We are the Ed Sullivan generation. What I mean is that more than any other generation we were exposed to all sorts of culture and entertainment through the magical medium of television. For instance how many people up to tour time had seen an Opera at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City? Ed Sullivan Show had Met Stars on all most every Sunday and when PBS came along we were put into a front row set at the Met for a real full-length Opera at the Met. Do you remember the day the world was changed by four mop top boys from Liverpool, it happened in our living rooms. The argument can be made that with the Internet culture of our kids today they have faster access to more cultural activities and more entertainment than we could possibly have ever dreamed of. There is one catch to that, we were a captive audience, there was only four TV channels and the great outdoors. The Internet is so vast and so full of the information and life but you have to go search for it. Most kids today well grab a video game and they're gone for hours. They don't get the exercise that they need. You see sometimes you have to be force fed things like the opera, books and plays that kids aren't really interested in today. Where we had no choice to either watch Ed Sullivan show or Lawrence Welk or go outside.unfortunately the Internet genie is out of the bottle and there over 300 channels TV channels of absolutely nothing fit to watch. I long for the days of the Wonderful World Walt Disney or for Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. I even remember the days when families had picnics together, if nowhere else at Charjean Park. Also, though it's hard to imagine, our parents taught us stuff like how to use a hand saw, a hammer. My grandmother once even taught me how to bake biscuits. I know all of us have grandchildren now so remember how those memories are the ones you cherish, so please don't forget to pass them on. It is your culture and their birth rite. 

I woke up in my small bed room, jumped to my feet realizing it was Saturday. I had to get ready quickly before the rest of our gang left me behind. We were going rabbit hunting in the fields between the expressway and our houses. The grass grew taller than we were by several feet. We would mash down the grass into squares sort of like crop circles to make our forts. We were pretending that we were in the jungles of Borneo. Of course, none of us knew exactly where Borneo was and the rabbits we were hunting were the tigers that threatened our village. Surprisingly enough there were quite a large number of rabbits there and we would hunt them in several packs in various directions hoping we might actually get one and have it for dinner. Luckily enough for the rabbit, they were smarter than a seven year old and we never seemed to catch one of them. As usual this day, we had no luck in our tiger hunt so we decided to walk over to Ketchum and all the way down Ketchum to where it ended past all the houses and go over into Nonconnah, the heart of the African delta, or at least as close you can get to it in Memphis. I know this sounds childish but to young boy growing up in Memphis, this was exploring the wild world at its best. There was a river, lakes, and marshland with all kinds of beasties. We found crawfish, rabbits, squirrels, possums, raccoons and fish. We did our best to rid our communities of these varments, but luckily for them, we had no clue how to do it, but we had the greatest time of our lives trying. If our parents had known that we had gone underneath the viaducts, past the expressway, into the Nonconnah creek area, we wouldn’t have been able to sit down for weeks, so we swore ourselves to silence so we could enjoy the best time of our lives. When we weren’t interested in hunting, we would grab our bikes, towels from the linen cabinet, and bandit masks and play Batman and Robin throughout the green apple orchard at the end of Durby before you got to Charjean Park. We would dig ditches as if we were trying to build the Panama Canal and Mrs. Miller would make us cover them up because the little kids would fall into them and kill themselves. The little kids were always ruining our fun. The green apple trees were always fun to climb, they weren’t extremely high, the branches were sturdy and far apart. I don’t know how long the apple orchard had been abandoned, but they seemed to have been there forever until they were bulldozed under for the new Junior High School, but they were one of the greatest sources of summer fun while they lasted, not to mention the occasional stomach aches. It was the time of the original G.I. Joe and every one of us guys on the street had one. We played war as if our lives and our community depended no us and G.I. Joe was tough and strong and never let us down, until all the girls brought out their Barbie dolls, and G.I. Joe melted at their feet. The truth is, we were astonished that the girls really wanted to associate with us. Those times were so innocent and pure that we explored every avenue of making them less innocent and less pure with no concept of why. Most of us now would love to recapture those innocent days for our grandchildren. I feel sorry for them that they don’t have the Borneo jungle field of grass and the Nonconnah African river delta, not to mention the green apple forest of no return to enhance their childhood imaginations as we did. I have heard people say that there is magic when neighborhoods become extended families and Hogwarts has nothing on the castle of Charjean.

Okay, I've been asked how I met my wife and how I became a world traveler. So here goes - (Part 1). I know that the story of how I met my wife is kind of farfetched, but it is true. I had divorced my first wife and I had the bills to prove it.In the summer of 1979 I took a part-time job with the Howard Johnson's on Elvis Presley Blvd. to help make ends meet. I was a bellhop and the driver of the hotel’s van. I would pick up guests from the airport which included pilots and stewardesses and especially tourists from all over the United States and the world coming to see Elvis Presley's home, Graceland. This was just two years after Elvis’s death. There were several women that came to Memphis from New York in a group and they were staying at the Howard Johnson’s Hotel. They complained that there was no way for them to be able to find all of the Elvis related sites in Memphis and, since I was extremely bored because I had moved back with my parents on Durby and really had nothing to do, I volunteered to take them to some of the sites that they otherwise would not get to see. That evening, after we had explored the Elvis sites, we went back to Graceland and, as they were browsing around, I noticed that they had a book called the gates of Graceland which was written by one of Elvis's cousins, Harold, who was a guard at the gates of Graceland. As I was asking him if he would autograph their copies of his book there came a loud commotion on the curb in front of the gates. He excused himself and went to see what the disturbance was. I followed him out of curiosity and I saw a young man that had his boots in his hand. He drew back with one of the boots, hitting Harold across the temple. Harold fell onto the curb and was hurt and trying to keep his gun covered so the assailant would not be able to access it. The young man drew back the boot again like he was about to strike Harold, whose head was on the concrete, again. I just could not let this happen. He was a friend of mine and I could not let someone hurt him. I pushed the assailant into the street doing a spinning reverse side kick and a back fist. The kick surprised him but I don't think it hurt him much. The back fist hit it’s mark across his temple and down he went. He got up and threw his boots at me and took off running. I followed him onto Elvis Presley Blvd. after I found out that they had called the police and had found out that Harold was OK. I kept my distance but kept him in sight. A squad car pulled alongside of me and asked what seemed to be the trouble. I told the officer that the two guys in front of me were who he was looking for. He pulled over to the curb in front of them and put both of them in the squad car. The one young man had not participated in the verbal altercation in the beginning that caused the guard to go down to see what the commotion was about, nor was he a participant in the assault, so the police let him go. They arrested the assailant. Now that all this was over, the ladies invited me to dinner as a payment for taking them around town. One of the ladies had a son about my age and we got along well, so I decided I would take them up on their offer and went with them to the Howard Johnson's Restaurant. We saw these two pretty young girls, set behind us. I poked the young man in the side and asked him to help me get their attention by talking about the fight at Graceland. I really have no recollection of what we said but it got the girls attention. Ann and Ursula were the two girls and they started talking with us because they had witnessed the whole incident. They were standing inside the gates up the hill. Ann was a tall skinny blonde girl that had an Ann Murray style haircut which a lot of girls had at the time. Ursula was shorter and very curvaceous, with curly short dark brown hair and I had noticed that she had one green eye and one Hazel colored eye. This intrigued me and she was extremely cute. So I asked what they were doing the next day and they told me they were going to a concert at Ellis Auditorium downtown that was for all of the Elvis fans in town. I didn't have a ticket so there was no way that I could follow her there so I believe I arranged to meet her later that evening. Needless to say, by the end of that week I was smitten. After they left for home, I wrote both her and Ann. Ann wrote back but Ursula didn't. I didn't think much more about it.
By the summer of 1980, I had gone to work at Tom Bell Chevrolet doing miscellaneous automotive and automotive electrical work. This particular day, I had gone to lunch just a little early and when I came back there was a white Z28 Camaro with an orange stripe and Canadian tags in my stall. The passenger side door was open. I looked at the car closely because I knew it looked like Ann’s car from the summer before and, if it had Ontario Canada plates, it would’ve had to have been her car. I was getting a tad bit excited wondering if it could possibly be Ann and if Ursula would be with her? Looking at my work order, I noticed that the passenger door window was the problem. The passenger door was the one that was open and the window would not work from either the driver’s or the passenger side and it was a Canadian made car for Canada so it had no air conditioning. It was about 100° in the shade in Memphis at that time and expected to get hotter. So who's ever car it was needed the window to work. I found it was the switch on the passenger side had shorted out causing it not to work. I replaced the switch and the window rolled up and down from both the driver’s and passenger side. The reason I explained that it was the passenger’s side window was because it would have been Ursula's window and, sure enough, into the dealership walked the two young girls that I had met last summer, Ann and Ursula. I'm a firm believer in fate and this coincidence was, in my opinion, fate. I went up to them excitedly saying to Ann “how are you doing and, I'm sorry, I don't remember your name” speaking to Ursula because my feelings were still smarting from no response to my letters. We all remarked what an amazing coincidence it was us meeting like this again. This summer I had no intentions of letting her get out of my sight and we did everything together. By the end of that week we both were smitten and she was complaining about how this relationship could not work, there was too much distance between us. We did keep in contact for at least half the winter and then it kind of went away.
The next summer, Rick Sparks and I were working on his racecar and had started racing yet at West Memphis Arkansas. One early evening after finishing the race, Sherry Waters went ahead of us to open the gates into my parents backyard where we parked the racecar because Rick’s house had no place to store it. When we got there she stopped us immediately and said that the two girls that I had met at the hotel, where she and I both had worked at that time, had driven by the house. So I took this is another sign and went looking for them. Of course I did find and we spent that summer not just getting smitten with each other but falling deeply in love. Later that year, I and a young man Ann had met that summer drove up to Canada to see them and again everything with Ursula was magic. I could not believe that a beautiful girl was so into me. No other girl had ever cared that much and I could feel that it was the best relationship I had ever had. I was scared as to what my family would think and excited also to tell them about her. My family was always negative about everything but somehow not this time. Unfortunately I had to ask her to marry me over the phone, long distance relationship you know. So that Christmas I took my first airplane ride. Notice I said my first airplane ride ever and went to propose to her in person. I racked my brain for something to do that might be romantic and, being a man, I decided what if I had one big tin can that had several smaller tin cans that she would have to open with a can opener to get to her engagement ring. I thought it was romantic, problem being she didn't know we needed a can opener and I didn't bring one with me so it took a while before she could see that I was serious. Just to let you know, she did say yes and we were engaged on New Year’s Eve 1981 and were married July 17, 1982. If you don’t already know it, that was an historic date, Disneyland opened it’s gates for the very first time on July 17th, 1955.
Stay tuned for Part 2 and how I became a world traveler.