Moving to Africa was easy

As a 12 year old I don’t remember having any concerns or insecurities about the move to South Africa at all.  My twin brother John and I were always close in those days and there was never a loss of something to do or someone to do things with.  Our days were filled with boyhood activities that were almost certainly typical of southern boys at the time.  We were boy scouts and enjoyed meetings and working for our merit badges.  Every week we would clean our bedroom and make our own beds and would earn a nickel (5 cents) each if we passed our dad’s inspection. 

For most of our young years we had lived in small rented houses in East Gadsden, Alabama.  These were the small whitewashed houses with front porches that one sees in old period films of the sharecropper south, only we weren’t sharecroppers or indentured laborers.  We were poor but didn’t realize it at the time as we never wanted for any essentials.  Our father had begun work right out of high school as a tire builder at the Goodyear tire plant in 1934.  Every two or three years we would move into a slightly better house in a slightly better location, eventually one which included a garage.  My parents were good parents.   They worked hard for everything and never spent a penny that could be set aside for something useful.  It was an important step forward when my father could afford to rent a brick house on a slightly larger lot, with a storage shed in the back corner of the yard.  Finally, when my twin and I were 7 or 8 years old, my family had more or less “arrived” and John and I had only about a 200 yard walk to elementary school.

Among the things I remember were the new motorized washing machine my mother used.  When the clothes have been washed in the old vertical, white, enameled washing machine, she would attach mechanical rollers to the top of the machine and feed them through the rollers to squeeze the soapy water out before putting them back in for a rinse cycle then going through the roller-squeeze operation again.  The thoroughly squeezed clothes were piled into a large galvanized tub and carried outside to the clothes line.  We would stand by and hand Mother the wooden clothes pegs as she hung the laundry in neat rows along the line.

Our first television came along when I was about seven.  It was a small appliance with a fuzzy black and white picture.  It seemed like my dad was always adjusting the “rabbit ears” antenna to maximize the picture quality.  We were only allowed to watch one program at night, after our homework was done.  The Thursday night 30 minute episode of Superman was a great incentive to get the homework done.  I always wondered how he always leaped out of the same window in every episode.  Special effects weren’t very good sixty years ago.  On Saturday morning we could watch an hour of TV.  Flash Gordon, with Buster Crabbe in the leading role, was a must see and The Lone Ranger was another essential.  “As the World Turns” and “The Guiding Light” were to become my mother’s two favorite daytime “soaps.”

A significant improvement in our quality of life came early one summer when my dad came home with a large electric fan from Sears, Roebuck and Company.  He set it into the lower half of one of our living room windows and turned it on to expel the warm air from the house, making sure to open all of the bedroom and kitchen windows just a few inches to get an effective through-draft.  The air, now moving through the house, gave some noticeable relief from the hot, humid, summer air and also made it more difficult for the mosquitoes to prey on us as effectively as before.  The wooden screen doors in the front and back of the house were important summer insect barriers.  I can still hear them slam shut behind when we ran in and out, and mother calling out, “Boys …don’t slam the door!”  Speaking of mosquitoes, I often wondered later in life, why mosquito nets were so common throughout Africa but were never used in the American south.

At about 9 or 10 years of age our father had been promoted at Goodyear and was superintendent of the Goodyear Tube plant, at that time the largest automobile tube producer in the world.  We moved out of the old part of town into a very nice home several miles south, along Rainbow Drive, past the putt-putt course, the drive-in movie and the golf course and into a wooded residential area.  We had a double garage, two bathrooms and a large lot, covered in trees.  John and I particularly enjoyed the bathroom and shower with a glass door that was just outside our bedroom door.  We shared a room and slept on bunk beds in our new home.  Our house even had a basement – a rarity in that part of the south.  It was in the basement that our electric train set would receive the attention it deserved.  It was an American Flyer set up on a 4 x 8 plywood table supported by two wooden trestles.

This was the first home that my parents had actually owned.   I remember my mother’s excitement when they were able to afford a car for her and the used Nash Metropolitan (a convertible no less) proudly took up space in our new garage.  Living some distance from town now and even further from our elementary school in East Gadsden required a second family car for getting to school and shopping.

Fairly often we would have to get ready for school early and our dad would drop us off at our grandparents’ house on South 3^rd Street that was on the way into town.  It was a small, two bedroom, wood house just a few blocks south of Mainstreet.  It stood on concrete blocks and you could kneel down and see all the way under the house from front to back.  When I was 18 years old I came back for a visit and found that a new Piggly Wiggly grocery store had been built right across the street from their house and the row of old houses that were there when I was a little boy had been torn down.  But I digress.

My paternal grandparents, Philo and Emma McDaniel in 1956

On those mornings we would be fed scrambled eggs and toast with “Mom’s” special homemade fig preserves, before “Pop” would back his car out of the garage to drive us the two miles, east on Broad Street and across the Coosa River Bridge, to school.  Pop was a really bad driver.  He had only learned to drive late in life and he drove painfully slowly.  John and I would stand on the floor in the back and prop ourselves over the front seat, looking back to watch the cars accumulating behind us.  It was always a relief to get to school when he would turn right, off of the main thoroughfare, and the long line of traffic could speed up and pass us.

Of course, in those days we weren’t accustomed to going to school with “negros” (the accepted term of the era).  The Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing segregation, was still a long way in the future.  We were moving away in troubled times, although I had little awareness growing up of the racial tensions around me.  When I was nine years old, living on River Street in East Gadsden I vividly recall a lesson taught me by my father.  We had gone to a tree lot to buy a Christmas tree and one of the salesmen, an older black man, asked me a question.  I politely replied, as I had been taught, “Yes sir.”  As soon as we got in the car to go home my mother turned to me and said, “Don’t you ever say “sir” to a black man.”  I suspect she actually said “nigger” (oops – should I use “the N-word here?) but I don’t really remember that detail for sure.  My dad turned to her and in an angry voice said, “You always say “yes sir” or “no sir” to an older person whom you respect.  It doesn’t matter if he is black or white.”  It’s those little things that mean so much when you are growing up.

One advantage of being raised in the south was that we were taught to be polite and always say “yes sir” or “no sir” and “yes ma’am” and “no ma’am” both to our parents and to all adults.  This would serve us in good stead when we would eventually be introduced to the South African school system.

On our way to Africa in 1956. L-R: John, Mother Marguerite, me and 1 year old David