Page 73 - People & Places In Time

were Erwin and Vernetta Shultz, they lived two houses up from us. Vernetta continued as one of mom’s closest friends until she passed away. I could tell when she had gone, that mom had suffered a big loss and she missed her companionship a lot.
Erwin was John Shultz’s brother, so they were next door neighbors for a time as well. Their son Dave remains a long-time friend though living in Florida now, I’ve seen little of him, the last time being for his uncle, John Shultz’s funeral. I likely won’t see Dave again; we remain pretty much out of touch. Ron passed away last year; he was one of the few gay men I’ve known. He and I had a lot in common as children and I enjoyed his company until he passed away, even though we didn’t have much contact over the years. John Shultz junior lives on his ranch between Exeter and Visalia and I see him perhaps once every two or three years.
Living on Lenox with the two Shultz families next door with three sons between them, I naturally spent a lot of time with some or all of them. On some summer evenings after dinner we road our bicycles up Rocky Hill, east of town, up to that point where Rocky Hill Drive dips into Yokohl Valley. At this point we turned and headed back down, the way we had come up. I had a speedometer mounted on the handlebars of my bike indicating my speed on the race to the bot- tom of at least 50 mph. Helmets weren’t even a con- sideration back then; we were home on Lenox Avenue before dark.
Erwin and John had grown up on their parents farm a couple of miles north of town. Once more this was an easy bicycle ride. A short way down the road from the farm was a railroad trestle spanning the Saint Johns river . . . it was of course much more of a river then, than it appears today since the construction of Terminus dam. Anyway, we stripped naked walked onto the trestle and jumped into the cool water below. An image of summertime worthy Norman Rockwell,.
Across and up the street, at the corner was the Knox family with son Chuck, another friend I still see from time to time. The Clevenger family lived down the street in the other direction; further down, on the next block were the Capps’ with son Rod, then the Shields
with two daughters, Kathy and Wendy. Joe and Mabel Doctor’s family included five children, Sandy, Mert, Ka- tie, Julie and James; they lived next door to the Shields. Sandy Doctor remains a friend, recently she told me of an entry in her mother’s diary, confirming that Mabel and my dad had been an item in high school. My moth- er, before marrying my dad, lived in the same rooming house that Joe lived in before marring Mabel.
If a family did move from the neighborhood, their house would continue to be known as the “Phil- lips’ house or the “Knox” house. As if the family’s spirit had become a part that house and a permanent part
of Exeter (pg 53). Neighborhoods change, friends and memories don’t, as part of this legacy, some may move on or even die, but “their never gone”. A name attached to a house remains, until no one is left to remember.
One block over from Lenox, along Channing Way lived the families of close friends, Terri Richards, Jennie Sandage and Steve Stanley, also the Wyrick, Far- rar, Turner and Harris families. Chuck Knox once told me, that at one point, there was at Exeter High School over thirty of us in various classes from this neighbor- hood, at one time. The four blocks comprising our neighborhood included the children of parents who had grown up attending schools in Exeter, those who had returned from war and those who waited; they married and settled into roles as part of Exeter’s legacy and its future, but now, change was edging into this familiar continuity.
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These names represent families that are at least second and third generation in Exeter, they serve to emphasize the connections that have prevailed through generations. Today, though many do remain, many oth- ers have drifted elsewhere. The continuity that bound Exeter so intimately, creating bonds that held the town close new generations have begun drifting away, and that includes me along with close friends and classmates
is changing. There are some who left and never looked back, while others left for college, eventually settling in other communities, marrying, starting new careers, building families, but also never completely sev- ering their ties to Exeter. It’s not uncommon for some
John Schults depicted on a mural celebrating his contribution to the annual fourth of July show, is painted near the intersection of Main and ‘D’ streets in downtown Exeter.
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