history

PATHWAYS by Don Miller

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Some thirty years ago the seed that would grow into this book was planted in my head when my wife Linda and I took pre-school daughter Ashley, now a mother and wife in her own right, to play in one of the many streams that cut our property. Frogs and their pollywogs, crawdads and minnows were in abundance along with a watermelon that I had placed into the dammed up stream to cool …just like my grandparents had done many, many years earlier. I had warm memories of picking red, vine ripened tomatoes and eating them whole for lunch before having a stream cooled watermelon split open for a sweet and refreshing mid-afternoon snack. I wanted Ashley to have some of the same experiences…without having to hoe the tomatoes or watermelons. Later as I struggled to get the watermelon out of the stream she pointed out, “Wouldn’t it been easier just to put it in the refrigerator?” Yep, and she doesn’t eat raw tomatoes either. Are you sure you are mine?

Closing in on my autumn years I find that my own footprints seem to wander back to the same paths that my parents and grandparents laid out for me…no matter how much I have resisted following them These are stories of my youth and reflect the era that I grew up in. They are what shaped and define me. American Exceptionalism of the Fifties, cotton fields and textiles mills, Civil Rights and “with all deliberate speed,” the Cold War and our involvement in Viet Nam in the Sixties. These are stories of a time now past that still affect us today. I hope if you take the time to read PATHWAYS that it will trigger the memories that you hold dear.

You may purchase PATHWAYS at the following link http://goo.gl/QsTE8r both through Kindle or Amazon.

PATHWAYS by Don Miller

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Excerpt from PATHWAYS

I have a habit of “woolgathering” when doing repetitive tasks. I have always allowed my mind to wander to wherever it might and today’s woolgathering session (insert weed eating) took me back to my childhood home. I have read so many stories by southern authors where hometowns are described as “sleepy, little southern towns.” I cannot describe mine that way. I did not live in a “sleepy, little southern town.” With no signal light or post office, I lived in a scattered, unincorporated rural area that was made up of even smaller, scattered unincorporated communities with the now socially unacceptable name of Indian Land, South Carolina. Home was a brick veneered single story home located on the corner of one of the many unnamed dirt “river roads” that followed a meandering path to the Catawba River and the Charlotte-Lancaster Highway. One of just a smattering of single family homes, with the exception my grandparents’ home and farm and two uncles’ homes and farms, we were the only ones living on the Catawba River side of the Charlotte-Lancaster Highway, on the mile long stretch between “the old cotton gin” and the Van Wyck highway.

Indian Land is located in what is called the “panhandle” of Lancaster County, which to the northwest, juts more like a small accusatory finger than a panhandle into North Carolina, with the “Queen City,” Charlotte to the north and the small railroad town of Waxhaw to the east. To the south, inside of the borders of South Carolina, you will find the city of Lancaster and to the west Rock Hill. To get to Rock Hill, some five miles away as the crow flies, you must cross the Catawba River which early in my life required a scary ride on a ferry. Today it is a congested eighteen-mile car ride that makes me wish for the ferry.

Many small communities were scattered along Highway 521, the Charlotte-Lancaster Highway, and Highway 160 which runs west of 521 to and through Fort Mill, SC and on to Rock Hill. Names like Osceola, Pleasant Hill, Pleasant Valley, Belair, Miller Bottoms, Possum Hollow (pronounced Holler), Yarborough Town and Camp Cox were just some of these small communities that populated the area. During my childhood, the population density became much sparser as you traveled away from these highways, with homes giving way to farms of varying sizes or large tracks of forested areas where wildlife outnumbered the people in the area, especially the area that bordered on the Catawba River. The now socially unacceptable yet historically accurate name of Indian Land comes from the fact that the area continued to be populated by Native Americans, mainly the Catawba and Waxhaw tribes, well after Europeans had arrived in the area. The Catawba Indian Reservation is still, to this day, located across the river from Indian Land but so thorough was their assimilation into the population, the most “Indian” sounding names might be Smith or Jones.

I would not characterize Indian Land as being “sleepy” either. Off of the main thoroughfare, 521, it was as slow and sleepy as a hibernating bear but the two-lane blacktop that connected the trade center of Charlotte, NC with the textile town of Lancaster, SC was always bustling with traffic, especially during those periods of time designated as “rush hour.” At the time there was no industry other than agriculture or a couple of general mercantile stores so people commuted to the larger cities. In addition to commuters, traffic included everything from John Deere tractors to tractor trailer trucks along with the Ashe Brick dump trucks that made their back and forth sojourn from the red clay dirt pit located a mile or so east of 521 to the brick-baking ovens located in the small town of Van Wyck to the south.

What I miss the most about my home, other than family who have passed away, are those dirt and gravel roads that cut through the area leading to the forests, fields or to farms, many on the river bottoms that lay near the muddy rock-strewn waters of the Catawba. Those roads were slow and easy on both the legs and eyes, leading me to adventure or work or sometimes both at the same time. Those dirt roads no longer exist anywhere other than my memory as Charlotte has sprawled across the state line, devouring farm and farm lands like a monster in an old Japanese horror movie. The house that I grew up in along with so many other familiar structures no longer exists and the land it sat on is now covered in condos belonging to an upscale retirement community. Most of the cotton fields that fed the area cotton mills are gone, as are the mills themselves. They are not only gone from my little part of the world but they are gone from the country itself and I feel great sorrow because of it. When I visit family there, if I close my eyes and concentrate enough, I can still see those dirt pathways and in my head, at least, feel the powdery dust between my toes. I now realize that no matter how far I have traveled, I have never been far from them and home.

THE NEW NORMAL…AND IT IS QUITE ABNORMAL

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Several decades ago I would find myself sitting in a freshman English class trying to translate the Old English of the Canterbury Tales into country redneck. I was having no success when the air raid siren in downtown Newberry began to blow. It was a test that was repeated every weekday at noon. My English professor, a sometimes not quite sober and always irreverent guy, looked out the window and stated to the class, “If the Rooskies have enough bombs to waste on Newberry, we are f@#$ed. Class is dismissed!”

As I think back I would have to agree with my old professor and also admit that I miss the Soviets. We thought we knew who our enemies were back then, where they were, and how far we could push them. They wore certain uniforms and lived in certain countries. We knew that we were here and they were somewhere over there. It was our government against their government. Our ideologies versus their ideologies. We had theaters of war where an army would be on a particular side.

Then came Vietnam and the end of our “American Exceptionalism.” Even though the Russians were still involved and were our greatest enemy the Cold War environment began to change. Suddenly all uniforms were made of the same camouflage material that looked for the world like pajamas and camouflaged to look like everyone else BUT US. We wore the same colors and hats we always had worn but in jungle camo. The fighting took place in a jungle where you could never be quite certain where or who Charlie was. Having said all that we started to sense a blur between the two sides and two sides became three…or more. It was harder to determine just who the enemy was and now the blur has become so exaggerated, it is extremely difficult to separate the “good” guys and the “bad” guys, EVEN ON OUR OWN SIDE.

We cannot really look around and identify our enemies with any certainty with sleeper cells, pretenders, spies, double agents, and even refugees. And we must not forget the US involvement in the formation and training of so many of these groups. There is possibly only one place where we can identify the real troublemakers…we can look in a mirror. To quote Pogo and his creator Walt Kelly, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

At least back in the 60’s there were air raid sirens that let you know something might be getting ready to happen. If you were lucky enough to be near a bomb shelter, you has some small semblance of safety even if it was just in your own mind. You knew that the Russians were coming…and still might. Today, we do not know who, how, when, or what may happen. I think I liked the sirens better.

“Daddy, what did you do in the war?”

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There is a World War Two photo of my Dad in his uniform and another of my Mother dating from the same era. Both were black and white “portraits” that had been “colorized.” There is a somewhat faded snapshot taken at Easter some twenty years later and not long before my Mother’s death to ALS. She is seated in a wheelchair with the rest of us crowded around in order for the old Kodak to get us all into its viewfinder.

Tom Brokaw’s book The Greatest Generation was written about my parents. Not my parents specifically but the millions of young men and women who went off to fight and win the Second World War, the last war that had a righteous goal of saving the world from monsters – Hitler and his Nazis or the Japanese Imperialist and Tojo. Some served as soldiers like my Dad or worked in munition factories like my Mother. Hers might have been a more important job than my Dad’s as she, along with millions of young women, filled the industrial workforce that defeated the Axis Powers. After they came home, those who came home, began to try to create better lives for themselves and their families than they, themselves, had had. I would say my parents were successful.
My father Ernest rarely spoke of his involvement in the war. He fought, or according to him, didn’t fight, in the Pacific Theater under the command of MacArthur. In 1941, just days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he and several of his buddies attempted to join the Marine Corp. After receiving his physical, I am sure, that “hell hath no fury” as my father when finding out he was 4F – physically unfit for duty due to a birth defect that left him one set of ribs too short. Undeterred, he attempted to join the Navy and then the Army but the 4F continued to follow him. I can only imagine his surprise upon receiving a draft notice in 1943. I guess this should graphically enlighten us on how well the war had gone up until that point. He served in the Philippines and was a part of the forces that occupied the Japanese Home Islands after the surrender at Tokyo Bay. Placed in the tank corps, his physical defect would cause him so much pain he would later be transferred to a group that maintained the landing craft that would be used to invade the Philippines and other Japanese held islands.

“Daddy, what did you do in the war?” I think this was a question that most of us from our generation asked. Like most vets that I have been around, neither he nor any of his friends seemed to want to answer that question or talk about the bloody action that they might have seen. They were full of funny stories but seldom ventured down the dark path of battle. “How many Japs did you shoot, Dad?” Let me say up front that this was his term for our now Japanese allies. In fact, there were worse descriptions used to describe the enemy that they fought in the Pacific. He would smile at my question and inform me that of the many waves of soldiers that “hit the beaches,” his wave went in right after the nurses when the island was secured. He did say that they were close enough to occasionally hear gunfire but it was the exception, not the norm. He once told a story of a “dud” bomb going off in a fire and commented that had he been in the Japanese Army he would have assumed it had been assembled by the Japanese equivalent of my mother. I found out later that the lone casualty was one of my father’s best friends.

Like most of the returning servicemen, my father brought home souvenirs from the war, along with his dress uniform with sergeant strips that included a “rocker” below the three strips and a big T in the middle. Tucked away in my mother’s cedar “wedding chest”, Japanese Kimonos made from rich colorful silk, small porcelain curios and Japanese script that had been used in place of money were just a few of the souvenirs that he returned with. My favorite souvenir was a Japanese rifle and bayonet. It had been “fixed” so that the bolt could not be retracted and, therefore, it could not fire. I spent hours trying to remove that bolt but that was okay. I got to use it to play at war when playing war was still okay to play. I would put on Dad’s old field jacket and boots, both several sizes too big, and with one of my mother’s metal mixing bowls turned over on top of my head, I was ready to defend the good ole United States against all of our enemies, at least the imagined ones.

I remember staying up late on a Saturday night, after the Gillette Fight of the Week had ended. It was a special treat to watch the NBC Saturday Night Movie of the Week with the family. The movie Sahara starring Humphrey Bogart was being shown. The story was about a tank crew separated from their unit as it retreated after the rout of Allied forces at the seaport of Tobruk. The story is not important, while my thoughts about it and my father are. I always thought that my father resembled Bogart in a somewhat less gaunt way, especially with a “coffin nail” hanging from his lower lip. Like Bogart he was not a big man and I am sure it was the dark hair and the strong and silent personality that he had. Maybe it was their sense of duty, although my father’s was not portrayed on the Silver Screen but in the way that he lived his life. I can remember thinking, “Gee, I wish Dad was more like Bogart and had gone out and killed all of those Krauts or Nips!” You know, someone heroic instead of a landing craft mechanic. Really? I guess youth is wasted upon the young or maybe with age comes some sort of wisdom.

SANDLOT BASEBALL: A story about Indian Land from PATHWAYS

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I have spent a large portion of my life sitting on a tractor, riding mower or John Deere Gator doing nothing more than traveling in circles. Cutting fields or dragging infields for untold hours, always ending up where I started. Miles and miles going absolutely nowhere. Occasionally, I did try to cut in different directions so that I might unwind myself. My last field, a middle school field, in Greenville County, South Carolina, was a palace compared to any of the fields that I played on in high school. It was a different time on a different planet, it would seem. My statement doesn’t mean that I didn’t coach on some pretty poor fields.

Our field was no different from any of the other fields that we played on in that it was terrible. Like many other fields, it was built as an afterthought. It was, however, terrible in different ways than the other terrible fields. Every field has its own…ah…ambience for lack of a better word. Ours was a football field adjusted to accommodate a baseball field. The backstop was constructed from creosoted “re-purposed” telephone poles and chicken wire. A skinned infield was located off of one end meaning the right field fence would have been about two hundred and fifty feet from home plate…if there had been a fence. Instead of a fence we had a steep drop off that was studded with pine trees. The left field line went on forever following the general path of the football sidelines until it ended with a fence. While much deeper, at least there were no light standards to navigate in left although there were goal post to worry about. In right you had to worry about light standards and goal posts. David Jowers, a big, blond-headed lefty, ripped a line drive so hard that when it hit a light standard he was almost a “3 unassisted” at first base from the rebound. After striking the standard it one-hopped back to the first baseman.

I found myself “camped out” in right field my sophomore year as the starter. Proud to start, normally right is where you put your worst fielder if you are playing on a little league team. Thank goodness this wasn’t little league or I might have gotten my feelings hurt. I think I played in right because I was the most expendable. No big loss if I ran into one of the light standards or got tangled up in a goalpost.
My first start was not on our terrible field, however, it was on someone else’s terrible field, Mt. Pisgah I think, and my first start was almost my last. Their field was not a football-baseball combination, it was an afterthought stuck behind the gym which took up a lot of the area of right field along with its high brick staircase that led up to court level. Just behind the infield a hard-packed dirt road ran through right and on into left field. Did I mention the outfield grass had not been cut and mounds of clover pushed up through the dormant Bermuda? To further complicate my field of dreams, the fans brought their lawn chairs and sat in the shade created by the high gymnasium walls and the tall staircase. If there were any ground rules involving fans I was not told them.

Early in the game a ball was hit over my head. I thought I could reach it…back then every ball that was hit I thought I could reach. Doing my best impersonation of Willy Mays at the Polo Grounds, I spun to my right and sprinted to the point I thought the ball was going to land. All I could see in front of me was a sea of fans…well maybe not a sea, more like a small pond of fans. All I could hear when I looked back over my left shoulder for the ball was the SNAP, SNAP, SNAP of lawn chairs being closed as fans vacated the area. No, I did not catch it. I watched the ball pass cleanly between my extended glove and my nose right before I stepped into someone’s green and white lawn chair. At least they didn’t have to cut me out of it.

Late in the game a flare was hit between me and the second baseman. I decided to field it on its first bounce but the ball didn’t bounce. Instead, it died in a clump of clover and my glove passed harmlessly over it. Slamming on brakes I then fell down, got up, overran the ball again before the “third time being the charm” came into play. All I could do was hang my head. When we finally got them out Coach Gunter met me at the bench and asked “Do you need to take a stick with you?” “Sir?” “So you will have something to hit it with!” Yeah, maybe. Later a popup between the second basemen and myself would turn into a double as I waited for it to come down…AFTER IT BOUNCED! The ball hit the hard-packed dirt road. Momma, I want to go home!

Thirty plus years later I would find myself standing at home plate behind Lockhart High School thinking about the fields that I had played on and wondering if I had just stepped through a time portal. In the spring, their outdoor athletic facility was a football field that doubled as a baseball field. In dead centerfield was a press box with bleachers that extended into left and right fields. Both sets of goal posts were in play as were several light posts that ran behind the bleachers. The right field foul line actually split the goal post which made them in play. The infield was placed off of what would have been the actual football playing field but dimensions were strange. Somewhere near four hundred feet down the left field line, nearer to five hundred down the right and a mere two hundred fifty feet to dead center if you hit a ball over the press box. What really bothered me was the water spigot with the bucket turned over it in center field and the hole filled with tires beyond the right field goal post. The coach had used more chalk to lay out the out of play areas than he had used to line the field. During the longest ground rules meeting in the annals of baseball, I was told that if a ball rolled into the hole filled with tires it was a ground rule double. I was more concerned with what happened if my right fielder fell into it. This game was a tort liability waiting to happen. I decided the best thing for me to do was to put the outfielder I could most afford to lose in right field…just like my coach had done thirty-plus years before.

WASTE NOT

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WASTE NOT is an excerpt from the soon to be released book PATHWAYS

When did we become such a disposable society? I wish people would quit disposing in my front yard. When did planned obsolescence become…planned? I remember ranting to a science class about wasting resources before I even knew what planned obsolescence meant. Does that make me clairvoyant? No, it probably makes me Clarabelle the Clown. Just because we can throw away a plastic bottle should we? Why do we change fashions every season? Hems go down, go up, then go down again while ties get wide then narrow then wide again. How many of you actually wear something until it wears out? Blue jeans maybe. How many of you really drive a car until the wheels metaphorically fall off. I’ve tried often. Linda and I bought an ’86 T-Bird with sixteen miles on it. It was a beauty. Two hundred and sixteen thousand miles later, thinking we had “licked all of the red off the candy” we traded it for a Mustang. A local teenage boy bought it…and the now father of three is still driving it. Presently I am actually attempting to see who can hit a quarter million first – me or my ’97 Cherokee “Bessie Mae.” We just cracked one hundred and ninety thousand on the “Bessie Mae” but I may be slightly ahead. Am I the only one to name his cars?

My grandparent’s generation were the ultimate recyclers and repurposers. My grandmother was also huge on sayings, “Early to bed, early to rise”, “a fool and his money” and one that I heard maybe daily was “Waste not, want not.” She lived it. Old plastic Clorox bottles were carefully cleaned, holes punched in the bottom and a hole cut about a third of the way up from the bottom. Why? It would become a martin house that would join a colony of Clorox bottles suspended over the garden providing homes for birds that became part of Nannie’s insect control. Buttons were cutoff of unrepairable clothing that would be later repurposed into patchwork quilts with matching pillow covers. The buttons themselves were put into an old Quaker Oats container for future repurposing when I didn’t play with them. My first set of drums were old Quaker Oats boxes and a really magical “comeback” toy. Shoes were “half-soled” repeatedly, old overalls that had finally given up the ghost were cut into patches to extend the lives of this generation’s overalls and blue jeans.

Fall would herald another type of recycling. Dried corn and beans were gathered, the best put into burlap cloth sacks and suspended from the high rafters of the crib. There they would wait until the spring to be shelled out and replanted to provide the next year’s bounty. Potatoes were spread and separated from each other on old newspapers in the darkest corner of the crib waiting to be made into chowders, salads and mashed potatoes. Those that survived the winter were cut, dividing the eyes, and replanted in the spring to start the cycle of life all over again.

Late in the fall an odd-looking truck would show up. It was the miller’s truck, not to be confused with the Miller’s truck. This was cutting edge technology for the period. Instead of taking your grain to be ground up, the truck showed up to grind your grain. This would be preceded by a flurry of activity as corn was shelled from the cob, dang that really hurts your fingers. Corn was ground into cornmeal and grits and no I had never heard of polenta. Even the cobs were ground into a fine powder that was mixed with water to be fed to our hogs. None of this could be done until my grandmother had chosen her feed sacks. This was the ultimate repurposing. She would use the emptied feed sacks to make “sack” dresses that she sewed on her foot-operated Singer treadle sewing machine. Rarely, until later in life, did my grandmother wear anything other than homemade dresses, many made from old feed sacks. Later they would be repurposed into cleaning rags or tie ups for the tomatoes. If they were a particular favorite they would be put into her scrap bag to become a part of a quilt.

The first fall frost would signify another “waste not” moment as a hog would be slaughtered. If you have a weak stomach or really don’t want to know how your food is processed, you might not want to read any more of this paragraph. I was amazed at how little of the hog was left after it had been processed. It began with a “crunch” as a heavy hammer was used to dispatch the hog. My uncle didn’t want to scramble the poor hog’s brains with a bullet even though the brains would be scrambled with eggs later. The hog would be hung by its rear legs, its throat cut and blood would be drained to be used later in blood pudding or other recipes. All of the recognizable parts of the hog were butchered and all of the unrecognizable parts were turned into sausage, liver mush and souse meat. Yuck! Anyone ever read the ingredient list on liver mush? Hint, liver is not the first ingredient…or the second. I really don’t want to even think about souse meat. The bones and the head would be boiled, the broth used to flavor soups and beans. Later the bones would be ground and used as fertilizer. Hog tallow (lard) would be stored and used in the making of candles, soap and biscuits. I liked eating the biscuits better than the soap that was used after I uttered an “expletive.”

While I don’t slaughter my own hogs (actually I don’t raise them), I did pick up some of my grandparents’ frugalness and their belief in environmental safekeeping. At the very least, I ask the question, “Is there anything I can use this for?” I’ve turned two liter bottles into bird houses or feeders, old pots into strange artwork, and Jack Daniel’s bottles into lamps. I have a pair of jeans that have patches on top of patches…only because they feel sooooooo good. Kitchen waste goes into a compost bin to join grass clippings and black print newspaper in my garden. Glass, magazines and plastics are separated and placed into recycling bins at our local trash dump.

Without really trying, my grandparents taught me to be a good steward of my world. As I constantly pick up trash from my roadside, I wish others had been taught as well or had paid better attention.

THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING…

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THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING…
I was six months past my twelfth birthday and really wasn’t sure I would live to see thirteen. Oh there was so much I wanted to do someday. Drive a car, find a girlfriend, walk through those double doors as a high school freshman, find a girlfriend, see Mickey Mantle play at the “House that Ruth Built,” and finally find a girlfriend. But the Cold War was escalating. “Dad, why don’t we have a fallout shelter? Do you think we ought to start digging one?” As he looked up from his crossword puzzle and cocked an eyebrow he said, “Sure. Get started. I’ll tell you when you are deep enough.”
In October of 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis was at its height. Walter Cronkite showed me images of nukes found in Cuba; Kennedy sitting behind his desk in a special broadcast explaining why we were blockading Cuba; Castro and Khrushchev standing with arms raised above their heads holding hands…make that clasping hands. It sounds so much manlier. Uncle Olin and Cousin Hall were reservists and worried they were about to be called up. Some one used the propaganda catch phrase “I’d rather be dead than Red!” Wait just one dang minute! I want that car, that girlfriend and all the other stuff. I’m ten and I’d rather be any color other than dead.
Do you remember Khrushchev during a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly banging his shoe on the podium and shouting in Russian, “We will bury you?” This was earlier in the fall of 1960 and on my black and white I could tell he was pissed. It was a reaction to England’s Harold McMillian…or to the Philippine’s Lorenzo Sumulong. Witnesses are unsure as to which. Short, with a close-cropped balding head, he had a large elevated mole around his nose. Despite these unflattering features, when he smiled and wore his reading glasses, he resembled someone’s grandfather. This day he resembled one of the devil’s minions. The scene was an iconic image of very angry person. His threatening statement sent chills through our collective hearts. It is a vivid memory but there are two problems. Problem one was that he might not have banged the shoe at all and his statement more closely translated to “We will outlast you.” The translator might have been a bit overworked at the time. The second problem? We bought into the iconic image and original translation because of our national propaganda machine. Consequently, most of the people from our generation remember it exactly that way. One of the first things I checked on my return to school the next day was the exact location of the yellow and black sign with the odd symbol designating the “Fallout Shelter.” I decided that I would be the first in line to enter.
I watched too much TV back then…still do! There was a short animated film shown on the Ed Sullivan Show called “A Short Vision?” Did you see it? If you have forgotten it or are too young, you still can see it on YouTube because I just did. In 1956 it traumatized an entire generation of children and kept their parents up at night wondering if this was going to be the night that the Soviets dropped the big one. I don’t know about my parents but one child it traumatized was me. Watching it today was almost as scary as it was sixty years ago. For months when a large airplane flew overhead I would shade my eyes and squint looking for red stars instead of white. At bedtime I prayed that “if I die before I wake please don’t let it be a nuclear bomb.” Shortly thereafter we had our first school “Emergency Drill.” That’s what we call them today, the old “duck and cover” drills. In my day it was “In Case of Nuclear Attack….” There were even posters, the kind you put on the wall of your school not the social media type, explaining what to do to insure your survival. I remember instruction one was to “Stand Clear OF Windows.” Two was to “Remove All Items From Your Pockets…” Somewhere down toward the bottom was Six: “Lean Forward and Place Your Head Between Your Legs.” When I got to college I saw a poster that some humorous someone had scrawled an addendum, “and kiss your ass goodbye.” Sound advice I should think.
In late October of 1962 we learned that I actually had a better chance of reaching the age of eleven than I did of finding a girlfriend…or being radioactive dust. The Russian Bear had blinked. They would remove their ICBM’s from Cuba. What our government didn’t tell us until later was that we would also remove our own weapons from Turkey. Oh life was good or, at least, it would go on for a while.
I should have picked better movies to watch. H-Man, The Blob, Godzilla and Rodan were all silly enough not to scare me even if they were made as statements against nuclear weapons. But then I had to watch On The Beach from a book by Nevil Shute. Later I even read the book. Characterized as a post-apocalyptic thriller, my question was “Don’t some people have to live for it to be a post-apocalyptic thriller?” No one survived the movie or the book. No one in the world. Not the stars, the costars, even the third grip died of radiation poisoning or took the easy way out. I would have taken the easy way…maybe. I had nightmares for months about the final scene of empty streets, sports stadiums and old newspapers blowing in the wind. I still have chills as I think about it.
Speaking of blowing in the wind. I wonder how the wind felt for Maj. T. J. “King” Kong as he rode his H- bomb down to its target in Dr. Strangelove. It would activate a Soviet Doomsday Machine causing nuclear explosions all over the world. That would be the actor Slim Pickens pretending to straddle the bomb as it fell to Earth. Little wonder the movie was described as a dark comedy. Yes, it was a real knee-slapper. As far as I know there were no Doomsday Machines but if they did exist, they are probably still around waiting for the North Koreans or Iranians to attack. Failsafe, in which we drop our own bomb on New York City, was another Cold War thriller that would come out the same year. It appears the whole country, or at least movie producers, were concerned about nuclear bombs being detonated. Apparently, no one “learned” from Dr. Strangelove’s sub-title “to stop worrying and love the bomb.”
Several years later I would find myself sitting in a freshman English class trying to translate the Old English of the Canterbury Tales into country redneck. I was having no success when the air raid siren in downtown Newberry began to blow. It was a test that was repeated every weekday at noon. My English professor, a sometimes not quite sober and always irreverent guy, looked out the window and stated to the class, “If the Rooskies have enough bombs to waste on Newberry, we are f@#$ed. Class is dismissed!”
As I think back I would have to agree and also admit that I miss the Soviets. We thought we knew who our enemies were back then, where they were, and how far we could push them. They wore certain uniforms and lived in certain countries. We knew that we were here and they were somewhere over there. It was our government against their government. Our ideologies versus their ideologies. We had theaters of war where an army would be on a particular side.
Then came Vietnam and the end of our “American Exceptionalism.” Even though the Russians were still involved and were our greatest enemy the environment began to change. Suddenly all uniforms were made of the same camouflage material that looked for the world like pajamas and camouflaged them to look like everyone else but us. We wore the same colors and hats we always had worn but in jungle camo. The fighting took place in a jungle where you could never be quite certain where or who Charlie was. Having said all that we started to sense a blur between the two sides and two sides became three…or more. It was harder to determine just who the enemy was and now the blur has become so exaggerated, it is extremely difficult to separate the “good” guys and the “bad” guys, even on our own side.
Today our governments set up factions to overturn other governments or groups of people in the name of democracy and for the pursuit of oil and other resources. Anyone remember the Shah of Iran? You might want to do a little research if you have asked why the Iranians hate us. Once we pull out, we leave a wealth of armaments which is scooped up by the likes of Al Qaeda or Issis. These arms are then used to destroy the very countries we tried to democratize. These people behead the Christian “infidels” and anyone else who does not submit to their sect of Islam. When you study how these radical jihadists were originally trained and funded by the US, you begin to understand the connection between us and them. And they are everywhere. They have no particular uniform or distinction or even a legitimate government. In a sense they are invisible unless they pick up an Islamist flag or yell “Death to America!” Or simply blow up a bomb somewhere. It would seem that the enemies that we made in the name of the Cold War and the Gulf Wars, and the people of the Middle East who we helped to militarize have very long memories of inequities that have taken place.
We cannot really look around and identify our enemies with any certainty with sleeper cells, pretenders, spies, and double agents. And we must not forget the US involvement in the formation and training of so many of these groups. There is possibly only one place where we can identify the real troublemakers…we can look in a mirror. To quote Pogo and his creator Walt Kelly, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
At least back in the 60’s there were air raid sirens that let you know something might be getting ready to happen. If you were lucky enough to be near a bomb shelter, you has some small semblance of safety. You knew that the Russians were coming…and still might. Today, we do not know who, how, when, or what may happen. I think I liked the sirens better.
Picture is from https://anotherexistence.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/atom-piece/

MICKEY MOUSE WAS A JEW?

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MICKEY MOUSE WAS A JEW?

I don’t know why the above statement, not the question, interested me then, in the glow of a flashlight, or now, in the fog of forty-eight years of brain cell death due to certain excesses involving distilled or brewed spirits. At the age of seventeen, with most of my brain cells still intact, seeing it scrawled on the wall in red paint along with a crude swastika gave me pause to think…for a moment, at least. So many questions. I knew about Hitler’s Final Solution and the death camps but what was a Jew and why would Mickey Mouse be one? After forty-eight years I still have no answers to those questions but do understand their relationship to the swastika.

I also don’t have any real answers as to why we were at Historic Brattonsville, outside of Rock Hill, late on a moonlit night. It was not “a dark and stormy” night, in fact, there was a “werewolf” full moon and no moors nearby. One might assume that it had something to do with girls and alcohol. Your assumption would only be partially correct because there was no alcohol. We didn’t need alcohol to be stupid because girls were usually all it took to cause a stupid reaction in teenage boys. I don’t know what excuse the girls had. In reality, in the spring of 1968, there was little that was historic about the dump that was Brattonsville. Brattonsville was a former plantation that came into existence in the 1760’s and grew to include some thirty buildings including a store and a three-story brick and wood manor house owned by the doctor who gave the ‘ville its name. A Revolutionary War battle fought nearby was a prequel to Kings Mountain and Camden. The buildings and store had fallen into disrepair and would not undergo renovations until the early Seventies. Since this was the late Sixties, we found ourselves in a rundown place on a “dark and scary” night.

I reiterate that there is no reason for teenagers to be stupid, we just were, and the group that I ran with was typical. For no other reason than being stupid, we somehow came to the conclusion that looking for ghosts in old abandoned structures would be an interesting thing to do. It began after a play practice but, for the life of me, I have no idea who suggested it or why. I do remember that we started a search for “alien lights” which turned out to be the distant Charlotte airport searchlight bouncing off thick, low-hanging clouds. Once we had scientifically proven there was no “intelligent life out there”, we decided to prove there was no “intelligent life” in our teenage world either. We were Successful!

One of the girls in our little group had mentioned Brattonsville which would explain how John and I, along with the two young ladies, had ended up there. My date knew a lot about the history of the area, including a story about a suspected Revolutionary War spy who had been hung from the pulley suspended outside of Doctor Bratton’s third story clinic in the manor house called “Fair Forest.” According to “her story” the spirit of the spy continued to haunt the place waiting for his soul to “cross-over” to the other side. Despite our fears, we took the late night tour of the original pre-Revolutionary War home place before finding our way into “Fair Forest” and seeing the scrawled message on the dining room wall.

Because I had the flashlight, I got to see the scrawling first, along with other graffiti, and because of that same flashlight became the de facto leader of the group. My date kept a running commentary going about the house and certain legends as we wandered through the building. A kitchen was connected to the main house by a covered causeway. It was not hard to visualize kitchen slaves, dressed in Aunt Jemima garb, the original not the modern, socially acceptable one, carrying platters of food from the huge fireplace to the dining room and served by old, dark men in black waistcoats. We visited all of the rooms, floor by floor, making note of the fireplaces and centuries-old mantels. On the second floor we found another narrow staircase and, leaving no stone unturned or in this case no ghost unfound, we made our way up to what I was told was “Doctor Bratton’s laboratory.” I had seen too many “monster movies.” On a dark night, in an old abandoned mansion, how could you not have thoughts about Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory with Boris Karloff waiting to get re-animated? You couldn’t.

As I entered the “laboratory,” actually just a large room that seemed to be part of an attic, I made room for everyone else and panned the room with the flashlight. Silhouetted against the opened floor-length double doors that led to the pulley was a body hung by the neck and swinging from the rafters. I was petrified! The hackles of my neck stood up and muscles tensed all the way down to my heels. I now understood the saying “scared stiff.” My brain said run but my body would not oblige. There was nothing wrong with my hearing and from the sounds of retreating feet in rapid motion, I knew that I was now all alone. Just enough breeze blew to cause the body to spin. As it slowly turned, I found myself staring into the blank face of a…hung…dead…department store mannequin. “Boy neat trick. A real knee slapper. Ha, you got me.” Suddenly I had the urge to pee…Glad that was frozen up, too or I might have been embarrassed. Let’s make sure that you understand that I was not being brave standing my ground. I might as well have been nailed to the spot. The only thing that smacked of being brave was that there was no puddle around my feet.
Since I had the keys to the car and it was locked, I decided to do a little more exploring before leaving and informing the rest of my little group about how badly we had gotten used. I found the “dummy” to have been dressed in blue jeans, a tattered plaid shirt and a Mickey Mouse Club hat with ears. Pinned to its chest was a sheet of paper that informed me that this was “Mickey Mouse.” When I got back to the car I did get one “Thank God.” For my return or for getting the car door open? Once inside, the next question was “What are we going to do?” I assured everyone that it was okay, “It’s just a Jewish guy named Mickey.” After a pause and some nervous laughter, I came clean and, of course, they wanted to go back and see for themselves.

This would be my last attempt at ghost hunting but not for the reason you might think. As we came back down the narrow stairs and into the main hallway I suddenly smelled cigarette smoke. Remember my hackles? They went up again because no one in our group had been smoking. As I hustled us out, I glanced over my shoulder and saw the glow of a cigarette in the crack made by a slightly opened door. No more ghost hunting for me!

I find myself intrigued that a badly written bit of graffiti and a hanging mannequin has been more thought-provoking than the possibility of having escaped death from a machete-wielding psycho or by secondhand cigarette smoke, at the very least. I still don’t know what it means to be Jewish. To my knowledge, I have met only three Jews in my entire life. All three were survivors of the Holocaust and had stories that they did not want to tell but told anyway. I thank them for sharing. All three are now gone, I hope, to join the families who they lost to the ovens. I am unsure about Jewish heaven and hell, although I guess, some had already experienced hell on earth. I wonder about that swastika and the mannequin… but for the life of me, “Why was Mickey Mouse a Jew?”

REDHEADS AND FLASHY CARS

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Seeing the trailer for The Quiet Man awakens a few memories. There stands Maureen O’Hara with her green eyes flashing. Those have to be real because I don’t think contacts had been invented yet. The memories triggered are not about green eyes, though, but about red hair. You see, my mother was a redhead. A real redhead, not the burgundy head that comes from a bottle, but what I guess is called bright red. She also had the freckles to go with her hair and the alabaster skin underneath that caused her to turn bright red after more than thirty seconds of exposure to the summer sun. I’ve heard that complexion called “peaches and cream”…or maybe “milk toast.” After being in the sun a little while, it was more like “peaches and strawberries.” In other words, she did not tan but went straight to burning and peeling.

I would not call my mother a classic beauty, mainly due to the presence of the Griffin’s nose which has a tendency to dominate one’s face. That proboscis would dominate the entire face of Mt. Rushmore. If I were going to compare her to a movie star of the “Golden Age”, it would be a redheaded version of Geraldine Page who, by her own admission, was a bit plain. Luckily, my mother also had the Griffin height making her a statuesque woman. If she were not my mother, I would also describe her as full-figured.

She was very shy; so shy, in fact, that she allowed her grades to drop enough in order to not have to give a valedictorian address her senior year in high school. Armed with all of this information I was shocked, appalled and quite amused to discover newspaper clippings of a local beauty pageant sponsored by Springs Mills as I went through a cedar “Hope” chest after her death.

Had I not asked myself the question, “Why did my mother keep this?” I would not have given it a second look. There was my mother, along with four other young ladies, and she was in…Gasp!..a two-piece bathing suit! The suit featured the Springs Mills logo “Miss Springmaid” – a pinup-style milkmaid, with a lot of cleavage and leg showing. I think the term “cheesecake” would be applicable and that would be the milkmaid, not my mother.

My shy mother was vying for the title of “Miss Springmaid” to represent Springs Mills, a company that made cloth for sheets and foundation cloth which an advertisement agency described as “for hip-harnesses and breast-holsters.” My mother’s suit bared her legs and midriff and accentuated other key attributes. There sure was a lot of skin being displayed! Thank God, I saw no belly button. Oh my, who was that young woman with the “come hither” look? Rita Hayworth or Lauren Bacall? She wasn’t even a redheaded Geraldine Page. Oh no! It was my MOTHER!

I guess that until that moment I had never thought of my mother or rather my parents as young people with the same drives and desires as any other young people. Even now I have an urge to blind myself for those thoughts but I don’t think it would erase them.

According to my Aunt Joyce, Eldora was quite popular and was pursued by many suitors until Ernest swept her off her feet. My parents romantic? I just can’t see it…but then again I was not adopted. At five-foot-six I find it hard to believe my father could have swept the floor much less Mom off of her feet. He did have a kind of dashing look in those photos from the Thirties and Forties.

I don’t even know how they met but would guess it would have been through friends or work. With no online-dating services or hopping music clubs, I don’t know how people actually met during those days. Church? What an interesting concept. In the same box as her clippings, I found the letters they had written to each other while Dad was island-hopping in World War Two. I’m happy that they knew the mail was being read and censored but the “R” rated versions were still “tres” uncomfortable. With silk kimonos contained in the same cedar chest, I am trying to purge the thought of Mom playing dress up as a Geisha girl. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAh!

A family member related a story that made me both uncomfortable and thankful at the same time. While still in high school my mother and several of her younger female cousins were taken with a very, very distant cousin who was, like them, attending a large family reunion.

The young man was described as very attractive with piercing eyes and a strong jaw to go with a very charismatic personality and a rich baritone voice. There was a mention of a smile that would “make your knees weak” so I am guessing that this storyteller might have been smitten, too. According to her story, he also had “very wavy hair that appeared to have been styled.”

He was driving a very flashy red convertible. It might not have been red but red fits the story. This “flashy” young cousin was taken with my mother-to-be and asked if she might go for a ride with him. As you would expect during these times, he asked permission to take her for a ride in what I hope was his car. My grandparents, after some thought and discussion, refused to grant their permission citing that they felt he “might be a little too fast and flashy for Eldora.” It turns out this “flashy and fast” distant cousin would slow down and become the much beloved and revered “Reverend Billy Graham.” While he does have really nice hair, I’m glad not to be his son Franklin.

SOT IN OUR WAYS

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SOT IN OUR WAYS
“Grace changes us and change is painful.”
-Flannery O’Connor

Grace aside, for Southerners anyway, change is not only painful it is damn near impossible. Most Southerners don’t like being told what to do, how to do it…or being told no you can’t do it. Statements like “I’ve done it this way for (fill in the blank) years” are the norm along with colorful expletives accompanying any attempts at change.

We are known to dig in like mud turtles, even when faced with the fact that what we are being asked to change to is a hundred times better than what we have. Well, “Bless your heart!” With a new washing machine, my grandmother still did part of her washing in a washtub with a scrub board.

Honestly, sometimes I’d like to have a phone with a rotor instead of the one that provides me with a hundred contrasting functions including my wife being able to find me by pushing one button…and don’t get me started on my wife and her Missouri mule-like ideas about change. “And just what was so wrong about Windows98?” Southerners look at change with a jaundiced eye. Lord help us if the “Gubment” tries to get involved!

Saying the South is conservative used to be like saying that the Grand Canyon is a deep hole. Now it is more so. I fear that any slight liberal shift is due to Carpetbaggers transplanting themselves into our homeland and “rooting” out a place for themselves the same way that a wild hog “roots” out an acorn.

These days Southerners tend to vote Republican and support the party of the “status quo.” If you ask someone why they voted Republican you are likely to get an answer like, “Well, my family has voted Republican since 1964.” But why do YOU vote Republican? “You dummy, didn’t you hear me? I told you my family has voted Republican since 1964!” Southerners do hate to repeat the obvious.

This should explain how unusual it was for Strom Thurmond to successfully make the change from Democrat to Republican by way of the Dixiecrats in 1964 due to a protest “that he said” was against “big gubment” and state’s rights. It worked and he was partially responsible for the flip-flop in the political spectrum that we follow today.

I consider myself moderate simply because I will expect some change in my life. You know, change in underwear type things. No, I try not to be held hostage to any party politics, but it is hard. By saying that I am a moderate, places me so far left of some of my acquaintances that many of them think that I might as well be standing next to Karl Marx.

There are Southern liberals. Many are African American or, if white, we tend to hide our liberalness and admit to it privately only to a voting machine. Please be aware that I am speaking of Southerners born and bred, not damn Yankees.

If a Southern liberal’s friends or family were to find out that they voted for a Democrat, this revelation would be accompanied by looks that you would expect from your baptist minister if he caught you coming out of a liquor store or “Hooters.” Never mind asking why he was there because we are also big on “Do as I say do not as I do.”

Before I go on with my tirade, I should point out that our “set in our way-ness,” while a Southern white attribute, is not a trait limited to one race. My friend Butch, who is African American, is as conservative as they come, and it has rubbed off on other members of his family. Of my generation, his loooonnnng pontifications would make a Kentucky colonel or GOP politician proud!

It surprises me how much our world view is comparable despite our differences in race. I attribute this to our rural upbringing that included chopping cotton and corn and working in textiles along with parents and grandparents who would “switch deem legs.” Despite this similar history, I imagine he has voted Democrat since 1964. Why? “You dummy, didn’t you hear me? I told you my family has voted Democrat since 1964!”

I don’t understand why people in other parts of the world consider us to be uneducated and backward just because we are conservative and inflexible to change as a piece of rebar. I just thought that “tongue in cheek.” Despite improvements, our school systems still rank lower while obesity, poverty, and numbers of unwed mothers still rank higher than the rest of the nation.

The world view is of a fat, tobacco chewing redneck who is a high school dropout sporting “shit-caked” work boots and wearing a “South will rise again!” belt buckle. Usually, this redneck could stand a bit of dental work on his four teeth and is much more concerned about the Second Amendment than any other aspect of “gubment.” His mate is barefooted and wearing a dress she made herself from a feed sack. “Sugah Pie” is pregnant and showing to be quite far along despite having a babe in arms and another, a year older, in a dirty diaper and tugging at the hem of her dress. They will not have to worry about having three in high school at the same time much less college.

In front of their single-wide is a rusting pickup truck on blocks whose engine is leaking vital fluids as it sits on a sagging picnic table next to it. Yes, there is a redbone hound asleep under the truck. Is this an accurate portrayal? Hell no…and, unfortunately, hell yes! The climate is changing but for those of us who are not “sot in our ways,” the change is slow. Oh God, I may be a liberal! Please don’t tell anyone! I will try to do better.

I now live in an area of South Carolina that has become known as the “Dark Corner.” Once I thought it got its name because of our location regarding the mountains to our west that block the sun as it slips beyond the horizon. To “sorta” quote Yogi Berra, it does “get darker here quicker” but that has nothing to do with the name. Oh no.

One local historian suggested that the Dark Corner somehow got its name because Unionist and Confederate deserters invaded the area “hereabouts” to defend themselves against a “gubment” that wanted them to uphold slavery that the deserters had decided was a “rich man’s” war to maintain the “status quo” or in the case of Unionists, a “gubment” that wanted them to rebel against the Union. In and around 1864 they decided to unite and began to fortify the nearby mountains and dare the Confederate Army or local constabulary to show up. By that time, the CSA had its hands full elsewhere and there was no confrontation.

I find it interesting that since the Flag issue in my state landed like a wet cow patty dropped from a B-52, there now seem to be way more Confederate Battle Flags around. I wonder if any of my tradition-laden friends realize the “checkered heritage” of where they live. “Nope, cause hit don’t matter ‘cept that the sumbitch ‘gubment is tryin’ to take my flag!” Damn Right!

The name Dark Corner was first used during the Nullification Crisis and solidified during secession, to quote “They were staunch Unionists during the nullification and secession crises and on the outbreak of civil war were slow to support the Confederacy. ‘Few Dark Corner men. . . have volunteered,’ a Greenvillian wrote in August 1861. ‘It is to be hoped that some light will break upon their darkness.'”

Another example of old traditions dying hard is the production of “tax-free” distilled spirits. Through the depression and into modern times, the Dark Corner was known for its production of moonshine. Not just any moonshine but what has been described as a particularly “fine moonshine.” That is not an oxymoron.

The smoothness supposedly came from the water. In the late Seventies it was also known for producing a particularly high grade of “killer weed” known as “Glassy Mountain Gold.” Weed did not replace moonshining because moonshining was the traditional drug of choice and “the good old boys ain’t about to change.”

During the depression poor families resorted to illegally distilling spirits to pay their taxes and to make a living that the “gubment” was attempting to take away, according to their “way ah thinking.” Well, this is 2022 and it is still being made. One morning in the late 2000s, I stepped out to begin my morning run and was assaulted by the sharp smell of sour mash cookin’. Several years later I found a broken down still on a stream located on my land. They could have, at least, offered me a taste!

I was somewhat shocked to see the face of the father of one of my former players pasted across my TV on the Six O’ Clock News. He was, and is still, a respected “gentleman peach farmer” of high means. His offense? Making “shine.” His defense was that his daddy had made it and his daddy before him and…. He did not need the money to pay his taxes or even take the kids to Disneyworld, nor is he very apologetic. It was a time-honored tradition to make the “family recipe” free of “gubment” taxes and he was “sot in his ways.” My guess is that despite the hefty fine that he paid, he is still “sot in his ways.”

Most of the Southerners I know don’t make shine and have more of their own teeth than I do. A few wave the flag and chew tobacco. Many of us own rusty old pickups. One even has the engine out of his. It’s in his double-bay garage, the one he built to work on his cars that includes a hydraulic lift rack and engine hoist. There is nothing but food on his picnic table and a German Shepard to guard it all. Despite his lack of a college degree, his home, garage, and farm are a lot nicer than mine.

Uneducated? Not where it counts, it would seem, because they don’t award degrees for common sense and work ethic. He doesn’t chew, dip, or drink his spirits out of a Mason jar and is more likely to be in flip-flops than in “shit kickers.” Jimmy Buffett meets Mr. Greenjeans? He also doesn’t wave the Battle Flag, but he is as Southern as the day is long and, I think, more of what the New, New South is about, despite being set in his conservative ways. Yes, he does still vote Republican. “You dummy, didn’t you hear me? I told you my family has voted Republican since 1964!”