Some of you have been patiently waiting (not so patiently in
a few cases, but that’s ok, I've been a little slow and I’m glad you're interested!) to hear
the story behind the cool metal mesh clutch I acquired while driving from
Seneca, SC to Savannah, GA. So here is the story I was told, a small chapter in the life of Charlene,* girlfriend to a rock star back in the day.
I don't really hang out with famous rock stars or their girlfriends much, so
it’s kind of exciting. It's like a very removed brush with fame – albeit over 40
years after the fact, but hey, it’s a brush! Although, I have to say, I do know a few up and coming, incredibly talented musicians who deserve to get there. Totally different sounds, but both groups are fantastic. So please, check them out - The Winchester in Chicago and Aeris here in Michigan, contact info listed below.
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| About how it looked when I was there. |
I met Charlene at a bar in Aiken, South Carolina called City
Billiards, founded in 1957. It’s a place that claims to have “The Best
Cheeseburger you’ll ever eat.” That’s why I stopped there for lunch and it was
a pretty darn good Cheeseburger, I have to say (mine was Medium, Swiss cheese, spicy mustard and grilled mushrooms and onions, just in case anyone wondered!). The place was pretty much empty
when I was there. It was late, after the lunch crowd had left. The stragglers besides me and Charlene left while we were there.
Charlene and I struck up a conversation while I ate lunch and she had a couple more drinks and some of my french fries.
Charlene lives in Aiken these days, but she grew up in a small town nearby,
which I won’t name at her request. She was fine with me writing about her, but
didn’t want her real name or where she grew up used and I am happy to oblige. I also have to clarify, this is all hearsay. I have absolutely no authentication for any part of this story. Except I believe her. Totally.
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| Charlene's Bag |
As we talked and I told her about my new online store, Charlene offered
to show me some of the things she’d kept since she was a teenager. Of course, I
jumped at the chance. We spent the next several hours at her small place. She
offered to let me have whatever I wanted, but I couldn’t do that. I’ve had
friends offer to give me things before and it makes me uncomfortable, like I’m
taking advantage of a friendship to get something for free that I plan to sell.
With family it’s not so bad, but with friends I would prefer to pay them for anything they give me to sell. I left with a few items (which I paid her for) that she was ok
letting go. The rest she had emotional attachments to and they’re still with
her. One of the items she let me have is the tan metal mesh bag.
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| Rich's Department Store, Atlanta 1959. |
Here’s the story, loosely, behind the bag and its owner.
Charlene bought the bag in Atlanta at a Department Store called “Rich’s,” a
popular higher end Department Store in Atlanta that, according to the
Encyclopedia of Georgia, symbolized “THE” Shopping Experience in
Atlanta for
most of the 20th Century. Rich’s was bought out by Federated in 1993
and absorbed into Macy’s in 2003, but in the 60’s it was still a downtown
landmark and THE place to shop.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and others being arrested at Rich's Department Store, October, 1960.
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In 1960, Rich’s
figured prominently in the Civil Rights Movement, where it was the target of
quite a few “sit ins,” more because of its prominence in the Community than because
of practices of discrimination as it was known as one of the least
discriminatory department stores in the South. Martin Luther King, Jr. was
arrested at Rich’s, along with several students on October 19, 1960.** Rich’s
was actually known for being much more advanced and accepting of African
Americans than its peers and agreed to desegregate it’s stores in 1961, far in
advance of most other establishments of the time.***
This was how all the other girls in her
town were still dressing in 1961, as weremost American teenage girls, especially
the ones in small towns.
Charlene had cousins in Atlanta and had visited occasionally while growing up. Her parents didn't really approve of the Atlanta branch of the family. She
made a trip to stay with her cousins again late summer after she graduated from
high school in 1961.One of her cousins was at the University of Georgia in Athens, the other was working in a Hair Salon. They were hip.
She had saved some money working part time at the Diner starting when she was sixteen and went on quite a shopping spree. To hear it from Charlene, she was quite the Fashionista for the time and didn’t want to stay in her small town, where she felt stifled. She had already been in trouble (both at school and at home) for altering her clothes to make them more stylish (and shorter!). She wanted out. Her plan was to go to New York and, in order, become an actress and meet a Rock Star, which put her at odds with her family and her high school boyfriend, who everyone else thought she should marry.
She had saved some money working part time at the Diner starting when she was sixteen and went on quite a shopping spree. To hear it from Charlene, she was quite the Fashionista for the time and didn’t want to stay in her small town, where she felt stifled. She had already been in trouble (both at school and at home) for altering her clothes to make them more stylish (and shorter!). She wanted out. Her plan was to go to New York and, in order, become an actress and meet a Rock Star, which put her at odds with her family and her high school boyfriend, who everyone else thought she should marry.
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| This was how Charlene wanted to dress. She wanted to look like the girls in the magazines and movies. The horrifyingly skeletal Mary Quant and Twiggy were her fashion idols. She wanted to look like them more than anything. |
She didn’t
want to get married and she had a stubborn streak. That trip to Atlanta opened her eyes in a way she'd never seen before. She had never shopped at a store that allowed Negroes, as African Americans were referred to at the time, the same privileges Whites enjoyed. Charlene told me how exciting this was, it made her feel like she was part of the world, and, she admitted, knowing that her parents would have been horrified made her enjoy it even more. Her cousins were older and their parents more liberal (her cousins marched with MLK and SMOKED, in Public!) and she was exposed to a younger, more hip group living on the fringe. It made its mark.
Charlene, like all
other American teenage girls of the day, wanted to meet Ricky Nelson, The Beach Boys and Elvis. She also wanted to marry a Beatle, an aspiration the rest of her contemporaries didn't reach for a few more years. She watched The Ed Sullivan Show religiously and
read every Teen Fan Magazine and Fashion Magazine she could get her hands on. She was a Beatles fan long before they appeared on TV here in the US. Her
savings went on Go-go boots (pretty exotic for America, but worn by
all the British Fashion Forwards and turned into an American Icon a few years
later by Nancy Sinatra), mini-skirts (which she couldn’t buy locally, they were
too scandalous!), a two piece bathing suit (same!), make-up and the metal mesh
bag, which I now have listed on my site.
Although this is actually a photo of fans from the Beatles
first US Appearance in 1964, this is what most teens still dressed like in 1961.
It's easy to believe that Charlene (who was a knock-out from pictures I saw), in her Mod Styles,
stuck out and gained the attention of an up and coming Rock Star.
Returning to South Carolina after a few weeks in Atlanta,
shopping and being exposed to Big City life by her more worldly cousins,
Charlene broke up with her boyfriend. Charlene went back to work at the Diner,
because she had spent all her money on clothes! In her own words, “I didn’t
think things through too well.” Her parents were furious about the clothes she'd bought (which she wasn't allowed to wear in the house, she had to change after work or at a friends' house) and the break-up. As soon as she could, she moved out and rented a room with another girl that was over a downtown store.
College was not only not the norm for most girls after high school in 1961, it wasn’t even considered. It was even less likely, not even imagined by girls who grew up in small southern towns. When I asked her if she’d ever thought about going to college she looked at me like I was speaking Arabic. College was never even mentioned or thought of, much less an actual option. Not only did she not regret not having gone to college, she’d never even given it a thought.
College was not only not the norm for most girls after high school in 1961, it wasn’t even considered. It was even less likely, not even imagined by girls who grew up in small southern towns. When I asked her if she’d ever thought about going to college she looked at me like I was speaking Arabic. College was never even mentioned or thought of, much less an actual option. Not only did she not regret not having gone to college, she’d never even given it a thought.
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| London, 1960. Charlene was cutting edge fashion. |
So far, this doesn’t sound much different from the lives
lived by probably thousands of girls who graduated High School in 1961 and
didn’t want to get married. Charlene told me though, that this was where she
changed course a bit. She went a little “wild,” in her words. There was another
woman who worked at the Diner who was quite scandalous, we’ll call her Mae. In
her early thirties, she was divorced and whether she actually was or not, was
known as “fast,” one of “those” girls. She’d come to town because she had
family there and couldn’t stay in her home town after her divorce, for reasons
unknown.
Charlene hit it off with Mae, not surprising for young girl
dying to escape her small town life and put into daily contact with an exotic
and mysterious woman with a past. Mae, of course, was terribly lonely and they
bonded. They became good friends and soon started visiting bars in all the
towns around to see the live bands that came through. All this was too much for
Charlene’s parents and they cut her off. She wasn’t allowed to see her younger brothers
and sister any more, but sometimes she did on the sly. She told me that she
kept close to her Grandmother, who refused to cut her off. She eventually started
talking to her mother again but she never spoke to her father again. He was a
staunch Southern Baptist and her “drinkin’ and carryin’ on” was more than he
could handle. He died of a heart attack when Charlene was in her early 30’s.
 |
| An early photo of the band she spent the next six years hanging around.**** |
It was at one of these bars in 1962 where Charlene met the boy in the
band for whom she put her life on hold for the next five years and for whom she
didn’t go to New York. She met him, we’ll call him “Bob,” after a show his
band played at a local bar. She couldn't remember the name of the band, she thought it might have been The Uniques, but couldn't remember for sure. "They changed it a whole bunch back then. Wasn't 'til they started usin' their last name they really made the big time." She and Bob clicked immediately, she said, the way
people sometimes do. “I just knew it,” she told me. “I just knew he was the one
I’d been waitin’ on.”
 |
| After they made the big time, late 1960's.**** |
Charlene kept on waiting for the next several years, still
working at the Diner and seeing Bob when he came through town. Sometimes
meeting him in Atlanta, Savannah or Charleston, even all the way up to Greenville and
Columbia a time or two, she was there, waiting. She was there as his band grew
more popular, changed names and started having to fight her way through crowds
of other girls when she met him after a show. Charlene lost
touch with Mae who had left for Charleston several years earlier with a salesman who traveled through town.
After being stood up a few times, phone calls that didn’t
come and finally, after a while, “Fin’ly facin’ up ta the writin’ on the wall.
I just didn’t want to know for a while, that’s all.” She said it took her a while to accept, but finally she, “kinda
let it go, you know how it goes, sometimes.”
Older and wiser, she moved to Aiken, got a new job and started a new life. A few years
later she married someone else and had a couple of children. Fifteen years
after that she got divorced.
“I still think about Bob,” she told me. “I wonder if he ever
thinks about me too.” It about broke my
heart. She appeared lost in thought for
a few minutes, and then shook it off, showing me pictures of her kids and grand kids. Charlene has done all right for herself, if seems.
Charlene, while a little worse for wear and at a low point when
I first met her, is a pretty amazing woman. Apparently about once a month or so she
spends the day at a local bar, drinking and reminiscing about old times. I
just lucked out and showed up on her day while she was still feeling social. She starts about 11AM and stops about
6PM, waits a few hours and goes home (I drove her home this time, then back to
the bar to pick up her car later).
It’s her way of
remembering the past. She doesn’t have much education but she is smart and has
managed to make a life for herself despite none of her dreams happening the way
she’d planned. Something that really happens to most of us, doesn't it? She has two grown up kids and grandchildren, who she sees often.
She has a great sense of humor and I had more fun spending an afternoon with her
than I’d had in a long time. I feel privileged to have made her acquaintance and the next time I’m in South Carolina, I’m going to make a point of going to Aiken to see Charlene.
* Charlene is a pseudonym, at her request.
**** http://www.duaneallman.info/familytree.htm
How to find the Bands I mentioned above:
http://www.thewinchestersound.com/
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