Back To School

If I was terrified going to the first day of Algebra class the first day of summer school at Texas Women's University the trip home was even worse. The decision to take the class in summer school sounded very logical in my pea size brain as that was the class I was most worried about.  A concentrated class everyday with nothing else to have to study sounded logical.

Visions of Mrs. Sharp with her comfortable shoes, silky flowery dresses and blue lips and tongue (Dad said that was from medicine she took) flashed through my mind.  I was fourteen and in the ninth grade when she became my teacher for the first year of what was termed "New Math".  The poor woman had no idea of what she was teaching or at least that was my excuse.  Then there was Mr. Grant in the tenth grade who let me come in early everyday to try to make sense of all the silly little scribbles involved in Algebra. He was kind, always cheerful and tried hard to etch some of it in my brain to no avail.  I actually dropped out of accelerated classes in the eleventh grade using mononucleosis as an excuse when it was really a phobia about MATH. 

To make matters even worse Dr. Smith, head of the math department, looked younger than my twenty-eight years and the other seven students were giggling eighteen year old girls.  Nothing that first day of class made any sense at all and maybe it would be best just to never return to that place.  There were probably some tears that day as I only had a thirty mile drive home to decided whether to tell the babysitter to return the next day or not. Maybe I should just not go back to college, stay home and be a good Mom, a good corporate wife and drag racer.

When I got home Wes and Wally were happy, the babysitter was happy
and everything was just fine.  As the baby sitter walked out the door she said she would see me tomorrow at the same time.  Out of my mouth came the word "great".  Guess I had made up my mind to not give up. Those were the days long before the term multi-tasking was used for women but it was certainly the beginning of mine.

It was a struggle to find time to do homework or at least attempt to do homework.  Wes was a very active five year old and Wally was only nine months old.  Dinner needed to be on the table at 5:05 and evenings were always busy especially since I had spoiled Dennis and he was not enthralled with my going back to school.  That was when my habit of getting up during the wee hours of the morning began.  There is something about having the absolute quiet at two or three o'clock in the morning when no one wants anything and you can't do anything except sit quietly so as not to awake anyone that made studying easy and actually fun.

The second day of class was the real shocker.  Maybe Dr. Smith did not want to spend his summer grading homework papers as he called on each student to put a homework problem on the board.  He would then go through each of the algebra problems and show what was right and what was wrong.  Needless to say the first few weeks mine were completely wrong. Once I got over being embarrassed about not getting the problems right and I realized there was no crying in math something clicked.  All of a sudden the funny squiggles, infinity and the angle of the dangle made sense.  First semester I managed of B and the second semester, which was Trig, was actually a pretty easy A. Wow, maybe I wasn't so stupid after all.

While I was busy juggling children, college and house hold duties the new Paul Peyton chassis arrived.  Weekends were busy building a body for it as well as for other racers.  No vacations for the weary except the annual trip to Indianapolis for the big NHRA race of the year which had become our only vacation. One thing about drag racing is that they were always scheduled to end on a night before one had to go back to work the next day.  I lost count of the number of times through the years that we arrived home from some distance place around dawn when Dennis had to be at work that morning and the children had to be in school. I probably passed a lot of interesting sights to see but missed them due to total darkness.

When school started in the fall Wally was only ten months old and needless to say not potty trained yet so I kept the babysitting service at home.  It actually worked out well since Wes started half-day kindergarten and could walk the block home when I was not there. That he could walk home is probably not the approved thing to do these days but was quite normal then as well as no car seats and such. The other advantage to the baby sitting service was that if one sitter could not come it was the job of the service to find another one. That saved a lot of headaches.

Wes, Wally and a neighbor at Wes' 5th Birthday Party

Sometime that summer a guy came by the garage one day with a very interesting proposition concerning the dragster.  Dennis was dubious of strangers bearing gifts.  I was awestruck at the thought of it as it would change the entire direction of what we were doing in racing.

                                        Oreo Cookies, anyone?

I'd Have to Have been Crazy

It is interesting to look back an realize how some events change and shape our lives.  For some it may be one huge moment or event.  For me it was a quite subtle series of things.

Arriving home from the hospital with a new baby I not only had a husband and a four year old but also Dennis's Mother and Father. Dennis had taken some time off from work not to entertain his parents or help with four year old Wes but because he had stuff to do in the garage.  Dr. Herndon always saw his patients each week for four weeks after the delivery of a baby and it was not a great visit the week after Wally was born. Seems like my blood pressure was really high when I went in for the first checkup.  He instructed me to go home and tell Dennis's parents to go home when I explained the scenario at home.  He wanted me back in his office in four days and if the blood pressure was not down I would be back in the hospital.  That certainly did not go over well with Dennis but they did disappear the same afternoon.  Blood pressure was back to normal on Friday.

Wally was a newborn that people dream about having.  He slept through the night very early and just a sweet little guy.  At about five weeks of age he suddenly began having what is called projectile vomiting.  Hours after he ate he would throw up formula that seemed like it just came from the bottle instead of being sour smelling and it came up with such force that it flew across the room.  That was a little scary so off the see our pediatrician.

Dr. Pharo was a very soft spoken and very conscientious as I had learned with Wes.  He explained to me that it sounded like pyloric stenosis which causes the muscle at the bottom of the stomach to slowly close prohibiting the digestion of food.  Since it was a Friday he sent us home with instructions to give Wally Benadryl over the weekend to see if it helped.  When Dr. Pharo called on Sunday night I told him Wally was actually a little worse.  So he told me to take Wally to Children's hospital on Monday morning.  By a stroke of luck we got the best pediatric surgeon in the state of Texas.  Wally and I spent the night at the hospital, surgery the next morning, first feeding at 11:00 AM and sent home at 2:00 in the afternoon when the formula stayed down.  No more problems so it was pretty simple.

Dennis decided that the dragster would not run well because the chassis was no good.  Good old me did not argue even though there were a lot of very good running cars with the same chassis.  He sold the chassis and immediately ordered a new one from a local chassis builder and friend, Paul Peyton.  That made for a relatively quiet winter except 
that he found an English Bulldog puppy born on the same day as Wally so it became the Christmas puppy and dog number dog six. He also did replace the flathead engine in the 1950 Mercury with a Ford V-eight.

This was 1975 and the days of the dare devil motorcycle guy named Evel Knieval.  Wes had an Evel Knieval toy, we had actually gone to see him jump over many semi-trucks at Green Valley Raceway and all the kids in the neighborhood were crazy about him. I have to admit that I thought he was really pretty cool in that bad boy sort of persona.  The neighbor kids built a jump ramp on the sidewalk and one weekend while working in the garage I watched the kids, including four and a half year old Wes going up the ramp and flying through the air.  Sure looked like fun.  Looked like lots more fun than building somebodies's race car body.

Have you guessed yet what my next move was?  I borrowed one of the kid's bikes and decided to fly through the air myself.  It looked pretty easy and if Wes could do it I certainly could.  Well, I guess I did not fully get the idea that you should keep pedaling and keep the speed up as you were going up the ramp.  At the top of the ramp the front wheel dropped off the end due to lack of speed and I did fly through the air without the bike with the greatest of ease.  I splatted on the sidewalk on my face. All I can remember after landing was my neighbor calling the ambulance and Dennis asking me where my insurance card was. The ambulance ride is a total blur.

One look at me in the emergency room and they called a plastic surgeon as no other doctor wanted to touch the mess I had made of my face. I did get up off the gurney a couple of hours into the wait for the plastic surgeon to go to the bathroom.  I looked in the mirror and thought "Boy, you have really done it this time" as my whole face was skinned up and my upper lip was split from the center of my lip to the left corner of my nose.  Not a pretty sight.

The plastic surgeon arrived after about a three hour wait.  He looked at me and asked how in the hell did I do that.  When I told him I tried to do an Evel Knieval stunt he rolled in laughter and asked me how old I was.  Proudly I told him I was a twenty-eight year old mother of two.  He then told me I should have paid more attention to how many times Evel had crash landed so I came back at him with how sexy I thought Evel was.  We got off to a good start and I think he delighted in sticking the needles in to deaden the lip for a multitude of stitches. Evidently I had run one of my upper front teeth through my bottom lip and just to prove to me how stupid I was he did not deaden it when he stitched the inside of my bottom lip up. That Hurt! The really hard part before the lip healed up was laughing. I guess I was the only person who thought the stunt was funny and I would have to hold my lip together to laugh with no pain.

Mom and Dad had been after me to go back to school.  Dad and I spent many hours when I was growing up talking about doctors and medicine. He really always wanted me to go to medical school.  My SAT scores showed I should avoid math and science at all costs and study something a little less intellectual. I had managed to garner eighty-seven hours in college without those two subjects before I quit the third time. Due to their wanting me to finish and a couple of doctors that really inspired me I decided to go back to college.  

It was a little daunting to find out to graduate with a pre-med degree that I only needed fifty-two hours of math and science. I chose to go and was accepted at Texas Women's University in Denton rather than North Texas University as I felt I would do better not competing against guys in math and science. All my female friends thought I was crazy, my parents were overjoyed and Dennis was laughing figuring I would flunk out the first semester. I also kept selling ceramic items to Margaret's Bed and Bath shop on Greenville Avenue in Dallas to pay for my tuition even though Dennis moaned for three years that he never thought he would have to put his wife through college. Everyone in Dallas County must have had a little ceramic bathtub soap dish.

Dr. Chandler, the plastic surgeon, and Dr. Herndon both were inspiration and both became my cheerleaders for the next three years. Dr. Chandler did boob jobs for several of my friends, My Mom came down and had her eyes done later a facelift so he and I stayed in contact even though I did not do any more Evel Knieval stunts.  He was interesting from the fact that he got a lot of his training serving on a medical ship during the Vietnam War taking care of injured soldiers.  He also had Insurance Only written across my chart in big red letters.  Of course I had insurance but his policy was if insurance did not cover an accident that needed plastic surgery then he would never send out a bill.  He always said he made enough money from insurance and cosmetic surgeries to do just fine. He also looked over my past college transcripts and told me if I was really intending to try for medical school I needed a 4.0 average in the rest of my classes.  Nothing like a little pressure before you even get started.

Luckily I had used a babysitting service on some weekends when we traveled with the race car.  They were older ladies that came to your house and stayed for a couple of hours or for an entire weekend.  The great thing was that they charged a dollar an hour and the house was always cleaner than when I left it and the boys were happy.  Wally could not go to the TWU Child Care Center until he was potty trained and Wes would be in kindergarten the following September.  Knowing that the first class I had to take was Algebra I enrolled only in it for the summer school session in June of 1975.

Needless to say after I enrolled I became terrified.  I was ten years older than anyone else in the class, hadn't studied anything except a cookbook or car parts for six or seven years and the instructor was none other than the Dean of the Math Department. Just what was I thinking!

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Put On A Happy Face

Mother and George

There is an old adage that most girls marry guys like their fathers.  I guess that stems from the fact that the father is the first male roll model and it feels familiar and comfortable.  My Dad was quiet, easy going on the outside, always listened and in his eyes I could do no wrong.  Mother on the other hand was loving one minute and totally 
unpredictable the next.  I always tried to be good, wear clothes she wanted me to wear, make good grades and do everything she wanted me to do. But the rules would change and I was always a disappointment to her.  After being married to Dennis for eight years I began to realize that I had married the personality traits of my Mother.

The year of 1974 started out pretty good.  We had the new Ed Mabry chassis, a new body and a new trailer.  I also found out I was pregnant with a due date sometime in October.  After being off two months on Wes's birth there was no need to set a real date this early.

Although I was not crazy about getting a boxer puppy she turned out to be a pretty sweet dog.  Her name was Dandy and she seemed quite alright with Wes poking at her eyes and pulling on her ears.  Since Dennis was still travelling every week and I was the one feeding her she quickly became my dog.  Dandy slept by my side of the bed at night, followed me to my ceramic workshop in the back yard to curl up in the boxes of shredded paper while I worked and was by my side all the time.

Wes and Dandy

The new dragster chassis got the 302 Ford engine installed and several attempts to get it to run consistently did not happen.  One night before the lettering and pin stripping was done on the car Dennis lost his temper when I offered a suggestion about what to do to the engine.  After all I had been around long enough to know something about them.  He flew into a rage and yelled at me that he felt like he was whipping a dead horse.  Anyone should know you should not yell at a pregnant woman.  Thank heavens Ralph and Mark popped in at that moment.  I was on the verge of tears but they thought the dead horse thing was the funniest thing they had heard in a long time and brought me to laughter.  When the ace painter, Zero Wasson, came to finish the car he painted a cartoon of a horse laying on it's back with all four hooves in the air.  The car was known from then on as the Dead Horse.

Town East Craft Show

Wes was growing like a weed, had a vivid imagination, never stopped talking or moving. At four years of age he was actually a lot of fun although there were times when I wanted to choke him. One time at a craft show at Town East Mall Wes and a fellow artist's little girl were playing behind us and then they were gone. Anne was panic stricken while I was not too concerned.  Anyone who took Wes would bring him back in ten minutes.  After about thirty minutes with Mall Security looking for them they were found eating ice cream cones in the mall office. It looked like my craft show days were numbered if I had to have a four year old with me all day.

                                                        Wes

The only friends I kept in contact with were Cathie and Pam from Stephens.  Pam had graduated from college in Arizona and went back to L.A. to work in banking.  I have stacks of letters and postcards from all around the world from her travels.  Cathie went to Texas Tech, met a great guy named Terry, got married and graduated with a mathematics teaching degree.  I always found it funny that she married an accountant and got a degree in math when she taught me to use red ink in my checkbook when I was overdrawn.

One day Cathie appeared on my doorstep.  That would be the first of many fun surprise visits through the years.  Wes fell instantly in love her with and said that when he grew up he was going to marry her.  Of course Cathie loved that.  Dennis and I took her out to dinner to the Old San Francisco Steakhouse where there was a waiting line.  Some bubba in line behind us started making remarks to her which were not very nice.  She turned around, stared at him with those huge blue eyes and told him in a very loud voice exactly where and what he could do with his male appendage.  Everyone in the line gasped and I thought Dennis was going to faint.  The bubba went silent for a few minutes and then apologized to her. That was typical Cathie and I loved every visit.  Dennis did not.

Sometime that spring or summer Dennis got a promotion from service rep to Owner's Relations Manager and the travelling slowed down.  After four years of him being gone all week he was suddenly home for dinner at 5:05 every afternoon.  He brought work home almost every night and it was not an easy adjustment to say the least.  Two things stand out in my mind.  One night Wes was running though the house playing and Dennis shouted for me to shut that screaming brat up.  The other was his statement that if he ever had a handicapped child he would put it in some institution.  Neither comment set very well with me as I had always thought I wanted to have six boys and I was pregnant at that time.  Time to rethink having any more children.

Although I had not kept in contact with any of my high school friends or even seen any of them on trips to Muskogee to see family I got a letter about our ten year reunion.  I really wanted to go.  After all I had spent all of my school years with these friends.  A year before I had organized and got all of Dennis's class together for a reunion so I assumed we would go to mine. Oh, how wrong could I be? There was some excuse about me being six months pregnant - so?  All I know is that I did not get to go and spent that entire weekend crying.   I ran out of imaginary black stars for awhile over that one.

October rolled around .  The dragster was still behaving like a dead horse making that part of my life difficult.  Dandy, the boxer, had developed Demodectic mange when she was about four months old.  Many trips to several vets and hundreds of dollars did not cure it.  She could no longer come in the house and it was getting cold outside.  It broke my heart but on the advice of the vet I had to put her down.

George had gone fishing one weekend at Beaver's Bend and came home on Sunday night telling Mom he thought he had gotten a cold.  Mom was going to school to become a nurse since George did not want her to work.  She had gotten a job when they first got married but he told her she was ruining his tax bracket so he gave her a couple of gas wells and an allowance to stay home.  When she came home from class on Monday morning she could not understand anything George said.  In the emergency room it was determined he had gotten stung by a wasp,  had viral encephalitis and lapsed into a coma that night.  He passed away on Thursday at the age of 57. They had only been married for four years during which Mother was the happiest I had ever seen her.

After a quick visit with Dr. Herndon on Friday he gave me a thumbs down on going to Oklahoma City to George's memorial service on Saturday.  Dennis attended the service which was probably not very comforting for Mother as they never got along well.

                                                                          Wally

I messed up Dr. Herndon's office hours on Monday by giving birth to Walter William Tarkington that afternoon.  Another healthy eight pound baby boy. One might think "What else could possibly happen?".  Well, life-changing events always seemed to pop up out of nowhere and grab you.  Seemed to happen often in our household and I was becoming very adept at putting on the happy face.

Black Stars?

If my narrative makes it seem like I was terribly unhappy in my marriage to Dennis I have to correct that impression here.  I wasn't because I did not know any better.  I have always said I was and am one of the happiest people I know. Growing up with my family I learned early on to outwardly let bad events get tucked away and forge ahead. There are a few things I wish now I had learned like you can't make someone else happy and how to express my point of view  instead of being so agreeable all the time. You learn a lot of behavior patterns and parenting skills from your parents, some good and some bad.  

Back to the story......

After Wes was born it was a little difficult with Dennis travelling all week.  His mother, Alpha, came down often and usually stayed a couple of weeks. When she came to visit or my Mother and George we did go places so it was a nice break always with Wes in tow. For Ford events when we needed a baby sitter our neighbor had a couple of teenage daughters who were willing to baby sit. I have to laugh when I hear about couples just going out for the evening for a "date night" without children.  What is that?

My salvation was Mother's Day Out which consisted of three or four hours during the day on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I could run errands, have time to clean the house by myself or actually do something fun.  Some how I discovered a ceramics class where I met other stay-at-home mom's and learned I could do something besides cook, clean and run around finding car parts. The best thing was that I met Becky, who actually lived three blocks down the street from me, had two little girls and a lot of artistic talent.  We became instant friends.

Wes

Becky painted pictures mainly for little children's rooms, taught me how to upholster and I taught her how to wallpaper.  Within a year I had bought my own kiln to fire the ceramics and both of us were overrun with ceramic pieces and paintings.  The idea popped into our minds that we could sell our art projects so we formed what we called the Crafty Artists. It didn't take long to find a few other gals who created artworks at home and wanted to sell them.

Our first venue was in a park in Carrollton on a beautiful spring day.  Becky was the organizer and I was the one who set up the craft sale.  To our surprise it went very well and more people came by and wanted to join the group.  At that time all the malls in the area had craft shows on the weekends to attract customers so it was fairly easy to really go big time.  At least every other month for three years our group appeared at Town East Mall, Valley View Mall and several other smaller malls in the Dallas Fort Worth area.  The group grew to over forty artists including some of Texas's famous ones.

I am the worst sales person in the world but my silly ceramics sold themselves.  By chance a couple of store owners showed up at some of our shows and I started selling to two stores.  We ended up buying a portable building for the backyard for me to work in as the ceramics were over running the house. When the malls stopped having craft shows due to the stores complaining about how much money the shows pulled out of the malls on the weekends I still had the retail stores for customers.  My first little home based business was a success, the extra money was nice, Wes was always with me and I made a lot of friends.

As far as the race car went the weekends were still busy.  We saw less and less of Lee J. so I spent even more time in the garage on the weekend.  Lee J's wife and I, to say it nicely, did not get along very well.  Sort of like mixing oil and water.  She liked to go out a lot on the weekends so Lee J was busy but still came over when he could. 

Racing became a little more difficult when it was just Dennis, Wes and I.  We tried having a kid named Kurt drive the car so Dennis could see what the engine was doing.  Kurt, his Dad and their monkey spent a lot of time at the house which was interesting.  Kurt was great at qualifying for a race and red lighting the first round or something broke in the engine. Dennis went back to driving which did not work out well. One night at Green Valley raceway we actually were winning rounds but in typical Green Valley fashion the races were running late and Dennis said he was tired and loaded up and we went home before we had the chance to try to win.  Back in those days you had to push the race car down the push road to start it and I was always the driver of the push car.  At Tulsa there was no return road for the push car so it followed the race car down the strip after the run.  Evidently the guys in the tower had been watching me go down the strip and they turned the timers on as I went down.  Dennis was not happy that I got the push car down the strip faster than he got the dragster.  I always felt like he needed to let me drive the car.

By this time in the racing world front motored cars were beginning to be a thing of the past.  Dennis decided we should get a back motored one so we had the famous (infamous) Ed Mabrey from Arlington build us a new one. Ed was a master craftsman, very intelligent but also a pretty wild and crazy guy. The front motor car got sold and racing stopped for a several months as we waited for the new car and to  build a new body.  In order to have something to do Dennis built a new trailer to haul the race car in.

Somehow Dennis got the brilliant idea that we should get a female wire-haired fox terrier for Herman and have puppies and sell them.  The female ended up being about the stupidest dog on the planet although she did have a litter of very cute puppies. Once the puppies were gone Dennis got rid of the female and then started taking his temper out on Herman. After he kicked Herman across the backyard one day I found a lady who adored him and gave him away. I loved Herman and needless to say Dennis got a big black star for that one.

Guess I have to explain about black stars.  Remember in grade school when the teacher had a chart on the board and would give you a gold star or a black star for your day's conduct in class.  Very early on in our marriage I conjured up an imaginary chart in my mind for Dennis's behavior.  When he did bad or hurtful things I just put up a black star on the chart.  I don't think he got too many, if any, gold stars.  Stupid as it sounds it did manage to take away most of the disappointment, hurt and anger.

Evidently Hertz stopped doing the rental car sales so we purchased a new 1972 Mercury station wagon with all the bling plus wood trim.  All we needed so I could be like Doris Day was an Old English Sheep dog but after Herman was gone a few months Dennis decided he wanted a boxer.  We planned a two week vacation to Colorado but when we drove to Durango, Colorado and found out that we should have made reservations a year in advance to ride the narrow gauge train he couldn't think of anything else to do.  After Dennis had read all of his latest Hot Rod magazine we came home in three days as he was bored.

So, we are now up to 1974 - eight years of marriage, moved 7 times, had 9 different vehicles, 2 different dragsters and trailers, 3 awful vacations, dog number 5 and baby boy number 1.  I have gotten pretty good at going with the flow but 1974 will get very interesting.

It seems like things never quite work out the way I envisioned them to be.  Bringing baby home from the hospital to rest and peace and quiet didn't happen.  Dennis had called his Mother before we left the house for the delivery and she was at the hospital when Wes was born.  Okay, I can understand her wanting to be there but.....

After three days in the hospital I arrived home shortly before lunch to find that not only was there no food in the house but no one had inquired what formula was needed for the baby.  So I got in the car and went to the grocery store while Dennis and Alpha took care of Wes.  That, plus throw in laundry, ironing and cleaning the house, was the scenario for the next three weeks. Need I mention that I was also the only one who got up during the night for the night time feedings?  In contrast my Mother came to visit for a couple of days after Alpha went home and by 9:00 in the morning she had done the wash, cleaned the house and had dinner planned so we could go shopping or out to lunch with Wes in tow. 

A few months after Wes was born Dennis started travelling for Ford Motor Company visiting dealerships in Texas and Oklahoma.  This meant he left on Monday morning and returned on Friday afternoon.  That was an interesting several years. Through all the years of Dennis working for a large company I did meet a lot of other company wives, only one or two that I had anything in common with.  I always said I could write a book about what the effect of being a single person all week and a married one on weekends did to many of the wives.  It was a very interesting study and perhaps hard in our case as we did not live close to family and when Dennis arrived home on Friday afternoon he never wanted to leave the driveway except when it came to racing.

In truth I was not resentful about the dragster or the amount of time and money we spent on it. I loved the sport as much as he did and it probably was the only thing we really had in common.  Being a stay at home Mom made it easy for me to have the house clean, the yard mowed, meals planned for the weekend when he arrived home on Friday night so there was time for working on our car, going racing or building bodies for other racers.  This created the situation where the only friends we had were other racers and no time for other activities.  

Living in a newly built neighborhood all the other women worked during the day and busy with their families at night.  For the first six months or so I stayed busy decorating the house to the point that Dennis came home one week and walked back out the door because he thought he was in the wrong house. My skill set at making drapes, painting and wallpapering got pretty good. It also caused me to become very independent as I had to take care of every little problem that arose.  One time the neighbor boy who was thirteen came home from school and stayed with Wes while he was napping so I could ride my bike to the auto parts store to get new water hoses for the car.  Chuck, the neighbor boy, learned that day not only how to watch a sleeping baby but also how to replace water hoses.

If the weekdays were a little lonely the weekends were certainly not.  Over the winter of '70-'71 Dennis and Lee J decided to build a bigger engine than the six-cylinder which was, of course, another Ford engine.
The dragster got a new paint job that looked a lot better than the old plain blue one.  Lee J had grown up in Gainesville and had two friends that also had a dragster who became regular fixtures at our house.  Ralph and Mark were both single, about my same age and came to Dallas on Saturday nights to do what ever two wild and crazy guys did on a Saturday night.  They would show up late in the evening on their way home which was usually about the time Dennis was losing his patience with car parts, pieces of aluminum or my inability to not hold something in the perfect position or Wes needing attention.  The whole tone of the evening changed to laughing and silliness.  I don't think either of them ever realized how much I loved having them show up even if they did keep me up until way past my bedtime.  Being around Ralph and Mark both at our house and when we travelled to races together kept racing fun.

My Mother had turned into a different person after her marriage to George...a much nicer person.   He was a great guy, a geologists with Halliburton in Oklahoma City, had a plane so they flew down several times to see us in Carrollton and a huge OU fan.  When a drag race popped up at a new track in Choctaw, Oklahoma we decided to go and not only race but spend the weekend with Mother and George. Wes had gone to the races with us from the time he was a couple of weeks old but it was nice that Mother offered to keep him for the day.  Actually it turned out to be great as it was hot and windy plus the new track was barely finished and there was a fine red dust that settled on everything.  That was George's first time at being a grandparent and he always had a special place in his heart for Wes.  He was very concerned that they did not have a baby bed for him to sleep in but Mother and I showed him how an empty large dresser drawer worked very well in a pinch.   

Once Wes learned to walk I discovered several church's that had Mother's Day Out programs.  For a dollar or two they would entertain your child so you had time to yourself.   There was one on a Tuesday morning and for the first several weeks he sat in the middle of the floor at the church and cried the entire time I was gone.  Guess he was not used to being away from mommy and he had never seen any other small children as none of the people we knew had any.  I signed up for a ceramics class and met some other stay-at-home moms.  It was interesting how one simple little class on Tuesday morning could create such a change in my life.