Barbara McDonald, my diary girl

 

Barbara was the same age as me and lived just through the woods behind our home. We often waited together for the morning school bus. Very shy with attractive girls, I rarely spoke with her. 

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I had one of those five-year diaries, with just a few lines to write for each day. For over two years I made daily coded entries, coded for fear that someone might read my diary. Each day I entered one of three codes. Code #1 meant, “I think she likes me less today.” Code #2 meant, “I think she likes me the same as before.” Code #3 meant, “I think she likes me more today.”

 

I had virtually no way of knowing how to provide the “correct” answer each day, but I kept entering my guess...maybe as an expression of my “love” for her.

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My father’s resignation scared me

 

On occasion, our family of five would take a Sunday morning drive to a park about 40 minutes from our home. South Mountain was a small mountain in that park.

 

Excitedly, I said to my father, “Daddy, let’s run up the mountain together!” He replied, “You go ahead, son...I’m feeling tired.” I knew what feeling tired was. But there was something else wrong. My father was resigned about life. Unlike my mother, I could see no spark of excitement about life. I made a promise to myself, “As I grow up, I’ll do whatever I can to keep that child-like delight with the world alive in myself.” My father was only 33 years old then.

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“You’ll change your mind”

 

I noticed that my parents worked so hard. But they had no free time and no free money. I thought to myself, “If they didn’t have three children, they would have a lot of free time and free money.”

 

I told everyone, “I’ll never have children.” Almost everyone replied, “You’ll change your mind.” I never did. When I was twenty-five I even got a vasectomy to help ensure that I didn't "accidentally" have a child.

 

Later in life, I came up with two other reasons not to have kids: they take away quiet and they take away romance, both of which I like very much.

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Masturbation, OMG!

 

It must have been the fall/winter of 1956. I was holding my hard penis with both hands, wrapped in the sheet and the warm electric blanket, fantasizing about being inside one of my female classmates.

 

My mother had taught me about “mating,” which was the word she used when referring to sex, where a man would put his penis inside a woman’s vagina. She neglected to mention anything about movement.

 

I moved my hands a little bit to adjust the blanket and noticed that it felt better. So I moved my hands some more, developing a rhythm of the warm sheet moving up and down along the shaft of my hard penis. It felt better and better, more and more exciting. And then! I exploded! The most intense excitement and pleasure I had ever felt, by far! OMG! This secret pleasure and excitement of sex are what the adults often make innuendos about…”No wonder!” I thought.

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But I want to be a good boy

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As the pleasure and excitement subsided, I began to feel guilty.

 

In the one talk that my father had with me about sex, maybe nine months earlier, I remembered that my father had said that "touching yourself is wrong."

 

I wanted to be a good boy, not a bad boy like I thought many of the bullies and foul mouths at school were. So I promised myself, I would not do it again.

 

On some occasions I would keep my promise for two days, sometimes even three. Then I would do it again. OMG again. This recurring guilt continued until I was 19 when I read some books in which I learned that masturbation is normal and healthy. 

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Much later in life, I told my mother about how I had felt guilty about masturbation. I asked her what she thought about it. She said she thought it was normal and natural. I asked her why, when teaching me about sex, she had not mentioned masturbation. Her reply, “It just never occurred to me.” I don’t think my mother had been aware of how thoughts of masturbation and sex can dominate the everyday life of a young man.

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Protecting Barbara from Marshall

 

Marshall Hall, a year my senior in school, was my regular after-school playmate. One day he bragged to me, “What do you bet I can’t get inside of Barbara’s panties?”

 

I suspected that he could not, but he was so cocky about it, I thought that I might be wrong. He wasn’t good enough for Barbara and, besides that, I was jealous. When I imagined replying with, “Yes, you can,” I thought it might encourage him. When I imagined replying, “No, I don’t think you can,” he might take it as a challenge. Finally, I replied with, “This is boring...let’s talk about something else,” hoping he would forget about the idea.

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Yuck! Sex and pubic hair

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Since I didn’t have any pubic hair yet, when I fantasized “mating” with a girl, we both were without pubic hair. I thought, “It would be too yucky to mate with a girl who had hair.” Later when I began to grow pubic hair, I changed my mind.

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Hay caverns

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In my grandfather’s hay barn, my sister and I re-stacked the bales of hay to create tunnels. We tried to charge our friends a nickel to go through the tunnels. When they balked at our request, we were so excited about showing off our tunnels, we let them go through for free. My grandfather, feeling sorry for us, offered to give us the money that our friends didn’t pay.

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Dateline 1956

 

IBM releases the first computer with a hard drive, the IBM 305 RAMAC, on September 14th. The machine weighed about one ton and measured about 16 square feet. IBM leased it for $3,200 per month. That’s $36,000 in 2022 dollars. The hard drive stored about five megabytes of data. Today you can buy a four terabyte drive for $150, about $13 in 1956 dollars, that will store 800 thousand times that amount. The IBM 305 RAMAC allowed users to immediately retrieve the data they needed without the use of punch cards. The development of the hard drive was a piece of revolutionary technology at the time and it greatly influenced the advancement of how we now use computers today.

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Elvis Presley had his first hit "Heartbreak Hotel."

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Alabama bus segregation laws were declared illegal by the United States Supreme Court.

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The world's population reached 2.82 billion.