The local schools were totally segregated. The Ku Klux Klan was prevalent in the Montgomery area. You would see crosses on the vehicles they drove. Martin Luther King Jr. lived and preached in town, had a home on Carter Hill Road, that was bombed. Lynching and bombing were rampant in rural areas of Alabama.
My parents separated when I was five or six years old and my mother moved with my younger brother, Louie Lee, and me, into my grandfather’s big house on South McDonough Street. My grandfather had been ill and my mother attended to him. The house was located a few blocks from the governor’s mansion and my grammar school, Bellinger Hill. I went to school all the way through high school with the children of three different governors: Jim Folsom, John Patterson, and George Wallace.
My grandfather was a successful local businessman. He drove a new Rolls Royce and was a member of Governor Folsom’s staff. My grandfather had been only narrowly defeated in the mayor’s race, just a few years earlier. His campaign slogan was “Win with Glynn.” He was well known locally and owned one of the first home improvement companies to feature Alcoa Aluminum siding in the area.
Bellinger Hill School had a large playground area and every afternoon, Evelyn Cooner, from the Parks and Recreation Department, would come over to the playground and open up a big wooden box full of bats, balls, and gloves. It had equipment to play all kinds of games: badminton, horseshoes, football, everything a kid needed. All the neighborhood kids would gather every afternoon. Students from the grammar school, high school, and even parents in the area played together.