SELMA SUN Newspaper

My brother and I were born while our parents lived on a farm out from Selma and near Burnsville. The house did not have electricity or central plumbing. Rooms were heated by open fireplaces, and a Home Comfort wood stove was in the kitchen. The outhouse was a little down the hill behind our home. I distinctly remember that it had a seat designed just for me and my brother. There were even side railings by the seat so that we could hold on.

Especially in the winter when the leaves were off the trees, we could spy river boats on the Alabama River. Sometimes at night when a boat was spotted, Dad would pass a kerosene lamp back and forth in front of a window just for fun. And, those river boats might blink their lights back to us in greetings.

Daddy had a two-door brown car for going to Selma or to a country store in Burnsville. My brother and I would stand on the floor of the car and behind the front seats. Sometimes I had my fingers dug into the indention around the car windows above the back seats as I looked out. I wondered what the other children we saw along the way were doing. Why didn’t they ever come to play with me?

In that country home, I remember sleeping in a raised bed with screen sides and a screened top. I had to yell to get someone to open the top to let me out. And I remember feeling awful when I had malaria.

Even when we lived near Burnsville, we went to Selma’s First Baptist Church. Especially after my older brother started school in Burnsville, I was excited to go because there would be other children there.

Clear images linger from when I was in a children’s Sunday School class. I knew the songs by heart. Remember the one about that little guy? “Zacchaeus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he.” I remember we all did the hand motions as if we were climbing up in that tree. And, we put our hands to our forehead as though we wanted to see.

The teacher had told us many times that Jesus lives up there in heaven. She would raise her arm and point skyward as she said this. “And, when we die,” she assured us, “we’ll all go up there and be with Jesus.” Her arm and her finger would be bouncing as she reminded us that Jesus was “up there.”

Maybe the teacher recognized what would be true for all my life: while antsy to be on the run, I was a dutiful student. And maybe that time, to regain my attention, she asked, “James, where does Jesus live?”

I had learned to compensate for the stammer I had while growing up, so I simply raised my arm and rhythmically jabbed my finger in the direction of “up there.” When the buzzer sounded, I dashed out to find my mother in the sanctuary. She always sat in the same place.

“Wait, James!” the Sunday School teacher called. “Walk with me.”

Obedient as usual, I took her hand as we walked from the annex and into the vestibule at the back of the Baptist Church’s sanctuary. Surely this fidgety boy would disturb fewer worshipers if he sat in the balcony. “James, would you like to sit with me up there?” I still see how she raised her arm pointing to the stairs leading to the balcony.

“No!” It was a long drawn out scream. “No! No!” I burst past the ushers and ran screaming down the aisle to where mother always sat. “Mama! Mama! Please! I don’t want to go up there where Jesus lives now!”

I have no memory of how long it took for the congregation to return to a worshipful attitude. Nor what the organist played to remind the parishioners where they were. Surely the choir sang and the preacher preached. But me? I cowered in my mother’s lap that entire hour. Jesus lives up there and I wasn’t ready to go. Not yet.

Here, more than three quarters of a century later, it would probably take some serious analysis to come to a full understanding of this, but – you see – I continue to have a lingering fear of heights.

Boys! My wife and I ended up with a passel of boys. Counting sons and grandsons: there are seven. There are only two girls that descend from us. As a result, I don’t get many valentine cards from pretty little girls. Thanksgiving is the big time in this family. Usually, on that long weekend, we spend at least one evening sitting around an outdoor campfire telling stories. Most Thanksgivings, Christmas plans came up – who would be visiting the other grandparents. That kind of thing.

At one campfire, the college boy who was trying to grow a beard started it. “Tell us a Christmas story, Grand Dad.”

I reached over and put another branch on the fire. “You mean beside the big one?” That got a smile or two.

I reminded them that my Tennessee Grandfather’s family grew tobacco, corn, and horses up there on the other side of Nashville. Grandfather Wade Preston Herod had six sons and must have realized that he really didn’t need all those young men tending his farm. He would expand. In the early twentieth century, three of the Herod boys were sent to Alabama to purchase and care for land in the Black Belt. There, they would grow cotton and corn. Cows for family milk, too.

Homes would be needed for those boys as they married and started families. Uncle Pascal (Red) Herod’s home and farm were in and around Hazen. Several of the Tennessee brothers helped dad build that house out from Selma. The dirt road down the hill from that house ran along the Alabama River between Selma and Burnsville. Today, it is called River Road.

On Christmas Eve, 1941, two of the Herod brothers brought their families to Route 3 in order to spend Christmas with Daddy’s family. The house had no electricity or running water. Remember that it was heated with a wood stove in the kitchen and with open fireplaces. Lighting was with kerosene lamps. I was only four that special Christmas Eve, but I remember that the adults were sitting in a semi-circle around the fireplace. My brother, cousins, and I were playing in front of that fire.

Seemingly, with a surprise to everyone, there was a knock on the door. If I had been ten years older, I probably would have wondered who would be visiting us way out in the country and in the late evening. I must have looked up and it must have been my father who went to the door.

This I remember. When he opened the door, the adults cheered. And I remember running to my mother. I was scared of that Santa Claus in Selma who greeted children at this time of the year while on the fourth floor of the Tepper’s Department store. Having him in our house was even terrifying!

Santa Claus made a lot of noise and passed out gifts to the children. Even me! He hugged my two aunts and petrified me when he came over to my mother. But get this … Santa Claus fell down on the floor! He fell and all the adults laughed. Not me! The horror! How could it be? Santa Claus comes to my house and falls on the floor?

Two more memories about this 1941 Christmas episode: one is that my mother said that Santa fell because she had waxed the floors, and the other is that he forgot to bring into the room a little red wagon with removable side panels.

Years later, after we moved to Orrville, I caught my brother smoking a cigarette behind the garage. He let me finish it to guarantee that I wouldn’t tell. And he told me the two secrets that somebody has to tell every boy. I told him that I already knew the one about Santa Claus. He added to that one by telling me which uncle it was that had dressed as Santa that year. And he told me how much they had to serve him before he would do it.

Another Christmas memory happened on Christmas Day, 1942. World War II had begun, daddy had started working at Craig Field, and we had moved to 530 Tremont Street in Selma. That Christmas, my brother and I had both gotten a cowboy hat, a cowboy shirt, and two-gun holsters. Probably other things, too. This time, my Grandmother Roy and Uncle James Roy were in the room as we opened presents. I don’t particularly remember that our mother and father were there.

They weren’t.

The telephone number for that house was TR2-6881. It rang. I don’t really remember my grandmother going to answer the phone, but I do remember her coming back. She was all smiles and said, “You boys are getting a sister for Christmas, too!”

I didn’t remember asking for a sister for Christmas. But I must have sat up. Maybe even stood with excitement. This I know. She might be a good playmate. “How old is she?”

My uncle and my grandmother laughed. My older brother? As usual, he was simply disgusted with my ignorance. How should I have known? Nobody told me. Anyway, my sister was born on December 25, 1942.

I am pretty confident that my sister will send me a valentine card after she reads this.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor was a surprise military attack by the Japanese Navy Air Service against the United States. The strike happened a little before eight o’clock on December 7, 1941. News of the attack was reported on the radio at two-thirty eastern time that day. On the day after the assault, President Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress for a Declaration of War.

My 44-year-old father’s contribution to the war effort was to work on airplanes at Craig Air Force Base. To make the drive to Craig Field shorter, we moved to Selma from that farm situated out toward Burnsville and on the banks of the Alabama River. We moved to 530 Tremont Street into half of a duplex with my family living on one side and my widowed grandmother living on the other.

Drive by 530 Tremont Street now. It has shrubbery and a well-kept lawn. Back then, it was not too long before the yard was well trampled by two rowdy boys and their friends. There was a sand box under the big oak tree. We were not supposed to get on the grass in front of Mrs. Bog’s house next door, but little cowboys couldn’t always control where their horses decided to run.

Sonny Caldwell lived down the street one way. Bobby Price and Sibley Thomas the other. Margaret Ellen Coe was across the street and Miriam Day lived behind us. We were all over that neighborhood. The only strict rule was not to go into the empty building across the street. Mama called it the Old Tremont School. It was old. I knew that because she had gone to school there.

What our parents called The Wilby House was at the other end of the block. No one ever came out to chide this little cowboy when his horse took him up onto that house’s porch by the Tremont Street steps and down again by the Abbott Avenue steps.

Because of Craig Field being close to Selma and with the ongoing world war, Selma had air raids at night. When the sirens sounded, everyone was supposed to turn off all lights. Police cars drove through town checking that all houses were complying with the order to have no light showing.

My father put up what he called “blackout shades” on one of the back rooms so that there could be some candles lit. Mostly during those times of lights-out, we played a board game called Parcheesi. I now realize it was a great way to encourage two little boys to do sums in their heads quickly.

With the rapid buildup of the Air Force, there must not have been enough housing at Craig Field for married officers. My grandmother, Maude Logan Roy, decided to advertise a room for rent, a room with kitchen privileges.

On a Sunday afternoon when a young pilot and his wife pulled up in front of our house, I was playing in the sand box in the front yard. I walked over between their car and our front steps. They sat there for a while looking at me, and across the street at the Tremont school, and to the Boggs’ house next to ours. Were they going to get out of their car? They did. My mother and grandmother came out onto the porch.

The pilot looked down at me, “Hello, Little Boy. I fly airplanes.”

“I’m going to fly airplanes,” I yelled back at him. I wanted him to know that I could do whatever he could do.

I remember distinctly that he put his cap on my head and picked me up high in the air, swirling me around above him and his wife. When he put me down, he asked me if he could come live with me.

“Can he, Mama?”

That seeming fondness for children won my mother and grandmother immediately. The pilot and his bride could have the room. I told him bye every morning and ran to him when he returned in the afternoons. He was loud and joyful and filled the house with music. I wanted to be around him as much as I could.

Their second Saturday morning, I waited on the front porch wondering why he was not leaving to go fly airplanes. In time, I ran down the hall and hit their door with both palms open. It burst wide, slamming back against the chifforobe. My exploding into their bedroom turned out to be very inappropriate. He yelled something I did not understand. But I stood at the door and stared. In a bit, the young pilot started laughing.

Everyone in the house was embarrassed except me and the young lieutenant. They didn’t stay long after that. I knew I had really done something bad when I heard my mother tell my daddy that he had to get that boy out of the house.

Mama was pregnant at the time, but I didn’t know that and would not have understood even if someone had told me.

They sent me to the Catholic kindergarten on Broad Street. No. They let me go to the Catholic kindergarten on Broad Street. My brother was in the second grade with Miss Butler at the Dallas Academy. If he was in school, I wanted to be in school. And now I was.

“See there! I made them let me!” That’s what I told him. “I made them let me go to school, too.”

The Education of a Five Year Old

We were in the second war.

And I was only five.

We were on the eastern side.

Gram was in the west.

And, I knew how to run.

Our side had two rooms,

Another just to cook.

There was a room for us to eat,

And one to take a bath.

While I was there to run.

Granny had the living room,

A kitchen and a bath.

One to sleep, one to eat.

For renting, there was more.

But, I was there to run.

He was flying jets at Craig.

They paused to take a look,

Parked his cap upon my head.

And asked if I would fly.

He’d catch me on the run.

Picked me up into the air,

And swung me all round.

Decided they would surely stay.

On just their second day.

And, I was on the run.

I could fly within the house.

Forget the doors are closed.

Surely not a stop for me,

Slam! Bam! And he said damn.

I should have turned to run.

But,

I stared.

He laughed.

She screamed.

And, I was on the run.

Jim Herod April 2006

I remember Aunt Callie. She wasn’t really my aunt. She was my mother’s aunt. She was the sister of my Grandfather James Granderson Roy. World War II was going strong and gas was scarce, but these were aunts and uncles. Sunday afternoon was the time to visit, and that’s what we did. Roy cousins married Harbins and Moorers. I didn’t pay much attention to all those grownups, but young cousin, Bobby Moorer, could really kick that ball. I wish now I knew what those aunts and uncles talked about while sipping sweet tea and sitting in those rocking chairs on their front porches. And I wonder how it was that most of them lived on the other side of the Alabama river. The mother of Grandaddy Roy and Aunt Callie and these aunts and uncles was Nancy Emily Smitherman. That’s my connection to my Third Great Grandfather, Londoner Joseph B. Smitherman. I have a great story about him.

Back to Aunt Callie. She married William Davis Rutledge. My records show that this aunt lived on Selma Avenue. However, I can’t find a house that looked like theirs in that area. My memory was that she lived within walking distance of the old Vaughn Memorial Hospital. One of her sons, James Calhoun Rutledge, married Betty Joyce Ralston. While that last fact is not important in this story, it was important to me. That’s because Betty Joyce Ralston was a sister of a classmate of mine, Jeanette Ralston. Thereafter, I claimed Jeannette and I were kissing cousins. She was homecoming queen the year we were seniors. You better believe I liked having a kissing cousin who turned out to be homecoming queen

Aunt Callie was a nurse at the old Vaughn Memorial Hospital. The hospital was in the building that is now the Vaughn-Smitherman Museum. I really liked visiting Aunt Callie’s home because she seemed to keep a plate of brownies on their dining room table. I have an odor memory associated with her. If I was visiting in their home when Aunt Callie came in from the hospital, I recorded somewhere in my brain that she smelled like the hospital. What was it? Ether, or just general antiseptics?

Whenever that hospital comes to mind, it brings two memories. Both happened in early 1943. One was of going to the hospital shortly after the new year in January, 1943. It was Aunt Callie who brought my newborn sister to the window separating the hallway from the newborn nursery. I was barely tall enough to stick my head over the window ledge and had to hold onto that ledge with both hands as I peeked through the large glass window and into the nursery. I don’t remember seeing that she was holding my baby sister, but she must have been so that my father could see her. That would have been too high up for me. I do remember all the baby cribs in that room. Older Brother Joe punched me and I ran to catch up with daddy as he walked up the hall to where mother was.

Sister Elizabeth still being a baby was why I remember the year of this second memory. My brother got Bright’s Disease that winter. It was a serious medical problem back in that era, and he was kept in the hospital for a while. Daddy and I were kind of living alone at 530 Tremont Street. Mama came home with Baby Elizabeth in the evenings, but they spent most of the day in the hospital room with Brother Joe. That room was on the second floor of the hospital. Daddy and I were going to see them as this story begins. Being a helpful son, I was carrying the diaper bag for baby sister, Elizabeth. I really don’t know if it was given to me to carry, or if I reached for it. I do remember walking up the stairs to the second floor using both hands to carry the bag. Those steps were so tall and, since I was carrying the diaper bag, I could not pull myself up by holding onto the banister rails. It was a struggle, but I could do it! “I’ve got it, Daddy!” Finally, at the top, I ran down the hall to Joe’s room in spite of the calls, “Don’t run!”

I rushed into his room yelling. I was so happy to see Joe that I swung that diaper bag in greetings. It hit him in the head. Like I planned. How was I to know that there was also a baby bottle filled with milk in the bag?

I remember that when Aunt Callie came into the room to check on Joe, I turned so that I wouldn’t be embarrassed by having her seeing me sitting in a corner and facing the wall. And I remember being told sternly to turn back to the wall. I did. If we had been at home, I would have been spanked, I would have cried, and it would have been over. But now, I sat silently in the corner and stayed facing the wall. It was a long afternoon.

Finally, I remember Aunt Callie seeming to be more concerned with the knot and bruise on Joe’s head than how he was faring with Bright’s Disease. Humph! I should tell you about all the times he put a knot on my head!

There was a school in the little community of Burnsville. My older brother turned six while we lived near there; that’s where he started school. In 1942, when the war took us to Selma, he began the second grade at the Dallas Academy in Selma. I didn’t like that. I hated it when Joe left me at home alone. I didn’t have anybody to play with. And then, an Army Air Force Lieutenant, with a little help from me, created a need for me to go to kindergarten. Perfect. Five years old and lots of playmates! That’s how I found myself at the Catholic Kindergarten on Broad Street in Selma.

What more could a five-year-old want? It seems the only specific memories that I have of that time, however, are of the two times I got in trouble. One is the time when three or four of us were so involved in our play, we didn’t know that the time-to-come-in bell had rung. Not coming in when the bell rang was bad enough, but boys and girls playing out of sight and down in the outside steps to the basement was a grievous misdemeanor. We were too young to know why that was so grievous, and no one told us when they scolded us. But they did scold us. “Yes, ma’am. We won’t do that again. Yes, ma’am.”

The other memory was on the occasion of my mother visiting the school. The Catholic Sister in charge of my class was so gracious and, I remember distinctly, she wanted my mother to know how good I was with numbers. The Catholic Sister asked me to tell my mother what was three plus five. “Seven,” I responded. The Sister was embarrassed and then I was. My mother? She laughed. She laughed again that night at the dinner table. So did my brother. My father didn’t. Neither did I.

I turned six in May, 1943. This meant I could join my brother in attending school at the Dallas Academy. Teachers there for me were Mrs. Ward, Miss Butler, and Mrs. Rivers. I was eager to go to that school with my brother. I really don’t remember if it was because I liked the teachers so much, or it was because I enjoyed the academics. Actually, I think it was because I liked having so many children to play with. Boys that I remember were Roger Butler, Donald Mills, Dick Grayson, and Johnny Jones. After finishing at the University of Alabama, Roger Butler returned to Selma and became an entrepreneur. Butler Jewelry is located on Broad Street. Donald Mills studied to be an engineer at the University of Alabama and eventually served as co-chair of the Engineering Division of the Alabama Natural Gas Association. Dick Grayson was an ENT physician until retirement. Johnny Jones became a probate judge for Dallas County. One girl at the school was Eleanor Kerr. She continues to be involved as an actress and director of productions in the performing arts community of Alabama. Interestingly, she married an Orrville native, Warren (Bo) Davis. Another was Janette Ralston. She was to become a kissing cousin a few years later.

Even as a simple little elementary school student, there was a curious civics situation that puzzled me. All my friends in and around Tremont Street went to Byrd School, but my brother and I attended the Dallas Academy. Why? The one or two times I asked my mother, she may have thought the answer too long. “Because that’s where I want you to go. Pay attention before you spill your hot chocolate.” That’s the way the answer might could have come. After we moved to Orrville, the question lay dormant. After all, there was Orrville School, and college, and more college, and Army, and mathematics. It took retiring and moving and getting involved in the Clarke County Historical Society for me to start putting things in a historical perspective.

Situated in the middle of the Black Belt, Selma held an important place in the middle of the nineteenth century. Perhaps because of this, Joseph Reid John (1814-1890) moved his family about thirty miles from Uniontown to Selma in 1855. There, he became a founder and first president of the Dallas Academy. While this was an important step for Selma, it was also a bold step. It was bold for he asserted that the Dallas Academy would educate the daughters as well as the sons of families in the surrounding area. What could be the circumstances that would lead a man to do such a thing? Maybe it was because he and his wife had seven children. The first three were girls; there were only two boys.

The biographies of sisters Frances John (Hobbs) and Mary Ameila John (Watson) is a fascinating look into the drive for women’s suffrage. My grandmother, Maude Odell Logan Roy would have known that history. My mother, too. But that’s a story for another place. This is about Joe and James Herod starting school in Selma.

My brother and I walked to the Dallas Academy from 530 Tremont Street. It wasn’t far. We had jackets and raincoats. Galoshes, too. Once, as we paused at the intersection of Church Street and Dallas Avenue, I pointed over to the First Baptist Church. “Joe, when I was little, I thought God lived up in that steeple.”

“What?” he gave me a backhand in the chest and took off running. I guess he thought it funny that a third-grade kid would look back and think his being little was something that happened in the yesterday. Now, I do too.

There were flags and speeches and parades in front of the Albert Hotel on Broad Street as the people of Selma celebrated the ending of World War II.

What was important to me was that even though our Daddy was going to keep working at Craig, our family was going to move to Orrville. Until the house was ready, Daddy would take vacation time. During that vacation time, Joe and I would get up early to eat breakfast and ride with him to Orrville each morning. He’d let us out at our new school.

Every day after school that first week, we walked back to where our new home was to be. The house was filled with screeches and bangs as Daddy, Uncle Red, and Arthur Moreland tore boards off the walls. They were stringing wires and screwing pipes between what was left standing. And then they nailed up boards all over again.

Joe and I explored. There was a barn and a chicken house. Behind the garden, there was another house where Daddy said that Arthur and Jessie Moreland were going to live. We scraped a place for our airplanes and our cars. One time when my airplane took off, I went running with it toward the street.

“Where’re you going?” Joe yelled.

“I’m flying over Orrville … like airplanes where Daddy works.”

I didn’t get up for breakfast on Saturday morning after that first week. Bacon and toast and a cup of warm chocolate were waiting. Sonny Caldwell and Bobby Price came when they saw us outside. They asked how we liked our new school. Joe said it was okay. And then they looked at me. “I don’t have any friends there. Everybody already has friends.” And I told him the rest. “They call me New Boy.” I wiped my eyes. “Don’t be a baby!” Joe nagged. I decided to go back inside.

Uncle James came over that afternoon. He and Mama were whispering before I came in where they were. He was not wearing his uniform. “Hey, James,” he greeted me. “Did your mama tell you that I’m not Captain Roy anymore. Now, I’m going to be J.G.” And, then Mama told me to greet him like I would for the rest of his life. “Say, ‘Uncle J.G.’” He had this new name. I liked it. “Uncle J.G.”

Mama and Little Sister went with us to Orrville on Sunday afternoon. So many things had changed since Friday. The tractor was there. The front yard had had tall grass growing and there had been two stumps in the front. All that was gone. And Arthur and Jessie had moved into the house on the other side of the garden.

“What happened?” It looked different from how it had looked on Friday.

“Daddy and Uncle Red and Arthur,” Joe answered. “And look what they found.” A bicycle had been lying in the tall grass. It would be the bicycle on which we both would learn to ride.

The second week at the new school began the next day. Mr. Childers was the Principal. He was big and the word was that he swung a mean paddle. Dressed in a white shirt and blue tie, dark pants, and black shoes, he looked fearsome when he stepped out the door of the Orrville School that Monday morning. “Why are you boys late for school again?”

Brother Joe would know what to say. “Tell him, Joe. Tell him.” Joe could read my mind. He knew what I was thinking.

“I gave you permission to be late until you moved to Orrville,” Mr. Childers said. “But I saw you at the house this weekend. Why are you late now?” I don’t know why Mr. Childers spoke so loudly. I wasn’t hard of hearing back then.

Joe said it. “We have not moved in, sir. But we were at the house this weekend. Daddy is still working. Mama came to look.”

Mr. Childers frowned at us and gave us a stern warning again. We could not be late once we moved to Orrville. We knew that already. He opened the school door and let us in.

As usual, Miss Herndon greeted me warmly when I walked into her class. The fifth grade sat on the other side of the room from my fourth-grade class. Miss Herndon told me I could take my seat. Neither looking left nor right, I walked in and slid into my seat between Dudley Reynolds and Margie Ann Bell. I knew everybody was looking at me. Anybody could see that. I sat there looking at my folded hands.

Miss Herndon fixed that. “James, your brother’s teacher said that you and your brother do multiplication tables when you are riding to school.”

“Sometimes.”

“Your brother told her that you can do two-digit ones.” Joe was getting me in trouble. “Can you do the multiplication table for eighteen?”

I nodded and said, “Yes ma’am.”

“I want you to stand up and tell us the multiplication table for the number eighteen.”

I slid out of my chair. Eighteen wasn’t a hard one. “One times eighteen is eighteen. Two times eighteen is thirty-six. Three times eighteen is fifty-four! Four times eighteen is seventy-two. Five times eighteen is …”

Daddy had said, “Good for you!” when we were riding in the car and I was saying these multiplication tables. I was sitting on the back seat all by myself. He had moved the rearview mirror so that I could see his eyes. I kept telling him the table. I liked doing daddy’s number things when we were riding to Orrville.

Here, more than seventy years later, I thank Miss Herndon for asking me to do that. Somehow after that and for reasons I didn’t understand back then, things changed.

My grandchildren look at each other and smile when I tell them that I delivered the newspaper from Selma to customers all over Orrville while riding my bicycle. They recognize this as just one more symbol of those quaint times back in the middle of the last century. Not only did I deliver the newspaper to homes, but I also had to be up early on Sunday mornings. You see, Ben Ellis Dunaway and others wanted to read the Sunday paper with their morning coffee.

“You took the newspaper to people’s homes?”

I looked at the grandson over the top of my coffee cup. “Yes, for a while, I was the Orrville newspaper boy.” I smiled as I thought of Chervis Isom, our friend from Birmingham and author of The Newspaper Boy. He had visited Grove Hill back in 2015 when the book club read his book. Newspaper boys! Maybe they are now a lost icon.

Being the town’s newspaper boy meant I knew every adult in town by name, and I also knew they would give me a provoked telephone call if they did not have the Selma paper to read on weekday evenings after dinner.

When Joe and I took over the newspaper business in Orrville for the Selma paper, the tradition had been to collect thirty cents from every customer on Friday afternoon. That made Fridays into long afternoons. And long afternoons on Friday interfered with Friday night ball games all year. It was Joe’s idea to collect only once a month. Thirty cents a week, fifty-two weeks in a year, and twelve months in the year means $1.30 each month was the same thing. Some customers would have none of that. They knew that there were four weeks in a month and that they would pay thirty cents every Friday. No high school boy was going to change their mind. They had an advantage in this discussion: they were adults and we were just boys.

There was one other serious problem. In the summers, I always got an invitation to stop for a glass of sweet tea at one house. The people further along on my route insisted that I bring their paper first and then go back to Joyce’s for that sweet tea. But look! I was a fifteen, sixteen, seventeen-year-old boy. A sip of tea and maybe some talk of going to The Spot down in Safford on Saturday night could have a good result. Down there, a pocket full of quarters turned the place into a great site for dancing.

One Sunday morning, one of those horrific storms was sweeping through the community. Never mind. I would deliver the papers. I was down at the south end of town coming back from leaving the paper at Virginia Englett’s parent’s home when the storm broke. I took off my shirt and used it to wrap the papers as I took them out of the rainproof sack which was attached to the bicycle handlebars. I had to run up onto all the porches and put the papers under the doormat or behind the screen door so that they wouldn’t blow away in the storm. The Wilsons, Gants, Maytons, and everybody else would get their papers dry. But their paperboy looked like he had just come from the shower while wearing jeans, socks, and shoes, but shirtless. I had long hair back then, and it hung in wet streaks across my forehead.

It is a firm part of my remembrance that no one who saw me at church that Sunday came up to me with thanks for putting their paper under the doormat or behind the screen door. Believe me, if their paper had gotten more than a little damp, they would have called before Sunday School.

All done and back home that stormy Sunday, I checked on the fifty baby chicks Dad had given Mama. He told her that they were an Easter present. I lifted the lid of their cage and there lay the biddies, their downy feathers plastered to their bodies and their heads lying motionless on the floor of the cage. I ran dripping into the house yelling that the baby chicks had drowned. Dad came out, shook his head sadly, and said we’d have to order more. Mom, however, came with two cookie sheets in her hands. “Put the chicks on these and bring them in.”

While I probably didn’t know the word incredulous back then, I did know that her suggestion was exactly that. But I was too young to argue. My mother put those drowned little chicks in the oven.

Yes! In the oven!

When we heard the chirping start, we opened the oven door and beheld a more joyous revival than had ever been conducted on any Sunday morning in any of the three Orrville churches. I knew the bottom of the pan must be hot for not only had the chicks been resuscitated, but also they had taken to a dance that could only have been provoked by tender feet on a hot cookie sheet.

There was nothing to do but release those baby chicks onto the kitchen floor. The excited little birds ran circles on the slickly waxed linoleum. The image that will stay with me is that of Daddy coming in the kitchen with his hands on his hips and a smile spreading across his face. Me? I was lying on the floor with three or four fuzzy chicks on my bare chest. Mama looked at Daddy and shook her head as I started to sing, “Up from the pan they arose, with a mighty heat upon their toes!”

What a glorious Easter morning revival.

I must have been a preteen when I first decided I needed some money. The first moneymaking deal for me and my brother was delivering the Selma newspaper in Orrville. That gave us a little cash. I wanted more. I got my first job for pay at a local grocery store. O’Brien’s Store in downtown Orrville was the first store that hired me. Of course, I was not the first teenaged boy to work for them. Being an unpainted wood framed building among the stores in Orrville, the place looked old. It was. The building was old and the owners were old. In addition to the large room where the groceries were, the building extended back into what was the home for Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien and all the people who lived with them.

Upon arriving early on Saturday mornings, my first job was to sweep. The bottle drinks were kept in a chest in which cold water circulated. So, the second job was to pull all the bottles already in the tank forward and to fill more in the back. Next, I restocked shelves, marking the price on every can. There was a big potbelly stove in the back of the store near a roll top desk where either Mr. or Mrs. O’Brien kept books.

After getting the shelves full, I would go back to where they were sitting and, with pad and pencil, make notes for myself on the prices of milk, bread, cheese, etc – things that could not be stamped with the price. More than once, they would shake their heads, sigh, and ask me why I couldn’t remember from the previous week. They did not hide their certainty that I was not very smart. Almost every Saturday, they would tell me again that their previous Saturday worker, Charlie Warren, could remember prices from one week to the next. I wanted to tell them to ask me to multiply 345 times 987 without using paper and pencil, but I wasn’t raised to sass adults. Besides, I did not want to be fired.

Their Saturday greeting to me was the same every time: “The broom is in the back.” To tell you the truth, I wondered why they could not remember that they told me that last Saturday, and that I didn’t have to be told where to return the broom after I finished.

In hindsight, it’s clear that the stores in Orrville at that time were social places. If Mrs. Wilson came into O’Brien’s store, Mrs. O’Brien would walk to the front and greet her. She would give me Mrs. Wilson’s list and the two of them would walk to the back where there were chairs. I learned quickly that if Mrs. Wilson said that she would like a soft drink, I was to bring the bottled drink, already opened and wrapped in a paper napkin. I have no idea what they talked about, but more than two or three times, Mrs. O’Brien called for me to get the post office key from the drawer by the cash register and see if they had anything in their mail box. I could tell from the way they watched me leave and how they moved apart when I came back that there had been some secretive conversation while I was gone.

When Mr. Tom Parson came in, everybody in the store would learn his opinion of last Friday night’s football game, or how his twin daughters were doing at the University. He got his own Coke and potato chips or cheese crackers. With him, my instructions were to watch what he ate and record that to the Parson’s account

There were some unpleasant jobs I might be given. For example, one Saturday, I was asked to clean out the sweet potato box. This box sat under a dark shelf in a corner and the potatoes must not have sold fast enough. The corner reeked with the stinking odor of rotting sweet potatoes. Gag! I nearly did that while pulling out the ones already soft and growing slime.

Part of my pay was eating Saturday lunch at a big round table in the attached living quarters. There were a bunch of sisters and cousins who ate there, too. I never bothered to sort out how they were all related. I’m sure they all understood that I probably could not have remembered anyway. This I remember even today: they were good cooks. Dinner was several bowls of vegetables, various kinds of meat, and home cooked bread – all served family style. I was doing my own metamorphosis at that time – a skinny boy turning into a skinny teen – and it seemed to amuse them at how much I could eat. One nice lady who was a sister to somebody said it was her goal to fatten me up. “Yeah, and good luck!”

I was on the second slice of pie when one of them just had to say, “Those rotten sweet potatoes made a good sweet potato pie. Didn’t they, James?” I’m pretty sure I turned white because everyone at the table laughed. I didn’t. Rather, I mumbled that I really should get back to the store and rushed away from the table, holding my hand over my mouth! Holy Catfish! What other of all the food on the table came from meats and vegetables too old to sell?

I told this story as we sat around the outdoor fire last Thanksgiving. The grandchildren laughed. It was the oldest grandson who looked at his grandmother and asked.

“No.” She shook her head. “No, Young man. We are not going to have sweet potato pie for dinner tonight.”

I was surprised to see Billy Gebhardt working at school with Mrs. Dunaway. He was older than I was, but not old enough to be in her physics or chemistry classes. Second year algebra either. His working with Mrs. Dunaway was something a twelve-year-old boy with an interest in science might notice, but not really do anything about except maybe nudge a buddy.

One Saturday, when I was working in the O’Brien’s Store, he came in. I was at the front counter. “Can I help you?”

He put a grocery list on the counter but didn’t wait for me to pick it up. He simply said an item. I looked down. It was the first item. I turned to get it just as Mrs. O’Brien walked up. “I’ll get his order, James. You go put some more Cokes in the soft drink box.” With only one customer in the store and with it being a little after lunch, I was surprised that she didn’t let me get his order.

The drink box didn’t need any more drinks, but I pulled a few forward and added a few in the back. After I finished that menial task, I went back to the stool where I usually sat. But I also continued to pay attention. They didn’t say anything to each other except he said what he wanted, she got it off the shelf, and she recorded the item in the charge book.

As he started to leave, he had a sack full under each arm. Of course, I jumped up to open the door. He stopped just before he walked out. “She called you James.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re taking science with Coach Wise.” He didn’t ask. He told me.

I nodded, looked back at Mrs. O’Brien, and said yeah again. How’d he know that?

“Biology next year is better.”

He didn’t wait for a response this time. Just stepped down to the sidewalk and started up the street. I watched him for a moment, then turned back. Mrs. O’Brien was looking at me.

Later, I went to see whose name she had written in the charge book. It was the name of a woman who was a newspaper customer of mine. Billy was written in parentheses after her name. Then, I realized that in addition to seeing him at school, I had sometimes seen him in the yard around the house where that woman lived.

One afternoon, when I got to that house, he was sitting on the porch steps. I rode my bicycle into the yard and pulled up to the steps. “Hey.” He didn’t answer. I dug down into the sack that held the papers and handed one to him. “I see you with Mrs. Dunaway a lot.”

“I help her set up for her classes.”

“What was all that stuff yesterday?”

He turned away. I thought he was going to tell me it was none of my business. To just shove off. But, he didn’t. “She used pendulums in her class today.” And then he started talking to me about force and reactions to force. I didn’t understand all that he said, but I nodded. And after a while, I said I had to go on and deliver the rest of the papers.

He was sitting on the steps a lot of times that fall, even after it started to turn chilly. I didn’t have to be the first one to say hello anymore. “Let me tell you about … .” And he would start talking about one thing or another involving physics or biology.

In truth, I didn’t know enough to understand what all he said. Sometimes, at night, I’d look up in our set of Compton’s Encyclopedias and get a little more understanding about what he had talked about that day. Once, I asked him how he knew so much, and he said that Mrs. Dunaway gave him books.

Why didn’t she give me books?

The next house on my route was the one where Coach and Mrs. Wise lived. She met me one afternoon in their carport and asked what Billy and I were talking about. I told her physics. I could tell from the way she looked at me that I ought to give her some other kind of answer the next time.

And then, I stopped seeing him. It was not really any of my business, but I thought he would have told me he was leaving. And, maybe if I had been more mature, I would have asked somebody what happened to Billy Gebhardt.

It was years later when I was teaching at Georgia Tech and got to see some really smart students that I thought about him and would wonder occasionally whatever happened to Billy Gebhardt. When I started paying attention to reunions of former Orrville High School students, I asked. No one knew. Even after retiring and thinking about those days long ago, I wondered. Some of my high school teachers made opportunities for me in getting to college. Wherever he went, did someone make opportunities for him? I was sure that in the right circumstances, he might have been recognized for what he was. Someone would have put him in a lab and told him that he should make a way so that people could type messages and send pictures around the world instantaneously. Then, he might have invented the internet in the 1960’s.

Last Fall, I googled him. His obituary was in the Thomaston newspaper. He had become a shrewd businessman and electronic genius. He managed machines in juke joints in the surrounding counties, sometimes even getting a call from their manufacturers for a problem they couldn’t fix. One employee wrote, “William was a walking encyclopedia, had a photographic memory, and managed to stay current on modern technology till his death.”

Since finding him and starting to talk about him in public, a number of people have told me two important characteristics. He was generous, and he lived a colorful life. A colorful life! Maybe that’s better than being in some high-powered lab stuck out in a western desert or putting together lectures and notes in mathematical biology. I wish I had known he lived so close.

I grew up in the community of Orrville. It was such a small community that the Methodist and Baptist churches alternated Sundays having services. Almost everyone who attended one of the churches attended both. There were no houses between us and the Baptist church. Rather, that church was across our pasture, across the town ditch, and across a field mostly occupied by privet bushes. If for whatever reason, I was not at church on a Baptist Sunday, I could hear the choir singing. And, during revivals, I could usually hear some of the sermon. Especially, I could hear the calls for rededication.

The Reverend E. B. Warren was the minister at the Orrville Baptist Church when we moved to Orrville in Fall, 1946. He was still there when I graduated from high school in Spring, 1955, when my mother died in 1959, and when my father died in 1981. I remember E. B. Warren and his providing counselling with us young teenaged boys. One winter afternoon, we met in the E. B. Warren home. Surely Mr. Warren talked to us and surely we sat courteously. What I remember most was his library. The walls were filled with books. At the far end of the room was a gas heater and the five or six of us sat around that heater. Because of repeated instructions in good manners, I knew I was supposed to be paying close attention to what was being said. What I wanted to do was to touch those books, to see what was there, to understand what he read.

You didn’t have to know him long to know he was an intellectual. On Sunday mornings, he shared that intellect with the adults in his congregation. But preachers in a rural church without a youth minister have to deal with rambunctious teenagers. In the early 1950’s, that was us. On the Sunday nights when services were at the Baptist church, we had recreation after evening services. Lillian Shoemaker and Dorothy Smith were our usual chaperones. Sometimes, Mr. Warren, with all his dignity and poise, would come into the recreation area to see what we were doing. Around him, we all stood straighter and mostly behaved. I should not really blame Mrs. Smith’s occasional antics for my creative devilment, or for what seemed to be my wildness which my father said troubled him. But it was there. I planned and proposed a contest. Who could drink a cup of red Kool-Aid from a baby bottle the fastest? You know about fools stepping in? I did it! I asked Mr. Warren to be one of the three contestants. A good sport but blushing, he agreed. What even Mrs. Smith did not know is that I had spiked his bottle with hot sauce! Whoa! After he made the first draws on that bottle, he paused and looked at the others, but he shrugged and, showing his determination, he continued toward emptying the bottle. Meanwhile, I was about to fall out of my chair. Of course, I stopped the contest and told what I had done. He laughed with us all. But here’s the thing: he moved up even one more notch in my respect … as I, no doubt, moved down one more in his.

Like many rural Methodist churches, Orrville’s Methodist switched pastors with some regularity. There was always interest in the community when there was a new Methodist preacher in town. You can imagine that the new preacher had a big job getting to know all the names of people in his Orrville flock. This was true in part because not all sitting in his congregation were Methodist and in part because he would be responsible for several other churches in the county, too.

It was one of those first weekends for a new Methodist minister in Orrville and, while I had not gone to morning services over at the Methodist Church, I decided to see what he was like that evening. Besides, Joyce O’Brien might be there. Also, there was a good chance that high school friends Ralph Watson or Charlie Warren would be playing the piano for evening services. Some people sang in both choirs.

As you know, the man who Rome had proclaimed to be King of the Jews in Israel gets a lot of attention around Christmas and Easter. Wikipedia gives a good summary of what the first King Herod did in Judea. He is always present in New Testament studies, but only once have I heard him be the main topic of a sermon. That occasion was that first evening with this new Methodist minister. He made an analogy about what King Herod did as compared with treacherous people in those times. He cited people who seem to be chosen to organize the nation and help the people, but whose real goal turns out to be to empower and enrich themselves.

This new minister ended the sermon with this warning: “Such people can be found even in our modern times. Some have national statue; some can be found around us. We must all watch out for the Herods within our community.”

I sank low in my pew. After that last hymn, I didn’t even pause to speak to Joyce O’Brien.

Someone must have alerted the young preacher, for he caught me walking home, stopped, and offered for me to ride the rest of the way with him. Turned out to be a nice guy: young, eager, personable, and willing to apologize to a Baptist youth who was sure he had been vilified from the pulpit.

Back in the middle of the 20th Century, all twelve grades at the Orrville school met in the same building. The cafeteria was separate. There was a building for vocational agriculture and home economics. However, reading, writing, and arithmetic for all grades were in that E-shaped building. Further, as I began to travel a bit, I saw that the Orrville school structure must have looked like at least a hundred more in rural Southeast United States.

Science and mathematics were favorite subjects of mine, but English classes were powerful. The topics were reading, writing, a little bit of theater, a little bit of English history, and a little bit of public speaking. I liked the reading, and writing essays wasn’t too bad. But public speaking became time consuming. The first time that came up, we had to write a two-page, typed speech. “You need to learn how to type.” That was part of the lesson.

First, there was the problem of choosing a subject, then the writing. Good opening and closing paragraphs were needed. Each student was asked to present their speech to the class. Some would choose to enter a public speaking contest. My older brother entered these contests and did well. So, I was determined to do this, too. My first contest was when I was in the ninth grade. What would I speak about?

It was a well-known family secret that I read in our set of Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedias. After all, what choices did one have in the evening? Remember, there was no television back then and the encyclopedias were in our room. I’d just pull one off the shelf and read.

One person I read about was Franklin Roosevelt. Our encyclopedia recorded this episode. A reporter interviewing Roosevelt asked, “Are you a Marxist?”

Roosevelt replied, “No.”

“Are you a communist?”

“No.”

“Are you a socialist?”

“No.”

“Then, what are you?”

Roosevelt’s answer was exactly right. “I’m a Christian and a Democrat. That’s all.”

The reason I liked this answer was because it was exactly what I understood from the teachings in Sunday School and Church. What I heard in those two places was also what I heard when the old men were talking around the gas heater in whatever store I was working at the time. In church, in the stores, and in school, I heard, “In as much as ye have done it unto the least of these, my brethren, ….”

You know how it goes.

So, Franklin Roosevelt would be the subject of my first speech. How was I going to make a speech about Franklin Roosevelt? Simple. I pulled down the encyclopedia with R on the back and, at this stage of my life, I confess: I copied. I knew I was going to use the lines in that interview of Roosevelt as the ending of the speech. What would be the first lines was the question?

I remember standing in the wings for the stage in the Orrville High School auditorium waiting to participate in my first speaking contest. Suzan Singleton was the speaker before me. My legs were shaking. Suzan always gave me courage when we were dancing. She winked at me as she walked off stage. I’d do it! So help me, I’d do it!

I was introduced as the next speaker. “Thank you, Madam Chairman.” I turned to an audience of parents, schoolmates, and contest judges: Ben Dunaway, Clyde Henderson, and Al Smith. I had practiced doing this before a mirror, before my parents, and before our dog. I knew to look left and right so that people in the audience would think I was talking to them.

I’ll never forget those first lines. “Roosevelt knew little about abstract economics.” The words that followed came out of my mouth. I had practiced so much that my physical body was on rote. My body was giving that speech. That’s not where my brain was. My brain was wondering why the judges had big smiles on their faces. Two of them had even looked at each other with those big smiles. Were my pants unzipped? What was funny? I got through the speech. Finally said, “Thank you.” And walked off.

I was in shock, and it was not because I didn’t win. “It was okay” was all I would say to anybody about how I did until late that evening at home. Finally, I asked my brother, “Why did the judges almost laugh when I started my speech?”

I remember he turned to me. “Abstract economics?” he sighed. “You idjiit! You were a pompous idjiit! You don’t know nothing about real economics, much less about abstract economics.” He turned away, lay down, and pulled the sheet over his head. “So, shut up and turn off the lights.”

You are not going to believe this but, I promise, it’s true. Before my older brother graduated from high school, I beat him in a speaking contest. It was in April, 1953 and it was the Stallworth Family who awarded the prizes to the winners. I got first and Brother Joe got second! Imagine. For once, Little Brother – the idjiit – came out on top! And Suzan Singleton? Ah! That was better than the ten dollars first prize. She asked me to bend down so that she could give me a kiss!

From time to time, I think about the teachers back at the Orrville School. Two stand out in my memory. The one who taught me science and mathematics was a person who also helped me with a business problem.

Recall that I was the paperboy in Orrville for the Selma paper and had been for a long time. I either delivered papers on my bicycle or, if the bicycle needed repair, ran the route. When delivering papers on foot, the strap for the rainproof sack that was supposed to fit on the bicycle handlebars would be draped behind my neck, pulled to the front to go under both armpits, and holding the load of papers hanging down my back.

For some reason, the number of papers I was supposed to receive was always one or two short. I complained and was told that the count they sent was accurate. So, I ordered more papers than customers. Suddenly, during the last months of my high school senior year, the number I needed would be six or seven short. My customers complained. They said they were going to call the newspaper office. “Please do,” I begged.

Actually, what broke the problem was that I told my math and science teacher, Mrs. Dunaway, about it. She told her husband, and he called the newspaper office.

While it still took several steps to get this worked out after the Dunaways stepped in, the editors knew they had to find out what was going on if Mr. Ben Ellis Dunaway was involved. Finally, the newspaper office bought a bus ticket for a University of Alabama apprentice. By riding the same bus that was bringing my papers, he discovered the problem. The bus driver was selling my papers to passengers on the bus.

I was furious, sad, and disgusted. I also gave praise to Mrs. Dunaway for all she did beside teaching math and science.

There was one other teacher that left me in wonder. Miss Bundy was among the daughters of officers at Craig Air Force Base who drove south through Selma in order to teach at the Orrville school. Her father was the base commander at Craig Air Force Base, so she certainly did not do this for money.

Miss Bundy set everyone to talking in the community. She could have been a double for Susan Hayward. She told our homeroom that she had, in fact, been in a movie. “Which one?” we all asked. She refused to answer. That was the most provocative answer she could have given. Here, sixty years later, I still wonder if she knew what she was doing to us. For sure, she was enjoying every minute. We were, too.

Old Man Forester, as we called him, was a great man to have as a principal during my high school years. He gave a sterling civics class our senior year and helped a lot of us to get in the University of Alabama. Mr. Forester seemed to run the school with a tight fist and stern discipline. Well, that is, until Miss Bundy wanted special permission for one thing or another. She could make him lose his cool. It was not too unusual to see her making a request while stepping closer and closer, and to see him backing away. He’d be beet red and a sweat would be breaking out on his forehead. We junior high guys loved it.

Word spread through the community of her talent. For singing, I mean. Both the Baptist Church and the Methodist Church invited Miss Bundy to come sing a special during Sunday services. The Preachers knew how to get a crowd. Ralph Watson, lucky devil, was her accompanist. I remember that when she finished singing at the Baptist Church, the congregation was stone silent. It seemed the silence went on and on. There she stood, eyes turned toward heaven and a hush in that sanctuary such as I had never heard even when I was there alone. I was told later that three grown men rededicated their lives that Sunday. Privately, of course.

There was one story that Miss Bundy told our class that left a vivid picture in my mind. She told us in class one day that she had been invited to sing at the next meeting of the Civitan Club and that she had agreed to do this. The girls asked if she would sing “Some Enchanted Evening,” or “Indian Love Song,” or even some fancy operatic aria? “No,” she said. “I’ll sing the Lord’s Prayer.” We all looked from one to the other. She added to our wonder. “I’ll wear a strapless gown.” I promise. That’s what she said. I don’t think any one of us said anything, but there was murmur heard all over the room. We could hardly wait.

Wednesday morning after the Tuesday night Civitan Club meeting, the class grew still when she walked into the room. She put her books and notes on her desk and looked at us. No one spoke. “What?” she asked, like she didn’t know.

I think it was Carolyn McHugh who asked, “How’d it go last night?”

“You mean at the Civitan meeting?” and then she laughed.

We all looked at each other and back to her, nodding.

“The Civitan President introduced me and thanked me for what I was doing for the community,” she laughed. “Bringing culture and all, he said.”

I remember that she walked over to the window and looked out onto the playground. “I sang a cappella.” She turned back to us, explaining, “No accompaniment.”

“What’d they do?”

Miss Bundy smiled. Looked toward the door of the classroom, and then back to us. “Why, they enjoyed it! Of course.”

It was on purpose that I tried to stay on good terms with my older brother. Perhaps you will guess that this was not out of brotherly love. Oh, no. That young teenager was more concerned with self-interest. Think about it for a moment: when Brother Joe got to be sixteen, had a driver’s license, and started to pick up dates in the family car, I would suggest that we double date. “It’ll be fun, Brother Joe,” I would argue.

I’d have the backseat for two whole years! You do understand, of course, that at age fourteen, it was an act of bravery simply to reach for my date’s hand. At fifteen, an arm over the seat behind her gave me bragging rights. And then came age sixteen. For sure, I didn’t want to have that song “Sweet Sixteen and Never Been Kissed” to apply to me. I’ll have to tell you that my heart was pounding as I walked Joyce O’Brien from the car the weekend after I turned sixteen. I think she was expecting something because, at the porch, she took one step above me and turned. It wasn’t a long kiss, more like touching first base and wishing you could steal to second. But! It was done.

Regrettably, in the following summer, Joyce’s father, Clarence, might be sitting in a lawn chair in the dark front yard. He’d take a draw on his cigarette so that the glow would let us know he was there. He’d invite us to sit and talk, but Joe and his date were waiting. After Joe had gone to college and I had taken Joyce to a movie or whatever, we might walk over to where Clarence was. He usually had his feet propped on a wrought iron table next to a package of safety matches and a pack of Camels. Once or twice, he asked if I wanted one. “Keeps the mosquitoes away,” he’d laugh. Back then, I declined. He knew I would. And, in a little while, Joyce would look at me and say goodnight. I’d shrug. “I’ll call. Okay?”

Much later, I got my turn at waiting for my children to come home from a night outing. I didn’t wait with cigarettes. I’d had my turn with those cigarettes earlier. That’s right. I once used cigarettes. For me, the cigarettes were not to keep the mosquitoes away, but to keep the sleep away when I was in the Army. It’d be late or maybe early and I might need to be alert. A cigarette might help. And for those times when a burn was inappropriate, there was chemistry: caffeine. I came to even use caffeine as a competitive runner. I’d eat six chocolate covered expresso beans before a race. As an eighty-year-old racer, eight of those expresso beans were even better.

I digress. I had taken that big step shortly after I turned sixteen and had gotten my first kiss! Some of you are probably going to ask why it took me so long! Never mind! It was done.

I remember how good it was to have an older brother for me to watch and to see what would happen as I got older. He taught me a lot of things about growing up. Sometimes, I went further than he ever knew.

On school nights, we usually ended the evenings doing homework on the dining room table. He’d be working on whatever assignment Mrs. Dunaway had given him, and I would be multiplying rows of three digit numbers times three digit numbers. Boring! Mrs. McQueen wouldn’t let us just write the answers down. We had to follow the steps.

Once, apropos nothing, Joe interrupted me. “Suppose you got trapped on a deserted island with only one person. Who would you like it to be?”

What? Only one person? Wow! Some thinking about that was necessary. You’d want someone who was creative in order to help figure out how to be rescued, someone who was strong in order to help build a shelter and find food, and someone who was intelligent in order to be a good conversationalist. You’d want someone who would make a good companion, too. After a time of reflection, I told him my answer.

It turned out that not many weeks later, Joyce O’Brien had one of those dance parties that were common on weekends in the late spring and summer. We danced in that corner room with windows on two sides and with fans trying to stir a breeze. As usual in the South, it was so hot and humid that streams of condensation ran down the sides of the pitchers of lemonade onto towels placed beneath them. The cookies got soft from soaking up humidity generated by hot bodies dancing to the sounds of Benny Goodman. The room was so hot that it was not unusual for us to walk out onto the porch which covered most of two sides of the O’Brien’s home. Need I say that we usually went out in pairs? My candidate for an ideal person to be trapped with on an island was there. Of course, after we had been dancing for a while, I suggested we walk outside. We weren’t there very long before I told her that I’d like to be trapped on a deserted island with her.

“You idjit! That’s what Brother Joe said when I told him what happened. You see, my well-considered choice had turned and walked away. That’s right. She simply left me standing out there alone! I marked her off as a possible candidate for the deserted island.

It had been my intention to reveal to all my former high school friends who my candidate was. However, I was reluctant to post her name in this public place without permission. Regrettably, she won’t respond to any of my requests for permission!

When we were preadolescent, people might have guessed that Brother Joe and I were twins, albeit not identical. We appeared to be about the same age and height, and our mother dressed us alike. Actually, Brother Joe was two years older. As he matured, he grew huskier than I and, of course, reached puberty more than two years before me. I was tall and skinny. To hide the fact that I was late maturing physically, I started shaving before I needed to. Even when I was a freshman at the University of Alabama, I didn’t shave except when I had a date and on Tuesday and Thursday before ROTC.

Probably any two brothers as close in age as we were would get into fights as they were growing up. Sometimes I think of the time he had me on the ground between Raymond Watson’s store and Raymond’s home. I was shirtless as usual, he was sitting on my belly, and knocking the big knuckle of his right hand over and over onto my skinny sternum. Raymond saw us. He came out of his store, picked Joe up off me, and put him down on the ground on his back. Raymond told me to get on top of him and to hit him in the chest. I shook my head for I knew that I might could pound on Joe while Raymond was there, but as soon as we got home, I’d get it worse than before. I might have been skinny, but I was not stupid.

About the time I became a teenager, physical conflicts stopped. In part, this was because we had both gotten big enough that we could really cause physical damage – a nose rearranged, a tooth cracked, or an eye blackened. With the awareness of the need for an armistice, we came to a compromise. He might yell at me, maybe even push me, but we didn’t come to blows. We did another thing that is surprising to me now. We agreed to have a password to let the other brother know that whatever we were telling was not just a story. It was true. Factual. If either of us said this password, then what was told was, on our honor, the truth. He asked me what our password should be. Even today, I shake my head at my answer: “Tom Mix.”

Of course, when I tell my sons about this long-ago story, they have no idea who Tom Mix was … who Tom Mix is.

Joe and I were so different. Even in high school, he knew he was going to be a medical doctor. Whereas I was a physics major my first year at the University. The next year I was a biology major, and a chemistry major the year after. I graduated with a degree in mathematics.

Because our room in Orrville was at the rear of the house, we could always come and go at night through the backdoor without our parents knowing. Surely, Dad understood that we were doing this and, for some reason, accepted this behavior of his male off springs.

More than two or three times I asked Joe where he was going as he started to leave after dark. He would tell me to mind my own business. Then, one day, I found him smoking behind the chicken house. He told me he was going to bust my butt if I told our parents and, to seal my promise not to tell, he let me finish the cigarette he had already lit up.

From then on, I stopped asking to do things with him. I would just do it. What this meant was that when he left home for college, I was two years younger, but had had about the same experiences he had had. And … well … I had two more years to mess around!

On the May night of 1953 when it was his last night before he moved to the University, I told him that from then on, the room where we slept was going to be my room. “Yeah? And what are you going to do?” I didn’t answer for a while. I let us both think about that. To understand my answer, you need to remember that I was a sixteen-year-old boy who had been raised by my parents, by my school, and by my church to be strict in my behavior, diligent in my studies, and circumspect in my perspective. Nevertheless, my answer was firm. “Whatever I damn please.” I couldn’t see Joe in the dark, but I knew he had turned to look at me. I heard him laugh. And then I said it again. “Whatever I damn please!” I didn’t laugh with him. Rather, it was a nod and a gentle smile of expectations.

All my life, I have remembered how important the understanding that came to me that night was.

I think we both understood what was happening as the plan for my room developed. In the first place, it was unusual for me to say “damn” at all, and especially with such intensity. I knew the word more than I said it. And second, I now see that I re-created myself when he left. I really did decide that I was going to do whatever I damn pleased.

Six years later, Dad had attended my college graduation and commissioning in the United States Army, and I was driving us home. I was surprised when he said that said he had worried about me those last two years when I had been at home in Orrville without Joe. He confessed that he was afraid that I might run away – that I might have just left.

I let us both think about that statement for a bit. There I was – a college graduate and a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. What should now be absolutely clear to him? “I guess you understand now, Dad, that such worry was wasted energy.”

Bill Gamble did not know how to read or write when he started working at Raymond Watson’s store in Orrville. Raymond’s Store was a gas station, a grocery store, and even a source for work clothes. The store opened in February, 1950 and had not been running a week before Raymond knew that he needed a pump-man - someone to service all the cars pulling up to his station. He and his wife were old family in Orrville and connected one way or another to many in the community. Raymond didn’t mind the family’s friends walking into the store while he was gassing up their cars. It was the strangers from nearby Selma, or Plantersville, even from Montgomery, who made Raymond uncomfortable when they walked into the store while he was pumping gas. Back then, customers at a grocery store didn’t fill a buggy that they were pushing around. Rather, they gave a clerk a list and he brought the items to the customer. So, Raymond needed to be inside taking care of whatever his customers wanted while someone else filled their cars with gas, or washed their windshields, or checked the air in the tires – all the things that happened when you stopped at a gas station back in the ‘50’s.

“Mr. Raymond, I can work for you.” That’s the way Bill Gamble introduced himself after Raymond’s store had been open a few weeks. “Pump gas. Sweep. Do whatever you need while you be inside watching out for folks who come in.”

Raymond didn’t know Bill Gamble. He had been just one more person seen walking by on the highway, maybe going to the Post Office, or visiting friends on the other side of town. “What’s your name?” Raymond was not particularly tall, but he towered over this older man standing across the counter from him.

“Bill Gamble. Yes, sir.” Bill Gamble never nodded in response to a question; rather, he bent at the knees bobbing his assent, a smile on his face.

“Bill Gamble?” Raymond considered. “I don’t think I know any of your people. Where do you stay?”

“Up that way,” Bill Gamble pointed down the Five Points Highway. “Last house before the creek. Before the turn off to Keith School. Yes, sir.”

Raymond leaned forward, looking down the highway. He turned back to the man wearing overalls and a shiny black, leather cap. “It would be every day ‘cept Sunday. Open at seven o’clock. You sure you want to do that? You’ll have to stay ‘till closing around dark during the week. Later on, Saturdays.”

“Yes, sir.” Bill Gamble’s entire demeanor expressed both his agreement and his pleasure. He had a job.

My brother also got a job at Raymond’s store. It seemed to be always understood between Raymond and my parents that when Brother Joe graduated from high school and went to the University of Alabama, I would work at Raymond’s on Saturdays during the school year and every day during the summer.

Young teen James couldn’t help but see that, even though Bill Gamble was poor and underprivileged, he had ambition. At first, he would write down the numbers shown on the gas pump before taking in whatever cash the driver had given him. Raymond would read the numbers aloud and count aloud the change for Bill Gamble to take back to the customer. In time, Bill Gamble could not only tell Raymond what the pump recorded, but also count the change back to the driver.

I remember telling my parents at supper one night about Bill Gamble asking me to read to him some of the headlines on old newspapers lying around the store. Before I graduated from high school, Bill could read the frontpage of the Selma paper, albeit slowly.

That last summer I was in Orrville, between my junior and senior year in high school, Raymond had an emergency appendectomy and was in the hospital for more than a week. His wife asked me to manage the store while Raymond recovered. I opened and closed the place, greeted customers, handled their purchases, and ordered supplies. I even knew the combination for the wall safe. I watched their home during the day when Virginia Watson was in Selma with her husband. Simply put, I was in charge while Raymond was in the hospital. I felt really important.

One morning, things were slow. I was sitting on a bench outside the store and a car pulled up. Written on the car door was the car’s owner: “Department of Social Services, State of Alabama.” The window rolled down as Bill Gamble stepped to the car. “Fill it up?” he asked. The woman nodded her head, “Yes. Thank you.”

Bill Gamble started into his job, washing and wiping. “Is this the way to Five Points?” Bill moved back to the open window. He was hard of hearing and cupped his hand over his ear. “Five Points?” She spoke louder and pointed down the road. Bill smiled and his entire body bobbled in affirmation.

Maybe aware that I could hear her and maybe a little shy, she was quieter with her next question. “Do you have a bathroom?”

That was when Bill Gamble made his mistake. I was about to shake my head no, but Bill moved next to the car window. Apparently, he thought she asked if he had a whisk broom. Bill Gamble certainly was proud that she had observed what a good job he was doing. He gave his best smile and replied, “No, but if you open the door, I can vacuum it out.”

First there was shock. Then silence! I got up and went into the store. What I know is that she did not wait for change. Maybe if I had not been laughing so loudly, I would have heard her squeals.

I wish that gas station was still there, that someone had modernized it, and that it had one of those outside vacuum cleaners into which you can feed two quarters. Then you can grab the hose and vacuum it out yourself.

During my sophomore year at the University of Alabama, I told my parents that I wanted to take a break from school. I had been a student every semester since the beginning of my senior year in high school. Year ‘round: fall, winter, spring, summer. Enough!

My daddy got me a summer job with the Dallas County Engineers. I would be working under the supervision of Holt Hamlett. I knew Holt from the times he had come into one store or another where I had been working while I was in high school.

My first assignment would be at a Dallas County Lab in Selma. Holt had told my dad that I should wear work clothes because I was going to get pretty dirty beginning with day one. No problem. I had two pair of worn-out jeans that still fit.

I was sitting on the porch at 7:00 that first morning, waiting for the ride into Selma with Holt. I remember that first day. “You and that tee-shirt are going to get pretty dirty,” Holt started. I told him I’d fix that. I’d keep the shirt on when I take a bath at night. It was good to hear Holt’s deep, rumbling laugh. I figured right then that he’d be a good boss.

At first, we talked about the cafeteria jobs I had had back on the University campus. It was when we were passing Beloit that Holt started my upcoming job description. “For the next two weeks, you’re going to be cooking dirt, not hamburgers.”

“Cooking dirt?”

“Yeah.” He laughed again.

“Your mother says you’re studying biology. Are you going to medical school like your brother?”

“No, sir. I don’t know what I’m going to do. For sure, it won’t be med school.”

“How much math have you had?”

Curious question, I thought. “I just finished two years. Calculus and differential equations.”

“I like to do integrals in my head. Can you do integrals without paper and pencil?”

Holy catfish! “Sir?”

“What’s the integral of x over 1 plus x?”

The math problems Holt posed as we finished the drive to the County Soil Laboratory that first morning weren’t too hard. I could do five of the six in my head. I hadn’t sold my second-hand calculus book, so I reviewed calculus almost every night thereafter. I wasn’t quite sure why Holt was testing me. Maybe he just thought math was fun.

Those first weeks in a county lab, cooking dirt is exactly what I did. Actually, it was red clay. The point was to determine the density of small samples of red clay that had been dug from a roadbed. The purpose was to test compactification in that roadbed as it was prepared for paving. Heating the clay to drive out the moisture and knowing the volume, then weighing the dry sample provided Holt and the County Engineers the density of that sample.

The dirt lab was sitting on the banks of the Alabama River in Selma and had nothing but fans for cooling. What it did have was a bunch of gas ovens for cooking dirt. That lab was hotter than any Dallas County hot. The other guy working there had graduated from high school that spring and was planning to start at Auburn in the Fall. He had already been working in the lab when I started and had a routine. He’d get the first batch cooking and the next batch ready. Between batches, he told me that he had been doing pushups and using a door frame to do chin-ups. Then, as a batch finished, he’d start heating the next one, weigh and record data for the last one, prepare the next one, and do more pushups. I adapted. We two upper teens turned that pretty easy job into a tough physical workout. On the second day, he and I were out of our shirts pretty early. We drank lots of water as sweat poured off us all day. At every day’s end, we were coated with sweat and red dust. I’d put my shirt back on when Holt got there and thought it looked pretty clean on the outside. By the end of the week, the red was showing through.

The routine continued for two weeks. On Friday of the second week, we had passed Hazen when Holt said, “I’ll take you to the office to meet your main boss on Monday. I think you ought not wear jeans with holes in them when we do that. And maybe a button-up-the-front shirt. I believe you’ve had on the same tee-shirt every day the past two weeks.”

It was true. He said he thought my mother must have washed the shirt at the end of last week. I admitted to this and that I had told her she didn’t need to. That earned his rumbling laugh and his pointing out that, even though his truck was airconditioned, the windows were open.

He went on, “You planning to grow a beard this summer?” I rubbed a hand over my face. “Mama is giving me a hard time about that. I didn’t figure you’d care.”

That afternoon, before he let me out, he reminded me to wear clean jeans on Monday and to get my mother to iron me a shirt.

“Yes, sir. Do I need to shave?”

He didn’t give me a direct answer. “The Chief Engineer sports a beard himself.” Good. “And, James.” I turned back before getting out of his truck. “Tell me how to do the integral of the secant function Monday morning.”

So began a fun summer of working with the Dallas County Engineers and with forty-year-old Holt Hamlett as my supervisor.

From my senior year at Orrville High School through my sophomore year at the University of Alabama, I was in school. It was twelve months a year for three years! Finally, after my sophomore year, I told the family I had had enough.

Dad got me a job working with the Dallas County Engineers. Holt Hamlett would be my supervisor. I liked the money, what I learned, and who I met. But, most of all, I liked getting to know Holt. He was not only my boss, but also my mentor.

For two weeks of that summer, Holt and I dug holes in the hard-packed gravel on the Cahaba Road just north and east of Orrville. The purpose was to check compactification before paving. Mostly, I worked bareheaded and shirtless, except I wore a bandana around my neck. Once when Carl Oxford stopped to speak to Holt and I was still slamming those posthole diggers into the roadbed, I heard Holt tell Mr. Oxford that he was working with a cowboy. Maybe so. Anyway, before August was half over, I was as brown as a walnut board.

I had only two pair of jeans for that hard, dirty roadwork: the ones I had on and the ones that were hanging on the line at home. What do you do with old jeans except wear them out? That’s what I was doing. At the end of the day on the first Friday of gathering samples by smashing those posthole diggers into the hardpack, I may have been more worn out than those jeans. I had rearranged the handkerchiefs inside my gloves many times. Calluses had torn and were bleeding. They would need attention when I got home. And my hands hurt even to hold a fork at dinner.

One hot afternoon, Holt said he needed to check the contractors further up the road. Before he left me, I rescued my second mayonnaise jar of water from his truck. Half of it went down my throat and the rest was poured onto my face and chest. Felt good.

It wasn’t unusual to see a car stirring a cloud of dust as it came down the road. I recognized this one. It was Mr. Joe McHugh. He owned land on both sides of the road further up the way. Holt saw him coming as he was preparing to leave. “If McHugh stops, tell him you’re earning your pay!” And then, Holt was gone.

I was wishing I had gone with him as I watched the approaching cloud of dust. Mr. Joe stopped. I could see my reflection in the car’s dark windows. That little bit of water I had poured over my head left tracks in the layer of red particles clinging to the sweat on my chest and belly. At first, Mr. Joe didn’t lower the window as the dust swirled around us. It seemed like at least half of it stuck to my sweaty body. In a bit, the window came down. “Hello, James.” I was surprised he remembered my name. “You’re working. Making a little money? You’re not quitting school, are you?"

"Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir. Yes, sir, I’m working and making a little money. But no, sir. I’m not quitting. I go back in September."

“It’s just a summer job?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “You study hard. Then, you’ll make more money than you get doing this." He nodded toward the posthole diggers.

"Yes, sir. I need the money from this job.” The back seat’s dark window was coming down. “And I need to study hard.” At that point, I was still talking to the father, but looking at his daughter. She had grown up since I last saw her.

“Hi.” That was what she said. At first, she was looking at my eyes, but I saw her look down at the sweat and dirt and filth. Maybe she saw I had changed, too.

“We miss having you bring the afternoon paper, James.” I leaned down to see Miss Josephine over on the other side of the front seat. “You should wear a shirt out here in this sun.”

I ought to say something. “Yes, ma’am. That’s what my mama says.”

“Miss Eola told the Community Club that you were working with her husband.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I must have looked vulgar and coarse standing there before this family. What was Delores thinking? I figured the best way to find out was to call her that night.

We talked a bit. She did say I had changed. Good. And she said she like my beard. She was probably teasing me about that. And then, I did what was the reason I called. I asked her if she would like to go dancing with me at that place over on Highway 80 on Saturday night.

She went to ask her daddy. When she came back to the phone, she said he said she wasn’t old enough to date a boy who had finished his second year of college. She said she was sorry. Yeah. Me, too.

For a moment, I stood there by the phone after we hung up. And then I went and looked in the bathroom mirror. “You old son-of-a-gun! You looked so rough and tough that he wouldn’t let her go out with you. It’s time you admit it: you ain’t a boy no more!”

Now, I smile when I recall how rough that barely twenty-year-old boy thought he looked, and how tough he thought he was. Further, more than sixty years later, I say that Mr. Joe McHugh made exactly the right decision. What did he know about that bare-chested kid talking to his daughter while standing on the side of the road? Yeah. That daddy did exactly the right thing.

After my sophomore year at the University of Alabama, I needed time away from school and from books. Daddy got me a job with the Dallas County Engineers and with Holt Hamlet as my supervisor. There had been some indoor lab work at first, then I rode with Holt as he inspected other Dallas County jobs in progress. With the lasts third of the summer, there came two physically tough jobs close to Orrville.

The first of those ripped my hands apart as I slammed posthole diggers into hardpack. The next job was to lay those big white rocks along the edges of a newly paved road. For this, I again teamed with a Selma high school graduate who was planning to go to Auburn in the Fall.

Holt Hamlet still picked me up in the mornings, but closer to dawn. He’d drop me off alongside a pile of rocks and headed off to some other project. By the time my cohort from Selma got there in his own car, I had been carrying rocks for almost a half-hour. He’d laugh when I greeted him with raised arms, cheering his arrival.

My two pair of work jeans were holding out. Of course, these never got worn at the University. No one except my mother complained about the hole in the right knee of one pair. But Mama complained loudly about the low-rise jeans. Although they had been popular when I was sixteen or seventeen, Mama told me in a stern voice that they were indecent on a twenty-year-old man. “Just look at yourself in a mirror.” I did, and I smiled because I knew I had gained those five pounds with hard, manual labor. “Everybody driving past me and my buddy out there on the Cahaba Road thinks we’re just Dallas County convicts. What we really need is a pair of striped pants.” She snorted, and I said under my breath that as reddish-brown as I had gotten, folks might even think I was Pawnee or Sioux.

I continued working shirtless. I wore that neckerchief around my neck because my older brother was getting married that summer, and I didn’t want a sunburned neck when I had to wear a buttoned-down collar and tie.

It was Frank Shaddix who was operating the rolling store that summer. He’d come by about noon and call out, “Does the grizzle-face want a big RC to go with his three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?” At first, his calling me that rankled me, but I came to laughing it off. Actually, that beard was beginning to look pretty good. The barber started trimming it a bit without my saying anything.

Mom came to understand that I wanted to run before dinner. “Supper is going to be ready in a half hour, but just go on. You’ll have to eat by yourself when you come in. You’ll be too sweaty and smelly to eat with civilized people anyway!” That’s what she’d say and shoo me out of the kitchen, waving a dishtowel in my direction. “And don’t be embarrassing me by running through town half naked.” She’d shake her head when I came back in the kitchen wearing gym shorts, an old tee-shirt, and what passed for running shoes in 1957. I heard her send me on my way more than once while muttering, “Decent people are inside eating at this time of day.”

I’d run to Orrville School, leave my tee-shirt behind a brick wall, and head out Cemetery Road. Just past the cemetery, I’d turn into what was historically called the Holloway Place. Sandy roads left by farm equipment were my trails from there. A tenant family’s dog started running beside me through those fields. Almost every day, he’d look up at me as though to ask why we were doing this.

“We’re animals, you and me,” I’d say. He’d kind of wag his tail and on we’d go. About the time the sun was setting, we’d be back by his house, and I’d be running alone again.

One Saturday, I hooked up a watering hose dangling from a nail in the eaves under the tin roof. I figured that’d be the end of Mama complaining about the ring around the tub every time I took a bath. Daddy shook his head, shrugged, and went back in the house when he saw what I had done.

Of course, Brother Joe had his say when he was home and saw my outside shower. “Making us look like white trash.” That’s what he said. I had a date that night, but the next morning, Mama spoke up during breakfast. “Your brother tried out your shower.”

I cocked my head, waiting to see what he’d say. At first, he was staring at me, then he looked down at his plate, stirred his scrambled eggs, and mumbled, “You need a hot water spigot. And, how you gonna shave out there without no mirror?” Shave? Yeah. He asked me three times if I was going to shave before his wedding.

I was Best Man at Brother Joe’s wedding that summer. Most important, I saved enough money so that I was able to survive with my scholarship and the pay as a chemistry lab assistant during the academic year 57/58. It was a summer not to be repeated for the army had plans for me in the Summer of 1958. What happened after that? I guess it’s best summarize by saying I became an adult.

During early Summer, 1958, concerned matrons in the Orrville Baptist Church whispered to each other as they looked at me. Finally, one of them got the courage to ask if I would be working with Holt Hamlett as I had the previous summer. “Army, ma’am,” I told them. “The United States Army says I am to report to Fort Eustis, Virginia next month.” And “Yes, ma’am. I will be back at the University in September.”

I hitch-hiked back to Tuscaloosa in mid-June. From there, I bummed a ride with three ROTC buddies. It didn’t take long on that drive north before we began repeating stories that the senior class guys had told us about the previous year’s training camp. We knew we were going to be physically and mentally stressed. Never mind all those tales. I figured we were not going to be really hurt. “Look,” I said. “If they hurt us, your mama would crawl all over the university’s administration starting with the President.” That seemed to shut down the concerns about our getting knocked around.

We were glad to see the Fort Eustis gate after that all-night drive. Cadets from twenty-one universities got quarters in a bunch of two-story buildings with one room on each floor. Those rooms were filled with cots, metal cabinets, foot lockers, and a bunch of twenty-year-old guys. Hebron bunked on one side of me; Hobar on the other. We wore nothing but boxers those first two days. Most of us passed the medical exams and physical stress tests. Then, the real stress tests began. The cadre tested us by assigning us positions as cadet officers. Changes to those assignments were made daily. One day you might be squad leader, or platoon sergeant, or company executive officer. If something went wrong among the guys under your command, it was hard to tell who got chewed out the most – you or the guilty party. At the same time, it was a pleasure to see the comradeship develop. There was a sense of I’ll try hard when you are in charge if you’ll try hard when I am.

Toward the end of camp, we had a long hike with gear in Camp A. P. Hill including a three day’s bivouac and a mock battle. We carried half tents, rain gear, mess gear, weapons – all necessary equipment. It was summer in Virginia, and the trees along that road held the memory of the last rain. I saw one guy in our company sag, move off to the side, and look badly exhausted. Then, with nothing said, a big guy went over, added the guy’s pack to his own, and encouraged the exhausted cadet to keep on.

The guys back at the University had told us what to expect that first night we were on bivouac. After everything got quiet, a bunch of real enlisted men were going to come charging into our area. They would knock down our tents and step on whatever was inside.

I went to the cadet platoon leader where my tent was. “Look. One thing they have told us over and over is to plan. It seems absurd for us to know what’s going to happen and not do anything.”

I got four in the platoon not to crawl into their tents at dark. Rather, the five of us would lie in the roadside ditch, in the tall grass, and rolled around the base of a tree. The mosquitoes were going to eat us. We knew that. But we were tough!

I had actually dropped off to sleep when the guy closest to me complained that what we were doing was stupid. That was about the same time that we heard the sound of running feet. They did what we expected. But we didn’t do what they expected. They were surprised to find themselves surrounded and in the blaze of five flashlights. Surprise turned to anger. Naive Cadet Jim Herod stepped forward, shining his flashlight in the faces of some of those guys, and asked, “Who’s in charge here?”

It was a mistake. Those enlisted guys knew that one year later, we would be officers and they would be court martialed should they dare to hit any one of us. I gave one guy his last chance. He took it, and I got it. Afterwards, there was nothing to do but laugh with my buddies.

I was to be a cadet company commander on the day and night before our mock battle. The cadre gave us company commanders maps and laid out the next morning’s plan of attack. They watched us tell the plans to the platoon leaders; and watched them lay out the plans to the squad leaders. We ate from the back of trucks and night was upon us. Except, I didn’t get to enjoy the morning’s mock battle. One of the officers pointed me to a jeep and driver. Maybe that change in plans was done to challenge the cadet company executive officer when the company commander disappeared. The officer at the place where I was taken never spoke to me. After he left, enlisted men took turns keeping me awake.

Driving home, the incident with the flashlights was mentioned only once. “Is your mama going to complain to the University President about what happened? You were the only cadet who … well … you know.”

My mama didn’t find out about all that. She didn’t because I didn’t tell her. She did ask if I did okay, so I showed her the picture from the end of camp. She looked at it for a moment, then asked why my picture was different from the other four.

What could I say to my mama? “I guess, being tall, I kind of stood out more.”

“I hope you didn’t get in any trouble.”

Like I said, I didn’t tell her about all that. Anyway, Mamas always worry about their boys getting in trouble.

The Herods came from Virginia. Great Grandfather Henderson Edward Herod (1827-1869) was the first Herod ancestor to be born in Tennessee. By 1887, his son, Wade Preston Herod (1858-1925), had a tobacco farm in middle Tennessee. Grandfather Herod and his wife, Victoria Isabella Garrett (1861-1943), had eight children – six boys and two girls. To help get all those boys settled, they needed more farmland. Wade and Victoria bought a cotton farm on the banks of the Alabama River between Selma and Burnsville. Four of the boys were sent down to manage that farm. They married Griffins, Lardents, Knights, and Roys.

This recollection is about some of those Roys. James Drane Roy (1810-1883) was born in South Carolina but moved to Autauga County, Alabama. He brought with him Temperance C. Motley (1814-1902) who was born in Georgia. The Roys married Smithermans, Bollings, Logans, Moseleys, and Hortons. They also got us connected with the notorious James Gang. On weekends, our family would visit mother’s relatives along both sides of the Alabama River. There, Brother Joe and I would play in yards full of cowboys and bank robbers.

It was not until I had retired and started wondering who I am that I learned all this Roy history. Only late in life did I discover that Roy Moorer and Bobby Moorer are cousins. Selma’s Mayor Joe Smitherman, too. I did not have any Roy first cousins because James Granderson Roy (1883-1935) and Maude Odell Logan (1885-1966) had only two children: James Granderson Roy Junior (1914-1992) and my mother, Audrey Logan Roy (1906-1959).

Uncle J.G. was a bachelor. It was my father who taught me to drive a tractor, milk a cow, raise chickens, pick cotton, and shuck corn. It was Uncle J.G. who taught me how to play a 78 RPM record player and how to use the card catalog at the Selma Public Library. He helped me grow stacks of 78 RPM albums of classical music. Remembering that houses were cooled by window fans in the 1940’s and early ‘50’s, you can understand that it wasn’t unusual for Old Doctor Moore’s wife to comment on what music I had been listening to when I delivered the Selma paper to her home across the street.

Dad inherited Grandmother Herod’s Kurtzmann piano that was made in Buffalo, New York in 1906 and sold to Grandfather Herod in January, 1907. Uncle J.G. wanted me to learn to play and began my piano lessons on that inherited piano with Bach’s Prelude in C. I probably could still play the first few bars of that piece. J.G. must have come to realized that I was not going to be a musician. When I played Prelude in C for him, it sounded only slightly changed from the usual Chop Sticks. His playing the same piece, however, sounded like music.

Uncle J.G. also tried to introduce me to the art community in Selma. See the photo taken at a reception held by J.G. for several in Selma’s art community. In the photograph, I am sitting between artists Crawford Gillis and John Lapsley. I have no memory of what they talked about and certainly have no memory of what I understood. What I do remember is that after the guests left, J.G. was picking up ash trays and wine glasses and not looking at me. He asked quietly, only a little above a whisper, but with a tone of exasperation, “Why did you wear white socks?”

On a visit to Selma several years ago, I visited the old public library across from the Walton Theater. A smile came easily when I saw the painting of Miss Betty Keith (1872-1957). When I was very young, J.G. had taken me to that library and introduced me to Miss Betty. Even though she knew who I was thereafter and knew my family, she always greeted me with “Shhh!” The distinct event that I remember in that library is finding the book I wanted, walking up to her station, and reaching up to put it on the counter. Immediately, she made me eager to read this one by asking, “Are you sure it is okay with your parents for you to read this book?” In my shyness, I simply showed her the reading list Uncle J.G. had given me. That book was last on the list: Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis.

For some reason, I was the one who inherited a box of letters and photographs that Uncle J.G. had collected through the years. I found in that box a letter dated February 4, 1976. It was enclosed in an envelope addressed to Mr. J. G. Roy and with return address Col. Joseph R. Bibb, Rt. 2, Selma, Ala. The letter is handwritten and signed by Betty Bibb. I can read the first sentence: “You have no idea how often you have been in my thoughts and your ears must have really burned as I have had a number of visits over the phone and in his home with Crawford since he began the work on the portrait of Aunt Bettie.” And further in the letter, she wrote, “You were so good to send the pictures and negatives.” And later, “Crawford called us to come Tuesday and see it and make any suggestions or criticisms.”

I am glad I have the three photos Uncle J.G. had taken and had given to Crawford Gillis to use in making the portrait. On July 22 this year, I gave a copy of the three photos to the current Selma Library. From the photos, one can see which one Crawford Gillis used to paint that portrait of Miss Bettie Keith. That portrait now hangs in the Selma Library. Go to the Selma Public Library and see the painting.

See biographical information about these two Selma artists here:

https://thejohnsoncollection.org/crawford-gillis/

and

https://thejohnsoncollection.org/john-lapsley/

The Herod Family fished. Maybe that’s because Dad and his brothers grew up on the banks of the Cumberland River in Tennessee. Or maybe because the Cahaba and Alabama Rivers were close by where we lived in Dallas County. There was an outboard motor hanging in our barn and an aluminum boat in the other bay of the garage. At least once a year, Dad and Uncle Pascal and Aunt Malena Knight Herod took us deep-sea fishing. Eventually, Dad and Pascal had a cottage down near the Gulf.

On the other hand, my Clarke County family hunted. They hunted animals.

Martha and I had been married about three years and were living near the University of North Carolina. It was Christmas Holidays. We spent Christmas Day in Orrville. Early the next day, we packed what Santa Claus had brought a one-year-old son and drove to Grove Hill. Martha’s father suggested that I might like to get away from all the cooking and goings on by taking a walk along trails a little to the east of a historical boundary road. It was a nice day, and, with a fast walk, I could be back in time for early evening turkey and trimmings.

Tillman Duke suggested I carry his shotgun. “After all,” he warned, “there are wild animals out there. Even bobcats.”

“Bobcats!”

“Yeah. Packs of wild dogs, too.” With that, I figured I ought to take his advice. Besides, he was my father-in-law.

I shrugged, “Show me your weapon.” I was a Second Lieutenant in the United States Army and had received training on a firing range. I even had training moving along woodland trails carrying a firearm. Tillman messed around with that shotgun for a bit and finally said, “Just flip this safety off and blast away!”

“Got it.”

He handed me a nearly full box of shells. Maybe he saw the frown on my face and so assured me. “You probably won’t see anything.”

I didn’t. I also didn’t carry those extra shells. It was warm so I left my shirt and that box of shells in the truck I had driven over. I’d make enough noise running on that woodland trail to alert every critter that I was there. And, if anything made aggressive motions, I’d blast away. If one blast was not enough, I’d turn the shotgun around and use it like a baseball bat. So was the thinking of that self-assured, US Army officer.

It was good to be out. After all, I was a serious runner and hadn’t had a chance to stretch my legs in several days. Even with watching for ruts and roots on that sandy, logging road, I made a pretty fast clip through the woods. Actually, I was regretting the encumbrance of that armament.

In time, I came back to the Old Line Road and was about three miles from the Andrew Jackson Monument where the truck was parked. The pleasure of a run fast enough to produce a sweat and on a smooth, paved surface lay in front of me. Dogs yelled as I passed and one human growled: “What you be doing running up this road without no shirt, boy? And toting that gun?”

I didn’t pay much attention to any of that.

No cars met me on the road, but I moved to the left side as I heard cars coming up behind me. Two flew by, but the second car was hardly thirty yards down the way when it came to a screeching stop. Two guys got out. One of them adjusted his cap and moved into the lane where I was running.

I slowed to a walk. “Morning,” I greeted him with more than a little trepidation.

He didn’t respond with a greeting. “Do you have a hunting license?”

I probably frowned. “Hunting license?”

“What are you doing with that gun?”

“My father-in-law, Tillman Duke, said I might need it for protection.”

The guy in front of me put his hands on his hips and looked at me quietly for a minute. There was no smile on his face or in his eyes. “I’m the Game Warden.” He let that pronouncement stand for a moment. “Have you got a shell in the chamber?”

Of course, there was a shell in the chamber. If there had been an attacking pack of wild dogs or a bobcat, they were not going to wait while I loaded my weapon.

These two guys got the shells and my shirt from the pickup truck before continuing to escort me in the back seat of their car to the Clarke County Jail. The driver carried the shells and shotgun into the building, the other handed me my shirt. “Get this on!” That’s what he said. He even gave me a not-so-gentle push and walked behind me as I was pulling the shirt over my head.

I told them to make my one call to Tillman Duke. I could hear laughter in the room upstairs while I waited down in the basement.

Someone I couldn’t see called from down the hall. “What ‘cha you in for?”

What do you think I said? “Running without a shirt on a public road.” I said it loudly and clearly with careful enunciation in case we were being recorded. I wasn’t hunting and I was never going to admit to that. Laughter erupted again upstairs. I assume that meant they heard me.

In time, Tillman Duke came to get me out of jail. I was given a date to appear in court, but I left the state. I hope no one gives notice to the courthouse that the recalcitrant is back in town.

No one would have treated me that sort of way if they had come up on me shirtless and on the banks of the Cahaba River. They probably would have known my daddy. Lillian and Ann, too. “Hey, James,” they might have called out. “I heard the Army wanted you to keep at the books a little longer. Take care and thank you for your service. We’ll all be praying for you down here in Dallas County.”

“Is this the boy I’m now supposed to call a Lieutenant?” That was Dad’s greeting as I stepped out of our black Ford in front of my old Orrville home. With a wink at Lillian, I pointed at Dad. “He used to call me High Pockets.”

Handshakes and hugs, and inquiries about my pregnant wife and their oldest grandchild followed. I assured them that Martha and the boy could not have had better care by anyone! There was a kind of “Oh, yeah?” look on Daddy’s face. But Lillian? She hugged me again.

I freely confess to you that when you are in your mid-twenties, you don’t realize that your mid-sixties Daddy is still young. I did know that Lillian was good for him and, because of that, good for me.

The plan was that I would shorten the long drive from Grove Hill to Fort Lee by stopping to spend one more night in Orrville. I would arrive in Petersburg, Virginia on July 3 and report for active duty on July 5. Because the car I was driving had neither air conditioning nor a radio, I would travel with both front windows open and rouse the local fauna with a loud voice in song!

Lillian had cleared the back room to be my room again. The three of us would be up at four o’clock the next morning, and I’d be on the road by five. Lillian packed me a lunch while Daddy watched me eat. I was well into scrambled eggs and grits when he spoke almost in a whisper. “When are you going to find out where you’re going next.”

“Pretty soon. In a month or so.”

“You know there’s a lot of bad stuff going on with Army guys these days.”

How could he bring that up just as I was about to leave? Why didn’t we talk about this last night? “Dad, we made a decision that I was going to do this a half a dozen or so years ago. And there is always stuff going on with Army guys.” I shrugged. “I’ll be back to see you and my family when this first bit is over. It’ll be tough, but so am I.” I looked over to Lillian. “Meanwhile, both of you keep me on your low burner.”

Daddy didn’t hug me when I left for the University of Alabama. He didn’t hug me when I got married, or when I left for the University of North Carolina. He did this time.

If anyone had been in the New Live Oak Cemetery in Selma that early morning, they would have seen me standing by Mama’s grave, and they would have heard me say that I was about to begin another adventure.

Coffee helped me prove theorems when I was in graduate school. Now, it encouraged both frequent stops and long drives, and I made it to Petersburg early morning July 3. There was a barbershop across from the place where I had one more cup of coffee. When I walked into the shop, one of the barbers asked me if I was reporting for active duty for the first time. I guess he knew that twenty-four-hour-drive look. “The first active-duty haircut is free.” I had to smile. I knew what the first active-duty hair cut would look like. He used only one set of clippers for the whole thing. He didn’t ask if I wanted a shave. He just did it. Shaving cream and the first time ever with a straight razor. Tipping the barber seemed like the right thing to do.

I got my room assignment that day. It was in the bachelor officer’s quarters and on the second floor of a block building. It was a pretty simple setup – a single bed, a chifforobe, a desk, a wooden chair, and a closet. Each room had its own bathroom. There was a pay phone down the hall. I made two calls.

The first two days were spent with physical exams. Happily, we were treated with a little more dignity than the physical I had received at the ROTC training camp. Of course, I did more than the required push-ups and chin-ups just to show that I could.

The Post Exchange knew we were coming with that list of required uniforms. They greeted us with only one question: “What size?”

On July 7, we met in a tiered classroom. Those first two days standing around in our underwear had been my first days on active duty, but this day felt like the real beginning. We stood when the major walked in. He was a sharp looking guy with a bunch of ribbons on his chest. Those creases down the front of his pants were sharp enough to cut cold butter. For sure, the major didn’t use the barber I had a few days earlier. He introduced himself, told us to be seated, and welcomed us to active duty.

One of the ways he intended for us to get to know each other was to ask how many were married. A bunch of us stood. How many had a child? Fewer. How many had more than one. Only two of us were still standing. The other guy had been an enlisted man but was now a new officer. It was clear that he was older than the rest of us. The major asked him what his name was and how many children he had. “Lieutenant Ben Cain, sir. And two.” The major nodded. “Good man.”

Then he turned to me. “How many do you have, Lieutenant?” I raised my chin in a nod to that older lieutenant and looked back to the Major. “Sir, Second Lieutenant Jim Herod. And sir, I have one and five-ninths children.” There was a brief moment of puzzlement, but then the reply caught its laugh.

With that, and like I told my Mama, a whole new adventure was beginning.

When I ran in Tuscaloosa or Chapel Hill, it was usually short jogs on campus. Part of the holiday enjoyment in Orrville was heading out on one of the paved spokes from town. A short run was out to the cemetery and then turning into a sandy trail that led to the Holloway Place. A run that brought lots of memories was pass Ben Moore’s home. Maybe Margaret Ann or Nancy Moore would be visiting. Then I’d stop. The run to Five Points gave me a chance to really stretch it out and a chance to slip into one of the creeks close by. Orrville folks might have talked about my cooling dips under the Big Swamp Creek Bridge, except nobody knew I did it. Drivers speeding by in their airconditioned trucks afterwards might have tapped the horn and shaken their heads. “Sweating like a horse,” they might say. “That’s that Herod boy. He ought to know better.” What they didn’t know was that it was creek water matting my hair and running down my shirtless back.

The Army was different. It had its rules and regulations and requirements. Besides, not all lonely, paved roads issued an invitation for a run. We new Army guys worked hard Monday through Friday. Saturday was a day for sleeping late, for an afternoon workout in the gym, and for a bit of socializing with classmates. I planned early Sunday mornings to be time alone on extended runs. I liked both the alone part and the extended part. What appeared to be a lonely road went down beyond a landing strip. On the first Sunday morning run, it wasn’t long before I was in an area where I was pretty sure I was the only animal around, except maybe deer, and snakes, and hawks. It was hot and, this time, what appeared to be sweat really was sweat. A man needs a good sweat once in a while.

The third Sunday’s run brought a surprise. I was about four miles out when I heard a car come up behind me. I looked back. MP’s! At about the same time I glanced back, they hit a short blast on their siren. I had been going at a pretty good clip, so I was panting and had hands on my hips when I turned. “What the hell?” That’s what I was thinking.

When the car stopped, both front doors opened. I noted that the driver put his left hand on the top of the door but he stayed behind that door. I had seen that stance before. He was sending me a message by not showing both hands. The other guy - a younger guy - walked about halfway between me and the car. “I’d like to see your ID.” That’s what he said.

I didn’t have on anything except socks, shoes, a baseball cap, and running shorts. Never mind. I could handle this. I was a proud, self-assured officer in the United States Army. “My Army ID is in my billfold back in my quarters.”

“Dog tags?”

I’d worn those tags the first time I ran out here, but they had bounced from one side to the other across my bare chest. I certainly did not need my chest being slapped by the metal edges of those dog tags. I had decided not to wear them when I didn’t have a tee-shirt to hold them in place. Nobody seemed to care when I came out here without them on that second run.

I looked at the older guy standing behind the car door, and then back to the younger guy. I probably nodded. I decided not to be a wise guy out here in the boondocks with two guys holding their shooting hands close to their weapons. “Both my ID and my dog tags are on the chest-of-drawers in my quarters.”

The younger MP looked over to the driver. Then, “You know this is a restricted area? You need secret clearance to be in this area.”

“Got those papers in my quarters, too.”

The younger guy looked at the older one again. I saw the nod. “We’re going to follow you back to your barracks.”

“Follow me? With me running?”

He didn’t answer that. Instead, he asked the barrack’s number. I told him. “Let’s go,” and he waved his hand in a circle around the car, indicating that I should run past the car on the other side of the road as we headed back.

When I had run about ten yards beyond them on the way to the barracks, I heard the car doors slam. I heard them turn the car around. And I heard them following not far behind.

At my quarters, I satisfied the young guy that I had proper credentials. Then, he put that black box with a long antenna sticking out up to his ear and gave my name and my eight-digit Army ID.

“What was that all about?”

“Required report, Lieutenant,” was his answer.

Thus, my name had been put on The Troublesome Soldier’s List for that base. Yeah. The Troublesome Soldier’s List.

I promise: when the MP walked back up the hall, down the steps to the first floor, and out through the long hall to the barrack’s door, all my buddies were standing in their doors, looking from one to the other, and nodding to each other. And later, they gave the real name for that list. I’ll let you speculate what that was.

There was another time on that base that my name might have been added to the list! It turns out that I’d gotten fed up with this guy in our class. In hindsight, maybe he was good for me, because he seemed to always be competing with me, and that just pushed me to try harder, to do more, to stand taller. One Saturday night, I’d had enough. I suggested he step outside with me to the parking lot. “I’ll be waiting by my black Ford.” Thankfully, another guy told us both to sit back down. “What you both need,” he called out. “You both need another round, and I’m buying.”

He was right. Nice Guy Jim Herod had taken on a new persona. It happens, you know.

I had received orders for my next assignment with the Army. I didn’t really get to know all the guys in that 1964 Officer’s Class, but I watched as we strove to perform our class assignments with pride. There is something about tough physical situations that can bring a bunch of twenty-something guys together.

Toward the end, we were told that it was the tradition for classes to invite the Base Commander and his wife for dinner. “One of you,” the Major said, “will have an important assignment at that dinner.” There was silence. “The class should choose who will take care of the General’s wife.” Silence again. Then one guy blurted out, “Herod is the man for the job.”

“What? Me? Why me?” Laughter and echoes of agreement followed. The Major turned to me. From the look on his face, you would think that he was about to ask me to lead the class over the hill. “Herod, you are to see that Mrs. General has whatever she wants to drink and to see that she is involved in interesting but non-controversial conversation. Are you man enough for the job?”

I sat straighter in my desk. “Sir! Yes, sir.”

“One more thing, Lieutenant Herod.” He paused. I leaned forward. “Be sure that she does not have to light her own cigarette.”

Light her own cigarette? Whatever! “Sir! Yes, sir!” Following orders was what this Army Officer was prepared to do.

The hour before that reception and dinner, I pictured how suave I’d be pulling out a lighter while she was tapping the end of her cigarette on the back of her gold-plated carrying case. She’d look at me for a moment, we’d both smile, and she’d put that little cigarette between her lips. I’d pause until she looked at me again. There was one little hitch: I didn’t smoke. No problem for an officer in the United States Army. Right? I got a classmate to lend me his lighter. We army guys worked together.

Picture the reaction of me and my classmates when the General and his wife walked into the room. Her eyes roamed over that mass of manliness. And that manliness was giving her full attention. She was glorious. She was wearing a cool Carolina Blue dress, just like her eyes!

Somehow, I got my act together. I remembered that I was under orders: attend Mrs. General’s every need. I should throw back my shoulders, stick out my chest, march over to where she was standing, and introduce myself. After all, had we not had six weeks of repeated instruction that we should boldly go where others feared to tread?

“Good evening, ma’am. I’m Lieutenant Jim Herod.”

“Lieutenant Jim Herod,” she repeated as she took my hand. “Did your mother call you Jimmy?”

All the guys around us laughed. I sniffed. “James, actually.”

“James.” She was still holding my hand. “Do you now spell your name J-I-M or G-E-M?”

There were a bunch of ho, ho, ho’s in that circle of classmates. She looked around at those laughing at my red face and then she won my heart. “Looking at you, I’d say the spelling might should be G-Y-M!”

Laughter again, and then silence. It was up to me. “Let me tell you some of our adventures this summer, ma’am.” And the stories started. She had some, too – stories of where she and her husband had been, episodes in their lives, what they expected next.

“Where are you going?” she asked one of the guys standing aside. One by one, she had those around her recount orders and anticipations. I enjoyed watching Mrs. General as she presided over that circle of masculinity.

Finally, she turned to me. “You haven’t said. What’s your next assignment, Lieutenant Herod?”

“I’ve been assigned to a tank platoon that’s up near Warren, Michigan, ma’am. They’re preparing for deployment.”

“A tank platoon?” she twisted her head a little to the left and looked at me out of the corner of her eyes. “You’re not a transportation officer.” Some of my fellow soldiers laughed. One pointed out that all tank platoons need some foot soldiers to discover where there are road bombs and snipers – to provide safety for those expensive tanks and their crews.

I loved it when she put her hand on my arm. “We all do what is required,” she said. “Hooah! Hooah! Hooah!” The cheers sounded around the circle.

In time, Mrs. General pulled the cigarette case out of that little black bag and I reached into my pocket without taking my eyes off of her. That borrowed lighter was in my hand before that cigarette touched her lips.

I popped that sucker open, touched that button like I had been shown, and … . If I had thought about it ahead of time, I would have guessed that the first time you ignite a lighter after filling it with a flammable fluid, there could be an accumulation of fumes as a result of over-filling. The fumes from that ignition fuel wafted out into the air, just waiting for a spark. I provided that spark by touching the appropriate button.

Whoof!

It really wasn’t a major explosion. For a second, however, the ball of fire engulfed my hand. My comrades-in-arms who had been standing around listening to the stories Mrs. General and I were swapping evacuated the area leaving me standing alone, still holding that incendiary.

Mrs. General? The cigarette fell out of her lips. But I guess career Army wives are tough, like their husbands. Anyway, I continued holding the dwindling torch while the circle of other young warriors backed away from all the action. Mrs. General was now looking at me through the flame. “I think you singed the hair out of my nose.” That was all she said.

It was all she said and all I remember about the rest of that evening.

Toward the end of my third year as a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, I asked the Department of Defense for one more year to continue my studies in mathematics. I figured someone in the Pentagon was probably getting impatient for me to meet my commitment to the US Army. On the other hand, I had a good chance of finishing my PhD studies in one more year. For sure, it was a relief in the winter of 1964 when Professor MacNerney suggested that I start pulling together my results and prepare to present a defense of my dissertation. A former Air Force pilot himself, he suggested I start working out in the gym and start running again. “Else,” he warned, “the Army is going to kill you.” I knew how to respond to my Major Professor: “Yes, sir. I’ll get on that!”

I received a Doctoral Degree in Mathematics from the University of North Carolina in Spring, 1964.

Toward the end of Officer’s Basic Orientation Class at Fort Lee, I got orders to report for active duty to the Automotive Tank Agency in Warren, Michigan. That unit would be deployed to Vietnam before the New Year.

It was only a few days before that 1964 Officer’s Class was over when an enlisted man came into the area where we were using some military gear and equipment. He pointed to me and signaled that I had a phone call. I looked to the officer in charge. He saw what was going on and gave me a nod. I jogged with the EM to his office and was connected to a call.

The First Sergeant who answered told me to hold for instruction with the commander of the tank company to which I was assigned.

In time, a Major came on the line. He told me factual information about the unit, what they were preparing to do, where they expected to be deployed, and what he would expect from me. Standard stuff. Serious stuff.

Then, he wanted to know about me.

“You married?”

“Sir, yes sir.”

The phone was quiet for a while. “Any children?”

“Yes, sir. One and seven-ninths.”

It was quiet for a longer period. I didn’t hear a smile. I listened. “What’s your wife going to do?”

“Sir?” What did he think? “She’s gonna have a baby, sir.”

“You sure?” That’s what he said. I wished I could see his eyes.

“Sir? That’s what she told me.”

I guess he let it go. Maybe if I had seen him, I would have seen a smile in his eyes. Or, maybe he thought I was being a smart-aleck. “What’s your background, Lieutenant Herod?”

I didn’t think he was interested in knowing that I was born in Selma and grew up in Orrville, Alabama. “Bachelors in ‘59. Masters in ‘60. Doctorate in Mathematics this spring. Sir.”

“You’ve got a PhD in Mathematics?” You can guess the tone of the voice of this tank commander who was looking for a battle-ready lieutenant who was prepared to help lead the company forward.

I knew the proper response to your commanding officer. “Sir. Yes, sir.”

Silence. Then, “You’ve been assigned to the wrong place.”

“Sir?”

He went on. “I’m calling the Pentagon Office responsible for making assignments and telling them to take a look at your education record.”

“Sir. Yes, sir.”

He didn’t say “Bye.” Or, “Over and out.” Or, any of what I was expecting. The next voice was the First Sergeant again. “That completes the call, Lieutenant Herod.”

I went back to where my buddies were. A Lieutenant standing next to me leaned a bit in my direction and whispered, “When do you ship out?”

“I don’t know.”

“What? Herod, how could you screw up right after you get your assignment?”

“It’s a long story,” I whispered.

The voice from the front broke up our conversation. “Herod! Are you talking back there?”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“Give me twenty pushups!”

“Sir? Here? Where we are?”

“Twenty-five!”

“Sir. Yes, sir!”

It was two days later that I got a note from the Lieutenant Colonel who was the Commander for all the Basic Classes at Fort Lee. The note told me to report to his office after class later that afternoon.

“Herod’s getting chewed … again.” That was the surmise of all my buddies as they headed for the showers and then to the officer’s club to relax after another day’s harassment. Not me. I was reporting to the office of Lieutenant Colonel Baxter.

When I was let into Baxter’s office, he just stared at me for a bit. Maybe I should have gotten out of my fatigue uniform and cleaned up before reporting. I guess he thought he needed to remind me of where we were. “Stand at ease, Lieutenant.” That’s what he said. He didn’t mean for me to pull up a chair and have a seat, or anything like that. The command to Stand At Ease meant that I should stand with my feet eight inches apart, my hands clasped behind my back, and my mouth shut. He told me that he had gotten a call about my new assignment. Neither of us said anything. “The unit to which you have been assigned is a joint forces unit. Do you know what that means?” “Sir. Yes sir.” “It’s the Defense Atomic Support Agency. All matters relating to the military and nuclear configurations are in the bailiwick of that agency.” Silence. “Are you up to it?”

“Sir. Yes, sir,” said in a firm voice. What did he think I was going to say?

I called my wife later that evening and told her our next home would be in New Mexico. Sandia Base was still involved in the underground testing of nuclear bombs. Wow! Here we go again. A brand-new adventure!

When we were in Orrville High School, all the guys in my class watched what was going on in Korea. When that war was over, we felt certain there would be another one just for us. Vietnam proved us right. The Orrville High School Principal, Old Man Forester, stuck with me in applying for support in getting admitted to the University, along with a cafeteria job and a scholarship. The plan was that I would graduate from the University of Alabama in 1959. I did not know how involved the United States was going to be in those conflicts after I graduated. Or how involved I was going to be.

This I knew. My grandfather and father had been in the army. My older brother was going to be in the army. I would take Advanced ROTC, accept a commission, and serve my time in the army. That’s simply was what I was going to do. The Department of Defense allowed me to delay going on active duty as I worked toward earning a PhD in mathematics. Eventually, all preparations were done and it was time.

We were conducting underground testing of nuclear weapons when I was assigned to the Defense Atomic Support Agency on Sandia Base, New Mexico. The birth of a second son delayed the family joining me in New Mexico immediately. The result was that I lived for two or three months in the Sandia Base Officer’s Club. Good quarters, I thought!

While living conditions were super, I had two problems. One was a work problem. I had only a secret clearance. I needed top secret. For more than a month, my Orrville family told me by telephone that many in the Orrville community had visitors knocking on their front doors and asking questions about me. During all that time, I could get past the first set of guards in the building where I was to work, but not the second. A Marine Major who was to write my Officer’s Efficiency Report for the next two years would meet me in a room with a long table, eight chairs, and a blackboard. Both physics journals and physics books filled the shelves lining the walls.

“Read this,” he would tell me. “But don’t take it out of the building. Be prepared to tell me the important points tomorrow morning at 8:30. The building is open all night.”

“Yes, sir.”

He would show up with a cup of coffee, sit at the head of the table, and listen to Second Lieutenant Jim Herod, chalk in hand, and acting as though he were an assistant professor in physics on some college campus.

The other problem I had in those first days in New Mexico was about my life. I was a married man with a son and almost another. I wanted us together again to share in this new adventure. I knew this would happen in time, but time does not conform to the whims of humans. I had to wait for top secret clearance, and I had to wait to be reunited with my family.

When that clearance came through and I could go behind the second set of guards, I began to learn what my fellow officers in the building were doing. Nearly all of them were supervising contracts with civilian scientists. It was the civilians who were doing the physics analysis for what happened when someone popped a nuke. That Marine Major, however, must have understood something that he never said to me.

It seems that he reported that I would be talented at developing an understanding the physics, and the Army should use me that way instead of having me to supervise someone else as they struggled to understand what happens when a nuke is popped.

Kirtland Air Force Base was next door to Sandia Base and the Weapons Laboratory was located on Kirtland. The decision was made to send me to Kirtland. Air Force Colonel Ralph Pennington knew exactly how to get me started. First, I’d learn computer code. While waiting my turn for my programs to run on the CDC 6600 computer, I studied the physics concerning the collision of charged particles with the Earth’s atmosphere. Because of the asymmetry in the Earth’s magnetic field, greater scattering of charged particles was observed in the southern Atlantic and, generally, in the southern polar regions. And I read that radiation data had been collected after high altitude nuclear tests.

I was assigned to a working group with four goals. Develop the mathematical physics to understand charged particles moving through the Earth’s magnetic field and colliding with the atmosphere. Write computer programs to represent the theoretical equations that resulted. Gather and organize observed data from high altitude tests. Compare the observed data with the numerical predictions as a check on the validity of the equations associated with the scattering. Finally, the results would be presented in classified technical reports.

In the end, I was honored to be asked to present the mathematical physics to the scientific community and to co-author the associated public research publication. During all these studies, I was promoted from second lieutenant to first lieutenant and then to captain.

I worked with outstanding scientists: Air Force Physicists Ralph Pennington and Jack Welch, Geo-Physicist Juan G. Roderer, Goddard Space Flight Center numerical analyst Glinnis Chinnery, and Air Force Lieutenant Frank Barish.

The Weapons Laboratory had an apartment in Washington DC that was lined from wall-to-wall with double-decker bunks. I spent many days at Goddard Space Flight Center or Andrews Air Force Base, and many nights in Washington. Colonel and Mrs. Welch would invite me over for work sessions Saturday and Sunday afternoons and evenings. That’s when I started asking for a cigarette to keep me awake as I drove back into the city after midnight.

During my first visits there, I learned the protocol for the Washington apartment. The top bunk was for brief cases and baggage. Clean bed covers were always there in a closet when I arrived; beds were to be stripped when I left. All lights were out except the bathroom after eleven in the evening. During the week, when I finished with a shower, one guy might be ready to get in and another could be shaving. Boxers were standard attire for those fixing their breakfast. Hardly anyone talked in the mornings. There might be one or two guys there when I stayed over the weekend to work with Colonel Welch.

For a short time after my tour of duty was over, I was allowed to continue to work as a civilian while preparing our results for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research. In this current recalling of those two years while acting as a mathematician studying nuclear physics, I searched for and found Juan G. Roderer. It was good to laugh with him over the telephone. He’s a little older than me, but well.

My last day of active duty in the Army was July 4, 1966. I wanted to return to the university life somewhere and hoped that it would be in southeastern United States. I also hoped to be at a university interested in a guy who had spent two years working in mathematical physics. I knew it would be best for me to get an appointment where, at the end of two years, the Full Professors would meet behind closed doors and the Department Chairman would ask, “Do we really want to keep this guy?”

Good science and engineering colleges are found all across the nation. Many carry a reputation of having tough standards and are considered important in producing science, technology, and engineering. I knew Georgia Tech’s reputation even when I was in high school. What I heard was that all the students at Tech were guys – guys studying engineering.

A change to that was made in 1952. The Georgia Board of Regents declared that women could enroll in programs at Georgia Tech provided those programs were not offered at other universities in the state.

My application for a position at Georgia Tech resulted in an invitation to visit the campus. The invitation did not ask me to prepare an introductory lecture. I did anyway. I met faculty and administration but was not asked to give that lecture.

I was offered a position as an assistant professor and took it. I wanted to stay at Tech, so I worked hard.

During those first two years, I coauthored a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research and another in Physics Letters. It was probably these that got me promoted to associate professor after two years, as well as a permanent position on the faculty.

Years later, I asked the chairman why I was hired without my having to reveal the depth of my research when I first visited Tech. His response left me with mixed feelings. “It was 1966,” Professor Bert Drucker said. “Think about it. The Regents for the University System of Georgia would be pleased when we told them that we had hired a veteran.” Then he added with a smile, “Turns out, we decided to keep you.”

I got to watch changes at Tech. Two years after I got there, the Board of Regents voted to allow women to enroll in all programs. In that same year, Dr. Helen Grenga became Georgia Tech’s first tenured, female engineering professor. Within five years, she and some of her female colleagues in non-engineering disciplines demanded an important change: all swimmers in the indoor pool should be required to wear swimming suits! Needless to say, there was opposition to this inevitable change.

Students came to Tech with ambition. Those ambitions could be felt in freshmen classes. The students seem to understand that powerful things were possible. They had hopes and dreams. While I liked to teach the graduate classes in mathematical analysis, I also liked those freshman classes. So many different expectations were there that whatever particular things were in the student’s dreams didn’t matter. That they dreamed was what was important. The expectation of a promise to be fulfilled was palatable.

When I first got to Tech, classes contained up to twenty-five or thirty students. I liked this for I usually got to know the students by name. In class, I always addressed them as Mr. Jones, or whatever. If we ran together on campus or in community races, I would call them by their first names. Professionally, he was Mr. Jones. Socially, he was Don.

I understood that students paid closer attention in class if the class was conducted in a participatory mode. At the same time, we agreed that if I asked Mr. Jones a question and he could not or did not choose to answer, he could say, “Pass.” Without my making a derogatory response, the question simply went to the person on his left. Three passes from the class and I explained the answer in detail.

And there was the day when I walked into class and found it empty. There was a rap on the window wall. The entire class was standing on a ledge outside the building, looking in and laughing at their surprised professor.

At some point, Georgia Tech began the progress that was happening all over the nation. New dormitories were being built, libraries were being expanded, and large lecture halls were constructed. How was I going to adapt my teaching techniques when I was meeting with three, four, or five times as many students as in the previous classes?

I asked the students to choose their permanent seat when they came in for the second session. From those choices, I made a seating chart. These large lecture halls were not in the math building, so I had a walk to the class. While walking, I memorized a few names in one or two sections of the lecture hall. I may not have recognized Mr. Jones, but I knew where he sat. So, I would look up in that direction and ask Mr. Jones a question. The student who started wiggling was Mr. Jones. It became known that even in large classes with me, students would be expected to participate. The agreement about “Pass” still held.

One day, I asked a question in a large class and before I could call a student by name, one guy held up his hand. Wow! What a pleasant surprise. This student was volunteering to participate.

I nodded to him. “Thank you. Tell me how this process should work.”

He said, “Pass.”

I was stunned – he volunteered and immediately said pass. In fact, for a moment, the whole class was stunned. Stunned until the girl sitting on his left let out a shriek. Then we all knew. This Mr. Jones was notching up his flirt with that Miss Smith to one more level.

Good for him!

The class got a good laugh. The professor did, too.

BECAUSE OF WORD LIMIT, THE FOLLOWING EPISODE DID NOT APPEAR IN THE PAPER.

So that I could avoid Atlanta traffic, my family had late dinner. Instead of leaving with everyone else, I’d often go to the gym at about five o’clock for a bit. One afternoon, I was running on the track. A student in one of my classes walked across in front of me and called out, “Trying to get in shape, Professor Herod?” The next day in class, I told my students that I had taken offense at this taunt by one of their classmates. They smiled. I knew the student’s name so, right there, I challenged him to a race. The class laughed. He called back, “Sure. When?” I told him the date of the Calloway Gardens Marathon. The class cheered. He laughed and waved a white handkerchief. I told him the date of the next Stone Mountain 10K. “Next year!” he said. And, “Pancake breakfast to the winner!” We raced. He won. And Martha fixed pancakes.

I was invited to spend the academic year 1976 -1977 at the University of Montana. During the previous ten years at Georgia Tech, I had learned from others that going away for a full year could give me two years of not being on Institute committees: the first year because I was out of town and the second because folks didn’t remember that I was back.

In Montana, we lived up a graveled road in Miller Creek Canyon and about twenty minutes from Missoula. The house was the next-to-last house up the canyon and about a mile past Bonnie and Charlie Graham’s place. A little beyond us, it seemed the canyon was closing. Then the road turned, went through “The Notch” and the valley opened again. Bachelor brothers lived alone together in this almost hidden section of Miller Creek Canyon. Their place was surrounded by a few cottonwood trees, some outbuildings, and both wire and wooden fences where their cattle were corralled.

Daylight lingered long when we got to Missoula in the late summer of ‘76. Before Fall Semester started, afternoons found me changing into running shorts and shoes in the school gym and running the streets of that small college town. At first, I ran alone. Then, I came to know other faculty and students who were dressing in the gym and about to go for a run. In that late summer, the family found the pleasure of overnight camps in the high country. Atlanta friend, David Bishop, came up to hike with Charlie Graham, George McRae, and me.

There was a different running adventure for the weekends as a national forest covered the canyon walls behind the house where we lived. There was a forest service road going up into that forest and joining with Miller Creek Road between our house and the Graham’s. As it turned cool, I discovered that, even with snow on the ground in the canyon, there could be a temperature inversion and be warm on the ridge. I would start a run up the forest road but soon would be taking off clothes and hanging them on bushes along the way – gloves, cap, the long sleeve sweater. And, yeah. The tee shirt might come off as I ran along the ridge in that national forest. Way up there, alone on a winter day, and not yet forty years old, it was irresistible. Imagine feeling snow on naked skin while going at a six minutes per mile pace. Of course, in the harsh time of winter, I wore multiple layers, gloves, and a wool cap that covered all of my head and neck except my eyes.

One weekend toward the end of that academic year, a winter storm was forecast. I did not go up the ridge during blizzards, for a fall up there at such times could be serious. I was making a run up Miller Creek Road on that day and, as I passed through The Notch, I could see that one of the brothers was leading the cows across Miller Creek Road and down toward their barns. No doubt, he wanted to get the cows sheltered before the storm hit. He had them almost to the barns as I was passing the closest point to the brother’s house.

I have no idea why his cattle decided that following me was an attractive alternative to going into the barns. Anyway, they turned and, at a gallop, joined me on my run up the canyon. In a bit, we got to the end of the graveled Miller Creek Road and the start of the forest service road. Completely innocent of any intended mischief, I turned and started back by the brother’s place. The cattle turned with me. Thankfully, they stopped as we all got near to the brother again. The cows were swishing their tails, expressing their pleasure with the morning jaunt before being stuck in a barn while the storm blew over.

The cows must have been amused at their thwarting of the brother’s simple plan. Not that brother! As I looked back, he had his fists clinched, his head lowered, and a very unpleasant look on his face. It certainly was not a look of amusement. I found out later that one of the brothers phoned Charlie Graham and asked who the fool was who came running almost naked up the road on weekends.

I never met either of the brothers. They must have cherished their lonely place above The Notch at the top of Miller Creek Canyon. I would have found it lonesome and boring living in that isolation. Think about it. Even the cows were seeking a little variety and excitement way up there. And, you know me: I look for running companions anywhere I can find them.

I put to you that this story illustrates one more reason why I have continued a lifetime of running. Imagine having a run surrounded by a galloping herd of cattle. Have you ever run with cows on both sides so close that you could reach out and touch them? Consider! And, consider the thrill to this Alabama boy for running shirtless – sometimes wearing more, sometimes less – while enveloped in a swirling snow mist through which the world appears and disappears.

After the academic year was over, Professor Robert McKelvey invited me to come back for the summer and to work with him on evolution systems. He and his wife provided me housing in their basement and an empty classroom for my office. I’d fill two walls of blackboards in the classroom with mathematics and, from time to time, he’d come listen to what I was doing. Finally, I got stuck. It was McKelvey with a suggestion that gave me a breakthrough from where I was stumped. Our result was published in the Israel Journal of Mathematics.

During the academic year 1981-1982, I was invited to spend a year at the United States Military Academy at West Point. This was a memorable year. In addition to the academic challenges, there were the pleasures in coming to know both faculty and students. Also, there were unforgettable running experiences.

Shortly after I arrived on campus, I ran to the top of a ridge above the Academy. It was a struggle. Gasping for oxygen, I made it to the top and turned. What a glorious view! I saw an animal way down near the foot of the rise. The motion as it moved was not the smooth glide of a runner. Rather, it was stretch and contract, stretch and contract. And the creature was nearly black. I had run mountain trails in Montana, Colorado, and New Mexico, as well as the woodlands of the Southeast. I knew what a bear looks like on a run.

Finally, I caught up enough to realize this was no bear. It was a guy in a wheelchair wearing a West Point hooded jacket. I ran faster and caught up with him. We talked as we continued at our pace. Where’d you grow up? That kind of thing. Eventually he told me that he lost both legs in Vietnam. A few years earlier, he had been a student at the Academy. On that morning, he was doing his run in the wheelchair – pulling forward with powerful strokes and reaching again. Pull and reach, pull and reach.

Regretfully, I had to go on. I had a math class coming up. I wished him well and ran. No, I flew on my two legs. Sometimes on a hard run for the rest of my life, I would think of that guy. I wanted the strength and resolve that he had.

Two majors and I ran the 1981 Marine Corps Marathon. Cheers from the crowds along the Washington D.C. street were exciting. There would be no slouching with all those people watching. You will not be surprised that we ran the last half of the marathon shirtless! I have strong memories of that finish: all the runners in front of us had taken all the oxygen out of the air. I had been sweat-dripping hot while running, but now was muscle-trembling cold as we waited for the bus to take us back to where our cars and wives were.

The next time I walked into the West Point math building, I found a note taped onto my office door. “3:04” That’s all it said. We had done that marathon in only seconds more than three hours! You runners note: that was twenty-six miles at a seven minutes per mile pace!

At some time during that year, a notice came out that runners on Post should wear a shirt. Likely the faculty that had been there more than a year knew this. The note was for us new guys. Proper decorum. That’s what it was about. The faculty and students have an image that must be maintained – especially as tourist visit campus. It turns out that a rockslide occurred on Storm King Highway alongside the Hudson River and connecting the Academy and Newburgh. The slide closed that road to all traffic. Both faculty and students would run off campus and onto that highway. Except on the days when it was extremely cold, we’d go out the gate and snatch off our shirts. Running shoes and shorts, maybe a black knit cap and knit gloves was all we wore. Of course, we put the shirts back on before we came back on Post. The cadets didn’t shed their shirts, but they grinned when they saw us. One Saturday morning, we saw a Firsty running in front of us. We picked up the pace. Let him see our boldness, our daring. The broad smile on his face made us know that he knew what we were doing. We laughed all the way to the gym.

Spring came and nature bloomed. In a place like the Academy, rising sap is strong in the Spring. One Saturday afternoon during those warming days, I started a run at the Parade Field and went up past the Chapel. A winding trail from there led up and over Stony Lonesome. No one was up there, so off came that shirt. Once I topped the hill, I was flying down the other side. Whoops! There was General Smith playing golf with his wife. “Good morning, sir!”

The next week, the chairman of the Math Department invited me to his office. I figured that I was going to be reminded of the Academy’s dress code. Instead, we talked about my classes, the seminars I had given, even my time in the army back when I was young. I recounted my original assignment to a tank platoon and reassignment to Sandia Base in New Mexico. While Sandia was our home, I worked at Goddard Space Flight Center, Andrews Air Force Base, and the Joint Forces Defense Atomic Support Agency in New Mexico.

“I was surprised to be reassigned from the tank platoon and assigned to a research unit. But this gave me a good start at doing applied mathematics after getting my PhD.” I said this to Colonel Pollin.

His response has stayed with me. He said it with a smile, “The policy was then and still is to let nerds be nerds.”

Pretty perceptive of the Army. They had recognized at the outset that Lieutenant Jim Herod, and later Captain Herod, was a nerd. Yep! Still is!

Retired Jim Herod says there are some other adventures to tell. He suggests that after this pandemic is over, you should meet Martha and him at the Farmer’s Market in Orrville. Maybe you’ll have a few to tell, too. And, with this last column, he thanks the editors of the Selma Sun. for allowing him to tell his story during the last year.

We all get e-mail messages that we don’t bother to open. Often, they simply go into the trash. On March 1, I received a message with title “Request for notes.” The bit of the first line that could be seen was, “Hello, Professor. Greetings to you.” Curiosity grabbed me. The message turned out to be a request for some mathematical notes which the author of the message said I had created.

Maybe there are such notes from long ago. Now, I am a reader, a writer, and a runner. I have been sending stories from The Edge of The Nethermost to this newspaper. With Cindy Yeager, I gathered, edited, and published more than three hundred copies of Orrville Memories. I have been posting short stories on the internet. After the pandemic closed the Grove Hill Book Club, I started The Pandemic Book Club which contains even more readers. Even more: lots of folks in Clarke County know I ran in a 10K race at age 80.

So, what is this about math notes of mine?

It was way back in 1998 that I retired from Georgia Tech. With retirement, Tech asked me to be a “consultant.” What I was to do was to prepare notes and film forty lectures for non-resident graduate students. An internet hookup would be made so that all the students could send and receive messages visible to all. I was asked to conduct an online session for at least an hour for five days a week. Finally, the classes would run with the regular summer semester.

What was it these students wanted while taking a graduate class and living off campus? Maybe they had an undergraduate degree from Rensselaer, or California Tech, or West Point. Maybe they had been working for four or five or so years and realized that they needed a graduate degree to advance in their profession. A graduate degree from Georgia Tech would fit well on their resume. Maybe they had been away from the academic settings so long that they needed a quick reminder of mathematics for scientists and engineers. This class was to be what they needed.

What kind of work had these students been doing? One was a navy officer stationed on a submarine. He’d download a load of notes, send me a packet of homework, and disappear for a week or more. One was a navy pilot. He sent me a bunch of photos from his plane. In one, I could see his reflection in the cockpit window. He did not have on his oxygen mask. I upbraided him just like I would have my own sons in such a situation. He laughed and thanked me. One of the students was getting too far behind his peers. I told him he was not going to be a successful graduate student if he didn’t shape up. Afterwards, I remember that these were not kids. I apologized. His response? He was the CEO of his company; it had been a long time since someone had spoken to him so sternly. We both laughed and he did well thereafter. Curiously, a West Point graduate who had been in the class during one of those four summers contacted me recently. He wanted to know if I was still alive.

Most of the students taking this class were ideal. They were ambitious, had fulfilling jobs, and were striving beyond the ordinary to excel. I decided to respond in that spirit. I filmed 46 lectures and made notes available for them all. The notes were not just words; with the help of a bit of software, the notes computed and drew pictures. Also, I made myself available three times a day, seven days a week. At the end of the summer, if they had not had time to finish due to their work obligations, I gave them the grade of incomplete and allowed them to continue working during the fall.

My participating in this program needed to stop after the summer of 2001. The Grove Hill Book Club and a Grove Hill Writers Group had started. Some long-time residents in the town asked me to be the front for those wanting the town of Grove Hill to allow the sale of alcoholic beverages. Also, the Town Council appointed me to the Library Board. During that time, I not only pushed for the library to have an online catalog, but also had to pay for the subscription for the first three years. And then, there was that most important new enterprise: I started attending writing workshops all over the US.

If someone had stopped me in the post office before March 1 and asked me if I had written some notes for science and engineering students around the turn of the century, I’d have had to scratch back in memory and try to remember. Maybe I’d already be walking to the truck before I’d stop and cry out, “Oh, yeah. I did. But I don’t know where they are.”

But now, I had an inquire in my email from Professor Bendan Wapang from Kohima Science College in Nagaland, India. He asked about mathematical notes. Sophomores in science and engineering take a class about objects moving in a line with changing force. These notes were about an object moving in three-dimensional space under a force and with a changing environment. Maybe the object is a piston moving up and down in a cylinder expanding as it heats. Maybe it is a nuclear particle rushing through Earth’s magnetic field and colliding with atmosphere. These notes had words to go with the spoken and filmed lecture, but also had computing code so that the student could learn how to create their own codes.

The files for the notes are large so I send two or three sections when the professor asks for more. Meanwhile, we exchange personal information. I sent him the photo of my lecturing back in 1987. He sent me a photo of his family. Professor Wapang from India and I almost know each other.

Good man, Professor Wapang.