The Exile Begins: Moving to Virginia, 1963

I will have to hunt up some photos for this post, but right now I‘m in the upper lower peninsula getting away for a few days. I’ll be home tomorrow night as on Friday, I’m the chief (volunteer) cook and bottle washer for a big fundraiser. Back to the story at hand. I’m pretty sure I have a photo of my 6th birthday, but it‘s not on this laptop. If I find it, I’ll add it. As any reader of this blog knows, I was born and mostly raised in North Carolina. However, there was a three year period that I jokingly refer to as “our exile.” Then, we lived in Petersburg, Virginia, where I attended Walnut Elementary School for grades one through three. This is the start of my Petersburg stories. Enjoy!


Mom was all excited as she stood next to the phone of the kitchen wall talking.

“We’re moving to Virginia,” she said with her hand over the mouthpiece. “Do you want to talk to your dad.“

It may have well been my first long distant phone call. I put the receiver to my ear and asked my dad if Virginia was another country.

Dad had started a new job several months earlier and had been in Baltimore, where ever that was, in training. He’d occasionally come home for a weekend and we’d pick him up at the train station in Southern Pines. When he’d go back, he’d take the overnighter on Sunday evening, arriving back on Monday morning. Once, when Mom was writing him a letter, I decided to write one, too. I was five and the only words I knew how to write where the names of filling stations, so on a piece of paper I wrote Esso, Shell, Sinclair, Gulf and Texaco. As the time to move got closer, Mom when up to Virginia with Dad and the three of us “youngins” stayed with my grandparents. I turned six then and my grandma threw a party; her dining room was cramped with cousins and friends from church.

We moved to Petersburg in January 1963, just a week after my sixth birthday. I don’t remember much about the move, except that Uncle Frank helped and all our stuff was loaded onto one of his farm trucks. I assume, since my Dad had just started to work for the company for whom he’d work for the next four decades, they didn’t provide expenses for the first move like they later did when they moved us back to North Carolina. It was after dark when we arrived at the rented cracker-box house on Montibello Street, overlooking toll booths along the Petersburg-Richmond Turnpike. There was a row of houses on the south side of the street, our backyards dropping into a swamp. Across the street was a chain-link fence that kept us from running out into just about all the traffic the moved between the Northeast and Southeast. Just south of town, I-85 and I-95 (although neither one was completed at this time) merged and if you heading north from New Orleans, Atlanta or Miami to Washington or New York, you drove right by our house. It didn’t seem such a problem that January night, as we moved in, but come spring, when we opened the windows, we heard the constant roar of trucks and cars as they braked for the toll booth and then accelerated as they continued their journeys into the night.

I have only snippets of memory about the house on Montibello Street. A gas floor heater in the hallway heated the house and when the gas was on, it was warm and you could stand on the grate and watch the first through a small window in the metal heater. When it snowed, my sister placed her wet shoes on the heater and turned it up. When my mother discovered this, our shoes were well-done and curled. Out back, the yard slopped down and there, my father taught me how to ride a bike. He had installed training wheels on the bike and blocks of wood on the paddles. After I got to where I could keep it upright, he took the training wheels off and I’d ride it down the hill and then turn and try to make it back up but generally gave up after a few stokes on the peddles. My grandma had given me some seeds, corn and peas if I remember correctly, and that spring I planted a small garden and was proud of my handful of peas that I harvested. I don’t remember if we got any corn.

Our next door neighbors, to the west, were the O’Neils. Mom was always telling us to be quiet when we were outside and they were home. I didn’t understand; they seemed stuck-up as they never talked or waved. I assumed that was because they were Yankees from New York. I knew they had a boy a few years older than me, but I only saw him in the backyard once, laying in a lounge chair sunning. Mom wouldn’t let us go out and meet him. Then he died and we had to be especially quiet. Mom made pecan pies and took them over and afterwards they became good friends. Ellen, who was a teenager, took me to the city pool when she introduced me as her new boyfriend. That made me feel special. Years later, I learned that her brother had leukemia.

On the other side of the O’Neil’s, at the last house on the street, lived a kid my age. His name was Robert and we became friends. His dad was in the Army and worked at Fort Lee. About the time school started, his family had a big party and Robert invited me, but my mother wouldn’t let me go because the adults were going to be drinking beer.

I should say something about church in Petersburg. Coming from good Highlander Presbyterian stock, albeit over two hundred years since leaving Scotland, we first attended Second Presbyterian Church. Maybe we tried First Presbyterian, but I only remember the Second one. There, in the sanctuary, someone took pleasure in showing us where a Yankee cannon ball crashed through the roof a mere 98 years earlier. The church had a big bell tower, but no steeple, the story being that the steeple got shot off during the Civil War. Afterwards, it was rebuilt to be blown off by a tornado. It was rebuilt again and in 1954, the winds of Hurricane Hazel once again removed it and the church decided that three strikes must mean God didn’t intend them to have a steeple.


That September, I entered the first grade at Walnut Hill’s Elementary School. As there was a shortage of teachers and classrooms, first graders went to school only a half day of class. I was in the morning shift and came home for lunch, passing by those going for the afternoon shift. Mostly, my parents took me to school and picked me up when it was time to come home. Once, I rode the city bus with Ellen. Mom had given me what she thought was the correct change, but I was a nickel short. I volunteered the nickel I had for milk, but the bus driver said I could pay him later. I never rode a bus again while we were in Petersburg. Well into adulthood I carried guilt with me for having cheated them out of a nickel. I was in my 20s, when I told my mother about it and she assured me that she was pretty sure she sent Ellen with the money I owed the next day. I’m not so sure, but it was a nice attempt to alleviate my guilt.

That fall, my parents brought a house on Bishop Street in Walnut Hills. Before moving in, Mom and Dad painted and fixed it up. We were still in the process of moving the day my father picked me up at school. When we got home, Mom had the TV and the radio on and was very upset. The President had just been shot. I will always associate that house with Kennedy’s assassination.