THE BEST SUMMER OF MY LIFE!

I couldn't bear to spend the summer at home where tension hung in the air like thick fog, so when my friend Bootsie asked me to spend the summer with her waiting tables at a resort on Jekyll Island, I was in!  Her father drove us down in his newly air conditioned car (it was 1962) where the temperature was about 40 degrees for the whole trip.  I sat in the back seat with my teeth chattering, but I wouldn't complain.  I was free for the first time in my life! Bootsie and I found jobs at a round glass restaurant right on the beach. When told that we would be picked up at 6:30

 AM, to work breakfast I almost fainted, but I kept on smiling.  All the college students

were staying at an old hotel which many years ago was a luxurious place where very wealthy people gathered.  At this point, part of the building was condemned and the rest should have been, but hey! it was $15 per week and the linens were changed weekly.  A double bed dominated the room and the sink in the bathroom was the size of a small baking pan.  All the girls were housed on one floor and the boys were on the floor above.  

The  biggest attraction was the pool outside which was fed by an artesian well. After work we all sat around the always cold and refreshing pool and built up

our tans.  That summer was the only time in my life when I had a tan, but I have paid for that golden skin by having skin cancer for 25 years.  When not lounging by the pool, we rode bikes around the island which was beautiful.

There were no parents, no house mothers, no hall monitors and no rules.  Since it was a dry island we were forced to drink as much as we could.  At night the parties lasted for hours; it was after all the summer of the Twist.  If there wasn't a party, there was always some young man who wanted to take us on a date.

Dates on Jekyll consisted of the young man getting a hold of some liquor and something to mix it with and lying on the beach with a willing young lady.  There was drinking and 

kissing followed by more kissing and

drinking.  The reason nothing got out of hand was the beach at night was also inhabited by many, many turtles as well as many, many people searching for these turtles and their eggs.  These folks were serious and earnest adults with flashlights and a scientific bent and we were drunken and entwined young people who were up to no good.  But it is impossible to lose one's virtue when turtles keep marching by followed by oblivious adults who kick sand in your face and step on your feet.  I'd had no idea that romance could be so difficult.

But while we were drinking and twisting and kissing on the moonlit beach, the world beyond our little island was changing.  We heard reports of black people being beaten for trying to sit in a white restaurant.  These troubles seemed so distant from our carefree days of serving tables and sitting by the pool.  But soon we would all be forced to change our ideas, our attitudes and our behaviors.
Wrenching change would soon begin to tear our country apart and its reverberations
would even reach our little paradise.

       

                                              TO BE CONTINUED