The folly of youth? Maybe not.

 Using little more than their imagination, do children still play in the make believe world that was so dear to my generation? Our imagination was so finely tuned that Peter Pan had nothing on us. Of course there were no electronics available or we might have fallen into the same trap our kids now accept as normal childhood development.

Not to be indelicate, but we grew up post-World War II and the forgotten Korean conflict and even though I cannot remember ever fighting an imaginary Korean Commie, my 3 brothers and I sent a lot of “Japs” and multiple thousands of “Krauts” to an early demise and we went to war with them very often and for a good number of victorious campaigns.

Our favorite rifle was quite often a stick and not just any stick, but a hand-hewn stick that each of us took pride in selecting. On a daily basis, we would watch Sergeant Saunders of the TV series Combat and this would recharge our imaginary fantasy batteries.

While we lived on the corn farm in Michigan, we spent hours in the high cornrows patrolling and often sustained heavy casualties that we rapidly recovered from. Now I don’t know what you imagine when I say playing in growing corn, but it can be a very scary place. A lot of animals and reptiles live in a corn field, including snakes, turtles, fox, deer, raccoons, and coyotes and besides all that, it is very easy to get turned around and lost. Needless to say, it was the perfect place to play army and fight the crafty Huns.

Moving to the suburbs of Toledo, Ohio, we found ourselves immersed in deadly urban warfare which pitted a good number of soldiers to help us along with the same number to be “the enemy”.  In the city we all carried plastic guns or Cadet Rifles and the evening war began each night when it was too late to play baseball and lasted until about 8:30 pm when our Mom’s would call us home. I can say without bragging that these city boys didn’t have much of a chance against the band of brothers who cut their chops in the corn rows of south Michigan.

By the time Junior high rolled around, we were still hard at it and spent hours upon hours in the piney woods of North Georgia hunting the Boche and believe it or not there was still evidence of the Civil War battles in those hills. We would run commando style from pot hole to pot hole, where either cannon balls had blown a hole, or soldiers had dug down for cover.

We knew every crook and nanny on the trails through the bushes and dense thickets like we were on a sidewalk and where exactly the ambush we be so it didn’t catch us by surprise. If it did, we would all make gun fire noises in the true style of a cross between the monkey house and the blistering gunfire of the Jeep mounted machine guns of the TV series Rat Patrol. What I’ve described thus far is only a small portion of the games we played that took us outside the house and didn’t cost a dime.

When we lived in Ogden, Utah it was very hot and there were cactus and succulent type plants, as a lot of other vegetation would not grow. Our house set on a hill and abruptly behind it was a 60 degree slope that dropped down about 20 feet. My 3 brothers and I would take off our shoes and basically slide down this sandy hard-packed slope onto the desert floor and lifting each foot to keep from burning it, attempt to run up that 60 degree slope. Sometimes it took 4 attempts and we would grab the brother and help him up. It hurt like the dickens… but what fun! We would then dip our feet in cool water and do it again. Now that I think of it, the sand was probably about a 120 degrees.

Did I mention Wiffle ball? Does the Wiffle ball still exist? We played it whenever there were too few of us to play regular baseball or on the suburb streets under the street light (when Fritz wasn’t around to shoot at us). What a great game and at my present advanced age, I could probably still be a contender (as long as Jim Finley wasn’t on the other team.) I imagine Ol Jimbo has played his fair share of the tricky game and would snuff out my attempts at personal glory.

Mom’s and Dad’s back in the day didn’t feel obligated to provide every luxury under the sky for us and for the most part, couldn’t afford it if they did. We found ways to entertain ourselves and everything worked out just fine. The trophies we got, we actually earned. The money we had come from recycling soda bottles, or mowing lawns. Most of us grew up with rich imaginations ready to move out when the time was right and make our own way and most of us have prospered… after 30 or more years.

.

Brrrr to me is not Grrrreat!

When I came into existence we lived in what is now frigid Michigan and the nearest hospital was in northern Ohio, so the city of Toledo got to witness my entrance. It was the beginning of summer and sunny and to this day, that is how I prefer my weather.

In the past we have enjoyed two months of near-perfect weather; October and April. Our usual rain or high humidly has been negated by dry air from the north and facilitates outdoor activity unmatched the rest of the year. This year it didn’t play out like that and last year wasn’t much of a match either. This brings us around to the recent 38ish cool front and my intolerance for cold temperatures.

I have been cold a good number of times in my life and quite frankly, experienced life threatening plunges in my body temperature. Sounds melodramatic doesn’t it, but I’m not exaggerating. To those of us who have never experienced the inability to maintain our 98.6 degree body temperature, it is extremely painful and even worse when you try to warm back up. You will literally cry from the pain. This condition becomes life-threatening when your inner body goes below 95 degrees. On the other end of the scale, being hot is simply uncomfortable and like you, I have experienced my fair share of that.

My three brothers and I ice skated with our backs to the wind up the Little Raisin river in the early 60’s until we were miles from home. We skated so far that we ran out of river and when we tried to turn back, the wind was too fierce. We were frozen and disoriented and crying. We finally abandoned the sliver of iced-over river and got up on the farm road where a passing motorist loaded the four of us and drove for about 30 minutes to get us home.

My mom, having no idea where we got off too, was too relieved to be angry, but wisely ran a tub of tepid water and began the process of thawing us out. Now before you judge her, understand that back in those days, farm kids played outdoors all day unsupervised and only came home to eat. The water felt scalding hot and we suffered through the process of getting our body temperatures back to normal.

Roll forward a few years and this was repeated when we lived in Morgan, Utah and the temp dropped below zero while we went off owl hunting with a neighbor boy. I vividly remember screaming in pain and crying as I thawed out. I also remember how angry my mom was at that neighbor boy. Another thing to note is that any kid growing up in snow country can tell their own horror stories about being cold.

Moving back to Ohio, the 4 of us skated far out on the frozen Ottawa River and once again the wind blew us so far away that my third brother just gave up and lay down on the ice to die. Again this sounds melodramatic, but I assure you under those conditions of hypothermia, you do not think straight. My other brothers and I struggled with him to get to shore and then walked in our skates the 5 blocks to our street with our skates on.  We were too cold to change into our shoes and the painful warming up process was repeated.

While serving in the US Air Force in Great Falls, Montana I was subjected to 5 twelve-hour nights of shoveling snow around the missile silos under the night sky, only to repeat it one day after returning. Understand that there are no trees to stop the constant wind on the Great Plains. We were under blizzard conditions and the fear of a sudden thaw meant water could drain down around the hundreds of Intercontinental Missiles and possibly flood them.  The decision was made to load up airmen and give them snow shovels and remove the snow that had drifted around the giant cement pads that covered each and every missile silo. Each pad covered 1 missile and each pad was miles from the next.

Now I had seen the map on the commanding General’s office wall and there were about 1500 Minuteman missiles under his command and by golly, I think we got every one of them. Initially we flew out in the middle of the night in helicopters and were dropped off on the Great Plains and it was so cold, we all thought we would die before morning. We would dig one out and low and behold, a stake bed deuce and a half truck would roll up and load us like cattle to drive to another silo. We were shoulder to shoulder in the back of that freezing open air truck bed only to dismount and dig out another.

My geocaching/kayaking friends make fun of me when I don’t want to go out on the water if the temp drops below 70 degrees, but I simply do not like being cold.  I have been elk hunting and fallen asleep in my mummy bag, only to awaken and the entire sleeping bag would be under an inch of snow. The goose down inside the bag kept me fairly warm, but that is one sight I don’t care to see again.

The word is that this Christmas, our temperature will be around 70 degrees and most likely sunny and I couldn’t be happier.  I think it was right after Christmas in 1976 that 2 of my 3 brothers and I worked a shutdown in Pasadena and it was 14 degrees. I would have burned a Yule log for warmth if I could have. Merry Christmas my friends, remember the reason for the season, and stay toasty and comfy.
.

An apple a day for a snob.

I am an apple snob and it is not entirely my fault.  It is because I spent my early pre-teen and a few later years living in Ohio and Michigan. Up in that part of the USA, apples grow everywhere and some trees have so many large apples on them, they break the limbs due to the extra weight.

Apples are like people in that there are many varieties and some are sweeter, larger, crisper, sourer, disgusting… etcetera. Recently an ex-councilman decided because he knows me that I would be a prime target to buy apples from him and a whole case at that. I think it is noble that one of the many clubs he belongs to sells apples to raise money for whatever they raise money for, but like I told him, “I don’t like the apples they sell because I am an apple snob.”

I know this was a direct, honest, and possibly unwanted answer, but what in the world am I going to do with all those apples I don’t like… give them away? I reckon that would have been a kinder gesture than my straight forward answer. Let me explain about why I am an apple snob. In the Buckeye State when I was a child, kids carried salt shakers in their pockets and after about 3 baseball games, we would ride our bikes to the orchards, climb up in the trees and eat green apples.

If you’ve seen the movie “Sandlot”, this was my childhood. Now, if you think we were putting a dent in the number of apples on these trees, you’ve never seen apple trees loaded with fruit. It’s practically impossible to exaggerate their numbers. Imagine a Granny Smith apple (not one that was picked two weeks before it was ready to be picked so it could be shipped to a grocery store) that is a just about ready to begin sweetening, but still sour and sprinkle salt on it until it has just the right amount.

The salt makes it bearable to eat without your jaws contracting (you know what I mean) and is so delicious that you eat the entire apple, core, *seeds, and all tossing the stem to the ground. It is so juicy and delicious; it’s like eating meat, sweets, and juice in each bite. After about 6 or 7 big fat juicy apples, you lick your fingers and carefully place the small patch of wax paper over the top of the shaker, and screw the lid back on it. Now you have had lunch and can resume the game.

Fuji Apples

I can’t remember ever going home for lunch when playing baseball in Ohio. We always ate apples. I loved to eat pears and cherries too, but let me tell you something about wild cherry trees you may not know. Most non-nursery trees are large and dangerous to climb and each cherry you can reach, you do so at risk of breaking your arms, legs, and maybe your neck, as gravity is not your friend.

Pear trees are finicky and the same tree, depending on the rain it gets and when it gets it, can bear a wide variation in the quality of the fruit. Just when you think you have found the perfect tree, the next year it is tasteless, too hard, or yucky. In Hillsdale, Michigan, we had (if I remember right) 12 apple trees and a cloned apple/pear tree. This particular tree would grow one fruit one ear and the next, the other, but it always had some of both.

These days I don’t eat many apples and it’s mainly because I don’t have enough teeth left to chew them up completely, but if I did, I would buy the Fuji and the Honey crisp varieties because they taste real good and are crisp.  Because I know the difference, I would be willing to bet they would be many times better if I could get them off the tree. When I lived in Southeast Asia, I would eat the pineapple right after it ripened on the bush and it was like eating candy. It was non-acidic and totally pleasing. The same went for the watermelon and the indigenous fruit.

Honey Crisp

Our measly selection of bananas is due to what holds up the best when shipped. I remember finger bananas right off the tree that although they were white-meated, they were buttery and sweet like sugar. We get about 3 of the over 1000 varieties of bananas in our stores. Can you imagine trying even 100 different bananas to see which ones you liked the most?

In my high school years in Georgia we would wade in the creeks and pick black berries which were larger than a big man’s thumb. That red clay soil and the water made them so big that a couple dozen was all you needed to make a small pie. Of course each berry was picked knowing the plentiful snakes also eat berries.

When I lived in Utah, we ate enough wild plumbs to feed a small army of chiren. In California, we again ate bananas and tangerines off the many trees and occasionally lemons. Now days, we eat what the grocery stores sell and that is one poor substitute for tree-ripened fruit.

I don’t know what got me on this subject today, but I do miss those Ohio apple orchards.

Note: Yes, we ate the seeds and lots of them.

*

Boogie men, costumes, & candy!

Way back yonder in the 20^th century, Halloween was second only to Christmas for most kids.  Easter was number 3 when it came to getting neato stuff, if you can call copious sugar… stuff.  Sugar was cheap and parents gave us more candy on those 3 days than we got the rest of the year.

My brothers and sister would grab over-sized pillow cases for booty sacks and rush from house to house for a trick or a treat. Very often the prize was a whole candy bar too and not the puny offerings we have these days either. Candy bars were big and heavy... and delicious. I once heard my mother tell someone that I could eat my weight in candy, as I loved the stuff. I was a candy consumer, while my brother Gordon was a hoarder and a saver.  He would have candy for months and having it secreted away kept the rest of us from partaking of his loot.

With pillow cases so full they couldn’t hold more, we would rush back to the house and dump the contents on our individual beds and head back out. We lived in a suburb of Toledo, Ohio and on any street; there might be one or maybe two houses that did not hand out candy. It was a monster, pirate, or hobo character’s dream come true.

I remember one time when a lady handed each of us one of those giant individually wrapped mints with the chocolate coating. We rushed off and swapped pieces of costume and came back for seconds. She looked us over and asked if we had just been there and we blatantly denied it, wanting more of the giant candy. She dropped a Tootsie roll in each of our loot bags and this prompted my hoarder brother to retort, “Whatsa matta lady?  You outta mints?”

It was ha-ha funny to all of us and we ran off laughing and as happy as kids can be.

I can’t remember ever wearing a store-bought costume either. We made our own and used make-up for our masks. It was innocent and mischievous times where a trick wasn’t destructive or malicious. We had imaginations as big as the nighttime’s unknowns. Boogiemen were headless horsemen or a cornfield’s scarecrow coming down off its anchor and chasing us. I was 11 the first time I read Robinson Crusoe and when he rescued Friday from the cannibals, the thought of a human eating another was so traumatic, I put the book down a week.  Kids didn’t know what they now know.

At the time I am referring to, monster craze was in full swing, with Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolfman, the Addams Family and the Munsters on TV. Friday night horror theater had a host named Morgus who would lead in a scary movie. I would watch through my fingers and pull something over my face each time the horrible whatever attacked.  It was both the worst and best of times. It was scary delicious times and I miss the innocence of it.

Today’s Halloween is a weak facsimile of the days 50 years ago when my siblings and I ran unescorted through Point Place, Ohio’s streets. We knew better than to get hit by a car. Sheesh. Any kid back then knew that. Today’s kids walk in front of cars and never know they are there. How could they? They have their eyes glued 18 inches in front of them.

We can blame one our own Texans from Pasadena for killing Halloween. Ronald Clark O’Bryan poisoned his own 8 year old son with a potassium cyanide-laced Pixy Stix for insurance money. Sadly, this Candy Man from Pasadena not only committed the worst kind of heinous crime against his own child, but he ultimately killed Halloween all across the country. Since November 1^st, 1974, parents are scared to death on every level and rightly so. These times have indeed changed, like Old Bob said they were.

I haven’t participated in any Halloween celebrations in about 20 years, I guess. The fun has left it for me. Back then it was simply monsters and boogie men and that was before I realized there were real monsters and boogie men out there. One of our kids can fall prey to them and that is why many civic locations and church groups stage a safer version and again, rightly so. Some things change for the better, but the Halloween of my youth is gone for good.

 .

Cold weather? No thanks.

I remember almost freezing to death as a teenager deer hunting in North Georgia.  I was about 15 and I went with my dad and our church’s pastor.  I was good to go the night before, but when the alarm went off at the very ungodly hour of 5am, I tried to talk dad out of taking me.  Nope.  Dad was going to take me dead or alive.  It came dangerously close to the former before 10am

Now I was no stranger to being cold.  I lived in Michigan and Ohio as a kid and it gets as cold as a mother in law’s love in them parts, trust me.  One winter in Hillsdale, Michigan, my dad made an actual igloo out of blocks of snow that stayed for much of the winter.  Our German Sheppard slept on a blanket in it at night.

In Dundee, Michigan, my 3 brothers and I made a near tragic mistake of skating up the Little Raisin, as the wind was at our backs and four hours later, unable to fight the wind to get back, we stepped out on the road about 10 miles from home.  We were near frozen solid and a good Samaritan brought us home.

In 1965, the “Marshall boys”, as we were known, skated out and across the great Ottawa river in Toledo, Ohio.  TJ, brother number 3 got so hypothermic that he lay down on the ice and refused to move.   We were all so cold, we knew that to lay down was to die and somehow we made it back to shore, dragging TJ and crying, walked the 11 blocks, on skates, back to our house.

When I was about 10 or so, my brothers and I followed a teenage boy far out in the woods in Morgan, Utah and came back near death and I say that without exaggeration, as it was about 10 degrees.  The 60 degree water in the tub felt like boiling water.  Now, before you judge my parents, let me say that back in the 1960’s kids were a heartier bunch and the times were different.  Kids spent hours unsupervised out of doors.

For every time something bad happened, fifteens of hundreds of other times, we pulled it off.  Sometimes we didn’t.  My brothers and I spent a lot of time on adventures in the woods and would venture out 4 or 5 miles at a time. I remember squirrel hunting by myself with my shotgun in Georgia 4 miles from home, more than once and I was only 15.

The 2 years I spent in the Strategic Air Command at Malmstrom Air Force base, in Great Falls, Montana was the icicle that broke the polar bear’s back though.  As Louis L’Amour put it in one of his great novels about an American Indian in Siberia, “I haven’t felt cold like this since I was in Montana”.

In the winter in Montana, the sun comes up on the horizon, goes up about a foot, and sets a short time later on the horizon. I hated it.  The wind blows non-stop and even in summer, you have to wear a jacket when the weak sun sets.  To put it in perspective, when I was there in 1971, it snowed on the 4^th of July.

To get back on my Georgia deer hunting occurrence, I wasn’t experienced with sitting on a ground stand in sub-freezing weather, so I did not dress for it.  Instead, I had an orange plastic-type suit that I drew over my jacket and jeans.  It was uncomfortably hot in the car and when dad asked if I had on enough to keep warm, I nodded a sleepy yes.

I slept all the way there in fact and when we got out, I donned the suit.  It was toasty.  I loaded the 16 gauge shotgun with number one buckshot and walked off to find a place to hunt.  There was no such thing as a lease back then and on government land, first come first served.  It was bitterly cold and I did not have gloves and I laid the gun in the crook of my arm and tried to keep warm as the wind picked up.  Each minute that passed, I grew colder.

The weak winter sun finally arrived and I was shaking violently.  I was just an hour into it and I was so cold, all I could think about was how cold I was.  As a son of the generation which fought World War II, I didn’t dare to interrupt our hunt though and besides that, I had no idea where my dad was or our pastor.  By 10am or so, I was beyond caring and stumbling to my feet, I headed back to the car.  Snow was falling and the wind began to abate, but I was so stiff, movement was difficult.  All I wanted to do was get in the car… but it was locked.  I began to cry.

I had reached the place where I was out of options and I did everything in my power, to get the safety off, so I could fire 3 warning shots, which I finally did with frozen unfeeling digits.  I waited what I felt like was a long time and fired 3 more.  This brought both my dad and my pastor and immediately seeing the sad shape I was in, they quickly loaded me up for an emergency trip home.

I just know I disappointed my dad, but he never said anything to confirm it.  What I got out of it was I never want to be that cold again, or disappoint dad.  Unlike being too hot, being too cold is a very painful thing.  Being too hot is uncomfortable.  Thawing out from hypothermia can kill a person.  With all these swings in temperature we are experiencing these days, bundle up.  Take a good hot shower.  Put a coat on.  Stay warm and thank the Good Lord above for the shelter we often take for granted.

Resisting a Bully – Part Two

 I am still in contact with a good number of student friends in North Georgia through a mailing list I started about 12 years ago at the urging of my sister and a classmate.  We call ourselves Friends Forever and on this list is a fellow named Alan Dempsey.  Alan was always like an older brother to me when I lived there, a welcome change from the extremely anti-Yankee attitude that prevailed at the time.  He was also a real charmer of the ladies and this, of course made him the target of every jealous boyfriend.

Alan was also a scrapper and although you couldn’t find a nicer guy, he seemed to always be getting in fights and was pretty danged good at defending himself.  Back in 1967, if you were caught fighting, a number of things were going to happen, but none of them involved dragging your parents to debtors prison, like is common today.  First, you were going to get “pops” or a paddling and you may end up going to the gym and putting on boxing gloves and get pops from the coach to boot.  In extreme cases of multiple acts of fisticuffs, you could get suspended or even expelled permanently.

The last time I saw Alan before we moved from Georgia, he was running across the breezeway and his face was bloody.  He stopped long enough to tell me he had just successful “beat the fire out of someone,” and kept going, fearing he would get pops.  Knowing Alan like I do, I can pretty much tell you the fight was by a jealous boyfriend.  Alan wrote on our mailing list today, asking for more details of the fight I wrote about last week, so here it is:

 Alan, it was Eldridge Bentley.  Someone had (reportedly) paid him $10 to beat me up, and then go after my younger brother.  I was his first target and in 3rd hall talking to a pretty girl when I saw a large crowd coming.  Eldridge was in the lead and the oddest thing was I had missed the bus and rode to school with him that morning in his car and we had arrived early, easily beating the long bus ride of 20 miles.  He was very strong and I was a full grown young man and he grabbed me by the front of the shirt and partially lifted me off the ground.  My back was to the edge of the lockers and he said "Me and you are gonna fight."

 I said, "Okay, but what for?"  I'll never forget his answer, "That's none of your danged business," and he hit me.  I bounced back into the corner between the locker and the wall and landing back on him, I wrapped my left arm around his neck and popped him in the face as hard as I could, maybe 6-10 times before he laid a wicked and wild hay-maker on the side of my jaw.  His thumb went under my jaw, hooking it and cutting my neck while breaking his thumb and wrist.

 It took me a few days and the help of a witness to figure out what happened when he hit me the second time.  The strike turned my head and I slammed my nose into the corner of the locker and I remember being on the floor trying to get up, but not going down.  I laid there for what seemed like a minute as my head spun, but was probably closer to five and in the meantime, the bell had sounded and first period already started.

 I got up slowly and I remember staring at the pool of blood on the tile.  I looked to my right and the teacher was in plain view, but to this day, I can't tell you her name, again a product of moving from school to school.  I gathered up my books and went to my desk.  My face and shirt were bloody and I couldn't breathe through my nose, as I thought it was broken.  No one looked at me and the room was very quiet. 

Now, let me back up a bit.  A week before this happened another muscular bully insulted me in front of Mr. Crockett's classroom in the hallway and again I was talking to a pretty girl.  I was in 10th grade and he was in the 9th and he also played football.  Seems like his name was Bobby something, maybe my brother remembers.  He said something really vulgar and I asked him what he said, as I had had enough, but being a Yankee from Ohio in North Georgia in 1967 made me lay pretty danged low, as there were just too many people who wouldn't mind seeing the Civil War end with a Rebel yell.

The fellow, who lifted weights and looked impressive, smacked me hard in the face and I was always under the ignorant belief that you let the other guy actually hit you before you fought back.  I threw my books to the side and hit him with a left, then a hard right as he went off-balance and I knocked him onto the floor on his back in front of everyone.  To my surprise, he grabbed up his books and took off and I grabbed mine and hurried into Mr. Crockett’s class before he arrived. Mr. Crockett was known for his ability to lift grown high school boys off the ground with his paddle and it was his answer for every altercation.

 I now believe this was the impetus for the Bentley fight.  The rest of that story I’ve already told and the odd thing was, I never got in another fight at Cherokee High School and everyone who was afraid of Eldridge Bentley steered clear of me and this is why you always resist a bully.  They only feed upon the weak.

My brother sent me this note:  “The kids name was Bobby Croft. I think he thought if he whipped you he would be some kind of hero. After the Eldridge Bentley fiasco, I was fishing at the little creek down from our house and Eldridge came along with his pole and sat by me. He told me what inspired him to fight that day. Our redneck neighbor from North Carolina, Mr. Lott offered him $5 apiece as a bounty to beat us up. Eldridge never got paid and he was sorry that he took the offer. He was the starting tailback on the football team and that ended his playing. I was walking in the 9th grade hall when I suddenly was picked off the ground from behind by the back of my shirt. Eldridge wanted to know where you were as he was going to go kick your butt and then come back for me. By the time I got over where you were Eldridge had already been there.”

Am I advocating fist fighting in school?  No.  I am advocating standing up for yourself and this may include learning to defend yourself, but it will for sure call for an adjustment of your attitude and that only comes by confidence, careful planning, or anger.  The pen is indeed mightier than the sword, so friends, choose your path wisely.

 .