ME AND MY GIRLS ::: Part 5 ::: JOAN CORMIER

NO PHOTO AT THIS TIME

Please scroll down to PART 1 to begin this series ::: ME AND MY GIRLS

I was hired at Central Arizona  Light And Power Company on March 17, 1947, as a Pre-Biller.  The meter readers would take the meter books scheduled to be read that day out into the field and transcribe the reads into the books for each meter and subtract the previous read from the current read.  At the end of the work day the meter reader would return the books to the Pre-Billing dept.  We pre-billers would use comptometers to subtract the previous read from the current read and enter the difference in the (used kilowatt hour) column.  Then another pre-biller would add the used kilowatt hours to the previous meter read to see if it equaled the current meter read.  Thus proving the accuracy of the figures.  Then the meter book would be delivered to the Burroughs Billing Machine Room for the manual production of the customers’ bill by the billing machine operators.  The placing of my desk was such that I was facing a beautiful girl named Joan Cormier who worked in the Customer Accounting Dept.  She had just moved to Phoenix from Indiana.  In time we became acquainted, dated and fell in love.

We ate lunch together; went to movies, lay around in Encanto Park necking; went on Saturday nights with my Mom and Stepdad to Riverside Ballroom to dance to the music of Buster Fite And His Western Playboys.  Sometimes we spent more time under the table dodging beer bottles when the dancers had too much beer and got into fist fights; which was not all that uncommon.  My stepdad was a big Irishman so we weren’t too afraid.  Joan and I were so much alike and even said the same things at the same time; used the same toothpaste and a lot of the same toiletries.  We liked the same foods.  I liked her taste in clothes and she liked mine.

She lived with her parents and teenage brother in a mobile home park in the 3400 block of East Van Buren Street.  Her father was totally blind.  Her mother could not work because of the need to look after her blind husband.  I did not own a car and did not know how to drive so we had to ride buses when we went most places.  After coming back to her place at the end of a date we would go a block or two from her residence to a Vernor’s Ginger Ale joint on Van Buren.  We’d order big mugs of ginger ale and dance to the music from the juke box, i.e. SOUTH, KING SIZE PAPA, MAMSELLE, DANCE BALLERINA DANCE, and such hits of the day until it was time for my bus to appear at the bus stop.  There we shared a goodnight kiss and hug and I boarded the bus and she returned to her mobile home residence; the bus stop being right in front of the mobile home park.

Soon there was talk of marriage and that was what killed our love.  She attended Central Methodist Church.  I did not attend church but favored a certain church my grandparents attended and with which I was familiar.  Her preacher had a Sunday morning service at the church and it was re-broadcast on the radio later on Sunday afternoon.  I went a few of times with Joan to the Sunday morning service and listened a few times to the radio broadcast.  There came a time when I could no longer stomach that preacher either at a live service or listening to the radio broadcast.  I began to make excuses to her for not attending the church service.  In my opinion he was a pompous, overweight, obnoxious little man.  But he was well known and revered in the Phoenix area.  When marriage was discussed I told her that I had no objection to being married in her church and that we would attend her church and take our children there but that I would not join her church.  I told her that I was familiar with my grandparents church and that if I ever joined a church it would be that one.  She immediately called me an atheist and said that under the circumstances she could not marry me.  By the same token I told her that I could not marry anyone who forced me to join her church and not doing so did not make me an atheist.  We broke up and I went home and locked myself in the bathroom and cried for hours....luckily no one else was home.  It became unbearable to have to face each other every day in the office when our desks faced each other.  But it was not long before Central Arizona Light And Power Co. built their own office building at another location.  We both moved into that office but she was on one floor and me on another.  So we did not but rarely see each other and when we did we did not speak.

Later I started dating Juanita Ashmore  who worked at the telephone company.  We fell in love and were married.  My friend, Jackie Ratliff, a high school friend was at mine and Juanita’s wedding and reception and afterward Jackie told me this story.  She said after the reception she went to the old Palms Theater to see a movie and at intermission time she went to the ladies room and while washing her hands Joan walked in.  I had introduced them on an earlier occasion.  Jackie said Joan was crying and asked Jackie if she had gone to my wedding that night.  Jackie told her yes and that was all there was to it.  Jackie said it was a sad movie so she did not know if Joan was crying over the movie or over me getting married that night.

Joan soon left the company where we both worked and her co-workers later told me that she and her family returned to Indiana where they had come from.    

ME AND MY GIRLS ::: Part 4 ::: OLIVE PACEY

In my Freshman year of high school our English class was asked if we would like to have an English pen pal The idea being to improve our writing skills and hopefully to encourage us to become more inclined toward writing.  I signed up and after a period of time I received the notification that I had a pen pal.  It was a SHE and her name was Olive Pacey of 47 Clifton Crescent, Peckham S. E. 15 London, England.  We began our correspondence and airmail letters flew across the Atlantic between us.  She was an interesting pen pal and I looked forward to each of her letters.  We were the same age and in the same year of school.  Her activities were rather curtailed because of the frequent bombings.  There was her mother and a younger brother.  She never mentioned her Dad and I did not ask.  She did have a “young man” as she called him.  She sent me a picture of him.  He was thin as a rail, puffing on a cigarette and looked unhealthy.  He probably was unhealthy because all the healthy guys were in the military by then.  The photo was taken by Olive while they were on a holiday at the seaside.

 

Olive was a sweet girl and there was something rather pitiful about her letters.  They seemed very poor and unfortunate.  I enjoyed our correspondence and she seemed to as well.  Our correspondence lasted until the Germans started sending the Buzz bombs across the English Channel to devastate the English neighborhoods.  She wrote of spending weeks at a time in their backyard bomb shelter without any relief from the drone of the approaching buzz bombs and their inevitable explosion.  Finally, there were no more letters from Olive.  I kept writing for quite awhile and my letters were never returned but neither did I ever hear a word from Olive again.

 

Many years later my friends, Richard and Georgie Jennings, who lived in Flagstaff, AZ let me know they were going to England to visit their remaining family over there.  I gave them Olive’s address and asked them to try and find that area and see if they could find any explanation of, perhaps, what happened to her.

On their return they told me they could never find such an address as 47 Clifton Crescent, Peckham S. E. 15 London England.  They went to a post office and inquired about that address and postal authorities told them that the buzz bombs had eradicated the area where that address had been and nothing was left of it.

After the war the rubble was bulldozed and the current new area built where that address had once been.  Therefore, I have to assume Olive and her family were killed in the constant bombings and there were no traces of the Pacey family nor the city where they lived.  She has haunted me for years and I hope she found peace and rest no matter what befell her. 

 

 

ME AND MY GIRLS ::: Part 3 ::: ROBERTA BURRIS

In high school I met a young man named Herbert Kick and we became friends. He had just moved with his family to Phoenix from Youngstown, Ohio and hadn't made any friends yet. We had one class together. It was called THE ORATORIO SOCIETY. It was a high falutin' boys glee club. Since neither of us were athletic nor played a musical instrument we ended up in THE ORATORIO SOCIETY. Girls were in the SOCIETY too but our classes were separated by gender. We only came together when rehearsing for a program. The teacher for both classes was Milton K. Rasbury. We staged Handel's Messiah; sang the popular selections from the Broadway production of OKLAHOMA on the local radio station KOY; performed in various department stores during the Christmas season; and usually performed musical numbers in our high school dramatic productions, if they were musicals.

 

Herbert attended the First Nazarene Church at 5th avenue and Monroe in Phoenix and in doing so he learned that several teens attending there also attended Phoenix Union High School.  On occasion I would go with him to church.  It soon became a habit for the Nazarene Church kids to gather on campus at school and they welcomed me to be among them.  One of the girls in this group who gathered with us was a girl named Roberta Burris.  I soon noticed that she became intensely aware of me which caused me to become aware of her.  The Nazarene kids were an active bunch of kids and I was always included in their activities although I often slept in on Sunday mornings and not joining them in worship services.  They did have an altar call with emphasis on me but I sat stonily still and embarrassed until the preacher realized I was not going to make a move.  Nevertheless, I was always a welcome member of the youth group.

 

We had many picnics at Papago Park.  None of us had access to a car.  The city bus line ran as far as 48th St.. and Van Buren.  So we would all board the bus with our sack lunches and thermos bottles at the city bus terminal in downtown Phoenix and get off at the end of the line at 48th St.. and Van Buren and have a fun and hilarious walk to Papago Park.  We would climb up into Hole In The Rock and explore the lagoons, etc. and eat our lunch in one of the ramadas and just have fun until time to return to 48th and Van Buren to catch the bus back to downtown Phoenix.  Roberta and I were always together looking rather like a couple at that time!  She was acting like she was in love with me but I felt no such intensity of feelings.  I liked her as a girlfriend but "love" was not in the picture.  There was also a time when somehow we obtained a car or two and the whole bunch of us made it to Apache Junction for a hike and picnic.  Somewhere I have photos of that event but I can't find them after a disconcerting search through a ton of photos.

 

I rather think this one sided love affair lasted two years and Roberta's Dad lost his job in Phoenix and he found another one in a steel mill or foundry in Gary, Indiana.  Roberta was teary eyed and she started writing long passionate love letters to me from Gary, Indiana.  I liked to get the letters and was flattered to think she was in love with me.  I will admit that her letters did fan the flame of love that was flickering around my heart but I was not ready for something that serious and she was putting on the pressure by telling me that she wanted to return to Phoenix and marry me.  By that time I was out of high school and very much in love with a girl named Joan Cormier with whom I worked at Arizona Public Service Company (known as CALAPCO) at that time.  I don't remember how I rid myself of Roberta or she rid herself of me (whichever was the case).  In any event, many years later I learned from a mutual friend of mine and Roberta's that she did marry and had children and died at a young age of breast cancer.  I hate to think of that being her fate and I hope her marriage was full of love and happiness.  The friend did tell me that she did have children but I don't remember how many. 

ME AND MY GIRLS ::: Part 2 ::: LETA PERKINS

When we moved to 1015 Woodland Avenue it became an increasing number of disappointments    The interior of the triplex we lived in was in sad need of paint and repair.  I won't enumerate the problems; suffice it to say it would cost a small fortune to get it to be livable   It was made livable for me because of the beautiful girl who lived next door.  I was a freshman in high school and she was an eighth grader.  So we didn't see each other at school.  What made it even worse was she had a steady boyfriend named Lefty Bevington.  Yeah, with a name like that he was not only tough but an accomplished athlete in softball, baseball and football.  I was not accomplished in anything but I WAS the boy next door!

Leta and I became acquainted but it was not until she was a Freshman at PUHS and I a Sophomore that we became good buddies.  I never, ever made a move on her.  She was out of my class and dated all the good looking hot shots in school and went to all the dances, parties and knew all the school gossip.  She had oodles and gobs of girlfriends and soon I knew them all.  So I was the boy next door to whom she always spilled her guts when the boys ticked her off, likewise her girlfriends.   Eventually she moved from Lefty Bevington to Jerry Littell whom I liked better and thought he was more deserving of her.   Jerry lasted quite awhile and she moved on to other charmers and I learned through Leta what to do and what not to do when dating....i.e. when you go on a hayride with a beautiful girl and you are one of the most handsome boys in school but not too accomplished in dating ettiquette, you do not ask the girl (after several minutes of awkward silence) "Do you want to neck?"  He did and she didn't and the rest of the evening was very awkward for him who had dreamed of getting this beautiful creature in a haystack!!

I was Leta's confidante all though my 4 years of high school, meeting all her boyfriends and girlfriends who greeted me on campus to the wonderment of my friends who were "nobody's" like me!  But finally I graduated, my parents divorced and me and my mom, sis and brother moved away.  Leta and I kept in touch by phone and she still included me in the story of her life.  Finally, in her senior year I got a phone call from her and she told me that she had run off with Rees Ragains and gotten married.  I had never heard of Rees and didn't meet him until years late when I ran into him and Leta at a grocery store.  Leta had a very distinctive voice and I heard her in the next aisle and peeked around the end of the aisle and there she was with a man whom she introduced as Rees.  Over the years Leta and I kept in touch by phone through my 48 years of marriage and neither my spouse nor Leta's were jealous of our friendship and they never met each other.  I never went to their house and they never came to mine but our friendship never ended until many years later.

Leta and Rees had two sons and one granddaughter, named Reese.  Finally, about two years ago Leta was diagnosed with lung cancer.  She was being treated at Mayo Clinic.  We still would talk on the phone until her voice would give out.  It was hard for me to listen to that raspy voice but she still never lost her sense of humor.  I talked on the phone with her right up until almost the end of her life when she went to Mayo's for a treatment and accidentally fell and broke her hip and died within a short time.

She did not want a funeral so she was cremated.  I am glad I did not have to attend a funeral.  Now I can remember her as one of my very best friends....Who gave me a 5x7 enlargement of the photo above.  The only difference being that on my 5x7 print she wrote in ink "Next to me I love you best!"  Leta

My Leta!   Always the jokester

Me and My Girls ::: Part 1

This is me on May 31st, 1946, at age 17, standing in my front yard at 1015 Woodland Avenue in Phoenix waiting for my family to drive me to Montgomery Stadium at Phoenix Union High School to participate in my high school graduation.  The boys were to dress as I was dressed or else wear blue serge suits.  The girls were to wear pastel colored formal gowns.  There were 646 of us graduating and we marched onto the football field to our high school band playing POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE.  We marched in two together; a boy and girl.  It was great fun to see who you had been paired with.  I was lucky.  My partner was Jeanne Luitjens, a lovely girl and fun to talk with as we went through the process.

It was an interesting day since I had been at the Maricopa County Court that morning at 10AM to witness my Mom be granted a divorce from my Dad.  My Aunt Irene Lindley was my Mom's witness who testified on Mom's behalf  against my Dad who was sitting with me in the gallery.  After the divorce was granted we went back to our house and later on we all got dressed to go to my graduation and I posed for this photo and off we went. 

After the graduation we, Mom, Dad, me and my sis and brother, all went to the Mexico Cafe for a scrumptious Mexican dinner.  That was the last time we ever functioned as a family.

When I was a six year old boy, in the 1st grade in Pleasant Valley, AZ it was always a great treat when we would hear that Aunt Callie Cravens, Aunt Meda Poage, Uncle Frank Lindley and perhaps others were coming from Texas to visit us. Those three people were Grandpa Lindleys sisters and brother. So naturally they would be put up for the nights at Grandpa and Grandma Lindleys' house. But all of us wanted to get to spend as much time with them as we possibly could. Aunt Callie would always bring us cousins, me, Gene, Eddie and Carol a gift of some sort. One time we boys all received a Buck Rogers gun that shot sparks. I don't remember what Carol got. Anyway the family would all spend even the nights at Grandma and Grandpa's house so we would not miss one minute of the whingding and all the larrupin' good food and hear all the stories they told about the "long ago in Texas." But when bedtime come there was always a feeling of dread because we kids knew we were headed for the foot of the bed.

SLEEPIN' AT THE FOOT OF THE BED

Did ye ever sleep at the foot o' the bed
When the weather wuz whizzin' cold,
When the wind wuz a-whistlin aroun' the house
An' the moon wuz yeller ez gold,
An give yore good warm feathers up
To Aunt Lizzie and Uncle Fred--
Too many kinfolks on a bad, raw night
And you went to the foot o' the bed--
Fer some dern reason the coldest night o' the season
An' you went to the foot o' the bed.

I could allus wait till the old folks et
An' then eat the leavin's with grace,
The teacher could keep me after school,
An' I'd still hold a smile on my face,
I could wear the big boys' wore-out clothes
Er let sister have my sled,
But it allus did git my nanny goat
To have to sleep at the foot o' the bed;
They's not a location topside o' creation
That I hate like the foot o' the bed.

'Twuz fine enough when the kinfolks come--
The kids brought brand -new games,
You could see how fat all the old folks wuz,
An' learn all the babies' names,
Had biscuits an' custard and chicken pie,
An' allus got Sunday fed,
But you knowed dern well when night come on
You wuz headed fer the foot o' the bed;
You couldn't git by it, they wuz no use to try it,
You wuz headed fer the foot o' the bed.

They tell me that some folks don't know whut it is
To have company all over the place,
To rassel fer cover thru a long winter night
With a big foot settin' in your face,
Er with cold toenails a-scratchin' yore back
An' a footboard a-scrubbin' yore head;
I'll tell the wide world you ain't lost a thing
Never sleepin' at the foot o' the bed;
You can live jest as gladly an' die jest as sadly
'N' never sleep at the foot o' the bed.

I've done it, an' I've done it many uv a time
In this land o' brave an' the free,
An' in this all-fired battle uv life
It's done left its mark upon me,
Fer I'm allus a-strugglin' around at the foot
Instead of forgin'ahead,
An' I don't think it's caused by a doggone thing
But sleepin' at the foot o' the bed;
I've lost all my claim on forturne an' fame,
A-sleepin' at the foot o' the bed.


~LUTHER PATRICK

                                                     click on photo to make it larger

"I think that Clay's daddy should post the above invitation in an enlarged format on the wall in his dental office.What better advertisement could a dentist have than this photo: a mouth full of pearly white teeth and a smile that could make any disgruntled and nervous patient relax. Once a patient sees this photo he/she would be looking forward to their next appointment!"

Clay's loving Great Grandpa
(and I don't have an ounce of prejudice!)