Norfolk trolley at Monticello Hotel stop
courtesy RKPuma's Old Ocean View Nickel Tour
~~~
Ocean View Park photo and handbill
~/////////~ CHIMES OF THE TIMES There is a clock sitting on the mantel in our living room today -- 1999 -- that my wife rescued 50 years ago from a storage room after my mother moved from the old house in Ahoskie. If you give the wind-up key a couple of turns every five days or so it will keep perfect time, except the big hand falls forward slightly on the down side and lags a little on the up side. It chimes faithfully, once on the half-hour and the full count for the hour. The amazing thing about the clock, a Seth Thomas, is that it is well over 100 years old. It was in my home when I was born and they stopped it temporarily there on the night my father died. We were surprised that my mother hadn't clung to it in later years, and that she so readily said we could have it when Becky found it in the storage room. A half-sister cleared that up for us after my mother was dead. She said the clock had belonged to my father's first wife (her mother) in their home in Phoebus VA, as far back as the early 1890s. After daddy's first wife died and he married my mother, he put it on the mantel in their new home. I guess my mother put up with all the chiming to keep him happy.
~~~
~~~~~~~~~ PIGGY'S FINGER John Milton Jenkins of Murfreesboro is an astute observer of people. He is one of my wife's older cousins, and also was her school teacher and later principal and superintendent of Hertford County schools. He noted once that you can tell when someone has achieved senior citizen status by their preoccupation with the weather and their reaction to the temperature. Senior citizens, he said, usually want their surroundings to be at least as warm as their age. When you're in your 60s, you want the thermometer to be there, too. When you reach 75 and 80, you're never comfortable in the wintertime. In your 90s, you're happiest on a sun-scorched day in summer. John Milton lost part of a finger in an accident as a youth, back when his nickname was "Piggy." While Dr. L. M. Futrell was trying to contain the damage, a solemn-faced Piggy eyed both
his maimed hand and the man of medicine and dolefully asked,
"Will I be able to play the banjo now?" Grasping at any straw to reassure his injured young patient, the doctor replied cheerily, "Certainly, Piggy. Certainly, you'll be able to play the banjo." "Well, that's really great," said Piggy, "because I never could before."
~~~
PIGGY IN THE CLASSROOM When Piggy was teaching school, he had a student named Sidney Deanes, who wasn't the
world's greatest for books.
He was so inept at it, as a matter of fact, that once when he showed up and took a pop-test
that Piggy handed out, he missed every answer.
Piggy didn't give Sidney a zero, however. He gave him a 35 ~ which he called
a "half-pass" ~ just for taking the test.
Another time at the start of a class, Piggy looked around and noticed Sidney wasn't
present.
"Where's Sidney?" he asked.
"Oh, he's down in the furnace room ~ asleep," a couple of students replied.
"Well, go get him," said Piggy.
When the pair returned with the truant, Piggy told him to sit down.
"Now, go on back to sleep," he said. "You are my student, and this is my class.
And if you are going to sleep during my class, you're going to do it right here in my classroom."
Once at a class reunion of Old Murfreesboro High, Sidney was called on to say a few words.
"Well, I'd just like to say," he began,
"that the eight years I spent in high school
right here in this old building were the best eight years of my life." ~/////////~ WAITING FOR THE MARQUIS DE The Marquis de Lafayette, the Frenchman who helped George Washington and the U.S. win the Revolutionary War, later paid a visit to the new republic. On his travels through the countryside, he visited and stayed overnight in Murfreesboro, one of Eastern North Carolina's leading trade centers at the time, and the event is celebrated every year in that community with the Lafayette Ball, a black-tie occasion for the elite of the area. But Murfreesboro, like a lot of other towns in the northeastern part of the state, slipped into the doldrums in the decades after Lafayette's visit with the result that today the town has about the same population as it did back then, and occupies a much lower position on the state's trade ladder than it did in 1800. Harry Hill, once one of Murfreesboro's leading businessmen and later one of its leading senior citizens, was discussing this turn of events one day, and said, "You know, when Lafayette came to visit us, his parting words were, 'Don't do anything until I get back.' "And," said Harry, "he never did get back, and we never did do anything." ~/////////~ 
courtesy Robert Jones
and RKPuma's Old Ocean View Nickel Tour
James Fred Pearce, his first wife Rose,
daughters Nora and Mabel
c. 1900
J. M. (Piggy) Jenkins
classroom days