Blog

Leonov was the first astronaut to walk in space and I was learning to play Hearts.

Weekends at Tech were special to me. Most of the students went home unless there was a football game being played. Saturday evenings would find us organizing a game of Hearts. The chatter that went on around the cards would have been worth charging an admission.

Love without questioning, Need without demanding, Want without restrictions, Accept without change, Desire without inhibitions.

Love not given is a life wasted.

Wish I had the answers, Life questions I could fix. Reflection in the mirrow, A face your mom would pick.

Listen to the silence, Vibrations never felt. Living in the moment, Playing what is dealt.

Friends long departed, Memories with us still. Find a place to settle, Know the fake from real.

Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison and I was a senior in high school. My friend Tommy moved to Alexandria, Virginia.

Hamburg was a place that forced you to find your own form of entertainment. We did have a drive-inn theater and on occasion a traveling skating rink would settle around the square.

Beatle Mania was sweeping across America and they reached the number one spot on the music charts with “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. Their long hair was a disgrace and lots of teenage boys started copying their style by spending lots of extra time in front of a mirror trying to make their hair look like Paul McCarney’s.

“She Loves You” was their second number one song. When they made a special appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, I was invited over to LaFran’s house, with Carol, Suzanne, James Mack, and Roy, to watch the event.

I ran track my senior year, mostly to prove to Coach Crews that I could put up with his attitude. I ran the mile, because there wasn’t anything longer for him to make me run. He knew what he was doing, but I always felt that his short coming was failing to let the runners know what he was trying to do with all those laps.

When track was over, Coach Herrod asked me to be the catcher for the school baseball team. I think that team was the first to compete for the school. We had some very good athletes in our class, but none of them chose to play on that team. My senior year seems like a blur. We all wanted to catch the wind, explore the dawn, and discover.

“Lord of the Flies” was a popular film, but I found it less exciting than the book. Bud Wilkinson resigned from the University of Oklahoma. He was their head football coach. Only the truest O.U. fan would care or remember.

When fall came around, I had decided to attend Arkansas Tech College in Russellville, Arkansas. Elaine, Sue, and Mother took me to Russellville early because the band started their thing early. It was exciting being a part of such an impressive group of musicians. The best from all over the state were there and most of them had chosen to major in music. I just enjoyed playing and getting a free ride to all the away games. Tech always had excellent football teams.

Jimmy Daniels was my first roommate and he played the bass drum. He took a lot of crap from students that knew nothing about the instrument. He was good natured and nothing seemed to bother him. We lived in the smallest dorm on campus. It had room for about eighty students. We did not have an air-conditioner and very little heat on some of those cold winter nights. Life was good!

I did not go back home until Thanksgiving and then I only left because they closed to dorm. I took a large duffel bag full of dirty cloths home for Mother to wash. I honestly thought that was what I was suppose to do. She saw that bag of clothes and asked me if they had washers and dryers in the dorm? I told her that they did and she told me that I should take them back and wash them myself. What she said was understandable. Her washer was an old wringer type machine and those in the dorm were new and easy to use.

When I left for home, someone took me and those clothes to the bus station, but when I returned on the bus I had to walk back to the campus with that heavy bag over my shoulder. Lesson learned.

I tried to listen to the fight between Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston, but my radio would not keep the station. In between fadeouts, Clay won. It took seven rounds. Liston never recovered from the rejection that he felt from home town fans.

Most of my trips home were made during holidays. I didn’t ride the bus very often. I tried to catch a ride with some of the other students. There were occasions when I could only catch a partial ride and I had to depend on my thumb for the rest of the journey. I would never consider using that process today.

One such adventure took me outside Pine Bluff and my first ride was with two men in a pickup truck. They said that they had come from Oklahoma and I could tell that both of them had been drinking. Even then three in the cab of a pick up truck was a crowd. A yellow school bus was in front of us and as the law states, you have to stop for the bus. Little black children were its load. The driver, the man I thought had been so gracious in picking me up, was giving me a different impression as he suggested that he was going to run down the next group of “n!@@&£$” that got off the bus.

I began to think about my exit strategy. My bag was in the back of his truck and contained most of what I owned in the way of clothes. I decide that when he pushed the gas peddle and attempted to become his own judge and jury, as it related to the lives of those children, I would push the door open and jump to my fate. I did not want to be a part of his plot. As I awaited my opening, he slowed down and said that he was going to turn onto a side road. I was never so glad to get out of a vehicle.

It took about an hour to find another safer ride. I completed my journey home without being part of a mass murder or having to share their whiskey. Finding peace within yourself allows you to live at peace with others.

President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas in 1963 and everything seemed breakable. The darkest moments often cause the most beautiful flowers to grow.

We all waited the afternoon he was shot for word of his condition. It was impossible to believe when the word finally came to our class room that he was dead.

Surely the doctors had made a mistake or the news people misunderstood what the doctors had said. What was the point? The truth hit home as we watched the funeral take place on television.

A television was placed in the school auditorium and we were encouraged to watch and say our goodbye to our fallen leader.

Negro field hands all over Mississippi were going on strike for better wages. They wanted to be paid one dollar per hour for their labor. The white land owners said that they gave them a house to live in and that was enough.

I was familiar with some of those houses and they would have had to pay me to stay in them. It was a strange summer with an unexpected spark that kindled a very bright flame.

I worked for a small construction company in Greenville, Mississippi that summer. Mr. Gray was often my work partner. He was an old black man that was also a Baptist Preacher. On a particularly hot July day, I asked him where he was going to eat lunch.

Preacher gave me all the particulars about where he was going to eat and what he was going to have. It sounded so good that I invited myself along. You can imagine my surprise when he said that I could not go with him. I was stunned.

What could be so wrong with me? Why did the kind old Preacher man not want to enjoy my company over lunch? He assured me that neither one of us would make it out of the lunch room alive if we went in together. I still didn’t understand. Even when he said the two of us could be mistaken for Freedom Riders. It was only months later that I understood the full impact of what was going on in Mississippi at that time.

I made seventy-five cents an hour that summer and I bet that Mr. Gray made less.

Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman in space and I could have cared less. Mini-skirted dancers in cages were the feature of America’s first discotheque called the Whiskey-A-Go-Go. It was two years later when I saw my first short skirted female. Everyone liked them so much that they are still with us. Do discotheques still exist?

Fall was a time for football and football was king in Hamburg.

The protest movement of the 1960s was well stated in the Bob Dylan classic, “Blowin’in the Wind.” Demonstrations were going on in Washington as 200,000 Freedom Marchers did their thing.

My brother Garvis was working in Huntsville, Alabama and was involved with the space program. Uncle Claude was positive that no person would ever walk on the moon. Garvis didn’t argue, but knew that it was going to happen soon. John Glenn did orbit the earth in a spacecraft.

This was the year of my first serious girl friend. It was an up and down relationship that would last for several years.

There were parties to attend on a regular basis and the same people were always there. There really wasn’t any place to go, unless it was the drive in or the movie house in Crossett, so having a party in town was special. When these parties actually started, I would walk or ride my bicycle. I didn’t realize it then, but I wore the same two sweaters to every dance. I thought I looked great and maybe I did. Who would know?

Even though Chubby Checker had a hit with The Twist, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. After practicing alone at home, I was told that I didn’t do it correctly. The Duke of Earl made the number one list and who among us doesn’t still sing along with that song when it is played today? In fact, I find myself singing it now!

My cousin Elaine and her husband Jack purchased a boat and told mother that if I got all my shots I could go skiing with then on special holidays and weekends. I got all the shots. I hate shots.

Good at her word, Elaine invited me to join then in the water. I eventually succeeded in getting up on those skies and out of the water. I enjoyed my time on the lake. Elaine was a very thoughtful cousin. She also took time to tutor me in chemistry. I know it was a chore for her, but she learned enough to get me through the class. It wasn’t that chemistry was so hard, it was related to the amount of time that I was willing to devote to the subject on my own. Elaine was a woman ahead of her time and she had red hair.

Algebra was another class that drove me to distraction. Coach Bierbaum was just doing a job and in my opinion not a very good one. Maybe my attitude was not the best, but with a little effort he could have done a job worth bragging about.

Coach got upset with me one morning. His class was the class just before lunch. He told me to stay after everyone left. On his desk was a sixteen inch ruler and he insisted on using it on my bottom. In the process of giving me a lesson, he broke the ruler.

That nasty temper of his was getting the better of him and when I laughed at his feeble attempt at punishment. Coach ordered me out of his room. That was the only spanking that I ever received in all my days at school. It wasn’t the only one that I deserved. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Coach as a person, but his best years as a teacher had evidently passed him by.

Mr. Hall enjoyed catching students as they ran to get in line for lunch. When he caught you running, three days were required at the end of the lunch line. You got to choose the days, but he had a list and three days or three years were not enough to make him forget.

I got caught many times and would often eat off campus and return for my stand behind the line. Mother would have had a fit if she had know that I was spending twenty-five cents for a hamburger, corn nuts, and coke when I could get more for ten cents in the cafeteria.

When I would enter the lunch room and was sure that my name was checked off Mr. Hall’s list, I would direct my feet out the side door without eating. I tried to be resourceful in my thinking. I learned a lot in high school.

Weekends were often filled with camping and hunting. I know it sounds strange, but the squirrels were in a migration phase, whatever that is. We seldom saw a squirrel in the woods and Tommy Evans and I spent a lot of time looking for them. We got lost in the woods several times. The sun was our only guide out. Those were the days. I knew that several of the boys were interested in drinking beer but we didn’t know anything about other drugs. Cigarettes were available for everyone and were not considered the threat that we know they are today. Life was simple or so we thought.

Albert Kursterine was a few years younger than Miriam and was an up and coming business man in Hamburg. He hadn’t arrive yet, but he was on his way. One afternoon when billiards was slow he asked me if I wanted to go hunting. Of course I did. We traveled out east of town and split up. I eventually stopped to rest on a fallen log.

The leaves had already let go of the trees and the ground was a rich golden color mixed with all shades of brown. As I got up to resume my hunting, my eyes fell directly on the copper head snake that was as frightened of me as I was of him. My impulse took over and I shot that snake without ever bring my gun up to my shoulder. I fired from the hip, as a reflex, and killed the snake. As I moved my eyes away and then returned then in the direc- tion of the snake, it was difficult to distinguish the reptile from the flora. I also shot and killed my first squirrel that day. It was a tasty treat!

Mother had a telephone in the beauty shop, but we did not have one at home. She said that if we had one everyone would be calling and wanting her to do their hair.

I talked mother into getting a car! It was a ‘62 Ford Falcon. It didn’t have a radio, but it would produce all the heat that a person needed in the winter. Mother said that she didn’t care what else it had, but a heater was absolutely necessary. She remembered the days of the rumble seat. Heat was important to her.