Getting Started in Life

Freddy and Ginny Freve

I really don't know much about my babyhood.  I was born at Cape Fear Hospital in North Carolina; about 6:40 am on October 17, 1949.  My father was a "Yankee" 30 years older than my mother and I was the 4th child born to them.  Since they had a son who had died as an infant, it left three:  my sister Alice and brother Joe...and of course, me.  In April of 1950, when I was 6 months old, my father died of a sudden heart attack.  He was 54.  My mother had just had her 25th birthday.
By all accounts, my parents were very much in love and, although not rich, were happy and planning for a long life together raising a family.  My father was an electrician in partnership with someone named Barr who was a plumber.  The two provided heating, electrical and plumbing services to the residents of Wilmington, NC and surrounding New Hanover County.

What I know about this early life of my parents comes mostly from my aunt and cousins who were close to them when their children were being born.  Later, after his death, when I was old enough to wonder about him, and to miss what I had never had, my sister, brother and I would beg my mother to tell us stories about him.  "Tell us about Daddy."  I would demand...and climb onto her lap, laying my head on her chest.  My cousin Juanita and her husband Norwood lived next door to my parents and she would tell me that they could hear my father singing every morning as he shaved and prepared for work.  He would sing an old World War I song:  "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up In the Morning.  Oh How I Wish I Could Stay In Bed."  Juanita was a fun-loving woman who adored his laughter and inclination to break into song and told me many stories about how he cared for his wife. Her stories became very important to  me later, when  I would  have done anything to bring some joy into  my mother's life.

Alfred J Freve with Alice and Joseph

My parents were married in Myrtle Beach, SC when my mother was 18 years old and my father was 48.  I think they met through my grandfather (my father knew him through business somehow).  Perhaps my father did some electrical work for my grandfather and accidentally ran into his youngest daughter, Virginia,  and it was love at  first sight.  That is how it was in my fantasies anyway.  I never knew what brought my father from Maine down to North Carolina.  Before he met my mother he sang in the grand Opera; served in the infantry in WWI; was a cop for the city of Boston; and married a woman named Mary with 3 children (2 girls and a boy).  From all the information I  was able to gather, she was most likely close in age to Freddy Freve and the children were nearing adolescence when they married.  She died and he left Maine.
I have had many questions about this marriage:  What was his relationship with his stepchildren?  Why did he leave New England and what did my mother think about his previous life?  My parents left North Carolina shortly after their marriage and lived in Maine for a few years.  My mother always said she hated the cold so much, they came back to NC, but I never quite believed that.  Juanita was no  help with any of these questions and I was never brave enough to ask anyone else.  I visited his home town of Auburn Maine in 1985 and met his remaining 2 sisters and brother; but they were no help with that part of his life.