The First Time
Part 1 of Welcome to Charlottesville, a weekly visit to a town, a failed art project, and the future of America.
Welcome to Charlottesville
The first time I moved to Charlottesville, I was three or four. My mom was fleeing a bad marriage with my older brother Bret and me. She couldn’t go back to her parents in East Brady, Pennsylvania because they’d warned her not to marry the guy but she had anyway. Her parents were not puritanical people. Oshie was a bridge-playing inventor’s daughter, and Skeets was a self-made fatherless son. They were fun people who ran the local factory with cocktails and cigarettes, but marriage was marriage. Mom had made her bed and now must lie in it. My mom, however, wouldn’t lie in it. She’s always done things her way. (That’s about the only thing we have in common; that, and pale skin.) Mom had a cousin in Charlottesville, ‘Aunt’ Barbara Pace, we called her, married to Bill Pace who worked for the school district’s athletic department. They accepted a fleeing woman with two kids.
My mom eventually landed a job managing the Hessian Hills apartments then under construction. She had no experience and no college degree (dropped out of William & Mary with mono, and American University to get married) but her boss was a strong-willed lady who rode around in a golf cart and did things her way too. We got to live in whatever apartment was empty, which if you’re a kid is glorious. At first that meant one of the two-floor townhouses. Our back patio faced the passing cars of Barracks Road. In the photo below we’re at the door of unit K, my mom managing to look beautiful even in her Sherlock Holmes cape, and me and my brother rocking our crew cuts. (I peaked at four.)
Here’s a Google map capture of the complex still today. Our townhouse was one of those in the distance on the left.
The ‘Hessians’ of Hessian Hills were 4000 British and Hessian prisoners captured during the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Saratoga. They were marched overland south to Charlottesville where they built themselves a prison camp including lots of barracks from which ‘Barracks Road’ is named. Hometown politician Thomas Jefferson pulled strings to get them here in order to help the local economy. Once they got here there was very little supervision. Officers rented rooms in town, enlisted men wandered off to work or marry local women. (Many stayed after the war and became American citizens.) This eccentric approach to what the wider world takes seriously will characterize much of Charlottesville history.
Most of my early memories of Charlottesville are of that apartment complex. Throwing up when I tried to eat sweet potatoes. (My mom still claims I did it on purpose.) Watching the Minnesota Vikings lose to the Miami Dolphins. (I’ve rooted for them ever since. Skol Vikes!) Collecting tent caterpillars in our Big Wheels. Recurring nightmares of the upper half of the townhouse where my brother and I slept tumbling off the bottom.
When the townhouse was rented by a paying customer we moved into a smaller, second-floor apartment. That was my favorite because it had a balcony and from the balcony we could see the patio of aunt Clarice’s basement apartment. She’d just moved to Charlottesville fresh out of the Peace Corps, and landed a job with the public schools. Bret and I were allowed to visit her as well as wander around the complex investigating the construction sites (and vandalizing many of them according to my brother). We were nearly as unsupervised as the Hessians. At some point I remember being awakened to watch the moon landing but I was too young to realize a moon landing was special. After all, my favorite toy, Major Matt Mason, lived in a space station on the moon.
My brother taking control of my Major Matt Mason moon base playset.
As far as Charlottesville memories I only can conjure up a vague montage of a girl in preschool with a runny nose (I couldn’t look but I couldn’t look away), endless rides in the back seat up and down hills, and bumping my head on the airplane in McIntyre Park. (The Air Force has been my least favorite service branch every since.)
But what I loved in Charlottesville even more than the apartment with the balcony, what I loved perhaps most in all the world, were these little plastic forks given out with bags of french fries by the nearby Hardee’s. (It was near where the Arby’s is now, I think.) I’m sure they were a choking hazard but America was willing to let a few kids choke for the sake of cute forks. It was a different time.
I only remember my biological father visiting once. Bret and I rode with him up Skyline Drive for an impromptu picnic of convenience store white bread and peanut butter spread with a pocket knife. I don’t remember what he looked like other than his hands making those sandwiches. I wasn’t scared of him but I remember feeling safe in Charlottesville with him not there. It had been a frightening home my mom had taken us from: two sometimes violent half-brothers by a previous marriage and their vanished mother purportedly in an asylum for threatening to kill my biological father. Allegedly he woke up one morning with her standing on the bed pointing a shotgun down at his face. One of those half-brothers would eventually do a long prison stint for assaulting another relative in a wheelchair. She never spoke again. Or those are the family stories. I don’t know how much is true, but I remember being happy to have escaped.
Before my mom took the final drastic step of ditching her husband and step-children and moving us here, she had tried to calm the household by taking in boarders, including aunt Clarice and a man named John Jones. Both were attending the local college. Only when Clarice went to the Peace Corps and John Jones went to Vietnam, did everything finally fall apart. John Jones wrote my mom long letters, and sent reel-to-reel tapes, and when he returned stateside he and my mom started dating. I’d known him since I was two, and loved him always for his humor and kindness, so while I don’t remember any specific visits to Charlottesville, I remember being aware that he was around. I was overjoyed when the summer before I turned 6 they married and we all moved to his hometown of Laurens, South Carolina. We never expected to come back to Charlottesville.
But we did. I did. Four major times in fact, plus lots of minor, more temporary, returns.
I want to tell you about the next return, but first I want to share the failed project that launched this series.
Welcome to Charlottesville appears every Tuesday. Pt 2: Police Stories is next.