In January 1958 my father, Chris E. Grimsley, was a freshman at East Carolina College in Greenville, North Carolina, about fifty miles north of New Bern, his hometown. He was a Navy veteran a few months past his 23rd birthday. The G.I. Bill was paying for his education.
Early that month he met my mother, Margaret Griffin Harvin, commonly known as Peggy. Peggy had just turned 22. She was from the small town of Woodland in the northeastern part of the state and had transferred to East Carolina after studying first at Duke University and then, briefly, at Guilford College in Greensboro. She was a senior majoring in Home Economics.
Throughout my life I’ve been told that I look just like my father, which is more or less the case, with two caveats. First, my father was six feet tall; I’m only five foot eight. Second, my father was considered quite good-looking; my looks are passable but not in the same league. It may have been the gap between his front incisors. When he grinned it gave him a boyish charm. I myself have never been accused of having charm, boyish or otherwise. Nor have my looks been compared to my mother’s. She was considered drop dead gorgeous; at age 18 had, in fact, been selected as the beauty queen of WTAR-TV in Norfolk, Virginia, which won her an all-expenses paid trip to New York City.
I don’t know exactly how my parents met, but they very definitely hit it off, and at 9 p.m. on Saturday, January 18, 1958, my father abandoned his textbooks and in his firm, masculine hand-writing penned my mother a three-page letter:
“In the cold light of day—this note—letter—what have you; may seem ridiculous, however, though I realize this. . . . there is, at least for the moment, the need to talk to you and since our sixth sense has not paralleled our development of writing—perhaps this page will suffice to capture this moment as it is—I know I could never tell you about it later.
“A few moments ago I was trying to study. Odd though it may seem, a little background music usually helps, but tonight all it does is bring visions of you to me—So you see it seems I can neither study when I’m with you nor when I’m without you. That probably sounds like a bad state of affairs—yet, I would not trade that ‘need for you to be near’ feeling for all the World.
“This is a crazy world Peg—two weeks ago I had not even heard of you—and tonight you possess my every thought—How do you explain this to anyone? How do you explain it to yourself? I do not know, and yet it is fact so I cannot deny it—even if I wanted to.”
