Page 85 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

A few months later, we met a lady, Maude Britt, at the First Baptist Church who had a
vacant apartment in her new duplex on Park Avenue, just a half block from the FSU
Campus. This time I didn’t have to climb on the roof for a TV antenna. I bought two 12
feet sections of pipe, topped with an electric motor that could rotate the antenna. With
this arrangement, I occasionally received television programs from distant places like
Cuba, Texas, and even Buffalo, NY. This was only under unusual atmospheric
conditions in the winter when it was cloudy or foggy.

When my college courses began, I tried to supplement our income with such things as
selling Wearever aluminum cookware. I was unsuccessful at that, so I finally got a
newspaper delivery route for the Florida Times-Union. It was for the “Star-edition”,
which only went to the black neighborhoods. The only trouble was not many
prescriptions were prepaid. For those unpaid subscriptions, I had to go to each house to
collect. Needless to say, I barely collected enough to pay for gas and wear and tear on
my car.

While working there, we learned of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama after
Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus, which was required under the laws of a
segregated south. There was great resistance to desegregation of public school. I
frequently remarked to my coworkers in the Times-Union office that I couldn’t
understand why it was customary to have black maids in white homes raising their
children when they didn’t want black children integrated with white children in the
schools.

I was able to quit delivering newspapers when I got a job working for Dr. Noel LaSeur
in the Meteorology Department on Jefferson Street. The department was located in a
two-story wooden building on Jefferson Street two blocks from Westcott auditorium.
On the second floor, I could read the latest synoptic weather observations on a teletype
printer, and see the weather charts on a facsimile machine. There was one room with a
table containing electric comptometers where we tallied rainfall totals for more than a
hundred recording sites around the state. The calculating machine had eight columns,
each containing ten numbers, 0 to 9, with which to tabulate daily totals. I was
impressed with the great variations of rainfall around the state.

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