Memories For My Grandchildren

Kaleb Becomes British

 By the age of eight Kaleb was still attempting to understand his relationship to Pauliine. At one point he asked her is she was his, like I was his grand daddy. Her response that since I was his grand daddy and she married me, then she must be his also. That drew a big grin and he said “I am glad you are mine.”

 Not long after that we were discussing his ancestors. “You are part German,” Pauline explained, “because Trolingers and Wombachers come from Germany.” 

Kaleb quickly added , “I am also part British, because you are British and you married my grand daddy before I was born.”

Kaleb discovers the identity of the Easter Bunny

 On Easter, 2009 Kaleb was participating in one of his favorite holidays, Easter, and was racing around his backyard to find eggs that had been carefully placed by the Easter Bunny. For some reason yet to be disclosed to any of us, he paused and began thinking about what he was doing. Mimie, his mom, had gone back into their home for a moment. Before continuing he entered the house and approached Mimie. “Mimie, tell me the truth. Is there really and Easter Bunny?” he queried. 

“Well, Kaleb, I guess you are grown up enough to to ask such a question and expect an honest answer. To be perfectly honest, the Easter Bunny doesn’t really exist.” 

“Do you mean he is a fake?” he continued. 

“I guess I cannot deny that.” She answered. “But that doesn’t mean you have to stop  having fun finding Easter eggs, does it?”  

So he returned to the back yard continuing his hunt for eggs, pondering his newly gained knowledge. It took only a few minutes for him to pause again, and race back into the house where he again approached Mimie. “Okay, so there is no Easter Bunny. How about the tooth fairy?” He pleaded.“No Tooth Fairy either,” she answered wondering how far this was going, “but you will still get money for your teeth when you place them under your pillow.” 

He ran back to the yard continuing the egg hunt but also continuing his line of logic. Again he stopped and ran back to Mimie. “Don’t tell me there is no Santa Claus.” He whined.

“Afraid we made that up, too,” she added. “But it doesn’t mean you can’t still have fun and get toys at Christmas.”

 All in one day Kaleb had discovered a collection of truths.

 Pauline and I made a number of attempts to explain the spirit of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny by explaining that they really exist in our minds and as your mind matures you begin to understand them in different ways.  He was not ready to be enthusiastic about this kind of interpretation. He wasn’t ready to reformulate his new knowledge that they were just simply fakes.

Kaleb Learns to Paint

On Kaleb’s recent eighth birthday we had a small party for him. I placed eight candles on a moon pie, and he loved it. He blew out the candles then ate the entire moon pie. During the visit we were standing in my study and he was admiring some of my paintings. He asked me, “Did you paint this?”

“Yeah, Kaleb. I love to paint.” On a recent visit

Kaleb, would you like me to teach you how to paint?” And then I asked him, “would you like for me to teach you how to paint?”

He snapped back immediately, “I already know how to paint!”

When Kaleb visits one of our rituals is to bake chocolate chip cookies. Kaleb goes to the cabinets and pulls out the ingredients. The mix takes vegetable oil, water, and an egg. By the time we get all of this together about half of it winds up either on the table or on the floor, especially the egg, which Kaleb loves to crack. Our next task is fishing out all of the bits of egg shell from the mix. We both blend the ingredients while Kaleb removes the exact optimum number of chocolate chips so the cookies will not have too many. These, he conveniently eats. Both of us dish the mixture onto a cookie sheet in various sizes and shapes. I place them in the oven while Kaleb licks the bowl.

When the cookies are done, Kaleb runs the taste test to make sure our product is as good as it should be, coming from expert bakers like us. On one particular day Pauline suggested that she should also run the taste test. "Why?" he reacted.

" You need to have a second opinion on the cookie quality, "she quipped.

His response ranks among the best of the Kalebisms. "If I need a second opinon, then I’ll just taste them again.

 Ruthann had spent the weekend of February 16, 2008 with Kaelyn and Gavin at Adam and Tracy’s home in Franklin, Tennessee. As planned, she packed her bags and was preparing to leave on the Sunday, the seventeenth. Kaelyn came into her room and ask her “Granny Ruthann, why are leaving today? You are going to miss the presents tomorrow.”

Puzzled, Ruthann asked Kaelyn, “What do you mean by presents? Who is getting presents tomorrow?”

Kaelyn replied, “Everyone! Tomorrow is presents day.”

Ruthann, remembering that February 18 was president’s day, attempted to explain. “Oh, you mean president’s day, don’t you, Kaelyn?”

Kaelyn response was, “What is a president?”

 I first saw her when I was 13 and in the seventh grade; she was about the prettiest thing I had ever seen, and her name was Mary Alma Sanders. Our teacher, Mrs. Burrough, had placed two chairs at the front of the room, facing the class, to be used to place anyone who had misbehaved. Having qualified, I was sitting in one of them facing the class. I happened to look at Alma, and she returned my look with the loveliest, heartwarming smile I had ever experienced. A few minutes later I looked at her again, and again was rewarded with that same smile. After this happened a few times I was in love, fully convinced that I had found the women I would love forever.

 Unfortunately, I was so shy that I could not bring myself to talk to her yet, so days passed before anything developed. Then one day Mary Jane, a friend of Alma’s, passed me a note. (A not allowed act) The note was a simple question,  I wrote my answer and handed the note back to Mary Jane just as Mrs. Burrough turned and looked straight at me. “Bring it to me,” she ordered Mary Jane. Upon receiving the note, Mrs Burrough opened it and began reading it to the class, “What do you think of Alma?” was the simple question posed by Mary Jane. And then came my answer, “I love her but its all in vain.” , which was immediately followed by a roar of laughter from the class.

 Mrs Burrough could have tied me to a post and horsewhipped me. She could have tied me up by the feet and poured water up my nose. She could have slapped me in the face. But nothing, in my imagination, could have been more horrible than what she had done. For days, my buddies repeated my answer to me and snickered. I was a complete disgrace to the male race. Nevertheless, Miss Burrough saved me a lot of time and produced instant sweethearts, Alma and me, for about a year. From that moment on, every time I glanced at Alma, she returned that instant smile, and ecstasy flowed instantly throughout my entire body; for the first time in my life, I was experiencing romantic love.

 My relationship with Alma evolved very little beyond that (by today’s standards). We swapped rings, and I carried a photo of her in my pocket, and got a taste of the ecstasy just by looking at the photo. I began to sit with her in the movies. My first major advance began during the movie, “And God Created Woman”, starring Bridget Bardot. All of Alma’s friends were urging me to hold hands with her. Oh, how I wanted to, and oh how my shyness wouldn’t let me. Fortunately, her friends persisted; I gave in and took her hand. I was so caught up in holding Alma’s hand I almost missed seeing Bridget Bardot’s incredible exposed-ass scene, which was amazing and shocking at the time.  I will never forget when that scene came on the screen, Billy Thomas, who was sitting in front of us leaned over his seat and started pounding on the seat in front of him. We had never seen anything like that before in the movies.

 Young love is so vulnerable to the requirements of parents. Alma’s family moved to Unionville, which placed her in a different high school. I imagine this was the better of the many ways I could have lost her. The next time I saw her was two years later at a basketball game between her school and mine. She was a cheerleader. I regret that I did not have the courage even to approach her and say hello again. I sat in my seat and pined for her across the court. To this day I regret the shyness I felt as a child and the many things it protected me from.

 When Jonathan reached the age of five plus, his older brother Adam often babysat him when Ruth and I were doing other things. We only learned years later what mischief these two managed to generate during some of those sittings. Today I can only feel thankful that some of these sagas did not turn into total disaster; in a few instances they were extremely close to that.

 Adam and Jon had several neighborhood pals that hung out with us a lot. Among Adam’s friends were Danny and Ben, the latter of which later in life became a policeman. One of the tales they now confessed to is one I call “Jonathan, the Ghostbuster”.

 One of the nights when Adam was babysitting, Adam had arranged with Danny to sneak over to the house and pretend to be a ghost, white sheet and all, hanging around just outside of the house.  He had set up poor Jonathan by telling him a ghost story somewhat like the ones I had told in to he and his buddies before. The story is told as being true, and it always ends with the ghost having appeared regularly in the very neighborhood where the story is being told.  Shortly after the story ended, the ghostly sounds were heard in our side yard. Adam armed Jonathan with a weapon, which happened to be an old broken, short handled hoe. He then told Jonathan to hide under the kitchen table while he checked outside.

 No sooner than he left the room, Danny, covered with a white sheet crawled into the room and headed for the table under which Jonathan was hiding, totally unaware that Jonathan had been armed by Adam.  It is hard to imagine a five year old being sufficiently together under such a situation to whack a ghost with a old broken hoe, but that is exactly what he did. We are extremely lucky that this potential travesty ended only in a bloody, but survivable cut to the head of Danny.

Recent Kaleb Wisdoms

Kaleb was visiting RuthAnn in the summer of 07 when California was in a heavy drought. She was trying to explain the drought to him and he wondered if God had anything to do with it. She suggested that they pray to God for rain and he agreed heartily. As they kneeled by the bed, she began by thanking God for all the wonderful things he had given us. She began to itemize these. "Thank you God for all the lovely children and thank you God for this wonderful grandson and thank you God for........."

Kaleb, with patience and attention span languishing, interrupted  "Grammyfan, get to the point!"

Kaleb the sharpshooter.

I recently purchased Kaleb a pair of nurf gun that came with velcro vests that two people can wear as targets. The nurf gun shoots a styrofoam bullet that will stick to the vest. Kaleb absolutely loved the guns, which have a revolving canister that holds 10 shots. However, as if often the case, Kaleb likes to make up rules to the game as he goes. We took the guns to the park and he wanted us to hunt down aliens that were attacking the earth. I suggested that we use the vest as pretend aliens and we could shoot at them. He was not interested. He wanted to use imagined aliens. So I used the vest targets and  he used his imagination. I hung the targets from a tree.  He objected, saying that anyone could tell that was not an alien; it was just a target.

He then shot one of his imaginary aliens right between the eyes, killing him with one shot. It took me a few shots to "kill" the target. Then he shot two more aliens, one bullet for each. It took me three bullets to get the other target. He looked at me and said, "I am a much better shot than you are Not only that but also my aliens are really moving fast, while yours are sitting still."

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 Ruthann often kept Kaleb for an entire weekend, picking him up from kindergarden on Friday and taking him home on Sunday. One particular weekend, on the day she was preparing to take him home, she was readying herself by brushing her hair and adjusting makeup. Kaleb noticed her standing before the mirror for what he thought to be a long time.

 “What are you doing, Grammyfan? He asked.

 “I was just fixing my hair, Kaleb,” she responded, and then she added, “Kaleb, Grammyfan doesn’t look so hot today.”

 Kaleb responded by saying, “You didn’t look so hot yesterday, either, Grammyfan.”

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 Kaleb, at the age of five, and Pauline were sitting in the floor playing a game with plastic animals. Suddenly he stopped and looked at her intently and asked, “Are you mine?”

Pauline, a little puzzled by the question, asked what he meant.

“Are you mine like Daddy is my daddy, and Mimi is my mother.”

Pauline answered by saying, “Well, let’s see now. Grand Daddy is your grand daddy and I married your grand daddy, so that means that I must be yours also. With a big smile he responded, “I’m glad you are mine.”

When I worked at AEDC as a student, I had a mentor and boss by the name of Harvey Cook. His daughter, Susan, who worked in a nearby office, was the most exciting woman I had met since high school. I would have killed to go out with her.  But I very timidly avoided anything more than a casual good morning. She seemed so out of my league, I could scarcely bring myself to engage in a conversation with her.

Fast forward 15 years later: I had graduated from school, was married, had two children, and a lot more confident in myself, was sitting in the bar at the AEDC officers club, and a gorgeous blond approaches me. "Jim, remember me? I am Susan Cook. I just had to tell you. When we worked in the same office together 15 years ago, I had such a crush on you, but I could never get up the nerve then to tell you."

When I then told her my side of the story, we both slapped our foreheads and laughed at each other, hugged, and then cried just a little, finally realizing what our shyness may have cost us (or protected us from?).

Susan, by the way, was also married and had children.

One thing that Adam and Jon have in common is that they each drove before reaching the age of four, although they did it in slightly different ways. Adam was playing in the yard in his home in Tullahoma and could not resist climbing into the drivers seat of his fathers car, which was sitting in the driveway. The driveway sloped gently towards the back yard and the back yard sloped at a greater angle, about ten degrees. Apparently he proceeded to do all of the things he had seen his father do when his father was behind the wheel. He managed to release the hand break and somehow put the car into neutral gear. At this point the car began to roll. By the time it had reached the end of the driveway, it had gained sufficiently speed to continue into the back yard, where the increased slope added yet more speed. The car stopped only after reaching the end of yard and smashing into a small shed. When Ruth ran out into the yard, she found Adam still behind the steering wheel "driving like mad".

Jonathan played to a different audience. I had planned to take some materials from my home to my office, and I had just placed Jon into a car seat and opened the garage door. At that point I went back into the house to retrieve the materials. Inside the house, I was having some problem finding what I was looking for and Ruth and I were discussing where it could possibly be when the doorbell rang. At the door was a somewhat distraught, young lady, who asked if it was our little boy in the car sitting in the middle of the street. Somehow, he had gotten out of his car seat, climbed behind the wheel and put the car in gear. The driveway slopes enough that the car rolled backwards all the way into the street. Fortunately, no one was speeding down the street the way they often do.

I had a slightly different kind of driveway experience with Adam in Tullahoma. It was at a time when I had just started a company in Tullahoma with Science Applications International Corporation. I had interviewed Adam’s mother, Ruth, and was considereing hiring her as a secretary and business manager for the office. My boss, Chris Bush, was in town to help me with some of the details, and I decided to introduce him to Ruth. I called her and ask if she could meet us somewhere. She was eager to meet Chris, but she had not planned anything for Adam, who was about four at the time. She invited us to come to her house, which we did. As we drove up to the house, Adam was standing in the driveway with his pants down, taking a pee. When he saw us he turned to face us and began to wave his stream back and forth, tracing circles on the driveway, accompanying the operation with great laughter.

Kids today are peppered with images of violence from every direction. Even the cartoons that kids watch are heavily based on the good guys slaughtering the bad guys. Computer games are even worse, where the players themselves are given the goal, even the duty, to venture out and kill the bad guys in a most violent manner. I never got the bug to play such games, and consequently never got very good at them. Jonathan, on the other hand, grew up playing such games and became such a master that once in a game called "Streetfighter", he challenged me to beat him with the handicap that he would be blindfolded. After some prodding, I accepted the challenge; he beat me hands down. Kaleb began playing such games at the age of five and owned at least three such games. He was in awe of his father’s ability on the Apple Gameboy game that was called "Halo". The good thing about that was that it drew them together and gave them something to look forward to.

Pauline and I were a bit concerned with this kind of exposure for Kaleb so we limited the availability of the game at our house to times when he and Jon were playing together. We chose more conventional games, like tinker toys, Legos, reading, and models for our activity with Kaleb, and we were pleasantly surprised to find that Kaleb was completely okay with this. He loved to construct buildings, forts, models, robots, and cities in the sand. Kaleb loves to use his imagination in such games, and he loves playing such games, especially with Pauline, perhaps even more than with me, since she has such a gift for using her imagination.

Nevertheless, even in these activities, we quickly wound up with our models and cities at war with each other. There were "good" guys and bad "guys", and the good guys always had to protect each other from the bad guys. The bad guys were always out to destroy anything by the good guys. Even the dynasours had good guys and bad guys and had to fight each other all the time. Before long everyone had weapons.

Pauline was not happy with this state of affairs so she elected to participate as a peaceful person, who would refuse to fight or allow weapons in her model buildings and cities. So began a long series of attempts by Kaleb to convince her to change this policy. She would construct a house populated by a few people and animals and he would build a fort populated with warriors, guns, and bombs. He then wanted to send some of his men over to protect her from the bad guys (which, by default was me). She okayed Kaleb’s men to visit only under a condition they would enter her city disarmed, leaving all weapons outside. This policy led a never ending sales pitch by Kaleb to convince her that she should allow his men to enter carrying their guns, that she needed protection from the bad guys.

On a typical day, Kaleb would drag out all of the construction materials and ask Pauline to be on his side. Before long he would be setting up the bad guys and start making attempts to arm her. She would object, saying that she would play the role of the ones who didn’t use guns, such as doctors, store operators, and teachers. When Kaleb began to create the bad guys, she would ask, "why are these guys bad?"

"They are bad because they want to kill us," was his response.

"But, why would they want to kill us?" was her immediate response. "If we are nice to them and if we talk to them, maybe we can make friends with them."

"No!", was his quick response, "you cannot make friends with the bad guys. You have to fight them."

"But I don’t want to fight them," she insisted. "I want to be friends with them. Anyway, how do you know there are always bad guys? How do you know you can’t be friends

unless you discuss it with them?" She queried.

He then tried with all his energy to explain. "Consider the mutant ninja turtles. Shredder is their enemy. He will always be their enemy. They can’t be friends with him. They have to fight him. Aliens always want to fight you, so you have to fight back."

"But those are pretend people. We can just as easily pretend to be friends.

At this point he would become frustrated. "NO! You cannot pretend to be friends. I know this."

"How do you know this?" she asked.

You see it all the time on TV, good guys fighting bad guys, and that is real", he answered."You don’t know anything." He added. "That is so amazing that I know more about good guys and bad guys than you do."

Fast Motion, Minus 10

All of my boys, Jimbo, Adam, Jon, and now Kaleb loved to wrestle with me as kids. We developed props, sounds, and rules to fit the times. With Kaleb now it ranges from Spiderman to Bionicles and mutant ninja turtles. The tools and rules of play war vary greatly between generations, and they each tell something about what was happening in society at the time. This story chronicles some of the father and son "wars" between Jimbo and I, and to some extent, Kris.

In the sixties, when Jimbo was a young lad, world events were dominated by space and missiles, and the fantasy and comic world saw its introduction of robots and bionics. Television and movies were still extremely limited, by today’s standards, in special effects, so special symbols and props were used, with much of the special effect left to the imagination of the viewer.

One of Jimbo’s first TV heroes was Batman, played in a campy fashion by …………….The Batmobile was cluge of a machine, and the best the special effects guys could come up with for turbines allowed the smoke to drift slowly upward from the exhaust. One needed a lot of imagination. When Batman would fight the bad guys, stars and large letters, like "BAM" and "WACK" covered the screen to denote the fist of Batman striking the Joker. The music led the action, with the BAM being sounded out with cymbals and with the Batman song rising and falling with the action. When Batman was in trouble, the music gave him the added power needed to escape the throws of a death dealing villain. Batman would be in serious trouble when suddenly the music would appear, "NANA NANA NANA NANA NANA NANA NAN……….BATMAN!!" and you would know that Batman was about to perform a miraculous escape and win out once more.

In my fights with Jimbo, to identify with Batman, we emulated the music in the same way as Batman to signify that the singer was about to zonk the other guy. Jimbo would seemingly be struggling hopelessly with me, the Joker, when suddenly he would sing out, "NANA NANA NANA NANA NANA NANA NAN ……….BATMAN!!" and launch himself like a missile towards me.

Four to six year old kids don’t understand that, unlike on TV, serious damage can be done to either the launcher or the launchee with such action. It is strickly up to the parent to anticipate such an act and do something to prevent either he or his son/grandson from getting hurt. Fortunately, precursors like the Batman song provided an advanced warning and usually I could provide enough cushion to render the attack harmless to both us, while at the same time appearing to be in great pain as a result of the act. Oftentimes, accidents occur and head gets banged against the floor, or even a bloody nose results, hopefully, that of the dad. When the head or nose is that of the young one, he is totally unforgiving and immediately accuses the father of hurting him on purpose. And then as soon as the tears subside, he is again ready to hurl himself like a missile at the father, already having forgotten the possible outcome.

On occasions when Jimbo would get hurt in games with me, he would immediately become angry with me for so "thoughtlessly and intentionally" hurting him, and he would come again for revenge with the one goal of hurting me at least as bad as he had been hurt. With this attack he would sing the Batman song with even greater vigor, calling upon its power to insure that he would win out on the next attempt. He had forgotten that the song was only part of a game, and he relied on it even more. Handling this situation without someone getting hurt was even more of a challenge, and sometimes I would have to call an end to the "fight". At that point, his attitude would change and he would promise to not get hurt again if we could continue the game. I have never understood why boys love to fight with daddies and grand daddies, but it is a fact of life.

I have the same challenge forty years later with Kaleb, and unfortunately, we don’t have the Batman song as a precursor. Kaleb will become the invulnerable Donatello up until the time when he slips and bumps his head on a table. At that very moment he returns to being a crying, sometimes angry Kaleb until I rub his head and quiet him down until the hurt lessens. Invariably, he insists on continuing and once again becomes the invulnerable Donatello.

In Jimbo’s day, eventually, Batman was replaced by a new level of special effects in a TV program called the "The Bionic Man" or the "Million Dollar Man" featuring a fighter pilot who after a horrible crash had his body improved with bionics. He could run at high speeds, leap tall buildings, lift an automobile, and see telescopically like superman.

The challenge for special effects people was show a man running at 100 miles per hour, or swinging a fist so fast that a criminal would never know what hit him. To do this, they ingeniously slowed down, instead of speeded up the movement of the bionic man, placing him in slow motion, as though they had to slow it down to make it visible. With this was accompanying music that essentially instructed the viewer to speed up the motion in his mind. It worked amazingly well.

Eventually, Jimbo and I became two bionic men who fought each other in slow motion. We would determine who was winning by scoring hits. Doing this in slow motion presents an ethical problem if sorts. If, for example, I am taking a slow motion swing at Jimbo and he detects it coming in slow motion, it is a simple matter for him to quickly move an open hand in position to block the blow. To accommodate this problem, we developed a negative score, so if I felt that he had unfairly blocked my blow by moving faster than would have been done in the TV program, I would shout out, "Fast motion, minus ten!" This, of course was a source of debate, so, not having a referee, we rarely would up with meaningful scores.

The space program had become dominant news in Jimbo’s early childhood, and missiles became our tools of war. Jimbo would be sitting on the couch near me and I would launch a missile headed straight for his body. He would immediately call up his anti missile missile to take mine out. We developed various more or less predictable routines and played over and over again. Each of us knew exactly what was going to happen, but that did not prevent us from pretending that we could trick each other with a surprise attack. Somehow, knowing the routine seemed to draw us closer together in the game.

One of the stunts that I did over and over was the following:

"Okay, Jimbo, I am a peaceful nation. I am going to launch a weather satellite that will help all countries predict weather. Don’t worry about it, even though it will perch right over your country, it is strictly peaceful." After falling for this the first time, he always knew of the impending deception that was about to happen when weather satellites were launched. And, of course, he began launching his own weather satellites. We could spend hours trying to convince the opponent that it really was a weather satellite, and without fail, it became a nuclear missile as soon as the opponent looked the other way. Regardless of the number of deceptions, the "weather satellite" trick emerged again and again by both of us.

Our kids and grandkids give us this wonderful gift of allowing us to be kids again.

The reoccurring deception became an integral part of childhood play with both Jimbo and Kris and it morphed into a wide number of forms. It is really nice to have this intimate familiarity that can be played out in symbolic games. When they outgrew Batman, we developed another routine that took the form of a ghost story. When first told, the story went on and on for some half an hour. It worked best when told to someone standing beside the story teller. I would put my arm around Jimbo as the story reach its ending, which went something like, "And even today, the ghost of the man shows his presence by kicking people in the butt", and at that very moment I would kick him in the butt by swinging my outside leg up and behind us, while pretending to be unaware of anything unusual. At first, he would say, "AWWWWW I know that was you!" And I would vehemently deny it, and within moments do it again. As his understanding of the joke grew, he would follow along with the story or even initiate it himself and attempt to be the kicker before becoming the kickee.

Kris loved the routine so much that she graduated to the deliverer stage almost from the beginning. Today, forty years later, we still fondly share this routine just about every time we meet. Among other things, it gives us an excuse to hug each other, not that we really need an excuse.

Teachers with Influence-CharlieTaylor

A few high school teachers had a major influence in my life. One of these was a chemistry and physics teacher by the name of Charley Taylor. Charley was eventually kicked off the teaching staff for teaching subjects a bit outside of the norm. Charley had been a World War Two hero, a pre med student, and eventually a high school teacher who was loved by (most of) the students. He had a genuine interest in the welfare of his students, and he stayed in touch with us far into our careers, calling with congratulations each time we reached a new level. Eventually, I stopped hearing from Charley until one day in 2005 when I saw a news story about Charley Taylor's World War Two record. This made me want to see him again if possible so I tracked him down. He had been in the Bedford County, Tennessee Hospital Nursing home for some time.

I visited him at Thanksgiving that year at the hospital. He seemed quite healthy and mischievous, though now in his own little world and he remembered little about high school. He was friendly with me but not too interested in visitors since he was quite involved with pestering one of the little ole ladies there, who was threatening to slap his face if he didn't leave her alone.  That actually seemed to make him even more determined to steal a book she was looking at.  I was pleased to see him again, even though he refused to believe that I was Trolinger, one of his old students. The
nurse told me that his memory comes and goes.

One of the craziest Charley Taylor stories concerns a bottle of white phosphorous sticks that he had in his Chemistry closet. He had thrilled his classes with demonstrations by cutting off a tiny piece of phosphorous and letting it burn when exposed to the air, filling the room with thick white phosphorous pentoxide smoke. A fellow troublemaker, John Shipp, and I thinking we could put the phosphorous to better use, subsequently stole the bottle. Charley was pretty unhappy about the missing phosphorous, and I am sure that he had suspicions about who took it. He warned us that it could be very dangerous, and that as a minimum to use extreme caution with it, but please return it.

Apparently we did not completely believe Charley in his description of such a product, which for sure would never be lying around in a high school laboratory today. One evening we decided to have some fun with the phosphorous and went scouting to find some unsuspecting soul to be the object of a practical joke. Our first victim was a young lady by the name of Ardis Hunter. We placed an entire stick of the phosphorous into the exhaust pipe of (what we thought) was Ardis’ car, which was sitting outside a local store where she worked part time.

Lo and behold, her dad, George, came out of the store and got in the car and drove off. When the phosphorous lit off, it shot a fifty-foot flame out the back and covered the entire block with white smoke. George was totally stunned as he stood by his smoking Oldsmobile in disbelief. He never learned how his car had become a flaming dragon that night.

After that we were much more cautious in our use of the phosphorous.

Taylor’s Christmas tale

One of Kaleb’s favorite past times is simulated battle between the various super heroes and cartoon characters. He had begun collecting a series of Bionicle men, whom I would assemble, with his help, and then we would have fights between two or more of these characters. Another character was Halo, a robotic war creature that was a character in a computer game of which he had managed to reach level 8. On his most recent visit he had brought a Halo character with him, and this set the scene for a battle between Halo (him) and Bionicle(me). We would each pretend shooting our ray guns at each other, and then he would yell out, "That was a direct hit. You are now dead."

After four or five times of getting killed by the deadly Halo, I claimed that I had developed a shield against his weapon and therefore had avoided being killed and continued to shoot at him.

This really upset Kaleb, and he got very angry with me. I asked him if he was really angry with me, to which he replied, "Yes, because you are cheating. You are supposed to be dead, and your shield is against the rules, and you have to die when I shoot you."

At that point I complained, "But you never die when I shoot you."

"Duh," he responded in all seriousness, "That is because YOU always miss."

The Invisible Shield

January, 2005

When Kris was a child beginning around the age of four or five years old, she often woke in the night with night terrors. I could sense her fear and anguish of something unknown lurking about her room. At some point she became so frightened that we had some problems getting her to go to sleep alone. I would sit with her, and when I believed that she would have fallen off asleep, I would rise as quietly as possible to leave the room. Occasionally, with the faintest of sounds, like a creek in the floor, those little eyes would pop open, and I would be chastised for trying to sneak out.

 Over the years I have developed various self-calming meditation techniques to deal with my own stresses, anxieties, and phobias. One such situation occurs on airplanes when the turbulence is so bad that the plane is bouncing all over the sky; this can get extremely frightening, and there is absolutely nothing a passenger can do but sit in his seat and suffer through it. As much as I travel, meditation has become a routine method for me to get through such experiences with minimal stress. It occurred to me that maybe she was old enough to learn some of the simpler methods to help her get through this period of her life. In my attempts to come up with something a child could understand and do I actually wound up developing and refining some methods that were even better than the ones I was already using for myself.

 I explained to Kris that God and our universe has provided people with powerful tools and protective devices to defend ourselves from evil, and the time had come for me to teach her about such tools. Anyone who wanted to use the tools could do so if they were willing to learn. One such tool I called “the invisible shield”. The way this works is the following:

When we sense evil or anything frightening in our environment, we first check to see if we can see or hear it. If we cannot, then it may be invisible, so the way we can protect ourselves and remain safe from whatever evil forces may be around, we call upon our imaginations and we picture in our minds a powerful shield that we place completely around our body. We see ourselves in our mind’s eye surrounded by this shield. Even though the shield is invisible and has been created by our minds, the universe will allow us to make it more powerful than any invisible evil. That is just the way the universe works. The shield will have whatever powers we give to it, the first of which is to block anything evil entering our immediate environment so that we cannot be touched by an evil thing. At this point we are safe from evil.

 Next we work on our shield and we can give it the ability to allow anything good to enter, while still blocking the bad. We give the shield the power to analyze anything that tries to enter.

 This process of putting up Kris’s shield became a nightly ritual. At first I put it up for her, then, I would simply help her put up her own shield. Before long she was able to construct a powerful shield on her own, and she was very proud of this achievement. I was amazed at how well the shield worked. In effect she had learned how to meditate as a young child, and it made a huge improvement in her quality of nightlife.

 During the period I was teaching her this meditation technique I began using it more myself with excellent effectiveness. In airplane flights where I became nervous I would sometimes put up a shield around the entire airplane. On more than one occasion, to my great amazement, I observed something very startling. The first time was on a trip from Europe when somewhere over the Atlantic we hit absolutely awful turbulence. The plane would rise and fall by thousands of feet, and then pitch, yaw, and roll violently. I became more and more terrified, thinking, “Well, this is it!”

 To calm myself I began placing a shield around the entire airplane. I concentrated on each extremity of the plane, visualizing a strong shield curving around the plane and protecting all of us on the plane. By the time I had examined each place in the shield to make sure it was secure, the flight became totally smooth, just as quickly as the onset of turbulence. The pilot apologized for the “bumps”. He expressed some surprise that it had come and gone so quickly, and he asked people to keep seatbelts on for a while just in case we had hit a fluke calm region. The flight remained smooth the rest of the way.

 After doing this with similar results several times on different flights, it became a standard practice of mine in travel.

 Of course one can argue that turbulence is always temporary and this is just my imagination at work. My reply is that all that matters to me is that it works for me in making travel more pleasant. In Kris’ case, it made her life more pleasant, and I was pleasantly touched when I learned that she had passed on the techniques to her children with similar success.

Mothers have X-ray vision

There were days when discipline was somewhat barbaric by today's standard. Each parent of every child had his and her own unique form of punishment for us hapless creatures. My five-year-old neighbor, Barbara, had a father who would make her go to the hedge between our houses and select a switch with which to spank her. If the switch she chose was too small, she would have to go back and get a larger one, with the switching becoming more severe with the number of failures to select the correct size.

Her mother used her bare hands to slap or spank. My father's tool of torture was his belt, which he mostly used as a threat. I don't remember many beltings, but I do remember many threats. Mother always dolled out the real punishment. She had several levels of punishment. The first level was a heavy scolding and yelling, and it was quite effective, because we all knew that the second level was the dreaded fly swatter. The fly swatter came out when we managed to push her over the edge or when we refused to give the kind of respect she wanted us to provide. And when it came out it was much more than a symbolic gesture; she actually used it with ferocity, usually on the bare legs, and Jesus! Did it hurt like hell!?

The fly swatter was, in fact, most likely to come out over disrespectful behavior than just about anything else. Several rules of respect had to be acknowledged. When I was four, saying "no" to my mother, without some form of apologetic modifier, could be compared today with "go fuck yourself", and would probably be met with a stronger response than children get today, even for those very words. Another crime was "disputing my word", which was essentially disagreeing with what she had just said. Many years later I found myself using the southern gentleman’s expression to people I disagreed with, "I don’t mean to dispute your word, but………". Disrespect of any type was the sort of crime that was likely to bring out the dreaded fly swatter. These disciplinary forms apparently worked rather well. None of my brothers or sister shows any obvious negative affects today; we all are, by almost anyone's standards, happy and successful people.

I do still remember some of the experiences that brought out the dreaded flyswatter. I was about four years old and just at the age where I had concluded that I could outsmart my mother without too much effort. I had just gone through a level one scolding about a mess I had made in the kitchen, and I was exiting the room through the back door, which had a large window, the bottom of which was just above my head. As soon as I reached the other side and closed the door behind me, I turned to face the door feeling rather safe with the door between she and me. So at that point to help me repair my dignity, which had been severely damaged by the scolding, I stuck my tongue out at the door, not realizing that she being about three feet taller than I, was looking straight down at my tongue wielding face.

Out of nowhere came the deadly fly swatter. Still not convinced that I couldn't out run her, I ran, which made matters even worse. I never stuck out my tongue at my mother again.

In later years, when I had outgrown the flyswatter treatment, she replaced it with a much more painful form of punishment, which also came in levels. By this time, pleasing my parents had become one of life's great pleasures, something my own kids never seemed to adopt as well as I did. So a sign from her that she was not pleased was a strong form of punishment. The few instances in which her disappointment was sufficiently great to cause her tears caused me more pain than a thousand fly swatters, and I would have done almost anything to avoid it.

I doubt that the more advanced form of punishment would have ever worked had she not taken us through the early corporal phases where her superiority was never in question. I doubt that her later forms of punishment would have had any effect at an earlier age.

Kaleb, alias Raphael (2005)

 At five Kaleb was heavily involved in Mutant Ninja turtles, and his interest in Thomas the Tank Engine was waning. He loved to wrassle and play the role of Raphael, saving Pauline (who played the role of the lady reporter in MNT) from the dreaded Shredder, played by Grand Daddy. I had some problems with this because he could get rough and I would occasionally hurt him either in defending myself or just playing with him.

 The game had its own set of complicated rules and procedures, including scenarios that I was supposed to pretend, like thinking that I had killed Raphael and failing to notice that he had risen  and sneaked up behind me. For both Kaleb's and my own protection I had to keep a close watch out of the corner of my eye, since he would leap into the air without abandon and land on top of me. Often he would catch me looking and chide me for "cheating". 

 One day while visiting a local video shop that was going out of business, I bought 4 MNT videos to help entertain him on his next visit. After watching one he immediately wanted to watch another and then another; these were cartoons and the videos were only about 15 minutes in length. Bedtime was near and I decided to hold back the last one to help coax him into bed, since getting him to go to bed was a real chore. He agreed.

 We got his teeth all brushed, his pajamas on, and the video going, and after watching with him for a few minutes, I decided to sneak out hoping he would drift off.

 After about an hour, I could still hear the action in the other room. When I went back into the room, I discovered him standing up in the middle of the bed, jumping and doing karate in harmony with the actors on the screen. He was anything but sleepy.

 Then discovered to my dismay that the fourth MNT video was the full length movie, two hours long, and their was no persuading him to shut it off at this point. So I sat down with him and watched the rest of the movie.

 Kaleb and the Pink Room (2005)

 Kaleb had spent one night with us. Getting through that night was a challenge. He had been so brave when talking us into letting him stay with us overnight, but this night, as I helped  him brush his teeth,  he was shivering with fear. He wanted to sleep in our room. Pauline had prepared a fold out bed for him that is in her office. With a combination of absolutely beautiful bed time music that Briana had supplied, his banky, and a few ups and downs we made it.

 On the second night, Pauline decided that our second bedroom may be better suited to him so she prepared a full queen sized bed for him. As soon as he saw the room he immediately refused to sleep in the room; it had pink curtains. He concluded that it was a girls room and he was not about to sleep in it. So ever since he slept on the fold out bed in Pauline's office.

Daddy, why did you do that? (Christmas Day~1965)

 Jimmy was about five years old on a cold Christmas day as we headed for Shelbyville, Tennessee to visit his grandmother. Our new Volkswagen was packed with Christmas presents. It had snowed on Christmas eve, but the highway was clear, at least it appeared to be as we rounded the curve on Whiteside hill. A long stretch of the highway lay in the shadow of Whiteside hill and I knew as soon as I hit the shadow that I was on a thick sheet of ice that had not melted. Suddenly, the steering wheel was useless and I was completely out of control with oncoming, highspeed traffic that was in the same state as I. I felt some relief when we slid sideways off the highway out of the path of oncoming traffic into soft turf. I don't know how many times we rolled before coming to a stop, upside down.

I looked around to see Linda, frightened but unhurt still buckled upside down. Likewise I looked at Jimmy, who was also hanging upside down, apparently unscathed. As I looked at him, he said, without hesitation, "Daddy, why did you do that?"

Realizing that everyone was unharmed I felt a great measure of euphoria, and I began to laugh, uncontrollably. The next mistake I made was forgetting about gravity as I unbuckled and crashed to the car roof. I managed to get Linda and Jimmy out with less problem.

 By this time a highway patrolman had stopped to investigate. As he walked up to the car, I shouted to him, "And for my next trick...." He didn't seem to think that was as funny as I did.

 As we stood there, other cars were sliding off the road, and we realized that we were not in a very safe location. I told him that we were all okay and that he should put up some flares to warn the oncoming traffic. He agreed and left, warning us to move further from the road, lest we find ourselves in the path of another out of control car.

 With Jimmy and Linda at a safe distance, I gave the Volkswagen a shove and it rolled back over on its wheels. We hopped in, started the engine and took off. We were all happy to be alive and we arrived at Grandmothers all singing Jingle Bells.

Kris learns to bargain in Mexico

The time: A Mid Summer day in 1979

When Kris was about 10 years old I took her to visit Tijuana, the first time she had ever left the USA and her first experience with a foreign culture. People who have been to Mexico soon discover a bargaining culture, unlike anything in the US, especially in small shops along the village roads and border cities in Mexico. Bargaining has become so widely known even to foreigners that even wealthy Americans will haggle with a road side vendor over a fifty cent difference in a five dollar souvenir. The vendors take pride in their ability to bargain with the customer; don't expect to outdo one of them; it is their living and they do it all day, every day.

In Mexican tourist cities some of the prices start out at ridiculous numbers, four or more times what the vendor will take, but not always. A few vendors mark prices on the items and won't budge.

I was interested in purchasing a leather wallet, and I was not so much interested in getting a great bargain as to getting a good wallet for a reasonable price. Once you pick up something and look at it closely, you feel an anxious Mexican breathing down your neck. His asking price was 50 dollars, way, way out of line. I watched him carefully as I offered him 10. He immediately responded claiming that was far less than it cost him and continued with a sad story that his family was in great need of the money and he badly needed a sale so he could care for his family, and he promised to give me his lowest possible price, 30. When I saw him come down so far, I guessed that we still had a way to go. I offered him 15. He dropped to 25. I was prepared to go to 20 but, in fact, I really wanted to shop around other stores so I replied with 17, and when he replied 23, I told him I wanted to look around and walked out. He followed us out of the store and down the street and dropped his number to 20. I stopped bargaining, said no thanks, and walked into the next store. He followed us into that store and finally took my arm and told me to give him the 17. I took the wallet and gave him the 17. I was sorry I had moved this far not so much for the money but I really did want to shop more, and I knew it would be an insult to back out now.

Kris was appalled by my behavior, literally petrified and upset with me for haggling this poor man down so far for a wallet that would have cost three times as much in the U.S. She had felt shame, especially when his family was in such need. It was then I attempted to explain the bargaining culture to her, a task that was about as hard as explaining the birds and bees to a teenager. I explained that this man had won the contest and was probably now bragging to his cohorts about this dumb American he had just out bargained. Then I came up with an idea.

I attempted to convince Kris that it would be useful for her to bargain with someone just for the experience. At first she said, "No way!" She had planned to buy a bundle of paper flowers from one of the lady vendors on the street, so I thought this a good time to press her into action. "Okay, " I said. "This will be very simple. Ask the lady the price of five flowers and when she tells you a price, tell her you will give her that much for six." After some convincing that it would be okay, useful, and easy, she made her move.

A little old lady answered, "Five flowers, one dollar." I knew that she could probably buy 10 flowers for a dollar but I remained silent. Kris responded sheepishly, "One dollar for six." The little old lady responded immediately, "Okay", and began counting out the flowers. Kris stopped her at five and said, "It's okay, I will just take the five." The puzzled lady handed her the sixth flower any way.

The experience has brought me many thousands of dollars in pleasure when I remember it fondly over and over, a never ending reminder of the wonderful person who is my daughter.

Fast forwarding about 20 years, March 2005 finds me in the Mexican Yucatan with Pauline and friends, Vladimir and Natasha. A long time has passed since I bargained for a souvenir. I had decided that I would like to bring back one of those neat Mayan calendars, while visiting the ruins of Chichen Itza. Everyone was waiting on me as I looked at a few variations. Asking the price, the lady tells me 250 Pesos, about 24 dollars. I offer her 200. "It’s a deal", she says immediately. Opps! Her fast response made me realized that I had gone way too high. But, Jeez! This is a nice little piece of art! Why should I bicker over a few dollars? Heading back to the car, I spotted another one that I liked even more. The asking price? 7 dollars. I don’t bicker and take it. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at a road side stand to look at the hammocks. Arriving back at the car I noticed that Vladimir was carrying a Mayan calendar of his own that he had just purchased, much like the one that I had just paid 24 dollars for. His price? Five dollars. So much for bargaining talents in Mexico.

More Adventures with Kaleb

January, 2005

The Constraint on a fantasy

Kaleb is four and I continue to find him limitless in his ability to enjoy life. For Christmas he got toys ranging from the traditional stuffed animal to the modern electronic gadgets like walkie-talkies and teaching devices like the "Leapster". Still the greatest possessions of a boy of four are limited only by his imagination. We played hide and seek with the use of the walkie-talkies. Although Grammyfan Ruth's one bedroom condo provided a serious limit to the number of places to hide, that did not limit the fun we had.

Although Kaleb had hidden in just about every place possible, he was having so much fun he was not about to let that be an excuse for ending the game. Hiding under the table, he had surrounded himself with left over Styrofoam box parts and had left the walkie-talkie in a different place as a decoy. After searching all over the room I leaned under the table and whispered, "I think that Kaleb is behind those boxes", at which point he informed me that these boxes were indestructible, and that I could not get to him.

Upon hearing this, I replied, "I have an indestructible wall destroying weapon right here in my hand and I am going to bust this wall down."

"No Grand Daddy, that is just a walkie talkie. You can't tear down my wall."

I responded, ""Kaleb, I am not Grand Daddy. I am Spiderman. And I am going to use my weapon to bust down this wall."

"Wait, Grand Daddy, I'm not finished. Spiderman has webs, not wall breaking weapons."

I continue to ponder how children ultimately learn the really hard rules. I honestly cannot remember when I finally learned that I could not always win. At his point, in Kaleb's world, games are designed so that he wins over and over. I learned this when I inadvertently passed his piece in a Thomas the Tank Engine race. He very quickly modified the rules so that I fell behind. He assured me with all confidence that he always wins. I haven't figured out how to break the news about winning to him. I hope he finally learns that from a kind person.

We played "I am going to get you", a game where each time he just manages to escape my grasp. After about 800 "I am going to get you’s" followed by, "You didn't get me," I said to him, "This time I am REALLY going to get you." He stopped in his tracks and looked me straight in the eyes and said, "Grand Daddy, that is not the way it works."

I am not sure what would have happened if I had really "got him". I am not sure I would know what to do with him next.

Kaleb learns about magic

January 2004

Near the end of 2004 Kaleb began paying visits to my home, and Pauline and I wondered how well we could keep him entertained on our turf. We decided to acquire a box in which to place a few toys to start with and add some as time passed on.

When Kaleb arrived I told him about his magic box that had a few things in it for him. He seemed already to know the concept of magic and he excitedly opened the box to find a new Thomas the tank engine book and a jigsaw puzzle. It was a simple puzzle with about 5 parts. To my surprise, Kaleb put it together in about 15 seconds. We quickly learned we would have to raise the bar a bit. At the end of the day I explained to him that each week, when he came back the magic box would have toys in it for him.

On his next visit, he immediately raced to the magic box, this time to find to his delight, some building blocks and yet another Thomas the Tank Engine book for us to read. Between the various construction projects and book reading, the time went fast, and it was time for him to leave. After staying for "just five more minutes" a few times, we terminated the process and I began to return his blocks, which were scattered across the room, into the magic box.

Mimi (his mom) asked him to help pick up the blocks, where upon his response was negative. At that point I explained to him that the box would lose its magic if he failed to help return the toys. It worked. When the job was done, Kaleb looked at me with such a serious face and asked, "Will the box keep its magic now? What a great discovery! I am not sure he learned what magic really is, though. It takes a long time and much living to learn that when you take responsibility for your life, magic is all around you every day.

Kris discovers the universal law of gambling

January 2005

Kris and Jimbo visited me in California many times. Jimbo came first when he was about 15 and Kris when she was about 12, somewhere around 1977. A year or so later, she and Jimbo came at the same time, and we ventured out from Orange County to take in Lake Tahoe and Reno. We swam in Lake Tahoe, got really sunburned because of the altitude, went white water rafting in the Truckee River, and visited Reno, where Kris and Jimbo had their first experiences with gambling.

Walking down the main street of "the Biggest Little City in the World", Jimbo and Kris could only watch the slots from the streets since minors are not allowed in casinos and are not allowed to gamble. I discovered the really good reason for this latter rule. I think that neither of them had much of a concept of what gambling really is.

Some of the slot machines were practically on the streets, giving Jimbo the bright idea that he could gamble by proxy. He asked me if I would put a few of his quarters into a machine for him while he watched from the street. It seemed like a harmless idea at the time, though little did I know what was in store for me.

I took a few of Jimbo's quarters and stepped up to the nearest slot machine facing the street. The first quarter won two quarters. The second quarter hit a five-dollar jackpot. Bells were ringing, lights were flashing, and quarters spilled out, rattling in a catcher that had been carefully designed to amplify the sound of quarters falling. Everything was great as Jimbo filled his pockets with the quarters. Everyone was cheering Jimbo, who had become an instant hero and a genius. "Way to go, Jimbo. At least for a few minutes everything was great, until Kris, who had been observing how easy this had been decided she wanted to the same thing. I should have put an end to it then and there, but foolishly, I let her talk me into the same thing and accepted a hand full of dimes from her to put into a nearby machine.

You can guess what happened. The dimes went without so much as a hint of winning, and I said, sorry, but it just didn't pay this time. Kris was not ready to walk away. She begged me to take a few more of her dimes and try again. I was digging myself a hole. There is an old saying, if you find your self in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. I put one of her dimes in the machine, which sucked it up without kudos and asked for more. I walked back over to her and tried to explain that most people who gamble lose. She still insisted on my putting the rest of the dimes in the slots. I noticed a slight quiver in her voice. At that moment she began to get a stomachache. I did something dishonest that I probably should not have done. I took the easy way out of the hole.

"Let me look for better machine," I said. Walking inside the casino out of her sight, I found a change machine, put in two dollars and got dimes in change. Then I made my way back to the front. "That machine gave me about what you lost," I said consolingly, "So I decided to stop while you were even." Within a few minutes her stomachache eased up, and the crisis had passed.

Later in the evening we encountered a different, more civilized form of gambling for children at Circus Circus. Kris played one of those games that always wins and won a teddy bear. That seemed to make her day, so she left Reno without being shaken terribly by her gambling experience. I don't know to this day if that was good or bad, but hey, she turned out okay. And I had learned the hard way how important it is to restrict gambling for children.

Fast-forwarding about 20 years found Kris and I in Las Vegas together, both grown-ups with a matured out look on life. In places like Vegas or Reno, there is a rarely used trick that will allow the disciplined individual to gamble a small amount and actually make a small amount of money most of the time. If you go to Vegas to gamble forget this. If you go for everything Vegas has to offer and would like to do a small amount of gambling free of charge losing, then read on........at least the odds are in your favor if you follow the rules. That doesn't mean it will always happen-Kris proved that to me.

Many casinos have a club that upon joining, as an incentive, the casino will give you a limited number of bets in which the odds are actually in your favor. For example, if you join the Caesar's Palace club, at an entry fee of 40 dollars, they will give you fifty dollars in gaming tokens. Since slot machines typically pay about 90% back, then theoretically, one should come out ahead if you just play the 50 dollars and quit. It takes discipline, however. They understand that few people have such discipline. I experimented with this one evening with five friends, who all agreed to save their winnings and stop, when the $50 in tokens was gone. All of us came out winning. Of the five, however, only four of us stopped when the tokens were gone. The fifth could not stop and lost everything. The casino still came out ahead in the transaction, and this is what they rely upon.

Kris invested her forty dollars upon my advice. I have never seen so many sequential lost dollars in a slot machine. The 50 evaporated with no danger of her ever getting ahead. This convinced me that there was something about luck at the slots that Kris doesn't have.

Later, in Las Vegas downtown we walked along the covered street without thinking much about slots, until one just sucked me right in. That is the way they do, you know. You just feel inside that the machine is talking to you. I started putting in quarters and loosing them as fast as I could shove them in. At that point, Kris stepped away to the bar to get herself a beer. No sooner than she was of sight, the machine started ringing as I hit a five dollar jackpot. As soon as she returned, I started loosing the quarters right back. We concluded that somehow our being together was bad karma. Or maybe she was sharing her dark cloud with me. So I stopped gambling, and we continued along the street. It is such a spectacular street that one doesn’t need to gamble anyway.

As we passed one of the topless bars, Kris, who was fascinated by my intrigue with such places, very thoughtfully suggested that if I wanted to go in for a quick beer, she would keep herself busy looking at the lights. I thought about it for a minute, and it occurred to me that our luck at slots really might have something to do with our joint karma. Strictly in the interest of science, I proceeded with an experiment. "Take this twenty dollars and find yourself another machine without me being around to disturb the karma and see what happens. While you are doing the experiment, I will occupy myself over a beer in this bar and meet you here in twenty minutes.

After twenty minutes, I emerged and once again found Kris, minus the twenty dollars, having eliminated my hypothesis, but actually in good spirits. We were able to laugh about her bad luck at slots, since she is so good at millions of other things. Our experiment had shown us both once and for all that slots were not for Kris. But wait. Read on.

Back at the Luxor hotel an hour later as she and I walked across the casino, I stuffed a quick dollar into a machine and hit it for 25. I decided to invest another dollar and hit again. Suddenly, I couldn't leave because I couldn't lose, and there she was standing right beside me. I handed a few dollars of winnings to Kris, and she decided to convert them into dimes so they would go further. Next thing I know, the dime machine is ringing and pouring out money. We walked out of there with over $100 in winnings.

The bottom line is that we still haven't found a universal law of gambling, except the one I knew at the outset that most people who go to Vegas, leave with less money than they came with. That is a good thing. Otherwise who would pay for all that stuff I go there to see.

Jonathan Remembers his Grandmother

Jan 2005

Before my mother passed on she had many wonderful experiences with all of my children. I often wondered how much impact these experiences my have on their lives, perhaps because I wonder how my experiences with grandchildren will impact their lives.

I asked Jon if there was any one special thing he remembers about his grandmother. He responded that there was, but he wasn' t sure I would like it. "Oh My God," I thought, "What possibly could such a thing be?"

While all of my children had wonderful experiences with their grandmother, Jonathan had many unique experiences that I was sure he would relate. She visited us on several occasions in California and she hung out with Jon quite a bit. He showed her a lot of respect, and, I think he, judging by his actions, truly loved her. He spent three intense weeks with her and me in Europe, where she acted as his tutor to satisfy his absence from school. On one of her visits I allowed him to choose the one place in the LA area that he would like to show her. To everyone's surprise, he selected the La Brea tar pits and museum, and she loved it as much as he did. With all of this, I was taken by surprise when he related his most vivid memory.

Mother was a very busy person. She would always find things to do, even if it was just "busywork". Just sitting and doing nothing would have made her feel guilty. She wanted to be a doer and to live life in every possible way. On one of her visits, during a hot sunny California day when she and Jon were at home together, she occupied herself by walking around the house swatting flies.

Now, unlike Tennessee, where she lived most of her life, Orange county California doesn't have that many flies, so fly swatting is more of a sport than a serious job. You rarely see more that one or two flies, even on a bad day. Consequently, the more industrious Californians have come up with any number of fly swatting tools that require a certain amount of skill, which turns fly swatting into something that more resembles hunting small game. Some of these shoot the flyswatter at the fly, some shoot a rubber band at the fly (that really takes a marksman) and others require the hunter to trap the fly, sometimes dead, sometimes alive.

I have owned or at least tried most of these weapons at one time or another. At the time I happened to own what might be described as a double flop-together fly swatter. Two swatting heads were mounted in such way that one had to catch the fly in between the two heads and pull a trigger, which then would flap the two swatters together with a loud pop, smashing the poor fly between the two. (Like the old saying, "Between a rock and a hard place.") After the kill, the hunter would then recock the device and start all over. It wasn't all that easy to master; this operation took a lot more skill than just swatting, and it gave the fly good odds of escaping.

He observed her chasing this rather illusive fly from one room to another flopping the swatter, recocking, searching, and flopping again. Finally after chasing the poor fly through the entire house she finally made the kill. (She most likely just tired the poor bastard out so that he could no longer fly fast out of the trap). She looked at the smashed fly, smiled victoriously, and gave the Trolinger salute, which is an old family secret known only to Trolingers.

This is the one experience that stands out most vividly in Jonathan's memory of his grandmother. Now I would guess that my father would get a bigger kick out of this story than she would.

The Old Rugged Cross

When I look back at my childhood I am often ashamed of what a complete butthead I was sometimes. I am lucky my family didn't kill me. “The Old Rugged Cross” is a story that I am not proud of but anyway here goes.

Music was always present in my childhood home, whether on the radio, record player, or around our family piano. The piano was an old upright that sat in the living room. The living room was usually off limits for kids except for special occasions. It wasn’t even heated most of the time. But there were different rules for the piano. The piano was always open and even encouraged for play by any of us. It continued to be open even after Perry, my older brother took a hammer to it and broke the edges off of half dozen keys. The ragged edged keys became part of the personality of the piano.

Often times our family gathered around the piano while either mother or Martha Gene played a song and we would sing. They both loved music and I thank them to this day that they gave me a wonderful pleasure of listening to piano music that never ceases. At one point they attempted to convince me that I had a good voice and Martha Gene and I even did a song on the local radio station, WHAL. The song was "Sioux City Sioux". I still remember the words. I was so scared even though all I could see was a microphone. We did it without a hitch, and all ten people listening to the performance praised it (I think they were all relatives). Nevertheless, I still concluded that I was not really cut out for singing.

On one of our family gatherings we assembled at the piano and one of the songs selected was "Old Rugged Cross", a song about Christ dying for our sins. Strangely enough, even my father joined in, since it was one of his favorite songs. Somehow his apparent pleasure in singing religious songs seemed quite out of kilter with the rest of his lifestyle. About five of us prepared to sing.

Unfortunately, my clowning cousin had taught me an alternate set of words (correct words in parenthesis) to this very song that go something like this:

On a hill far away,
stood an old (rugged cross) Chevrolet,
and the tires were flat as a board.
And the tank had no gas,
and the........so on.

I suppose since Martha Gene was getting all the attention being at the center on the piano, I decided to sing the alternate words. The first time around, my antics actually got a few polite laughs. So then we started over. I sang the same alternate words again. At that point, my mother and father began to get upset and demanded that I either use the right words or be totally quiet while everyone else sang.

I assured them with my most convincing whine and plea that I would use the right words. Upon fooling them a third time, they ordered me to leave the singing group. I pleaded and pleaded and promised to behave. I may have even shed tears to get another chance. And so they gave in and let me sing yet a fourth time. To this day, I don't know what I was doing, but even on the fourth time, after all the pleading and promising,

"On a hill far away,
Stood and ole Chevrolet.........."

I blanked out what happened after that. My mother was a patient woman, but she also was never one to spare the rod when pushed to the edge. Whatever happened, I deserved it and more. I hope mother in heaven will see this and forgive me for being such a butt head sometimes.

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The Box Dog

For as far back as I can remember my mother always encouraged me at art. She herself was quite talented at drawing. As soon as I could manage a pencil, she was teaching me drawing techniques. One of the first was to break down objects into boxes, a technique that beginning art students in college learn today. One of the first representational things I learned to draw was a box dog. He had a rectangle for a body, a square for a head, square eyes, ears, and nose and a long rectangle for a tail. Every time I produced it I was smothered in praise for my great artistic talent. As soon as I was deciding what I would be when I grew up, I had chosen to be an artist. While friends wanted to be firemen and policemen, I was sure that I would be an artist.

By the time I entered the first grade (only rich people went to kindergarten in those days), I was well beyond the box dog. I had learned to draw what I could see. Drawing came so natural to me that I assumed anyone could look at an object and draw it. So I was puzzled when people would look at my drawing of a tree and would comment, it looks just like the tree. Of course it does, I thought. Since the tree is what I was looking at when I drew it, why should it not look like the tree?

My transition from box objects to retinally correct drawing began when I was about four years old at a family gathering. Our family gatherings often featured games and contests, some designed for the children and some also for the aunts, uncles, and parents. One of the adult contests during the gathering was a drawing contest, and by this time my mother had me convinced that I was already a great artist and could outdraw any adult. I insisted on entering the adult art contest, which was to produce the best drawing of an animal of choice. My choice, of course was the box dog, since that is the only animal I had really mastered.

As the contest moved on, I could hear oohing and aahing over my mothers drawing of a horse. I took a quick glance of it and it was the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen, something like what you would expect to see in Leonardo’s notebook. For the first time I realized what a challenge I was up against. I worked harder and harder on the boxes erasing and moving them around over and over again to make a perfect dog. I couldn’t see a single box on her horse. My cousins were all prodding me and telling me I didn’t stand a chance. The time was up. I begged for more time and got a few more minutes to see what I could do with my boxes. I wouldn’t be finished until my box dog looked at least as good as my mother’s horse. No matter what I did to the boxes, it still looked like a box dog. Over my objections, the contest came to an end. I was devastated.

Then my mother came to the rescue. She announced that she would be the judge for the contest, and after intense study of the various drawings decided with no further hesitation that my box dog was indeed the best drawing. Several years passed before I was smart enough to figure out that the real winner was chosen after I proudly left the room with my prize.

 
But it wasn’t long before I learned to merge the squares and add the fine details that one could get only by truly seeing the object being drawn.  Even today I rarely look at the details of what I see unless I think about drawing it.

 My profession became not art but physics, with art taking a second position in my life for many years to come. With my later stages of life returning me to art and allowing me to refine skills, I have discovered that I must now learn how first to see the details and then to remove some of them to make the drawing even more interesting and more artistic. This has been just about as hard a process as going from the box dog to a smooth dog.

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Collision with a Witch

Grammar school was filled with trials of all sorts, but one of the worst experiences was with the resident school witch, Miss Bryant. Miss Bryant was the mean old lady who ran the cafeteria. Each day we took a morning break to drink a bottle of milk. We had to place the money in Miss Bryant’s hands and hope beyond hope that we didn't do something wrong for her to shout at us. She had a whole set of rules that required one to be on ones toes at all times. You had to turn the right way with your tray. You had to place the money in her right hand. She would scowl at you even if you did it right. But when you did it wrong she would grab you and scream at you, ruining your entire day. I was so terrified of her.

To make matters worse, Miss Bryant was one of my customers on my paper route. I always dreaded collecting the twenty cents for the week’s paper. Something was always wrong. I knocked too loud, I threw the paper in the water, or I woke her up.

By this time I had been studying art privately for a few years and was quite accomplished. For a project on birds I created the most beautiful painting of a group of cardinals. My teacher, Miss Rutledge, was so proud of it that she hung it in the lunchroom for everyone to see. When it came time to collect the artwork, the painting had vanished. Miss Bryant had no idea who had taken it.

Then the awfullest thing possible happened. Each day I rode my bike to school. The bike was too big for me and I had to struggle to get it going and to stop it, because my feet would not touch the ground on both sides of the bar. As I entered the school parking lot and headed up the driveway to the bike racks I started slowing down and reaching my instability regime, where I had to jump over the bar or else fall over. Just as I reached the worst possible point, who should step directly in front of me? Miss Bryant!

I bumped her just hard enough to come to a dead stop at which time I crashed to the ground. She went into tirades, screaming at me, accusing me of trying to kill her. I was so terrified that I could only think about one thing, getting away from her. I picked up my bike and ran from her as fast as I could.

Later in the day, the school principle, Mr. Thomas, called an assembly to discuss the event with the entire school. He made a rule that from that day on students must dismount and walk their bikes from the street to the bike racks.

Oh how I dreaded collecting for the paper that week. I skipped a week hoping she would forget. Finally, when I went to collect, she jumped me. She humiliated my family upbringing for having bumped her and left without a proper apology. She scorned me for what seemed like hours as I stood in her doorway. Then, for the first time I looked into her living room and was stunned at what I saw.

There on her living room wall was my cardinal painting.

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Waking to a Desperate Sight

I grew up with the nickname "Doodle" and with the position of middle between two wonderful brothers, Perry and Billy, although sometimes they did not seem so wonderful at the time. We had millions of fights wherein more often than not two brothers ganged up on the third. In retro respect it seems that my older brother, Perry, was more likely to be the organizer of the gang and less likely to be the victim, although today he vehemently denies this.

Until we were older Perry and I slept in the same bed, Billy slept in a separate bed in the hallway, and our older sister, Martha Gene, had her own room. The last to wake up was often the center of a plot with extremes limited only by the imagination of the other two brothers.

Possibly the worst of these punishments, which, at one time or another was pulled on all brothers by the other two. This stunt created such a feeling of outrage mixed with complete helplessness and despair that returns even today just prior to making me laugh out loud. My thoughts return to those of a six-year-old boy being awakened by Billy's voice.

"Doodle!, Wake up!"

Lying flat on my back, my eyes open to a sight, which for just a moment while my brain is becoming conscious, is confusing before becoming absolutely dismaying. In that one instant that lasts about a millisecond, I realize that I have just become this morning's victim. Perry's bare-ass cheeks loom just six inches above my face. On the occasions where the timing and logistics was successful, before I could move a muscle, and just as my brain begins shouting "DANGER" to the rest of my sleep-paralyzed body, I hear the sound of a roaring fart, followed by the thunderous roar of laughter of the two evil ones.

The subsequent fight, which no one every doubted would follow, could be stopped only by threats of a homicidal, belt-wielding father. Although I would not have known it at the time, Daddy was probably more amused by the stunt than the two brothers who pulled it.

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RC Colas in the Irises

Occasionally, I remember a childhood experience that I have not recalled since childhood. The memory is still clothed in child hood logic and emotion. Sometimes when reexamining such an experience with adult logic I arrive at new conclusions and new emotions that had never occurred to me before. This is such a tale.

I lived in a small town neighborhood on Madison Street with friends my age in every direction. We would assemble and play in the streets and any yard large enough to contain us. Some times the owners ran us off their property, especially when we trampled flowers or broke things with flying baseballs or sticks. On Jefferson Street, where my pal Kenny lived, just behind my home, was a very large, old, scary looking home. In it lived a little-old, white-haired lady, Mrs. Davidson. We seldom saw her, were pretty frightened of her for some reason, and would run when she made herself visible. Her yard contained the only pataugwa (Indian cigar) tree in the neighborhood, which was surrounded by what seemed like acres of irises. On a fairly regular basis we had to sneak in and climb the pataugwa tree to harvest the Indian cigars for smoking. This was always a scary adventure since being caught in the tree by Miss Davidson would surely lead to instant death, especially since getting to the tree required trampling through her irises.

On more than one occasion she shouted at us causing near cardiac arrest, as we made gallant escapes into the nearby woods, where we maintained a cardboard club house, thanking God a clean getaway, and another day of life.

Then one day the most magical thing happened. As Burt and I stood watch while Kenny climbed the tree I felt something slick under my feet. Leaning down to look I discovered an RC Cola tucked in the irises. Such a find in those days for me could be compared with the discovery of gold at Sutter's mill, kicking off the great gold rush. Before I could catch my breath Burt lifted another from the flowers. Oh My GOD!! A quick search turned up a third one for Kenny who very quickly forgot about the Indian cigars and dismounted the tree almost as fast as when we warned him of Miss Davidson approaching.  

A week later after regaining our courage we returned to the tree actually more interested in searching the irises than in Indian cigars, just in case we had missed something. Sure enough, we found three more big beautiful RC Colas. Over the course of the summer we did this over and over, occasionally finding not only RC Colas but also other goodies like candy bars. Strangely enough, we never were that curious about where the goodies were coming from. To us we had discovered a magic iris patch that somehow sprouted RC Colas and candy bars.

I remembered this experience just recently, having not thought about it since childhood. For the first time I began to ask myself about the real source of treasure. There can be little doubt that Miss Davidson was placing them there for us and for the first time I realized that she was not scolding us at all. She was just trying to be friendly. The RC Colas must have been her last ditch effort at participating with us. I hope she had some idea how much we enjoyed getting the colas. I wish there was some way I could go back and thank that wonderful white-haired lady for making three little boys very happy.

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Harris

My father had a lot of brothers. There was Hill, Roy, Harris, and Harris' twin, who died when he was young. Possibly, the all time favorite was Harris, Daddy's younger brother, who also represented a true mystique for us. He had gone "up north" to work in the high-paying automotive industry, where he resided for most of my memory of him. He was the only one who always seemed to have money, nice clothes, a good car, and a different girl friend that he would bring with him (to the great dismay of my mother). I heard whispers that he may actually be sleeping with these women on occasion. Harris never married.

Harris' reputation for partying was legendary and on his visits, which occurred a few times a year, he always managed to visit the local honky tonks, occasionally  winding up in fights in the clubs. It seems that all of his friends had hilarious names such as "One-yard Lynch" and "Rough House Morgan". The origin of Rough House's name is pretty obvious, but only recently did it occur to me that the "one- yard" was probably referring to a part of Lynch's  anatomy.

Harris was a wonderful uncle and all of his nephews love him partly because he always had wise words for us, special sayings, and rewards to offer us, but also because he represented some kind of special achievement. To us he was big, brave, strong, and invincible, an apt defender of the Trolinger name. We were always happy when he visited.

I was ready for college when Harris died, seemingly as a result of an injury sustained in a bar fight in Detroit. I photographed him in his casket from every angle to keep some memory alive. A few relatives silently regretted that the diamond ring we had all admired remained on his finger.

At his burial, I noticed a nicely dressed, little old man, standing alone, weeping gently. No one seemed to know who he was. As the cars began to leave the site, he walked over to my brother and I and asked if we were Harris' nephews. After our positive response he introduced himself as an old friend of Harris, Robert Lynch. Finally I had met One-Yard. It never occurred to me to ask him about the origin of  the nickname.

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Raisin Bread in Space

The science editor of the Orange County Register News visited us to do a special article on Orange County Companies who are involved in space research. He first interviewed me for about half an hour. One of our more interesting space projects, which I attempted to explain to him was the three-dimensional recording and analysis of particle fields in space using holography. He was having considerable trouble understanding what I was explaining so I called in Robert and Frank, who are doing some experiments and asked them to show the reporter some examples and explain to him. They took him to the lab and I forgot all about the story until the next day, when I saw Robert at the coffee pot.

Robert explained how difficult it had been to explain to the reporter. They would scan through a three dimensional image produced by the holograms we had made in space, focusing on particles one by one until they scanned the whole volume, showing how we could track particles precisely in three-D, measuring microgravity effects on particle motion. The reporter had considerable difficulty understanding what we were doing, until Frank came forth with a good analogy that cleared things up.

Frank said, "Consider if you had a loaf of raisin bread and wanted to find the distribution of raisins in the bread. You could slice it off in thin slices one by one until you had located each raisin. How we can do the same sort of thing optically with lasers, slicing a three-dimensional image up optically until we find all of the raisins, and we don't have to touch the space where the bread is. "Oh, I see now," said the reporter, "That clears up everything". Today, we got the galley proof of the MetroLaser portion of his article. It read something like the following.

"Not all of the Orange County Companies involved in space are large. Take MetroLaser Inc., for example, a thirty-five man company in Irvine. This group of scientists produce extremely high tech and esoteric solution to all kinds of measurement problems using advanced optics and lasers. These brilliant, if a bit nerdy, scientists are providing solutions that make life easier for astronauts in space. They have developed an advanced method for slicing raisin bread in microgravity that is so sophisticated that they can tell where the raisins are even before the bread is sliced." My first reaction was "Robert...............tell him it's perfect. Print it." Unfortunately, Robert had already explained to the reporter that MetroLaser does not slice bread in space.

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Rope Jumping Contest

I more or less gave up sports when I started to college. Fortunately, the University required all students to take physical education. The most painful one was conditioning in the Freshman year, where the goal of the coach was to kill all of the freshman. After that it was easier to wimp out with classes like dancing and weight training. Rope jumping, however, was different. I loved rope jumping. By the time I had taken it a couple of quarters I was the top in the class. I could do spins, double jumps, cross jumps, jumps sitting in a chair, backwards and forwards.

A few years later at a family reunion I watched as all the little girls of the family jumped rope in my mother’s front yard. At some point I began to tease them and said " That really looks easy. I wonder if I could do it." They all roared with laughter. "Sure, uncle Jim. "It is so easy. Just come over and try it". One of them handed me her rope, daring me to try. I took it and sort of clumsily started to swing it around and acted like I was having trouble. Then I speeded up and said "Hey its going so fast I have to double jump, so I began swinging it around twice per jump. Then I said "Hey, it is starting to twist on me. " So I began to cross jumping with the rope folded in front of me. I stopped and sorta froze like I was puzzled and started swinging it backwards, acting like it was out my control, but back jumping, then cross back jumping.

They were all totally freaked out.

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Dewannis makes the Majors

My career as a minor league baseball coach began and ended in the small town of Tullahoma, Tennessee, where baseball was about the most exciting thing happening. It helped that the town had been blessed with four factories that made baseballs, bats, gloves, and shoes. Aluminum bats for the National Little league were actually invented, developed, and first manufactured in Tullahoma at the Worth factory, and the factories contributed heavily to construct first rate ball parks on four edges of town (actually all within walking distance of each other).

So many kids were into baseball that we not only had a Little League, Babe Ruth League, and State League, we had a minor league for the kids who were not quite ready for the Little League, and eventually a league even before that one. Minor league began with seven year olds, a year before they were old enough for Little League, and they could stay with us until they were twelve or else good enough to make Little League. Little league coaches could draft minor league kids at any time, one of the most serious perils for the minor league coach.

Minor leagues had our own rules to accommodate the special situation. Every child on the team must play at least one inning; The game must end in two hours or five innings whichever came first; whoever was winning at the bottom of the last inning won the game at the two hour mark; pitchers could not pitch more than five straight innings, no stealing bases, and so on, rules that attempted to make games tractable with baseball players at a somewhat challenged level. Some of the games never got past two innings. Scores sometimes ran as high as fifty to nothing. Kids cried, parents threatened coaches, and almost no one seemed to know all of the rules and restrictions.

All of this led to a different win strategy for coaches. One of my primary tasks at the beginning of the season was to find anyone who could repeatedly get the ball over the plate...at any speed. A team with such a pitcher was a winning team on most nights. I was lucky the first year. God had sent me a pitcher with a real arm. His name was Lexi Fletcher. I knew we wouldn't keep him long before he was drafted so I searched for others who had some potential. Just as I was ending the search, settling for a few kids who at least could hit the backstop with the ball, I noticed a tiny little black kid standing sheepishly, but determined in line. He could not have been more that three feet tall, and I had mistaken him as a little brother of one of the players. As I started to end off the practice he ask me if he could try out as pitcher. His name was Dewannis but he preferred to be called Butch. Actually, he looked more like a Dewannis.

Dewannis had the most beautiful Afro I had ever seen; it was twice as big as his head. It was not one of those specially styled Afros; it was 100% genuine, there because it was the least expensive option for his parents. I doubted that such a small kid would be able to get the ball from the mound to the plate, let alone hit the back stop, but I wanted them all to feel like stars, so I put him on the mound, almost dreading in advance having to turn him down. It was true; he could hardly get the ball to me from the mound. Nevertheless, I could not miss the fact that when Dewannis threw the ball it went to the same place every single time, just barely reaching the plate, but always down the middle.

Another problem was that he couldn't catch the ball when I pitched it back to him. After a few such misses I noticed the leather rag he was attempting to use as a glove. Loaning him a decent glove (which I later gave him) not only helped him catch, but also made him about the happiest kid I had ever seen. Every day at practice we paired him off and let him pitch and catch for essentially the entire two hours. By the time the season started he could throw nine out of ten strikes and even catch the return ball if it was thrown to him. Now I have to qualify these strikes. One of Dewannis' strikes would hit the ground before the catcher could catch it, simply because it was traveling at a snails velocity in the last part of an arc.

The kids who could hit loved Dewannis as a pitcher because they knew exactly where to swing and because it was always a slow ball. That was not too serious a problem for me because most of the kids in this league either struck out or walked. Dewannis rarely walked anybody. They either knocked the jacket off the ball or struck out. He won more games than he lost. Dewannis and Lexi took us to a season championship in my first year as head coach.

At the end of the season I took Dewannis aside and spoke with him man to man. I encouraged him to throw something every single day for as long as he could. I advised him to throw rocks, balls, bottles anything he could get his hands on at any target he could find. I told him he could be a champion if he could get some more muscle in that arm.

When the next season rolled around and my search for pitchers began, I immediately discovered that there was no Dewannis on the field. Lexi had moved on to Little League as I had expected and the rest of the pickings were pretty slim. Realizing the seriousness of the matter I drove to the neighborhood where Dewannis lived to see if was still in town. To my surprise I found him in his front yard throwing rocks at a tin can. He explained to me that his mother could not afford to buy him shoes and the shoes he was wearing were so full of holes he was too ashamed to come to the practice with them.

At this point I asked him if he had been throwing like I had advised. "Oh, Yassuh," was his enthusiastic response, "every single day, just like you said." Reaching into the back seat of my Volkswagen I retrieved a hand full of baseballs and ask him to throw me a few. Since he was throwing rocks when I arrived his arm was already warmed up. I kneeled and held up the mitt as a target. He took his windup just like a pro, releasing a ball that whizzed into the mitt with a pop, without any movement needed on my part. Again and again the ball popped into the mitt splitting the make shift plate I had placed on the ground. I had just discovered a gold mine for a minor league coach. The price of a league championship had just become a new pair of shoes and approaching his mom for permission.

I explained to his mom how much we needed him and asked her permission to buy him some shoes. Without hesitation she accepted my offer. Ordinarily a major league coach would have drafted Dewannis immediately, but two things lay on my side. First he was so small, no one would take a second look at him, and second, he and his mother wanted him on my team.

With Dewannis' help, we won the league championship for the second year. I could see his improvement from one game to the next. By the end of the season, his reputation was developing and I knew that would be the last time I would see him in the minor leagues. After that season traveling and work schedule forced me to give up coaching and I lost touch with baseball.

One evening about five years later a friend who had helped me coach phoned and suggested I go to a Babe Ruth League game that night because some of our former players would be playing. He wouldn't tell me which ones, but he was sure I would remember them, so I agreed to meet up with him. As I walked into the park my heart leaped when who was standing on the mound but Dewannis. In those five years Dewannis must have grown at least three feet. He was one of the tallest, most muscular kids on the field. He unleashed a fastball that damn near knocked the catcher over, sending a loud pop echoing into the stands, and I almost exploded with pride. Before the night was over I discovered that in the time I had left Tullahoma, Dewannis had become a star and one of the most dreaded pitchers in the league. College baseball scouts were there to check him out.

I never saw him again after that night. Maybe he went on to the majors, maybe not. Someday I hope to find out just how far Dewannis got with his baseball. Regardless, he would always be a star in my book.

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The Hypodermic

 My father, Winston, or Wince, as he was most often called, was a short stout man, hardened by many years as a plumber and electrician.  Because of his work activity he had a powerful grip that he was very proud of.  He often wrestled with my brothers and I, playfully, and if we ever allowed him to grab a hand or a fleshy part of our body in that vice of his, all was lost.  In every wrestling match, without fail he always threatened us that he was about to “put the hypodermic” on us.  None of us ever understood what the hypodermic was, but we all knew that whatever it was, it must be really horrible.  The “hypodermic” was his trademark threat.

 In our young years, before my brothers and I grew larger than he and before he allowed drink to ravage his body we were no match for his strength.  Even after he became frail and crippled by alcohol induced strokes, he continued to believe that he still had the vice grip hands, and he was quick to challenge us, always flavoring the encounter with “If you mess with me, you are going to get the “hypodermic.”  We humored him and begged him to hold back the ‘hypodermic’.

 The enjoyment of the memory of his trademark is eternal for my brothers and our sister as well. In these many years after he left us we rarely meet without one of us threatening the other with the dreaded “hypodermic”, and to this day, none of us has any idea what the hypodermic was supposed to be.

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The Neighborhood Story Teller

Growing up in the South offered a wide range of unique conditions, beliefs, and things to be proud of. One would especially be proud of having General Robert E. Lee as an ancestor. Ancestors of Lee worked his name in wherever possible. One of my classmates, named Mary Lee Parker, jumped on any opportunity to let you know she was kin to Robert E. Lee. Another friend, who was not kin to Robert was named Robert Eley any way. Having Jefferson Davis as an ancestor, as I did, was less prestigious, even though he had been the president of the confederacy. Even though he had been a very accomplished man even before the War Between the States, he never won the respect that the General had won because he was a politician, not a soldier.

I understood who Robert E. Lee was only after I was about 14 years old, but I knew Mr. Lee down the street from the time I could walk around the neighborhood alone. Mr. Lee was famous among the neighborhood kids, not because he was a direct descendant of Robert E. Lee, who was no one to us, but because he was the neighborhood story teller for the kids. Often when we ran out of something to do, someone would suggest, "Let's get Mr. Lee to tell us a story".

All the kids loved his stories, which I think he made up as he told them. And maybe we enjoyed, even more, the lemonade and cookies that usually followed the story. The same routine always followed. "Mr. Lee, please tell us a story." And after the story, "Mr. Lee, please tell us another story." And his response was always, "Well maybe tomorrow, but now let's have some lemonade and cookies."

I have forgotten every single story but one; why I remember this one I cannot imagine, but it has stayed with me since the day he told it, while all others long since faded from memory. Mr. Lee spent about half an hour telling it and we were all captivated. The story is about a group of cowboys, jealousy, and punishment. The bad guy is jealous of a new, young broncobuster who is admired by everyone, especially the boss man, who is the young cowboy's mentor. The bad guy slips a burr under a saddle and the horse throws the young cowboy, leaving the bad guy laughing at him. When the boss man discovers the bad guy's prank, he makes him stand against a wall and he shoots off a tiny piece of the bad guy's earlobe.

I also will never forget one other visit we made to Mr. Lee's home. That was the day that someone greeted us at the door and told us that he had gone away and would not be back for a long time. When we pressed the issue we all were puzzled as to why the lady began to cry.

I met Mary Lee in the first grade, long before I discovered that she was Mr. Lee's granddaughter. She was the smartest person in the class and was the first girl ever to kiss me. Within the first week of school she came up to me and said, "You are cute." And she kissed me on the cheek. I thought that meant she was my girl friend forever. It took a while for me to realize that there was a long line in front of me. The first realization came on St. Valentine’s Day when everyone exchanged valentines. I was proudly showing my valentine from her to my friend, Andy. After I finished, he showed me one that she gave him, which, to my great puzzlement, was much bigger and nicer than mine, but I was not puzzled for long. Neither one of us ever actually dated Mary Lee.

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Chiggy, My Artist Pal

In the first grade my first true friend was Chiggy Gunter, a fuzzy headed big guy, who had a great artistic talent, wonderful parents, and in all a great influence in my life. Chiggy's mother Catherine encouraged him from early childhood to be a great artist and because my own mother, likewise, had pushed me, in art immediately found a lot in common with him. Our styles were totally different; he drew like Van Gough and I was more a realist. Since my drawings looked more realistic than Chiggy's I simply assumed that I was the better artist. It took me about 50 years to figure out why people really loved Chiggy's art.

At the time, it made little difference to me that his representations were not like mine. It meant I didn't have to compete with him. We became a great team and usually wound up producing the arts that were hung in the school halls and show places. By the time we reached the second grade our teacher, Mrs. Haynes, seeing some potential, began grooming both of us for the southeastern art contest, called America the Beautiful. Consequently, we spent a lot of time sitting in the back of the classroom drawing and painting. Each of us qualified for the finals with paintings she had selected and entered for us.

I was really baffled when the Principal, Mr. Thomas, proudly announced in a Monday assembly that Chiggy had taken the top prize in the contest. My painting obviously was better than his. I mean…….his really looked to me like a child's drawing while mine could have been mistaken for a photograph. I could only conclude that the judges thought I had traced it or otherwise plagiarized an older guy's drawing. It may seem surprising that Chiggy's winning the contest, instead of me, was a very important gift by the universe to me. If I had won instead of him, an extremely valuable influence in my life may never have happened.

By my standards Chiggy came from a wealthy family, and his mother, Catherine, thought larger than most of our parents at the time. She was so proud of Chiggy’s winning that she could only conclude that he should have professional training, even at the age of seven. Realizing that Chiggy would be more enthusiastic for more schooling if a pal went along, she posed her ideas to my mother, who was having hard enough time feeding her kids, let alone paying for private training. Private schooling was something contemplated only by those with money, and my family could never consider such a luxury. All Catherine had to do was volunteer to pay the fees for me if mother would permit me to attend with Chiggy. Mother's pride would neither let her accept Catherine's money nor refuse her proposition for us, so she agreed and insisted that she would pay my expenses as long as she could.

The town of Shelbyville, population 12,000, was not exactly a haven for artists. There was one well-known master, an aging spinster, Corrine Houston (or Miss Corrine), who in addition to being an eccentric little ole, hunch backed lady, was presumably a great niece of Sam Houston. In better times she had studied art in Italy with the “masters”, had painted since she was a child, and had already become a collectible artist because of her classic landscapes. She lived in the only remaining wing of a family mansion house that had almost burned to the ground when she was a young lady. Soon afterwards everything went wrong for her family, untimely deaths, alcoholism, insanity, and other losses and scandals that left them penniless. She was reduced to eking out a living by giving art lessons and whatever charity was available. She represented the end of an aristocracy. Her home had no lights or water and she refused offers for improvements from anyone.

Corrine became a tutor, mentor and wonderful friend for me for the next three years. Some of the greatest moments of my childhood were spent sitting with her before an easel. At first Chiggy and I went together twice a week. She charged a dollar a month until we moved to oils, then the price went up to a dollar a week, because she furnished some of the materials. Chiggy would always get hungry after an hour of painting, so Miss Corrine would give us money to cross the street to the store for cookies and sodas. Our lessons included four to six hours of drawing, painting, singing (she played a very nice guitar), philosophy, and some times, mischief. Eventually she encouraged us to come separately because we tended to distract each other. She was loving but also stern and demanding. If a painting needed attention and it was getting dark, we worked on it by lighting a kerosene lantern. It is difficult to imagine how a seven year old remained calm sitting in the dark with a hunch backed old lady (that some people thought was crazy) in the remains of an ancient mansion.

From that time on art was always a great retreat for me even when my profession turned elsewhere. Chiggy became a history professor at the East Tennessee State University.

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Trolinger's Legendary Still(s)

My overall high school experience was filled with an amazing blend of experiences, ranging from the good to the ridiculous. On the one hand I liked to be seen a smart kid with a future, but I also needed the image of the badass hood among friends. It is completely amazing that I survived those years without something totally disastrous and/or winding up in jail for life.

I was known about school both as a scientifically and artistically gifted person with my own chemistry laboratory in the garage behind my house. The people who knew me would have guessed that I would have a future as some kind of scientist or engineer. More appropriately, if you asked anyone who knew of me, you would hear stories about my still, where I produced a fine brand of drink for friends. Some of the stories were true; I did have a still and produced enough moonshine to furnish at least a few parties, but never a continuous flow in large quantity. A few of the gang helped supply me with materials and in turn they received a half pint of white lightning.

In Tennessee in the '40's to 50's alcoholic beverages were much more controlled than they are now. Hard liquor was totally illegal in most cities and counties and one could not even buy beer on Sundays. A great curiosity even to this day is that Moore County, home of Jack Daniels Distillery, is a dry county. Around the year 2000 a special state law was passed that permitted Jack Daniels to sell one special commemorative whisky in its gift store. Some countries banned all alcoholic beverages. Three professions existed because of this, moon shining, which is making whiskey, bootlegging, which is selling whiskey, illegally, moonshine or otherwise, and revenuers, who were government employees charged with finding and arresting moon shiners, who commonly operated their stills under cover of woods and mountains.

A still of this sort contains a boiler, where the mash is cooked. A pipe takes steam into a secondary container, called a thumper keg by moon shiners, because it makes a thumping sound. Its purpose is to perform a secondary distillation, strengthening the alcohol content. Since heat for the secondary container comes from the steam itself, it holds the temperature ideally for the process to concentrate the alcohol content and raise the quality. I discovered quite by accident a rather standard procedure of adding a flavor to the alcohol by placing fruit in the thumper keg. This gave my whiskey a distinct, pleasant aroma.

Some of the components of the still, such as glass flasks and condensers were pinched from the high school chemistry laboratory. Other material came from Renegar's drug store which at the time was next to my home at 306 Madison street, Shelbyville, Tennessee, where now lies a Hardy's parking lot. To mix the mash, I used stainless steel milk cans that we had stolen from farmers, who left them vulnerable at pickup and drop off points near the highway.

My parents encouraged the laboratory and apparently never really caught on to the fact that I was more of a moon shiner than a chemist. In fact, I did conduct legitimate research, though a bit naive, on the improvement of yeasts for fermenting. I had reasoned that I could isolate a super strain of yeast that could survive much higher alcohol content. Common yeasts die when the alcohol content reaches about 12%. I also had dreams of developing an alcohol that tastes the same as ethanol but would not be addicting, a naive hope of curing an alcoholic father.

I came close to getting caught on more than one occasion. One such instance happened the day I decided to move the operation into the house where I could use the kitchen stove top and running water for the condenser. Timing was critical because mother worked a ten hour shift at a Empire Pencil Company, and I had to be in and out totally, smell and all, while she was away. During the installation I broke a glass tube running from the top of the boiler to the thumper keg. I ran next door to Renegar's to pick up another tube. Unfortunately, in my haste I failed to recognize that the tube I had purchased was plastic and not glass; it was a long hard plastic straw.

I should have realized this when I heated and bent it to fit the appropriate position, because its behavior was rather strange. What I failed to recognize was that the plastic had just melted and sealed itself at the bend.

As the mash began heating I could hear the sound of the liquid churning to a boil. But something was different with this batch. It sounded different and still no alcohol was emerging from the condenser, not even steam. By the time I figured out that pressure was building up in the boiler, it was too late. The entire top of the still exploded and steam-propelled mash spewed to the ceiling. By the time I could safely shut down the operation the kitchen was covered with bits of mash, and the ceiling was soaked.

I spent the rest of the day cleaning the stove, the floor, and every exposed surface, but there was little I could do about the big spot on the ceiling or the strong smell of alcohol and mash. You could get high just by breathing. The smell hit her as soon as she stepped from her car, and I was in big trouble. She immediately began to ask me what I was doing that would create such a smell. When she realized that the smell was coming from the house and not the garage, she immediately went to the kitchen and discovered the source. She was suspicious but still apparently failed to guess exactly what I was really doing. I came very close that day to being shut down entirely.

By the end of high school I routinely produced a pint or so a week of 140 proof white lighting, which always found a grateful taker, since I drank very little of it myself. This was my little niche in the gang, and I was proud of the capability. A few of my friends began to think much bigger and to dream about where this could lead. Moon shining and bootlegging were a highly profitable, especially not counting for necessary payoffs to the local law, about which we had less experience. Especially in a dry county, where one not only avoided federal taxes, but also avoided the cost of being illegal even after federal taxes were paid. (i.e. security, staying sub rosa, payoffs, and special transportation).

Two of my friends, Sam and Dale, who somehow had made contacts with the seedier old folk about town, took it upon themselves to deliver a pint of my product to a local bootlegger for his opinion. Sam was one of the true entrepreneurs of our class, and he had a new money making scheme on his mind every time I saw him. After sampling from the bottle, the bootlegger made an immediate offer to buy as much of this as we could deliver for 15 dollars a gallon. I could see the dollar signs in Sam's eyes as he unfolded a plan to back a large-scale moon shining operation.

Sam's enthusiasm was contagious, and soon the three of us worked out a plan. Within days they had located a 300-acre forest-covered farm that we could lease for almost nothing. Excitement was high as we drove along an old dirt road finding several excellent, well-hidden sites with a good water source. I began to round up materials for a fifty-gallon still. To this day I have no idea how far we would have taken this if God had not come along and tossed in a roadblock.

I had manage to build a prototype of the still using stainless steel milk cans for both the boiler and the thumper keg, with copper tubing connecting them and passing the steam through the condenser. Then came the visit from Sam that stopped everything. He came to say good-bye, apologizing for having to bail out of the operation. For other reasons Sam was leaving town for a while. The universe had done two naive kids, who were about to get in over their heads, a great favor. If the law had not come down on us, then a worse fate wrought by rival moon shiners most likely would have. Moonshining was a big business, not designed for the weak or timid, and moon shiners often died early and untidy deaths I hope that this was the dumbest business scheme I will ever participate in.

I continued to dabble in moon shining on a very small scale for years, though most of the stories about my booze were urban legends, since everyone wanted to lay claim to have sampled it. Actually, only a handful of friends actually did. The first major confrontation from mother came after reading multiple testimonies written by pals who signed my high school annual. It seems I had developed a rather clear reputation. Fortunately I was off to college and bowed out of the business.

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Showdown at the Lions Club

I had some really great friends in high school and crazy experiences with all of them. I met them in different ways and some of them even started out as enemies. Dale was one of those cases; and the story leading up to our friendship sounds more like fiction. During my first year I associated a lot with Perry, my older brother and his pals, Tommy Troupe, Bob Sanders, and Bob Rittenberry, who were seniors. This had great advantages since they all had cars, were really cool, and made great mentors, not to mention the trouble they got me into early on.

Apparently what I was purported to bring to the party was a connection to the freshman girls. At the time I was less interested in girls than in the other more manly activities they offered, like guns, cars, and drag racing. Possibly our greatest fiasco came about on a Sunday afternoon when we went out shooting. Our method was to drive country roads with a carload of armed buddies and look for practically anything that moved, like hawks, crows and rabbits. Under the circumstances there were amazingly few fatal accidents. This particular Sunday was not a day to be proud of, however. What we thought to be a tree full of crows turned out to be a farmer’s prized game hens. We gunned down four or five before someone shouted chickens. The farmer took down our license plate and ultimately agreed to forget about the event if we paid for his hens.

Perry's friends constituted one of several distinct sets of rival "gangs" in the school and most freshmen, like me, had not yet settled into an equivalent group of same-age peers. One of my first “wars” with the opposition occurred when a guy, named Dale Cleek, whom I barely knew, bumped me in the school hallway. The problem was that a lot of friends from both sides were watching requiring cool words from both directions resulting in what was essentially the throwing down of a gauntlet. The confrontation began to escalate beyond what would be acceptable in the school corridor and we both agreed with great panache that we would continue this later in an appropriate place.

The whole affair may have ended there except that Dale, like me, had older mentors who apparently were in need of entertainment. Each of us received much advice putting us into a collision course that was widely advertised as an event on the way. Generally, when a confrontation between two rivaling guys took place, a lot of words passed back and forth and the contestant with the best presentation of curse words mixed with coolness was the winner. Perry and his buddies had had developed a different approach on such encounters and apparently had used it successfully on several occasions.

The basic idea was that if I get in one hellacious punch at the outset, then that really ups the odds of winning. Not only that, the approach was such a surprise that it would meet little if any defense, a sort of free punch.

Emotions stirred and rumors floated for about a month and I really dreaded the night that was now destined to come. It happened at a dance at the local Lions Club, one of the few venues for dances in Shelbyville. I sat on one of side of the dance floor and Dale the other, exchanging heated glances. Perry had sent spies to check Dale out who returned with the report that he was wearing at least two very large rings. Perry had rounded up four or five class rings from his guys and told me to put them on. He continued to coach me right up until the dreaded moment when one of Dales cronies came over with the dreaded message that Dale wanted to see me outside. I really didn't want to do this, but I was beyond the point of no return.

Outside, Dale and his mentors stood in a semi circle with Dale at the focus. Perry, Troupe, and Sanders followed me. As I walked up to the semi circle, I never actually stopped, even as Dale started saying something that was supposed to be cool and scary, and I never actually heard what he was saying.

I hit him as hard as I could right between the eyes and followed through as he fell backwards to the ground. I hit him a few more times in the face before we both wound tangled up motionless on the ground, at which time he told me that even if I killed him he would not give up. As I felt my shirt being soaked with his blood, I realized for the first time what I had done. This really was not fun, even if I was winning. I asked him if he wanted to shake and call it quits. He responded positively, and indeed we shook hands and walked away.

I wasn't sure what would come next. Would he sneak up behind me and kill me? Would I have to do this again without the advantage of surprise? A few days later Dale approached me still sporting black eyes and cuts on his face. To my pleasant surprise he said that he really felt stupid going out and getting his butt kicked for no particular reason at all and he hoped we could be friends. From that day on Dale and I enjoyed a fine friendship and had many fun experiences together. His follow on action left me a lot more respect and admiration than I would have had if he had whipped my ass.

Forty years later I walked with my daughter, Kris, into his furniture store on the Shelbyville Square and stood silently before him. After a few moments of his puzzled look I said, "Okay Dale, you old fart, I recognize you, so now it is your turn." Before I could get the words from my mouth he leapt from this chair and hugged me, shouting "DR. DOODLE".

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The Springfield Rifle

September 2003

If you recall childhood memories and then analyze them again in adulthood you will often discover new conclusions that seem obvious to a mature mind. From about the age of four, I often accompanied my father in his work. I thought he was the greatest genius in the world; he knew how to do everything, and everyone he met liked him. Sometimes he paid me about a dollar a day. I'm not sure if he was baby sitting, showing me off, or just using me for entertainment, since I often found myself embarrassed after saying or doing something that drew a lot of laughs. A big pile of sand was left over after a job, and the men were discussing what they should do with it. I offered what seemed a rather obvious solution, to take it home and put it in my sand box. Everyone laughed. I felt like a total idiot.

On another occasion, my father had repaired some plumbing in an antique store in Tullahoma and the owner, with great appreciation, wanted my father to see his gun collection. He had stacks of ancient guns. My father was handling one and admiring it as though it were solid gold. I wanted to hold it, but Daddy snapped, "No, no, these are priceless and I don't want to have to buy one." Once more I felt like shit.

The man responded by insisting that I hold it, which I did. I felt like a god. Then he asks me, "Would you like to buy it? My eyes lit up and I looked at Daddy wishfully, "Yes, can I?" And the man asked me how much I would pay. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my day's pay, one dollar, and proudly offered it to him, almost expecting him to take it and give me some change back. Everyone in the room laughed, and I started feeling like shit again.

At that moment, the man responded by saying "Son, you have a deal." And he handed me a beautiful Springfield rifle in mint condition, from the War Between the States era, and he took my dollar. I felt wonderful again, and I knew better than ask for change at that point.

I kept the rifle for many years, and hung it on my bedroom wall. Like so many other possessions I had as a child, my ignorance of its real value led me to treat it more like a toy. I was occasionally puzzled when Daddy would refer to it as his, since clearly I had purchased it with my own money. Eventually, my friends and I used it as much as any other toy gun and tossed it around carelessly. It was the one toy gun that we could shoot fireworks in the barrel. One of my friends during a mock gunfight tossed it from the roof our garage and broke it in half. Today I have only a few pieces of what once was a mint condition relic from the civil war.

Like many other experiences from childhood that I have revisited here, I was able now to interpret this one with a more mature mind. Only now can I realize that the man who sold the rifle to me for one dollar must have been a very kind and sensitive man to give up such a fine relic out of respect for my father and to protect the feelings of a child. Only in my recent analysis did I realize that the man had, in effect, given it to my father. I wish there were some way I could go back and thank him for being a great human being.

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Memories of James Onman Davis, My Grandfather

September, 2003

I always felt like I was his favorite because I was named after him. Actually, there was more. Onman was a tall slender man and I looked more like him than any of the others. I was sure I had more of his genes because I had inherited his explosive temper and his pectus excavatum, which mother also had. She told me that Onman never realized that his chest was abnormal because his generation of folk did not remove shirts even when working the hot fields.

I got my middle name "Davis", (which I disliked about as much as the pectus) from him, and even Onman preferred to call me James. It took me 20 years to settle down on a solid name, "Jim", after passing through "James, Davis, and Doodle". Eventually, I shook the explosive temper.

Onman was a farmer, and he and grandmother owned a 130 Acre farm. Every Sunday we drove to the farm for a large noontime Sunday "Dinner". Grandmother was the best cook in the entire world, and she made a coconut cake that men would kill for. The kids and our friends, who often went with us, explored the hills and woods, dammed the creeks, played in the hay loft, and got lessons in hunting and shooting.

Onman’s first wife, Mattie Tillet, had died of pleurisy when mother was four years old. Later he married Mattie Jenkins, a spinster who owned the farm near Normandy, Tennessee and moved in with her. We know very little about his life with his first wife except that they lived half way between Shelbyville and Tullahoma, near the church where many of the Tillets are buried.

Onman was a skilful farmer, and he introduced advanced farming methods, such as crop rotation and contour plowing that greatly improved his crop production. He added many improvements to the farm, such as indoor toilets, electrical pumps for the wells, new wings to the home and outbuildings. He added honeybees to the farm, providing additional revenue and a never ending supply of honey. He convinced the county to build a grammar school on land that he donated. (The school operated until the mid 1940's).

During World War II, both the U.S. Army and Air Force had bases in Tullahoma. The Army base, Camp Forrest, also served as a prison camp for German prisoners of war. Onman worked as a prison guard at Camp Forrest and often brought prisoners to work on the farm. I had heard such horrible tales about Germans that I was terrified to learn that there were three of them walking up the road with Grand daddy. I immediately ran to Grand Mother and never left her side the entire day.

The Germans were apparently thankful to have the freedom and to actually be paid to work. Some of them were excellent craftsmen and they presented him various crafts, including two woodcarvings of flowers. On the back of these carvings, which my son Jim now owns, are written in German, "In memory of prisoners of war". They also presented him with a silver ring with the initials JOD carved, which he gave to me, unfortunately, when I was too young to appreciate it. I lost it many years ago.

During the summers my brothers and I often worked with Onman for a dollar a day doing about the hardest work I can remember in my life. We followed along behind his mule drawn plow, picking up potatoes. We pulled yellow dog fennel from the pastures, stacked hay, and cut firewood. The worst job I ever did was holding down sheep while one of the helpers cut off his balls with a pocket knife. I learned a lot from Onman, who went out of his way to teach me things. But he never explained why anyone would want to cut off a sheeps balls. Apparently, the helper’s pay was the sheep’s balls, and I heard one of them say "They’s good eatin".

In the winter visits we spent many hours sitting around a warm crackling fire, roasting corn and potatoes in the coals. Granddaddy’s and Grandmother’s rocking chairs sat in front of the fireplace and they became part of our play. On the mantel above the fireplace sat a grandfather clock that housed a set of rattle snake rattlers that Onman would remove and rattle for us. This was the clock he used to quiz me when I was learning to tell time, and winding, watching the pendulum, and listening was part of the ritual.

Onman was an industrious individual, always devising new ways to improve the farm and create additional resources. One of his side industries was honey production. He had what amounted to a small honey factory on the farm with beehives and all the equipment needed to extract and can honey. In the process of canning the honey one of the problems was preventing the honey from crystallizing into sugar. While looking for better ways to do this he discovered a process in which the honey would turn into a creamy candy, and candied honey became one of his biggest sellers. I rarely see this delicacy in stores even today. When the weather was nice on Saturdays he would sell honey from the trunk of his 47 Oldsmobile on the Shelbyville town square. Sometimes he would visit us for lunch. Mother was always so happy to see him and she always had ice cream (or simply "cream", to him) for dessert, his favorite dish. That made his visit even more exciting to me. Near the end of every meal, without fail, he would come forth with a long gurgling burp that seemed to go on for minutes. All of we children had been taught that this was a no-no, but not for granddaddy. We came to recognize this as simply something that is okay for Granddaddy. I remember this fondly more than any other part of the meal... except maybe the part when the "cream" was served.

One Sunday afternoon when I was about 12 years old, I was attending a Boy Scout outing with Mother and Daddy at Northern Field in Tullahoma when we were interrupted by an ominous appearance of Wallace Cartwright (now a brother in law). He told us of an emergency at Granddaddy’s farm and that we should come with them. We followed them towards the farm. About half way there mother insisted on stopping him to find out more details. She asked Wally if it was her mother or father. He responded that it was her father. "How bad is it?", she asked.

"Very bad", was his response with tear filled eyes. She knew not to press him further. She knew that she was soon going to experience something horrible. We arrived at the farm about 10 minutes later. Wallace took me away from the house towards the barn, while Mother and Daddy went to the house. As they arrived at the house I could hear mother screaming. Granddaddy had been found lying on the ground in the back yard with most of his face blown away by the blast of a 12 gauge shot gun.

The death was ruled "self inflicted", which meant to some people that he had committed suicide. Those of us who knew him had little doubt that his death was accidental. He died beneath three electrical high-wires that carried power from the house to a smoke house. Small bits of flesh from his face remained, draped over the wires and could be seen for years before eventually drying and blowing away with the wind.

About 15 years later, Grandmother asked me if I would like to have the shotgun that killed him, since she still perceived me as closest to him. I accepted the weapon and stood it in the corner of my study. The weapon is a double-barreled, twelve gauge shotgun with hand-cocked hammers. One of the hammers was missing. Perry and I discussed taking it out and firing it, but decided to run a few tests on it first to assess its condition and safeness. During the tests we made a horrifying discovery. Perry cocked the remaining hammer and held the gun up and slapped the butt with his other hand. To our horror the hammer spontaneously fired. We discovered that the gun was extremely dangerous, and unstable. All Onman would have had to do would be to stumble and hit the butt and it would have fired accidentally. We looked at each other in horror realizing that we had just discovered how he had most probably died.

A few months later as I worked late in my study and fell asleep in my chair, I dreamed about Onman and woke feeling the presence of the shotgun. The feeling was extremely depressing and left me sleepless for hours. In the weeks that followed that night’ the feeling returned over and over every time I passed the study. I began to avoid entering the study and eventually developed a deep dread when coming near where the shot gun stood. I knew the feeling was all psychological, but the knowledge helped little. Eventually, I asked mother if she would keep the weapon, since its presence in my house had become troubling. She took it and told me she would keep it for me until I wanted it back.

Perry, being a gun collector asked if he could have it and I agreed. I never had any desire to have it again.

What I did choose, however, when the time came, was the grandfather clock and the two rocking chairs that now sit in front of my fireplace. When it came down to choosing between all the antiques and heirlooms there was never a question in my own mind about what I wanted most.

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George and Shadow-Early Mentors

July, 2003

My life has been filled with many outstanding (or maybe outrageous is a better word) characters I enjoy writing about because each of them has left me with fond memories, knowledge, and maybe a bit of wisdom. Some of my favorites leave me smiling when I revisit some of their antics. For two of my high school years I worked in Martin and Price Hardware Store, just off the Shelbyville Square. George Price and Shadow Martin, the store owners, employed another young man, George Faver, as a clerk. Each of these three characters was outstanding in his own way, and each played somewhat a father role to me.

It was a rather large store with the first floor packed with every conceivable kind of hardware, appliances, and paint, and a basement where toys were sold during the Christmas season. There was hardly an empty space with merchandise stacked to and hanging from the ceiling. Every morning we moved a huge "front" out onto the sidewalk, including lawn mowers, rakes, tools, wire fencing, bicycles, and wheelbarrows. Periods when the store was void of customers were filled with a combination of maintenance and some form of entertainment. George Price was the macho type, an avid hunter and fisherman. Shadow Martin was a sportsman and avid golfer. George Faver was a 100% ladies’ man. Each of these guys had an act that could have gone on stage and together they provided non-stop entertainment for themselves, select customers, and me. Each had an endless stream of jokes to tell. They loved their work as much as their play.

George Faver had a dance routine that he mixed with impromptu verses of a mock sales pitch (that would no longer be politically acceptable) that never went the same way twice and was often created on the spot to fit the occasion.

"Step right up and see the big show.

We got hogs, dogs, fish, and frogs, hot dogs bigger'n saw logs.

We got pencils, marbles, chalk,

a little nigga’ baby old enough to talk;

got a train ticket..... won't have to walk.

Each and every item is guaranteed

not to slip, rip, or tear,

or turn up on the ends.

Ladies, strep right up; I’m gonna sell you sump’n or ‘nother

Some way or somehow.

Wham Bam,

Thank you ma’am,

What else now"

It went on and on. George made up new lines for it every day.

In another instance he was acting as a quartermaster answering the phone.

"This is fo fo fo, the quartermaster’s co. We got two by two’s, fo by foes, six by six’s, and them long, loooong muthafuckas what bends in da middle and go CHOOOO." (Refers to the following military vehicles: jeeps, pickup trucks, larger trucks and tandems with air brakes)

Shadow Martin purportedly was called "Shadow" because he had once been football star and was so fast and agile the opponents often mistook him for a shadow. He had a special place in the store where he could stand with his golf driver and do a full swing, the head of the driver passing between counters, light fixtures, and kitchenware missing by mere inches. Often the three men, like kids, made attempts to outdo each other’s antics, or to play pranks. We often threatened to place a piece of glassware into the clear path Shadow had created for his swing, but to my knowledge no one had the nerve to do that.

When the store was devoid of customers, the jokes and some of the stunts got a bit raunchy. One of the greatest faux pas occurred late one evening near closing time. We had just moved the front display inside for the night, and George Price was walking back into the store towards Shadow and me as we stood near the cash register. About half way up the aisle he stopped abruptly, hiked his leg and ripped a loud, roaring fart. He stared at us with puzzlement, as we stood in dead silence, no one even so much as cracking a smile or saying a word.

At that moment he looked around behind him and discovered his greatest nightmare. A little ole lady had walked into the store just behind him and, unbeknownst to him, had followed him up the aisle.

He immediately headed for the basement stairs, shouting, "Shadow, I need to go down and check on that new shipment." And he disappeared from sight into the basement, which was quite empty at the time, until the little ole lady had gone. I cannot remember if we sold her anything after that or not.

We kidded George about the shipment in the (empty) basement for years after that. Anytime anyone did anything wrong we threatened to send them to the basement to check on a shipment.

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Puckett's Practical Joke

September 2003

I have had many wonderful and crazy friends in different phases of my life and I plan never to forget any of them even knowing that I may never see some of them again. In my very early career days as a graduate student working at the USAF Arnold Engineering Development Center, one of my mentors was a brilliant engineer by the name of Jim Puckett. Puckett had an understanding of mechanical things and ideas of how to create new ones that was the envy of most of his peers. He loved to solve problems with gadgets. His love of machinery was such that even in his private life he created unusual devices.

Part of his motivation seemed to be driven by his love of the practical joke. He was infamous for setting up elaborate devices to play jokes on those around him. Some of these tricks included a video recording that he would show at parties. Puckett was also good with words and one would rarely know before it was too late that he was leading you down a garden path that turned into a ridiculous play on words and puns. I give you this background so that you can perceive how I could have fallen for his most elaborate practical joke that he unwittingly played on me.

In addition to learning a huge amount of engineering savvy from Pucket, I also learned to keep up some amount of guard around him, although usually his friends felt flattered when he selected one of them for the focus of his antics. On a Monday morning in the Spring of 1965 I reported to work and headed for the coffee pot for a first cup. As soon as Puckett spotted me he ambled over with that suspicious look on his face that tells you to get ready for the first practical joke of the day. It wasn't a question of if, but who would be the victim. Then he began.

"Jim", he started. "The damndest thing happened this past weekend. My wife and I were driving over in North Carolina and as we passed through a small town we saw banners hanging everywhere announcing a Jim Trolinger Day Celebration." Seeing that it was pretty obvious that I was to be the fall guy of his joke I, without any hesitation, responded, "Oh, of course, they do that ever year. Do you mean you never heard of Jim Trolinger Day?"

Puckett continued to press and asked, "Do you go to it?" I responded positively and went on to explain how a famous relative of mine once lived there and gets honored each year and continued to ad lib as he questioned further. Finally, he gave up and the subject changed to work. For once I had outsmarted Puckett and foiled his practical joke.

About ten years later, after I had left AEDC, I was fishing through research notes that my mother had collected in tracing the Trolinger family history and came upon a copy of a book that gave a variety of personal interest stories about the Trolinger family. One of the stories was titled "White Knight". It went something like this

I saw Puckett again at a reunion a few years later and admitted to him that I had thought he was joking. He did remember the event and got a great laugh from it. Puckett had unknowingly pulled off one of his most elaborate jokes of all and seemed quite fulfilled by the ending.

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Andy Lennert, a most colorful mentor

September, 2003

I have had the gift of wonderful and colorful mentors, whom I loved and learned from but never attempted to imitate. No one could successfully imitate them though many people tried.

Some people seem to own any environment in which they find themselves. Such a person was Andy Lennert, a physicist, who became my first mentor after I graduated from the University of Tennessee. Andy was one of the most intelligent men I have known; he spoke many languages, perhaps seven, and he was so comfortable in practically any language after hearing it for a while that it was difficult to know how well he spoke it. I personally listened to what appeared to be complex conversations in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic, Greek, and Russian, and, of course, English. I never saw Andy intimidated in any situation or language; he always seemed comfortable and hyperactive wherever he was. His overconfidence with languages sometimes created comical situations.

Although his German was one of his more fluent languages, my German friends related his childish mistakes when he insisted on lecturing in German. For example, he once described the action of a rocket as upgesheitzen, instead of upgeshutzen, which means that the rocket shitted up as opposed to shooting up.

Andy had a special talent for acting outrageous and even insulting that people could enjoy-at least to a point. It is truly puzzling how he managed to get away with being who he was and saying the things he said, often to people he hardly knew. People either loved or hated him because of this. He was a great stand up comedian, a cross between Rodney Dangerfield and George Carlin. His word skills and quick mind made him a brilliant master of ceremonies for which he gained quite a reputation. He played that role often until eventually at a company Christmas party, after a few too many drinks, he turned an otherwise memorable event into a fiasco that went down in history as the most embarrassing-ever company event. After that, people considered him too risky for such a job. He was a gracious man as long as he was sober, but after a few drinks he would often become so overbearing that his goal appeared one of driving everyone in the room beyond reasonable limits and over the edge.

He was extremely creative with words, often inventing new words to cover any situation. In science some equations are easier to derive if one can begin with certain assumptions, such as "an object's mass is concentrated at a single point in space". For this assumption Andy had invented and often used the word "impervium" to mean a substance with infinite mass so that a small piece of it at a point in space could have a finite weight. One of his even more creative substances was hydrozonium Pepsicolite, a material he knew existed though but he had no idea what it was. Whatever property was needed hydrozonium Pepsicolite had it. He used terms like this seriously as though everyone should know about them.

Sometimes he would deliberately bastardize words as a kind of friendly derision. Someone might for example have a degree from The Georgia Institute of Testiclenology. Testiclenology was one of his favorite words.

A lot of people tried unsuccessfully to imitate Andy, but it never really worked. Like a scientific Bob Hope, he could say anything and make people laugh just because of who he was and how it sounded. Only Andy could give the soul to the words he used.

Andy, who was a personal friend of the president of the company, had assembled a formidable scientific team to do the leading edge research for the company. In many ways he was great and inspiring leader. He defended this group, got support for it and gained a lot of publicity for it, and he made political enemies in doing so. One of the problems was that he had so much confidence in himself that he saw himself, not just as a manager of the group, but as a leading scientific member of it. At some point apparently he had been a strong technical person, himself, but that was difficult to know. He was a good front man for his team, and he seemed to have a reasonable grasp of the science, at least enough to allow him to sound intelligent about it, although this sometimes appeared outrageous. Insisting on getting his own hands on the hardware, however, often presented comical, if not dangerous situations. His depth and hands on skill were considerably less than he himself seemed to understand.

Everyone who knew Andy, could tell you an "Andy" story. One did not have to exaggerate when telling such a story; just tell what actually happened. At the time most of the stories were being created, they were not funny; they were always more comical later when you could look back and see that everyone survived. One of my favorite stories occurred around 1969 after the team had made a trip from Arnold Air Force Station to NASA Langley Research Center to promote the work we were doing. During this period NASA had more government funding for research than the Air Force, and Andy's mission was to get some of it for our group (which he ultimately did).

We used an Air Force plane to fly four of us from the Air Force Base directly to Langley Field with the objective of convincing NASA that we could help solve the problem caused by air craft trailing vortices. After an apparently remarkable success at presenting our capabilities, Andy was feeling especially cocky ("feeling his oats") and decided to stop at the officers club to stock up on beer before heading back to our plane. Before the wheels were in the well, Andy was downing the beers one after another.

By the time we landed at Arnold AF Station, he was roaring drunk and getting louder and louder. We had a potential problem because we had to get him from the Air Field through two guard gates in order to get him home. That would have been much simpler if we could have kept him quiet. We sat in the car for a while waiting as he appeared to drift off to sleep. Just as we approached the first guard gate he roused and began demanding to see the Base Commanding General. He had decided that tonight he would "fire the general". It was as though he wanted to test the system to see how far he could push it. He was invincible, and not about to be quiet. Somehow he felt that his success at Langley should give him unlimited authority at Arnold. Regardless of how much we beckoned him to be quiet, he got louder and louder. As a compromise, we convinced him to sing one of the 10,000 drinking songs he knew. "My ole Sal, is a wonderful gal........". Just as he realized we were being successfully waved on by the guard he immediately began his "fire the General" routine yelling back to the officer, after discovered our diversion.

Some how we managed to pass through two inspections without being ordered out of the car by armed guards. To this day, I am not quite sure how. Maybe the guards knew him and forgave his antics.

Andy’s group and a few outsiders formed the company, Sci-Metrics, owned equally by a dozen people, to market technology that had been developed by the group. The problem with Sci-Metrics was that no one was willing to quit his secure job and take on the role of making the company succeed. This was a real mistake, and we missed a great opportunity, allowing at least a dozen multimillion dollar companies form and succeed based on the technology we had in our hands years earlier. I learned the lesson that a successful company is not likely to come out of a part time effort.

I left Andy’s nest and ventured into the world of business, joining a company called Science Applications International (SAIC). As a part of this move, I attempted to revive Sci-Metrics, and became president. SAIC had agreed to capitalize Sci-Metrics for part ownership and allow me to work in both companies. At best this was still an extremely difficult struggle. At one point, when money was short, and financial decisions became difficult, Andy and I had a strong disagreement about spending. When the argument became extremely, heated Andy somehow came to the conclusion that he, being treasurer of Sci-Metrics, would fire me, the company’s president, because I would not agree with him. I responded by firing him. We sat on two ends of the phone firing each other for the next half hour. Andy and I had finally wound up on two opposing sides of the fence. Out of frustration, I eventually sold my share of Sci-Metrics to the others, realizing by now that the company was destined for failure, because it still had no one totally dedicated to its success. (Sci-Metrics was disbanded about a year later. SAIC lost their entire investment in Sci-Metrics.)

Andy had more outstanding strengths than faults. He was an excellent writer, an accomplished tennis player, a legendary bridge player, a friend of many people in high places, and always the center of a whirlwind. While his difficulties with drink brought on many challenges, most of which he seemed to overcome, his chain smoking ultimately killed him.

Adventures with Kaleb

I have never been proud of my talents as a father, and I doubt any of my kids will ever credit me for bringing enlightenment to their lives. By the time I had grand children, I lived in a different state and managed a few minutes a year with them. In the year 2000, Kaleb came along under such unusual circumstances that I found it impractical to behave like I would imagine a typical grandfather should. Then after he was about two and a half years old I discovered what an amazing gift grandchildren can be. It has been said that grand children are the rewards God gives to parents for not killing their own children. 

I realize that all grand parents think their grand children are geniuses and unique in the world. Well Kaleb is one of the cases where this happens to be true. A few experiences gave me the incentive to begin a chronicle of experiences with Kaleb. 

Kaleb as a young child is like a sponge, learning both what parents want him to learn as well as what they would rather he had not. At the age of two, he had the vocabulary of a normal four year old. At three he was using advanced communication concepts, metaphors, and words normally understood only by grownups that he picked up from people surrounding him. I could carry on a rather interesting conversation with him.  

GrammyFan-One of Kaleb’s grandmothers is Ruthann. When she introduced herself as Granny Ruthann, he automatically translated this into a one word name, GrammyFan, which he called her from that day on. He had learned to argue by the age of three and to use some of the techniques he had learned from grownups. When, Ruthann caught him in the candy bowl once too often before a meal, she told him he could not have more candy because it was not good for him and it would ruin his dinner. His response came with a stern voice,  

“GrammyFan, I don't like the way you are talking."

 He had become somewhat puzzled by the arrangement of grand parents, mother, father, which had them passing him around between various houses. He would ask Ruthann why she picked him up each week. She told him that someday he would be as big as she was and that he would have children of his own, and then he would understand better. His response was that that he would never be able to eat enough to become as big as she was. 

Kaleb is a huge fan of Thomas the train. He has known all of the characters, colors, and most of the stories since he was two years old. Oftentimes when I would visit him, I would bring a new book to read with him, and he soon identified me as the book source. He enjoys sitting my lap as I read to him. On one occasion he was asleep when I arrived to visit, and he slept almost until the time I had to leave. When he woke, he immediately ran over to see what book I had brought, and ask me to read it. After reading it, as often happened, he then asked me, enthusiastically, to read it again.  At that point I told him that I had to leave. He then apprised me that he did not like the book and could just take it with me. I understood his communication completely.

Kaleb discovers his shadow.-When Kaleb was about three, I took for a walk in the bird sanctuary near my office. At one point I lofted him onto my shoulders and we walked along the lakes watching the birds. At some point I realized that he had discovered a definite correlation between his movement and that of his shadow; he was fascinated that he could make the shadow move at will. He then asked me what the thing on the ground was. He seemed satisfied with my explanation and giving it a name.

Kaleb encounters a Mountain Lion.-At the age of four on some of my visits with him we walked in the nearby San Joaquin bird sanctuary near the Orange County Airport, one of my usual walking spots. He loved the ducks, rabbits, squirrels, butterflies, and throwing rocks into the lakes. He walked about half the time and rode on my shoulders when "My legs are too tired to walk anymore." After a few minutes on my shoulders he would, fortunately, spot something that would require him to get down and walk a while. 

On July 4, 2004 we were walking along Pond 5, Kaleb on my shoulder nearing a long wooden bridge that crosses one of the wet marshes. He had just told me he wanted down to run along the bridge.  

Suddenly, to my great surprise, a larger mountain lion crossed the path in front of us. "Oh, my God,” I said. "That was a mountain lion." Generally mountain lions don't like people and do not approach them. In nearly 30 years in California, I had not seen one before this day.

 At that moment, Kaleb quickly said, "Grand Dad", my legs are still too tired to walk."

(Summer 2004)

Kaleb's language antics are always a joy to experience. He loves to use "Grown up" words and concepts, and he gets them right with amazing regularity after hearing them used just once. GrammyFan took him to visit his dad at Starbucks. As always, Jon would pull something special from the pastry cabinet for him. He was four years old and sitting with a beautiful slice of chocolate cake. GrammyFan was eying this cake with envy. The cake was larger than a four year old should eat.  "Oh, how good just one bite would be!" she thought.

When she asked Kaleb, he quickly refused even just a single bite. She tried to explain to him how sharing was a nice thing to do. He looked at her pensively, and then responded. "Last night, you would not play cars with me, GrammyFan, so I should not share this cake with you now. And then he added, "Can you appreciate that?"

He commented that sometimes his mother, 'Mimi' got angry with him, when he didn't do what she wanted him to do. "That is very frustrating", he explained.

Comments like these coming from a 4 year old always turns heads.

Kaleb is a great fan of Thomas the Train. He has most of the engines, tracks, and people, and he knows them all. I usually take a book when I visit Kaleb, and when possible, I pick up a Thomas book, because I know that will get his attention. In England, where Thomas originated, new Thomas game books appear on the newsstand every "fortnight". In August, 2004, I appeared on a visit with Kaleb with book in hand. We went through each page with Kaleb working out the puzzles. On three pages, arithmetic was introduced by adding and subtracting engines, people, and objects. Kaleb was quite familiar with addition, but he had not been exposed to subtraction. He picked up the concept quickly and seemed fascinating with the concept of "minus".

Attached to the book was a game in which train pieces move around the board according to numbers on a spinner for each turn. At one point when my spin would have taken me past Kaleb's piece, he quickly objected, explaining that he must stay in front in order to win. The same thing happened again when GrammyFan's piece had earned a pass of Kaleb's piece. We couldn't help but laugh, not really knowing how to handle his requirement to win. He then loudly objected, stating, "THAT IS NOT FUNNY!" I made some attempt without success of explaining that while winning is good, everyone cannot always win. He was not able to grasp that concept, however, because, "He always wins."

Kris and Jimmy Stories

The infamous ghost story On family outings, especially camp outs or night cookouts it became customary at some point to tell a ghost story. I had known a few legitimate ghost stories, but quickly used them up and began to make up stories. Eventually a standard formula developed and the story became more ritual and predictable, finally developing family tradition status. Stories varied in content, but the formula placed the supposedly true story at a place in the very location where we were at the moment. It contained brain eating, guts, skinning alive, smashing bones and such mayhem, and it always contained someone who lived in the area being horribly wronged. That person appeared each year to replay the mayhem on the same evening and that just happened to be this very evening.

One of the stories became so traditional that its ending was adopted by all of us almost as a greeting. In the story the ghost sneaks up behind someone, and just before mayhem sets in, kicks his victim in the rear. When it first started, this part of the story would find me standing beside one of the listeners and I would kick them from behind with a swift leg motion, which, I would quickly vow on my Boy Scout's honor, was not me. Before long most of the listeners began to forego the story, skip to the end, and attempt to be the kicker instead of the kickee.

Organizing Jimmy's and Kris' toys    

Our three-level home had a large family room on the lower level complete with fireplace, wet bar and a huge storage box, which had become packed to the top with toys, many of which were broken and rarely used.

Finally, one day, realizing that most of the stuff in the box was junk, which served only to clutter up the house when kids insisted on emptying everything in the box in search of something magic, I decided to toss out most of the toys, many of which were broken anyway. I had a large trash can that was quickly becoming filled with broken and useless toys that I knew were just taking up space. Kris began to observe this activity with great concern and she wanted to know what I was doing. I told her, "I am organizing these toys so you can play with them better."

She stepped back and continued to watch with concern until finally she stepped forward again and pleaded with me. "Daddy, please don't 'organize' my dolls."

Singing in the Rain  

Kris and Jimmy and I spent many pleasurable hours walking the woods, canoeing, caving, and camping around Tullahoma. Now I realize that I was too much a friend and not enough parent to them.

One day Kris (about four years old) and I lay on the hood of my car, looking up at the sky and enjoying the autumn weather when it started to rain. Kris said, "Daddy, it's raining. We are going to get wet."

My response was, "Yeah, we are if we stay here. How about we stay here and enjoy the rain?"

She thought that was the coolest thing she had ever heard, and we both lay there looking up into the rain until we got soaking wet. Later on she told me how me how much fun it was. She then told me, "I love mommy more than you, but you are much funner."

I called him Jimbo and eventually he began calling me Daddybo. Jimmy and I wrestled and played a lot rougher as he grew. We also had various missile games where we would launch missiles at each other. Each would try and convince the other that a launched missile was merely a weather satellite and should be disregarded, until, of course the missile after being disregarded was quickly and covertly converted into a nuclear bomb that completely destroyed its target.

Along with wrestling, we often sang the various theme songs to action cartoons such as Batman and Superman.  Sometimes the wrestling got a little too rough and Jimbo would become angry and attack seriously and fiercely. To my great amusement, even though the play had become serious, it was still accompanied by the Batman theme song, as though that aided the attack.

Jonathan Stories

Jonathan's big swim 

We were enjoying the marvels of Yosemite, two families, three cousins, two sisters and husbands, Ruth, Sandy, Roger, Jim, Jonathan, Kandy, and Christopher. The party had moved to a picnic area along the Merced River, with icy waters running through the park. We had moved to a picnic ground that was located on an elevated level that sloped gently to a flat, rocky shallow shoal about a hundred feet away. After the shoal the water got deeper nearer the picnic ground and swimmers could jump from the picnic area into a deep part of the river, about a ten foot drop.

At first we walked to the shoal and the kids began tossing rocks in the water. Jonathan, who was not yet three at the time, still in diapers, was having a great  time with his two cousins Kandy and Christopher, who were five and six years old. We left them standing on the rocky shoal while we unloaded the car, set up the picnic table and began preparing food. Both Christopher and Kandy were fascinated with Jonathan, especially since his size made them feel like grownups themselves. We could see them throwing one rock after the other into the river.

We must  have carelessly taken our eyes off the three children longer than we should, for what seemed to happen suddenly was that Kandy and Christopher were standing beside the picnic table and Jonathan was nowhere in sight. As panic and shock began to set in, time seemed to stand still. Jonathan was not on the shoal or anywhere else, and Kandy and Christopher appeared completely uninvolved and unsure why everyone was asking "Where is Jonathan?”  Suddenly, through the trees someone pointed to a white object floating in the middle of the river, which was deep at that point but still rather swift with the object visibly moving down the river at a fair clip.

We all seemed paralyzed and confused, almost frozen, like in some kind of painting, until suddenly the air was filled with a scream that I have never forgotten. It was loud, guttural, horrible, anguished, terrifying, all the words cannot describe. Sandy's scream galvanized the entire picnic ground into action with everyone running to the water's edge. I began to wade into the water as the object, which now was clearly recognizable as Jonathan's diaper (with him in it) floating on his back passed by. Before I could resolve how to get to him, a complete stranger standing on the cliff dived head first, came up to the river's surface exactly where Jonathan was, and scooped him up from the water. He quickly swam to me and handed him to me as I stood in two feet deep water.

Jonathan was completely limp and seemed not to be breathing. Holding him face down with one hand under his stomach I raced to the shore and lay him on his back in Ruth's arms. Someone shouted "Does anyone know CPR?" Ruth began very calmly talking to Jonathan and soon he opened his eyes and began breathing. Within a few minutes he was almost normal.

We lay him on the car seat and thanked the universe for sparing our son. His rescuer came to the car and asked if he was okay. In the state of anguish I was in I could only express my thanks so much and I regret to this day that I was not alert enough to get the name of the young man who saved Jonathan's life. If some day this reaches that young man, I hope he will contact me again.

That night as I lay in bed in our cabin, I had finally come out of the state of shock, but neither Ruth nor I slept a single wink. The horror of seeing one's child floating down the river never leaves entirely.

We never learned exactly what happened that day; it all happened so fast. Jonathan remembers tossing a rock into the water and doing a somersault into the river. He believes that he simply held his breath from that moment until he was back on shore. This could have been no more that a minute, although it seemed like forever. 

Jonathan and the Mystery of the Missing Socks-While Jonathan was still in high school, he and I often wore the same kind of white sport socks, made by Champion, purchased in sixpacks at CostCo. This led to a neverending conflict because he never seemed to have any clean ones and  he would take mine from my bedroom.  That would have been okay, except he wore them around the house and even outdoors without any shoes, so the bottoms quickly deteriorated and became hopelessly soiled and dark. I probably screamed at him more for taking my socks than anything else.

Regardless of how many new packs I bought for him and myself, the problem would never go away. I think I must have bought a hundred packs tryiing to fix the problem. I even marked all my socks with a magic marker and dared him to take them. He did.

Some years later after Jon had left I was cleaning out his closet and decided to  take a look into the attic which could be accessed from his closet. As I lifted the trap door and shined a light into the darkness, my eyes fell upon a very strange and enlightening sight. There scattered across the rafters in the attic were hundreds of dirty  white socks. Washing them had become too great a chore.

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