Shave and a Haircut…

Shave and a Haircut…

Most of us know what two words come after “Shave and a haircut.” The words are a piece of Americana, etched into most of our memories. Like the part played by actor Howard McNear for a bunch of years as “Floyd the Barber.” Andy and Barney and everyone else in Mayberry went to see Floyd on a regular basis so that they could look good for Helen and Thelma-Lou.

Someone got smart and is cashing in on Floyd, these days. I have seen at least two places recently where one can go in and visit “Floyd’s Barber Shop.” That’s not counting the “Floyd’s” seen at a Missouri rest stop shown here at the top of the page. (It was one of several “storefronts” serving as shelters for picnic tables along a walkway marked as “Route 66”) I would be happy to say that actor McNear would feel quite good about the proliferation of his character’s name, but he’s been gone for over 50 years. Maybe his heirs are getting royalties.

No matter.

I was reminded of Floyd and several other barbers a couple of days after my last post when I decided that it was too darn hot to continue to keep the mop on top of my head. I took out the clippers, spread newspapers over the bathroom sink and proceeded to give myself a buzz cut. I did that despite having deep discount coupons from a place called “Sports Clips,” and some other competing hair styling salon within spitting distance of “Sports Clips.” I’ve taken advantage of both places, but the last time I was in either was years ago. Not that I disliked either. It’s just more convenient for me to pull out the clippers every three to five months.

I grew up on haircuts done in a barber shop. Actually, I have frequented several shops over the years and have fond memories of some of the barbers.

My first haircuts were done at a small shop in Fairview West Virginia – my mother’s home town. Mom told a story about one of my early haircuts where I stood in the barber’s chair and announced my name, her name and a few other details which weren’t really appropriate (like her age).

When I was ten, or so, Dad took me to “Midpark Barbers” on Pearl Road in Middleburg Heights Ohio. It was a busy shop – not too personal, but friendly enough. The shop sponsored the little league baseball team I played on, with the promise that if we won a game, they would give my team-mates and me a free sucker. We won exactly once.

When we moved to Chillicothe Ohio, Dad took me and my brothers to Gall’s Barber Shop downtown. Four chairs, two aging barbers and lots of stories. According to one of the barbers, there was a time when, on Saturday afternoons, the shop was busy – not only cutting and shaving, but for another quarter, a customer could go into the back room to take a bath. (See Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter)

The shops in that era didn’t do too bad for themselves, either. The person from Gall’s who normally did my hair owned a house across the street and up the block from us – a grand Victorian with an ample yard, kept ever so neat and tidy. One of my high school classmate’s father had a shop a few blocks away from Gall’s – she posted that the family house had recently been offered for sale. Again, another large, well-appointed house built to last the ages.

Bets that Floyd’s home would have been just as grand.

After Gall’s went away, I went to several places, finally settling on a shop run by a fellow who painted Civil War scenes as a hobby. Nearly thirty years later, I doubt he’s still in the business.

I never really settled on a place here in Texas. I visited a shop in Allen, finding out later that one of the barbers there was named Roy Rogers. The shop is frequented by a friend named Gene Autrey. Think about it for a moment.

There came a time when I decided that the best thing for me to do was to buy a set of clippers to cut my and my son’s hair. A $25 investment which has paid for itself many times over. Of course, that means I am stuck with a buzz cut every three to five months.

Maybe next time, I’ll try Floyd’s, for the nostalgia if nothing else.

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Shirtless in the Metromess

Shirtless in the Metromess

It’s been hot here in my little corner of the DFW Metromess. By hot, I mean both actual and “feels like” temperatures are in the triple digits. Add to that a lingering drought and one can see why I took the liberty of shedding my shirt when I decided to pose with the sunflowers in my back yard to make a profile picture for my social media addictions.

My posting of the photo on Facebook led to a number of reactions ranging from “Thumbs-up” to “Wow” to the floating, laughing head. There were comments a plenty, too, from the expected “Oh, my eyes!” to several from friends who complimented me on being brave enough to post my semi-nude body.

Okay. Let’s get something straight. I am not a model by any stretch of the imagination. I’m just a typical guy approaching 70 (way too fast in my opinion) with a bit of a gut and a couple of scars here and there from where a surgeon or two went into my gut to better my health. Except for the occasional glitch here and there, my body has served me well for all these years – hopefully allowing me to die at the age of 102 from a gunshot wound from a jealous lover.

That’s the goal, anyway.

Part of my “body positivity” has to do with the quarrel I had with cancer last year.

I won.

At least that’s what the doctors have been telling me.

The quarrel has taught me that my body is pretty darn good at taking care of that part of me just under my hairline (and behind my glasses). So, I have been taking steps to better take care of my body and have developed a positive attitude about it. Sometimes it means exposing a little more of me than what many people would expect on a platform like Facebook.

And the reactions have been pretty much what I’ve expected.

Brave? Perhaps, but not really. I do have an advantage my female friends don’t have, which is to be able to display a shirtless photgraph of myself on a supposedly “family friendly” platform. Part of that has to do with comedian Terry Thomas’ monologue about the American preoccupation with “Bosums” in the movie It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Preoccupation, indeed!

I’m just proud of who I am and happy that I’m still able to walk upright with a minimum of fuss in the latter part of my sixties.

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Sporting Propositions

Sporting Propositions

GONE FISHIN’

Farmersville fishing team send two teams to state

Actual headline and sub-headline from the local newspaper a couple of weeks ago. Farmersville High School has “Fishing” as a school sport.

At first it seems weird, but come to think of it, there’s a pretty fair-sized lake between my little corner of the DFW Metromess and Farmersville. On any good fishing day, at least a good half dozen cars are parked in the median of the causeway going over the lake, their owners out with poles and tackle boxes in pursuit of what I will assume to be some really good fishing.

I never really took to fishing, myself. When I was a kid, we were in bicycling distance of a small lake in suburban Cleveland Ohio where we would go fishing in the summer. We never caught anything we couldn’t throw back. The only “catch” we had was when Mickey T. somehow got a fishhook stuck in his nose.

But a school fishing team. Not that I’m knocking it, but, who’d a thunk?

For that matter, who’d a thunk of some of the other sports being offered at the high school level these days? Time was when there was a cycle of sports throughout the school year. Football in the fall, basketball in the winter, tennis, softball and baseball in the spring. Regular as clockwork. Then there was wrestling. Not WWE style, but Greco/Roman style. Cross Country, track, all of them.

In the later seventies, onward, a few other sports started to creep into prominence. Volleyball, for instance. We played it as one of the winter sports when I was in high school. Somehow or another, it became a big thing, likely because it was another sport which women could play and go on to college on a volleyball scholarship. A niece of mine went to college on a volleyball scholarship.

Times change.

I mentioned golf in my last little tirade. Yeah, we had a golf team, I think, when I went to high school. Then there’s bowling. One of the first impressions I had of high school sports after moving to Texas was the brag that the Allen High School BOWLING team had won the state tournament! Most of the bowling I’ve done was as an adult. We included a “beer frame”. I don’t imagine that high school bowlers would have a “beer frame” – probably why they tended to have higher average scores than I’ve ever rolled.

Another school sport I’ve come to find out is lacrosse (the Native American game, not a Buick or the nickname Canadians give to “self-satisfaction”). I had no idea the game was even being played until one morning when checking out of a hotel, my then almost three-year-old son was flirting with a girl’s lacross team in the hotel lobby. One of the residences I’ve lived in here in the Dallas area was just around the corner from a field where people were out practicing their lacrosse skills.

Oh, and ice hockey. But that was a club sport when I was in college. No scholarships, just two groups of people skating around and beating at each other with sticks. One of the club members was part of a group I hung with… there would be tales of some of the guys going to Byrd Arena to watch Harvey A. play, or to get drunk. Take yer pick!

But fishing! Good luck to ’em. I may not understand or I may get a chuckle from it, but… it’s whatever floats your boat, I reckon!

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Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden

Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden

The other day was writing, I heard an unfamiliar sound, as if something had hit the house. I really didn’t think about it until the kid from across the street was out on the front sidewalk looking a little confused. After a minute or so, I went out and asked him if he was looking for something.

“Yes. A golf ball,” he told me.

Well, we looked for his golf ball, finding it on a corner of the property. He took it back to his place and all was well.

If we didn’t find it, I was willing to give up one of the golf balls I have in my garage. I have a small collection of the things, gathered years ago when I was living with the first wife and the kids in Allen. The high school student living across the street from us would go into his back yard which overlooked a former cotton field and smack golf balls into the field as practice for his high school golf team. After he hit a bunch of balls, he would go out into the field to gather as many of the balls as he could find so he could hit them out again.

He didn’t find all of them. I would regularly go into the same field with my son and/or our dog at the time and gather what the person hitting the balls couldn’t find. I told my son (who was four at the time) that the golf balls grew there naturally, calling it the “Golf Ball Field.”

I took the notion that since I was collecting the neighbor’s left-over golf balls, I wouldn’t mind having a club and smacking a few of them out into the field myself. I requested a club for Christmas. The wife complied, bought a club and showed it to our son.

Fast forward a week or two. It’s a Saturday morning, less than a week before Christmas, and there was a man at our door asking if I would be interested in joining the local Country Club as a Christmas gift to myself. I politely declined, saying that I wasn’t interested in joining as I did not golf.

As I was explaining my position to the gentleman, my son was right behind me, tugging at my trousers: “But Dad… But Dad…”

Now, I didn’t tell him directly that I knew about the club his mother bought for me as a Christmas present, but he did get the idea that one should not spoil a Christmas surprise.

For a few years after that, we would occasionally go out to the “Golf Ball Field,” hit a few balls, and usually find more balls than we hit.

I still have the club and a few of the balls I’ve collected.

Funny thing is, I had a physical education requirement in college – so, I took golf lessons at the college golf course. We learned technique, smacked balls around for a bit, and had loads of fun. Since I was never well funded, most of my golfing experience after college was at one of several local putting greens. A couple of my college classmates are still regular golfers to this day. They love the game. Me, well, I would likely be the guy who would get frustrated at every turn, eventually tossing my bag and all the clubs in it in some water hazard (after mangling a club or two on the way there).

I still have my club. I use it every once in a while to fish out the dog Filbrix’s tennis balls out from under the furniture. As for the golf balls in my collection, the kid across the street is welcome to them if and when he discovers I have them.

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Jerry

Jerry

Wrapping up a few odds and ends on a Sunday afternoon and my thoughts turned to Jerry – a former co-worker of mine when I was selling stuff at one of the “Big Box” stores in my area.

While I was making lunch, I thought that the world could use a few more Jerrys.

Jerry sold grills and lawn equipment. He was good at it, too. He had oodles of advice, most of it I carry with me nearly ten years later. He was customer friendly… maybe a bit too friendly in a good way. He could have sold more mowers if it hadn’t been for the stories he told and the advice he’d give people.

He also tended not to suffer fools gladly. He was advising a customer one afternoon when someone else tried to butt-in to the conversation, demanding Jerry’s attention RIGHT NOW! Jerry told the customer that he would be with him in a minute and continued the conversation he had been having. The other customer pushed back a second, and then a third time. Finally, Jerry told the person trying to interrupt to “I’m with a customer, Buffalo Breath, I’ll help you when I’ve finished.”

The customer didn’t take to being called “Buffalo Breath” – He called Corporate to report him. Corporate called and talked with Jerry. “Is it true that you called a customer Buffalo Breath?” Jerry didn’t deny it. He told us that he was able to tell that he was on speaker phone when he heard the laughter of everyone listening in at corporate.

Now, that wasn’t the first time, nor was it the last time that corporate called to check up on Jerry. He had a disarming sense of humor which was appreciated by the people in North Carolina, but not necessarily by some of his customers here in Texas.

Of Jerry’s co-workers, I cannot say that there was anyone of them who didn’t like him. Even those of us on the other end of the political spectrum (I like to think that Jerry thought that Ronald Reagan was way too liberal for his tastes) respected Jerry. He was one of a kind.

Toward the end of my tenure at the store where we worked, Jerry was in the habit of inviting one or another of his co-workers to lunch at “On the Border.” He had a favorite table and a favorite server. I had the honor of having lunch with him a few days after I left the store. The man was generous to a fault.

A year, maybe two or three after my lunch with Jerry, I learned that he passed while having an operation for some minor little detail. Every one of his former co-workers felt the same way I did about his passing. It was one of those sad days when memories of someone who was truly one of the good guys.

We need more Jerrys in this world.

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When Will Enough Be Enough?

When Will Enough Be Enough?

A year or so ago, my son told me of an experience he had working as a volunteer first-responder. It seems he was riding an ambulance with a young woman who had overdosed. During that ride, the woman died. Boom! Just like that. It affected him to the point that he had counseling. She was about his age.

First responders face death on a daily basis. It can affect them in many ways, to the point where it can rub off on their families and friends. Add the trauma which falls on the living and you can see where this is going. Trauma isn’t linear, it’s exponential.

It’s bad enough for someone to be riding in an ambulance and having someone your own age die as you are watching. Now, imagine the nightmare of arriving at a school and finding not just one, but eighteen young, vibrant children shot dead by a teenaged gunman.

I cannot help but to think of how any one of the first responders will react to the situation they found in Uvalde on the afternoon of the 24th of May.

As of the time I began writing this blog, there were eighteen children and two adults dead. God knows how many others were wounded, and God knows how many people will be affected by the act of a lone gunman in the last week of school.

Not linear. Exponential.

And what’s worse were some of the comments made on the bulletin board where I got the news, attempting to place the blame on “Open Borders,” “Obama,” “Democrats,” and “Joe Biden.” I quit reading those comments before someone would blame “Mexicans” or “The Jews.”

I believe I’ve mentioned before my dislike of people trying to fix the blame instead of fixing a problem. And I’m sure we’ll be seeing much more blame fixing when the NRA meets in Houston this coming weekend. The usual politicians who, today, are fervently pleading for “Thoughts and Prayers,” will be speaking at that convention.

So, the question becomes – “When will we reach the point where we say enough is enough?”

Unfortunately, more blood of the innocent will be spilled before the question is asked again. And again. And again.

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Lidsville

Lidsville

I woke up this morning with a post from a friend in Ohio, featuring her latest child. The child is cute as a button (although not quite as cute as my stepdaughter’s slightly older child (sorry, but it’s all relative if you catch my meaning)). The text accompanying the photo had to do with the child having a big head – in the 98th percentile. I have suffered from having a physically big head – big enough so that I cannot wear one of those “One Size Fits All” baseball caps which almost everyone around me is able to wear.

This morning’s post from my friend in Ohio ties in with a couple of discussions both at home and on the internet about hats, and heads, and the place they hold in our hearts.

Not to say that I cannot wear hats. I have one hanging on the small rack by my front door. It’s one I got as a gift from my daughter a few years back when she worked at “The Mad Hatter,” a hat store in Savannah Georgia. It was the second hat I’ve gotten as a gift from the same store. A few years prior to the current hat, I was on a visit to Savannah with the first wife when we wandered into The Mad Hatter. She was aware of the size of my head – and took it upon herself to kid me about it almost incessantly. I told her when we walked into the shop that if she could find a hat which would fit me, I would wear it.

I walked out of the Mad Hatter wearing a Tilley Hat. My size.

The Tilley Hat is distinctive. Made in Canada, it’s probably the only hat I know of which comes with an owner’s manual. The hat itself is seriously overbuilt – the owner’s manual is seriously tongue-in-cheek. One of the instructions with the hat is if one encounters someone else wearing a Tilley Hat, they are to compliment the other person as being someone with good taste and distinction.

When I ran across a photo of a naturist wearing nothing but a Tilley Hat (and nothing else) over the weekend, I naturally complimented him on his good taste and distinction.

The other tie-in to hats came on discussions on Saturday and Sunday. A friend in Rhode Island was telling me about what her daughter did on Saturday mornings. Naturally, for a child that age, she loved watching what cartoons are still running on network television. On Sunday, my better half, for no discernable reason, started singing the theme song from H.R. Puffenstuff, Sid and Marty Croft’s ‘Live Action’ puppet show from the early to mid-seventies.

A bit of background – Back in the sixties, Saturday mornings were a cartoon ghetto, mostly geared as attention getters so Kellogg’s and General Mills could sell their sugary cereals. There was protest about the glut of cartoons, so networks wound up going to the Croft brothers and other producers to come up with whimsical live action shows to appeal to kids.

One of those shows was “Lidsville” – a magical place where everyone other than the three main characters was a hat of some sort. And what a cast for the main characters. The chief protagonist was an overly curious teenager who was sucked into Lidsville, played by Butch Patrick. Yeah. THAT Butch Patrick, better known as “Eddie” from The Munsters! He was assisted by “Witchie-Poo,” played to perfection by Billie Burke. Ms. Burke also appeared in H.R. Puffenstuff. She did a good job as a witch. The chief antagonist was played by Charles Nelson Reilly. No, it should be that the chief antagonist was “Camped Up” by Charles Nelson Reilly (is there anyone from that era that didn’t catch on that CNR was Gay as a Maypole?).

I recall watching Lidsville and immensely enjoying the few episodes I managed to catch. Given the size of my head, Lidsville is, perhaps, the only other place where I could find a hat which fits me!

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Bait Sandwiches and RV Parks

Bait Sandwiches and RV Parks

I finally took the time to stop at the Lucas Foods to take a photograph of the large sign on top of the building. Local legend is that the juxtaposition of the words “Bait” and “Sandwiches” was not noticed by the owner until after the sign was completed. Instead of insisting that the sign be changed, the owner decided to keep it as-is for the novelty value. In a story I have been working on, the owner of a similar store in another Texas town took the same attitude – even offering Shrimp Po Boys to anyone who came in and remarked in a negative way on the sign.

Don’t know if the fellow owning the Lucas Foods has done the same thing. Maybe he should. Might make him a small fortune.

Lucas is another of the numerous well-to-do little towns here in this little corner of the DFW Metromess. Less than a mile south of this sign is a neighborhood called Seis Lagos. It’s gated. You can’t go there unless you have business there and can prove it. To the east about two miles away, is Brockdale Estates – a collection of McMansions costing well north of half a million dollars when it was being built a few years back. Going east, there are more than a few homes with plenty of acreage, most of them with a horse barn with real horses in them.

And then there are the RV parks.

We’re not talking about nice little resorts where people will go and temporarily park their Winnebagos for a month or two. We’re talking about a place where people live. Full time. All year round.

When on my way from Lucas to my little corner of the DFW Metromess, a distance of around 5 miles, I counted at least a half-dozen of these little camps tucked away off the main road. And that’s just in a five-mile drive. While driving by myself and with the other half, I have noted that there is an explosion of these little RV encampments within, say, a twenty-mile radius of where we live. Not trailer parks. A trailer park would be a step up from these RV encampments.

On the other hand, the other half pointed out that at least the people living in the RV parks aren’t living out in the street somewhere. Lord knows that we have enough people living in the streets already.

Someone on one of my social media feeds pointed out that for less than half the money being spent to help arm Ukraine, the homeless problem could be solved. Chump change for the likes of Jeff Bezos. Maybe he could help out just a little bit.

Elon Musk reportedly once challenged the UN – Give him a budget and he would be willing to end world hunger. A budget of $5billion was submitted, but he didn’t pony up. Instead, he made headlines in the past few weeks by buying Twitter for an outrageous sum of money. Somewhere in the vicinity of $150billion. But he didn’t have the money to invest in ending world hunger. (Wasn’t he manning a soup kitchen in an episode of The Big Bang Theory?)

I can’t help but to think that if these high-falutin’ billionaires would put their heads together and work on real problems instead of seeing how much money they can stuff into their bank accounts, the world would be a much better place for everyone.

The solutions are out there. We just need to change a few attitudes.

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Friends

Friends

I spend a fair amount of time on social media applications keeping up with and exploring friendships from around the country and a couple from other parts of the world. Recently I have been conversing with a woman living in one of the New England states who started to follow me out of the blue. What prompted me to follow her back had less to do with her appearance as it did with what she had previously posted.

About once a week, I get unsolicited requests from young women who appear to be just starting out. They usually have very few posts and in those posts, they are wearing very few clothes. The word provocative comes to mind. It’s as if they are inviting me to indulge in… shall we say, less than a “family” friendly behavior. This newest friend posted some really nice photos – post card quality – of places I have not been but would like to.

Nice woman, so far. Let’s see where this goes.

I wrote an Email using my Google Email account this afternoon. It drove the editorial feature batty. By the end of the process, the editor said that I had made several major mistakes. What the editor didn’t take into consideration is that I write a lot like I talk. Way to go, Google editor. I may just bypass Google the next time I do an Email. For the most part, I use Yahoo, sometimes the former Hotmail. Neither of them care much about how I post.

With the addition of the woman living in New England, I’m finding I have lots of friends I am in contact with all over the country. One of my friends, someone I knew from high school, pointed out that many of our friends are “Bookmark” friends. There are long periods when we have no contact, but when something comes up, we’re on the phone or on the internet jabbering away as if our last meeting was yesterday.

Sometimes those are the best friends to have.

Then, too, there are those friends you find by accident. While I was working with a couple a few years ago, the woman remarked that I have a radio voice. She asked if I had worked in radio locally. I told her that I worked mostly in southern Ohio, She almost immediately told me that she listened to me on a station I had worked for. Seems that her younger brother and I were running buddies back in the day. We get together on a semi-regular basis, although with COVID, we haven’t seen or heard from each other as often. I know that I will hear from her husband, though, almost as soon as I post this on the internet.

No matter how a friend comes into your life, a friend is nice to have around… and sometimes the least likely people are the best friends. What makes a friendship is having common interests and/or common goals. I’m finding that to be true, especially now that I’m in the final third of my life.

Here’s to more friends!

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