Blacksburg, Virginia Pt. I

So many things happened to me in Blacksburg, Virginia from 1952-54, I hardly know where to start.

I was seven years old when we arrived. My father was to teach ROTC at what was then Virginia Polytechnic Institute, or V.P.I. My younger sister Teresa was going on four years old and baby brother Bill was one. We’d moved there from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. In many respects, it was a rather exotic place to be: beautiful, in the mountains, with a whole new culture to get used to. And we were living in a town, a small one but a real one (not an Air Force base), with a downtown business district, neighborhoods, and of course the school. I think my father and mother liked it in the Blue Ridge Mountains. In the days before air conditioning, the evevation probably counted for an awful lot. They were also in their 30s, strong enough to drink and smoke and still be healthy, young enough to have a chance.

The first house we lived in was on a gravel street in a neighborhood without many trees. It sat up plain and white, as I remember it. I doubt I liked it very much. I don’t remember where I slept, but I do remember that the place had an old coal furnace in the basement. Sometimes I had to go down and shake the grate, then put the clinkers in a bucket and carry them outside somewhere. I remember getting excited one cold gray day when some of the “big kids” came back from the dump where they’d been shooting rats and brought one back with them. A Norway rat, big as a small dog, black and bloody and dead. Some time after that, we moved to a house we must have stayed at longer. It was during the time of the second house that everything happened.

I remember a small suburban bungalow. There were grass and trees, nicer neighbors, big backyards for gardens, and woods around the edges. I was mostly happy there and had the fiercest active relationships with other kids. (You didn’t get that, living “on base,” as we called it, where favorite playmates constantly rotated out of your life.) The neighborhood pack was led by a couple of slightly older girls who lived across the street. The family of one of them bought one of the first TVs I’d ever seen. I remember standing in a room full of children watching “Superman” on a little black and white screen in a huge dark cabinet.

On sticky summer evenings, we kids would play out epic dramas of hide-and-seek as the light grew dark and we pretended not to hear each other’s mothers calling us home. For sheer heart-pounding excitement and frenzied joy — and the emotional high of just-can’t-STAND-to-miss-it — I doubt anything I’ve ever done can rival the climaxes of those twilight games: leaping from your hiding place, running shrieking and whooping for the designated base, stumbling triumphantly in the sweaty dark…

(Actually, there is one, the infamous lost Hatteras weekend of sun, alcohol, bottle rockets and highly dangerous practical jokes back in ’84? 85?? But that will have to wait until another time.)

[To be continued]

Related posts:

1. Blacksburg, Virginia Pt. II
2. Yellow Varnish
3. Amnesia or Enlightenment
4. Busted Down in Babylon
5. Spooky but Cool