Celanese Years 1963-68

As I've noted before in other posts, these work-related divisions - such the "Celanese Years" are just my arbitrary way of lumping time.

I don't know how Brenda would have figured the 1963 - 1968 period, if she would have felt the need to create categories.

A few events were certainly important enough for her to associate with a particular year.

There was the Kennedy assassination in 1963, a month after Curtis died and we moved back to Blanton Street. I don't know how or when Brenda heard about it. I was coming back from lunch to the labs at Celanese when somebody met us at the door and said that Kennedy was shot, maybe dead. This person laughed and said that he hoped so. Brenda and I watched the little TV in our bedroom all weekend, joining the national observance.

Probably the trip to West Palm Beach. I know that the trip happened in 1965 because we were in the 1965 MG 1100 sedan which we bought new and which only lasted for a year. I know that the trip was in the summer because the little black car did not have air conditioning and the heat - in North Carolina and especially in Florida was intense. Perhaps we went late in August to celebrate our anniversary - it would have been our fourth. The trip was not especially successful. There was the heat and the distance. Even in four years since my last trip, West Palm Beach had changed for the worse. Brenda was anxious - I suppose about her cats and her mother - which made her even less than normally romantic. (But breakfast outside at the hotel by the beach was nice. We sat outside before it got hot and ate danish pastries for the first time. They became Brenda's favorite.) We only stayed one day in West Palm Beach (Palm Beach actually) and made the 720 mile trip back to Shelby without spending the night. It took 16 hours.

(There were other cars. We parked the 48 Plymouth in the back yard and got Brenda her second, second car, a 1959 Volvo PV544 coupe which she named Bridgette. In 1966 we traded the MG for a new Volvo 122S sedan which she named Greta. I commuted in it for a year and then Brenda drove it for many years afterward. She loved the car and we kept it for 40 years before giving it to Bill Harris because we knew that he would never get rid of it.)

Maybe the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 was memorable to Brenda. I recall sitting in my room at the boarding house listening to a sound coming from across the hall. Click-click-click, click-click-click. Getting up, glancing through the open door into the other room I saw a man sitting on the bed, holding a rifle working the bolt - click-click-click, click-click-click.

But I can't think of anything else. Certainly nothing as arbitrary as my jobs.

Brenda's work?

It was during this period that the Right of Way Department took over the entire top floor of the Highway Building (red brick, two story, located on the edge of town, across highway 74 from the Fairground, around the corner from Cleveland Community College - which itself occupied the land where the county home used to be).

Margaret Bowen came to work as the new secretary. She and Brenda and all the file cabinets and the break room table moved to what had been the big drafting room at the end of the second floor. Brenda and Margaret, a neat little woman with a wicked sense of humor had fun together. They told jokes and laughed so hard they cried. Periodically they got up from their desks on one side of the room to move to the common table on the other side, to join the men and continue the jokes - being told now mostly by the men. Everybody smoked. Occasionally there was homemade wine.

This was a period of expansion; a number of new men came to work for the Department as Right of Way agents. Some of the men stayed until they retired 30 and 40 years later; some worked for a few years and moved on. Over the years I met and became friendly with most of these who stayed. Carl Acker might have been the boss during this period; maybe Dean Bridges began his long tenure as supervisor.

Politics continued to be a factor. Brenda met several gubernatorial candidates who came by the office looking for votes. Bob Scott, the Democrat stopped Brenda in the parking lot, shook her hand and said to her, "You know why I am here."

Brenda traded in her old manual typewriter for an electric and complained that she could not type as fast as before, beginning a long-running war with technology. It was during this period that she came to be regarded as a de facto agent and the expert regarding policies and procedures.

Collectively all of this was memorable - to Brenda and by then to me. But it was part of a flow, a continuum. No event stands out. Time just happened at the office.

Our life together?

Isabel continued to get drunk. In the first few years she brought men into the house, but that seemed to diminish after I bloodied one man's face and threatened another with a hammer. To avoid strangers coming to the house I would pick up her vodka and beer on my way from Charlotte.

To break up the daily 90 mile commute I spent two nights a week in a rooming house in Charlotte. On those nights Brenda and her mother would go out, sometimes with Linnie the neighbor lady. Often they would ride over to Kings Mountain or Gastonia. They seemed to enjoy my nights in Charlotte.

I tried to have fun. I ate out, went to movies, and a few times went to bars with Dieter and Juan, the German and Peruvian who worked in the labs at Celanese. Dieter and I went to see Dr. Zhivago and 2001 A Space Odyssey. But none of it seemed right. And at night in the room I had to leave the TV until morning to avoid feelings of depersonalization when I got outside of myself and worried about getting back.

We continued our habit of going out at night, to drive-in-moves (summer or winter, rain or dry) and to drive-in restaurants. Frank might have started to join us in this period, drinking coffee with us in our car or his, adding his contribution to the cigarette smoke boiling out of the window. (The first place we gathered was the Little Moo across the street from the Presbyterian Church. Every night a small tractor trailer mail truck whipped around corner at about 9:00 PM, prompting one of us to make a comment. We might have visited the Dairy Queen during the Celanese period, beginning our long association with the Rachels family.)

There is more but it is all part of the same flow, the same continuum. Brenda and I had a shared life on Blanton Street, Brenda had her life at her office and I had my life at various jobs (my lumped life), and of course my secret life of quiet grandiosity. We were getting along OK. There was affection. Nobody was thinking about leaving anybody. I was grumpy about living on Blanton Street but Brenda seemed relatively happy.

(Since this is supposed to be more Brenda's story than mine, my various lives are not in play. Celanese was just the place where I had modest adventures and dreamed grandiose dreams. It was where I worked with Frank McCain whom I would learn 20 years later played a famous role in the civil rights movement and whom I learned 40 years later knew the little girl in that I had known in Baltimore when I was a child - multiple lifetimes prior to all this. The Army was just the Army. The story in the Red Clay Reader, the articles in the Observer, the night classes and correspondence courses, the modular building system, the aborted stories and aborted novels. That was all just me.)