Peninsula In Passage

Kevin Alston remembers I went to Driver elementary and John Yeates. Schools were different then. We used to get paddled when we misbehaved. Yeates was obsolete when it opened - too many students – so some of us were sent to Chuckatuck for 7th grade. We used to ride the bus to Yeates and then get another bus to Chuckatuck. As we approached the Nick Wright drawbridge we’d cheer on any barge about to pass through the bridge because the bridge would have to lift and we could get to school late. We used to hunt after school in the J. W. Nelms’ fields across from Yates and built our homecoming floats in his barns. During the summer we’d swim at the Planters Club or at Vernon Eberwine’s where we’d jump off the boathouse. After I almost drowned twice I took swimming lessons at Monogram Field, which was still a military base. The Little League also played at Monogram but there was just one team for the whole Bennett’s Creek/Driver area and competition to get on the team was tough. At Yeates Billy Whitley was my physical education teacher and Ann Johnson, my trigonometry and geometry teacher. I played football for coach Gail Parker ( who later went on to coach at Marshall University and narrowly escaped death in the 1970 plane crash the killed the Marshall football team.) He had a big impact on my life and inspired me to become a teacher and coach. I went to James Madison University, got married when I graduated and ended up back in Suffolk teaching and coaching at John Yeates where Billy Whitley hired me. When I left Yeates to go to Suffolk High as a coach, Tom McLemore followed me as coach. Thomas McLemore Tom McLemore’s career in Suffolk started in 1984 under a magnolia tree at the Camden County Courthouse in North Carolina when he and his wife, Jane, an English teacher, met Billy Whitley, principal of Yeates High School, for an interview. McLemore, a Clinton, North Carolina native, accepted a position at Yeates as a coach and teacher and Jane signed on to teach English. They both had ties to the area – she was from Norfolk and he had graduated from Frederick Military Academy in 1973. “This area has changed so much since 1984,” McLemore says. “When we went to

Yeates we saw farms all over. In 1990 when Lakeland and Nansemond River High Schools opened this area was still agricultural with bean and cornfields everywhere – more like Holland is now.” After stints at Forest Glen and Kennedy Middle Schools as assistant principal and principal, he moved into the principal’s office at Nansemond River High School in 1999. The McLemores found a new home in the Nansemond Shores subdivision just as housing was beginning to boom in North Suffolk. “It was like a ghost town at first - there were less than a dozen houses built and only five families living there,” he says. “Now we have more than 200 families in the neighborhood.”

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