Bob Thomas Writes

This is long, sorry!

MY LIFE…

(THE MOST RECENT VERSION!)

    According to the tales I’ve heard around the campfire, I was born in 1943…January 23 to be exact. It’s told that my Mother was a sucker for a man in uniform, and my Dad had just finished his shift as a bus driver and was all hot and sweaty, had his tie undone, his lunch box stuck under his arm at a jaunty angle and his cap pushed back on his head. It was a sultry day in May of 1942, the breeze was blowing through the room at the boarding house and my older brother was out playing with his self. . (I guess that should read “by his self”.) Dad said,” what’s on T.V.?”, and Mom said “we’re not getting a T.V. until 1951, but I’ll show you something that will make a real couch potato out of you!”…..so, in January I was born.

 

  From 1943 until 1947 I don’t remember much of anything, but in 1947 my folks bought a restaurant nearMyrtle Beach, and all I could think about were girls in bikinis and drinking beer! Now, in 1947 beer had been invented but girls in bikinis were available only in dark smoky clubs…most of those clubs were in foreign countries … certainly not  in South Carolina!…but, none the less, I looked forward to living near Myrtle Beach, S.C. and chasing some hot babes! Being only 4 years old didn’t seem, to me, to be a problem.

   The first thing that I discovered about being a cute 4 year old was, girls liked to pick you up and squeeze you, and they felt really good…sort of soft and warm…like a teddy bear that had been left in the sun. When they did squeeze me I would generally wet my pants…and they would throw me in the tub and give me a bath !…what a gimmick!…I seriously considered lying about my age for the next 15 years! (By the time I was in my teens, wetting my pants had lost its “cute-ness” and generally just turned girls off!)

 

    I really don’t remember much about the restaurant, but the stories that I’ve heard seem to “become” memories over the years. For example, I distinctly “remember” that the theater next door showed two kinds of movies…cowboy movies and movies that scared the hell out of me! Like movies about Frankenstein and other assorted monsters. Theaters in those days used projectors that burned carbon rods for light…in other words the light came from a thing that worked like  welding rods…when they touched together they gave off a tremendous light. When these rods burned down the projectionist threw them out the window onto our roof…for years I thought those used rods were the “bullets” from the cowboy movies !…it made sense to me !

   I also “remember” the “Caromaid” ice cream salesman, Mr. Grice; delivering ice cream to the restaurant …he would park his truck in front of the restaurant and leave the door open while he unloaded ice cream. One day I got in the truck and hid, expecting him to find me and shout “I found you!”, as adults like to do…but he didn’t do that…instead he slammed the door shut and drove to Myrtle Beach, S.C., about 15 miles down the road !

As it turned out, he knew I was in the truck and he figured that I wouldn’t freeze to death in 20 minutes….and I would also learn a really good lesson about not getting into trucks!!!

   By the age of 5, my folks had made their fortune in the restaurant business and had returned toNorth Carolinaand moved into a little garage apartment behind my Grandparents house.

  My folks wanted to move into a large 14 room mansion on the other side of town, but the mortgage company said “HA!” or something like that! So, they decided to live in a 3 room garage apartment for a few years.

 

   Shortly after that I started school. I went to Glenwood Elementary. “Glenwood” was a school with a reputation for creating some of the most knowledgeable, and shrewd alumni ever to grace the halls of N.C. State Prison! The bathroom walls, like all bathroom walls in elementary schools, had detailed drawings of the female anatomy on them. This probably explains why I break out in a sweat when I hear the toilet flush!

 

Now, I was not a hoodlum, but most of the other guys in my class were…one, in particular, was a kid named “Cooter” Hardman. Cooter was not just rambunctious, he was a damned killer! I was absolutely convinced that he was going to beat me to death on my way home from school and leave my body as a warning to other little wimps that this was his private trail. In addition to Cooter, there were a few other guys that kept me on edge. Terry Ellis was a close friend of Cooter’s and his next door neighbor. Terry was Cooter’s “YEAH!”-man…anything Cooter said, Terry would shout “YEAH”, as in, “and don’t you forget it!” The other terror was a kid named Billy Flowers. Billy had 2 or 3 big brothers that had taught him what it felt like to have the snot beaten out of you! Billy’s goal in life was to help everyone else experience the same feeling of absolute terror. He accomplished this by hitting you on the shoulder so hard that your eyes would immediately fill with tears and your nose would run before you had chance to scream. He would then stick his face up close to yours and say “if you holler I’ll hit you again!” He usually did this while you were sitting in class and the teacher had her back turned,  so you had no choice except to sit their and make noises like a pig rooting for truffles.

The first grade teacher, Mrs. McClean, was a very caring and sympathetic person, and she would rush to my desk and say “Bobby Ray! Why are you crying?” I, of course, denied that I was crying! I was simply resting my arm on my desk, and I have a cold, and possibly an eye infection. Plus, polio was going around, and I may have caught a touch of it! After school, Cooter would try to connect a ‘smoking right cross’ to the same location on your arm, just so you would know that you were lucky he didn’t decide to kill you today. If he did hit you, you were free from fear for the rest of the day…his principles apparently, only allowed him to pick on you once a day!

 

  The other curse of my life in Glenwood was the jocks…Gary Williams could do anything with any kind of ball…he could knock a baseball so far that I generally was late getting back from recess after I had run a mile to retrieve it! And he could throw a dodge ball so hard, and with enough English on it that it would knock me flat on my back and leave skid marks on my face!  Fortunately, when it was time to choose sides for baseball, kickball or any other type of ball, I was always chosen in the mid-round draft pick…there were other kids who were actually worse than I was at organized sports!

 

 Wayne Anderson was another jock type that I detested…he really wasn’t that good at sports, just fair, but he would pour about a half bottle of Lucky Tiger hair tonic on his jet black hair, splash on some of his Dads Old Spice, turn his collar up like Elvis and tell everyone he wasn’t playing no stinking kids game!…and we all assumed that he could, but he just didn’t want too…it was years later before I found out that he couldn’t even play pocket pool without hurting himself!

 

As the years went by I became less threatened by Cooter and the others…because I found out that they were just as insecure as I was! I also found a different way home! Insecure is one thing, but having a limp and being insecure is another! After he grew up I heard that Cooter got a job in the nail factory…biting the heads off of defective nails, or something like that!

Billy Flowers joined the army to follow in the footsteps of his older brother, Liston. Liston was in the airborne because he thought it was the meanest outfit in the army…when he walked up to the door of the airplane on his first jump, he wet his pants and grabbed the jump master around the neck…however, the jump master has a secret maneuver to make you release your hold on his neck and grab your crotch!…  then he pushes you out of the door! Liston had not paid attention in training and did not remember how to open his parachute. By the time he landed  he  had unlaced both boots, unzipped his fly, assembled his pup tent and was trying to put his cooking gear together, in the hopes that if he looked like he was on the ground, he would be!

Fortunately, his rip cord was pulled automatically in the process and his parachute had deployed and stopped him about 6 feet from the ground!…there was a horrendous crash as all of his junk hit the ground about 2 seconds before he did…then total silence…then a noise like someone ripping a canvas tent apart, as Liston’s lower intestine rebelled against the sudden effects of gravity!…for the rest of his enlistment  everyone referred to him as ” Skid mark”, because he was the first person to ever leave a skid mark in the sky !…

 

NOV 1996

This has nothing to do with anything, but…

I once heard on the radio that someone , somewhere had a LIVE FROG eating contest!…the fellow that won chewed three times and swallowed and smiled…second place chewed once and swallowed and third place swallowed whole!…

At the time I worked for Paulis’ Bicycle Shop in Metarie, Louisiana. There was another fellow working there named Billy Ray. Billy had a very weak stomach…anything would make him loose his lunch! I told Billy the story about the frogs and he immediately clamped his hand over his mouth so hard he almost puked out of his ears!

Billy had 3 kids, one of them, Little Billy, would sit at the dinner table and squeeze chocolate pudding out between his teeth and smile at his Dad just to watch him gag!

 

My head is full of disconnected thoughts sometimes…I think if you could open it up you would see a little man in there driving a golf ball as hard as he can…and watching it bounce off walls!…

 

When I was about 10 years old,  my next door neighbor, Butch, and I used to go down to a patch of woods near our house and look for Hobo camps…we lived near the railroad tracks. We often found signs of camping and cooking, a few old rags and an empty can or two of beans, but never a real live Hobo…until one night as we were coming back from the movies; we heard a noise…a noise that sounded like a large, scary, kid killer! We were sure that a Hobo was about to attack us and devour our scrawny little bodies like a skinny fried chicken . . . so, we ran. Since we were such close friends, I ran a few hundred yards ahead of Butch to clear a trail for him. . .honest!. . .that was the only reason I was sitting on the front porch when he finally showed up!. . .I had cleared a trail for  him. . .what are friends for anyway?

 

At the same tracks we learned to smash pennies, nails, pieces of wire and most anything else we could think of…by placing them on the tracks and letting the train run over them…we also learned to tell if the train was coming by putting our ear to the tracks and listening for the hum in the rails…I found that you could also tell if a train was coming by putting your ear to the rails and looking down the track…that way you could… see a. TRAIN COMING!!!….       

 

Across from the tracks was a paper recycling yard…they had bundles of old papers, magazines etc., all over the place…

  After giving it some thought, we realized that, if they have old magazines, then they must have some copies of Playboy and other magazines like Studs, or something close to it…so, we climbed a 12 foot fence plus 6 strands of barbed wire, to find out. The magazines were stacked like bales of hay and all we had to do was browse through the titles… (That’s when I realized what college students meant when they “browsed the stacks” at the library)…anyway, I found a bundle of choice material in the middle of a stack and pulled it out…and I saw a face on the other side of the hole looking back at me!! It was the night watchman!!!…he had made a little house out of the bundles of magazines and I had just ripped a hole in his house!!!…I ran.

I ran like the wind…I ran like the hounds of hell were after me! And judging from the bellowing, cursing and wheezing immediately behind me, they were!!! I could see the fence about 50 yards ahead of me now…the 12 foot fence with 6 stands of barbed wire! I heard a gravely voice behind me shout “STOP or I’s gonna’ shoot!!….SHOOT? ME? No way! I had visions of my folks standing over my grave while their friends stood a discrete distance away whispering among themselves. Words like “pervert” and “dirty books” drifting across the air of the cemetery…no way was I going to die in a dirty book storage yard! I leapt for the fence and hit it about 7 feet up, 2 steps and I was at the top with my hands on one side of the barbed wire and my feet on the other desperately trying to pick my way over the top, when I heard and felt the roar of a shotgun! BOOM!

Suddenly I was on the ground with my butt on fire; surely he wouldn’t shoot a kid? Would he?  OWWWCH! Yes he would, and did! It felt like a nest of hornets had been jammed into my wranglers and they were all mad as hell! I slid down the bank, vaulted over the railroad tracks, climbed the bank on the other side and ran into the woods…and then I thought “where’s Butch?”…he wasn’t with me when I climbed the fence…is he dead? I hope not, I’ll never explain that! Then I heard a tiny little voice say, “are you gonna’ die?” from deep in the bushes…it was Butch. “How did you get out so fast?” I asked. “When I saw you tear a hole in his wall I started running for the fence.”

“YOU KNEW HE WAS THERE?”” Yea, I thought everybody knew about him, that’s why I thought you were crazy to climb that fence!”

  As it turned out, the watchman had shot me with rock salt! It slowly dissolved, and much to my surprise, it didn’t feel any worse that sulfuric acid on an open wound! It also did not break the skin too bad…so, when I got home I was able to briskly walk past Mom and Dad into my room…I think I said something like

“HeyitscoldoutsideIthinkI’lltakeabathandgotobedG’night!”

 

 

                                         

                                     MORSON STREET

 

In the late 1950’s we moved to Morson Street, 2918 to be exact. It was a very nice neighborhood and all of the kids were the same ones I had been going to school with for 3 or 4 years already…so I wasn’t traumatized by the move…

  The house we lived in was a nice three bedroom, double shotgun style.

In other words the living room, dinning room and kitchen were down one side of the house and the bed rooms were down the other side. If you had your speed built up you could run in the front door and out the back door before the front door slammed shut!

 

 My brother and I had the middle bedroom and behind it was the back bedroom with a door to the outside. I’m not absolutely positive, but, I suspect that my brother, Billy,  went on numerous ‘night maneuvers’ out of that un-guarded back door….I know that I certainly did!…your own back door is the dream of every kid…or it would be if they thought there was a possibility they could get one ! After your parents go to sleep, easily verified by loud snoring noises from their room, you can go out and roam the neighborhood for hours on end. It’s amazing what happens late at night in a fairly respectable neighborhood! Especially if your only 10 or 11 years old.  For instance, two doors down from us lived a young girl named Billie Sigmond…Billie was dating a guy named Buddy Davis. On Saturday nights, (after they had been to a movie or something), they would sit in his car in the driveway and neck like crazy! Well, I discovered this by accident one night while I was trapped in the bushes by B&B arriving home earlier than I had expected. They parked right beside me and proceeded to educate me in the fine art of “fooling around”! I didn’t even know that you were supposed to moan, pull hair and beg while you were ‘doing it’….As it turned out, they weren’t ‘doing it’, but, it was years later before I found out. (At least Billie wasn’t ‘doing it’; I suspect that Buddy thought that he was “doing it”.)

 

 On with the story of my life!

When I was about 13 years old I went to Edwards Military Institute…more correctly, I was sent to military school! I had made miserable grades in the 7th grade at Harding High School and my folks decided that I would do better in a more “structured” environment! Actually, the term “structured environment” wasn’t used until I was about 40 years old…what my Dad said to the commandant was “Smack em’ if you have to…and they did!

I lived in a place called Junior Barracks…or as I told my Mom in my first letter home…Jr. Barrax.

Junior Barracks had about 60 or so kids from all over the country living there. There were some there because they were “Gifted”…or exceedingly smart. Others were there because they were also “Gifted”…they could steal almost anything and get caught only one out of 20 times! Most of us were there because we had screwed up in public school and gotten low grades…we weren’t stupid, just bored! (What did you expect me to say? that I’m stupid!)

 

Military School was my first venture into organized crime…we would sneak out at night and go on a rampage through the chow hall…eating everything in sight! We were not starving to death, but, we thought we were because they gave us a balanced diet with all of the necessary vitamins and other stuff that we needed…consequently, we didn’t have a very high level of sugar in out systems to keep us wired out of our minds, like we were at home!

Today of course we would be raiding the infirmary for dope or something like it…but, when I was a kid, DOPE was something you were…not something you ate!

I also discovered girls at E.M.I….well, actually I had discovered girls a few years before that, but they weren’t “bad” girls….and, of course, we assumed that any girls attending a boarding school were “bad” girls. My first encounter with a “bad” girl was in the hallway between classes…I don’t remember her name, but she had auburn hair, green eyes, long legs and a body that would keep an eight grader awake all  night ! (So I heard!).

 

I had followed her from one class to the next everyday for about two or three weeks…the halls were crowded…we were pushed up against each other…I placed my hand on her butt and pressed lightly…just enough so she would really appreciate it!…she spun around and hit the cadet beside me with the edge of her history book !…right across the bridge of his nose!…blood went everywhere !…he screamed !…I looked like a Deer in the headlights of a Mack Truck !…I stood there with my hand held rigid at butt level, palm out, fingers splayed open !…and she walked into it!…front wards!…belly first!…I was in heaven!… I had never felt a belly before, and it was wonderful! She looked at me and said, (I’ll never forget these 7 little words)…”Get the hell out of the way! “She then hauled off and hit the other guy about 10 or 19 more times with her book. By this time he was writhing on the floor and screaming “what d’ I do?…what d’ I do?…blood was flying,  she was cussing and calling him names, the teachers, principal, commandant and every damn body else were running down the halls shouting ,”Get out of the way…go to class!”

I just stood there with my hand stuck out…until the commandant ran into it and I felt something I never want to feel again!

 

My trance broken, I ran to my next class…auburn hair/green eyes sat down next to me and said, “Thanks for helping me get away from that guy!”…I was a hero! There is a God! She became my friend. (And I her slave!)

 

The following year, when I was in the ninth grade, she and I met in the hall on the first day of school, talked about our summer, our friends, our children and the guy who patted her on the butt last year. He didn’t come back after his expulsion last year. Auburn hair looked me in the eye, smiled and said “keep your hands off of my ass this year! I did.

 

                                                   

                                              I QUIT!

 

About October of my ninth grade year at military school I was playing football in front of Junior Barracks one afternoon after classes. The football ended up in the Commandants wife’s flower garden and I stepped over the fence to get it. The Commandant saw me and called me to his office. I was given 25 demerits. That amounts to 25 hours extra duty, 25 laps around the football field with a nine pound  M-1 rifle held above your head and 25 licks with a canoe paddle…even though they drape a sheet over your butt, it still feels like someone has applied electricity to your ass!

So, I called my Dad and told him what was going on and he picked me up from school the next day….I showed them.

 

When I got back to Charlotte I enrolled at Herbert Spaugh Jr. High, in the ninth grade. “Spaugh”, pronounced “Spaw”, was a brand new school and we were the first class to attend…we considered ourselves “test dummies”…if they didn’t kill us and  we didn’t kill them, the new school would be a success. We were one of the first schools in N.C. to have televised classes…they had a new thing called “Educational T.V.”…everyday we would all file into the cafeteria…about 250 of us…and watch science on “Educational T.V.”…what a joke! We all knew that you couldn’t learn anything from T.V.!…it was strictly for entertainment…good stuff, like Howdy Doody, Gunsmoke, Dragnet and of course the Saturday morning cartoons!

 

After a week or two of absolute boredom during the T.V. classes, we decided to create a few entertaining diversions….we would all watch the clock and as the second hand hit the appointed time, we would all drop a book on the floor!….250 books all at once!…GOSH, WHAT A BUNCH OF GENIUSES WE WERE!…That lasted about as long as it takes for the second hand on the clock to get to the next number!…and then the teacher explained the rules to us…but, in order not to interrupt the class time, he did it from 3 p.m. until 5 p.m. for the next 5 days! If I were any smarter I’d have to concentrate to breathe! We did eventually start paying attention….after we found out that the school board considered the T.V. class a “for credit” class and we were all failing!

 

T.V. classes were a complete dud…by the end of the school year the teachers rebelled! They felt that the lack of individual attention and the inability to control the pace would make T.V. classes a short lived phenomenon….and we students agreed with them. It was really weird being on the same side of the argument as the teachers…unfortunately, the Dept of Education had their opinion of the T.V. classes and it was not the same as ours….in other words, T.V. classes were around for a long time! I think that spending my formative years in front of a T.V.  is the reason I spend so much time there now..?…I KNEW IT! THE SCHOOL SYSTEM IS THE REASON THAT I’M A COUCH POTATO! …Gosh! Wait till the rest of the world comes to this miraculous conclusion! …we’ll all get rich suing the school systems of the world!

I knew that Mr. Robertson, one of my T.V. teachers, was right when he told me that T.V. classes might help me get rich later in life!!!

While at Spaugh I played basketball, and I use the term loosely.  One day the coach gathered the team in the locker room (all 7 of us) and told us to pick a mascot for the school. The school was so new that no mascot had been selected, or appointed? Anyway, we didn’t have one. So, the seven of us , realizing that we would all be gone next year, chose the ever popular Buffalo! Really! A damned Buffalo! We thought the idea would be great for a few laughs . . . but, the faculty believed us!

So, 35 ,or so, years later I ran into the coach for Herbert Spaugh Junior High, and wow, is he pissed at me after hearing the story about the mascot. He hates the “Buff” and has tried to get it changed but, the school board and the teachers all cry “tradition” and won’t change it.   It’s nice to know that I had an impact on history.

 

 

WEST MECKLENBURG HIGH SCHOOL

 

After I finished the 9th grade at Spaugh, my folks built a house out in the country…or at least, it seemed like country it to me. I had spent my life up to this point living in a busy community. I could walk to everything that I was involved in…I could even ride my bike to downtown Charlotte and buzz the “Square” (the center of town at the intersection of Trade and Tryon Streets)…or I could catch a city bus to anywhere I wanted to go. But, after we moved to the country, I was trapped…no drivers license, no bus, no big brother to take me anywhere (as if he ever did !), and a bunch of kids in school that I hadn’t grown up with….and they wore “blue jeans” to school !  I had just started wearing dress pants and oxford cloth shirts to school and I wasn’t about to lower myself and start dressing like a yokel!

As the year wore on…and on…and on! I discovered that most of the kids in school were O.K.  There were a few farm boys who thought it was great fun to castrate the pigs in Agriculture class and place the “removed parts” on the manifold of your car!. . .but, they were the exception. I did find out that the dress code was about the same as the city schools . . . not the schools dress code! The kids dress code! . . . So, I fit right in . . . . Except for calling everybody “Goober”, “Hayseed” and “Peckerwood”! . . . They sure were touchy about nicknames!

                                               

 

“The Hoskins Rock Chunkers”

 

About the time I entered the 5th grade I discovered that I was taller than everybody else! Now, being taller does not make you smarter, meaner or faster. But, some people (especially short people) think it makes you smarter, meaner, faster etc., and they also think it bestows upon you the extraordinary ability to whip everybody’s butt! Consequently, they (short people) tend to expect you to defend them after they have managed to get themselves into trouble! Among the kids that I counted as my friends were an inordinate number of short kids! . . . As a matter of fact, all of them were shorter than me! As a result of their shortness, I was pretty much the neighborhood enforcer, or so it seemed to me. . .(I’m sure the other kids have a different recollection of my service to my community !. . .especially Cooter Hardman, Billy Flowers and others !)

My best friend was Butch Raley. He was my next door neighbor and we spent almost all of our waking hours together. Butch was Tonto to my Lone Ranger, I was Sergeant to his Captain and we took turns being the “Bad Guy” in the black hat. Butch and I spent most of our days trying to find some girl who would “do it” with us. We weren’t sure just what “doing it” entailed, but we were pretty sure that it would feel good if we ever “did it!”

 

In our neighborhood there were a number of willing girls . . . actually, we didn’t know if they were willing or not, but we assumed they all were willing until proven other wise. It took us from the age of about 10 years old until the age of 12 to figure out that the opposite was true…none of them were willing, and we were going to be old men by the time we found out how to “do it”. Fortunately there was an older woman in the neighborhood who took pity on me and taught me how to “do it”. Actually, she challenged me to “do it” after overhearing a conversation between myself and a friend . . . he was intently listening to me tell him in great detail just how often I had “done it”. . . and I was giving him some pointers on which ear to blow in, how long to blow, how hard to blow and why girls liked to have someone blow peanut butter breath in their ears! In other words, I was lying like crazy and trying to build my image in the eyes of a younger kid . . . I figured that we all need heroes and I was willing to be his!

 

Anyway, the older lady, (she was about eighteen or nineteen,) challenged me to “do it” with her right then and there . . . we were in her house and I was talking to her little brother. I said . . . after I could breath again . . . to her brother, “she’s your sister, you go first!” He immediately went screaming from the house and left me there to prove my manhood! Fortunately, even though I was terrified and in danger of passing out at any moment, my body did not fail me . . . actually, I couldn’t figure out what my body was doing. All of the blood had rushed from my head and headed straight for “Mr. Wiggley”. My little symbol of manhood was on the verge of exploding . . . and the older lady said, and I quote, “let’s do it!”. . . And opened her bath robe! . . . She was butt neckked ! I thought my heart was going to stop . . . a neckked woman! She looked better than the volley ball players in the nudist magazines . . . and a damn sight better than the National Geographic pygmy edition! Since I was in the position of defending the honor of all mankind. . . I did it!

Later, as I stood in the front yard (while pulling my pants up) savoring the moment, I could still hear her in the house . . . laughing so hard she was about to choke!

But I didn’t care. . . I had “Done it!”

 

Many years later, as I look back on the momentous occasion, I suspect that her memory is different than mine. . .I suspect that she remembers a sweaty little body blurring across hers, a door slamming and a damp spot somewhere on her thigh!….But, that’s her memory and I can guarantee you that my memory is better…a lot better. As a matter of fact, I have discovered that certain memories improve with age . . . now, at the age of sixty plus years . . . it is truly, a wonderful memory.

 

~~~

 

Anyway, I started to tell you about the “Hoskins Rock Hunkers”.

The community across the rail road tracks was called Hoskins. Most of us in Glenwood had a pretty low opinion of kids from Hoskins…no reason for it…our gang had to dislike somebody! Anyway, one or two afternoons a week we would meet in the middle of a patch of woods and fight. Since we were the more technologically advanced gang, we were always armed with slingshots, BB guns and bows and arrows! (Yes, you read that right…we would shoot at other kids with these weapons!)

Where were out parents you ask? Who knew! They sure as heck weren’t in the woods with us and that’s all we cared about! Now, the kids from Hoskins were not as well armed as we were . . . they had a few BB guns, but mostly they threw rocks, with deadly accuracy I might add!

 

Our strategy was to keep them so far away from us that they couldn’t throw a rock hard enough to get to us! (Pretty smart, huh?) But, we also had to get them closed enough to us to inflict some pain on them and win the battle. We did that by shooting at them with the BB guns and the bow and arrows . . . (we did remove the arrow head!). Now, being shot with an arrow is painful, even if it is just a stick with feathers on it. And , of course being shot in the eye is deadly. . .so, both sides wore football helmets with screen wire face mask!. . .and, by  un-written agreement, we didn’t shoot at anybody’s face ! (Now, years later, I wonder about that last part…how accurate can you be while running through the woods and shooting over your shoulder!)

The battle always raged until supper time, or until someone got hurt and cried. God forbid that you were the one who cried . . . if you got hurt that bad, you tried to look like John Wayne looks when he’s been shot. I can’t describe the look, but if you’ve ever been shot I’m sure you know what it is. Over the months that we battled, we occasionally took a few prisoners, took their pants and sent them back to their side . . . then fought for another 30 minutes over the pants. After all, war was war, but sending a kid home without his pants was a war crime! Once the pants were returned . . . generally in a pants exchange . . . the war was over for the day.

 

Towards the end of the war, the Rock Chunkers did a terrible thing; they didn’t return a pair of pants! The victim, Willie Henderson, had to walk about six blocks home in the middle of a crowd of fellow warriors. Unfortunately, as we walked the warriors began dropping out as we passed their house! By the time Willie was two blocks from home he was alone! . . . And he was running like the wind!

 

The next week we decided to get even . . . real even! On the day of the battle we went to the woods with one goal in mind . . . take a prisoner! The Rock Chunkers were well aware that they were fighting for their lives, or their pants.

 

About four o’clock in the afternoon we caught a Rock Chunker! . . . And he was little, so we didn’t have to beat the hell out him to subdue him! . . . He just gave up!

We then proceeded to strip him to his hand-me-down underwear and tear his pants to shreds. Then (this is the good part), we pulled a tree over to the ground, tied a board to the tree, put the prisoner on the board, and SHOT HIM INTO THE LAKE!! ! !….It seemed like a good idea at the time. We thought we would shoot him into the mud at the edge of the lake . . . actually, it was a pond . . . but, we miscalculated and shot him almost all of the way across the pond . . . about 25 yards! Believe me, we were one scared bunch of combat veterans! We thought we had killed someone . . . and killing someone was considered poor sportsmanship! As it turned out he could swim, cry and scream at the same time and he survived the ride. We immediately ran to the other side of the pond and explained to him that it was just a joke, we didn’t mean it, here’s your pants, your Mom can sew them up, don’t tell anybody, let’s don’t fight anymore, etc. And the funny thing was his Gang was telling him the same thing!

 

That was pretty much the end of “The Rock Chunker War”…no one wanted to be the next one to get captured !. . . But, it did give us a certain status in the neighborhood…we were tough, unmerciful hoodlums!

We had a catapult!! !

Cool!

 

D. LINGERFELT

 

There was a young lady in my neighborhood named D. Lingerfelt…you can just imagine the abuse she took because of her last name….especially from young boys with raging hormones. Lingerfelt was always bastardized into “Fingerfelt” and she often went home crying. We thought it was hysterically funny to torment her relentlessly. If apologies are acceptable 45+ years later, I apologize D. (Name deleted to protect me from her lawyer)

 

 One night in the summer I was walking home from the “Center”, officially known as “The Enderly Park Recreation Center”. I had been playing mumbly peg with several other, death defying, or at least, “amputation defying”, knife throwers. When I came out of the bushes of the short cut through the middle of the block, there were D. Lingerfelt and her friend Arzelle walking toward me. Since I was alone, I didn’t make any smart remarks about her name….after all, why do it when there was no audience. I stopped to talk to the two of them for a few minutes and they quickly realized the truth about me….I was scared to death of girls and I became a giggling, slobbering, stuttering fool around them. D. said something about being kissed…I don’t remember what because  when she said the word “kiss” my brain went into hyper-drive and I  started grinning like a mule with a mouth full of briars and tried to look like Henry Fonda  would look in this same situation.  There were a lot of words, giggles, smiles, snorts, pshhht’s and Awwww Y’alls.  . . until Delores said, “I’m going to kiss you” ! Just to make sure I had heard her correctly I said, “Huh”?  She reached out and took my hands and placed them on her waist, she put her arms around my neck and planted a big ol’ wet kiss right on my lips! . . . I grinned. I grinned so big that my ears were in the corners of my mouth! She then did it again, except this time she stuck her tongue in my mouth and it was all I could do to keep from pukeing! I did suppress a gag with all of my might though! Although, all she could do was run her tongue around my gums, because my teeth were clenched tight enough to crack my molars! That was my first “memorable” kiss . . . I have since perfected my technique and I no longer kiss like I am trying to suck a pea through a straw. And I don’t clench my teeth quite as much !. . .and I don’t “swagger” and hitch up my pants with every step I take  for the next two or three days. I also found out that when a girl kisses you…especially and older girl…she doesn’t like for you to follow her around for weeks on end and offer to “do it again” if she wants too!

 

 

A work in progress……….. Many years to go…………………….