This is my father, Bob Crews, standing next to his favorite car of all time, his '59 T-Bird convertible. He is in front of our home in the 7600 block of Dunmanway, in Dundalk, Maryland. We moved there in 1955, when I was 5-years-old. Both of my parents passed away to the other side years ago, and my younger sister has the house there now. Dad was a foreman, than supervisor in charge of pollution control for Eastern Stainless Steel. He was a World War Two Navy Veteran, who never really said much about his years in that war. He was in some heavy fighting too, especially "on the picket line" during the battle of Okinawa, when the Japanese Kamikazes killed so many of our men in uniform. The only thing he ever said about the terrible his war experiences were, was that he was on a mine sweeper as an electrician and anytime something solid in the water around his ship made scrapping noises down along the side of the vessel, and he was down below deck, "you could here a pin drop," because all the sailors were so fearful that it was a mine about to explode. When he told me that, I was in my mid 30s and had been in the Army, had heard lots of war stories in all kinds of places from all kinds of people, had seen plenty of war stories on TV and in the movies and had read a lot about war. So, when he said to me that day, during the 1980s, while he was setting there in his easy chair, in the living room, "you could hear a pin drop", I let out one of them serious laughs some of us men sometimes emit at imagining the fear someone else felt as they tell a story about living through fear; I leaned forward towards him a tad bit, as I sat on the sofa, and sorta' involuntarily barked out a "well I guess so!!" because it sent chills through me to imagine how quiet it got as that scrapping sound was passing by each sailor. I could never actually know, but it hit even harder when my father leaned towards me, partially up out of his chai,r and firmly added, "No. I m e a n y o u c o u l d h e a r a p i n d r o p .&quot. I'll never forget, never get over, the look on his face and the language his body expressed, as he said that. I can't even describe it. He did tell one cool war story one time though. I wasn't the only one there, but I can't recall who else in our family was. Dad had stayed in the Navy after the big war ended and was stationed on the ground in China for awhile. American military might was there to help the Nationalist Chinese fight the Communist Chinese. All hell was breaking loose all over the place; if it wasn't the commies, it was the criminals who'd get ya'. My father's little story was brought to the forefront of his mind by something said about the weight of some rifle that one of us there was comparing with some gun my uncle or cousin preferred, and my dad said that he liked the little M1 Carbine so much that in China he had gotten his hands on one and would not give it up for a larger, somewhat cumbersome rifle that was regular issue to sailors at the time. The catch was that in order to get his hands on that Carbine he had to volunteer to be a message runner. A friggin runner in a China that was falling part at the government seems and it was known by dad that the commies were mostly still to the north of the Naval positions he was part of defending, but there was no way to guess where those bad-ass, murderous, torture expert Chinese bandits might be. So instead of carrying around a heavier rifle and staying with the other sailors in better defensive positions, my father went haul-assin' on down through the strange, beautiful, wondrous Chinese countryside alone. Dad had a big grin on his mug the entire time he was telling this true tale. I could see that he had taken on that runner's job, maybe a little bit for the cool little M1, but mostly for the freakin thrill of it -- for that hot-danged adrenaline rush he got as soon as a written message was handed to him and off he went ground-poundin, with his heart poundin hard, and there was nobody he had to rely on but himself. He was a young man who just wanted to know how much could he accomplish and how far he could go on his own merits. As dad told only the second war story I ever heard him talk about, I have never seen him smile wider or more mischievously proudly any other time in my life. He loved and cherished the challenges and triumphs of hoofing it through Chinese badlands with nothing but his own self and a lightweight, but very deadly, M1 Carbine for a weapon. That big black buggy in the background of this old photograph of my father is the hearse that the Psychedelic Propeller Blues Rock band used to haul their equipment to gigs in. The drummer, Austin O'Baker was my next door neighbor there, my age, and my best friend. The band practiced in a large family room added onto the back of the house. And I spent a lot of time there and also on the road with the Propeller in that hear

This microbrew was seen at the 2011 Wilson County Fair in Lebanon, TN. The price seems high at first - $12. But with that, you get a 32oz. stainless steel mug and free refills all day. On tap, they had seven flavors: Root Beer, Diet Root Beer, Birch Beer, Vanilla Cream, Orange Cream, Grape and Cherry. Each time you return, they'll scoop ice into your mug and you can get what you want. I've never been a fan of root beer or grape sodas, but I thought their Orange Cream was excellent and the Cherry was also really good.