Leaving the Past Behind

Tommy Towery

LHS '64

When I look back upon the entries I made in my journal on this day in 1964 (62 years ago) I read about getting ready to make my move to Memphis on the day after graduation. It was a big dread in my life. I was about to leave Huntsville for good, and all I could take with me were the few items that would fit in my mother's car. Here are my memories of what I wrote that day.

It's a terrible thing to think that you have to pack everything of value in your life into one car.  As a teenager I didn't have any furniture, but I did have clothes, books, records, camping gear, and memories.  There were little things of no apparent value, but still worth keeping.  My whole world had to be packed into cardboard boxes, put into the Impala station wagon, and readied for the move to Memphis.

The memories thrown away into brown paper sacks that day will never be known.  Paper bags from the grocery store were the receptacles of choice.  Large black plastic bags had not been discovered yet.  Today mothers with large black plastic bags have much more power over their kids than the Sixties' mothers did with small paper bags.  It would be like opening a time capsule to see the things that were discarded on that day.  I know for a fact that the baseball cards of my childhood days did not survive.  Who wanted old cards of Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle and Roger Marris anyway?  "You don't need these."  And so the conversation and the memories went into the Kroger's and Hill's bags destined for the big can hanging in the back alley.

Newspaper clippings are some of the few memories that most people are willing to keep.  Perhaps that's because they take up so little room.  You can put them in books and albums.  Today's newspapers are full of tomorrow's memories.  With that thought in mind, I decided that one of the things that would help me through my transitional move would be to keep up with the local news of Huntsville.  A three-month subscription to "The Huntsville Times" would get me through the summer.  The coming summer, the summer of 1964, would be the one that would carry all the wedding announcements and "off to college" news about those with whom I would graduate the next day.

Teenagers can look at the wedding announcements and find stories about their friends.  A little later, the birth announcements cover the same people.  The older you get, the less those announcements mean to you.  Finally, there comes a time when you see more names you recognize in the death notices than anywhere else in the newspaper.  

I know I am not the only one who fell victim to someone else getting rid of things they wanted to keep. Do you have any similiar memories of what you went through when you finally left home for the first time?

The Wayback Machine

Here is one collection of the songs we enjoyed back in the summer of 1964. I have a personal memory of the song "The House of the Rising Sun". The summer of 1964, after I moved to Memphis, I got a job as a counselor at the YMCA camp at Pickwick Lake. I was still in my folk song era and took my guitar to camp with me. Another counselor was also into folk music and had a book of folk songs we sang from. One of the songs was "House of Rising Sun." We sang that song all summer, but little did we know it was going to be such a blockbuster hit later for The Animals.

Summer time is a'coming and I am personally looking forward to some warm weather. I know before long we will be wishing it would be cool again, but after miserable cold rain filled trips to Alaska and Michigan, I will enjoy the sunshine for a while.

Last Week's Questions, Answers, And Comments

Michael Crowl, LHS ‘65, "Reading about Vietnam, Don Ho, and Glen Campbell brought some memories for me during that time. While in Vietnam you were given a R&R vacation . I chose Hawaii; it was the closest they allowed you be to the states at the time. My reason was so my wife could meet me and have some time together. We happened to have booked a show where Don Ho was. He was a very nice person and put on a good show. On coming back from my service commitments I was working in Houston,TX,  as a manager of Piggly Wiggly. Glen Campbell’s sister use to shop with me . She brought Glen by a couple times and I got to spend a little time with him. He was a great guy , very down to earth.  Thanks for bringing back memories, you always do a great job of just that!" 

Linda Kinkle Cianci, LHS ‘66, "Thanks as always, Tommy, for helping us remember all those lost. The DCAS list is interesting though. Perhaps others will notice it too.  One Huntsville soldier I knew personally was not on the DCAS list - Sam Smith, LHS '67, Marine Corp, died in combat in 1967 or 1968."

Delores McBride Kilgore, LHS '66, “Thank you, Tommy! You are so appreciated!”