THE GREAT GRUMP Writes Again.....

For those who don't know (I had similar posts last summer/fall),

this is a caricature of "The Great Grump"

(so-named by his grandchildren.....and also known around the small - too small for a REAL mayor -community in which he lived as "The Mayor").

This was painted years ago on a 24 x 36 piece of old plywood by folk artist

Butch Anthony from Seale, Alabama.

Daddy wrote a column for the Columbus newspaper for years - stories of "life". Many of his columns reminisced about years gone by in Columbus, Georgia.

Daddy had always said he needed to gather all of his columns together into a little booklet, but he never did. So, as a Father's Day gift for him, I typed up several of his stories and created two small booklets with about twelve stories in each one.

He died two months later (two years ago this month), but his stories live on...as does he in the hearts of all who knew and loved him.

The following story is fairly long but evokes such a sense of the 1940's/1950's era in the South that it is worth reading.

FAULKENBERRY’S WAS WHERE YOUNG MEN LEARNED ABOUT LIFE

Faulkenberry’s Service Station on the corner of Wynnton Road and Forest Avenue was not an educational institution, but a large number of East Wynnton boys learned a lot about life there back in the late 1940’s and early ‘50’s.

Faulkenberry’s was where we hung out. Every afternoon after school, Saturdays, and some Sunday afternoons there would be anywhere from two to a dozen teen-age boys there.
Nowadays we might have been called a gang. We did do a lot of bad things, but rarely anything truly mean. Mostly we grew up and had fun.

How Fred Faulkenberry stood us is hard to understand now. We must have been a total nuisance. Every now and then when we got too rambunctious, he would run us off, and we would all move across Forest Avenue to the front yard of Wynnton School.

There was a big Nehi drink box in the front of the station that was a favorite place of ours to sit. It was one of those old boxes that you lifted the top up, slid your drink down to one end, put a nickel in the slot to trip the mechanism, and then pulled your drink out. The box had a big flat top, a perfect place for sitting with your legs hanging over the side showing your white socks and loafers.

Customers had a hard time getting a drink because they first had to get two or three lazy teen-agers to move off the top of the drink box.
Fred or W.D. or Oscar, who worked there, were forever running the boys off the box. In five minutes they would be right back. Fred and W.D. finally wired the drink box to a 6 volt car battery and put a switch inside the station. They would let two or three boys get real comfortable on the drink and pop the juice to them. They broke up the drink box sitting, but some of the boys found the switch and began surprising a few customers. We thought it was hilarious. Fred and the customers didn’t think too much of it.

I guess we could have been called a gang.

We even called ourselves the Wildwood Indians.

For a while there was another group that hung out at Weracoba Pharmacy that called themselves the Drugstore Cowboys.

The two groups were always picking at one another but never did do anything serious.

The favorite pastime was to ride by the other hang-out and

“kidnap” one of the other group.

It was all a friendly sort of rivalry, and the worst thing that was ever done to anybody was to take their pants off and put them out on the street to get home

the best way they could.

Since I was one of the smallest and the youngest of the group,

I was often kidnapped and de-panted. Most of the time, I would just hide my skinny legs in the bushes until one of my buddies came by to rescue me. It was a little awkward sometimes when a car load of girls would come by and offer you a ride and ask why you were standing over in the bushes. Often it was the kidnappers who sent the girls.

Across Wynnton Road from Faulkenberry’s was a drugstore (with a soda fountain), the Blue J Barber Shop, Spano’s Fish Market, a cleaners, and one or two other stores. The buildings are still there, but all the businesses are gone now except the Blue J, where some of us still get our hair cut.

The only really bad thing that was pulled by this bunch of teen-agers that I can remember, was when Angelo Spano’s Fish Market got blown up.

Angelo was an excitable Italian and sometimes got angry at the teen-agers hanging around his store.

We all liked him, but some of the group did pick at him too much sometimes.
This was right after World War II, and some of the boys got a hold of an army smoke bomb. Nobody knew just what a smoke bomb would do, and most of the group was leery of using the thing. Two or three of the boys decided to play a trick on Angelo anyway, and they detonated the smoke bomb in the doorway of his fish market and a fruit stand next door.

There was more to a smoke bomb than they bargained for. Nobody got hurt, thank goodness, but it did do some damage and caused quite a bit of excitement. The boys involved were punished pretty severely for this misdeed, and everybody learned a good lesson from it.

At Faulkenberry’s we learned a lot about cars and how to work on them (all the cars we had NEEDED working on). We learned how to cuss pretty good. We talked a lot about girls (we didn’t call it sex back then), but most of the information that we passed around was not very accurate.
One boy, who never hung around the station very much, was a bully. When he did come up there he seemed to take great pleasure in picking on me. He was bigger and older than I was and would pinch me or trip me just to aggravate and embarrass me.
One day, on the advice of my older brother and the older boys in the group, I screwed up my courage and, shaking in my boots, socked him in the nose as hard as I could. Boy, was I scared, and boy, was he surprised. He never bothered me again, and I learned a little about facing up to life’s problems.

We all helped out some around the station when they got busy. We would wash windshields, check tires, and pump gas as needed.

Frank Dunham, the mechanic, was working on a car and asked me to go inside and get him a left-handed monkey wrench.

I had never heard of such a thing, but went in and asked W.D. where I could find it.

Without cracking a smile, he told me it was lost, and I would have to go to the station across the street to borrow one. Everybody was watching as I innocently went to the station across the street to borrow a left-handed monkey wrench.

When the men from two filling stations were practically rolling on the ground laughing, I finally figured out that there was no such thing as a left-handed monkey wrench. They had a lot more fun with that joke than I did.

The station sold peanuts and crackers off a little rack inside the station. Fred gave up early on trying to keep up with a half dozen teen-agers in and out of his place. He put us all on the honor system about paying for whatever we got. We put the money on the cash register, or, quite often, just opened the cash register and put the money on the drawer.

So far as I know, none of that crowd ever intentionally beat Fred out of any money.

He trusted us, and we were very careful not to betray that trust.

Most all of that bunch of Wildwood Indians turned out O.K.

I don’t know of any who are in jail, but one did serve in the state legislature, and one became mayor of a medium-sized town in Georgia. One or two bad eggs ain’t bad out of a dozen.
Faulkenberry’s Service Station was an institution and we all learned a lot there.

Thanks, Fred, for putting up with us.

(February 15, 1991 – “Voices”, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer)

Have a "Lug-ly" Day!

-Mug

GARBAGE TRUCKS ARE GOOD THINGS

Well, today was garbage day in our neck of the woods....and it brought to mind another column by The "Pundit of Pittsview" .......

Yep, Garbage Trucks are Good Things

When you get to thinking about all the good things and bad things around, it gets right interesting.
The garbage truck is one of the best things I can think of. Aspirin is a real good thing. Paved roads, Sunday afternoons, a cola on ice, and finding your newspaper are all pretty good things.
Not finding your newspaper in your box after you have gone out in your bathrobe at daylight to get it is not a good thing. Everybody will agree that a sore thumb is not very good, either.
Loud radios, weddings, Macon Road in Columbus, and people who say “My God” all the time are on my list of bad things.
I think I’ll put down sevens with a line across the middle of them, too. It makes the 7 look like a backwards F. Whoever thought that up, anyway?

Garbage trucks rate high with me because until just a few years ago, no garbage trucks came to Pittsview. All we have to do now is put our garbage in a sack on the side of the road on Friday morning. It has gone – disappeared – by dinnertime.
I don’t know what they do with all that garbage, and I don’t want to know.
Before garbage trucks, you had to do something with it yourself. Finding a place to dump it was a problem. The food in the garbage was not so bad. Oh, it might smell bad, but at least the food would finally rot, or the ‘coons, possums, and ants would eat it up.
The tin cans, broken plates, and old light bulbs were harder to do something with. Styrofoam and plastic were the worst, though. I still find pieces of Styrofoam cups around the ditch where we dumped our trash.

Aspirin is on my list because it is good for anything from a sore toe to a headache. Aspirin is sort of like that joke about a thermos bottle….”How do it know?”

And paved roads! I was driving up a hill over near Nuckoll’s Crossing in the rain the other day. I remembered going up that long, slick hill with my daddy in the good old days.
He drove the car while I was out in the rain putting pine boughs under the wheels to get up that hill. The car would move up 2 or 3 feet, and I would grab that muddy pine limb and put it in front of the wheel again.
Over and over I had to do that until we got to the top of the hill. I would be so muddy by then that daddy did not want to let me back in the car, but he always did.

Sunday afternoons, especially in the spring and the fall, are really nice. If you have gone to church like you are supposed to do, and you’ve had a big dinner, that is all you’ve got to do for the rest of the day.
Since I don’t watch the stupid ball games, I usually just piddle around in the yard – not work, now – just piddle. I might wrestle with my dog awhile, sit in the yard swing and watch a hawk, or take a walk in the woods. Do nothing, really.
It is perfectly legitimate to just be lazy on Sunday afternoon. Sometimes I just think about garbage trucks.

(January 3, 1985, - the East Alabama Today section of the Ledger Enquirer)

Have a Lovely Day!

-Mug

PACK RATS IS WHAT WE ARE

Several of the blogs I’ve read lately have talked about cleaning out closets, getting rid of “stuff’, and just plain organizing.

The following newspaper column written by my father 20+ years ago gives a humorous look at “stuff”….(My mother is notorious for saving EVERYTHING…..and, believe you me, she knows what she has and where it is….just ask her!:)

Pack Rats is What We Are

Pack rats is what we are. Stuff and things that we have ‘saved’ over the years are just about to overwhelm us.
Why, we have the grammar school report cards of my wife’s father. They are stuck in his 1931 yearbook from Georgia Tech. For 55 or 60 years those report cards have been ‘saved’ by somebody. They are just regular report cards. His mama must have saved them to start with…then his wife…and now his daughter. By golly, I sure hope nobody has any of MY old report cards stuck away anywhere.
We live in a big, old house that we raised our five children in. Now that all but one of the children is gone, and she’s got one foot out the door, we have lots and lots of room to save stuff.

Upstairs, we have more empty boxes than Kirven’s department store does. For years, every time we have gotten something, my wife has saved the box it came in. She might need to pack things in them. We have boxes inside boxes inside boxes.
We keep our old paint cans under the house. Each can has about ¼ of the paint left in it. No matter what the paint job, you know, there is always some paint left over. How can you throw away perfectly good paint? I almost always put the leftover paint under the house, but there are a few cans out in the shed, too. I haven’t counted them, but there must be 20 cans of paint of every color with two inches of hardened paint in the bottom of each bucket.
All of those can be thrown out, except maybe 4 or 5 cans that the paint is still good. Might need those.
We have broken furniture, leftovers in the refrigerator, my Navy watch cap from 35 years ago that is full of moth holes, two wide tires off of one my boy’s ’69 Pontiac which he sold 10 years ago, and old, paint-spattered window screens that we replaced about 20 years ago. We saved them all.
That 1931 Georgia Tech annual that belonged to my father-in-law is in good company with perhaps every other book that any of us ever owned. Many of them are musty and mildewed and smell to high heaven. Most have not been reopened since they were put on the shelf. We finally managed to get rid of our 300 pound collection of National Geographics. But we are saving all these others….for some reason.
One of those books is an economics textbook that one of our children had in college. The price tag is still in it…$35.90. I’m positive that no one will EVER look at that book again, but how can you throw out a $35 book?
We have a full set of drums upstairs waiting for the rightful owner to claim them. The rightful owner, son Francis, was a wild and wooly drummer-man just a few years ago. Now he is studying for the ministry, and I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that he won’t be claiming his drums anytime soon. I’ve heard of guitar playing and piano playing preachers, but I don’t think these drums are going to fit into his future plans.
We will ‘save’ the drums along with the broken garden tools (nothing broken but the handle), the out-of-date clothes, and all the other junk.
You never can tell when you might need some of that stuff.

(written 1983-84 for the The Southland Star newspaper)

Have a Lovely Day!

-Mug

GET OUT YOUR MONEY...!

Fok artist Butch Anthony's rendering of my father painted about 15? years ago.....

And another 'folksy" column by the "mayor"...or as he has been called...

"The Pundit of Pittsview"...

GET OUT YOUR MONEY –
DOG RACING HAS COME TO PITTSVIEW

All this talk about dog racing these days is a little confusing. All the politicians are busy declaring whether they are for it or against it.
If they don’t like dog racing, I guess they’d better stay out of Pittsview, because we already have it.
We have a half-mile measured track from George Boon’s store down to the graveyard, right through the middle of town.
If you want to see dog races, come on down and just park under one of our oak trees for awhile. Bring your own dog if you want to.
But he won’t stand much of a chance. These country dogs are in pretty good shape.
I don’t think we have many greyhounds. In fact, I’m pretty sure we don’t. But we do have plenty of dogs that can and do race daily.
Some days only two or three will race. Some days all the dogs in Pittsview seem to get in on the fun.
My own dog participates about once a week. Most of the time he just hangs around the house listening for the screen door to open. But about once a week I reckon he gets bored, and he decides to follow me to downtown Pittsview.
By the time he gets to the main street, ole Beau is really moving. The regular dogs in Pittsview are caught napping.
Beau just streaks on through till he gets to my old store building where he drinks a lot of water, slobbers on everything, and then stretches out on the cool concrete floor. He is preparing for the trip back.
Meanwhile, the regular Pittsview dogs are watching for him. They have learned that when he flashes through their territory like that, it won’t be long before he will be coming back.
When I start back home in my truck, ole Beau strikes out down the main street ahead of me. A great big black dog hangs out at the first house, but he doesn’t stand a chance in the dog race since Beau has passed him before he knows what has happened.
But the black dog’s bark alerts the rest of the dogs down the street, and then the real race is on.
The next dog in line is an Eskimo-looking dog with long hair, and he can run pretty good.
Across the street is a fat, short-legged bulldog. He always gets an ‘A’ for effort, but he is 'way out of his league. Those short, stubby legs move so fast you can hardly see them, but he is quickly left in the dust of the others.
At one time there was a great big St. Bernard living in the fourth house on the right. He would come charging out of his driveway with such power that he had trouble negotiating the turn onto the street.
He would swing ‘way across to the other side before he could straighten up and get in the race. Ole Beau, the Eskimo dog, and even the big black dog would all be past him before he got going good.
The St. Bernard got to where he would come charging out of his yard just as soon as he heard the first noise down the street in order to try to get ahead of them.
One day he heard a noise, charged headlong out into the street, and tangled with a pulpwood truck. Unfortunately, he was permanently eliminated from the race.
One fellow in Pittsview has four mixed-breed, long-legged dogs that follow his car everywhere he goes. When he comes through town with four yapping dogs alongside his car, it really does get exciting. You never heard such yelping, snarling, and barking at any dog race.
If they do get the dog track started over in Tuskegee, I’m thinking seriously about taking a truckload of these Pittsview dogs over there. Even if I didn’t win any money, I know it would be great fun for everybody concerned. Especially the dogs.

(written August 25, 1983 for the East Alabama section of the Ledger Enquirer newspaper in Columbus, GA)

Have a lovely Day!

-Mug

MODERN-DAY "YARD MULES" MAKE NICE GUYS MANIACS

......Another newspaper column from "The Mayor" of Pittsview. ENJOY!

Modern-Day ‘Yard Mules' Make Nice Guys Maniacs

Lawnmowers can make grown men completely lose their cool. Big-hearted, gentle, easy-going men have been reduced to red-faced, cussing maniacs on Saturday mornings all over this country.
Lawnmowers have brought wives scurrying outside to remove children from the presence of their father.
One little boy who was allowed to hang around too long burned his grandmother’s ears one day. “When I get big enough to cut the grass,” he chirped, “I can use words like @#%$ and &*^! …That’s what my daddy says when he is trying to start the lawnmower.”
And remember the news story about the man who shot his lawnmower? The police called to investigate gunshots in a residential neighborhood, found nobody around at the address given. But in the middle of the driveway was a dead lawnmower, shot full of holes, oozing a puddle of oil onto the pavement.
In the house was a big, husky fellow all scrunched down in his chair. His eyes were glazed, but he was smiling. On the table was an empty pistol…a wisp of blue smoke rising from the barrel.
Like most Saturday morning grass cutters, he was a nice, normal, everyday guy. He had never been in trouble with the police and hardly ever raised his voice.
Lawnmowers are our modern-day mules. Many of us never plowed a mule, but we have heard about how stubborn, cranky, and unpredictable they are, just like some lawnmowers I have known – stubborn, cranky, and unpredictable.
Proprietors of lawnmower repair shops all seem to be happy-go-lucky, easy-going types. They must all be rich. Their shops are always jammed with broken-down lawnmowers.
You walk in and find the proprietor at a greasy desk, drinking a cold drink, talking to friends. The only person in the shop is a teen-aged boy with his hat on backwards. He is sitting on an overturned five-gallon can staring at a lawnmower. The radio is on, loud.
You walk back and untie the string holding your trunk lid down. You bruise your leg and get grass stains and grease all over your britches, not to mention a hernia, while getting the mower out of the trunk. THEN the proprietor comes out to wait on you.
“What seems to be the trouble?” he asks pleasantly. Then he reaches down and pulls ever so lightly on the starter cord.
In the last few days you have yanked the cord at least 397 times, and that sulking monster never even pooped. Now it not only starts with one pull; it purrs like a kitten. “Well, what’s wrong with it?” asks the mechanic.
The proprietor finally consents to “take a look at it”.
“Check back with us in two weeks,” he tells you.
TWO WEEKS! Your grass is too high to cut now! In two weeks Tarzan and the apes will have moved into your yard.

One fellow with an old riding lawnmower had no trouble starting it, but it would only run wide open. He found where a part was broken on the carburetor that made it either cut off completely or wind up to full throttle.
He fiddled with it for a while, but it revved up so fast the whole machine vibrated all over. By next Saturday, the grass would be impossible. He decided to give it a try, jumped on, and slammed it in forward gear. The front wheels came off the ground, the back wheels slung dirt and grass out the back, and man and mower took off with a roar.
His hat flew off as he came into the first turn, but he had no time to worry about that. He barely made the turn on two wheels and roared down the straightaway on the back side of his lawn. With a half smile on his face, he was zooming along in good shape now.
Up ahead was the morning newspaper. He was on it and over it quickly leaving a thousand bits of paper in his path.
Leaning into the next turn like a professional race car driver, he saw the rake ahead, half-hidden in the tall grass.
To late – BLAM, WHAM! The handle was in splinters. His wife’s new rosebush was mulched quickly and silently as he careened around another turn and into the straightaway again.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw his wife standing on the porch, eyes agog, mouth open. No time to think about her, either, with another turn coming up. His hat was chewed up that time.
Now his wife was running across the yard waving her arms. He reached under the seat to cut the switch off. “Something the matter?” he asked as he smoothed his hair and got off the mower.
“Have you gone completely crazy?” she asked. “You are going to kill yourself…and just look at the yard!”
He had a strange gleam in his eye as he explained the problem to her, stating that he was going to cut the grass. She stared at him for a long time, then threw up her hands and went back to the house.
Surveying his track as Joey Chitwood, the stunt driver, might do before a big event, he cranked her up and took off again. He was getting this grass cut in record time.
But the vibrations of the wildly racing machine began to take it toll. First the cover over the motor flew off. Then it was the air filter. As he zoomed around the yard he noticed more and more parts lying on the ground each time around. Finally, a bolt in the steering column sheared off just as he went into a turn.
Barely missing a tree, the mower plowed into the woodpile, covering the man and his machine with logs. The mower died then and there, never to run again. The man limped away without looking back, bruised but not beaten.
Lawnmowers – balky, stubborn, mule-headed contraptions. I hope they didn’t arrest the guy that shot his…they ought to give him a medal. We ought to take up a collection for him so he can have it stuffed and hang it over his mantelpiece.

(July 26, 1984, - the East Alabama Today section of the Ledger Enquirer)

Have a Lovely Day!

Funny Man in the Mirror

My father wrote a "folksy" column called "The View from Pittsview" for the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer newspaper during the 1980's and early 1990's. Daddy had always said he should compile all of his writings into a booklet, but he never did, so last summer, unbeknownst to him, I began this project and completed the first booklet for Father's Day 2008.

*Note* Last summer Daddy was very sick with lung cancer...

....he died at the end of August.

I only managed to finish the above 2 booklets before he passed away.

--------------

This column began the first booklet:

ENJOY!

---------------

Funny Man in the Mirror: Oops, That’s Me!

I found out why people smile at me all the time. I mean total strangers. I thought they were just being friendly. They feel sorry for me.

I was in Opelika the week after Christmas and saw a sweater I liked on sale. I put it on and walked up to one of those three-way mirrors to see how it looked. I couldn’t look at the sweater for looking at myself.

The mirror was one of those that you can see the side view of yourself. You can even see the back of your head if you twist around and look out of the corner of your eye.

My hair is a lot grayer than I realized. I’ve got a weak chin, and my nose is sort of pointed. My posture is terrible in that mirror, but I stood up straight right quick and then I noticed that one shoulder is a lot lower than the other. I already knew that, but I always forget until I look in a strange mirror. And I hold my head over to one side, too.

Every time I get in front of one of those mirrors, I must look as though I have a big bug in my britches. I’m so intrigued that I’m twisting this way and that way trying to see myself better. I try to stand up straight, hold up my low shoulder, and then I’ll stick my chin out trying to make myself look better.

People in the store must think I’m crazy. I do get some funny looks.

I feel so badly about the way I look in those mirrors until I’m almost ashamed to walk out of the store. I sneak along and get to the door as quickly as I can.

Strangers do smile at me a lot. I like to think it is because I’m just a friendly-looking person. But after looking in one of those 3-way mirrors, I’m not so sure. Usually, though, within about 30 minutes or less, I get over my shame and go on about my business, forgetting what I look like.

I really think something must be wrong with those mirrors.

I couldn’t look like that.

(January 31, 1985, - the East Alabama Today section of the Ledger Enquirer)