My grandmother took me to Roanoke, VA in 1958. We stayed at the Patrick Henry Hotel, a Colonial Revival hotel on South Jefferson Street.
Nonnie let me go down to the mezzanine of the hotel where I sat on a black leather couch to watch I Love Lucy on a 21-inch black and white television there.
The show was the first scripted TV program to be shot on 35mm film in front of a studio audience and the first to feature an ensemble cast. It is considered the most influential sitcom in US television history.
I also recall a kindly black porter who took me into the luncheonette and bought me a big hamburger with mayonnaise on it. He called it “a steak burger.”
Mom found us again. After much negotiation to which I was not invited, Nonnie, Dale, and mom came to a semi-practical solution. Dale transferred to Arthur Murray’s Dance Studio in Roanoke. Dale rented a U-Haul and moved us all to Day Avenue in Roanoke.
To please Nonnie, we lived in two separate but adjacent apartments. This was only the third time in my first twenty years that I lived with, or at least near, my mother.
In 1958, one of Arthur Murray's biggest franchise owners asked mom and Dale to help open a new studio in Ponce, Puerto Rico.
Dale and Nonnie were not getting along. Consequently, my mother and Dale left for Puerto Rico.
With them out of the picture, Nonnie took me by Greyhound bus to Wooster, Ohio, the city where I was conceived.
I went through junior high and high school there until 1964.
