pages 49,50,51

The next day Maggie chided me for not coming over to her place. She said, “since you have met Frank I don’t see anything of you.” I said “Frank was the least of my thoughts,” so I went over and stayed on night with Maggie and she with me. We talked of when fall came, we would go to school in Norfolk and all the things two girls can think of far into the night.
My mother missed the fruit we had on our old home place. The place we were now on used to be a 120 acre farm which included forty acres containing fruit trees. A couple from Chicago, a machinist and his wife who was a nurse with their two children, bought the forty which lay across the road with the fruit trees on it the summer before. They were nice neighbors and liked to visit. My folks had already been getting good offers for the place from people coming out from town and wanting a country place for the summer. It was a beautiful, well built, large home built in an (elongated z shape laying on its side) The front part was with and up and down stairway and bedroom overhead. It also had two back porches.
My father and brother stayed on as life guards at Virginia Beach on the Atlantic for most of the summer season before taking to their new jobs. My father was an excellent swimmer. I’ve seen him swim out past the life lines and back in on the huge waves many times and I’ve heard him tell many times how quick work of the guards had saved more than one life. People little realize the awful pull the undertow has when a wave is receding. Then they get caught in it and carried out to sea.
My father was a fine skater too. In the winter we children loved to have him skate with us and show us how he, with his skates while skating, would write or carve his name in the ice and other figures and stunts as well.
Summer was fast coming to a close and Frank would come over and say to my mother, “I want to tell you one more time how nice you have been to me and how I have enjoyed the hospitality of your home.” Then he would say, “I’ve brought one more sheet of music I want to teach Annie to play before I go.” He would always wind up wanting us to sing his favorite, “a Hammock Built for Two”.
The days were slipping past fast and mother had begun getting my school clothes ready. Maggie and I would ride the thirteen miles night and morning to school. Norfolk’s high school was a large beautiful one.
In the weeks that followed I saw Frank several times. The last time he said, “I am packed and I am leaving but I’ll never forget the little girl I am leaving behind and all the wonderful times we’ve had together at your home and in this beautiful country I am leaving. The next morning he left. In a few short days a letter came telling all about school and the subjects he was taking. He said he would never forget the little town of Lynn haven, the country side and the little girl he left behind him. He hoped to return next summer and find me there.
Some days later I answered and told him of the food times Maggie and I were having riding back and forth on the trolley and all the new friends I was meeting and the subjects I was taking in school. With al of that, each Sunday morning found me in the Sunday School class along with my sisters. I signed the letter, Your Friend, Annie.
We three sisters seemed to enjoy attending this church. We were old enough now that we took more interest. My two sisters played the piano for Sunday School and church. My mother was good at helping out when they had visiting delegates because of the extra bedrooms in our home.
My sister Sallie was now working in Norfolk and liked her work. She rode with me of morning on the trolley but came back on a later one in the afternoon. Maggie use to want me to stay over and go to the picture show with her and come home on the one hour later trolley. I did once in a while but I told her I would much rather go home and have that hour to go horse back riding, which I did most of the fall while the evenings were nice.
I was riding thus on afternoon and rode past a rather shabby looking home not too far from Lynnhaven. A man in the yard seemed to be having an awful time to get to the house. I thought perhaps he was crippled and resolved to ask the girl and boy about my size I had seen playing there. The girl us to come out to the road and speak to me as I rode by. She looked about my age. So that next evening as I got off the electric car at Lynnhaven I noticed this girl coming from the country school with her books in her hand. I resolved to wait and walk with her. She said her name was Ethel. Her brother, younger than she , was tagging along some distance back. We soon struck up quite a conversation. I had heard her mother took in washings. She said she had watched me ride by lots of times and wished she had a pony to ride. By now her brother had caught up to us by running and was just in time to hear what his sister had said. “we could,” said her brother, half out of breath, “if daddy would only quit drinking so he would hold a job. Mama supports us by taking in washing.” then I knew what was wrong with their father when I saw him that afternoon. Ethel and I had lots of good visits after that. She seemed to like me and used to be right at the depot or pretty close by when the trolley would pull in and I”d get off. On bad afternoons my folks would meet me and they would pick up Ethel and her brother also.
Most generally of morning s though, I would get up, fix myself breakfast and be at the station or depot before the rest were awake. I had to be there by seven forty-five AM. If the weather was bad I’d put on rubbers and take an umbrella. Lots of times when the morning were nice I’d walk through our field, the long way of our eighty acres, and take the electric car with Maggie at the Tyler Station. This station was right at the back of our farm. Then we’d have fun hunting for four leaf clovers while waiting for the trolley.
When I told my father and mother about the folks in the little house and the conditions there, my mother felt awfully sorry. My father said, “a man isn’t smart when he takes on habits of drinking and smoking. It is only a waste of time and money and leads to poor health. The worst of it is that his family is deprived of a decent living.” I never ever knew of or saw my father use either. My folks were very strict with us while we were growing up. They saw to it that we shunned things like that and tat we used good grammar and spoke correctly. They used to say, “show that you have been well raised at all times.” We were not allowed to associate with bad company or those our folks thought would not be good for us. They would say, “a good name is rather to be chosen than great riches. Hold it high do not desecrate it or defame it in any way.”
A week or more later I got another letter from Frank. He always liked to write about where he had spent the summer or things that had happened. He spoke of the time when we had returned from the beach one evening Mother said to me, “Annie, go change your dress.” When I came back downstairs and stood in the door, Frank said, “you look just as pretty in that dress ad the one you just changed. I picked the patterns and my sister Sallie made them fro me when my mother was too busy to make my dresses.
That fall and winter, 1907 and 1908, my father worked for an oil company. The following spring and summer he worked putting in buildings and pump stations.
That same fall I was picked along with a lot of other boys and girls to sing in the Jamestown exposition chorus. Did I enjoy that! I can picture myself now. When the fellow that tried each boy and girl out said, “open your mouths now and sing. Let’s see what you can do,” I really did my best. Finally he said, “that’s fine, you have a wonderful voice.” Then he told me to be at the armory each evening for so many evenings or afternoons. Then the big day came. I thought that was something grand. We sang for sometime at the exposition each afternoon after school and that summer. I always did like to sing. I used to wake up each morning with a song in my mind already to start the day. It was most generally a sacred song.
My father ‘s one pride and joy was lining us up and teaching us to sing while mother played the piano. Father was a choir boy in the Episcopal Church in his country.