Home Again to Winston-Salem with my Dad

Today was the day I took my Dad back to Winston-Salem to visit all the sites of his childhood. Actually he drove me since it is a better gift to him if he gets to drive his own car. So I got up extra early this morning and went up to the farm where I found my father dressed up and ready to go on our big adventure. Meandering our way in the hour that it took us to go to Winston-Salem I was thankful he was driving because I was in unfamiliar territory.

My Dad had thought long and hard about this trip and had the whole route mapped out on what we were going to try and see and the order we would go in. Since I had only lived in Winston-Salem from the ages of zero to six weeks I was up for what ever he wanted to show me.

We got off the interstate at 5^th street to see if we could find the hospital where my father had his serious back operation three months before I was born. The building was there, but we think it was now part of a school. It was not my idea of the happiest place to start, but it was important to my Dad. As we entered downtown we went by the warehouse/factory where my father had worked summers at RJ Reynolds when he was in school. The factory where my Grandfather had been the manager was a shell being renovated, but still existed.

My Dad was really interested in finding the first place he worked out of college and amazingly the building was still there, now listed as a historic landmark. He thought that was great since it had just been a supplier to mills and factories back when he worked there.

From there we drove to the Episcopal Church that had been his church for the first 11 years of his life. As a child I heard the stories of the church he had built as a teenager and clearly this fancy building was not it. Dad explained that his parents along with 49 other families had broken away from this church to create a new one because they were the worker bees of the church as opposed to being the check writers/decision makers and they got tired of that.

Along the tour of the day I saw the basement of the furniture store where the new church met for the first two years, the place where the congregational church once stood in their Ardmore neighborhood where they met as a church on off hours for the next three years and finally St. Timothy’s the church my father had help build. He quickly pointed out where the mortar mixing station was that he manned and how he carried all the cement blocks up the scaffolding. See, his father had been the first church treasurer and knew that one way they could afford to build that first church building was to use my strong Dad as labor. My father had experience doing cement block work since he had done it at his own family home as a ten year old.

The highlight of the day for me was the tour of my father’s paper route. Many life lessons we taught to me as a child through my father’s stories of his morning and afternoon paper routes. We started our tour at the place where his 210 papers were dropped off at five each each morning. Amazingly most of the neighborhood looked the same to my Dad. There were a few new houses, but most looked very similar to the way they were in 1948. As we neared the end of his route we came to two houses next to each other with some African Americans sitting on their front porches. My Dad stopped the car and got out to talk to them. Turns out that they were the same family that had lived in those two houses when my Dad had delivered their papers.

We met a nice woman who was a year younger than my Dad who had lived with her grandmother in one of the houses. She and my Dad talked about which schools they both went to. Since the schools were segregated back then she told us how she had to take two different busses to get home from her school in the East part of town. My Dad had an easy walk to the Ardmore school that was just a few blocks away. Turns out this woman had a daughter exactly my age who had been the first African American to enroll in Ardmore school as a first grader when desegregation first happened. It is hard for me to imagine that all this happened in my lifetime.

More about my trip with my Dad back home again in tomorrows blog.