Ever since my high school days more than 30 years ago, the date July 23rd has had special meaning to me. So it is fitting that I select Thursday, July 23, 2009, to salute my longtime close friend Harold Tolbert of Austin, Texas, and reflect on our 43 years of friendship. July 23rd is both Harold's birthday and his wedding anniversary. I have always been in awe of H.T.'s slick idea to get married on his birthday. What man hasn't forgotten his anniversary at least once in his life? Easy answer. Harold Tolbert. Every year on July 23rd when my buddy turns another year older, he and his lovely wife Rhonda pop the cork on a bottle of champagne or wine and toast their wedding anniversary. So today, with great love and respect to the "Shammy Dog," my home boy H.T. celebrates his 53rd birthday. I started giving him birthday cards around 1973 on July 23rd and don't believe I have ever missed sending him birthday greetings through the postal service or via telephone call in the 36 years since. As you can see from the photo above of the two of us taken earlier this year, one of us has not aged very well (and it's not the brother) but what hasn't suffered from the ravages of time is the devotion and level of love and respect the two of us feel for one another. I cannot speak for my longtime pal, but speaking solely for myself I have to say that Harold Tolbert has been just like a brother to me since we were in high school in West Columbia in the 1970s. But the genesis of our relationship began years before the two of us started hanging together when we were young teenagers.
When my children throw questions my way about my childhood and teenaged years they often want to know about segregation. All of my boys are grown now and they all grew up attending the same schools that their mother and father went to back in the day, but with one major difference. Peggy and I started school at West Columbia Elementary School in 1963, actually receiving our first grade educations in adjoining classrooms. Our children have lived their lives in an integrated world where children of all races coexist in practically every facet of the modern American way. But it wasn't always that way. Harold Tolbert and other black children my age, from the elementary grades all the way up to seniors in high school, were segregated away from the white children in West Columbia. The Charlie Brown School, sitting on property donated by a former slave named Charlie Brown who became a millionaire later in life after being freed along with all the other Negroes in our nation at the close of the Civil War, is a mere three blocks from the property I have called my home since I was five years old. West Columbia was a generic Southern town in America in the 1960s. In the time of my early childhood white children such as myself went to school and church without seeing any black faces, swam in the public swimming pool in town where no children or adults of color were allowed, and downed their ice cold sodas and hot buttered popcorn in The Capitol Theater where the popular movies of the day were shown and any blacks attending the town's movie theater had to enter through a separate side door and sit in the balcony, kept separated from all of the white people sitting below.
It was not until 1966 that black children were allowed to attend the former all-white schools in the Columbia-Brazoria Independent School District in West Columbia and Brazoria. And then our school district approached "integration" of the races on what would have to be labeled more of a trial basis. The majority of black students continued attending the Charlie Brown school in West Columbia and Henry O. Tanner school in Brazoria during the 1966-67 school year, while a handful of black children and teenagers ventured into a world of the unknown by becoming the first children of their race to walk the halls of formerly segregated elementary schools in the two neighboring Brazoria County towns and the junior high and high school in West Columbia. My longtime close friend Harold Arlean Tolbert Jr. and his cousins Herbert Cotton and Margo Diggs were among the few black fourth graders we had in West Columbia. Both Harold and Margo were in Joyce Lester's fourth grade classroom with me and my other white classmates. Herbert was in Mrs. Askew's classroom next door to ours. Harold and I hit it off well practically from the start when we were in the fourth grade. I can still vaguely recall playing with Harold on the playground at the old elementary school that has since been a victim of the wrecking ball. I remember how entertaining he was, always talking like Donald Duck and displaying a hyper personality while keeping me laughing when we all went outside to play. Margo and Harold are both very intelligent people who quickly erased the opinion I had created in my young mind of Negroes being "a lesser race of people" that had been created by my existing in an isolated, uninformed world of public segregation. While Harold and I didn't become best friends until high school, that fourth grade "experimental" year was when the seeds of friendship were actually planted. I have a strong, vivid memory of one incident during that year when my friendship with Harold was in its infancy that, for some odd reason, stands out more than the others. I remember Mrs. Lester had stepped out of the classroom for some reason. She had given her students instructions to stay at our desks and work on some project or read a book or something like that. She wasn't gone long when Vernon Whitehead and Richard Cole began chasing each other around the room and one of them bumped into Harold's desk, sending my black friend tumbling over in his chair and his desk falling on top of him while Vernon and Richard continued their horseplay. When Mrs. Lester came walking back in the room she saw me helping my new friend get out from under his desk and put his books and school supplies back in it. Harold was crying and Mrs. Lester asked him was he crying because he was hurt or just because he was mad. I don't remember what Harold said in reply, but I know that particular incident went a long way in totally altering my opinion of black people and putting me on a path, which I admit took many years to walk, of acceptance of my fellow human beings, regardless of their race and different backgrounds and upbringings. Harold Tolbert laughed and cried just like I did, he felt pain and joy as any other child of nine years old would, and the two of us were able to speak to one another in class and on the playground as equals, not simply as black and white children. When my younger sister began her elementary school experience with trial integration that same year she was in the first grade with Harold's sister Sandra. There is a memorable story those two girls can tell, and still do when they get together, that involved their swapping shoes one day at school. My mother asked Kelli whose shoes she was wearing when she arrived home one afternoon from elementary school without her own shoes. Mama was irate when she discovered that Kelly was wearing a black girl's shoes and demanded that my sister get her own shoes back the following day at school. The point I try to make with this story is that the integration of the races in the public school system in the 1960s in West Columbia and across the nation was more of a problem with the adults than with the children who actually had to go through it. Or at least that is my take on the matter. My brother and sister and I all had black friends when we were children. Today I have just as many close black friends as I do white friends and take pride in having been able to blur the line of separation between the various races to the point where it doesn't even exist any longer. Harold Tolbert deserves a great deal of the credit for creating that change in my own life. I cannot thank him enough.
Our close relationship actually had its nascence in the early days of our four-year tenure at Columbia High School. Harold lived in East Columbia with his family: parents Harold Sr. and Essie Tolbert, daughters Shirley, Sandra, Reeva and Lorie and their lone son, Harold Jr., who was (and still is today) referred to as "Bubba" by his four sisters. My mother grew up in East Columbia as well, and we spent a large amount of time at our grandmother's house, my brother Cody and sister Kelli and I, when we were kids. So after I got my driver's license at age 16, Harold and Herbert and Herbert's younger brother Johnny began to spend more and more time together in East Columbia, playing football, baseball and basketball, card games and dominoes, and listening to lots of music (while stealing sips from Mister Harold's ice cold beer when he wasn't looking). We remained close friends throughout our high school days, bonding in such a manner that our mutual love for each other has survived portions of five decades and we stay in touch even today, although Harold's physical absence from my life the majority of the time is one of the most difficult adjustments I have been forced to make since I became an adult. Harold, who is pictured above at about 14 or 15 and below on the campus of Columbia High School in the fall semester of our senior year in 1974 when H.T. was a starting defensive back on the Roughnecks varsity football team (he wore the same number 22 that his nephew Jared Flannel would wear for his four seasons as a standout Roughneck running back prior to becoming a Texas Tech Red Raider), put West Columbia in his rearview mirror after graduating from Columbia High in May 1975 when he embarked on his collegiate days in Austin as a student at Huston-Tillotson University. Our post-high school paths seemed to mirror one another in many ways. Harold stood up for me at my June 1980 wedding as one of my groomsmen and I would later act as his best man when he took Rhonda Bonner as his bride a couple years later. Peggy and I had three sons and so did Harold and Rhonda. I graduated from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville and went to work in the newspaper field while H.T. collected his college degree from Huston-Tillotson and has worked a long time for the City of Austin, and we each are now looking forward to our eventual retirements when hopefully the two of us will have much more free time to hook up more frequently than we have been able to do in the past because of our respective jobs and busy family lives.
My buddy H.T. has always, ever since our early post-high school days in the mid 1970s, taken much pride in the vehicles he has driven. I took the two pictures below of Harold with a couple of his sporty rides. The first photo was taken at Surfside Beach, where we used to love to drive up and down the coastline getting an eye full of the scantily clad babes and showing off our Camaros and Firebirds and (in the case of our mutual Columbia High School running buddies Melvin Johnson and Gilbert Jones) Corvettes. The beach shot is from around 1976 or 1977, while the lower photo of Harold was taken on a recent visit to my West Columbia home. Once again, H.T. is showing off his stylish wheels. Today, more than 30 years after I used to frequently cruise the beaches with Harold, Melvin, Gilbert, Steve Weems, Ronnie Taylor and other good friends, I often find myself thinking back to those wonderful summer months of my youth when trips to Galveston, Surfside, Matagorda, Bryan and Quintana beaches always offered quick escapes from the usual drudgery of those extremely hot summer months. Just thinking back to those days of long ago brings back the soulful sounds of WAR, my favorite group from the 1970s, performing great songs like "Summer," "All Day Music" and "Slippin' Into Darkness" on our 8-track players. I still have all of those old 8-track tapes from the seventies but, unfortunately, nothing to listen to them on any longer. Similarly I no longer have Harold as my constant companion like I did in the 1970s but the memories of those special days from the past are kind of like those old 8-tracks . . . they may be "oldies but goodies" but I will forever cling to those memories of our special childhood bond and keep my first black friend close to me at all times in my thoughts and prayers, when unable to stand next to him in the real world. Just as I stood next to him at his wedding and he was by my side at mine, my hopes are that Harold will always be there for me in times of need. And I will forever try to return the favor. I love you Bubba!
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