Our First Photo Together: Carol and Me

Carol E. Williamson and I are pictured, probably in 1968. This was our first photo made together. We are shown standing in front of a house (Greenville, S.C.) where Carol rented a room. We married in August 1970 at Bethany Baptist Church in Travelers Rest, S.C.

Charlie Brown's Barber Shop

 Pictured are my Aunt Frances and late Uncle Fred Crain. Fred enjoyed making music at Charlie Brown's Barber Shop.
 

I drove on Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018, to Greg’s Barber Shop located in a shopping center on Wade Hampton Blvd., between Taylors and Greenville, SC. At 8:55 a.m. Greg Barnes wasn’t there and didn’t show at 9:00, his weekday opening time. Another arrival, David Rogers, said, “Greg’s usually here early.”

David and I introduced ourselves. He’s a Vietnam vet and a Christian. We talked about where we were stationed in Vietnam. He was injured — shrapnel in the back — and has suffered a couple heart attacks, he said. After 15 minutes, we left, figuring something delayed Greg.

I drove back toward Taylors and made a first-time stop at Zack’s Barber Shop on Wade Hampton. Corey, age 21, invited me to one of three chairs. His brother, Zack, 23, runs the business. Corey said the shop used to be called “Charlie Brown’s Barber Shop.” I was stunned. My Uncle Fred Crain, who died on Feb. 21, 2018, at age 92, frequented this shop and probably had sat in the same chair I was using. Carol and I moved to Taylors in January of this year after living in N.C. for over 29 years because of my work in carpet manufacturing. During those years, I telephoned Fred who often told me of getting a haircut at Charlie Brown's Barber Shop and then, if there were no customers waiting, “making music” with Charlie B. and a younger barber, David, who played trumpet. I had not known exactly where Charlie Brown's shop was located but had "stumbled into it." I pictured Charlie (who also plays guitar) on keyboard, David on trumpet, and Uncle Fred on guitar, enjoying jamming in that small shop. I missed my uncle as I sat there and thought of him making music with friends. 

“There used to be a lot of junk sitting around here when Charlie owned this shop,” Corey said. “Charlie’s retired but he doesn't drive now. He lives up on St. Mark Road and walks down here sometime. I don’t know where David is working.”

I thought about “change.” Carey and his brother sport youthful hairstyles. Relocated are Charlie Brown and David and gone is Charlie’s “junk.” Gone are the sounds of their music. Gone to Glory is Uncle Fred.

Here is an internet blurb about the old shop: “Brown’s Barber Shop was founded in 1990, is located at 3058 Wade Hampton Blvd. #14 in Taylors, S.C. It’s a hair salon offering such things as haircuts and hair styling and blowouts. Sample prices include $13 for a men's haircut.”

Matthew Craft, a customer, wrote about the shop on March 13, 2014, saying, “Absolutely one of the most surreal haircut experiences I have ever had. The Charlie Brown Barber Shop on Wade Hampton. Jazz music playing on the stereo — come to find out the two barbers are musicians. Before I left Charlie and David said, "Lets play a little ditty.” They are all from New York. Best 13 bucks spent yet.”
 
Here are youtube sites showing Charlie and David playing music, along with an old fellow (not my uncle): 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ka1JJozSJY8 
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPRMnz3Mu_o 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFeHrwDD80A

Cinder Was a Great Dog

Cinder, pictured here, was a great dog. 

We found “Cinder” caged alongside various yapping dogs. She appeared shy . . . a quiet, sad-eyed black canine (still a puppy) looking for someone to adopt her from a Greenville, S.C., shelter in early 1972. She was part Labrador Retriever and part “something else,” probably a mix of Lab and small hound of some kind.      

  

“I think her face will haunt me if we don’t take her,” I told my wife, Carol, after we looked at other young dogs.   

  

I named her “Cinder” because she was black, except for a small white spot on her chest. A cinder is “a small piece of partly burned coal or wood that has stopped giving off flames but still has combustible matter in it.” That named fit because we learned Cinder was recovering from canine distemper, a viral illness that usually affects dogs with high fever, reddened eyes, and discharge from nose and eyes. “An infected dog will become lethargic and tired, and often anorexic,” sources say. Distemper can affect a dog’s spine and nervous system. Cinder never was able to raise her tail very high or wag it well. 

   

Distemper caused her teeth to appear a bit brown, but our vet vouched they were OK, just discolored on the outside. I tried to get Cinder to run and play, but she cowered and seemed as weak as a kitten. But several weeks later, she raced around and appeared healthy.  

  

Before we married, my wife, Carol, and I worked as first-year teachers for Greenville, S.C., public schools. She served in elementary school, and I taught art at Woodmont High. Uncle Sam called, and I completed basic training during hot summer months at Ft. Jackson, S.C. We married in August 1970 and I spent a year in Vietnam, working first at Long Binh for the U.S. Army’s inventory control center as a draftsman and later for “The Army Reporter” newspaper as an illustrator (81E MOS). 

  

Carol wanted a dog after I left the army in Feb. 1972, so we found Cinder. Some folk say a couple shares a dog before they get a child. We adopted Cinder, and Carol soon announced she was pregnant. Cinder loved lying on our black Naugahyde couch. Not noticing, I once half-sat on her, before she yelped. She later pawed a hole in that settee after circling to prepare herself a place to sleep.  

  

I worked at Faith Printing until a client of that business offered me a job as art director for his Christian book publishing business, Logos International (no longer in business) in Plainfield, N.J. Carol and I staged a garage sale at our tiny rented house, shipped furniture to N.J.,  loaded Cinder (who had grown to about 30 lbs.) into our 1969 Nova, and headed north in July 1972. Carol had to change doctors during her pregnancy, but we were young and adventuresome. 

  

The owner of Logos bought an old 2-story apartment house for us to rent and share with another couple (the Balsigers and their two young daughters). David Balsiger, hired as a Logos writer-editor, and his wife, Janie, moved from California to N.J. just before we moved from S.C. When we arrived, the Balsigers had settled into the second floor apartment. The house lacked air-conditioning at that time, and our windows had no screens. Our landlord (the owner of Logos) planned to supply screens as soon as he could. Houses in that neighborhood were close. Our driveway, to the right of our house, jutted up to our neighbor’s drive. The two passageways were divided by a sliver of yard and a waist-high wire fence. 

  

Our master bedroom, in the rear of the house, featured a window that stood, at the sill, about six feet above the backyard lawn. July in N.J. in 1972 was hot and humid, and despite lack of a screen for that bedroom window, we raised the window’s bottom portion as high as possible. We had put up “curtains” made of a gauzy, see-through, lace-like material. Cinder slept in our bedroom each night. After occupying the house several days, we were lying awake around 10 p.m. when I heard Cinder growl, which was unlike her. 

  

“Be quiet, Cinder,” I said. 

  

She growled again, walked to the open window, placed front paws on the sill and peered out. I rose slowly from the bed and nudged Cinder aside, parted the thin curtains and gazed into the backyard. A distant streetlight allowed me to see most of the narrow-but-deep rear landscape that I scanned from side to side. Then I looked down. There, crouched three feet below our window was a burly, gray-haired man wearing a gray jacket. 

  

“Yeo-o-w!” I yelled, and slammed shut the window. I guess I told Carol there was a man out there. I hardly remember what was said. She donned a robe, snatched up Cinder under one arm, and high-tailed it up the stairs to the Balsigers, who had heard me yell and the window slam. (I’ve wondered, “Why would an ‘obviously pregnant’ woman lug a 30-lb. dog up a staircase? I probably needed that dog down there with me.)

  

I called the police: “What’s that?” I said. “You can’t do anything about a man in our yard unless he’s still in the yard? He’s gray-haired with a spiky hairstyle. He was underneath our bedroom window. My wife’s very upset and she’s pregnant!” 

  

The next day, we learned from neighbors that our “night visitor” was probably our next-door neighbor, an alleged “Peeping Tom.” They said, “We hated to tell you about him.” The accused lived in the house on the other side of those two gravel driveways I earlier described. After work the next day, I knocked on the accused’s door, and he answered. Behind him, about a room away, I saw his two teenage daughters and wife peering in our direction. “Mr. ___,” I said, “I know you were over at our house last night. God loves you and I care about you, but don’t ever set your foot on our property again.” 

He denied he was the guy, but I believed our neighbors. As far as I know, he never again snooped around our landlord’s property during the year we lived there. During that year, when Mr. ___ came out to get into his car and Cinder was anywhere near our back door, the hair on her back would rise up, and sometimes we heard a low growl.

  

Cinder wasn’t always “wonder dog,” in a good sense. During autumn, I planted tulip bulbs, but Cinder dug up those bulbs, playfully flipping them into the air. When my mother and our friend, Janet, journeyed together from the South to visit us, Mother petted Cinder, but Janet, who was not a “pet person,” shunned her. We made a Sunday train trip into New York City. Home alone, Cinder chewed three pairs of new shoes Janet had bought for her trip. Cinder touched none of my mother’s shoes. 

  

For months before our daughter was born, Carol’s feet swelled badly. She rested daily on our couch while Cinder licked those painful appendages. Carol gave birth to Janelle in Feb. 1973, and her feet returned to normal size. When Carol came home from the hospital and reclined on the couch, Cinder looked at Carol’s un-swollen feet and never licked them again.  

  

In July 1973, we moved back to Greenville, S.C., and I returned to Woodmont High to teach art. Janelle, learning to walk, steadied herself by holding onto Cinder. They’d walk along together, and Cinder would look back to see if Janelle was OK; at least that’s the way it seemed to us. Janelle tried (once, that we know of) to eat some of Cinder’s dry dog food. We saw the evidence: Janelle’s cheeks were pooched way out.

  

Five years after Janelle was born, our second and last child, Suzanne, arrived. Cinder became part of Suzanne’s life, too. Cinder was 13 years old when arthritis prompted X-rays. Our vet viewed those pictures with me. He said her hips had deteriorated and he felt it was best to put her to sleep. Janelle drove with me to take Cinder’s body to my grandmother’s farm. We buried Cinder, amid tears, close to the barn where I played as a child. The field had been plowed hundreds of times, and the ground was soft and easy to dig . . . but leaving Cinder’s remains there was hard. Agnes Sligh Turnbull said, “Dogs’ lives are too short. Their only fault, really.” 

My Try at Taxidermy

Living in the rural South as a child in the 1950s, I loved animals. Maybe I was destined to try my hand at taxidermy.

Taxidermy is “the art of preparing, stuffing, and mounting the skins of animals with lifelike effect,” including tanning skins and making rugs. The term comes from the Greek-Latin “taxis” (“to move or arrange”) and “derma” (“skin”).

“Taxidermy began in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries to preserve specimens collected by world-traveling explorers,” says Matt Blitz (Smithsonian.com). Taxidermy, especially of birds, was “popular as Victorian-era home decoration.” Using arsenic in soap to protect specimens, led “to a golden age of taxidermy that spanned from about 1840 through the dawn of World War I.” Today, arsenic is banned in most countries, and “Borax and tanning techniques are often used as alternatives.”
 
In the mid-1950s, I saw a Northwestern School of Taxidermy (NST) advertisement in “Outdoor Life” magazine. I ordered a booklet containing enticements such as this one: 

“BECAUSE REAL GAME CONSERVATION PRACTICES ARE NECESSARY TO PRESERVE OUR WILD-GAME! Unrestricted hunting is the thing of the past. … TAXIDERMY makes up for this restricted shooting. It enables the sportsman to DOUBLE his enjoyment from hunting or fishing, by being able to preserve PERMANENTLY all of his finest trophies. There is no surer way for you to greatly INCREASE your hunting pleasure than to learn TAXIDERMY. … Any average man or boy who takes our course, studies and practices the lessons … is ALMOST CERTAIN to find ways of turning his knowledge into CASH.”
 
I considered sending $10 to order the nine NST “to be sequentially mailed” lessons, and something my parents did helped me decide to “go for it."

My family moved us from our 13-acre farm to nearby Greer, S.C. Before I started 7th grade, my parents bought a mounted gray squirrel from Ford McKinney, who worked in a textile mill but learned taxidermy as a hobby. The squirrel – purchased for $25 or less – held a hickory nut between its front feet and sat upright on a log with its tail curled upward in an “S” shape. That squirrel influenced me to order the lessons.

The NST was located at 1202 Howard St. in Omaha, Nebraska. J.W. Elwood founded the school in 1903. It also sold taxidermy supplies. In the early 1900s, “taxidermy was known to only a few; the methods had been kept secret,” sources say. “But Mr. Elwood believed he could teach it by mail just as effectively as he had done it with his friends in his home.”
 
Stephen Rogers says many who took up taxidermy over 45 years ago “had their beginnings with the old J.W. Elwood Northwestern School of Taxidermy Correspondence School.” Rogers says Elwood “made a ‘killing’ by ‘teaching’ taxidermy to the common folk.” His NST lessons are still offered, at times, on E-bay.
 
I received my first NST booklet; it was about mounting birds. Few illustrations accompanied the black-and-white printed pages. I stayed at my paternal grandparents’ nearby farm for a few days and carried my Red Ryder BB gun. An electric line crossed my grandparents’ pasture, and I spotted an Eastern Meadowlark perched on one of the wires. My shot hit the bird in the chest, and it plummeted. Growing up in farming country and seeing animals processed for food or being “put down,” I didn’t feel many twangs of conscience about that lark’s demise. But I had heard in church that a sparrow did not fall to the ground without God knowing about it, and I thought about that. 

I laid the bird on a newspaper on a table and read something like this from my lesson: “The breast of a bird is bare. This is a great boon to the taxidermist.” I parted feathers covering the meadowlark’s torso. Its breast was, indeed, bare. Per instructions, I made an incision from the top to the bottom of the breast with my X-Acto knife.

I skinned the bird, taking out the body but leaving the skull, plus bones in the wings and feet. Brain tissue had to be removed. I cut tissue from the skull’s exterior and later replaced tissue with clay. The feathers unfortunately gathered moisture during flesh removal. Years later, someone wrote about that lesson: “Mounting small birds calls for a lot more patience and skill than most young boys can muster.”
 
I had ordered supplies from NST and used NST wire to fashion the bird’s skeleton. Wires extended through the feet to a wooden pedestal. Around that wire skeleton, I wrapped something called “Kara-flex,” as I recall. It was an artificial straw-like material. I looped string around the Kara-flex and ordered glass eyes for the meadowlark. Weeks later, my finished product disappointed me – the pitiful meadowlark appeared bedraggled.
  
Lesson two, telling how to stuff a squirrel, arrived, and someone gave me a harvested squirrel. Beginning with an incision down the subject’s front, the skinning progressed over the head and to the nose, which had to stay connected to the skull. I scraped off skull tissue but had no stomach for removing the brain, which was bigger than the bird’s brain I had removed. My grandmother dipped into the skull with a tiny spoon and took out the brain. I skinned the squirrel to his feet and tail. To preserve his skin, I soaked it in an alum solution for a day or two, as I recall.

I procured a log slab with bark intact and planned to position my squirrel as though he were running up the side of a tree but pausing and peering slightly downward, as though looking for danger. I drilled holes in the slab to later receive wires extending from the squirrel’s feet.

I sculpted the replacement body from Kara-flex, wrapping it around wire serving as a skeleton. That wire also ran up inside the tail, parallel to the bone left inside.  

After pulling the skin over the sculpted torso, I stitched it together at the incision site. I think I cemented the glass eyes in place before returning the skin to the skull and filling the squirrel’s mouth with colored NST wax. I laid the squirrel, stomach-down, on the slab and inserted feet wires into drilled holes. I bent the wires on the slab’s backside and covered them with felt. I attached a hanger and hung the trophy on a wall, adjusting the squirrel’s tail to flow downward in a subtle “S” shape. My folks thought my squirrel turned out better than the meadowlark.
 
Someone gave me a hawk, and I tried to stuff it. Mr. Hawk went from “handsome” to appearing underweight and having been, as the old folks used to say, “beat with an ugly stick.”
 
Somebody gave me another squirrel, but after I soaked his hide in alum solution, most of his hair came out. That was my last taxidermy project. I gave someone my nine lessons. All my “trophy mounts” – including my best one, the “squirrel climbing a tree” – ended up in the county dump.
 
After WWI, photography began replacing taxidermy. Museums finished creating most habitat dioramas by the 1940s, sources say, and big game hunting became less socially acceptable after WWII. The Northwestern School of Taxidermy reportedly went out of business around 1980. But now there is a revival of taxidermy, and many women are participating, some say. Pat Morris, author of “A History of Taxidermy: Art, Science, and Bad Taste,” says a “sense of getting back in touch with the physical world is at the core of taxidermy’s rebirth.”
 
According to writer Matt Blitz, Ms. Allis Markham, who worked as Walt Disney Corporation’s director of social media strategy, completed a deer specimen during a 2-week taxidermy school and felt a sense of accomplishment. “It existed in the real world and not on a computer,” Markham said. She quit her job to open a business called “Prey Taxidermy” in Los Angeles. She creates “ethical” pieces, meaning that no animal she works on died solely for taxidermy.
 
I don’t intend to try stuffing any more creatures, despite reports of a taxidermy revival. I admire the art, but if I had to stuff another bird or an animal, I might go a little squirrelly.

Pete and Kate: Two Mules Remembered

My paternal grandfather, Carl Crain, worked two dark-colored mules named Pete and Kate. They pastured together and often pulled a 2-horse wagon. They slept in adjoining stalls in a tin-roofed barn in rural Greenville, S.C., in the early 1950s.

I recall “riding” Pete when I was about three years old. “Pa” (that’s what I called my paternal grandfather) plowed with Pete one afternoon and brought him, at end of day, to drink from a tin tub sitting under a spigot placed between Pa’s house and barn. My dad set me on Pete’s back, and that was fine until Pete lowered his head to drink. Fear of sliding down his long neck hit me, but I stayed on.  

“He’ll let you ride him,” Pa said, “but Kate won’t.”  

I distrusted Kate and thought she was aloof and mean. She appeared a little darker in color and heavier than Pete. A few red hairs flecked Pete’s coat, and his peaceful face shaded into gray-white around his muzzle. The pair did almost everything together – grazing, drinking from the creek, and rolling on their backs in the pasture after Pa took off their harnesses. Mules and horses roll after being worked in order to ease the irritation of drying sweat. They dry the sweat with dirt, and dirt also helps protect them from biting insects.

In the 1950s, I thought poor people were “mule folk” and rich people were “horse folk.” That’s how I perceived the “class system” in the rural South during the middle of the 20th century. But mules were highly valued in olden days. King David often rode them, and the “kings of the earth” sent mules as gifts to King Solomon.

A mule, the offspring (usually sterile) of a male donkey and a female horse, is said to possess the strength of a horse and the endurance and surefootedness of the donkey.

The late Ben Crain, great-grandfather to L.S. Crain, is pictured with two mules and a grandchild.

According to mulemuseum.org (MMO), the U.S. boasted an estimated 855,000 mules in 1808. By 1897, 2.2 million mules populated the U.S. before cotton boomed in Texas and numbers rose to 4.1 million. The U.S. Army last used mules in any great number in World War 1, according to MMO. In that war, 6-mule teams hauled 2,000-lb. wagons loaded with 3,000 lbs. of cargo. War wagons were useless in mountainous country, so an Army train of 50 or more mules, each carrying 250 pounds, would move in single file and cover 60 miles a day.

Ma (my paternal grandmother) and Pa married and sharecropped before purchasing a small farm. Pa worked as a carpenter and farmed “on the side.” Ma, a housewife, never worked at a “public job.” They usually kept two mules, two cows, one or two hogs, two beagles, a cat or two, and some chickens. Except for the hogs and chickens, their animals had names and my grandparents formed bonds with them. Philosopher René Descarte reportedly regarded animals as “mindless machines” programmed with instincts. But, animals have feelings, and Pa and Ma believed righteous people took care of their animals (Proverbs 12:10).

My family (my parents, my younger sister, and I) lived near Ma and Pa, and I slept “many a night” at my grandparents’ house. Pa wore brogan shoes and overalls, except on Sundays or on Saturday mornings when he, driving his car, chauffeured Ma to Greenville to sell a little milk and butter.

When Pa drove his farm wagon, Pete and Kate pulled while I operated the brake if we descended a hill. The brake was a wooden pole I pushed against one of the rear, metal-rimmed wheels.  

Pictured is the late Homer Crain, son of Claude Crain (brother to Carl Crain), and a dappled mule. Homer served in the U.S. Army in World War II and was hit by a sniper’s bullet. He later became a pastor who walked with a limp.

I served as Pa’s water-boy during spring planting when I was five. “Take this water to Pa,” Ma would say as she dropped ice cubes into a quart-size Mason jar holding water. She’d insert wax paper between the jar and the lid to make sure I didn’t slosh out water as I trekked across the field. I’d walk under two tall pecan trees standing near Ma’s kitchen and head out – bare feet on plowed warm soil, water jar hugged to my torso. I’d see Pa and Pete (or Kate) plowing and planting – one man and one mule, working, so that the man could “earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.”

Pa would stop the mule, doff his straw hat, wipe his forehead on one arm of his long-sleeved work shirt, and drink. (The mule drank plenty of water at morning, noon, and night.)    

One spring day each year during my elementary school years, I skipped classes to help Pa fertilize a field for corn planting. Pete and Kate pulled the wagon as Pa and I set down 100-lb. sacks of guano (powdered bird droppings used as fertilizer) at intervals across the field. Pa then hitched Pete to a “distributor plow.” Using a bucket, I deposited fertilizer into the distributor’s box as Pa plowed, dispensing guano into furrows. As one guano sack emptied, I moved to another bag, as Pa continued plowing row by row. Pa talked to Pete, guiding him and saying “gee” and “haw,” as they traversed the field. According to “Wikipedia,” “Gee and haw are voice commands used to tell a draft animal or sled dog to turn right or left … ‘Gee’ (pronounced ‘jee’) has its first attested use in the 1620s in Scotland; the first known use of ‘haw’ was in 1777.”

The late Pinkney “Pink” Parker is pictured with a mule and a child, standing near his barn in Taylors, S.C. 

I was in third grade when Pa let Pete and Kate out of their stalls and into pasture on an overcast winter morning. He put up three bars to the barn’s pasture-side hallway. (The front side of the barn had no gate or bars.) Perhaps Pa reasoned that his mules stayed outside and weathered rains during most months and would be all right, or maybe he thought the rain would “hold off” until evening. He then drove to his carpenter job. A cold rain began around mid-morning.

Seeking shelter but blocked by the bars, Pete pushed through the barbed wire fence and kudzu located to the left of the barn. Beneath the kudzu lay a deep gully, and Pete mired up to his chest in that red-dirt ditch. I think he stood there for hours, sinking further into the muck as he struggled. Kate stayed in the pasture, perhaps sensing danger.   

That afternoon, Pa found Pete. My father and I soon arrived – neither family had a telephone – to visit my grandparents. The rain had mostly stopped, but the sky was still gray when I saw Pete. He stood, eyes pleading. About every 30 seconds, he flopped the right side of his neck against the bank sloping into the gully. He had worn off the kudzu on that side of the ditch.

Troy Burrell, a neighbor, stood near Pa. Before Dad and I arrived, they had placed a rope around Pete’s neck and tried to coax him to free himself, but the mud’s suction prevailed. Troy walked home and returned on a small tractor. They attached the rope to the tractor and dragged Pete, by his neck, from the mire. He lay a few feet from the gully on a flat, plowed field. He rested on his right side, with stiff legs stuck straight out before him. He appeared to me to resemble one of the plastic toy horses with unbendable legs that I often bought as a child at a dime store in town.

They said the circulation was gone in Pete’s cold legs. Hoping he would rise, they let him lie there for a while. But he didn’t get up, and they decided to put him out of his misery. I guess I was in Ma and Pa’s house or gone home with Dad when they dispatched Pete. I don’t remember hearing the shot. Pa told me that a man from Greenville came the next day and hauled away Pete’s body. I recall thinking it didn’t seem fair that Pete died in such a tragic way. He seemed the nicer mule of the pair.  

Perhaps Pete’s partner wasn’t as devoid of kindness as I had thought. A few months after Pete’s passing, Pa found Kate, dead. I asked him what happened to her.

“I think she grieved herself to death,” Pa said.

Lunch at the China Garden

I ate at the China Garden today. It’s an all-you-can-eat, sprawling Chinese restaurant in Aberdeen, N.C., located almost where Hwy. 15-501 intersects Hwy. 1. That area is a traffic hub in southern Moore County, where natives and relocated folk drive, shop, and eat together in peace, for the most part. 

When I head to China Garden, I often think of “Garden Party,” a song popularized by the late Rick Nelson. The first words of that tune go like this:

“Went to a garden party to reminisce with my old friends / A chance to share old memories and play our songs again / When I got to the garden party, they all knew my name / No one recognized me, I didn't look the same / (chorus) But it's all right now, I learned my lesson well. / You see, ya can't please everyone, so ya got to please yourself.”

When I hum “Garden Party,” I change those two words (“garden party”) to “China Garden.” Thus, I sing, “I went to the China Garden to reminisce with my old friends.”

Today, I did exactly that.

I motored to China Garden to dine and talk with two friends I worked with at the former Gulistan Carpet that manufactured carpet in Aberdeen.

Diane (that’s the name I’ll call her) and Dan (that’s what I’ll call him) were working at Gulistan when I arrived there in April 1989. We worked together until Gulistan closed in 2013. That’s a long time to be around each other in a small product development department. We got along pretty well.

I’m 70. Diane and Dan are in their fifties. They had to find other things to do after the company folded. Me? I retired. I was within two months of being 66 when Gulistan went, as they say, belly-up. Gulistan means “garden of roses” in Armenian. Gulistan didn’t get “nipped in the bud,” but it got nipped after it had bloomed and faded a bit. Around 400 people “walked” when “the bloom was off the rose.”  

We enjoyed lunch. The China Garden is spacious, and the music is soothingly Chinese. We talked about folk we used to work with. Some found other jobs. Some moved. Some died.

“Have you heard from _____ or _______,” Diane asked, referring to supervisors we worked for. 

“Who’s that?” I quipped, and then answered, “No.” 

We all smiled, enjoying the camaraderie that forms among lower-echelon “associates.”     

We chatted about our respective relatives and their ups and downs and health problems. We shared some of our own challenges.

During our last years at Gulistan, only five people worked in our office. We had to coordinate closely in order to design carpets and move them into production modes. The manufacturing group sometimes referred to our product development group as “problem development.” They seemingly wanted to “run” established products and not encounter challenges presented by introducing new styles.

Four of our five folk in Product Development, during the last few years our company “hung on,” were guys. (Diane was our office administrator.) We guys usually took breaks together. During watermelon season, we’d buy melons and cut them into slices we loved to eat during afternoon breaks. Two of our five fellow workers died not long after their Gulistan employment ended. Dan and I attended both funerals; we rode together to each service.

Diane, Dan, and I grew pretty close over all those years we worked alongside each other. We spent nearly two hours at lunch today. I enjoyed every minute we lingered at the China Garden.   

When TV "Came In"

Phil Lister, pictured above in 1957, loved to play "cowboys" -- loved to act like the cowpokes he saw on TV. 

Dad bought our first television in 1954 when I was seven. My younger sister, Shirley, and I virtually welcomed Roy Rogers and Dale Evans into our small, shingled house in rural Taylors, S.C. We loved our black-and-white, 24-inch-screen TV.  

We soaked up “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin,” featuring Rusty, a boy orphaned by an American Indian raid, and Rin Tin Tin, a German shepherd dog. They lived on an army post called “Fort Apache.” We loved watching Westerns!

Mom and Dad liked “The Jackie Gleason Show” and “Dragnet.” Dad relished “The Life of Riley” starring William Bendix. A U.S. infantry veteran who fought in Germany in WWII, Dad smiled at “Riley” and his television predicaments. My parents also liked “You Bet Your Life,” a quiz show starring Groucho Marx.

Not everyone thought highly of “telly-vision.” A few pastors referred to it as “helly-vision.” I recall this joke from those days when TV sets came with “rabbit ears”(two extendable antenna on top):

An older lady bought a TV. One day, she looked out a window and saw her pastor arriving. She ran and threw a bed sheet over the TV that sported long “rabbit ears.” She welcomed her pastor and they sat to chat. Looking around the room, he saw the sheet and realized the two points poking upward beneath the sheet were antennae. He told the lady, “Well, you can hide the Devil, but you can’t hide his horns!”

“At the start of the decade [1950-60], there were about three million TV owners; by the end of it, there were 55 million, watching shows from 530 stations,” says Steve Wiegand, adding that the average price of a TV set was about $500 in 1949 but by 1953 had dropped to around $200.

Families huddled and watched shows. In 1954, the Toledo, Ohio, water commissioner reported that water consumption surged at certain times because so many people were simultaneously using their toilets during commercial breaks on the most popular shows.

Before TV came to our house, Mom persuaded Dad to read (several nights each week) to our family from “Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible for Young and Old.”   

Somehow, TV started replacing those “devotional times.” Instead of hearing how David defeated Goliath, we watched fictional Marshal Matt Dillon dispatch bad guys in “Dodge City, Kansas,” on a program called “Gunsmoke.” Instead of learning about Moses leading the Children of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land, we watched “Major Adams” lead actors in covered wagons toward California on a program called “Wagon Train.”  

Someone said, “Bad things seen on television may prove harmful, but TV’s greatest danger may lie in what it replaces.”    

During my fifth grade year at Mountain View Elementary (Greenville, S.C.), Mrs. Barton, a good teacher and a Southern Baptist, asked us to write something and read it in front of the class. Gladys King stood and read about her imaginary trip to the “Gunsmoke” version of Dodge City, where Matt Dillon was “the law” and Miss Kitty, Dillon’s friend, owned and managed the Long Branch Saloon.

“I walked down the street and met Marshall Dillon,” Gladys said. “Then, we went into the Long Branch, and I met Miss Kitty, and we had some beers.”

“Gladys!” exclaimed Mrs. Barton.

Gladys reddened, smiled sheepishly and finished her story.

Later that year, Mrs. Barton asked Kenneth Salmon a history question, and he gave an answer.

“That’s wrong,” Mrs. Barton said.

“I goofed,” Kenneth said. 

“Where’d you hear that word?” Mrs. Barton asked.

“I heard it on TV,” Kenneth said.

Mrs. Barton didn’t smile and went on with our lesson. 

 Pictured above are Genelia and Hovey Parker with their daughter and only child, Marian, who married Clifton Lister. Clifton and Marian have two sons: Phil and Mark.

 

    Shown above is a March 1957 photo of Phil Lister. He was around age seven in this photo.

I was about ten years old when I rode my bike a mile from home to visit Phil and Mark Lister. Phil was seven years old; Mark was three. Their parents are Clifton and Marian Lister. Their family then lived next door to Marian’s parents, the late Hovey and Genelia Parker. Hovey was my maternal grandma’s brother. He owned several acres and had fenced in a pasture for a horse he bought for Phil and Mark.  

“Hey, Steve!” Phil said, after their mother invited me into their house. “Let’s go to the basement and play cowboys!”

Many Westerns entertained us during those black-and-white TV days – stories about Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, the Cisco Kid and Pancho, Tex Ritter, Annie Oakley, and the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Many of us owned cap pistols, holsters and cowboy hats. Back then, we could tell who were the good and bad folk on TV Westerns.

Phil and Mark were wearing shorts; I had on long pants. We clamored into the basement and dreamed up a cowboy drama. We began acting out a scenario, but, after a while, Phil wanted a fight scene. I soon was laughing and “fighting off” Mark, with my back toward Phil. Suddenly, I felt something “ka-blam” me in the back of the head. Whoa! I placed my left hand on the rear of my skull and brought that hand around for a look. Have mercy! Blood was flowing. Phil ran screaming for his mama. Like a shadow, Mark ran behind him.

On television, Phil had seen cowboys get into fights, pick up chairs, and break them over the backs of opponents. When we began play-fighting, Phil picked up a straight-back chair and whopped me on the back. One leg of that chair caught me on the head. I still have a scar. (Some chairs used on cowboy TV shows were made, no doubt, to break apart, but the chair Phil used was not a fake TV prop.)    

Their mother, Marian, quickly brought me a towel for my head. She was thin and frail, back then, but she grabbed Phil by one arm and somehow laid hold of a long hickory. She jerked Phil out into the yard. I stood at the basement door, and Mark and I watched as Marian and Phil whirled round-and-round in what seemed like a kind of maypole dance – Marian was the pole; Phil was the not-so-happy dancer. As Marian laid on lashes, Phil circled his mother, who had a firm grip on his arm. As he tried to avoid stripes landing on his bare legs, Phil yelled, “I seen it on TV! I seen it on TV!”

Television can provide information, entertainment, inspiration and virtual companionship, and TV ads influence choices and decisions. I recently viewed 14 commercials during only one break in a program.  

Alfred Hitchcock said, “Seeing a murder on television . . . can help work off one’s antagonisms. And if you haven’t any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.”

Neil Postman said, “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”

According to “Wikipedia,” Postman's best-known book is “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (1985). Postman warns of a decline in our media’s ability to share serious ideas and argues that TV replaces the written word and demeans and undermines political discourse “by turning real, complex issues into superficial images, less about ideas and thoughts and more about entertainment.”

Groucho Marx said, “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on a set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

Writer Jess C. Scott said, “People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.”

When I mentally search for an example of TV’s powerful influence, I think about the scar on the back of my head and about Phil’s mother lashing his legs as Phil yelled, “I seen it on TV! I seen it on TV!” 

 The above photo shows Mark Lister (left) and his older brother, Phil, as they pose with the famous Roy Rogers in 1993. Phil and Mark are singers and guitarists who worked for years in Nashville, Tennessee.