I have to tell you I never had considered the fact that anyone else had never tried a tomato sandwich. We called them mater sandwiches when I was a kid.  The tomatoes taste slightly different at various times of the year. Hothouse tomatoes and various types of tomatoes also taste different but I have to say the tomatoes that we got locally in Memphis were the best tasting tomatoes for the tomato sandwich of any place I’ve ever lived, so I didn’t eat them all that much after I had moved away, till one day I tried a slice of tomato from the ugliest tomatoes I had ever seen and they work perfect. I asked my wife if she wanted one and she said she’d never tried one. I was shocked that after 32 years I had never introduced her to a tomato sandwich. I had introduced her to fried green tomatoes and fried okra but I had let her down by not introducing her to the most delicious southern delicacy known to man. 

Of course, a lot of people may differ in their technique in preparing a tomato sandwich but here’s how I do it.  It has to be the regular white bread that we got as kids and real mayonnaise spread on the bread thickly, two generous slices of tomato a quarter inch thick are better and salted generously and then enjoyed to your heart’s content.  I never knew how lucky I was living in Memphis and enjoying the cuisine that Memphis had to offer.  I have always attributed the variety of delicious foods to the fact that Memphis is dead center of the south and was a major artery for the native Americans along the Mississippi River that early British, Irish and Spanish settlers and French Canadians used when fleeing from the tyranny of the British in Canada to Louisiana.  Because of the cotton plantations all around Memphis there were abundant slaves that brought their cuisine from Africa as well. I even think that my wife’s German family recipes influenced my cooking talents. So to summarize, we had the best of the Native American influence, the French Canadian influence, the Spanish influence and the African influence, and the best of these influences on our food in Memphis.  I don’t want to leave out the British and the Irish influence on the food that we know as Memphis cuisine.  I thoroughly believe that our mothers were influenced in some way by all of the blending of the cultural foods that passed through Memphis on its way south or west.  I have no proof of this other than to give you certain examples like a southern buttermilk biscuit. Where do you think the Southerners got the recipe for the southern biscuit?  I will give you my assumption by asking you to look at the recipes of the Scottish scone.  They mirror the southern biscuits in many ways. With a couple of exceptions they are identical.  Those exceptions are things that would have been difficult for the early Southern settlers to find, so the mothers and wives of the early settlers would have had to adapt and change the recipe to what they had on hand.  The same could be said of all of the ethnic cultures that passed through Memphis and there is some similarity to all of the foods that we serve on our tables today to all of the cultures and cuisines that were a great part in making up what I call Memphis fixin’s. 

My family came from farmers, wheel rites and trades people, but I think the earliest of my family were farmers and had pigs that they would raise to sell the better parts of meat to the butchers but they would keep things like the legs and feet, the head and the ribs that the butchers could not sell to those that could afford to buy their meat at a store.  Now you find such things like ribs and pig knuckles, ham hocks and other such meats that the farmers would make meals for their families with.  One of the biggest restaurants in Memphis that’s known worldwide serves the best dry rub ribs in the world.  If it had not been for the fact that the farmers could not sell these parts of the pig to the butchers, we might not have had the barbecued ribs that most of us love today.  So much of our culture has been blended and processed into what we know now.  I know all of you have had smoked or sugar cured ham and a biscuit for breakfast or you had biscuits and gravy. 

It’s kind of funny when you travel the United States and look at what the restaurants serve for breakfast and I’m gonna pick biscuits and gravy to make my example. I have seen in the western states that they use brown gravy made with either cornstarch or some other type of thickener for biscuits and gravy.  In the deep south, it’s what we call sawmill gravy which is grease flour and water, spiced with pork sausage mixed in to make the gravy.  As you travel up into the north east, it is just flour, salt, pepper and grease that makes up the gravy.  To give you a taste of East Tennessee cuisine, one of the main dishes that seems to have been a staple in the mountains of Tennessee is white beans and onions served together with cornbread and they don’t seem to use any other spices for their beans and onions.  I have to say that the restaurants and your tables in your homes serve way better food than you get here and like I’ve said to many people, you can’t get better food than you get in Memphis.  I even remember a place in Memphis on Park Avenue, I think, where they had a restaurant called the Barbecue Palace where you could get anything and everything barbecued and I don’t mean grilled on a grill, which brings up another interesting tidbit, in Canada if you put it on a grill that makes it barbecue and I’m not sure whether their wrong or I’m wrong but, to me, you can grill anything without it being barbecue. It’s the preparation and the sauce that makes it barbecue.  At the Barbecue Palace you could get their sample platter which had barbecued bologna, barbecued ham, barbecued beef brisket, barbecued pork shoulder pulled or chopped, and it even had barbecued spam which, from what I understand, is a Hawaiian delicacy. 

I really loved remembering the end of this school year picnics that we had at Charjean. All of our mothers would get together and make their most famous dishes trying to outdo one another and we, their children, would get the most marvelous meals ever created.  I remember the sweets, the meats, the vegetables, prepared in their family recipes for all of us to enjoy.  Our mothers did way much, much more than I have ever seen since those days for the parties that we had at school than they do today.  I can just smell the sugar cured ham that they prepared the way that their families had done for years. The aroma would just burst your taste buds wide open. 

They even went all out when we just made hamburgers and hot dogs with special mustards that they personally made, the ingredients that they put into the hamburgers and, one time, one mother even made the buns homemade herself. Who does that today?  I do still bake my own bread at times and there is nothing like homemade bread.  When we sat down to a meal at my house there was always either homemade biscuits or homemade corn bread and even sometimes there would be homemade yeast rolls.  My mother was not necessarily a baker when it comes to making homemade bread but my grandmother was and, Oh, what bread she made.  There are two smells in this world that will bring me to tears almost immediately because I remember my mother and my grandmother through those smells. One of them was homemade bread baking and the other was homemade fresh apple pie baking.  We lived right behind the apple orchard that later became Airways Junior High School and we could pick as many apples as we could take home and they were the green apples that I personally think make the absolute best pies because the blending of that tart sweet and cinnamon flavors along with the homemade pie crust were the most heavenly taste, well almost.

I personally think that the old cranked homemade ice creams that all of us were used to were absolutely the defining moment in sweet treats. 

I know all of you have your favorites and I’m sure they were passed down from one family to another or your spouse brought them into your family and it could even be possible that you picked them up from your neighbors or friends.  Food has defined the south as long as I can remember and I think that southern cooks have always been willing to experiment and adapt to their surroundings with new and exotic flavors.  If you are like me, I still long for the foods that my mother and grandmother made and that the ladies of our neighborhoods prepared for us when we were kids. 

Save Your Heritage

I have said this time and time again to all of you, any one that reads my posts you need to start writing down everything that you remember for your children your grandchildren and your great grandchildren.  The reason I am saying this is because I was too busy living my life to ask the questions I needed to two have found out where I came from and who my family are really was.  I have traced back my family tree to the early 1600s, both sides came from England to the United States.  But knowing the statistics is different than knowing who they were what they did.  I am a believer in the fact that what you’re family was, is what you now are. It is so disappointing when you have nothing to go by to try and trace your family tree.  So if you have parents, aunts, uncles,  grandparents, still living take the time I beg of you take the time to ask those questions that you will need to know to pass your heritage down to your descendants.  So once again I beg of you please start writing these things down and if you have older relatives still living record their voices or even better video the interview about your heritage for posterity.  The picture I’m going to add is from sometime around 1901-1902 of my grandmother who is the little baby in my great grandmother’s lap.

Through the Mirror to Graceland

I’ve made no secret my entire life of the fact that I liked early rock and roll. My musical heroes were Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Bill Haley and the Comets, Fats Domino, Chubby Checker, Jerry Lee Lewis and many others, but there was one young man that made the largest impact of anyone in music history on me and eventually on my life.  He came from the same area in Mississippi that my parents came from and there were even rumblings from my late relatives that we were kin to the Smith family on my mother’s mother’s side, just like everyone else that I grew up with.  His background was from sharecroppers, just like my family’s background from Mississippi was. What else can I say. I was always looking up to my greatest American dream, Elvis Aaron Presley.  He grew up in the same city that I grew up in, Memphis, Tennessee, and when he became famous, his home was just five miles from my house.

Being from Memphis, I had seen Elvis from time to time at Graceland, in concert and riding Star, his horse, at Graceland.  I even saw him once in his wife Priscilla’s white Stutz Bearcat pulling in to the gates of Graceland. I know that most of you might not understand the thrill of this poor little Memphis boy seeing his idol up close.

When I was in my teens, around 1974, I worked for a glass company part time and, one time, I was helping deliver mirrors that had been cut in some strange shapes and I didn’t understand why. Most mirrors that we cut were square or rectangular but all of these mirrors were cut at an angle on the top and the bottom and I could not figure out why until we arrived in front of his house on Highway 51, aka, 3734 Elvis Presley Boulevard.  I was starting to get excited as I realized that, just maybe, we would get to see him. Believe it or not, when we started to pull the mirrors off the truck, the older gentleman with me asked someone where they wanted the mirrors delivered and a small wiry gentleman said “wait just a minute”, and sure enough, dressed in a sweat suit with a towel around his neck, with his hair disheveled, he said “OK, you can just put them over there in that building” which I knew to be his Fan Club office.  Wow, Elvis had actually spoken too us! At least that’s how I perceived it. I believe these were the mirrors that ended up on the main staircase of Graceland.

I used to say that that was my only claim to fame, but I have had many more encounters with greatness since that day. One of the biggest thrills of my life was seeing a beautiful young woman on the hillside beside the driveway, under one of those very tall trees, just up from the gates of Graceland in August of 1979. We met because of Elvis. She was a fan and came to see where he had lived and wanted to walk where he walked. I know that y’all may think I’m crazy, but I think very possibly being drawn to Graceland was what led me to meet the love of my life.  So nowadays, I am more than grateful to Elvis for his wonderful effect on my life. If it weren’t for Elvis, I would never have met my wife. Our 35^th anniversary of the day we met is coming up this August. Thanks Elvis!

It's only Rock N Roll but I like it

I have seen on my time line here recently a couple of comments about the fact that the music we grew up with was the best.  My wife and I totally agree. The music from the 1960s up to the 1980s was altogether different than the music that you hear today. The innocence that the music had and even the adult themes were more subliminal than spoken.  The groups and the singers from the bands from our era had their own specific individual sound, even the songs on their album’s had their own individual sound, not like the songs of today that have all the computerized echo and special effects mastered into them for these newer artists that can’t hold a tune.  I once saw a video of various artists singing Happy Birthday and the absolute worst one of them all was Justin Bieber. He couldn’t carry the tune.  I don’t mean to pick on any one individual artist of today, but very few of them don’t use all of the enhancements that modern recording provides in their music that our generation of artists were not able to use because it didn’t exist.  The computer age seems to have brought forth a generation of singers that are not of the caliber of our generation’s singers because the computer wasn’t around to make them sound good, they sounded great on their own. 

Now, you take a band like the Beatles, every single person, John, Paul George and Ringo have all been award winning vocalists.  I can’t believe that the kids of today think that some of these artists they listen to wrote some of the greatest songs to ever hit the radio when it was the artists of our day that wrote them.  I have seen some pretty good covers of songs that came from our era and a few really good songs from today’s artists, but when you try to listen to their albums there’s only one song on their whole albut that’s worth its weight and who’s going to pay for 10 songs when you’re only getting one that is worth listening too.  Yes, I’m an old fuddy duddy, but my bands are better than theirs.  Pick up an old album from the 1960s to the 1970s and you would be hard pressed to find only one song that you liked. Most of the albums had 10 great songs on them.  

 All of these “make a star” shows that are on television have only produced a couple of artists that can stand the test of time and I must admit those artists are pretty good but where are the rest of them.  A group like Sawyer Brown which was an extremely good group who won Star Search but is no longer around today. It’s almost impossible in this day and age for a group or any individual to make it in the industry as the Beatles and other groups did in the early sixties.  They developed their craft for several years before they hit it big and/or found the right producer to ever even get noticed.  The people at the top of the music industry are using these young people up so fast that it’s impossible for them to last. Yes I am blaming the way the record industry is run today on the lack of great talent and using what good talent they have up too quickly and they’re getting burned completely up before their time.  Even country music is now so homogenized and synthesized that it’s not funny.

Like Elvis once said in Jailhouse Rock, “I don’t sound like nobody”. I know everyone’s trying to find the next Alabama or the next Reba McEntire, but they seem to all sound exactly the same. The female artists sound like one another, not like in our day when you could’ve heard Dolly Parton who sounds like no one else I’ve ever heard or Linda Ronstadt who just received an award from the President a United States. It also has been said that our music is good and the younger generation’s music is bad. I personally cannot agree with that argument because the younger generation’s is just not music, most of it.  The groups from our day played music that is still in major demand today, just listen to Slacker, or Jango or Pandora.  I wonder where all the music of today will be 60 years from now when they really do let the dogs out, woof, woof, woof.  Not that I really care what happens to their music, excuse me, their talking on a record. 

I always thought that the music would get better in the future but it has digressed rather than bringing a lovely art form to a higher level.  Names like Elvis Presley,  the Everly Brothers, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Monkeys, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Mama’s and the Papas, the Righteous Brothers, Donovan, Cat Stevens, the Grateful Dead, Elton John, BJ Thomas, Barry Manilow and so, so many more names will live in the annals of rock history, it is impossible to name them all here. 

I want to know who it was that decided rap should be included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  I guess that’s what we get for allowing a city that’s only claim to rock and roll fame was that a DJ from there supposedly coined the phrase rock and roll which, if the truth be told, was lifted from black artists in the 1930’s and 1940’s.  This brings me to my pet peeve, even though there can be made a substantial argument against Memphis, Tennessee being the birthplace of rock and roll, but without the blues and rhythm and blues which were definitely born from the Delta area that ran from Mississippi all the way up into Memphis, Tennessee and the acceptance of a young swivel hipped white boy from Tupelo, Mississippi recording his brand of music on the Sun label in Memphis, Tennessee, there would have been no rock and roll as we know it.  Whether you like that fact or not, it is absolutely a fact and whoever it was that decided that Cleveland was the rock and roll capital of the United States should be tarred and feathered and run out of the country on a rail while they play Johnny B. Goode.  I personally give the early rhythm and blues black artists the credit for starting a style of music that was blended with gospel and country music to become what we know as rock and roll.  And yes, Memphis really is the Home of Rock and Roll.

The Band

We had an extremely good band at Airways Junior High School in Memphis, Tennessee.  I remember my parents buying me my alto saxophone.  I was so proud. It was golden, shiny and made a lot of noise.  I remember the first day I sat beside this feisty little short haired girl named Sheila. She was also an alto saxophone and she even had the same brand of saxophone I did.  We had the most wonderful band room I had ever seen.  It had soundproof practice rooms in the back of the class just behind the band podium. That’s right, we had a stair step podium for our band and Mr. Knapp would stand in front of this and direct.  I notice the first year he had earplugs in and I can’t say that I blame him. We were pretty bad that first year, but by the middle of our second year, the Airways Junior High School Boosters Club had bought us uniforms.  You couldn’t have found a happier group of kids. We thoroughly loved to our band. It made us feel alive and creative. 

Speaking of being creative, I loved Neil Young’s album “After the Gold Rush” and I brought it in one day for Mr. Knapp and our French horn player to hear. There is a part in After the Gold Rush that I thoroughly loved and I knew it had the sound of a French horn but different somehow.  Mr. Knapp explained to us that the French horn could double as a B flat instrument as well. I think even our French horn player (I wish I could remember everybody in the band’s name but I just can’t) was also shocked,  but we trusted our band director and teacher and he took the album and made an arrangement for us to play After the Gold Rush.  I don’t know if everyone did but I do know that the French horn player and I both practiced together over and over and over again until we got this particular piece of music the way we liked it. I won’t say it was perfect because, unfortunately, I don’t think I was that good but I wasn’t bad and neither was our band. There were some pretty great players in our band and we even went to a band contest sort of like Haley Mills did in “The Trouble With Angels” (that’s a movie if you didn’t know and you really should watch it).  But back to my story, at this band contest we didn’t finish first by any means but, if I remember correctly, we didn’t finish last either.  Before that year ended we talked it over with Mr. Knapp and we had a band summer school. Oh my goodness, how much better a way to spend your summer than to go to band camp.  Oh my, that sounded extremely nerdy didn’t it?  So who cares anyway. We may not have improved a whole lot but we loved every minute of it. Our Senior year we had improved enough that they allowed us to play at a Pep Rally.

I have to tell you a story about a young man named Ralph who played drums. He had to be an extremely good sport because we would play pranks on him at band camp all summer long and he loved it.  I remember one time Mr. Knapp told us to make the motions of playing but not to produce any sound at all and we did it.  We all pretended to be playing and he pretended to be directing a band that was playing. At first, Ralph was confused and Mr. Knapp was yelling “where’s the percussion, we have to have percussion”. Ralph wasn’t playing in the beginning and after a few seconds Ralph started playing his part but I don’t think we let it go on too long and we let him in on the joke.  We would take a short break every day from our practicing and playing but one day Ralph was late coming back from break so we all hid in the band director’s office and in the soundproof practice rooms.  Ralph finally came in and he yelled “where is everybody at” and then he left for just a few seconds and came right back. He exclaimed “no one’s here” and he left again and was gone for a few minutes. He must have gone to the lunchroom to see if everyone was still in there and, of course, we weren’t.  Someone heard him say “I guess they decided to call it a day, I’ll go call mom”.  Oh no, should we let him call his mom and get her all the way out here when we still had at least some of our of band practice left.  No, someone’s got to go stop him from calling his mom.  In those days no one had a cell phone and I do mean no one. They weren’t invented yet.  So a couple of the guys ran as hard as they could to try and stop him before he could call his mom.  It was too late. They could not find him so we all started searching the whole school. We all returned to the band room and there he was, sitting in Mr. Knapp’s chair and laughing his head off because he had turned the tables, the joke was now on us. Then we finished the day’s practice.

I know this is going to sound strange to most of you but I enjoyed being in that band much more than I enjoyed being a football player or playing baseball.  I had even met my best friend sitting right next to me playing alto saxophone. Sheila was always someone who cut through the red tape to get down to business.  If I asked her about a problem she either had an answer or told me to grow up.  As I’ve told you before, we talked about some of the strangest things.  We both loved early rock and roll music, and one time, our Assistant Principal Ashley took a cassette recorder player away from me because Sheila and I were listening to early rock and roll at a pep rally. I guess it was for basketball because any other sport besides track, I would’ve been a participant.  I guess it was kind of disrespectful to the cheerleaders and I’m sorry.  I was with my best friend listening to the best music in the world and I still believe that we, my best friend and I, made the best music in the world with help from all of our band mates. I am appalled at school systems taking band out of the curriculum of our schools. It may not prepare all of us for our jobs but it makes us better human beings. I will always love and cherish the memories and the friends we made in our band.

It always seemed like both my wife and I, as we were growing up, were different than the other kids.  No one seemed to share our passions.  I was always dreaming of far off adventures in faraway lands.  She was dreaming of travelling to the wonders of the world, like cruising down the Nile as the sun sets. 

We were both dreamers she and I. We took the time to dream of what we both were passionate about.  She studied to be a traveler and I studied to be adventurous.  You can call it fate or whatever, but the more I learned about her over time, we were just meant to be together.  Between us both we have a club of sorts, where we go on each other’s adventures and come back both loving what we have done and whom we have met. 

I can’t help but think that my adventures would be nothing without her. She likes to plan and keep to a tight schedule.  I know I must aggravate her so much because I can get caught up in a moment of adventure and history and wander down a path she hadn’t picked.  I do think sometimes she loves my adventures as much as I do when I take us on these little side trips of mine.  We went to see a wonderful little Disney movie called “Up” together and I just couldn’t help but think how much this mirrors our feelings for each other and our passions.  It was the story of a young couple sharing their love and passion of travel and adventure, when in their golden years, his wonderful wife of all those many years passes away.

I cried so hard in the middle of the movie when he lost his partner and love of his life.  I know it’s just a cartoon, but I know exactly how someone would feel if they lost the other have of their life.  I still today say a prayer that God never lets this happen to us.  I know that it may be somewhat of a useless prayer but I need to let God know how much she means me. 

I too would probably take that last adventure she planned as he did in her memory, but the thought horrifies me. The thought of going on an adventure she had planned without her is unfathomable to me.  By the Grace of God, we will have many more adventures to enjoy with each other. 

As a matter of fact, she is in the process of planning our Roman holiday as I am writing this little tale.

I was talking to my best friend from Airways Junior High School today and somehow we got to talking about our pets and I told her about my little kitty cat that I loved dearly. My wife found her at the Humane Society in Gatlinburg around 1993. She was in the shelter in her own little cage when my wife saw her and told me that she sat there so prim and proper while all the other cats looked like barn cats, all scruffy and without any manners. Then she noticed the cat’s name on the cage and it was Pumpkin and she knew we had to have her. There were two reasons why. One is that for every female in my family, I will use the pet name Pumpkin and two, she had the brightest orange colored coat when she was a young kitten.  She was the most loving and cuddly kitty cat I had ever known. 

I remember one time I had gotten Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and was extremely sick, and I do mean extremely sick, Pumpkin would not leave my side. She would either be in my lap or laying on my legs the whole time I was sick. Pumpkin knew there was something wrong and she loved me dearly and I loved her dearly too.  She was a very quiet cat with a little petite meow.  One day while playing with her, I noticed a lump and I was concerned so I took her to the vet and he confirmed my worst fears, she had breast cancer. The doctor, of course, operated but unfortunately did not get all of the cancer and he told me so.  I knew it was only a short time before I would lose my precious cat.  I knew she was in a lot of pain. She didn’t want to play anymore and she ate very little. The day came that she didn’t eat or drink anything. She just wanted to lay in a box that she had now claimed as her home.  The next morning my wife carried her to the vet and went on to work.  I was working a night shift at that time so, as usual, my wife woke me up when she came home from work.  She woke me very gently and said “it’s bad”, “what’s bad” I replied. She said “Pumpkin” and I said “I know it’s bad”. She said “no you don’t understand, she’s gone”.

I had lost my little darling. She passed away as the doctor was preparing to put a feeding tube in her to get her strength back but it was too late.  I bawled like a little baby for that wonderful little creature that had woven herself into my heart so deep.  Even though I was crying all the way through it, I built her a small square Coffin and my wife took a table runner that we had bought at Big Lots that was for a prayer table. It was made of silk with flower patterns woven into the cloth and with two tassels and a sharp point at either end. She folded one end over and sewed it together and removed the tassel from that end and folded the other one down and sewed the two sides together to make a sort of sleeping bag with a pillow at the head of it for her head. I had put a pillow in the small square coffin and we laid her to rest in a small rose garden beside our house.  I still miss that wonderfully sweet cat even today.

We eventually got over the heartache of losing Pumpkin and decided we should get another cat. On our way to Walmart in Knoxville,  we saw an animal rescue center that was a no kill animal shelter.  When we were in Walmart we happened to find the Mike Douglas interviews of John Lennon and Yoko Ono on DVD.  We purchased it because my wife is a huge Beatles fan and we had decided to stop at the animal shelter on our way back through.  When we got into the room where all the cats were at, we saw this one frightened little kitty cat. She seemed so very sweet and when we asked what her name was, they told us it was Yoko. So I’m asking you, what could I do. Was this not fate that we had just found that DVD of Yoko Ono and a cat named Yoko. Of course, we took her home.  Cats being exactly like people, this one had a completely different personality than that of Pumpkin. She doesn’t let very many people pet her. I’m one of the only people that she allows to pet her.  I even think she’s actually mean compared to Pumpkin but I fell in love with this cat from the first time I saw her and always will love her.  She’s not even much like a cat and we found out why she was named Yoko. She can scream at the top of her lungs just as if she was “singing” like Yoko Ono did.  She would, as soon as we went to bed, start screaming at us.

We finally found out that she wanted to play. We bought her some little nerf golf balls and she plays fetch just like a little dog with a stick. I will toss the little golf ball several times and she has to have my wife toss the golf ball several times as well before she will let us go to sleep.  She also has woven herself into my heart. She seems to be getting a respiratory infection and is not as much as she used to and is not “singing” as loud anymore. She too is now getting some age on her and I’m afraid these are probably the last few years I will have her. It’s so hard to say goodbye to these little creatures. I love them as if they were one of my own children.  My wife has asked me how dogs and cats became so dependent on humans, but I’m asking you how did we become so dependent on these little lovely creatures we call our pets.

When I was nine or maybe ten years old, I can remember my mother getting extremely mad at me when she had found out that I had mounted my old metal strap-on roller skates to a flat piece of wood and was trying to use it as a sidewalk surfboard. 

My friends at the time, Keith S. and Richard L., and I would go up Ketchum to  where they were building duplexes and basically steal a board and cut it into three pieces and mount our strap-on skates to the bottom of the board.  They were so horribly balanced and the skates themselves were of metal and loose around the bearings that made it extremely hard to skate on the sidewalk.  They did a little better in the streets but our streets were shot and chipped, which means that they were gravel and tar, so they were lumpy as well and you couldn’t ride them for very long because you would hit a gap in the side walk or a small pot hole in the street and you’d go flying off your board. 

 I can’t remember which one of us it was that got the first commercial skateboard, but I do remember all of us taking turns and riding it.  We thought that we had found utopia with this new board we could stay on for longer periods of time and make turns. We couldn’t do that with our homemade skateboards. Eventually all of us had our own boards and we would go to Charjean Elementary School’s parking lot and ride them in the big parking lot there, which was much smoother than our streets. Eventually, I think we all lost interest in it because we were all starting to play baseball and other things at that time, which would’ve been around 1965.

 I think it was when the United States seemed to lose interest in sidewalk surfing as well but, as my wife always says, if you wait long enough what was old will be new again. 

For some reason, in the 1970’s, sidewalk surfing on your skateboards seemed to find a new popularity and grew   

slowly into an actual sport.  People were actually getting paid to ride skateboards. They had teams and everybody would go to actual skateboard parks and watch them.  That was the birth of what is now extreme sports in the United States.  Who knew that this fad that was started in the early sixties would still be around today?  Looking online, I can see that skateboards or, as we called them, sidewalk surfboards can cost almost as much as a car did when sidewalk surfing was first invented.  No one knows exactly who invented it because it seemed to kind of be simultaneously springing up all over California and covered the United States almost immediately with this fad.  They even made it a centerpiece in the three Back to the Future movies in the 1980’s and even made a futuristic sidewalk surfboard that could hover, AKA the hover board.

I just can’t believe that during the long hot Memphis summers, we had so much fun with a piece of board and some strap-on roller skates and now it has become so popular and so high tech with today’s young people.  Do you remember the days that all of us were trying to learn to skate with those horrible metal strap-on skates.  Now try to remember that and picture it with one skate fastened to the bottom of a wooden plank and try to skate with that.  Yes, you’re right, it’s almost impossible to do it but we loved it. It was a wonder we didn’t kill ourselves or break our necks or something. I know we had scrapes and bruises and cuts all over us from sidewalk surfing because we were young boys that didn’t wear kneepads or helmets. Oh OK, no one had really invented pads and helmets or anything for roller skating in those days. I just thought it would be better if it sounded like we were more macho than we really were.  It really was a wonderful time when we were growing up, wasn’t it. Wish I could go back in time for real. 

Mountain Home

Have you ever set on a mountain and just listened to the earth. At first you can only hear the noise of everything going about their lives, but sit and listen and pick out the birds songs or the squirrels fussing at each other. You will have to block out the sounds of all that lives that is still able to call the mountain home. It will take concentration and meditation, so don't give up. It will take more time for some and less for others. What the mountain will tell you is the echo of long ago times before man touched the land, just after God brought forth the land and the waters. You will hear trees growing and the wind that started blowing at the beginning of time through the mountains. The mountain will tell you of the birth of the first animals to walk its slopes. She tells of all the insects and how all of the life that lived in the mountain coexisted in harmony, how they relied on each other for their existence and nourishment. She tells of the proud Eagle that no longer fly’s above her and screams with delight at her beauty. How the wise owl calls to the new comers to announce who they are. She tells you how they welcomed the first man to marvel at her with open arms and how he and his kind respected her and the friends of the mountain. She will also ask you what she has done to deserve what man is doing to her now and why so many of her friends have left her and not returned as they once did? The mountain still welcomes man to marvel at her wonders and scale her peak, but she now begs you to listen and respect what she gives and what she needs to help the world to continue to live so that man can still exist. I still love to sit and listen to her tell the tales of the Cherokee people playing in her and her family's valleys and how they foraged through her forests to find their food. I keep her love in my heart always and now you know why I live in the foothills of The Great Smoky Mountains. 

I had to put the Bald Eagle in this picture because so few live as they once did in the Smokies.

I have grown up in a marvelous age. I have called it the Ed Sullivan generation but it’s much more than that.  I have seen the computer age unfold before my eyes and many marvelous things that the common man would have never had access to become readily available.  Air travel in this day and age is affordable if one wishes to travel by air.  I have enjoyed the computer age myself by using it as a flight instructor with many flight simulation programs at my command.  I am even flown are real airplane thanks to my lovely wife.  I have had so many dreams that I once thought unattainable come true.  All I have to do is type into

my computer and the vast world of information and entertainment is there for me to partake in.  I remember the days when encyclopedia salespeople came knocking on our door and, to be honest, the information that was in those books was something I desired but they were much too expensive for common folk like us, but now with the Internet I can learn just about anything my heart desires and I can find the answers to the most burning questions I have.  I’m old enough to remember searching on a transistor radio or a shortwave radio trying to find out what the rest of the world was up to.

  Tuning a shortwave radio in to some exotic land across the Atlantic fed my desire for adventure and mystery.  I can remember listening to Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in Sherlock Holmes on the Armed Forces Radio Network on the shortwave radio and now I watch Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman in the BBC’s production of “Sherlock”.  To find out anything about someone famous or events of the day you had to read a newspaper or magazine, but today all of that information is instantly at your fingertips. 

Now that I’m almost a senior citizen, I realize that change is inevitable but it doesn’t mean that I have to like it or at least like all of it.  So much is happening so fast that we’re not able to keep up with all the changes.  As I get older it seems like the changes are going faster and faster and there starting to slightly leave me behind.  I know you’ve experienced it when one of your grandchildren mentions something that you have no clue what they’re talking about and their astonished that haven’t heard of it.  It’s not that I’m upset or even concerned, it’s just that I remember being on top of everything that went on around me.  I don’t know if it’s the stress of daily work getting harder or I’m just getting a little slower.  This is the part of change that I’d don’t like.  I have always been a fan of TV and movies because that’s the generation that grew up in.

I’m not the generation that grew up with video games, so I’m not quite as interested as the following generation naturally is, but I must say the amount of violence disturbs me now and I don’t think that it would have disturbed me as much when I was younger.  I used to love watching the old Universal horror pictures and at this time I dislike calling them horror pictures as we did back then because they have no relationship to the kind of horror that one can see today on the movies.  When someone was shot on television in our day, they just fell over and on today’s television when someone is shot it’s just gross and horrifying.  That’s the kind of changes I don’t like.  I still think that this is a marvelous time to live in and it kind of reminds me of the Carousel of Progress show that Walt Disney put on in the 1964 World’s Fair in New York and is still showing at Walt Disney World today.  It’s a show that tells the story of one man’s life traveling through time and all the marvelous inventions that each era brings to his life.

That’s the way I feel, like there has been a multitude of marvelous things come my way and I won’t bore you any longer with describing each and every one of the things in detail but let me just tell you about this one dream of my wife’s and mine when we were children watching television.  My wife dreamed of somehow capturing the invasion of the Beatles to North America so that she could see and relive those moments forever.  I dreamed of a way of having a library full of such wonderful movies as Sherlock Holmes and having a complete library of all of those wonderful mysteries that kept me entertained. Both of us had recorded television audio on reel to reel tape in hopes of capturing memories in some way. It wasn’t until the 1970s that commercial video recorders appeared in retail stores, but they were still expensive for my meager means.  I remember the first one my wife and I purchased. It was extremely large and noisy.  Just like everyone else, I copied everything I thought I would ever want on videotape.  Videotape being quite large, I had walls of bookcases full of videotape and now they’re so obsolete and most of them have deteriorated to the point you can’t play them.

  It’s even becoming impossible to find a VHS machine because they came out with something better that everyone had to purchase.  When all this happened I thought this was the end all and be all, but it wasn’t and it never will be, just remember that next best thing is just around the corner waiting for all of us to marvel over, so just keep enjoying this marvelous age we are living in.