Baltimore Maryland...A Strange Stop during my Cosmic Journey

We lived about where the red dot is

My dad in the parking lot of the Baltimore business.."cool dude"

OK, we have left Wilmington Delaware in the rear view mirror and are now in Baltimore Maryland (to be accurate...Lutherville/Timonium). This would have been mid-1961 to mid-1963. I would have been 15 to 17 years old during this time. My dad did such a great job in Wilmington that the DuPont family I spoke of decided to expand to Baltimore and they put my dad in charge of getting the business up and running.

I left some good memories in Wilmington, especially my girlfriend. As mentioned before, her parents allowed her to come and visit us in Baltimore. She would come by bus and we would drive into Baltimore to pick her up. It was only about 100 miles from Wilmington to Baltimore. This happened two or three times but things cooled, as they will do when you are 14 and little by little the boyfriend/girlfriend thing died away. We wrote to each other for awhile but that died away too. As they say, you will never forget your first and I don't.

My Dulaney Valley HS picture

Baltimore was a strange stop in my cosmic journey. I have memories but they are of specific things. I have absolutely NO memory of going to school and you would think I would since it was my 10th and 11th grade years. How strange is that. I found myself in the Dulaney Valley High School yearbook but I have no memory of going there, no real memory of any friends, no memory of attending any classes....it is the oddest thing.

Our house was just above the Hwy 146 oval above the red finish button

The fishing cabin

The Lake not 10 minutes from our house

Lock Raven from the air

The fishing boats you could rent on Lock Raven

Since I don't have any real memories of school, I will hit on some others that I do have. The first is Lock Raven Reservoir. My dad did not want to live in Baltimore proper. He wanted to live where there were good schools (which I don't remember) and a neighborhood that was safe. Baltimore was getting kinda iffy if you know what I mean. As mentioned, we lived in Lutherville/Timonium in Dulaney Valley. Not 10 minutes from our house (by bike) was Lock Raven Reservoir. Here, I could rent a little boat...head out to the middle of the lake and go fishing....something I remember doing a lot. There was also a very nice country club out there that my dad joined. He was also still a member of Kennett Square Country Club but that was now about an hour away. I just remember hanging out at the fishing lodge and talking to the owners and the fishermen that were coming and going. I also remember going with my dad to play golf. If he had a foursome of adults, I would just drive the cart, but if it was just him and me...he would continue my golf lessons.

Our boat and house in background

The Sunfish sailboat I learned on

Since we were so close to the reservoir and also had access to a summer cabin on the Severn River...my dad decided to buy a small boat. I think we all knew that he was never really going to use it but he bought it anyway. I do have some great memories of that boat and also some bad memories. I have more memories of that boat after we moved to Texas, but that's for later blogs. We had the best time taking that boat to the cabin, launching it into the Severn River and heading for the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay....right in front of the US Navel Academy in Annapolis Maryland, just about 5 miles from where our cabin was. We would do our fishing and crabbing right there. The crabbing was excellent. We would catch a couple bushel baskets of crabs, put them in a cooler and head back to the cabin and have a crab bake with all the neighbors. My dad was still the social butterfly and knew everybody. He would make a few phone calls and by the time we got back to the cabin, there would be bunches of people waiting for the crab bake and beer drinking party. My mom was still social but not as much as she had been while in Washington DC. I also remember taking our boat right up to the boat docks at Annapolis, tie up and walk the grounds. The Navel Cadets would meet us, make sure we tied the boat up securely and then watch the boat for us until we returned....I think that was part of their training. I'm pretty sure you couldn't do that today. I also learned to sail while we lived in Baltimore. Our next door neighbor on the Severn River had a small sail boat and he would take me and his daughter out into the calm part of the Chesapeake Bay and teach us how to sail. Boy, did we have a great time. I learned to sail a small sailboat called the Sunfish and I thought I was in hog heaven!! I also really remember his daughter's two piece bikini. She was my age and was really filling out. She and I had a really good time sailing the little boat up and down the river and talking to all the neighbors on both sides.
Before I leave the memories about the boat...I have to mention that my dad and I went to Power Squadron school together. That was an organization that taught new boat owners how to handle a boat correctly. That was fun and one of the better memories of my father and I doing something together.

This would become my car but it was the blue of the convertible

I will talk about one final thing. It was about time for me to get my drivers license and at the same time, my dad was buying another new car. He was always a Buick fan but he knew a guy that could get him a Chevrolet at a real good price. He bought a blue 1960 Chevy Impala two door. I didn't know it at the time but that would become my car as soon as we moved to San Antonio. I have included two pictures of the 1960 Impala. The convertible you see was the exact color so use you imagination and put that color on the picture of the hard top and you will get an idea of what my first car looked like. I needed to get my license so I had to start learning to drive. I remember my dad taking me out to a parking lot on a Sunday morning to teach me to drive. I do find the humor that he was teaching me on a Sunday morning while all the while swearing at me for every mistake I would make (my favorite was...."Goddamn it, you're going to kill us both")....the beers in the car didn't help. Apparently he thought he needed to bring some beer along during my lesson to give him the courage to ride with me. My mother was really the one who taught me to drive. She was sick and tired of my dad coming home after one of my lessons and being pissed off the rest of the day, so she decided to take over. The day of my test, I had to go to downtown Baltimore to take the test. My mother refused to go because she really didn't like downtown Baltimore. In those days, it was dirty and very unsafe. Anyway my dad drove me down to the testing station and I passed both the written and driving tests with flying colors. We headed out to the car and I headed to the passenger side and my dad said, what do you think your doing. You just got your license so you drive home and give the old man a break. I got in and started up and the next thing I remember was that my dad had me getting onto the the expressway at rush hour in Baltimore Maryland, driving towards home. I was scared shitless, I didn't have that many hours of driving experience under my belt and now he had me out there with thousands of cars driving 70+ MPH. I wanted to pee so bad that I almost let it go, I was scared so bad, but I got home and when I pulled in the driveway, I felt so good that I had really accomplished something.

Well, I'll stop here for today but in the next blog, I will remember George, our Poodle,..... Henry, our Mynah bird, Johnny Unitas and bowling, and a few other memories that made my short stay in Baltimore interesting!!