Melanie Gay (Myers) Shive (1951 - 2019)

Born 25 Jun 1951 in Winston-Salem, NC

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Melanie (Myers) Shive was a wonderful member of our WikiTree community who has passed away. Melanie (Myers) Shive made many contributions and will be missed.

Biography

I was born at North Carolina Baptist Hospital, now Wake Forest University Medical Center in Winston-Salem, NC. At the time I was born, the windows of the patient rooms at the hospital were open to the summer breeze, as there was no air conditioning, and shaded by big magnolia trees facing Hawthorne Road in Winston-Salem - my first view of the world. Little did I know how much of my early life would be spent at locations on or near this road or how many memories I would hold of this corner of the world.

My first home was on Austin Lane in Winston-Salem, NC. We lived in the western part of town in a newly developed area that was formerly a farm with many large and beautiful native pine trees, as of 1949, when my parents' house was built. We had lots of fun with all the neighborhood children we played with and went to school with. We could ride our bikes freely in the streets then and roam the area with our friends. We had birthday parties at Farmers Dairy ice cream shop near Thruway Shopping Center, where we occasionally shopped with our mother. And we had skating parties at our church gym and swimming parties at the YWCA downtown and home parties where everyone wore swimsuits and got in our little backyard pool.

Every Fall we went to the Dixie Classic Fair in the daytime and rode the ponies there. At night, we could sit on our porch and watch the fireworks in the distance at the fairgrounds, while we sipped iced coffee. Every Halloween, we went out for "Trick or Treat" in our neighborhood for hours in the dark, while one of our parents stayed at home to hand out candy to whomever appeared at the front door. My favorite Halloween costume had an owl face mask and a flashlight attached to my costume.

Every Christmas, our father would put Christmas lights on the large and beautiful cedar tree in the front yard. The outdoor Christmas tree was near our front bedroom window and we could see the pretty lights at night when we went to sleep. We also had a lighted indoor tree in front of the big picture window in the living room with the manger scene figurines placed in front of it. Santa Claus evidently came down the chimney and left gifts on the hearth. We would look up the chimney for him before we went to bed on Christmas Eve! Every winter, we had lots of snow and we always went sledding down the nearby streets and at nearby Forsyth Country Club Golf Course with our neighborhood friends.

Every Easter morning, we would be awakened before dawn by the local Moravian Band playing Easter hymns as they rode by on a bus that stopped at many street corners in our town. This was done every Easter to proclaim Christ is risen from the grave and to wake everyone up in time for the Moravian sunrise service, which we never went to, as it was still dark. The Easter Bunny always visited our house and evidently placed candy eggs and chocolate bunnies and stuffed toys in our Easter Baskets which we had set out on the back porch the night before. We would always leave the screen door on the porch propped open so the Easter Bunny could get in! We always went to church on Easter and were usually singing in the choir.

In the summers, we went to High Rock Lake and stayed at our neighbor's lake house and went fishing and riding in their motorboat. We always went to the beach in the summer and stayed at a beach cottage at Cherry Grove or Ocean Drive, SC. or to the Outer Banks in NC. On weekends, we always visited our grandparents in Wilkes and Guilford counties and rode their horses and played with our many cousins. Our Grandma in Guilford County let some of our cousins keep horses at her barn and we always loved it when they let us ride Molly. Our Grandma in Wilkes County had a farm horse named Prince and we loved riding him around the farm also.

Life in Winston-Salem was more convenient back then, especially when milk and dairy products were delivered to our door by "the milk man", eggs were delivered by "the egg lady" and our wool and winter clothes and father's suits were picked up, dry cleaned and ironed at the "dry cleaners" and brought back to our home. Every day, the paper boy brought the latest local newspaper to our door, and the mailman delivered the mail to the box that was right beside our front door. Our mailman was the person who told me that President John F. Kennedy had just been assassinated. I was sick at home that day and he knocked on our door to tell me.

At home, our garbage was picked up every week from the metal garbage cans in our back yard by city workers. Workers at the gas stations pumped the gas into our car and cleaned our car's windshield and checked the oil for us every time we stopped there. Street sweeping machines would clean the pavement on our road and city maintenance trucks would come down our road to spray for mosquitoes on a regular basis. And in the winter, when it snowed, city workers would clear the snow from our street and spread salt on it to help melt the remaining snow and ice. This was how our life was in the 1950's and 60's in Winston-Salem.

We went to family reunions every year. These gatherings were always held on the grandparents' home place lawns under large shade trees. Long plank tables were covered with all kinds of the best southern food and always held plenty of fried chicken and ham biscuits and all kinds of southern cakes and pies. There were helpers around the tables who kept any insects away from the food by continuously waving freshly cut leafy tree branches around the food table area. My dad's side of the family had yearly reunions on the family farm in Wilkes County, near Union Grove, and my Mother's side of the family had theirs at the family farm in Guilford County, near High Point. One of my cousins later published a genealogy book about our father's side of the family. I am working on a book for our mother's side of the family, although a family history was compiled by one of our cousins in the 1980's.

One of the first things I remember is going to tap dancing classes at the Frederick's Dance Studio on Hawthorne Road when I was four years old. I was put in "time out" from class numerous times for " tickling" the other girls, so I never was good at tap dancing. I also participated in "Romper Room", a local live TV show for children, which was fun but - TV did not have reruns back then. I went to kindergarten at Fries Moravian Church on Hawthorne Road in Winston-Salem. That was where I met my first "boyfriend". We had a wonderful teacher, who was a close friend of my mother, and she often invited the class to her farm at Lake Hills, where we had picnics and parties. She also made each child a special end of the year gift - a pair of framed painted tiles depicting our first attempts at art. My first paintings were of Indian tepees and a chicken sitting on a clutch of eggs. These framed tile paintings still hang in our kitchen. The end of the year kindergarten party at the farm was very memorable, as that is where I lost my first baby tooth while eating fried chicken and also because it was the first place I got to ride a pony! I loved each horse or pony I saw from then on and still do.

We walked two blocks to Whitaker Elementary School and back home each school day, accompanied by other neighborhood children. The school was rebuilt around 2010 but all the school playgrounds we knew in the 1950's remain intact, along with the long set of cement steps that were built from the street edge up to the building on top of the hill back in the 1950's. Every day, we played on the manicured playgrounds, learning softball, kickball, speed ball ( an easy form of soccer) and basketball through the years. Each year on the last day of school we had Field Day, where we showed off our skills in running, high jumping and foot races, followed by our year end picnic on the fields for the students, teachers and parents.

We were always in a Brownie troop and then a Girl Scout troop until we went to High School. Our scout leaders took us on backyard overnight camping trips on their land, where we would swim in their lake and camp out in their woods. We learned how to build campfires and roast hot dogs and marshmallows and pitch a tent. Then we spent the night in our tents and woke up cold and dirty - and fixed our own breakfast over the campfire before we went home.

Back then, there were no school buses in our neighborhood in the city and all of the children who lived nearby walked to school and back home. Back then, our mothers were at home waiting for us to get there after school. If the weather was bad, our parents or a neighbor would take us to school and bring us home in the car. We had many wonderful elementary school teachers. I can remember the face and name of each one and where their classroom was located, even what each classroom looked like and the view outside from each class. Most of all, I like to remember my classmates and teachers in the class photo we received each year. We still look at those class photos when visiting with old friends.

In first grade, I forgot to bring a jar for glue to my class and when the teacher came around to collect them, I was so embarrassed that I ran out of the room and ran two blocks back home to get the glue jar. My mother had to walk me back to school with the "glue jar" and apologize to the teacher for me running away from school.

In fourth grade, on the last day of school, my boyfriend, who was in my class, gave me a little pearl ring on a gold necklace. Of course, he forgot all about me over the summer. I still have the little ring and necklace, but we were never friends after that year.

In the summer, we walked two blocks to College Village Drug Store, which had a soda fountain where we knew the employees by name. We bought soft drinks, milk shakes, ice cream and candy. When we were older, we were allowed to ride our bikes there and sit at the soda fountain. One time my mother asked me to get a loaf of bread for her at the College Village Grocery Store. As I was riding my bike home on a bumpy side road, the bread bounced out of my bicycle basket and I ran over it with the front wheel of my bike. I was crying when I got home but mother was laughing when she saw the loaf of bread, squashed with a tire track down the middle. Back then, a loaf of bread cost less than twenty cents.

As we grew older we learned to ride skateboards with our friends and became experts skateboarding down the big hills in the neighborhood. By some miracle, no one we knew was ever hurt by this activity, even though we could have been hurt badly by a fall on the pavement or a collision with a vehicle.

We would take short cuts through the woods to visit neighbors and friends. One day I walked through the woods behind my house to a friend's house. A girl who lived next door to us and had mental problems ran out of the woods and jumped on me. She knocked me down and tried to beat me up- and then ran home. When I came home and told my parents, they were very concerned and told me I could never play with her again. Then they built a tall wire fence between our property and her home.

We had many pets while we were young. We had a pet rabbit in a pen beside the house, but a dog got it when we were gone away. And I had a pet chipmunk that I rescued from my cat and kept in a cage on the porch for about a year, but it finally escaped. We had a big playhouse that our father built in our backyard. We also stored our bicycles and outdoor toys there. We had several cats through the years and some of our cats had kittens in the storeroom in our playhouse, which had a trap door so the cats could get in or out. We had to give away most of the kittens. We had several dogs while growing up, which were kept in a nice pen with a large dog house my father built. One of our dogs, Maverick, had puppies and we found good homes for them all. Back then, it was common to have pets that were not neutered but that soon changed with all the traffic and people moving into our area.

We went to our elementary school's summer recreation program, which included trips to the large area swimming pools like Crystal Lake, Tanglewood and Reynolds Park with our friends and schoolmates. Once in a while, our mother would take us to Peace Haven Riding Stables, and Ted Nance's stock farm in Clemmons, where we rented ponies and horses by the hour. We took took riding lessons at Tanglewood Park. We learned to swim at the Winston-Salem YMCA and Tanglewood Park, where we attended summer day camps. Later we went away to Camp Betty Hastings and Camp Tonawanda in Hendersonville, NC in the summers. My favorite activities there were always riding the ponies or horses. Every summer, we went to the beach and stayed in a nice beach cottage on the oceanfront at Ocean Drive or Cherry Grove Beach and we would take short trips to Myrtle Beach to visit the large amusement park and the Pavilion. In the Fall, we would always visit the Blue Ridge Parkway to look at the beautiful leaves in the mountains and go to coffee shops and gift shops along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

We always attended First Baptist Church in downtown Winston-Salem. Our parents were members there for many years. I was baptized there by Dr. Ralph Herring around the age of nine and remained a member there until after I was married. The large round sanctuary was and still is memorable and is now a landmark of the downtown area. There are huge green and white marble columns in the sanctuary and beautiful golden stained glass windows there. A large golden hued chandelier hangs from the high indoor top of the domed ceiling. The chandelier used to sway slightly back and forth in the breeze when the church windows were opened on summer Sunday mornings. I was always afraid the chandelier would fall on me when we were seated beneath it. I like to remember the large open windows there in summer, with the fragrance of magnolia blossoms drifting in through the sanctuary during the service. This was before the days when the church had air conditioning.

We participated in all the church programs and activities, including Choir - led by the memorable Grady Miller and later by Fred Kelly. Grady Miller used to make us laugh by actually wiggling his ears and then we would sing the song "If you're happy and you know it, wiggle your ears" in choir practice and Bible School. In the Training Union, we were taught to memorize all the names of the books in the Bible in order and recite the names. Then we had "Sword Drills", which was a competition to see who could turn to the page of a particular Bible verse first and then read it out loud. Memorizing the names of the books of the Bible and the order they were in were learned early in life and were retained through the years - a valuable skill when looking up Bible passages quickly during services and classes. Every week, we always went to the wonderful dinner served at at the church on Wednesday night by church workers. On Sundays, we would often go out for lunch to the K & W Cafeteria, or the Robert E. Lee Hotel, as they were the only places in town that were open on Sunday back in the 1950's. My favorite foods there were always shrimp cocktail and cherry or coconut cream pie.

We were members in the church choir, starting in first grade. At Christmas, our children's choir sang Christmas carols while standing in the huge dark church balcony while holding battery lit candles. We sang at Easter and Christmas every year and continued to be choir members through high school. We often walked from school to the nearby church for choir practice. After high school, most everyone our age at our church went away to college, as we did. We hardly ever saw any of those people again, as our lives were scattered forever.

When I was in elementary school, my best friend from across the street would come over and we would play with our toy horses and farm animals. I would also play at her house and the big woods behind her home. We would run wild through the woods with the other neighborhood children, exploring and playing hide and seek. We did not realize at the time that we were trespassing on a neighbor's large estate, but we never went near their house and they never complained. Later we found out the land belonged to the owner of Dewey's Bakery, where we always bought our birthday cakes when we were having a swimming party at the YWCA or a skating party at our church. Now the Dewey's estate is the site of huge new expensive homes and all the woods are gone.

Our mother usually made a cake every week. One week it was yellow cake with chocolate icing and the next week it was white cake with caramel icing. She taught us how to make cakes first and then we learned how to cook most anything that can be prepared at home. As we grew older, we helped with cooking on a daily basis. Our father also liked to cook and made the best fried chicken, gravy and biscuits. Our mother liked to preserve all kinds of fruits and vegetables and much of the produce came from our half acre garden that my father grew each year. We also had grape vines, cherry trees and a strawberry patch. We harvested the fruit and made grape, cherry and strawberry jelly and we went to a large farm and picked peaches to preserve each year.

In the fall, we would rake leaves into big piles and then jump in them and hide. We rode our bikes everywhere and parked them in the neighbors yards while we visited. When we were very young, our father dressed up as a pirate and went out with us on Halloween. We had various costumes we dressed in every year, mine was usually a witch costume. We had large Trick or Treat bags that we carried around the neighborhood until they were filled with Halloween candy from our neighbors. Then we would go home and spread it all out in a box and share it with our parents. One Halloween I fell off a wall next to a neighbor's driveway because my flashlight battery went out and one time some older boys drove by and threw firecrackers at us, but Halloween was always fun for us.

We had a friend nearby who invited us over many times for sodas and cookies while we learned to play cards, especially Canasta and Go Fishing. And we were allowed to play in their large attic, filled with relics and interesting items from her father's former medical office. This special friend was older than we were and went to a Catholic School. We lost touch with her when we moved to our new house, as well as all our neighborhood friends we had known since our early years.

There were several sad things that happened in our first neighborhood too. One of our neighbors' house caught on fire at night due to a faulty window air conditioner and their baby girl died from smoke inhalation, Another neighbor's house was struck by lightning and caught on fire but no one was hurt. And two of the fathers who lived on our street died of heart attacks when their children were in elementary school.

My best friend at school and church moved to Shreveport, Louisiana with her family when she was thirteen. She and her family were very close friends with my family. We played with Jill and Barbie dolls and Breyer toy horses and spent the night at each other's houses on weekends. When she moved, we became pen pals, but I never saw her again, as she died suddenly of nephritis at the age of fifteen. This friend's mother and father published a book made up of original poems their daughter had written over the years and sent them to me. They even came to visit me after I graduated from high school. My friend's father was a rather famous survivor of the sinking of the battleship Arizona in WWII. He and his wife lived to be very old. They were buried in Louisiana, near their daughter, who died so young.

My sister and I attended Wiley Jr. High School on the corner of Hawthorne Road and R. J. Reynolds High School on Hawthorne Road and we walked to Wake Forest Baptist Hospital on Hawthorne Road after school. If it was cold or raining, we rode the city bus for a dime. Our mother worked at the hospital in the Personnel Department, so we would go to the hospital snack bar and do our homework until it was time for mother to go home.

We also had to take ballroom dancing lessons after school at Baylin Dance Studios on Hawthorne Road. Almost all of our school friends participated in this activity - which our parents paid for. We had to learn various types of ballroom dancing and social etiquette with boys and girls of our age. We attended dances with our escorts at the local country clubs so we could practice our dancing and social skills, which we rarely used in our teenage years in the 1960's! After all, we were busy skateboarding like daredevils with our neighborhood friends.

Our father worked at Duke Power for many years and then at Haverty Furniture Company in downtown Winston-Salem. When we were young children, we would play hide and seek in the furniture store. We watched the Winston-Salem Christmas parade every year, while standing in front of the Haverty store entrance on Liberty Street in downtown Winston-Salem. We also got to help pick out new furniture for our house from the store and we enjoyed attending the Furniture Market in High Point, NC each year with our parents, where we sometimes bought new furniture for our house.

When we were still in Junior High School, we moved to a new home in the Mountainbrook community in western Forsyth County. We had several backyard horses, with their own little barn and paddock that my father built out in the large back yard. There were many trails and places to ride near our home. My friends that lived nearby had horses and we would ride all over the countryside and visit nearby boarding stables where we had other friends with horses. Our parents rarely knew for sure where we were, but they never worried if we were in a safe place. In those days, nothing bad ever happened in our neighborhood except one time I left my bike parked at nearby Clearwater Lake while I visited a friend. The bike had been stolen when I returned to get it. Behind our house was a huge forest with trails we used for horseback riding near to Salem Creek, which was close to our backyard. We rode all around the area for years, mostly on the country roads and county right of ways that were wooded trails that stretched for miles around our house, which was then outside the city limits. This area is now a highly populated residential and commercial area but Clearwater Lake and the city-county right of ways where we rode through the woods are still there today.

One summer, while I was in Junior high school, my mother wanted me to be a hospital volunteer at Baptist Hospital. We had to wear a special outfit so everyone at the hospital would know we were Red Cross Volunteers. Somehow, I was placed in the medical school research department to help in an office near where the animals were kept for experiments. Everything was fine until they took me on an educational tour and showed me an autopsy on a monkey. I went back to my desk, fainted and fell over backward in my chair with my legs sticking up in the air. They had to revive me with smelling salts. Everyone had a good laugh over that!

Later on, I asked if I could buy some of the white mice they kept at the medical school for testing. They were very generous with their mice and gave me two cute white mice, which I kept at home in a nice bird cage. My parents made me keep them in the basement area, so I hung the cage from the ceiling by a wire in front of a large basement window, so the mice could see outside and get some sunlight. Somehow the mice figured out how to escape the cage one night and made their way up the basement stairs. After nibbling a hole in the carpet under the hall door, they explored the main floor of the house. My mother woke up when one of the mice had climbed in her bed and was sniffing her ear! Mother made me get rid of the mice, so I turned them loose out in the woods behind our house, hoping they would have a chance for a nice life.

While in high school, I started working part time at my first real job at WFU Baptist Hospital in the Radiology Department. I enjoyed working in the office, doing filing and typing and going on errands to the hospital soda shop. I had friends there among the radiology students and soda shop employees and rode home from work sometimes with a hospital chaplain who lived in our neighborhood. I worked there until I graduated from high school.

I had studied piano continuously for ten years, with several teachers in the area. My first piano teacher liked to hold recitals for her students. At the Christmas recital she gave me a pretty bracelet decorated with gold musical note charms. Each charm had a different colored sparkling stone in it. I always kept it and often wore it. My second piano teacher lived nearby and I would ride my bike to her house for lessons early on Saturday mornings. She would still be in her PJ's while teaching my lessons. By the time I was in high school I was taking lessons from a Wake Forest University music professor named Dr. Thane McDonald. I found out later he was a well known and respected professor, but all I remember is that he rapped my knuckles with a ruler if I played a wrong note! My mother was not happy about that, so she changed my teacher to a well known Salem College professor, Dr. Margaret Mueller. She was a wonderful teacher, with a humorous habit of eating peanut butter from a jar while she taught my lessons. She was my last music teacher, and she held recitals for all her students at Salem College Arts Center. My mother was disappointed when I quit piano during high school but I had learned about all there was to know with piano, so she finally let me have my own horse-which was all I ever wanted. I still have my Baldwin spinet piano, and all the music books and sheet music-and I can still play most anything I learned from all those years of lessons back then.

My parents gave me a beautiful gold locket and bracelet with my initials engraved for my high school graduation from R. J. Reynolds High School in 1969. I can still remember giggling during the graduation because the boy standing behind me on the stage kept tickling the back of my neck. That boy later became our family dentist for many years until he retired.

I attended Appalachian State University in Boone, NC and majored in English. I lived in a dorm with a nice roommate from Greensboro and made many friends there. Once I had to climb out of the dormitory elevator which became stuck halfway between floors with the door open. One day there was an earthquake while I was in my dorm room and it shook the windows but there was no damage. The view outside my window was a nearby mountain called Howard's Knob. I loved the view of the clouds rising over the mountain. We often hiked the road to the top of the mountain for exercise and also drove to the top for something to do with family and friends. There was a pretty lake there in a hollow near the top of the mountain and a large rock cliff on the summit. People used to walk out near the edge and take photos with family and friends with the university view far below and their friends standing near the edge of the cliff. I learned to ski at beautiful Beech Mountain, near Banner Elk, NC, where I also sprained my ankle - after being thrown from a bouncing ski lift seat on a downhill slope. I was rescued near the bottom of the slope by a member of the ski patrol, who was a boy from my high school. My ankle was always weak after that.

I lived in Blowing Rock for one summer, in a local resident's backyard apartment which had a pretty goldfish pond. I was able to bring my horse up there and keep her at the Blowing Rock Show Grounds Stables. I had a lot of fun there, trail riding in Price Park and attending the Blowing Rock Horse Show, but I soon had to return home, as my mother had cancer and she needed me.

I also attended Forsyth Technical College in Winston-Salem, studying Business Administration. While attending school there, I worked part time in the library. One night when I left work after dark, someone tried to jump in my car as I drove out of the parking lot, but I floored the gas pedal and was able to get away. I enjoyed working with the library staff and met many interesting people there, including my first husband, a Vietnam Veteran who had served in the Navy, where he fell from a platform to the deck on his ship and survived. He was injured but recovered and after his career in the Navy he went to Forsyth Tech on the GI bill. We had many good times and were married for about ten years.

I also worked part time at the McCashin riding stables at Tanglewood Park, and I kept my own horse at Tanglewood for several years. I met many people there that became good friends, helped me along the way and made a lasting impact on my life. I also cared for and handled many race horses and hunter jumpers and traveled to long distance horse shows as a groomer for the McCashins. Horses have always been my favorite hobby, and I have many good memories of riding with friends around the Tanglewood racetrack and the trails along the Yadkin River that borders the park. The park is still there today and is as popular as ever and still has horses for trail riding. and I still visit it occasionally when taking my dogs to the dog park there.

My mother died of cancer at Forsyth Hospital a few days before my 21st birthday in June, 1972. She had been sick for a long time. It was a very sad time for our family. I was married in December that year, as was my sister. My first husband and I soon moved in with my father and lived there for five years, until my father remarried.

Then we bought a home in nearby Lewisville, on Concord Church Road. While living there, my life revolved around working in bookkeeping at several different manufacturing companies, which was not very enjoyable, and spending my free time with our horses, which was lots of fun. We had our own barn with a hayloft and pasture in the backyard and many places to ride in the country. I also enjoyed going to bluegrass festivals and parties, and going on beach trips and mountain trips with my husband and friends. The worst thing that I remember during those years was going on a hayride in Yadkin County. The flatbed wagon, pulled by two horses, was full of people sitting on hay bales, talking and laughing. The wagon was rolling along just fine in the dark, out on a lonely gravel road. Suddenly, something-probably a deer, spooked the horses and they took off at full speed. Everyone was able to jump off the wagon in the dark except me and my husband, as we were sitting in the middle of the wagon behind the driver. As the spooked horses ran faster, the wagon driver was desperately trying to stop the horses when he fell headfirst off the front of the wagon and was run over by the wagon. My husband was able to reach down and recover the long reins and by some miracle was able to gradually stop the team of horses - after they ran a long way in the dark with both of us hanging on to the seat of the hay wagon. We finally jumped off when the horses slowed down and we were able to lead the horses and wagon back to the scene of the accident, where most of the other people were gathered as an ambulance arrived. Thankfully the fallen driver survived, but he was badly injured. I have never gone on another hayride and don't plan to ever again.

My first husband and I divorced after he went on a long adventure trip with his friends to Alaska to check out the then new Alaskan oil pipeline job prospects. He left me at home alone for months with little communication and neither he or any of his group of friends, except one, was able to get a job there- so they all had a long vacation in Alaska while I was left in Lewisville alone driving to work and back every day. While he was gone, my diamond engagement ring fell off my finger while I was grocery shopping and I was never able to find it. After he returned, we did not get along as he spent most of his free time with his friends. We separated and I moved into an apartment in Winston-Salem with a roommate who was a friend from Tanglewood. One night someone tried to get in our apartment in the middle of the night. We could hear and see that someone was trying to turn the doorknob, When we turned on the lights, they ran away. We never did find out who it was. After that, I moved to the apartments in Lewisville where my future husband lived, which was much safer. I kept my horse at a large historic farm in Lewisville on Concord Church Road where I could ride for miles on trails. I worked for a real estate investment company in Lewisville, where my future second husband also worked. We were married in 1984 and moved to Lewisville near the quiet and pretty neighborhood of Shallowford Lakes on Grapevine Road. In 1985, our daughter, Elizabeth Ann, was born at Forsyth Memorial Hospital in Winston-Salem. Little did we know that thirty years later, she and her husband would buy a very nice historical home on Grapevine Road, one block away from where we lived when she was born.

In December 1986, my father died from a stroke and was buried beside my mother at Forsyth Memorial Park in Winston-Salem. This is also the place where my husband and I have a grave plot beside my parents. Some of my relatives and many friends and neighbors parents are also buried there.

In 1986, we bought our home in East Bend, NC in the Forbush community, very near to the Yadkin River and Logan Creek and we have lived there ever since. Our daughter went to school in Yadkin County, and was active in all the school sports teams and church groups and activities. We all became members of Enon Baptist Church in East Bend. During those years, we went to the beach every year and visited my husband's relatives in many states. We took the children on trips to Washington, DC and New York City and Jacksonville and Orlando and many other places in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee. We went to all the large theme parks in the southern part of the U. S. at least once. We also went to Colorado and New Mexico with my sister's family for the NRA national rifle competition for school students, as her sons were avid hunters. Through the years, we often visited my sister and brother-in-law's mountain home in Fancy Gap, VA., where they later built their retirement home and we still visit there often.

I worked in bookkeeping for several real estate companies, which was not very enjoyable, while trying to raise our daughter. My sister, who lived nearby, was kind enough to keep my daughter at her home while I was working during the day. This was a great arrangement for us and our daughter made many friends in our neighborhood who also stayed at my sister's house after school. During those years, when our families were members of Enon Baptist Church and choir, we had many friends there, especially in the choir. My favorite choir leader was Paul Middleton, who was the son of a missionary and was raised in South America, where he had played the piano music at a royal wedding in Chili. He could play anything at all on the piano by ear, and direct the choir at the same time. Our favorite pastor was David Southern, who baptized my daughter and husband. I was also a member of the Wake Forest Chorale at WFU for about five years, and greatly enjoyed singing with the community choral group led by Dr. Brian Gorlick, head of the WFU Music Department. We participated in many concerts at the WFU Fine Arts Center, where we performed great classical choral compositions and some modern compositions, accompanied by the WFU concert orchestra. After a number of years, our group had so many new WFU music students that there was no longer room for volunteer members like me to assemble with them. We had accomplished our purpose of helping to grow the WFU Music Department to its full capacity. I am thankful I was able to be a part of that, and it was a lot of fun. Dr. Gorlick gave us CDs of our concerts during those years and we listen to them often.

Our daughter graduated from Forbush High School in East Bend, where she was in the Show Choir. She also played the trumpet in the Forbush High School Band. We traveled to many places to see her groups in competitions and visited many churches where they were invited to sing. She was also on a soccer team from elementary school through high school and we spent much time attending all of her soccer games. We were fortunate to serve as chaperones for my daughter' s concert choir group trip to New York City in 2002. We enjoyed a wonderful visit to NYC with our daughter and the group of her classmates and the other chaperones. We were able to watch and listen to her group perform in two famous cathedrals there and also in front of the Statue of Liberty. We all went to the top of the Empire State Building together and to the 9-11 Memorial, which was still under construction then. We were able to visit many of the famous places in the city with her and her classmates, including attending several popular Broadway plays and popular restaurants. Our daughter graduated with honors from Forbush High School in 2003. She graduated from University of NC at Greensboro with a bachelors degree in English in 2008. Her wedding was held at Raffaldini Vineyards in Ronda, NC with all of her friends and relatives in attendance. She and her husband, a native of Pilot Mountain, bought a historic home in Lewisville, just a few miles across the river from our home. She continues to play on a women's soccer league and we still attend many of her soccer games and we revisit Raffaldini each season of the year.

Currently, my husband and I are retired and still living in East Bend. We are members of Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem. I am a member of the Calvary Choir with about 200 choir members led by Rev. Larry White of Winston-Salem. Our group has done some recording projects and many concerts for our church and community. We will visit Paris, France in 2017 and sing at a number of churches there. I am also a member of "Cloud", a rescue group for wild horses and plan to adopt a rescued horse soon. We visit the Outer Banks with our family and dogs on vacations and often take day trips to historical sites. I am currently researching my family history and my ancestral families from England, Ireland and Scotland that settled in NC in the 1700's. We have lived near the Shallow Ford in Yadkin County for over thirty years and not far from Union Grove, where much of the history of my family in North Carolina began.

I was born on June 25, 1951 at Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, NC, Forsyth County, NC. I was raised in Winston-Salem, attended Whitaker Elementary, Wiley Jr. High and graduated from R. J. Reynolds High School in 1969. I attended Appalachian State University in Boone, NC , High Point College and Forsyth Technical Institute in Winston-Salem.

My father's family was from Wilkes and Iredell County, NC and my mother's family was from High Point and Thomasville, NC.

I was married to William Craven from 1972 to 1984. I married Kerry Shive in 1984 and lived in Lewisville, NC before moving to East Bend, Yadkin County, NC in 1986 to present.

I am a member of Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem and the Calvary Baptist Adult choir.

I am retired and interested in sacred, classical and contemporary music, genealogy, wildlife, photography and anything to do with horses and animal rescue.

Sources

• First-hand information. Entered by Melanie Myers at registration.