[Before I start, let it be known that I have not been offered nor have I been compensated for any of the brands mentioned in this little essay. Not to say that offers will be rejected outright.]

With that out of the way, I’ll start by stating that a new pair of shoes came by way of Amazon yesterday. They were my new shoes, purchased for my better half’s birthday. Before you call me an uncaring so and so, I will be quick to point out that on my birthday, we went out and purchased her a new set of shoes. She endorsed my purchase. In fact, she requested that I go and purchase my new pair of shoes.

The better half and I are like that with each other. We don’t purchase shoes very often because we usually make our shoe purchases with an eye to keeping them in the long run. Or in our case, walk.

Both of us do quite a bit of walking. A good pair of shoes are a necessity. She is a nurse. I worked a sales floor, and before that, I was a route supervisor for a daily paper. I now have the dog Filbrix who I take out at least three times a day. Both of us put quite a few miles on our feet every week.

Back when I was a route supervisor (I was called a “District Manager”), I would go down to a small shoe store to purchase a pair of relatively stout walking shoes every four to six months. The proprietor kept nudging me to purchase a pair of Clark’s, claiming that they would outlast the whatever it was I was wearing at the time. Me, being me, rejected his sales pitch. The notion of paying over $100 for a pair of shoes was something I was not about to do.

A move to Texas and a Christmas gift in anticipation of a trip overseas led me right back to the man who had recommended Clark’s, and a purchase which more than proved his point about shoes outlasting what I had been wearing. That first pair lasted 3+ years, including the miles I walked in London and daily use on a concrete sales floor. I still have a pair of Clark’s I wear today – they’re my Sunday Go-To-Meeting shoes.

When the better half needed a new pair of shoes to do her rounds, I took her to a Clark’s store in our corner of the DFW Metromess and purchased a set of Clark’s for her to wear. Again, years of wear instead of having to replace shoes every few months.

I got away from Clark’s for everyday wear and started to purchase Merrills. Good shoe, moderate price, long-lasting. My brother-in-law in Columbus loves ’em. Until a year and a half of purchasing my last pair, I loved them, too. Unfortunately, one of the effects of being a seasoned citizen is that apparently our feet grow, not only in length (from a size 11 to size 13), but in width as well. I developed a painful corn on one of my feet and went looking for something a bit wider.

My son came by and suggested that I try a set of New Balance shoes. They worked, in large part due to the fact that the shoes I purchased were wide, instead of a medium width. A good shoe… for a while. The soles were softer than most and they ended up wearing down within a year. [Nine months, really, but I don’t want to upset the lad too much. They were, after all, purchased on his recommendation.]

Which brings me to the day before yesterday when I went on Amazon to find a pair of decent shoes to buy for my better half’s birthday (as explained above).

Before the Great Lockdown, the better half and I found a SAS factory store in San Antonio (SAS = San Antonio Shoe). Her Clark’s were about due to be replaced and we had heard that SAS shoes were every bit as good as Clark’s, so we gave them a try. Not only is she still wearing the pair purchased in San Antonio, she has another pair which she wears on Sundays.

As I started to say (and to make a long story short) I found a decent pair of SAS shoes to wear at a price which made me think twice. At the same time, if they wear as well as my first set of Clark’s, it will be money well spent. And besides, I don’t have to tie the things.

Time to go take a walk…

Be Seeing You!

Sometime this spring marks 24 years since moving to North Texas from southern Ohio. Chillicothe Ohio to be precise. I lived in Chillicothe for a total of 23 years starting in 1968. Counting as I did, several times just to make sure, and counting three years I spent living in Houston, I have lived in Texas for most of my adult life. Still, for some reason, I cannot shake having lived in Chillicothe Ohio.

People I’ve worked with and people I’ve socialized with are quite familiar with stories I’ve told about the years I’ve lived in Chillicothe. Some of them have taken me to task for my repeated mentioning of that certain southern Ohio city.

I’m not the only person aware of Chillicothe Ohio. I about fell off my chair the other night when I ran across a clip from the syndicated television show Fernwood 2-Nite, a lampoon of television talk shows hosted by Ohio comedian Martin Mull. I accessed the clip on You-Tube when I learned that the guest was Harry Shearer. Now, Harry has been around for a while. He was on the pilot for Leave it to Beaver and is best known for providing many of the character voices for The Simpsons. So, Harry comes on and mentions that after doing the show with Martin Mull, he is headed to Dayton (Fernwood is set in the fictional town of Fernwood Ohio) or Chillicothe.

Whoa!

Had that been the only reference to Chillicothe in the wide world of entertainment, it would have been an absolute bombshell! Truth of the matter, Chillicothe Ohio is mentioned in any number of television and motion picture presentations. As an example, several weeks earlier, I was on You-Tube watching what was the first episode of the kid’s cartoon, Roger Ramjet when it was mentioned that one of the places targeted by the villain of the piece was…

Elvis Presley’s love interests in both Blue Hawaii and Viva Las Vegas were from Chillicothe, as was one of the soldiers in the war movie, The Longest Day. Those three I know for certain. Undoubtably there were more.

A newer book featuring a revamp of the old Tom Swift series mentions the city, although from the text, the author more or less picked the place out of a hat.

Several people of note have passed through the town. Bill Clinton, for one. Chillicothe was the first place he visited as President of the United States. He was less than a mile from my living room when he gave a speech at the high school gymnasium. I wisely stayed home – out of the way of the entourage and the many people just wanting to get a glimpse of the President. Bill has been what could be called a “Frequent Flyer,” appearing in at least two campaign appearances in ’96 and 2016 (for Hillary).

Peter Lupus, one of the team on Mission: Impossible came through town and purchased an automobile from one of the local dealers. Seems that the dealer had helped the struggling actor some years before. Lupus was returning the favor.

The best passing through Chillicothe story came about during World War II. A young Stan Lee was on his way east when he had a tire blow on him. A woman with ties to the rationing board hooked him up with a new tire and he was on his way to fame and Spiderman. Supposedly, whenever Mr. Lee needed to mention a small town as part of a story, he has used Chillicothe as his name of choice as an homage to his coming through the town. I don’t know that for certain. My specialty is trash TV, not the comics.

While it is nice to be associated with such a well-known, unknown city between Columbus and the Ohio River, it’s just as nice to know that there are people nearby who are from the same place. A sister to one of my old running buddies lives with her husband in the next town over. A fellow I knew from the church I attended lives a few miles away in Greenville. Another friend lives in nearby (by Texas standards) in Garland. We all have a little bit of Chillicothe in us.

Twenty-Four years. Almost six in what I call my little corner of the DFW Metromess. I like it here. A lot. But I sure am looking forward to visiting Chillicothe early this coming fall.

Be Seeing You!

Cruising the news this evening, I watched a story about the orange harvest in Florida and how that harvest is affecting the price of a morning staple of mine.

Orange Juice.

Back when the initial blows of the current ongoing pandemic were underway, I went to see a doctor for the first time in (unintelligible) years. He suggested a vitamin supplement along with high blood pressure pills and something called a statin. I decided to go one step further and have my morning pills with a glass of Florida’s finest. If I was going to be around for a few more years, I may as well eat (and drink) healthy. Right?

Until two weeks ago, getting orange juice was one of those “easy peasy” things I could count on. When I went to my grocery store of choice, the shelves containing a variety of orange juices was empty. “Supply chain problem,” I thought. Last week’s pilgrimage confirmed my diagnosis. There was plenty of orange juice available, so, I was back to purchasing my weekly container of orange juice.

Not so fast. Today, empty shelves, save for one container. Then there was the news report tonight. Wow. Who’d a thunk it?

Yeah, I know that most orange juice has a hint of orange color added to it to make it more appealing, and I am aware that the juice is processed from some sort of orange juice “slurry” made in a factory and shipped up north (or out west as the case may be) for consumption by people like me who make orange juice a daily staple.

I like the stuff so much that I wrote a book called “An Orange Juice Story,” combining a couple of stories I’ve told about my days living in Houston’s southwest corner.

The first involves an evening trip to the local grocery store to get supplies for the next couple of days. Soon after getting back to my apartment, I was annoyed by the buzzing of a helicopter in the general area. I went out on my patio, watched the helicopter circle for a while, and then thought nothing more of the sighting until the next morning. I switched on the news to find that less than five minutes after leaving the store, two men came into the store, robbed it, and shot the manager stone-cold dead!

The other story has to do with being woken up in the middle of the night by a drunken woman who was babbling about someone coming after her and doing her harm. It took me two hours to get the woman off cloud nine and get her to another complex, where she felt she would be safe. How she decided to come to my apartment out of all of the apartments in that particular complex, I’ll never know. What I do know is that it took her an hour and a half to notice that all I was wearing was a pair of underpants.

I also wonder why in the hell I didn’t get robbed or murdered in either instance. Charmed, I’ll guess.

Anyhoo, I combined both incidents into one cohesive narrative. The book, however, was one I set up by myself when I didn’t exactly know what I was doing. Small print with lots of white space on each page. It’s one of the reasons I don’t exactly promote that particular book.

During the meanwhilst, the price of orange juice has been going up by a considerable margin. I suppose I’ll see orange juice on the shelves again, but in the meantime, I’m already looking at alternatives.

V-8, anybody?

Be Seeing You!

An acquaintance of mine has a problem. Due to a minor stroke, he has lost the ability to recognize faces. He compensates for it quite well, using other cues to figure out who he might be talking to.

I have sort of the same problem. There have been times when I have had entire conversations with people, wondering who in hell am I talking with… drawing a blank with their names. I will occasionally draw a blank when conversing with members of one of the two small groups I am affiliated with. I work around it, usually coming up with the name of the person I was talking with after the conversation has come to an end.

With some of the people I know on Facebook, the problem can be worse. One fellow has been nagging at me for a while in terms of trying to figure out why I know this person. I finally figured it out the other day. I should be embarrassed that it took so long for me to know why. Once he wrote something about his being associated with a bank, it fell into place.

I thought I knew him in high school. But I didn’t know him in high school. He was a few years younger than me. I would not have run into him while I was in high school. I knew his sister, too. My sisters knew his sister and by osmosis, I knew the sister. But that still did not tell me why I knew this one guy in particular.

Between the time I had (and failed at) my own business, and the birth of my eldest child, I worked for a now-defunct appliance store called Sun TV. Sun wasn’t a bad gig, for the most part. It was well known in the Columbus Ohio market – the saying at the Sun at the time was that any competing appliance store would likely be out of business within a year of opening. Radio Shack tried with a concept called “The Show.” Bombed. Jack Nicklaus tried with his own brand of appliance store. He should have stuck to golf. But until Sun TV overextended itself and went bankrupt, it was the best place to buy appliances in Columbus Ohio.

Sun relied on outside credit providers to help its customers purchase what Sun was selling. And that’s where I met that mystery person. At the time I was working for Sun TV, my friend was working for one of the outside credit suppliers.

He and I got into a conversation one afternoon about his experience with that credit supplier. He started from the ground up, meaning that he had to work collections and repossessions. He told a story about a certain repossession which had me scratching my head, at first, and later became one of several stories I keep in my repertoire of interesting stories.

It seems that he (or it might have been someone else, the details are foggy at the moment) was assigned to repossess a Kirby Vacuum cleaner from a rural address somewhere in one of the local counties. While driving out to the address, something struck him as odd. He wasn’t quite sure what it was until he arrived at the home where the cleaner was kept.

When the owner of the house opened the door, a couple of chickens came racing out. Once inside, he noted two reasons why the cleaner was still in the box in perfect condition. For one, the house had a dirt floor. For the other, the house had no electricity. What struck the person making the repossession on the way out was that there were no overhead electrical wires leading to the house!

Now, one would think that in this day and age (or even in that day and age nearly forty years ago) that even the most remote home would have at least a wooden floor and electricity. I thought the story to be a little on the unbelievable side until an encounter I had about ten years later.

Within city limits.

I was working in the circulation department of the local newspaper, managing routes on the south end of town. One of my carriers was intimidated by one of her customers and wanted me to go see the fellow in her stead. I got to the house, no more than what I would consider to be a tar paper shack, waded past the two or three transmissions on the front porch and wondered what I would be in for.

No chickens, but the owner had dirt floors, and an ashtray overflowing with unfiltered cigarette butts. He had electricity and he had a couple of space heaters going full blast. And he was bragging that this was the best house he’d ever lived in. The others had, for reasons he could not fathom, burned to the ground!

Long story short, he paid his bill in cash, peeled off a wad of money “Jed Clampett” would carry around as “walking money.”

Did I mention that he was barefoot and only had three toes between both of his feet?

Now, that was something.

Anyway, I finally figured out where I knew that fellow on Facebook. Next time I’m up in his direction, I’ll have to look him up and swap stories. Bets he has a bunch of them.

Be Seeing You!