Me -- Beginning to Be Chapter 3

 

“Down the road a ways from home was a bridge. I’d walk down there on warm spring days and sit up on that there bridge. You could see the schoolhouse from it and they could see me sittin’ up on that bridge jus’ doin’ nothin’. It was hot and you could hear them kids ‘cause the school windows was up. A teacher saw me sittin’ and she motions the whole class up ‘gainst those windows. ‘Take a look at a fool,’ she said real loud, ‘who isn’t goin’ amount to nothin’” –  Bill Meredith

William Wilson Meredith the Second got a chest x-ray and the doctor saw a spot on his lung. The diagnosis was tuberculosis and he was pulled out of school and send to a sanitarium. Somebody later discovered the spot was a dirt smudge on the photo plates and sent him home again. (My dad on the far right, 1930, (12 years old,)

But he never went back to school. He didn’t do much after coming home, but get into mischief. He was a tough kid. He almost beat his brother to death out in the woods one day because Ben sassed him. (Benjamin and William in 1922 on the  right)  He and some friends dismantled a farmer’s Motel T and reconstructed it on the barn roof one Halloween, which seems an over ambitious prank to me. And he spent a lot of days ambling down from Meredith Row to the Brandywine Bridge and lollygagging there, staring at the school across the creek. He said it was to laugh at the kids stuck in that place on hot days, but maybe he missed being there.

When his father died his dawdling about and prankster days came to an abrupt end. He spent a year in the CCC, and then he came back home looking for steady work.

  About ten or so miles east was a teenage girl who
had her fill of steady work. She had enough of mushrooms. She dreamed of being a movie star like the glamorous women on the covers of the magazines she read, such as Modern Screen and Movie Mirror. When David O. Selznick announced a nationwide talent search to find a fresh face to play Scarlet O’Hara in the production of Gone With  The Wind

, she entered. These contests were publicity stunts for the film and nothing more, but what dreamy-eyed young woman knew that? She had wavy red hair, blue eyes and confidence she could play the part. Of course the part went to Vivian Leigh (pictured left; mom pictured right), not any of the thousands of anonymous amateur hopefuls.

Her nickname was Millie. Family and friends called the boy squandering his time on the Modena Bridge Willie.

Willie and Millie, it sounds
like a Saturday morning cartoon show for children. But Willie and Millie were not yet a team having not met. It is a wonder they hadn’t. They were family, second cousins in fact.

Millie was in her senior year at West Chester High School. Willie was through an equal  number of years in the school of hard knocks. One day a friend of Millie’s introduced her to Willie, a friend of that girl’s boyfriend. Millie  though Willie was pretty sharp. He was tall and thin with a head of dark wavy hair. It was a chance meeting; a brief encounter and she didn’t expect to see the guy again.

One day this same girlfriend asked Millie if she would like to go on a moonlight boat ride with her and her boyfriend. “Willie would be there.” She said.

 “Yes, you bet’cha,” said mom.

At the start of the cruise a storm hit and everyone got back off the boat. Millie had her hair curled for the date and put on a new navy crepe dress for the occasion. She wanted to look her best, but she ended up soaking wet with her curls coming down and her crepe dress shrinking up. She decided this guy would never want to see her again.

Lo and behold, he made another date with her.

And then he stood her up.

 Her parents took her to a carnival in Coatesville a few nights later. She ran into Willie there. They walked around together and that was the beginning of their romance.

Willie had no car so he hiked from Modena to Whitford to visit, a distance of 9 or 10 miles. She would walk across the field around the lake to the roadway and meet him. She would sit up on the rail fence, her long red hair blowing along with the tall grasses of the field. They would link hands and talk for hours.

 

Willie wouldn’t come up to the house. He had walked 10 miles; perhaps he didn’t want to walk any further. Maybe he wanted to lean against the fence and rest his feet. But one-day Millie’s mother trudged across the field and asked if he would like to stay for supper. After that they never got rid of him. He was always there, like the squeak in the floorboards. Millie’s dad would come home from work and find Willie sitting on the porch.

He even began sleeping over on that porch. Millie’s dad would come out in the morning to leave for his job and find Willie curled up there. “Boy, I thought you went home,” he would say and shake his head.