Remembering Felton

When asked where I am from I simply answer “Delaware.” If pressed for a city I offer “Wilmington”. I was born there, but I lived in many different towns all over the state. If I had to choose only one of them to call my hometown it would be Felton.



Felton is a very small town, little more than a crossroad on US 13, the major highway running North and South through the state. The population was six hundred when I lived there in the early sixties. It hasn’t grown much since then. There was one gas station with an attached diner, and one grocery store. The store was a small market that featured fresh beef from a cow slaughtered weekly by the proprietor. I attended school with his son and have witnessed the slaughter, a grizzly business.



As far as I know Felton is known for only one thing. It is the boyhood home of actor Robert Mitchum. Mitchum was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut and moved to Delaware after his father was killed in a railroad accident in Charleston, South Carolina. He attended Felton High School but quit before graduation, hitting the road to find adventure, ending up in Hollywood.











I also attended Felton High School. I lived in a bright yellow house across the road from the school’s front door, just down the street from the gas station, three blocks from the grocery. It felt like the precise geographic center of nowhere. When I heard the story of Robert Mitchum I immediately felt a kinship. We both had landed in Felton as boys and soon found compelling reasons to leave. He quit school at the age of sixteen and left. I lacked that opportunity. But, unlike Mitchum, I eventually found reasons to stay.



I call Felton my hometown because so many notable things happened to me in the year and a half I lived there. I made my first good friend, tasted alcohol, discovered girls, flirted with stage acting, and awakened a creative spirit. In Felton I grew from a boy into a young man. The process was sometimes painful but certainly memorable.

I arrived the summer before beginning the eleventh grade. The arrival of a new family in town was big news and when Jack heard it he sought me out. Jack was my age and lived on the other side of the schoolyard next to a parking lot filled with trucks that hauled live chickens. Constant exposure to feathers carried by the wind created an allergy that one day would exempt Jack from military service and, he believes, may have saved his life.

Jack became my first best friend. What made him special to me was that he thought that I was special. What made me special to him was that I was not from Felton, I was from a big city (Wilmington) and I was not a hick like everyone else in Felton. What Jack didn’t know was that Wilmington was not a big city (unless you were from Felton) and that I was a hick by almost anyone else’s measure. Jack wanted to hang around with me because he thought I was sophisticated. I wanted to hang around with Jack because his constant praise of me fed my ego and helped to fill the emotional void created by my inferiority complex. I don’t know if the relationship was good for either of us but it felt OK and we saw each other every day. Jack introduced me to the other kids when school began and it was comfortable to begin the year as the new kid having the endorsement of a local.


Throughout the school year my classmates were turning sixteen and getting a driver’s license. We were mobile. Evenings were spent cruising and sneaking beer. We were lucky to survive that first year on the road. We all were idiots; drag racing, driving while drinking, taunting other teens from nearby towns and challenging them to meet us for a rumble. What idiots we were!






For my sixteenth birthday my mother rented the VFW hall and invited my friends to a surprise party. It was sweet of her but embarrassing for me. She thought I had more friends than I really did, and that became painfully obvious when only about eight kids showed up. Jack passed the word around school but few people wanted to spend Saturday night having cake and Kool-Aid served by the new kid’s mother when they could be having real fun cruising country roads with six-packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon.



Jack tried to salvage the bittersweet evening by fixing me up with an easy girl from nearby Milford. He brought her by the VFW and whispered that she wanted to ride in the backseat with me. I told Mom I had a date, thanked her for the party and climbed in the back of Jack’s car. Twenty minutes later she was insisting that we take her home and complaining that, birthday or no birthday, she wasn’t going to spend another minute with some goofy kid who didn’t have any idea what to do. That was the evening I learned that alcohol could drown feelings. It was a remedy I would seek often in the ensuing years.


There were good times, too. I had a reel-to-reel tape recorder and Jack had a huge collection of 45-RPM rock and roll records. We spent many weekends in my room making recordings. We pretended to be disk jockeys; introducing records, doing phony commercials, news breaks, weather forecasts. Sometimes we would do interviews, pretending to be record producers or performers. Years later I would major in television and motion picture production, working at the local TV station as an announcer.




Felton High School was small, so small that the senior play required participation by juniors in order to fill the cast. The faculty drama advisor was Mr. Mason. He had a flair for drama, a trait that gave rise to whispered rumors in a town as small as Felton. Mr. Mason had always wanted to stage a musical. Somehow, he convinced Jack and I that we had the talent to make his dream a reality. I suspect he used flattery to wear us down. Suddenly, I found myself cast as a principle player in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado”, an elaborate costume musical set in feudal Japan. A reporter later published a review in the Wilmington Evening Journal that summarized our efforts as “Ambitious.” He was very kind.

The production was elaborate by small-town standards. We were costumed in elaborate garments fashioned from dyed bed sheets, hurriedly sewn by my mother who saved the play on the night of dress rehearsal when she stepped in for the costume committee after learning that they had completed almost nothing. A single piano served as our orchestra. We had a chorus of eight boys and eight girls in addition to the main actors. I played Ko-Ko, chief executioner of the town of Titipu. Jack played the Exchequer, Pooh-bah. We both had tons of lines and solo singing performances. The production played for three nights. It was crazy and amazing and frightening and fun. How we did it I will never know.

That year was the best of my boyhood. When my father later informed us that we were about to move again I received the news with regret for the first time. We had moved every year, changing houses and schools and friends. Usually, I was happy to make the change. But leaving Felton and the friends I made there would prove difficult and painful.

I returned to visit years later, attempting to rekindle old relationships. But, too much time had passed. Our friendships had been intense but had lasted only a short while. Time had eroded in reality what still existed only in my memory. I found Jack and reminisced about special moments from our past, only to discover that he had no recollection of some of my most cherished memories.

Memories are personal treasures, freezing moments in time that portray the world as we would have it be. They are fragile and need to be protected. Else, they may not survive intact to bring comfort and joy in later years when they attain their greatest value.