Bill's World

POP WAS a worrier.

He used to sit on the back porch in the summertime and worry when he had been laid off a few days. It would start right after breakfast. He’d take his seat on a cane-bottomed chair, prop it against the wall, place his feet on the bot­tom rung, lean over and put his chin in his hands … and worry.

He would spend most of the morning worrying. He would take time out for lunch, worry most of the time while trying to eat and then call up the wrinkles again shortly after lunch.

Mom got on him about it. She told him he was going to worry himself sick and it was just no sense in it. He couldn’t change anything by worrying, she would say.

He’d just give her that exasperated look, invoke his own private angel, get up and walk out to the barn to stand look­ing into the hayloft and return to start worrying all over again.

Fortunately for Pop, he was never out of work more than three or four days at a time. A week at the most. I can’t remember when he ever was laid off for any length of time. If he had been, he would have ended up in the bug house beating his head against the wall.

WHEN people in high finance today become incredibly serious about the state of the money market and talk of recession, even depression, I often wonder what would have been Pop’s reaction to it all.

Pop died many years ago. He was done in by the rock dust in his lungs that he had breathed while making a living for his wife, mother and eight children. It was a hard living, cutting stone. I didn’t understand just how hard it was at the time, but I think I do now.

He had a comfortable income as a stone cutter, and back then there was a demand for cut stone. He must have known that there were precious few years left for a cutter of stone. It was becoming too expensive to quarry, too hard to get people to breathe that dust, too many of them dying off when their lungs clogged up.

And so, he worried.

But he took his money to the bank every Saturday morn­ing.

YES, there were 11 mouths to feed in our family. And we had few luxuries during the Depression. But we had plenty of food at every meal, something special for Friday supper (country-style steak was a favorite) and oysters every Saturday when they were in season.

You can imagine how far a box of Post Toasties went in the mornings when all 11 of us were eating from it. Mom found that cereal went further if she mixed up two big bowls in the kitchen and passed them around. At least, in that manner she could regulate outgo. The problem lay at the end of the table, however, where I sat. By the time the bowl came to me, I got mostly milk and a few flakes that somehow had evaded the serving spoon.

SINCE I was the last of the litter, Pop had just about played out by the time I came along. He no longer felt like whacking the ball with the boys on the school ground across the street. When he arrived home in the afternoons covered with white rock dust, all he wanted to do was wash up, eat a hearty meal and perhaps walk “up street” where he and his hard-working cronies rested on a store bench, talked of mutual problems and discussed the issues of the day.

Then, as the sun sank behind the horizon and darkness settled in, we’d see Pop coming across the school ground, sometimes carrying a small sack of groceries for Mom, but always the paper. Pennies were hard to come by, but for two cents a day, the paper was a bargain.

I  GU ESS I never gave much thought back then to the burden that Pop shouldered. I had everything I needed for happiness. I was secure within the protection of my parents. I didn’t know that tomorrow’s comfort was not guaranteed.

Pop knew it. He had seen some people have to go on welfare, and that thought tugged at his very being. To go on welfare was to fold up your tent completely. I guess that’s why he worried so much. He just couldn’t bear that thought.

It never happened, of course. It never came close. When he finally was forced into early retirement because his lungs gave out, those Saturday visits to the bank had guaranteed the comfort and safety of his wife and himself, then the only ones remaining at the old home place.

POP WAS not a solo worrier. He had company. Even to­day as the economy does flipflops, if you look closely you can see the tell-tale signs of gloom upon the land. A mom will show it on her face in the supermarket line, a pop’s wrinkles will deepen when he pulls up to a gas tank.

The only difference is that my Pop did most of his worry­ing on that back-porch, cane-bottomed chair.

(This column was printed previously in The Gazette.)

            When I was a boy, I seemed to have little time for adults. Too many other things to do rather than sit around and listen to what they had to say.

            I lived in that little town of Faith, six miles south of Salisbury at the end of Faith Road; then, it became something else. I forget what.

            The elementary school was just across the street, 200 yards away. In between was a soccer field that saw the game played there when even big cities such as Charlotte had no soccer team. We did. Bob Griffith, an elderly gentleman,  had come to town from England, settled down and…got together a soccer team. One year, there, I was the mascot. About 10 years old and got to go to all the away games and even got to play in one when one player got hurt, and nobody else was available.

            The baseball field was just beyond the soccer field, with left field being part of the soccer field. Left fielders had a problem; well, two. First was the dry ditch that ran heavy when it rained. Second, the two boulders on which our left-fielders learned from experience how to catch a fly ball while dealing with that quarrelsome 45-degree angle of the hard-rock boulder. Visiting teams probably had never seen anything like that before.

            Mom and Pop had six sons, and all played on Faith’s ball teams. We didn’t have many toys, so we played with the boulders. We stretched out on them on full-moon nights, or when there was no moon but when the sky was filled with a million stars, the Little Dipper and the Big, and Orion and a few stars that became favorites with no names.

            On those Saturdays when we had home games, the day began about 9 o’clock when Mohawk Peeler would show up with his truck to scrape the infield. That was a given. It had to be done. A whole week (or more) had gone by since the last game was played there. During that time, the infield had been used for considerable action – everything from some of the young swains racing their mules around the bases to thunder storms dropping an inch or two of water. Since first base was a few feet higher than home plate, getting there was a challenge. If you made it, it was downhill from there on.

            Anyhow, it was my unofficial duty as the ten-year-old baseball field overseer to stand on that metal scraper while it was doing its job. The metal frame needed a bit of heft, and I fit the formula.

            The games usually began about 1:30 or 2. By the time the first pitch found the catcher’s mitt, the grandstand would be as crowded as a department store on opening morning of Christmas rush.  There was no order for parking. Drivers just drove in, parked where there was space, then found a seat in the grandstand or on one of the boulders that rested 15-20 feet off the left-field line.

            Games back then were mostly civil, but there were times when sideline chatter seemed to challenge the character of the opposition. You could say that it was crisp and varied, like a bunch of squirrels barking at each other while crows sat on an up-high limb in fits of mirth.

            Most of the games were civil, but there was a time or two when the fans became boisterous to the boiling point of name-calling.

            There was one game – we were playing Enochville, as I recall – when a fight erupted along the third-base line and spread quickly to home plate. I had never seen a grandstand empty so fast. A few wanted to fight but the majority suddenly felt the need to go home.

            I remember all of this quite vividly because there was one energetic fellow out there on crutches, holding himself up with one prop and the other he used for head-bopping.

              I don’t remember who won that ballgame. I don’t even remember why I started this column.

            I do remember how to quit writing, however.

            See ya.

                       All my life, I have associated “going to get my ears trimmed” with getting a haircut.

            Somebody told me the other day that that’s not necessarily so.

            Close friend. At least, I thought so.

            He had taken a quick look at my head, spotted the encroaching bald spot and then wandered on down  first to my right ear and then to my left ear.

            “You know what,” he said. “You need to go and get your ears trimmed.”

            I told him it had been less than a month since I got my hair cut and that I wasn’t due for a week or two yet.

            “I’m not talking about your hair,” he continued. “You need to see a veterinarian and let him take off a bit here and a bit there. Vets know how to do that with ears like yours.”

            I wanted to know if he was born with poison in his blood or if he had to drink something to make it that way.

            “No, I’m serious,” he said. “Some people are born with little ears, some with middle-sized ears, and some like you. You need to get an ear trim.”

            I tried to be nice and change the subject, but he was relentless, like a nagging tongue, which he was.

            I told him that this had happened before. The first time I said that to Pete, the barber, he flashed back: “I know that you have a lot of respect for me – even though I won’t give you a discount on haircuts – but I have no license to operate on ears.”

            And that was the end of that, until the shop owner, Roy Hullett, walked by and said that a little trimming on the right one certainly would help.

            Well, having big ears is not the worst thing in the world. The U.S. president has big ears. The media call them “Presidential Ears.” They could be twins. The only problem is that there are two and that when someone addresses one of them as “Mr. President”, neither knows who’s being addressed.

            I would think that the bigger the ears the better the hearing. I think wrong. But the bigger the ear, the smaller seems the hearing aid. It is unfortunate that the size of my hearing aids has to be in direct proportion to the size of my ears. Big ears, big hearing aids.

            Most aid-wearers wear them with pride. They have to spend $4,000 for a couple of aids and they want people to know about it. My friend, James, had been to his hearing-aid person just that morning. He was at a party that night. He took a look at mine and said mine would look better if I had smaller ears. I told him that when I was little I had trouble getting into Mom’s broom closet because of my ears.

            At Christmastime,  a wonderful season, we are supposed to go around singing Joy to the World and wearing a smile like it has been stretched there with a rubber band.

            It is challenging, though, if you have big ears that seem to command the rubber band. I’ll be doing just fine with a smile as wide as a mousetrap when along comes somebody with the latest gossip.

            In such a case, it is better to have big ears.

            That was one reason I got into journalism.

            When I was a little boy, I had little ears.

            Then, I became a shoeshine boy and it was hard to hear the rumors going around the barber shop when I was slaving away at my shoeshine stand.

            The Lord provides. Ears grew, and I ended up in the newspaper business.

            Looked for someone to trim my ears, but nobody, it seems, is in that business.

            Marked for life.

(This column ran previously in The Gazette.)

       I have a drawer or two in my bedroom that remind me of a picture I saw the other day.

            This fellow had just eaten his way through mince pies in an eating contest, and he had walked off with the money

            Well, I’m not sure that he walked off. They might have had to carry him off.

            The picture shows him sitting at a table with one hand on a glass of water and his other hand half way in the air. It would have been good if that hand had held a white flag.

            His mouth was full to capacity and his cheeks puffed out like a plastic bedpan that had seen many years of activity.

            This annual mince-pie-eating contest took place in Wookey Hole, England. Competitors attempted to eat as many pies as possible in 10 minutes. The prize was $2,000 and the chance to compete in a major speed-eating event in the United States – if he could make it.

            Wookey Hole. Yep, that’s where that contest was held. Wookey Hole. That sounds like an experiment for a new brand of   X-Lax that was put out to rise but didn’t.

            Anyhow, if you win in Wookey Hole, you get to travel to the United States where we have some wicky-wokey names attached to our cities. Odd names. Like Odd, W. Va., or Hell, Mich.

            I think Sophoppy, Fla., would be a good place for a pie-eating contest – or Monkey’s Eyebrow, Az.

            I am not sure what are the contest rules. For instance, how long do you have to hold down the food before you can splatter it on a ceiling fan? And, is there a prize for hitting the most-distant wall?

            I am not in favor of eating contests. I had a close relative some years ago who stopped off at a restaurant in Texas and ate the really big steak with all the trimmings. If you ate it all in within a half an hour, you got it free. If you didn’t, you forked over $49.99, and that was in the ‘70s – a lot of money.

            He forced the last bite down as the clock hurried to zero, and then had enough money to finish the trip out West.

            He was the toast of his Boy Scout troop for a spell, even though he did look like somebody with a dead dog chained around his neck.

            Which reminds me…I must do something about those bedroom drawers.

(This column ran previously in The Gazette.)

Just before my wife and I headed out for Florida, I suggested only one thing: that she remember our names and I would remember our destination.

We have taken trips before when an argument would erupt in the car as we tooled along. She would say one thing. I would say another. Eventu­ally, a bet would be made. And we would let it go at that. The problem was that the next day, we couldn’t remember what the bet was about. Nor how much were the stakes. A perfect way to settle an argument: Nobody wins.

Anyhow, we didn’t have that problem on this trip.

We headed down to Naples, Fla., right on the southwest part of that sunshine state, a haven for seniors and sailing vessels.

We were on a sailing vessel (with motor, actually) when things sort of went awry.

We had stopped off in Tallahassee to see some long-time friends when they suggested that we travel about 50 miles to the coast where their 35­-foot trawler was harbored.

It was one of those days when you feel the sap rising in your body but you want to start slow and taper off. Temperature about 75, slight breeze, and a few clouds high above teaching a sermon on tranquility.

The handsome blue-and-white boat rode gently in its slip. We boarded, did this, did that, loosed the lines and headed for the open Gulf.

The trip out and the trip back were uneventful.

Waves were a little higher than normal. A few seagulls and pelicans gave us a hard time and a mean eye, figuring that surely we would toss them a cracker or two. Sorry, no crackers, and the sand­wiches were intended for human consumption only. Peanut butter and pelican bills were not intended for each other.

It was after we had tied down back in the slip that things got interesting. Lunch was over and we were sitting in the cabin discussing the significance of things when the captain asked the first mate to start up the engine. He wanted to see how it sounded at idle, and he wanted to test his wife’s visual acuity.

That was fine and dandy but suddenly the engine roared at full blast, the boat went into gear and we were being tossed around like sailors in a summer storm. The lines held, however, and the captain managed to climb table, fallen boxes and people and turn off the power just before the symptoms turned into disease. The look he gave his mate, however, was laser laced and did a neat little surgical procedure on her mind.

Some things that we noted going down and com­ing back:

* 1-95 is not the bogy-road that it has been tagged.

A few people have been killed at rest stops on that route, and it has ended up with a bad name. It doesn’t deserve it. I used up my allotted number of rest stops and carefully noted that security person­nel were on duty at every stop. They were alert, helpful and eager to serve.

* Drivers in general seemed to be more courteous than in times past. I saw a few hotdoggers who whipped in and out of traffic and a few who bull­headed along in the left passing lane while the rest of the world had to pass on the right. They were the small minority, however, and no doubt had taken poison pills before heading out that day. Eventu­ally, they get their just rewards. Saw two cars box in a slow-pokey left-lane driver. The two cars slowed even more and held the left winger at that pace for miles. Not recommended for the faint of heart.

* Saw seven-year-old Atlanta grandson play a key basketball game. I used to think I knew excitement. Didn’t. Those kids didn’t find gravity to be easy, but it’s the law. They flew off in every direction. At the end of four quarters, the score was tied, 6-6. Went into overtime and Our Team won six seconds before the final gong. That’s excitement.

We got back home in good shape. My wife remem­bered our names and I could tell her most of where we had been.

(This column was published previously in The Gazette.)

(Dick Nielsen, with shoes newly shined.)

  It was more than half a century ago – probably 1954, as I recall – when I had a telephone tip that a new industry was about to be born near Bessemer City. A Minnesota company was buying up land for a seven-million-dollar project.

            Pretty big, back then.

            Had something to do with lithium, whatever that was. Once they got the spodumene out of the ground. And whoever had heard of spodumene back then? It kind of got confusing, until they sent in a covey of people from the home company to  ‘splain things to the natives, and to plant the seed that would still be growing, even today.

            As a reporter I kept up with the hugely local successful growth of Lithium Corporation of America. Got to know most of group who came here from Minneapolis.

            It was a highly educated, highly motivated group, challenged to dig stuff from the ground and make it into something that people would want to buy and pay good money for.

            It wasn’t easy, but the effort was hugely successful. Names such as Dean Herman, Dr. Ricardo Bach, Dick Nielsen, Jerry Orazem, Myron Herre and others put together a larger team that saw the company become a leader in the industry, and make a lot of moola for those visionaries who saw the vision and put knowhow and muscle into it.

            I was shining Dick Nielsen’s shoes the other day when we talked a little about those days. Dick lives down the street. We have kept in touch these many years. Dick now calls his wheeled walker a good friend and Audrey, still sharp, probably feels cramped in the necessity of restricted living.

            We were having dinner together the other day when I noticed that Dick’s shoes could benefit from a shine. So, I said to him:

            “Dick, you have two shoes that are a nice pair, but they are in need of attention.”

            He said: “Yeah, I been putting that off for a while. I’ll get around to it one of these days.”

            I told him that I come from a long line of shoe-shine boys, and the longer the line the better we got.

            A day or two later, I showed up at his door, with enough polish, rags and brushes to make an infantry battalion smile.

            I told him that I had come to make shoes shine and for him to take a seat on the kitchen stool and put his right foot on the stand’s wooden foot, his hand on the Bible, and we’d see what might happen.

            I take pride in my shine-boy background. It was rooted in my brother Floyd’s Barber Shop in that little town of Faith, hard by the city of Salisbury six miles away. Floyd was the oldest of six boys, and the rest of us shined shoes. In his shop. Each of us in the order of succession, were almost rich in those Depression days.

            Anyhow, I explained to Dick and Audrey, (she, watching wide-eyed as I clowned around) that shining shoes is a chemical science, just as is the lithium process. All you need are the right chemicals (paste), a rag or two, a couple of brushes, and enough energy to make the rag pop.

            We talked about that. Making the rag pop.

            In my prime, I was known as the King of Pop (in my town). Say that today, and Elvis Presley comes to mind.

            Just any ol’ rag won’t pop. For best results, use a rag about four or five inches wide, about 18 inches long, hard on one side and soft on the other.

            Once you have cleaned shoes thoroughly, applied paste and brushed it off, apply one more time to get full cooperation from the shoe. Then, use the “popping rag” and make it pop to the tune of Red Foley’s “Chattanooga Shoeshine Boy.” Come in, Red:

            People gather round
And they clap their Hands
He’s a great big Bundle of Joy
He pops a Boogie Woogie Rag,
The Chattanooga Shoeshine Boy.

       Dick brought out two pairs and Audrey one. Judy and George Miller were walking by and wanted to know what was going on. I told them. George’s shoes had just come from a Bad Shoeshine Convention and were in the running for the worst category when they were ousted by a pair from China.

       I fixed that, however. And…

       Everyone went home happy.

       Have a nice day.

    For the life of me, why anyone with a doctor’s degree and a lifetime of

putting bones back together would want to use up good resting hours matching

nuts with bolts on old cars is way beyond my comprehension.

    But, then, I’m not Bob Blake, M.D., and a lot of others like him.

    The orthopedist, he said, and the auto mechanic have a lot in common.

Both are in the hands-on-type repair business. And, if it’s broke, both want

to fix it.

    Down through the years, Dr. Blake and others in their firm, Carolina

Orthopedic and Sports Medicine, have been gluing and bailing-wiring me back

together. It started with Dr. George Miller, back there in the ’50s when

Miller and Dr. Roberts were creating those miracles at the old Orthopedic

Hospital. My latest injury was that shoulder problem that Bob Blake laid his

magical fingers on and got me back into the swing of tennis.

    It was on such a visit that we got to talking about those old cars that

he fixes up.

    It’s his therapy, his relaxation. That old ’65 Thunderbird can’t wait

until the doctor shows up at the door late in the afternoon or on a weekend

with stethoscope and scalpel (screw driver) in hand. “Help me doctor,” the

bird says. “I need my pistons oiled!”

    There was a time in Bob Blake’s life when a little thing such as a broken

back sent him into medicine instead of journalism.

    He was living in Abbeville, S. C., was in high school and was managing

editor of his high school’s newspaper. Also, he was doing pictures and

features for the Anderson (S.C.) Independent. His dad was a small-town

merchant and his mom rented out rooms. An upstairs room was rented to a

doctor. He was around when Bob Blake fell down a flight of stairs

and broke his back.

    The surgeon did such a good job of healing and of telling Bob about the

benefits of being a doctor that today Bob has a strong back and has been

doing orthopedic work for over 35 years.

    He stopped off at Davidson College for his undergrad degree, was working

on his M.D. when Vietnam called. He joined the Air Force and finished med

school while there. He became a flight surgeon with the Strategic Air

command, worked with a secret U-2 outfit and was named Flight Surgeon of the

Year in 1967 for the SAC.

    Meanwhile, at Davidson, he had met Dotty. They dated for a while and, a

week after she finished nurse’s school, they got married and he began his first week of med school. Forty years have passed together.

    Besides the thousands of patients Blake has helped in the Gastonia area,

his work in medicine continues at the hospital in Haiti that he and his

partner, Dr. Buddy Whitesides, began there over 30 years ago. At that time,

the old Garrison General Hospital was closing its doors on York Street and

needed to get rid of its equipment. Blake and Whitesides talked the hospital

board into letting them have the equipment, which they boxed up and sent

along to that Latin American country. These two men, and others, have spent

much time there, fixing bones, healing bodies, all on their own time and no

charge. Both men are still on the board; Whitesides is president and Blake is

treasurer.

    Blake’s interest in old cars has him not only restoring old cars but

writing about them. He is a writer and general promoter of a magazine called

“Members Parade,” a slick, heavy-stock magazine that tells the story of

antique cars in this area. It is published monthly and right there up front

and interesting is a column by the orthopedic surgeon. His last article was

titled “100 years of pumping gas.” The research that went into that piece was

done with depth; it was written with understanding. Now, not only does Blake

write the monthly column, but he is heavily involved in the editing of the

publication.

    Besides the ’65 T-Bird, Blake also has a ’73 T-Bird that has only 2200

actual miles on the odometer. “It doesn’t need a thing,” he said, “and I

won’t put a wrench on it.” He also has a ’57 English taxi that he bought from

Gastonian Bynum Carter. This is the same car that the late Barney Garrison,

former county commissioner, had shipped here in the ’60s.

    What about the cars of today? Twenty-five years from now, will

antique-car lovers be crawling out from under the 2000 and 2001 models,

wearing greased faces and smiles of satisfaction.

    “I doubt it,” he said. “Cars today are run by computers. They are too

complicated for shade-tree mechanics to work on.

    “But, we can still write about them.”

(This column was printed previously in The Gazette.)

(Moon Huffstetler)  

It was a voice over the phone that I hadn’t heard for a while – well, maybe 50 years or so. And it said:

            “Hey, Bill, this is Moon…how ya doin’?”

            I hesitated and he said, “Moon Huffstetler. You know… You were with me on that Catawba River swim back there in the middle fifties.”

            Absolutely, I knew. That night, he left the Buster Boyd Bridge and swam for 14 miles before he reached the Wilkinson Boulevard Bridge 16 hours later.

            Moon was the swimmer, and I was along for the ride, but mostly as reporter-photographer for The Gazette.

            There had been talk that he would try this long-distance swim, something that no one had ever done  before, at least no record of it.

            So, the effort would be made, and a crowd had gathered to see him push off. On hand in one boat was George Thrower of Belmont. He had a cabin cruiser, as I recall, and a few water enthusiasts on board. Ernest Dow was head of the local life-saving crew, and was in a smaller boat. Perhaps a couple of other boats with Moon enthusiasts aboard. I was in the boat with Dow.

            The weather was good. Clear and warm and hardly a breeze.

            Moon had been swimming long distance for some time. He was 22 years old, in good shape and filled with the spirit of adventure.

            He sliced through the water with ease and the first couple of miles went by and he wasn’t breathing hard.  In the dark, it would have been difficult to stay on course, but Moon’s friends knew the lake well. They used lights a mile or two away to keep him from straying.

            All through the night, he swam…and swam…and swam. Plant Allen electric plant had just been built. Some time about mid-afternoon the next day, the plant loomed ahead. Moon was about to pass it when he  got sick and threw up.

            He treaded water, fought off the illness and trudged ahead.

            In time, the Highway 74 Bridge could be seen in the distance. By then, he had been in the water 15 hours, was running on empty and had the look of an overworked nag.

            Still, he lifted one arm and then the other…one and then the other.

            When he arrived at the bridge, he hardly knew where he was. The word was out, however. Radio stations kept up a running account of his finish. The bridge was flooded with people, news folks, curiosity seekers.

            He was taken from the water, a blanket wrapped around him and was led to the adjacent Riverview Fish Camp where he was taken to the hospital for a checkup. There, he found out that he was “good to go.”

            That swim in Lake Wylie might have been his crowning moment up to that time. The days and years following, however, found him probably more often in water than not.

            He spent a lot of time marathon swimming. He went to Canada and trained to swim the English Channel and would have made it had a bad storm not blown him out of the water and back home.

            He swam from Narragansett, R.I., to Block Island on one occasion. On another trip, he swam 25 miles in the harbor and ocean in that area.

            He swam 15 miles  in Holland near Amsterdam where he met Johnny Weissmuller, an actor who made Tarzan famous. He went to Canada to Lake St. Johns where he swam 25 miles and “was treated like a hero.

            “The fact is I was all greased up when I shook hands with Pierre Trudeau, the prime minister,” he said.

            He returned to his home in Belmont and swam the same route on Lake Wylie that he had swum before, this time in 14 hours.

            Later on, Moon set many records for treading water. He was logged into the Guinness Book of World Records a half a dozen years, the last being 1989. He met a Guinness representative that year who told him that his record had been retired. He was presented a certificate saying so.

            Moon Huffstetler is now 76. He spent a lot of his time as a fireman in Belmont and retired from a technology company in Charlotte. A stroke five years ago put him on the sidelines but he exercises daily. He lives by himself gets around with the help of a walker.

            What’s ahead for him?

            “I want to swim an anniversary swim,” he said, “and you can put your money on that.”

            I had an email from my long-time buddy and former chief of county detectives, Ralph Miller – also a first-class artist to boot.

            He reminded me of those Burma-Shave signs that used to populate the roadways backin the ‘30s and ‘40s.

            Wrote he:

            “For those who never saw any of the Burma Shave signs, here is a quick

lesson in our history of the 1930′s and ’40′s. Before there were

interstates, when everyone drove the old 2 lane roads, Burma Shave signs

would be posted all over the countryside in farmers’ fields.   They were

small red signs with white letters. Five signs,*****, about 100 feet apart, each containing 1 line of a 4-line couplet…….and the obligatory 5th sign advertising Burma Shave, a popular shaving cream.”

            He included a few of the hundreds and thousands, and I reprint them here for your pleasure  and edification.  Have fun:

DON’T STICK YOUR ELBOW

OUT SO FAR

IT MAY GO HOME

IN ANOTHER CAR.

 BURMA SHAVE

TRAINS DON’T WANDER

ALL OVER THE MAP

‘CAUSE NOBODY SITS

IN THE ENGINEER’S LAP

 Burma Shave

SHE KISSED THE HAIRBRUSH

BY MISTAKE

SHE THOUGHT IT WAS

HER HUSBAND JAKE

Burma Shave

DON’T LOSE YOUR HEAD

TO GAIN A MINUTE

YOU NEED YOUR HEAD

YOUR BRAINS ARE IN IT

 Burma Shave

DROVE TOO LONG

DRIVER SNOOZING

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

IS NOT AMUSING

Burma Shave

BROTHER SPEEDER

LET’S REHEARSE

ALL TOGETHER

GOOD MORNING, NURSE

Burma Shave

CAUTIOUS RIDER

TO HER RECKLESS DEAR

LET’S HAVE LESS BULL

AND A LITTLE MORE STEER

Burma Shave

SPEED WAS HIGH

WEATHER WAS NOT

TIRES WERE THIN

X MARKS THE SPOT

Burma Shave

THE MIDNIGHT RIDE

OF PAUL FOR BEER

LED TO A WARMER

HEMISPHERE

Burma Shave

AROUND THE CURVE

LICKETY-SPLIT

BEAUTIFUL CAR

WASN’T IT?

Burma Shave

NO MATTER THE PRICE

NO MATTER HOW NEW

THE BEST SAFETY DEVICE

IN THE CAR IS YOU

Burma Shave

A GUY WHO DRIVES

A CAR WIDE OPEN

IS NOT THINKIN’

HE’S JUST HOPIN’

Burma Shave

AT INTERSECTIONS

LOOK EACH WAY

A HARP SOUNDS NICE

BUT IT’S HARD TO PLAY

Burma Shave

BOTH HANDS ON THE WHEEL

EYES ON THE ROAD

THAT’S THE SKILLFUL

DRIVER’S CODE

Burma Shave

THE ONE WHO DRIVES

WHEN HE’S BEEN DRINKING

DEPENDS ON YOU

TO DO HIS THINKING

Burma Shave

CAR IN DITCH

DRIVER IN TREE

THE MOON WAS FULL

AND SO WAS HE.

Burma Shave

PASSING SCHOOL ZONE

TAKE IT SLOW

LET OUR LITTLE

SHAVERS GROW

  Burma Shave

Have a nice day.

(Dean Wood)

When we came here in the summer of 1950,  one of the first couples we met were Dean and Mary Wood.

We connected. Went to the same church, had kids about the same age. Dean and I joined the same Lions club. He was in the paint business, and I was a devil of a painter with a paint brush. We spent a lot of time at the Wood’s place “on the river.”

The days mounted up, a half a century slipped by, more.

And all that time, I kept wondering: “What in the world makes Dean Wood so good.”

He wore a grin like he knew it was there but never bothered to hang it up, night or day. It  was there to reflect the depth of  his great personality.

Dean  was one of a kind. A gem. What you saw is what you got… as transparent as a just-washed window.

There was, of course, no one thing that made Dean what he was. He could be serious. He could be funny. But always, he was caring.  He died a few months ago, yes, and he has been sorely missed, especially by Mary and their family.

The other day, his kids were going through his belongings when someone found what might be part of the evidence – what made Dean what he was. It was found tacked to his desk where he could see it (himself, alone)  every day. And, he also had attached it to the back of  his checkbook. Two copies, just to make sure.

Here it is, three little verses that helped make Dean Wood what he was:

When Life Is Through

I’d like to think when a life is done that I had filled a needed post,

That here and there I’d paid my fare with more than idle talk and boast;

That I had taken gifts divine, tAhe breath of life and manhood fine,

And tried to use them now and then, in service for my fellow men.

I’d hate to think when life is through that I had lived my round of years

A useless kind, that leaves behind no record in this vale of tears;

That I had wasted all my days by treading only selfish ways;

And that this world would be the same if it had never known my name.

I’d like to think that here and there when I am gone, there shall remain

A happier spot that might have not existed had I toiled for gain;

That someone ‘s cheery voice and smile shall prove that I had been worthwhile;

That I had paid with something fine my debt to God for life divine.

Three verses, warm as sunshine, reflecting in the life of Gastonia’s Dean wood.