Life's Lows and Highs- SamKat
Consider life's lowest points in disapointments or hurts with the highest points of oh-my-gosh happiness.
A personal low:
About 1938 after Portsmouth''s and the Ohio Valley's horrendous floods of 1937- My great parents, Forest and Mary Kegley were coping their very best
with then Ted, Joan, Bud, Sam, and George, five of the eventual ten kids
of the family.
I am nearing seven and wearing my knicker pants. I felt like a rag muffin or a near homeless refugee kid. Pre-WW II elastic quickly stretched beyond limits and became non-elastic. Boys like me had one pants leg held up under the knee and the other pants leg hanging loosely. That was a low, not understandable by a six year old boy.
A personal High:
I am nearing seventeen in 1949 and I have met this girl from New Boston, Jeanette Weddington. A while earlier Paul Stamm and Don Ramsey told me of a New Boston Beauty they had seen at Grierson's Restauraunt across Millbrook Lake Bridge in New Boston. Next evening we rode up to the popular New Boston hangout for the teeny boppers of that era which was called the Honky Tonk.
I was impressed with the appearance of the smooth two-year-older girl, but not to the point of even thinking of a possible romance.
I also worked as an usher at the Ohio Theatre in New Boston. Shortly afterwards I would see Jeanette from time to time, either walking by the show on her way up to another gathering spot for the teens, Joe Day's American Restaurant or in the theatre. I was more impressed than at first. She was recognized among most as the excellent jitter-bug dancer she was, and as an attractive and slim, around five feet-six inches tall, good-looking young lady. I soon became smitten.
Now I had kissed girls at parties even though I was still quite bashful. The Clark twins, Carl and Clare whom I grew up with, were also Ohio Theatre ushers. Many times they, not being bashfiul with girls to say the very least, had to goad me into kissing a girl, sometimes even at our boy-girl parties.
I made it a point to meet this beautiful Jeanette. She eventually consented to let me walk her home from the Honky Tonk, nearly a mile west on Rhodes Avenue. I found that I could talk with her more easily than any other female. She made me comfortable with our conversation. We got to her house and there was a fence with a crooked tree in the yard near the gate. Close conversations led to closer heads and it happened. Jeanie kissed me! Of course, this smitten, bashful boy had pursed his lips first inviting the mystic happening. Took me a while to get to this point of my story but this was a definite High in my life.
Consider also that the latter event happened sixty-three years ago and Jeanie and I will be married sixty-one years next month.
Sammie Kegley aka SamKat
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