Serious Business

The Old Man is praying for those in harm's way from Gustav and encourages you to do the same.

If We Could Just Eat Them

The Old Man as you have read, is not much as a gardener. I did, however, have the good sense to marry well. Miss Martha is quite the flower gardener. It's her patience, I suppose. At any rate, I'm so very thankful for her, and you will get to know her better in future posts.


Here is just a tiny little bit of her handiwork.

Perhaps next year, I'll make her Vice-president of Tomatoes.

A Gal Named Hazel

The Old Man has a long standing fascination with weather. We have been visited over the past 24 hours with the remnants of Hurricane Fay. The official rainfall total here is 7 + inches. My rain gauge shows 6 3/4 inches. I've watched Fay's progress since she was born and slapped on the butt by Mother Nature. I must confess, the rain is a welcome sight to a drought plagued area. Perhaps even my dwarf garden will resuscitate. Nah.

I was 12 years old and in the 7th grade when Hazel blew into our lives in Bedford. OK...it's science lecture time courtesy of Jay Barnes excellent book, North Carolina Hurricane History. Could I have your attention, class? Hurricane is from a Carib Indian word translated big wind or storm god. In the Western Pacific they are called typhoons and in the Indian Ocean they are called cyclones. They are still the most powerful airborne malignancies known to man. Tornadoes get much of the press, but for day in and day out widespread destruction, hurricanes wear the crown.

On October 15,1954 Hurricane Hazel tore through the North Carolina coast with a vengeance. Not only did North Carolina suffer, but she blistered her way north into Virginia and was still a major storm with winds of 110 miles per hour when she went across the border into Canada. Hazel was last seen crossing the Artic Circle on her way to Scandinavia where she eventually fell apart.

In Bedford, school dismissed early that day. The eye wall of the storm was due around mid-afternoon. Of course, in 1954 there was no Double Doppler Radar, supercomputer atmospheric modeling, or weather satellites. Most folks that I knew subscribed to the "Holy Crap would you look at that mother" school of weather forecasting. Either that or the "Dang it. My corns are killing me" school. My friend Kenny (of watermelon crime spree fame) and I decided we would like to see what a hurricane was like up close....and personal. As 7th graders, we pretty much figured we knew all we needed to know about the world. We had already learned about watermelons.

So outside we went. When we came out of Kenny's basement, it didn't seem like a big deal. Then we rounded the house. Kenny went down and with wind propulsion slid down to the barn at the back of their lot and I ended up clinging to the outdoor picnic table. About this time, Kenny's mom opened the back door and started screaming to us to "get in here right this minute". Uh, OK Mrs. C. By this time, Kenny had worked his way back up to my picnic table and we were able to scramble inside, drenched and bruised but with that good feeling that we had conquered something. We just weren't sure what.

I no longer feel the need to go out into a hurricane. Following their progress remotely is quite fine, thank you. I saw one blow NBC weather man Al Roker over onto the ground on one of his live reports recently. I remember thinking, "Al, my man, welcome to the club.

Olympiad....1950's Style

The Old Man has been caught up in the Olympic competition. I have been captivated by some of the sights and performances from Beijing. Such style, such grace, such polish. And that's just the commentators. The athletes themselves have proven over and over what dedication, diligence, and raw talent can accomplish. My thoughts have rambled back to my limited exposure to track and field as a "Bedford Otter".

It was a less complex time. Here are some differences:

• The track. Athletes ran and sometimes fell on the track at the Bird's Nest on a composite material that seemed to be a rubber-like substance. Those who fell, appeared to have no road rash, cuts and scrapes, or other injuries. We ran on cinders. That's right, cinders. They were finely ground and provided a great base for running. Fine as long as you remained vertical. Fall on them and your knees, thighs, and if you were really unlucky, your nose, looked much like you'd been keel-hauled behind a John Deere.
• The track shoes. At Beijing, the runners wore high-tech shoes with ridges, grooves, pads,and imprints. My shoes were little light weight leather "slippers" with sharp steel spikes on the bottom. They complimented the cinders. Make a mis-step and your ankles could end up looking like grated Parmesan cheese mixed with ketchup.
• High jump. Modern jumpers sail over with a backwards technique and land on soft balloons of fabric. Us old guys went over the bar face down and landed in a pit of coarse sawdust. Wonderful on a really hot day.
• Pole Vault. Today's vaulters use poles with enough spring in them to send a small child into the jet stream. Bedford pole vaulters found a bamboo patch and cut their own pole. With the right tape pattern to grip, you could hope to achieve a vault of, maybe, 10 feet. Here again, you landed in a sawdust pit. Of course the increased height of the fall made the sawdust even more appealing.
• High & Low hurdles. These were made of heavy wood. Miss one and tangle in it and you added blunt force trauma to the cinders and the steel spikes.

We had no uneven parallel bars, no pommel horse, and no floor exercises. We did have discus and shot put. I'm firmly convinced that the shot was a cannon ball left over from the War of Northern Aggression.

Do not misunderstand my comments. I'm in no way diminishing the accomplishments of these gifted young people. They are, in most cases, my heroes. They are the best of the bunch and I yield to their talents. Perhaps because I've experienced the feeling of being in a starting block, "set" and holding for the gun, I am attached to them remotely. I know their thoughts, I feel their heart pounding. I know the taste of blood in my throat when I've run a 220 yard dash all out and won. I know the agony of getting back into shape after an off season. My hat's tipped.

At the risk of immodesty, but for the benefit of those who follow me, I still hold two records at that old high school. I set records of 10 sec. flat in the 100 yard dash, and 22 sec. flat in the 220 yard dash. Forgive me the self-administered "attaboy", but I need to add this for the benefit of my children and grandchildren. The Old Man hasn't always been the old man. To put it into perspective lest I be thought self-aggrandizing, they closed the school 3 years after my historic performance, thus insuring my standing. I had a little help in being the fastest kid on the block.

No Silver Bells or Cockle Shells

The Old Man hasn't had a lot of luck growing vegetables. For some reason the old children's' nursery rhyme crossed my mind today. "Mary Mary quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row. " I remember hearing my mother quoting that at an early age. Miss Alma was quite a lady. She grew up in the country and had country ways until her death. I value those lessons she probably didn't even know she was teaching. Agriculture was a big part of her life as well as my father's.

His background was rural as well. His father was a sharecropper. In the event you are unaware of the concept, a sharecropper lived on someone else's farm and worked the crops. At harvest time, the owner shared the profits and/or produce with the tenant. I remember my dad talking about "suckering tobacco", saving and curing tobacco, and going to market with his dad. I recall he said it was hot, nasty work, made even worse by tobacco sap irritating his skin and having to squash these big worms before they could damage the crop.

Near my mother's homeplace, there was a community canning factory. The local folks brought their produce to the cannery and "put them up" for the winter. It was hot, tiring work and wasn't for the weak. My mother, her siblings, and my grandmother all worked in the canning factory. Sturdy stock, they. Her father eked out a living by raising produce, some carpentry work, and helping in a sawmill. Much more about my parents on later posts.

I didn't inherit my folks talents for farming. I must have the scummiest soil on earth behind my house. All the experts said, "You need to do a soil test". OK. I did a soil test. It said I needed phosphate, lime, and fertilizer. I put out phosphate, lime and fertilizer. No silver bells, no cockle shells, and you can definitely forget about the pretty maids. The tomato plants died after they got all of 15 inches tall, and you could cover the squash plants with a car wash bucket. I did, however, get one Jalepeno pepper. It was about the size of the first joint of my thumb.

My dad could coax a Thanksgiving banquet out of a gravel parking lot. I should have listened to him more. I remember he sometimes borrowed a pick-up and went to a friends house to clean out the horse barn. He would take me with him. I think it was on one of these trips that I firmly decided to learn where all the grocery stores were.

But next year, I'll try again. I'm thinking raised beds. Maybe I'll try to run down that little bandy-legged guy who squirted Miracle Grow on all those TV commercials. Not sure about the horse barn thing, though. The thought of that makes me glad there's always Harris-Teeter or Food Lion.

Life Is Just A Bowl of Cherry

The Old Man has a couple of hearing issues. Some time back, I began wearing a hearing aid in my right ear. It seems that there are some things going on (or not going on) that make me less able to hear "instructions and guidance". When this first became appearant, I searched the memory banks for reasons. Suddenly, without warning, an episode from my childhood occurred to me.

One night in August, I was walking home from a Cub Scout meeting. I hadn't made it up to full Scout status yet, and yes, you could feel very comfortable walking alone in 1940's Bedford. Something caught my eye lying in the grass beside the sidewalk. I picked it up and it was a Cherry Bomb, soaked with early evening dew. I casually stuck it in my pocket and continued on home.

When I got to my room, I put the bomb in a drawer where I kept my special treasures; my Sky King decoder, my half used tube of Red Ryder BB's, and my deed to one square inch of land in the Klondike from Quaker Puffed Wheat. It took residence there until early December.

One day, I was out of school and felt boredom set in. Bad sign. I picked up the Cherry Bomb and found that it had long since dried. Experiment time. I took the bomb into our bathroom and figured that I would turn the water on in the sink and "test" for dryness by lighting the fuse. My plan was to immediately stick the end of the fuse in the running water before any catastrophe could occur. Bad plan now joined bad sign as the rule of the day.

After three "sticks" under the running water, slow boy finally realized that Cherry Bombs Burn Under Water! I had just enough time to drop the thing in the sink and turn my head before critical mass was reached.

The resulting blast took out a shelf above the sink where my dad kept his Kreml Hair Tonic, and shredded several slats of a metal Venetian blind adjacent to the sink. The gunpowder mixed with the water and covered me until I looked like the Tar Baby in the Uncle Remus cartoons popular at the time.

Now, my mother was a stout woman but she cleared the steep steps in about a nanosecond. She screamed, "Are you alright?" At least she said later she did...all I heard was a persistent bell ringing. The bell continued for a couple of weeks.

Mother later admitted that she first thought I had concocted some fiendish substance with my chemistry set. I wish that had been the case. I would have been hailed as a boy genius as opposed to the opposite.

So, mystery solved. This probably explains the hearing aid as well as my seeming reluctance to follow instructions. Some days I just nod and grin. And now and then, from somewhere far away for just a minute, a bell rings.

Commin' Up For Air

The Old Man has always loved the water. As far back as I can remember, my fascination with all things "nautical" has been a strong influence in my life. I never saw the ocean until I was about ten years old, but by then, I felt a kinship to Popeye the Sailor. My mother would fix spinach and I would eat my fill, then go into my room and watch my arms. Nothing happened. You may give a collective "Yuuk" but to this day good old canned spinach is one of my favorites. The arms still haven't hit the Popeye stage yet, but there is an area around my belt that has taken up the slack.

Swimming pools as we know them didn't exist in Bedford. I knew of one that was little more than a concrete hole. There was no filter and no chemicals. There were, however, frogs, bugs, enough algae to support the weight of Bigfoot, and who-knows-what-else lurking in the deep end. But the "real" water was at "The Lake". Formally known as the Bedford County Park, it was about 10 miles outside of town. As lakes go, it wasn't all that big. You could rent a rowboat and row from one end to the other in about 20 minutes. But it was "our" lake. My folks loved to go out there and fish. My dad taught me at an early age about Blue Gills, minnows, nightcrawlers, and backlash. We didn't have such fancy reels in those days. I learned quickly how to "thumb" my reel on a cast in an attempt to prevent the Queen Mother of all tangles. Other than salt herring in winter, I grew up thinking that to "eat fish" meant perch and that the "Holy Grail" of fishing was the largemouth bass. My dad lived his whole life hoping to catch one, but never did as I recall.

I tolerated the fishing, but my true love was the swimming area. There was a little sandy beach and a chained off swimming area with water about chest high on an adult. My friends and I would spend entire Saturdays in that swimming area, freezing and shivering during June and early July. It always got better by August when the water warmed to probably 90 degrees.

The Lake had it all. In addition to the swimming area, the boat house, and the fishing, there was the concession stand. Two large speakers on the roof of the building blared popular songs of the day as the older kids fed nickles into the jukebox. Even after all these years, "Born To Be With You" by the Chordettes calls up memories of being at The Lake. Its Pavlovian, I suppose.

As I grew to the teen years, my relation with The Lake grew with me. In Bedford, you could just stand on Longwood Avenue and if you had a towel with your bathing suit (not called trunks) wrapped and rolled under your arm, and sure enough someone you knew would stop and give you a ride. You just had to agree to come home when they did. Mom & Dad have stopped for many of them. That's just how Bedford was back then.

I have a lifelong affection for the water.....the ocean....the mystery of what's down there. In another life, I would probably choose to be Clive Cussler......or Popeye.

I must go, now. I need to hear Born To Be With You..................

Not Now, Helen

The Old Man doesn't know a lot about women. But then, what man does? I thought that maybe Dr. Phil would, but according to my last trip through a super market check out line, I'm doubtful. Case in point, my early adventures. Let me set the scene.

At our church in Bedford, our Sunday routine was ironclad. There was Sunday morning service, followed by lunch at Coleman's Restaurant. A quiet afternoon (Dad forbade Sunday movies, but curiously enjoyed TV) led up to Sunday evening service. We trudged upstairs and dutifully re-donned our shirt and tie. This may not sound like a huge deal, but a second story bedroom in Bedford in August was akin to the very breath of hell we were going to church to avoid in the first place.

Now it was the practice of our church to have the children/youth choir sit in the choir loft and perform during the service. I was about 10 years old when I had my first encounter.

It was about mid way through the evening. Rev. A.G. the Short Tie Preacher had worked up a full head of steam and was thundering through his message. The little cardboard fans with the tongue-depressor handles provided by Carder's Funeral Home were going at warp speed. Now, those of us in the choir were not allowed fans, so we just suffered. A. G.'s wife on many occasions responded to those who said it was too hot for church with, "I know of a place that's hotter". I'm not too sure I would agree.

At any rate there I sat, next to Helen. She was a couple of years older than me and so pretty that I had begun to take notice that girls could be good for something other than playing dodge ball. All of a sudden, I felt something against my shoulder. It was Helen's head. It seemed that no one in the congregation had yet noticed, so I whispered, "Not now, Helen", and gently moved her head back up straight. As soon as I relaxed a bit, here came the head. "Not now, Helen" I tried again. No sooner had I put her back together, than the whole thing happened again. By now, I was close to full panic. This time I moved away a bit and Helen fell into my lap. By this time the congregation had gotten in on the project and recognized that Helen had a problem. She had fainted.

Well, somehow, they got Helen back among the living. She nor I ever mentioned the incident again to the best of my memory. Hopefully she's still with us, out there somewhere. She may or may not remember my Don Juan polish, but I hope her life has been filled with a good mixture.

Margaritaville

The Old Man is going to spend a few days in Margaritaville. As such, I will be away from the computer for a bit. Fear not, I will return to Blogville shortly. I'll pick up where I left off and you will meet Helen, the Un-Scout-like Boy Scouts, A.G the Short-Tie Preacher, and a host of others.

I thank you for your interest and especially for your kind comments.

A Slight Pause

The Old Man is taking a slight pause from the routine accounts of his youth. A word of explanation is in order.

Virtually all of my paternal and maternal family has gone on. As such, there are many unanswered questions I never got around to asking, and now that doorway has closed. It is, at times, an uncomfortable feeling. The little details that went into making my parents the wonderful people they were are so lacking. I do remember some stories, but I'm sure there were hundreds more. There always are.

I have been mulling over a venue for setting down some autobiographical history for the benefit of my children and grandchildren. Nothing seemed to quite "fit" for me until Jules introduced me to the blog. That was an "Ah Ha" moment. I have discovered that the words flow freely and one story reminds me of another. To paraphrase that great detective, O J Simpson, "It does fit so I wont quit".

Through my posts, you will learn about what it was like to grow up in the small Va. town of Bedford. You'll meet some characters and share some adventures during the late 1940's and '50's; a simpler and less complex time. They will be true and I hope, told in such a way as to prove a worthwhile respite from your daily grind.

So my goal is twofold; to leave a more complete picture of my life for my children, and to provide for everyone an entertaining and nostalgic look over their shoulder.

So stay tuned, and many thanks for your comments. You've probably already discovered they are the best motivation for continuing.