Firsts: My First Date

Okay - now I'm moving into my more "mature" years in my "firsts." I hope my readers can take this!  This photo was taken on January 16, 1966. I'm two months shy of being 10 years old. The caption on the back of this photo says, "Steve making a date with Gloria." The girl, Gloria Grubbs, was my first girlfriend, and this was my first date.

Okay... stop that laughing! This is serious stuff. I was in the 4th grade and we lived in Prentiss, MS. For the first nine years of my life girls meant nothing to me. You just had to put up with them. They giggled a lot and they couldn't play baseball very well. Suddenly, in late '65, and early '66 I became interested in women (I'm sure I referred to them as "women" back then).

And what an amazing transformation it was! We moved to Prentiss from Ft. Leavenworth, KS where I had been the only boy in a choir with over 20 girls, but I had no interest in girls. My voice back then sounded like a girl, mind you. But then, my voice changed at age 9 1/2 and suddenly girls interested me. No....I that's not true. I didn't go through puberty at 10, but I sure was suddenly interested in Gloria Grubbs. Truth is, I was very interested in Gloria Grubbs. That much is evident from the photo. Look at it closer.

You may not be able to tell, but I have on a dickey under that shirt. What? You don't know what a dickey is? A dickey is a fake turtleneck - like the one Cousin Eddie wore in Christmas Vacation. Mine was about as bad as Cousin Eddie's. As I recall the one in the photo was white and it really made that blue shirt I had on "pop." And notice the telephone. That phone was your standard-issue rotary dial, 50 pound black model. You remember those don't you? And what's with the "Forget Hell!" Rebel general picture mom and dad had hanging in our house? I know were were living in MS and it was the sixties, but that was a still a little politically incorrect don't you think? And I have absolutely no idea why we had those wind chimes hanging over an interior door in our house. No doubt the house was drafty, but that's a little much don't you think?

Oh well. I look pretty happy talking to Gloria - telling her when Mom and I are going to pick her up (Dad was in Korea). What? You didn't do those "dates" as a kid where your parent drove and you picked up your date and mom or dad drove you around like a chauffeur and tried not to look in the backseat? Oh yeah... classy. Mom even drove my sister and her boyfriend (8th graders at the time), and a a few other kids (including Gloria and me as fourth-graders) to see Herman's Hermits in Jackson, MS back in '66. Everything went fine until Mom tried to parallel park and she hit the car behind us and she shouted, "Oh $#!&." Tricia and I weren't sure whether to be proud of our mom's Sailor's mouth, or whether to turn invisible with embarrassment over the incident. But these days I think I'd be mostly proud. I still don't know what mom did during the 3 hours we were in the concert. But that, like so many of these tales, is a story for another day.