Growing Up Southern: August 7, 2017

I wish I could say it was a book by Dickens, but I was only in the third grade. No, it was a book about … ready? Red Ryder. He was the hero of the first book I ever read.

Red who? Red Ryder was a character created by Stephen Slesinger and artist Fred Harman. He was first a comic-strip character, later a book, movie, and radio character. They even made some TV pilots featuring him, but they never aired. He was a major cowboy star of the 1040s and1950s.

Most people now know him only as the name on the most famous BB-gun ever manufactured, right here in Arkansas.

I knew him best through the movies. A number of characters portrayed him over the years. My favorite was Wild Bill Elliott. At the movies, Red and his sidekick, Little Beaver, sometimes played by Robert Blake, would emerge from a large book as the title and credits began. The bad guys had better start running. He rarely shot to kill, further, I don’t think Red Ryder ever kissed a woman.

If you are over 65, you remember all this.

Anyway. I knew there were books, but I thought they were only for teaching us reading in school. Then I found one that belonged to my sister stashed away in a closet. I was afraid to ask her if I could touch it, so I would slip in and sit there looking at it in wonderment. It was about Red Ryder and some rustlers. And I could make out the words and the story! I began my journey.

Soon, I had read the whole thing. Red Ryder and Little Beaver had cleared the land of rustlers, and I knew that a magnificent new world had opened for me.

Yeah, yeah, I’m sure your kids were reading Proust in the third grade, some probably in the original French. But for me, it was a simple story about a fictional cowboy that opened the door to a lifetime habit that has brought me joy unspeakable.

I was in the seventh grade before I read my first Dickens, Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. In the tenth, I read Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and though bullfighting was neat until a brief viewing of a real one disabused me of that notion. Barf.

Fortunately, or perhaps by design, I married a woman who loves to read as much as I. Interestingly, she and I each read James A. Michener’s Hawaii while in the tenth grade, albeit several years apart, and have never since viewed missionaries in a totally positive light.

We still share common responses. The current antics from our White House send us to worn and ragged copies of Alas, Babylon, or On the Beach. That may not comfort us, but it prepares us.

Thanks to poor, simple Red Ryder for all this. It wasn’t a grandiose entry into the world of literature, but, to me, it was most splendiferous. After all, millions are alive today because someone wondered what that green stuff was on molded bread. Great things do grow from simple beginnings.

So, if the young folks won’t read anything but Harry Potter, let them. Proust can wait. 

Sailing To Oblivium: August 5, 2017

When I returned from overseas and checked aboard the USS Hunley for the remaining two years of my Navy enlistment, I carried my all in one sea bag.

When I moved to Little Rock to begin my first professional job, I carried everything I owned, save one sack of books, in a 1967 Chevrolet sedan.

You know those childhood dreams about a genie granting you three wishes? My first would be to live in that condition again.

How do we accumulate so much stuff? I don’t know. We buy things. People give us things. We acquire things through the death of others. Other family members and friends pawn things off on us. Some items simply appear overnight by magic, left by some invisible force seeking to add gravity to our lives. We even find things others have lost or discarded.

I have this person in my life, of whom I think highly—very highly—who can spot a wrench or other tool on the shoulder of the road 100 feet away at 50 miles per hour. The person in question acquired the skill from her father, who practiced it for over 50 years. We now have three tubs filled with such random items. A few even work.

In family fairness, I’ve been known to take a book from our condo “library” and not return it. Everyone knows, though, that books and guitars don’t count. And our best slip-joint pliers I found in a street gutter while out fat-walking.  But back to useless acquisitions.

We once lived on a wonderful block that had an alley. That alley was the social spine of our neighborhood as well as the trash collection route. People living there were known, on occasion, to peak at the “throw-aways” of others and sneak away items of some undetermined but potentially useful value. I’m not admitting to anything, but we still have an item or two obtained that way.

Flea markets and yard sales? Please don’t mention them. Every time I move some mysterious object from one place to another, I hear the words of dear friend and former neighbor Nick Nicholson, “Why the wood alone is worth the price.”

Doubtless.

Further, there is no cleansing, as there should be. The main obstacle? It’s what I call the “20-second rule” which posits that if one stares at an object for 20 seconds, even one just found 30-years since it was last seen, and whose original purpose is unfathomable, she or he will think of something for which it might be useful, and squirrel it away for another 30 years.

No, we never eliminate, we simply change storage spots. With the energy I’ve spent moving unused, sometimes unusable, items from one location to another, I could have, well hell, I could have helped renovate an historic home, learned to play the banjo, or written a novel.

Well, I’ve done those things, but I could certainly could have done them better if I weren’t caring for junk.

The problem is, any time I’ve thrown both caution and endearment to the wind and disposed of a completely useless object, I’ve needed it within a week or so.

Meanwhile the pile grows. We still have a path through the house, but it grows more narrow with each passing year. Eventually, we could become housebound.

Know what? The Russians don’t need to subvert our elections or out-bomb us. They could just hire drug-runners to change products, and instead of dope, they could smuggle in useless junk and set up fake yard sales. The country would be paralyzed in a few years.

Oh, wait a minute …

Would a clean desk improve
the quality of writing? I dunno.

Growing Up Southern: August 4,

Did I ever tell you how I got my first real job? Would you believe I did it solely on merit? Good.

It was like this. I had just, by more or less mutual agreement, ended my relationship with the United States Navy. Oh, that’s not true. They wanted me to stay in. Even promised to send me to OCS. But, I was free, white, and over 21, so I wanted more.

Don’t forget about the “white” part.

I intended to go back to San Francisco. That’s where I had begun my four years of a hate-love relationship with the world of John Paul Jones. When I stopped off in my home town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, though, my mother begged me to stick around and see if I might find employment. “You’ve been gone away from us long enough,” she said.

Here’s hoping you understand a thing or two about Southern boys and their mamas.

So, I looked around. I never expected to find anything. The draft-dodgers already had all the good jobs, and, like a carnival ride turning upside down, public sentiment had reversed itself in its attitude toward honorable discharges. Potential employers sort of looked at me as if to say, “You were too dumb to think of a way out of the draft?”

I was packing to head West when my mother told me that one of my favorite cousins ran the sanitation department at City Hall and knew everyone in the county. I went up and talked to him. Turns out he knew somebody who knew somebody in Little Rock who might know somebody.

I went to Little Rock, and within a few minutes was talking to two young men who had just started an urban planning consulting firm. They agreed to hire me if I would work for pretty much minimum wage at first. Gosh, that was an area I had hoped to get into, and I had no expenses. Why not? I found out later that one of the motivating factors in my getting hired was because they mistakenly thought I was related to the somebody my cousin knew and they were working on a big contract with his department. They kept me on anyway.

Within five years, I was a partner in the firm, all this success due to my merit. Oh, a little bit of it was due to the fact that I was a white male of European descent. Why, any young African-American man with my credentials could have walked in and received the same deal.

Maybe not. I’d been with the firm about a year when I referred a secretarial applicant to one of the partners. A friend introduced her to me. She was a highly skilled worker with glowing recommendations and an immaculate appearance. She even fit the “cute and perky” part, which was a, more or less, universal requirement for secretarial work in those days. But, I neglected to mention her race. I barely kept my job because of that one small sin of omission.

I’ve been thinking for two days, and that is the only time in 46 years that my job was imperiled because a human being was offered a bit of human decency and a chance at success in life.

I got my first job more because
of this beloved cousin than
my uniform or good looks.
(That's me on the left).

Growing Up Southern August 17, 2017

I remember his picture hanging in my grandmother’s house, actually her second husband’s house. Her first had died when Mother was three.

I didn’t think much about ancestors as a kid. How many do? When her husband died, my father built a house for “Mama Rogers.” She brought the photograph with her and lived next door to us until she died.

Nobody wanted the old photograph. They put in behind the sugar barrel in our grocery store, and it stayed there for 15 years ago. Nobody wanted it.

Then I got married to a woman who appreciated such things. We took the picture and still have it.

Great Grandpa is leaving the house today. It’s time. I’ve had him for nearly 40 years. I even became interested and researched his life as best I could.

His name was William Coats, Reverend William Coats, they called him in his obituary. He was born 28 May 1829 in Tennessee somewhere. He traveled from Shelby with his father Sanders Coats to what was then Bradley, now Cleveland County. He married Anna Elizabeth (Ryburn) on 27 May 1855. He died 18 September 1897 and is buried in Friendship Cemetery. He served the CSA in Co D., 26th Arkansas Infantry.

That unit marched around a lot. From Cleveland County, Arkansas the boys somehow got to Northwest, Arkansas and were held in reserve at the Battle of Prairie Grove. They saw action at a skirmish near Greenwood, at Devil’s Backbone. Then they came back and took part, as I understand it, at Jenkin’s Ferry.

His daughter married a man whose father served in a Union Cavalry regiment. When I asked my grandmother once if that wasn’t odd, she said, “Why no, Papa was a Democrat and Mr. Harris was a Republican.” I guess that explained it all. She also told me how Great-grandpa Coats had told her that the most danger he encountered was getting home after the war. Roving bands he called “graylegs” preyed on men traveling. Returning home after the war was hard. Some things never change.

He died suddenly of a heart attack. His obituary stated that he always wanted to be a preacher but couldn’t afford to because of the pressures of supporting a family. He had married, as noted earlier, Elizabeth Ryburn, now a well-respected name in the county.

His obit said further that he was well-respected in the community and “never took part in a neighborhood brawl.” Don’t ask. I sometime wonder if that was a sort of coded message referring to the KKK. As Hemingway said, “It’s pretty to think so.”

I finally contacted a distant cousin who still bears the Coats name. He seemed delighted to have the photograph and has sons to pass it on to. I’ll hand Great Grandpa Coats over to him today. I think he’ll like his new home.

Sailing To Oblivium: August 2, 2017

The guys on the ship called him “Shorty” and that was no term of camaraderie in the United States Navy. I called him Danny and he liked that.

He had been a “Bubblehead,” i.e. a submarined sailor. Long before, though, he had washed out and been assigned to tender duty, a huge step down. See, he tended to “drink a bit.” I guess he stood about five-foot-four in his Navy boondockers. Sometimes, though, after one too many drinks while on liberty, he saw himself as tall and tough as Gary Cooper. He persisted in that notion, no matter how many times the Charleston, South Carolina police disabused him of it.

Unlike the 99 percent of police officers in our great county who are brave, dedicated, and respectful of rights, the ones in Charleston, at least back in the late 1960s, didn’t need a president of the United States to tell them to rough-up suspects. It was in their DNA, especially if the “suspect” wore a military uniform. Uniforms of the United States Navy, in particular, excited their “whip-ass” genes.

The last time I saw Danny wasn’t the first time I had seen him being escorted up the gangplank AWOL. It was the worst time, though. He had to be half-carried and I wouldn’t have recognized his face had not someone told me who he was. Even the front of his blue Navy blouse was covered in caked blood.

“He done been fightin’ them police again,” Seaman Richardson said. “I told him about that.” Seaman Richardson stood over six-feet tall, weighed over 200, and was a pretty rough customer from all accounts. He was a gentle giant, but some shipmates from his home town of Memphis swore he had once cleaned out an entire holding cell of men bent on violating his honor in ways he deemed improper. Nobody crossed Richardson, but even Richardson didn’t cross the Charleston police.

Anyway, that last trip up the gangplank with a bruised and battered face was enough for the Navy. They could make sailors like Danny disappear quickly, and they did.

We pretty much forgot about him, that is until a shipmate from his home town came back from leave one day. The Deck Force crew began to buzz. “Hey, did you hear about that guy Shorty … the one they shit-canned last winter? Well guess what?”

Yes, guess what. It seems that Danny and some friends were at a lake watching people swim when a young girl drifted out too far and fell from her inner tube. There were no lifeguards and the crowd froze as she screamed, all except Danny.

You can guess the rest. He got her back to her tube, but he couldn’t make it himself. His waterlogged clothes pulled him under. Our informant swore that, when they finally got his body ashore, he had grown six inches in height. We chose to believe him. After all, shipmates are shipmates, and many a man among us would be taller in death than in life.

To Shipmates: those who serve
 with a thin sheet of steel between
 them and the bottom of the sea.

Growing Up Southern" August 1, 2017

Ahh. A consultant’s job is never through. First task in town today was to introduce some of the younger women to the good old Southern term, “The Vapors.”

As in, “that guitar player, Slash, for Guns and Roses, gives my wife a case of the vapors.”

“The what?”

“The vapors, not the Matthew McConaughey vapors, mind you, but the regular kind.” I proceeded to elucidate, noting their increased interest.

The condition may have, back in history, referred to a number of conditions women encountered, including bloating or having gas. In the American South, however, it refers to a condition of near-swooning brought on by an emotional rush experienced, exclusively back in the day, by Southern Belles.

“I’ll sweah Hon, I took one look at that man and it nearly gave me the vapors. Hit showly did.”

This short explanation derives from a secondary database. I never, as far as I know, caused the condition in anyone.

Growing Up Southern: July 31, 2017

I was sickly as a youth. They were forever forcing needles into my arm or noxious liquids down my throat. Illness never was a pastime for me. As a result, I can count my serious illnesses as an adult—ones you would miss work for—fairly easily.

Now, hangovers from too much fun, muscles strained from kicking at dogs, fatigue from obsessive jogging, malnutrition from smart-mouthing a wife, and other self-induced idiocies don’t count, do they? Okay.

Let’s see, I had severe cold upon checking aboard the USS Hunley in the winter of 1968. I had the flu somewhere around 1989. I mean I really had the flu. Knocked me out for over a week. It was not a case we see so often when someone has a bad cold and elevates it to flu status. I had the real thing. Trust me.

Speaking of colds, you seldom hear about them anymore. We euphemistically call them “sinus infections now.” Why? I’m not sure, but I suspect it is so we can demand antibiotics. They have no effect on a virus, as we know. As we should know anyway. There is the placebo effect, and prescribing them gets you out of the doctor’s hair. So, there.

I think I read somewhere that each case of the common cold results from a separate virus. Once we have had a specific one, we become immune to it. If that is true, I had so many as a youth that I think I used them all up. That one I mentioned in 1968 was the last.

Other than the flu once, I did pass two kidney stones. The first instance took me to the emergency room a year or so ago, whereupon a couple of drips of morphine made me as unconcerned as a politician doing dirty work. The second? Well, it occurred a few weeks ago. I recognized the symptoms that time and used profanity combined with a gritting of teeth to see me through. All in all, the morphine was better, profanity cheaper.

Why am I telling you all this? It’s because a I have knee giving me fits and it really pisses me off. That seems to be a common response when one isn’t used to, and doesn’t enjoy, being incapacitated. Anyway. I decided to employ my normal treatment for pain: just working through it. This included profanity, stretching, walking, and picking peas, a chore that requires a good deal of stretching and bending.

That made it worse. I guess I’ll have to let someone look at it. I always remember the words of our beloved country doctor, though. “Those boys in Little Rock like to cut on you.” I think I may tell them that I’m “a screamer” and friend to scads of lawyers. Then they might want to think twice about it.

Oh well, I am lucky for 50 years of good health. I reckon a little attention won’t hurt.