THE JOURNAL

My Thoughts and My Memories

Tommy Towery

LHS '64

I guess it was the feeling that I had witnessed a true piece of American history that made me start a journal of my life on the day that President Kennedy was shot.  It had to be a journal because boys did not keep diaries.  Girls kept diaries in which they committed to paper their innermost thoughts and secret loves.  On the other hand, it wasn't manly for boys to do that type of thing.  If you were a boy and kept a diary, everyone would have thought you were a little funny.  Our label for funny people back then was "fruit."  I know I didn't have to keep it a secret, but I did.  I kept my journal hidden and told no one about it, not even my closest friends.

My journal was a very personal thing.  I recorded my daily activities and thoughts in it.  I wrote in it each night before I went to bed and kept it in a cedar box secured with a lock without a key.  The lack of the key was part of my security plan to ensure no one read it.  I found if I bent a paper clip just right I could easily pick the lock.  That left me alone with the ability to get into the box and to the journal.  I never had any future plans for the journal except to keep it for my own memories.  I had no idea that one day I would share it with the world.

My high school days have always had a special place in my heart.  I don't think I am unusual to feel that way.  The boy who wrote the journal, the seventeen-year-old editor of the high school newspaper, is the person living inside my body today.  He is the person who is most shocked in the morning to see an old man looking back at him in the mirror.

Many times I have wished that I had started the journal on the first day of class of my senior year.  I could have written in it that I wore the new pair of stiff-starched blue jeans and white shirt to school on the first day and could have carried the writings throughout the full nine months of that year.

Regretfully, the recording of events from the first day of school, shortly after Labor Day, until the 22nd of November, 1963, was never accomplished.  My memories of those days will live as most other people's memories live, in the slowly dying parts of the mind.  They are tucked away with other things, where names and faces, dates and times, the good and bad are slowly blending from blacks and whites to grays in our aging memories.

In the chapters of my book (A Million Tomorrows...Memories of the Class of '64) the original journal entries, complete with bad grammar, incomplete sentences, secret codes and the misspelled words of the seventeen-year-old writer are included at the beginning of each section.  I believe that it is important to leave them as intact as possible to help preserve the authenticity of the work.  

The first few weeks' comments were very short and contained little information compared to the later entries.  Perhaps this showed my maturing and the emergence of my writing skills.

"The names have been changed to protect the innocent" was a common statement during my high school period.  We heard it each week on "Dragnet."  It made sense for them and for me.  Certain people would not care to have their high school activities revealed today.  How would they explain them to their own kids?  They all swear that they didn't do stupid things when they were in high school.  In truth, they did, just as our parents did and our grandchildren will do when they get to school.  They won't be the same stupid things of course.  Each generation finds their own stupid things to do, but they are all related.

My journal started its life on some small yellow slips of paper that I obtained from the printing shop that printed the school paper.  I swear that all these years I remembered starting the journal on the day that Kennedy was shot, November 22, 1963.  It was much to my surprise that, in reality, when I looked at the yellow pages of the journal, it was actually started on November 25, 1963.  I finally remembered that the original entries of that particular day in history were actually recorded in the margin of my twelfth-grade English book and were never transferred to the journal.

I did miss out on a lot by not starting the journal on the first day of school.  I missed the fall activities such as the football games and the dances earlier in the year.  I missed the governor's visit to our school, and my autographed photo of Governor George Wallace.  The stories of many of those events were recorded in the school papers, but that was not the same type of information as was recorded in the journal.  The school paper was public and not personal like a journal or diary.  Little personal secrets shared by the crowd were not allowed in the school's paper.

Some things that happened during those lost days would have made interesting tales.  A whole book could be written about Halloween night alone.  It was a night of 29-cents-a-dozen eggs, water balloons, and nickel cherry bombs obtained across the Tennessee state line.  Cherry bombs made a lot of Halloween tricks interesting.  Mailboxes didn't hold up well to cherry bombs and the reaction to a cherry bomb by a couple parked on a lonely spot is indescribable.

In the school paper's editorial and in the margin of my English book I recorded my association with that day in history when the shots rang out in Dallas.  It is the day that I look back upon as the start of the end of my childhood and the beginning of my adulthood.  For my generation, the shots in Dallas killed not only our President, but also the innocence of our childhood.  It made us look reality in the face and see that everything was not milk and cookies but that real things happened in a real world and those things could affect our lives.  Our neighborhood was no longer secure from outside forces.  We were vulnerable and uncertain.

For years to come members of my generation would be asked "What were you doing on the day Kennedy was shot?"  It is a day that no one who was old enough to remember will ever be able to forget.

November 25, 1963 - Bob and I had a double date planned for Janice and Joyce.  Joyce had to go to a band practice so Michelle substituted for her.  We went to see "Playgirls and the Vampire" & "Pirate of Blood River."  It was a very interesting night.  KMG-N. I was flying on a cloud.

The first entry on the yellow papers of my journal was this simple paragraph.  This was not really the first page of the journal though.  This entry followed a cover sheet that simply read, "The Journal of Tommy Towery."  It was a simple title for a simple life.

The paragraph written on November 25, 1963, was simple and not as detailed as those that I would later add to the journal.  I remember it was a Monday and it was a National Day of Morning, so neither I nor any of my friends went to school.  The unexpected holiday gave us an extra night to do something special, and it was a special night for sure for me.

As much as it contradicts the theory about why I really started writing a journal, it is highly possible that it would not have been started at all had it not been for the things that happened to me on that night.  My journal might have continued in the margins of the English book and perhaps have been lost to future generations.  That day's entry would not hold national importance or universal appeal for the later readers of the English book margins so I had to record it somewhere else.  They were very personal events and therefore had to be recorded in a very personal place.

The last entry of the day, "KMG-N" was a simple way of saying I kissed Michelle Good-Night."

Coming Soon

I saw this on Facebook and thought you might be interested.Sammy is a former classmate.

The Wayback Machine

The Rebel is a 76-episode American Western television series starring Nick Adams that ran on the ABC network from 1959 to 1961. The Rebel was one of the few Goodson-Todman Productions outside of their game-show ventures.

The series portrays the adventures of young Confederate army veteran Johnny Yuma, an aspiring writer, played by Nick Adams. Haunted by his memories of the American Civil War, Yuma, in search of inner peace, roams the American West, specifically the Texas Hill Country and South Plains. He keeps a journal of his adventures and fights injustice where he finds it with a revolver and his dead father's sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun.

The first episode, "Johnny Yuma", is set in early 1867. It shows Johnny Yuma returning to his hometown nearly two years after the end of the war. His father, Ned Yuma, the sheriff, had been killed by a gang who took control of the town. Dan Blocker plays the gang leader. Yuma gets his father's shotgun in this episode.

I know several of you have purchased and read "A Million Tomorrows...Memories of the Class of '64" sometime in your past. But I am sure many of you have never seen it. I often write about my journal, so I thought I would clear up the mystery for those who do not know about it. The big thing to remember is that many of the important names have been changed, but some are not.

Last Week's Questions, Answers, 

And Comments

David Mullins , LHS ‘64, "Thank you so very much for posting the obit of Miss Linda Bradford. I remember her well and appreciate the thoughts and feelings of Zac. She was always such a sweet person when we were in school."

Bryan Towery,  LHS ‘66, "Thank you Tommy, once again, for the wonderful memories of the Huntsville of the mid-fifties.  One that stands in my mind today is all the activity would be seen as you walked around the old Courthouse Square on a Saturday morning. Two, especially,  that stands in my mind are all the events during the Sesquicentennial (the beards on the grown men and all the lovely bonnets the women wore) - also seeing all the older men carving on their small blocks of wood at the Courthouse square. Small memories but I thank you so much for helping keep alive.  

Mary Ann Bond Wallace, LHS ‘64, "Tommy your description of that boom of Huntsville and that era brought back so many memories.  I started at Lee second semester of my 7th grade.  I remember going downtown on Saturdays and watching the older farmers whittling while sitting on a round raised concrete separation with the women's bathroom on one corner and water fountains (across the street from Harrison Brother's Store),  That was my very first realization that black people and white people drank from different fountains.  My family, my parents never mentioned any differences in the two races to us.  I remember after that jolting realization I developed emotions about some of the injustices I witnessed in college.  

When we went down town on Saturdays to go to the movies (two theaters across the street from each other).  You could get in the Saturday matinee for a potato chip bag or a soda pop top.  We did not have either in our house hold so my brother and I would find them in places and took the empty bags or bottle tops.  We always road the bus.  We knew which bus to take and what time was the last one to run.  The bus stop was diagonally across the street from the court house.  I was deeply saddened when they tore down the old Court House and built the new one that was so much more modern.  I like the older one better.  But I like old things.

We would also go to Big Spring Park with our father to fish.  Always a special outing.  I few small fish were caught, don't think I ever caught one.  I loved the old stone wall of the spring across the street from the cave and water fall (just a drip).  I loved to walk along this stream.  Lots of great memories.  The swimming pool during the summer, swim team practices and competitions, loved the ducks too.  So many great memories that your article brought back to me.

The second year I taught at Appleby Jr High in Florence I thought P.E. with Joanne Thomas.  I saw Joanne (went to Butler) recently at the Out Patient Surgery Center and while my husband and Joanne was in the back for their procedures I talked with her husband David Thomas (Butler).  I am sure I knew this at one time but had forgotten.  David was hired the second semester of our senior year as an assistant football coach.  I did not remember him at Lee but that would have been the months following my brothers death and I don't remember very much about that time.  It was great to talk with him and thought that maybe some of the male athletes at Lee might remember him.

Thank you so much for sharing your memories which reminds all of us of the memories we have at LHS.  I look forward to receiving your newsletter each week."

Jim Ballard, LHS ‘67, "Still love that music. Hey Tommy,  Loved your "reminder" of that great ole Paul Simon song, Kodachrome...The really sad part of that YouTube video is that there really is no digital format...none whatsoever...that can match the ole "Kodachrome" reversals, or any Kodak color print format...Millennials and "post-Millennials" will never know the true saturated colors/depth & texture of "old school" color optical and B & W film silver nitrates. Furthermore, they don't care."