Charlie Carney

He didn’t strike you as the son of a school principle.  He was disorganized.  He would bring his homework to school slightly crumpled and messy.  One day he arrived upset that he had dropped his homework in a mud puddle, after which the bus ran over it.  If he had owned a dog, the dog would have eaten his homework, probably daily, and for real. 

He had a great heart, but sort of bumbled around.  He reminds me now of a Charlie Brown type of person, without the abuse by any female peers.  A few times I referred to him as "Charlie Corny" in fun, which I thought was clever at the age of 8, but it was more unkind than clever.

Charlie asked me over one Saturday to spend the day with him at his home.  He was very excited that he had spotted a bald eagle in the area.  I failed to understand the significance of this.  I was under the impression that all those turkey buzzards flying around were actually eagles.  At the time, the eagle population was at an all time low.  They had been declared endangered just two years prior in 1967.

That second grade year, we took one of the most interesting field trips, ever.  We went to the Schmidt Bakery in Salisbury, MD.  At the end of the tour, they gave every one of us our own loaf of Sunbeam Bread.  It was the softest bread I have ever consumed in all the years of my life.  For some reason, Charlie took his loaf completely out of the bag, and then tried to re-insert it.  This presented a problem, but he did manage to stuff it back in, in a disheveled manner.  Typical.

I never saw Charlie again after the second grade.  His father must have taken another job, as Sussex County finally got around to desegregating in 1969, years behind schedule, and our school - John M. Clayton - became part of the Indian River School District.  The next year, our third grade class met in a building that the previous year had been an all-black school.

Since then, the bald eagle has come back, Schmidt Bakery has stopped giving tours, and Charlie Carney, well, I wish I knew what happened to him.  He had a good heart, and probably continued to be the kind of person you would want to have as a friend.