The Ellingtons' extension of the Wiggins clan started when a young, skinny, handsome, dark-haired basketball player and all-around ladies' man named Buddy was struck with young, devastingly lovely Nancy Lee (who also played basketball). You should have seen him in his "James Dean" pompadour and his leather bomber jacket, standing next to the '38 Ford - so cool!
That Nancy Lee played basketball is quite surprising. You should know that that nobody called her Nancy - everyone knew her by her family's nick-name, "Teenie" - which she was. She once claimed to have been as tall as 5'1", but nobody really believes she was that tall. Nonetheless, she played the game with pinache.
They met in a gym where he was playing a game. They both attended a make-shift school, in the brand-new, bustling Alexander Park, which was built very hastily for the flood of Defense workers that showed up for the jobs in the Norfolk area during the War. They remember when the classes were held in 5 or 6 adjacent houses, and the kids would move from one to another for different classes. That group of people was also aparently quite genial, as they have annual reunions even now, 60-some years after they all were all poor kids in a hastily slapped-together, huge muddy construction field of a neighborhood. (Each house in Alexander Park was 'assembled' on-site in not more than 2 or 3 days. Click here to see the former site of Alexander Park as it is now.)
After graduation, they lived for a time in Alexander Park, sharing the tiny house with Bud's recently widowed mother, Par Nina Ellington. Seems to me, that house was on Dorsett - about a block and a half from the little shopping center where you could get groceries. I'm told that as a toddler they had to drag me out from under the little porch (which I think I thought must have been a great spot because the dog liked it so much), or coax me out of the coal bin. Later, Bud and Nancy moved to another house in that development on the main drag - Cavalier.
I remember that house because of the place I spent my nap time - heaven. Yup, I'd be sitting there on the clouds with my hands folded while we kids all did quiet, polite things ('cause the kindergarten teacher was God). Then the bell on the popsicle truck would ring and I was free! I'd get dumped down the hole in the clouds where the fireman's pole was and I'd awake with a thump in my bed to run beg mommy to buy me a popsicle.
Later, Bud and Nancy moved across the street to another house on Cavalier. That was where I remember Dad chasing down the street in the middle of hurricane Hazel (I suppose it was) to retrieve the cover for the propane tanks on the side of the house. That decade, it seemed hurricanes had it in for the area. Here's a map of the hurricanes in that time - it looks like they gave a party in Nag's Head, and all the Hurricanes attended!
After they had been there for a few months, the house they had move out of across the street burned down. I also remember the neighbors - the Doughty's (as in "Shoo-fly pie, and apple pan doughty"). They had two marvelous things that I can recall playing with. One - a huge doll house with real wooden furniture, and the other was their incredible blue velvet chair that you could swipe your hand one way, and cause your hand-print to show, and then back the other way, and it would disappear Magic!.
I do remember the odd-shaped coal bucket that held fuel for the heater in the wall between the living room and the kitchen, and the time they sanded and varnished the wooden floors.
That's also the house where my Dad's younger brother, Billy, came to visit one summer when he was about 15 or so. He was cool! He even had a couple of firecrackers he brought up from Carolina, whch he lit and threw out in the field behind the house one summer's afternoon (I suppose it was getting close to 4th of July). Boy, that fire in those bone-dry weeds was something to see. Fortunately, it didn't burn down the whole project.
Later, they moved to Norfolk, living in houses in Bay View, Chesterfield Heights, and Ingleside. During those years they produced a string of children who love them and hold them dear, to this day.