Bob Davidson
Janalu,
We moved to Dallas at the end of the eigth grade so I went to RHS ninth to graduation. Dad worked in Dallas from January, the rest of us moved when we sold our house and they bought the new one in May. I went to UT, worked for a time, then went to U of H Law School. I lived in Austin, suburban Chicago, Cuernavaca, Mexico and Denton before law school. I fell in love with Houston -- it's full of interesting people, fun things to do, great food, and has been a wonderful place to practice law. The class of 2018 Beto judges have made a huge negative difference in state law practice, but we are all hoping that they may figure out what they are doing after the coronavirus disaster lets up.
Ridgewood was my favorite place to live, followed by New Orleans. For my mom, Jackson was her favorite place. Dad liked working in New Orleans and NYC; he made lifelong friends everywhere we lived. My brother, who lives in Austin, still loathes Mississippi. Dad didn't like the financial and professional mess his boss in Jackson got him into and how much it upset Mom; he said that colored his view of living there. After 25 years in Northwood Hills, they lived in Vancouver, Canada, for a few years while Dad fixed a Canadian insurance company, then Corpus Christi until he died in 2015. Mom moved to a senior living place in Austin a few years ago and still lives there.
One thing I didn't like about Jackson was that Mom was never home. We spent too much time with babysitters. Unlike every other place we lived, we kids had to stay in our part of the house when they had people over. No one brought their kids -- like they did everywhere else, because they all had easy access to babysitters.
For a boy my age, Jackson had a horrible culture of bullying. There were older kids a grade or two ahead of us who tormented me and my classmates, guys who were the biggest guys in their grade, big and strong and total assholes -- I still vividly remember Elby Johnson, Buddy Mims, Bobby Cope, Preston York, and Earl Bell and get angry. I was a little guy in 7th and the start of 8th grade (I grew eight inches in the six months before I turned 14) so there wasn't a whole lot I could do physically about hulking 6 footers who outweighed me by 60 or 80 pounds. Unfortunately for them, I had an imaginative mouth -- I made up nicknames that caught on -- Elby became "Elby Jay" -- Vice President-President Johnson was not a popular figure among the redneck population -- and "Bobby Cope what a dope" "Ding Dong Bell" and "York, York, York" (said like Curly from the Three Stooges) were some of the catch phrases I came up with for the 7th grade after they started terrorizing us After a time, they pretty much stayed away from me and my friends, at least when we weren't alone. I don't think they knew who made up the nicknames since they didn't go after me more than the others.
My brother says he remembers me coming home from school bloody regularly -- I remember our maid Mary wrapping ice in paper towels and cleaning me up a few times and agreeing not to tell Mom, but not as much as he thinks. I remember him fighting much more than I did -- he grew up to be 6'5" but was short and stocky as a kid -- Grandpa called him Mr. 4 x 4 because he was four feet tall and four feet wide.
In retrospect it was probably a class thing -- those guys were dumb and didn't like the smart ass kids in the advanced class in particular or much of anyone else, for that matter. I never experienced bullying to any degree at RHS or saw it anywhere else like in Jackson.
I never much liked RHS. I did like a lot of the people -- there were some really awesome kids there, but the old Richardson clique that ran everything seemed closed to new kids. I didn't like school or the teachers. They were by far the worst we had anywhere we lived, mostly dull and seeming to be bored with a few exceptions. My Mom was unhappy and Dad gone most of the time. I was pretty bitter with her for years over college: one of the colleges had a program where I could go there after junior year if I took extra classes as a junior and senior English in summer school and did okay on the SAT and achievement tests. Dad offered to let me skip senior year and go to college so I took the tests and extra classes, sent in the application, asked for recommendations from teachers, and got conditionally accepted. He'd never gone to high school: he was expelled when he was 15, in 1944, lied about his age and joined the army so he could be in the War, took the GED, and came back after serving as a radioman in the Pacific and MP sergeant during the Occupation of Japan to go to college on the GI Bill with his old classmates. Mom vetoed my going -- she said my senior year would be the best year of my life (she was wrong) and besides she needed help with other kids. I was furious about having to be in high school hell for yet another year and she and I barely spoke. Incidentally, when I went off to college, Dad got a job in town with Southland Life in downtown Dallas where he didn't travel that lasted unitl my brother left home.
|