my taking a test to determine whether I could be skipped to the eighth grade. She and Uncle Danny told him that I was very smart, but because of peer pressure in Harlem, I had tried to be just one of the guys and not an egghead so I had spent very little time studying. Mr. Harris administered the test and the results showed that I scored at or above the ninth grade level on all sections of the exam. Mr. Harris skipped me to the eighth grade and became one of my staunchest supporters. He encouraged me daily to do my best, work hard, and make good grades so I could go to college. Also many relatives and extended family members encouraged me after the word spread about my test scores.

I had many conversations with grandmother Marstella from the time that I was a toddler until she died at age 97 in 1981. I talked with her about many personal and professional matters because she always gave me good advice. Without the benefit of her no-nonsense, mother-wit and common-sense wisdom, I could not have made so many right decisions which enabled me to accomplish so much in my life. Some examples of her wisdom that instilled moral principles and values that I have lived by include:

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t do something. Always try to do it and put forth your best effort;

Remember, there will always be people who are bigger, faster, stronger and smarter than you, but if you are willing to work harder than them, you can accomplish more than they;

Don’t ever forget when you are successful that God has blessed you so that you can be a blessing to others who are less fortunate than you;

Always do the right thing and stand up for what you believe even if you are the only one who is willing to do so;

Try to make as many friends as you can because you never know when you might need them;

Always be courteous and listen to what people say, but more importantly watch what they do;

The best ways to learn are to read, listen, observe and ask questions. Always remember that you can’t learn anything while you are talking. That is why God gave you two ears, two eyes and one mouth.

I followed her admonitions on many occasions. I must admit that it took me much longer than it should have to recognize the wisdom of my grandmother’s sage advice. Unfortunately, it was not until my second year of college that I truly realized the value and importance of her advice. Her teachings were reinforced by my undergraduate college adviser, Dr. Harry V. Klug, who challenged me academically in his political science course during my sophomore year at Shepherd College.

The principles and values instilled in me by my grandmother were first manifested in my actions as early as my teenage years and have continued until the present. On the many occasions I had to make crucial decisions ranging from whether to integrate the white high school, oppose the Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives for reelection or publicly criticize President George W. Bush for invading Iraq. I did these things because I believed what Grandmother Marstella told me. I did what I thought was right even when I was the only one or in a small minority, regardless of the consequences. Beginning in college, I became relentless in all of my endeavors, which enabled me to become an overachiever and a history maker. And as soon as I achieved a significant level of success, I began to give back. I have served on more than 20 nonprofit boards that have enhanced the quality of life of society’s less fortunate adults and children living in poverty.

However, as a teenager I was more interested in having fun and playing sports and school was a low priority, particularly after I began to notice girls. Despite my high test scores and encouragement from Mr. Harris, my grandmother and other relatives, I did not study hard until I went to college. In the eighth grade, I looked forward to the summer months when my brother, cousins, friends and I could work for the Shepherdstown Fruit Growers Association and buy some new clothes for school.

Back in Shepherdstown, I discovered that almost everyone had a nickname. Although my brother and I could only conjecture about the origins of the nicknames, we quickly learned that almost everyone preferred to be called by their street name like Charles Hunter (Ginger Bread), Charles Branson (Mouse); Thomas Creamer (Scrum), Eddie Kidrick (Bo); and Clarence Branson Wick. My brother was called Tootie Boy and my moniker was Speedy. Even the girls had nicknames, such as Mary Stevenson, Toots, Patricia Kidrick, Peaches and Betty Monroe, Sweetpea.

The Shepherdstown Fruit Growers Association employed dozens of local people and migrant workers from the Caribbean Islands. Migrants came to the United States in the early spring to harvest fruits and vegetables in Florida and pick cotton and tobacco in South Carolina and North Carolina in the late spring. They moved to Virginia and West Virginia to pick apples, cherries and peaches during the summer and early fall months. Next these workers went to Connecticut to harvest tobacco and ended up in Maine where they picked the late fall apple crop. In each state, they were joined in the fields by their families and local adults and children. In West Virginia, migrants did not receive a base hourly wage, but were paid 13 cents per