DRIVING IN RALEIGH IN 1942

Pop left home at age 15 to work in the shipyards in Brunswick, Georgia.

I didn't know anything about driving licenses back then when I left for Brunswick, Georgia.  Didn't know you were supposed to have one.  Hell, I'd owned a car by then.  I bought an old '31 Pontiac from a fellow back there in the woods.  Way back in there.  The damn thing would run.  So that's all that needed to be.  I paid him thirty-five dollars for it, something like that.  If it ever had a title to it I don't remember it.  I finally sold it to somebody for seventy-five dollars. 

But I wasn't even aware of the fact that you were supposed to have a driver's license or that there was supposed to be a license on a car.  There weren't but about thirty-five patrolmen in the whole state of North Carolina. 

That first streak of highway out of Raleigh, old 70 highway from Raleigh to Clayton, was the first road that was paved in North Carolina.  And they paved it just the way the hog path went.  It was so hilly and crooked there won't no way in hell you could run 55 miles an hour.   But all along, you'd see the speed limit sign, 55.  And finally, on Water Creek Hill, they put up a sign at 45 miles an hour.  That was a big joke, because there won't nobody that had anything strong enough to run up that hill that fast.  Everybody thought they were going to get tickets because they couldn't run 45 miles an hour.