This is in Marietta’s City Cemetery, the plot of brothers Sam and Carl Van Callaway.. We knew Carl as Van, and I did not know he was named after his father until I saw this tombstone. I think his parents are buried in Dalton, Georgia.
I grew up with Van. His older brother Sam was in the Army and fought in the Korean War. I only saw Sam a few times over the years. Van is buried in his grave but I'm not sure where Sam is buried.
The Calllaways lived on Atlanta Street in Latimer Apartments. While living there they lived across Atlanta Street in another apartment house lived a girl in our class at Waterman Street School that we both had a crush on and had a friendly rival going on. We would climb trees in the apartment house’s back yard and jump off the apartment’s garage building and do other show-off dangerous missions.
Our principal, Miss Whitehead, lived in a boarding house two house down and noticed our after school show-off activities and put us to work by giving us the key the paper drive house and were then responsible to unlock the door for people to make off hours deliveries and pickups of paper-drive paper.
Van’s father worked at the railroad depot (now Marietta’s Visitor’s Center). We visited him at work at work for Van to beg some money off him to go to a Matinee at the Strand Theater. He appeared not to like shelling out his change for his son to see a movie.
I think our friendly competition showing off for the girl might have gotten under Van’s skin. In the 5th grade at recess one day he pushed me against the fire escape. It cracked my forehead opened. I was bleeding. They called my father, who was a Marietta policeman, so nearby. Until he got there, Miss Shouse, my 5th grade teacher carried me to the teachers’ lounge and on a couch had me put my head in her lap while she held an ice pack to the wound. I was in pain but yet I was in ecstasy cuddling up to a female’s lap. A year or so later, she became Mrs. Bill Kinney. For several years I had a Frankenstein scar on my forehead.
A few years Mr. Callaway was transferred to Dalton, Georgia. Of course Van had to move to Dalton. Since Van was a child of a Railroad employee he got free train passage. So, when he first moved he often traveled back and forth between Marietta an Dalton. One time I went back with him and was going to spend the night in Dalton. When Mr. Callaway saw me there he did not like it. He sent me back the same evening that I had arrived.
Which reminds me of one time my late friend Larry was carry his younger sister and her friend to a Marietta Hgh School football game on a Friday night and they had to wait on Whitlock Avenue at the train crossing wait on a train that was stopped. They were even with the diner car and passengers were dining. Larry’s sister and her friends rearranged themselves in the front seat, push their rear ends up to the front windshield, pulled down their pants and mooned them.
Later they moved to Phillips Drive.
One evening after I was married, on the Square at a concert I ran into Van. He was still single. Not long after that he died on the operating table. He was a diabetic and was to have a let amputated and the doctor amputated the wrong leg.
His brother Sam was furious and tried to sue the doctor but it did not work out. Sam met a lady that lived in Alabama and he moved in with her. He quit taking his high blood pressure medicine and said “let nature take its course.” Which it probably has by now
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