Billie James Stamper
I was born the 10th of June, 1946 in a house near
Crum, West Virginia. My father’s name
was Billie Stamper. My mother’s name is Maxine. Her maiden name was Edsall. My
father was not continually employed until 1951 when he secured employment as a
carpenter at Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan. My family was very poor
and moved often from shack to shack in places near where I was born. My brother
Steve was born during this time, and so was my sister Bonnie. Bonnie Died shortly
after birth.
In 1951 my father moved his family to Detroit, Michigan
where he rented the upstairs flat from his brother Paul. It was in Detroit
where I first attended public school in kindergarten. During that summer before
starting school, my younger brother, Steve, lost two of his toes while riding a
chain driven tricycle. One day my brother Gary dropped me while we were playing
doctor. The fall broke my upper left arm. Our stay in Detroit was not long. My
father moved his us back to West Virginia. The school I began attending was
Crum High School. Everyone that attended school, regardless of the grade,
attended that school. Because there was not quite enough room for all the small
children to meet in the two story sandstone school house, first and second
grades met in the basement of a church about a block away. I attended first
grade and then second grade two times. I was in love with Mrs. Little, my
teacher. My brother, Rick, had failed the second grade and my parents did not
want him to feel bad so they asked the school to hold me back so he and I were
not in the same grade together. We had great fun playing in the hills that
surrounded our little red roofed house.
My brother, Danny, and sister Brenda, were born during this
time.
My father had purchased a white house that had a red roof
from a local store owner named Carl Little, and it was in a location that got
flooded from the Spring rains and snow melt nearly every year. Dad continued to
work and live in Michigan while visiting us in West Virginia. I remember
sitting by the highway waiting for him to come home. At first, he came on a
regular basis. After a while, he stopped coming so often. We lived there for
about three years and dad moved us to Michigan again. This time to Taylor, a
small town located about 25 miles southwest of Detroit. We lived on Mary
Street. My dad had purchased the house from my mother’s father, Allen Edsall.
My dad did not always keep up the payments which strained their relationship.
I attended the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grades while
living on Mary Street in Taylor. My parents were dysfunctional and rarely
provided guidance or emotional support. As a child, I was left primarily on my
own to do as I pleased. My sixth grade teacher was named Mr. Spears. He was
also the sports coach. I played football for him. At the end of the season my school, Fairlane
Elementary, played a bigger school, Blair Moody Elementary, for the
championship. We played well but lost to a larger school.
My father was not a faithful husband. He and my mother had
many arguments while we lived on Mary Street in Taylor. During the summer
vacation after the sixth grade and after a rather violent fight, my mother left
us. She has since told me that if she had not left, she would have killed my
father and would have ended up in jail. That was part of her reasoning for
leaving her family. Since my dad needed to work, and had no one to watch after
his children, he moved us to live with his parents, Fred and Martha Stamper, in
West Virginia. I was back at Crum High School and starting the seventh grade.
At the Christmas break, my dad came and got us and moved us back to Michigan,
this time to Dearborn. He had a girlfriend, Jeanne Williams. She was divorced
and had four children. Dad was not divorced. Roxanne, my oldest sister married
after mom left and before we moved back to West Virginia. Gary, my oldest
brother, joined the Marine Corp, and never lived with the rest of us again
after the separation of my parents. Gary died of leukemia when he was twenty one
years old.
I completed the seventh grade at a Junior High School in
Dearborn, started and completed part of the eighth grade and during the
Christmas break, my father moved us and his new family to McGuire Street in
Taylor, Michigan where I completed the eighth and ninth grades. The children in
the neighborhood met at the corner of Beech Daly and Eureka Road to ride the
bus to school. It was at the bus stop that I first met the girl, Cheryl Eberts,
who would become my wife. It took a little while but we started “going
together”. The school I attended was called Brake Junior High School. While at
Brake I learned how to pole vault for the track team. I was very fast for short
distances but not for the long run. That was okay for pole vaulting, but when I
tried out for the football team, the only position the coach would let me play
was fullback. Although fast at short distances, I was pretty small. Fullbacks
are normally pretty big. You can guess how many times the coach let me play in
a game. Another thing happened while I was at Break Jr. H.S., I found out that
I liked to read novels and often checked out books by Walter Farley who wrote
about horses.
After finishing the ninth grade, I began attending Taylor
Center High School. I got in a fight the first day. The fight was more of a
standoff than a brawl. The vice principle came out and drug me inside with
warnings. It wasn’t my fault but that did not matter to him. I continued to be
part of the track team and my pole vaulting skills improved. After finishing half
of the eleventh grade, I moved to Columbus, Ohio to live with my mother. I also
continued to be on the track team. At the finals for all the track teams in the
Columbus area, I won the pole vault championship for vaulting 11 feet 6 inches.
They gave me a gold colored metal belt buckle. I kept the belt buckle for a
long time until it became very tarnished and I threw it away.
When school was over, I moved back to Michigan. I started
working at a pizza place called LaRiveria in Allen Park. My soon to be wife was
not involved with anyone and we started seeing each other again. I turned 18
that summer and in August applied for a job at Ford Motor Company in Dearborn,
Michigan, the same place where my father continued to work. I never finished
high school; the money was too good to quit. On the 27th of February
1965, Cheryl and I were married at a Methodist church on Eureka Road in Taylor,
Michigan. When I saw Cheryl in her wedding dress, I was so stressed I didn’t
know what to say. Before the minister could finish asking me if I would take
her for my wife, I said yes, and then had to wait until he finished the
sentence before I could say yes again. We got about a foot of snow the day
before the wedding. The Minister wanted 5 dollars for the ceremony. I thought
my dad was paying for it, he never did. I have often thought about that and
have felt guilty many times. Once, many years later, I tried to get in touch
with the minister but he had retired and lived in another state. The workers
running the day care center at the church would not give me his address.
Misschelle was born 9 months after the wedding. Almost two
years later, Carrie came along. Then Danae and Holly were born. Cheryl could
not have any more children, and since we wanted more, we adopted David, then
Todd, and finally Ryan.
When Cheryl and I were first married, we lived in a little
rental house on Beech Daly in Taylor. Next we moved to another rental house in
Dearborn Heights. I quit Ford Motor Company and we moved to Columbus, Ohio
where my uncle Freddy got me a job at a small machine shop. We were there for
only 6 months when we moved back to Michigan and lived with Cheryl’s parents. I
got a job back at Ford’s working in the skilled trades program as a welder
apprentice. We purchased a house on Daniels St. in the Northwest part of
Taylor. That was where we lived when Carrie, Danae, and Holly were born. In
March of 1972 we moved to a larger house on Gibraltar Rd. in Flat Rock. I
continued to work at Ford Motor Company until retirement in October 1994. Flat
Rock was a good place to raise our children and we have good memories of living
there. At the end of October 1994 we moved to Grace, Idaho. Carrie and her
husband Mark lived there and on a previous visit we had purchased 40 acres of
property. We lived with Mark and Carrie until the following spring. I worked
through the winter building a house for us to live in. We moved into the
apartment above the garage and I continued to work on the main part of the
building.
We sold the house in 1999 and moved to Cary, North Carolina
where I began working as an instructor at Wake Technical Community College.
After 4 years, we purchased a new home in Clayton, NC. We have lived in Clayton
until the present. It is now November 2012 and I continue to work at the college.
We like to visit our children in places where they live. We now have 22
grandchildren, of which, two grandsons, Tyler and Nick, have served missions
for the church, and one granddaughter, Danae’s daughter Maddie, who is married.
We joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
while living on Daniels St. in Taylor, Michigan. That was in 1968. We have
lived in many wards and stakes and have found the church is pretty much the
same no matter where it is organized.
