Category: Everything Fred

2 April 2021

After meeting with the dean of academic affairs and reading the handwriting on the wall, I begin to look around for something new to do. The University of Mississippi Medical Center had a lab technican program. It looked interesting. For some reason, science labs and I always clicked. I decided I needed to check out the program.

For some reason, my phone call about the lab technician program got routed to the microbiology department to a Dr. William Clemm. After clearing up the misunderstanding he asked why I was interested in the program in the first place. I explained my love of everything laboratory. He asked “Why not come get a PhD in microbiolgoy from us?” I was stunned. I told him I didn’t think they would be interested in me. He suggested I fill out the paper work and submit my résumé. I did and I got a call from him later saying to come on down to Jackson. I was given a graduate stipend of $5000 a year and I still had money left on my G.I. Bill. It seemed a win-win situation.

It was reinforced that I needed to leave IJC when Dad got sick and was in the Veterans Administration hospital. I asked for leave from the IJC to go down and see about him. By the time I got there, he was back home. I found out the dean of academic affairs had called to make sure he was really ill. He thought I had lied to him about Dad’s illness. I packed up and headed to Brandon for a talk with my brother. He had a cabin on a piece of property out from Brandon and said I could stay there for graduate school at the medical center.

Previously, good friends from IJC had moved to Jackson and they took me around to the two local gay bars. One was called Emerald City and the other was Jacks and Jills. Emerald City had entertainment in the form of drag queens.

Jacks and Jills was one of the oldest gay establishments in the south. It was located on the west end of Capital Street and been in continuous business since World War I. The bar was divided into two parts – Jacks for guys and Jills for gals. In reality, everyone was welcome on either side. Between the two bars was a massive dance floor.

It was at Jacks and Jills one night with Steve and Bobby (friends I knew from IJC) when I ran into an old high school chum Mike. He and I were in the Boy Scouts together. Small world.

Slowly but surely I was introduced to the gay community of Jackson. I even had a gay doctor. Also, because I was at the Medical Center in Jackson, it was recommended I get the hepatitis B vaccine. It was the gay doctor who administered the shots. Sadly, he was later found murdered in his home in Jackson.

One of the fraternity initiations that local colleges would do would be to drop someone off at the front door of Jacks and have them come in to get a beer to go. The front door at Jacks was so seldom used it always drew attention of the crowd if anyone walked in that route. This college dude would come in, walk up to the bar and it would slowly sink in to him that there were no females anywhere around. One guy was brave enough to ask “Is this a gay bar?” The response was pretty raucous and he ran out pretty quickly.

I knew I would be hanging out there on my free time and I knew Archie got around enough in Jackson and knew enough people he would eventually get wind of me at gay bars. I asked him to meet me at the cabin he’d offered me and we sat outside in the swing and I told him I was gay. He took it pretty well and said no matter what, he loved me. Thus begin a PhD program at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. The drive from a rural area near Brandon to the medical center didn’t take too long. I always parked in the Mississippi Memorial Stadium parking lot across from the medical center. The department was located on, I think, the third floor.

The microbiology department was undergoing a shift to new blood. Dr. Clemm was from the University of Florida and had become chair. He brought two youngish PhD’s with him. To get him, the university had to significantly expand the budget of the department and agree to increase graduate school enrollment. I think at the time, Clemm was getting paid more than the governor of Mississippi. I, along with 4 others were given a while to settle in but we had to pick an advisor pretty quickly. I’ll be honest and say I probably made a bad choice. The guy I chose spoke very softly (too softly) and seemed easy going but I was later to find out he was wound pretty tightly. His interest was fish immunoglobulins. By studying the immune system of fish he hoped to translate that to the immune system of humans. This was in the early 1980’s and there was still a lot of confusion about the human immune system and a lot of the particulars were just being worked out – things like the compliment cascade, killer T-cells, etc.

One of the things we would do would be to travel to the Mississippi Delta and collect live catfish and bleed them through the caudal artery for their blood. Once back at the lab, we would spin it down and try to culture the white blood cells. Once enough were grown, then we would do cell counts through a very expensive cell counter and try to determine the type of white blood cells found in fish.

We also raised catfish in the basement of the medical center. We had huge plastic fish tanks and I would have to periodically climb up on them and net catfish and bleed them and put them back in the tanks. I slipped and fell more than once but it never did knock any sense into me.

All graduate students also had to take a veterinary science course where we had to operate on a cat and a dog – common research animals. The Medical Center had been the center of a controversy on how they did or did not humanely treat their research animals and having all grad students take the course was their way of insuring safe and humane treatment. We had to remove the spleen of one dog. The team I was on had a guy that was a little loose and apparently nicked an artery. The dog almost didn’t make it. The instructor had to go back in operate again. He did make it.

We had to scrub and dress like surgeons with the whole nine yards of gowns, masks, and gloves. It was a great learning experience.

Since we were also taking classes with the med students, we had to participate in their POPS exercises – I forget the acronym but it had something to do with proper diagnoses and treatments. In one of the exercises we had to draw blood from each other. The instructor gave very brief instructions and turned us loose. The guy who did me did well but when I drew blood from him, he pulled away from the needle and I ended up giving him a hematoma. He turned very ashen and was very shaky for a while but recovered OK. By the way, what we wanted to blood sample for was to test for syphilis. Fortunately, I was clear.

Interestingly, in the department was one of Crag Knox’s old girlfriends. She was working on a PhD under the resident virologist. We always had to wear dosimeters in the department as standard gear because we were constantly dealing with radioactive isotopes. Of course, we always went way over the count. She had a way of dealing with the over count. She would simply lock it up in a drawer in her office for a week before it got read. Otherwise, she would have been forced to take a week away from her research.

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One day, I had to work with the radioactive isotopes and check my cultured catfish cells for any radioactivity. It was an automated machine much like a wheel. Someone had just used it and I was next in line. I got my readings and left for the day. My advisor comes in the next morning all hot and steaming and screaming at me that I had contaminated the machine. I really don’t think I did but since I was the last logged, I was the first blamed. He was really upset because he thought it reflected poorly on him. He shouted I needed to immediately go decontaminate the machine. I finally looked him in the eye and said very calmly, I’m going to go get a cup of coffee and when you calm down, come see me and let’s go over how you want me to decontaminate it. To this day, I don’t think it was me that contaminated the machine. There was a chemical that supposedly absorbed the radioactive isotope.

As mentioned before, as graduate students we had to take some classes with the medical students. One was biochemistry. I had a biochemistry course at Ole Miss which was a terrible experience. It was a weed course for premed students at Ole Miss and the test questions were all multiple choice. All five answers varied only in one word. In other words, you didn’t need to learn the material, you needed to memorize your notes word for word from the professor’s mouth. It was my worst college course up until I took biochemistry at the Medical Center.

The biochemistry course was team taught. It was divided into five or six sections and a different professor would lecture over their speciality. Fortunately, the grad students had available to us the note taking system of the medical students. For a fee, we were provided printed notes from the lectures. Of course, we all were required to do our time taking notes ourselves.

When it came time for me to take notes, I was given the recorder. I taped the lecture, took notes during the lecture and then played the tape back and corrected my notes and added things I missed. It took me a couple of days. The lecturer was a dietician who was new to the university and it was her first lecture to the medical students. I knew something was wrong when I got a note to go see the her.

She immediately told me that she didn’t say anything like what I had presented for photocopy. I was stunned. It was pretty much verbatim without any editorial comments. She insisted I correct the notes. I refused.

I was then called into the anatomy lab to meet with the note taking coordinator. He happened to be the anatomy lab assistant. He again demanded I correct the notes. I again refused. I asked to have the tape of the notes so I could compare it again to the notes I printed. He said (two days after the day I took the notes) that it had been erased. He explained that I would no longer be able to receive the notes and I was barred from any note taking copies.

My suspicion was she made some errors during her lecture and she realized it or someone pointed it out to her and instead of issuing a correction, she blamed the note taker. In any case, it saved me some money. All my grad student buddies allowed me to photocopy their notes.

I didn’t think anything would turn me off to biochemistry but the one course at Oxford and the team taught course in Jackson almost did. Once I got back into teaching, I rediscovered my love of biochemistry. I finally eked out a B in the course. Other courses I took were medical microbiology, introduction to animal medicine, microbial physiology and, of course, seminars. I only needed one more course to finish my academic coursework.

Very early, we were asked to present a seminar to the department. I had to choose a scientific paper with the approval of my advisor and present the research. I opted to go with his first recommendation. I had it down pat. I was also not adverse to public speaking since I had taught the last five years at IJC. I was just waiting for the knives to come out from department factions and was not disappointed. Fortunately, they were not aimed at me. One of the professors asked me a question and I honestly replied I didn’t know the answer because that was not addressed in the original article. Another professor suggested a solution and another challenged the first professor – and they were off. I only got about 1/2 of the way through my presentation before the place erupted in debate among the professors. Later, all the biggies in the department complimented me on my presentation. What presentation? I was interrupted midway and never got a chance to say anything else!

About midway in my first semester, Archie began to have business problems and marital problems. It got to be real difficult for him and as a consequence, it fed over onto me. I decided the best thing I could do would be to give him some space so he didn’t have to worry about me. I found a room on State Street near Millsaps and the Medical Center. I was close enough I could walk to the Medical Center – and pass Bailey Junior High School every day (just the memories I wanted to re-live. It was a great apartment and it even had a “roof” terrace. Actually, you had to climb through the kitchen window and the terrace was simply the flat roof of the room below me. However, I kept a couple of deck chairs out there and a table.

Some of the graduate students and faculty were very social. I would invite them over to my apartment and we’d play Trivial Pursuit all night long and drink beer. I probably should have signed up with the professor that always showed up at these events, in retrospect.

Speaking of gay bars…. I had the conversation with Crag Knox. It didn’t seem to bother him and he admitted he and his current girl friend used to got to Jacks and Jills to dance. He was surprised he had not seen me in there. It really did have the best dance floor and music. Archie and Tanis used to go and dance the night away and Archie loved playing pool at Jacks.

I spent two semesters at the Medical Center and finished all my coursework except for one course. The rest of my course load would be research hours. It was at that point that I decided I didn’t want a career in research. I learned a tremendous amount and actually utilized a lot of it in my next teaching position but I didn’t want to spend three more years for the PhD and another two or three years getting a postdoc and then a second postdoc. For some reason, a PhD means original thinking. I didn’t categorize myself as an original thinker.

I made it around to the various faculty and notified them of my decision to leave. I think it hit Clemm pretty hard. I was pleased when Clemm and a couple of the other professors told me I would be welcome back into the program anytime. I even had one professor offer to take me as a student to get me away from my advisor. That left me feeling pretty good.

I kept up with most of the graduate students in the program for several years and I’m still in contact with one who eventually finished her PhD in virology.

So what to do next. I stopped my PhD program and had no job. On a phone call to my cousin Jo in San Antonio, she blurted out “Come live with me!” I love San Antonio – having spent some time there while in the Coast Guard. I agreed. I loaded up my truck and headed west.

Stay tuned!

1 April 2021

Hilda Hill worked her magic once again. She knew the president of Itawamba Junior College and she figured it was the perfect place to park me while the nature center was being funded and built up near Iuka, Mississippi. It didn’t hurt that the president was a former high school science teacher.

Like most junior/community colleges in Mississippi, Itawamba Junior College started as a continuation of the agricultural high school in Fulton, Mississippi. In 1941, the high school started a two year extension with college classes at the and the college became a separate entity in 1948 – the year I was born. Most junior/community colleges provided basic two year college instruction because students couldn’t afford to travel to Oxford, Starkville, Hattiesburg. Remember the 40’s were part of the period of segregation in the South and no Black students need apply.

By the time I was hired on at IJC (later ICC) the agricultural high school was still located on the same campus as the college. I was asked to teach biology, botany, zoology, and physical science. IJC only hired you for the fall and spring semester. If you were lucky, you could pick up summer classwork and I was often asked to teach either chemistry lab or, on occasion, chemistry lecture. Eventually, I was also to teach anatomy and physiology at night for nursing students. I think my beginning salary for two semesters was somewhere around $7,000 (1979 dollars).

Eventually, I developed such a tough reputation I was put in the embarrassing position of having the department chair having to split classes so I would have students to teach. No one seemed to want to take my general biology classes because I was considered too hard. I usually made my botany and zoology classes pretty easily.

For a while, I was still living at the house in Fulton paying rent to the superintendent of education via proxy to the owner. The Dean of Student Affairs, who was in charge of dormitories on campus, asked if I would be interested in helping with dorms. They had just built a massive men’s dorm and the dorm manager was a sweet old lady named Jewel Blaylock. She needed some help corralling rambunctious freshmen and sophomores. I sold all my belongings at the house and moved into one of the rooms on the third floor of the dorm and helped her out. It was rent free for me and a great savings.

Later, a new women’s dorm was built and Jewel moved over to there and I took up residence as the manager of the men’s dorm. The residence had a kitchenette, living room/dining room with a full bath, a bedroom with another full bath. It was luxury after living in a small dorm room for about 6 months.

Jewel would occasionally ask for help in the women’s dorm and she more than compensated me by cooking me meals. After she retired from the college we still remained close friends and I would often go over to her retirement house and eat dinner with her.

The biggest problem in the dorms was getting noise levels down at night, getting the guys to clean their rooms, and to keep them from drinking and smoking dope on campus. Every so often you’d have to chase a girl out of one of the rooms but the other issues were more constant.

Again, my intimidating personality helped with the noise. I would walk the halls at night and very courteously knock on a door and ask them to turn a stereo down. I would hold weekly inspections of their rooms. Otherwise, the debris got so bad in some of the rooms that you couldn’t walk on the floor. Beer sales were across the county line and I really didn’t have too much trouble with that – they drank beer at home on the weekends. Marijuana was a bigger problem. For college students, they never seemed to realize that smoking dope had a distinctive smell.

One year, we had a welcome party in front of my dorm for new students. One student in the music department served as DJ and the Dean of Students provided refreshments. Apparently, some of my dorm students figured this was the perfect time to get stoned in one of the rooms. Their mistake was they chose a room on the first floor right by the front entrance of the dorm. To be safe, they smoked in the bathroom of their room and put a towel under the door to the bathroom and to their dorm room. What they didn’t take into account was the vent into the bathroom emptied out into the vestibule of the front door. The campus security required no investigation.

I became friends with campus security because they were often called for dorm issues. They once brought me a specimen and asked if it was marijuana. Cannabis has such distinctive hairs (trichomes) on its leaves that I was readily able to identify it for them. Another time, they asked me to open a room for them to search. They were looking for evidence of grass. I was just sitting there after they had finished searching the room and they hadn’t found anything. Security couldn’t understand it because they supposedly had an informant. I was sitting at a desk in the room waiting to lock up and noticed a band aid box sitting on the bookshelf of the desk. I thought – strange – why isn’t that in the medicine cabinet. I opened it up to take a look and it was filled with marijuana seeds. I knew them immediately because in graduate school, we used irradiated marijuana seeds to grow certain aquatic fungi.

The college was very conservative. The board of trustees was mostly Church of Christ members. Fulton was a very closed town. The physics teacher, Jim Long, had been teaching there for 20 years and he told me he still felt like an outsider. If you were born in Fulton, you were OK. Otherwise, you were a foreigner.

There was a faculty senate (and yes, I did my stint as president) with virtually no power but at least you could air issues. However, you were never allowed to attend board meetings.

The heart of the college was the faculty lounge – about 400 square feet with a coffee urn and seating. It was where everyone congregated in between classes and after class. That’s were you made friends, caught the local gossip, and found out what the college was doing administratively. The dean of students and the registrar often joined faculty. About the only administrators who did not attend were the dean of academic affairs and the president.

Speaking of the president, the president’s wife was the head librarian at the college. For some reason she took a shine to me and if I asked for it, I got it in the library. I ordered videos, slides, books, and magazines. I don’t think she ever told me no to any request.

The department at the time consisted of two other biologists besides me, Lucy Senter and Johnny Mattox, a physics teacher – Jim – and a chemistry teacher, Herb Parham. IJC had a reputation in the physical sciences. Students trying to get into med school would often take chemistry under Herb. He had a way of explaining chemistry that students could understand. Ole Miss often referred students to him for freshman chemistry. The engineering school at Ole Miss and Mississippi State often referred students to Jim Long for physics. To this day I’ve never met any better teacher in physics or chemistry than those two – and I’ve know a lot of chemistry and physics teachers over the years.

Not part of our department but someone who would also teach physical science was Reid Smith. He was actually in the math department. We would eventually become best friends. Reid and his wife Jane owned a shoe store across the street from the college. Jane ran it while Reid taught and then Reid would run it when he was finished with classes. They paid the way for college for three kids with that store.

To get the faculty a little closer, Reid and I hatched the idea to throw some parties. Reid and Jane would host and I would provide the guest list. We knew some people wouldn’t come if others did so it was like walking through a mine field to get the guest list correct.

One party we threw was a crawfish boil. Reid and I went out to the bottoms around the college and collected crawfish. We then purged them in salt water. You have to purge them (get them to puke and crap) to clear out the digestive tract otherwise they taste like mud. We didn’t have a whole lot of crawfish – enough for everyone to have 4 or 5 so we supplemented the menu with shrimp and plenty of booze. Another lifelong friend, Effie Kemp, provided the bourbon tea. To say the party was a hit is an understatement. It got to where we had to throw one every couple of months. Reid and I are still friends to this day (he’s 90 this year)!

All of the science people were great to work with. It was a pretty decent place to work as long as you didn’t upset the board or displease the president. Next to the faculty lounge was the faculty dining room which was also attached to the college cafeteria. The cafeteria and faculty dining room were run by Morrison’s. Not too long after I got there, they changed managers. The new manager was Les Miller. His wife and his son also worked the cafeteria.

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Les knew I lived on campus and for some reason he took to me. I always ate early so as not to be bothered by too many students. He got to where he comped my evening meal every so often. I think I probably paid for only 5 or 6 evening meals at the college in five years – Les always complimented me. It was some of the best institutional food I’ve ever eaten.

Les’ son was Steve. He was in his early 20’s and didn’t really hang around the college crowd. He was also a lot more mature than others. He found out my love of music – by then I had quite a collection of albums plus a killer stereo system. He started coming over and hanging with me at the dorm.

We got to be pretty close. One night, I get a knock on my outside bedroom door. It’s Steve with a strange look on his face. He looks at me and asks “Are you gay?” I said yes and he says “OK” and starts to walk away. I said “Wait, you don’t get to ask a question like that and then walk away.” He came inside and we sat and talked a long time. He was the very first person I had ever come out to. He could have easily have gotten me fired from an institution that in the hiring interview asked what church domination you were.

If anything, we became a lot closer. I knew Steve was straight and knew several of his girlfriends over the years. Once, when I was in Fort Lauderdale, I got a call from his then wife wanting to know if Steve was gay. She was getting a divorce and wanted some ammo. She knew I was gay and assumed from that. I said she would have to ask Steve. I then called him and let him know about his wife calling me. It was good to know that he eventually married well a second time. To this day, when he sees me when I go to Fulton, he gives me a great big bear hug.

Steve also became my hiking and camping buddy. The year I moved to Hollywood, Florida, Steve went with me to Europe. He’s a great traveling companion.

About the time I was ready to leave IJC for the graduate school at the medical center in Jackson, Steve knocks on my door and walks in with a tray of brownies. I think you know the kind. He ate two, I ate two. I felt absolutely nothing. Steve later told me when he left, he drove home and stopped at a stop sign and was so stoned on two brownies he was waiting for the stop sign to change colors. Those must have been some potent brownies.

Anyway, a few other friends wanted to give me a going away party. As I got ready to leave, I popped a single brownie in my mouth and headed to the party. I can’t tell you how many times people at the party told me how relaxed and calm I looked. Apparently, brownies mellow you out pretty well.

Jim Long (physics) was a big fisherman. He suggested I might like to join their fishing club. I did and went to my first tournament somewhere in Alabama. By pure dumb luck I caught the biggest fish and the most fish and won all the prize money. Jim thought I was a ringer and that worried him until the next tournament when I got skunked. I finally quit after a few more tournaments because these people were obsessed with fishing. Jim probably could have turned professional.

While at IJC, I convinced the faculty to go all in on a science competition for the regional high schools. We worked hard on making test questions for general competition and for lightning rounds for both biology, chemistry and physics. All the high schools participated and we had hundreds on campus. It kept going for a while after I left.

I was also able to write a grant and get a greenhouse attached to the biology/chemistry/physics building. The other thing I did that I’m proud of is that we took one of the classrooms and converted it to a lab. I was asked to write up an equipment list. I admit to dirty pool here. Instead of ordering one microscope for a pair of students, I ordered one for each of the students and ended up getting new microscopes for my botany/zoology lab. At least I helped get some new equipment.

Since I taught botany, I decided to teach the students how to make homemade beer as a lesson in fermentation. It was working pretty well. I would have students come in during the week and do readings for alcohol content with a hydrometer. Then I noticed it looked like the container was loosing a lot to evaporation which was strange because it had a lid on it.

I noticed one kid was absent several lectures and one lab and asked if anyone had seen him. The class broke out in laughter and said he had been sneaking the beer and hadn’t made it out of the bathroom yet. Beer than hasn’t been fully processed is an excellent laxative. Lesson learned for him.

One year I had them make alcohol with peaches to show you could ferment just about anything. I then had them distill it down into peach brandy. Whenever I made booze, I would always ask Johnny Mattox to try it out. I walked into his office one day with the peach brandy and handed it to him and said taste this. Before I could add “It’s brandy.” He downed it in one shot because he thought it was the usual beer recipe. It took his breath away. You could ignite that brandy it had so much alcohol in it.

We had to set up our own labs at IJC. I always taught at least three so I was always in the storeroom pulling out equipment and supplies. We did have one work study student but he mostly helped anatomy and physiology lab set ups. One afternoon I walked into the storeroom and the lights were off. I didn’t think anything of it because there was a single bulb in the center with a pull cord. I went to reach for the cord and stepped on the work study student’s back. He was having sex with his girlfriend on the floor. I shut the light off and said excuse me and allowed them to put themselves together and leave. I never said a word to any of the faculty.

One of my years teaching at IJC I took students down to the Gulf Coast Marine Laboratory in Biloxi. It was great. We stayed in the dorm, had a boat take us out and trawl to collect specimens. Once at sea, the captain pulled up to an oyster reef and plucked some oysters for us to eat right from the sea. My students wouldn’t touch raw oysters but I was in oyster heaven.

We also trawled and pulled up shrimp and squid. I had a collection permit from the state. It was not shrimp season but since I had the permit, my class had the only legal fresh shrimp on the Gulf Coast. What was amazing was the squid. When they net was pulled on deck, they couldn’t decide what color they were supposed to be so they just flashed every color they were capable of trying to match something.

Later that night we had a shrimp and squid boil. It was amazing. I later told the students that they were 18 (drinking age was 18 then) and they could go out and see the sights of Biloxi but they had to be back in the morning by 8 am to leave to go home. I told them they were on their honor for best behavior and not to embarrass the school. Everyone complied except one kid. He came in around 2 am drunk and kicked a transom out of one of the dorm doors. Later, I had him write the station and apologize and offer to pay for damages. To their credit, they didn’t make him. Could you imagine doing that today?

The dean of academic affairs was very religious – remember, one of my interview questions was with what church I was affiliated. Yes, it was illegal to ask that even back then. He also had a PhD from Nova Southeastern. At the time, Nova degrees were generally not recognized as legitimate by some states and colleges. Today, it’s considered an innovative institution.

Anyway, one of the dean’s pet projects was the new performing arts center. It caught fire. I was out watching the fire department try to put out the fire when the dean started to walk into the building. I blurted out “Are you crazy!” The next day I was called into the office and officially reprimanded with it entered into my record. I was simply concerned for his safety.

By that time I had spent five years there and would have probably spent the rest of my life there but I realized the dean simply had it in for me. I applied and was accepted to the microbiology PhD program at the University of Mississippi and left soon after that. My good friend Carl Comer, the registrar, called me into his office and said if the dean had threatened me, not to worry about it. I lied and told Carl no, I just wanted to pursue other things. Not long after, I headed to Jackson to have a long talk with my brother.

Stay tuned!

31 March 2021

The only time I ever heard of Itawamba County was when Mr. Johnson made us learn the 82 counties in Mississippi and their location in his Mississippi History class (I can still recite most of them). It’s a small county in the northeastern part of the state and abuts Alabama to the east and Tishomingo County, Mississippi to the north. The 2010 census listed 23,401 residents. By far and away the largest town in the county is Fulton with a 2010 population 3, 961. The biggest claim to fame prior to the Tennessee-Tombigbee waterway was Itawamba Junior College (now Itawamba Community College).

Hilda hill set me up with a job at Mantachie High School in Mantachie, Mississippi, a vast metropolis of 1,144 people. I met the county superintendent at the county courthouse in Fulton (it has a very nice town square) and he told me the name of the principal and what subjects I would be teaching.

I drove out to the school to see my classroom/laboratory and meet the principal and get my textbooks. I was going to be teaching biology, biology lab, chemistry and chemistry lab and would be asked to add physics and physics lab in the future. I then looked for a place to live in Fulton.

The county superintendent had just the place. A relative – soon to be a common refrain – had a place to rent. All I had to do was put down a deposit – 1st month and last month and cleaning fee. I had to do the cleaning. It was a house with two bedrooms, a floor furnace, kitchen, living room and a single bath. It also had an extensive back yard. Later, when I explained the state of the place before I moved in, the superintendent took off the cleaning fee from the next month’s rent.

I got Rascal and Sam back from Dad and began a delicious grind of getting up, eating breakfast, driving to Mantachie, a fourteen mile drive one way. I taught four classes/labs, one study hall and had the last period free. I spent the rest of the afternoon surveying the equipment and materials. I usually left at 6:30 pm, got home, jogged, cooked dinner, graded papers until midnight, and started all over again. I was so very happy!

The reason I liked teaching at Mantachie was because it was so easy to engage the students. They hadn’t had a proper science teacher in quite a few years. I think they had four microscopes. The students told me they were broken and hadn’t been used in years. They were actually very good quality scopes. The only problem was they had not been cleaned in about 25 years and they had no external light source. Instead they had the classic mirror attached to the bottom of the scope to get sunlight. After I spent time cleaning them, students fought to get to look through the microscopes and loved what I showed them.

Sorting out the chemicals for chemistry was another matter. Very few containers were labeled. One gallon jar with no label had a rectangular piece of material covered in white powder-like substance. I was at a loss until I took the piece out and scraped the white away. It was pure sodium metal. I can’t imagine having that large of a piece of sodium metal.

I was assigned a student helper to get the labs set up and I hadn’t had time to put the sodium back on the storeroom shelf after I properly labeled it. I walked in just in time to see the student worker about to dump the sodium metal into the sink and turn the water on. I’m afraid I scared the poor kid to death with my “STOP! Don’t do that.”

Another container I found that was labeled was a jar of picric acid. If picric acid sits for any length of time it becomes very unstable and the simple act of picking it up off a shelf can cause it to explode. I had to look up how to dispose of the acid. I was glad to get that out of the lab.

I asked the chem students from last years bio class what dissections they did. One student said they didn’t do any dissections. Another student looked at her and said “Yes we did.” “We did the earthworm, the clam, the starfish, a fish, a shark and a cat.” I was impressed. The other student said she didn’t remember any of those. Without missing a beat, the other student said “Oh, that must have been the day you missed.”

When I questioned where they got the cat for dissection, the student said one of the boys in the class brought in a stray cat. I asked how they euthanized the cat. She said “Oh, the teacher just poured acid on it.”

I had some really good students. One young girl was exceptional. She aced every test and if you ask anyone about my tests, you will know they are not easy to pass, much less ace. I asked her what she wanted to be. She replied “a nurse.” I suggested she consider going to medical school. Later, the principal got a call from her parents wanting to know why I was trying to talk their daughter out of nursing. I told the principal honestly that she had the ability to do medical school and wanted her to aim her sights a little higher.

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In biology, there were a group of boys that sat in the back. They were a clique and they all flunked everything I tested them on. One boy was an exception. I knew he was bright simply from his questions in class and conversations with him. He would flunk one test and barely pass another. After a while, I caught on. He wanted to be popular with the rest of the clique so he was able to calculate from one test to the next what he needed to get a “D” average for the year. He would pass but his friends would fail and he did poorly enough to still be popular with his friends.

One of the things I had a tough time with was Mantachie allowed students to smoke on campus. They had a designated smoking area and I was, at times, called on to police the area. It was so incongruous to see middle school and high school students puffing away. I was talking about it with one of my bio students and she said – “Oh, when my daughter is hyper I give her a cigarette in the morning to calm down.” The daughter was five.

Mantachie believed in corporal punishment. One of the first things the principal issued me was a paddle. I didn’t really want to enforce paddling but eventually my hand was called. There was this one kid on the basketball team. Athlete that he was, he was a regular at smoke breaks. Anyway, he did everything he could to needle me. I finally had to paddle him. It was my first. I took him out into the hallway and had him bend over and grab his ankles (I had watched others do it so I knew this was the routine). I gave him five licks. It brought tears to his eyes. I really hated having to paddle anyone but once I did it and the kids knew I would do it, they behaved differently and better. I only had to paddle one other kid after that.

The kid who teared up improved. I decided to find out his story. I went to the office and pulled his record. There was very little entered into his permanent record but somewhere in middle school some teacher (female by the handwriting) had entered the statement “uncircumcised male.” I thought why would the school want to know that? I checked a few other permanent records and none had any similar entry. Wonder what was up with that teacher?

One day I was on my break (5th period) in the teachers’ lounge. The study hall teacher came in and asked if I could help her quiet down the study hall. I grabbed my paddle and walked back with her. I walked to the librarians desk amid the din of talking and laughing and slapped the paddle down on the desk as hard as I could and said something to the effect that the next person who uttered a word would meet me in the hallway. I must really be intimidating (students my entire teaching career have told me this) because I never had to go back after that day to quiet her study hall down.

I later gave the library my entire book collection. By that time, I had moved so many times, I was tired of having to move so many books. I probably had several hundred books. I must have doubled the holdings of Mantachie High School library.

The women’s basketball coach was a great guy and we became good friends. I would often be required to take up tickets at basketball and football games as part of my duties. For basketball games, after the game started, I would go up into the stands and watch the games. All the faculty were astounded I stayed around to watch the games. The women’s coach really appreciated me staying and cheering on his team. He asked me how much I knew about defenses. I didn’t. He taught me the basics of high school basketball defenses. Later, when I moved to Itawmaba Junior College, he would still check in on me every so often.

One night we were taking tickets at the football game. I think in the middle of the first quarter the lights in town went out. I was joking around with the women’s coach and the principal overheard. He was dead serious and said “Don’t even joke about this.” Fortunately for everyone, the lights came back on about 30 minutes later.

As Halloween approached, I asked what my students were doing. There didn’t seem to be any school event for them. I was immediately informed the mains source of entertainment was toilet papering each others’ yards.

One set of parents asked to see me after class. They were concerned about their son’s grades. I explained to them their son was very capable but he didn’t apply himself. They explained that he was interested in band and they wanted him to put his emphasis on that. I was dumbfounded. I still, to this day, don’t know what kind of career band is for a student. He had no intention on going any further. What the students didn’t know – and I didn’t at the time – was that I would see a lot of them at IJC later.

I didn’t know it but the principal at Mantachie had been getting a lot of phone calls about me. I found this out through the women’s basketball coach. I asked the principal about the calls and he said not to worry about it. The parents were concerned I was being too hard on students. The principal simply told them I was teaching them what they should have been being taught for years. The principal, about mid semester, finally called me in and told me I had to tone down my purchases for the classes. I managed to zoom through his budget for me by mid semester. He did let me order a couple of new microscopes. He really supported what I did. What I didn’t know was he and the county superintendent were at odds.

One night, I got a phone call from a “parent” who was complaining his daughter had been benched from the women’s basketball team because of her grade. When he told me the name of the student, I said I don’t know about that. I consulted my grade book and she had indeed failed the most recent grading period. He called me a liar and started screaming into the phone that he had her report card right in front of him. I thought it was my friend who coached the women’s team just trying to wind me up. He was known to do that. As it turned out, it really was the parent and he was really, really angry. The report cards were due back the next class and I looked. She had changed the grade from an “F” to a “B” because she didn’t want the father to know. I later received an apology from the Dad.

I got a call from the county superintendent at home one night. He wanted to know if I would mentor an education major who needed to practice teach. I thought it a little strange. I told the superintendent I didn’t think it would be a good idea since I was teaching on a temporary certificate at the time and I wasn’t sure the state would support such a move. He reassured me it was OK.

On the first day the practice teacher showed up, I found out he was originally from Mantachie. It then dawned on me I was training my replacement. When I called the county superintendent on it, he replied, “Fred, I think Tremont High School will be a better fit for you.” Back to Hilda Hill. She got me an interview at Itawamba Junior College.

30 March 2021

Park Manager. Golden Memorial State Park. Another trailer to live in. At least there was a storm shelter in back of the trailer. Walnut Grove, the closest town, is in Mississippi’s tornado alley. I can recall at least three times the town has been hit.

I couldn’t keep the cats in the park so Dad took them at his trailer in Pulaski. They pretty much loved the place. Unfortunately, not too long after, Sam disappeared. Dad supposed it was squirrel hunters who shot him. They don’t like cats because they can take out squirrels – Rascal actually brought one to Dad. Sam was always a roamer anyway and his curiosity probably got him shot.

One rainy Sunday Dad called me up and said Rascal was in a tree and could get down. I told him it was a cat. It could go up and down if it wanted to. He couldn’t stand it. He parked his truck next to the tree and climbed atop the cab to coax the cat down.

Golden Memorial is a very small state park. It does have a 15 acre lake on the property and I put in a nature trail while there. There are two pavilions and at the time, you could camp there with trailer pads available. We never had a lot of traffic. Today, it’s a day use park only.

There was a concession stand that provided all kinds of snacks (uncooked) for visitors and it was run by a particular governor’s mother. When I first got there, I didn’t pay it much mind but I later found out she was working about 4 hours a day and getting paid for 8. I had a quiet conversation with her and told her that in good conscience, I couldn’t do that. She left soon after.

Years later I was working at Itawamba Junior College in Fulton, Mississippi and the department head came rushing into my lab and said in a panicked voice “The FBI is here and want to interview you!” I laughed and headed over because I figured what it was about. They asked me if the governor had ever coerced me to do something that was illegal. I explained that no, he hadn’t and I had even chased off his mother who once worked for me. It really shook up my department head. He thought he had hired a crime figure.

I had an assistant park manager and two grizzled guys for maintenance. We also had a YCC program with 3 kids. I wasn’t impressed with any of them except for one Black female teen. She was very sharp. I put everyone to work on building the nature trail and then worked with the Black teen on hosting nature walks during the day. She jumped in with both feet and learned everything I tried to tell her about the flora and fauna of the place. I actually put her in charge of the YCC group. That caused the two white guys to quit. They wouldn’t work for any n****r girl. I was OK with them leaving. Their positions were filled relatively quickly and before I allowed them to work I made sure they had no problem with working with her.

We had a lot of mature pine trees in the park. Several were dead and a danger to people in the park and several were infected with the southern pine beetle. You could walk by a tree and hear them gnawing. I called a person I knew in the state office (my immediate supervisor) and asked permission to remove the diseased and dead pines. I got a verbal OK. Yea, I know, I was young and stupid.

I had arranged for a local business to haul the trees away, saw it into timber and pay the company by simply sharing the timber. We used our portion of the shared timber to make bridges along the lake for the nature trail.

I soon got a call from the head of the Mississippi Park Commission. He wanted to know why I was clear cutting the timber in the park. The call was on speaker phone in his office and I asked if my immediate supervisor was in the room. He spoke up and said yes he was. I then asked if he remembered me getting verbal authority to clear diseased and dead pines. I was ready for him to deny it but to my surprise, he admitted he had given me permission. The call quickly ended after that.

My park assistant had a wife and young son and both parents were young themselves. They were from out west somewhere and were into health food. In particular, I remember them never eating processed cheese. I don’t think you could buy non-processed cheese in Mississippi at the time. I was later heard that after I left the park system, the assistant was caught selling drugs on park property.

My lifeguard was Larry Thrash from Sebastopol, Mississippi. My grandmother Ruby used to go there all the time to buy antiques. I think that’s where I got my fascination with old things. The antique shops were like museums to me. There’s not much there in Sebastopol other than a few antique stores and a post office.

Anyway, Larry only worked the summer. In the fall he started at Millsaps. It turned out to be a lifelong friendship and we are still in touch today. He ended up as a postal carrier and retired a few years ago in San Antonio. Every time I visit my cousin Jo out there, I try to make time to visit with Larry.

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Anyway, to be honest, there wasn’t a whole lot to do at the park other than swim, fish, and hike. I kept trying to find some way to bring people into the park and Forest radio had an answer. It was the only radio station you could get consistently and they had a segment where they aired all the events going on.

I approached my best friend Crag Knox and asked if he would be willing to have his band show up and play for 4th of July. I couldn’t promise them very much money – just petty cash but I also promised them all the beer they could drink after the event. They agreed. Crag’s band was a blue grass band. He and I built a small covered stage next to the concession stand, did the wiring for overhead lights and amps and microphones. I advertised a 4th of July party at the park with Forest radio and put up flyers in Walnut Grove.

People came out of the woodwork! It was the busiest day of the park. People had to park on the side of the road to the entrance of the park. G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery was campaigning for U.S. House re-election. He showed up at the park and walked straight towards me and said “I came to Walnut Grove to campaign and no one was in town.” Everything was closed. He said he now knew why. He asked my permission to go through the crowd and pass out cards. I figured it was OK and let him. There’s nothing more patriotic than campaigning on the fourth. He was also running un-apposed. He later wrote me a glowing letter and copied the park commission. I thought to myself – this can’t be good. They don’t like someone being complimented. I was soon to be proven prescient.

Crag and his band played for hours. There were others who volunteered, including my two grizzled workers. All in all, it was a great success to get people to the park.

One day I was walking below the dam of the lake and noticed water coming out of crawdad holes in the dam. That got me worried. At least the water was clear and not muddy. I put in a call to the park commission and asked for help. It took a while but they sent out an engineer. He hinted, obtusely, that it might be best to shut down the swimming area – our biggest draw to the park. It turned out to not be such a problem because it was after labor day. Later, the engineer approved reopening the lake. I did spend some time blowing up crawdad holes with acetylene.

I also had the problem of stray hunting dogs in the park. They got to be a nuisance. If they had tags, I would call the owner. One of the YCC people overheard me saying I was gonna shoot the next wild dog. He didn’t realize I was kidding. I would shoot a pistol with rat shot into the air to scare the dogs away but I would never kill one or shoot one.

Later this guy drives up in a pickup and starts swearing at me for trying to kill his dogs and said he was more than willing to shoot me. I calmed him down and explained that if they had tags, I called the owner and if they didn’t, I would shoot in the air to get them to leave the park. He apologized after he calmed down and left. A YCC kid told me later told me it was his uncle and he had embellished the story to get his uncle riled. He didn’t realize the uncle would jump in his truck and come after me and threaten to shoot me.

I was out around the park one day when my assistant came looking for me. Two people from the state came up. One immediately jumped on me and started in on how he knew I was ignorant of child labor laws and I had to shut down several operations in the park. It was just the way he said it and I went red in the face. I told him quickly he might be surprised how much I did know about child labor laws and I would be happy to show him to the exit of the park. (I didn’t say it quite that nicely.) His buddy with him had to get between him and me and calm me down and pull his buddy away. The other guy apologized and provided me with a piece of paper that was much more innocuous that the firebrand buddy led me to believe. Here’s a hint. Don’t start a conversation with how ignorant the person you are talking to is.

Soon after I had my tête à tête with the governor’s mother, I got a phone call from payroll asking me to provide a secondary payroll. When I asked what that was, I was told to take a payroll sheet, put all the peoples’ names on it, put no hours down and sign it and turn it in. I told her I was uncomfortable with that. We hemmed and hawed a while and finally she grew frustrated and said it was OK if I wrote across the payroll sheet “Not for payroll purposes.” I was asked to do this once a month.

I was friends with the park manager at Roosevelt State Park near Morton. I called him up and asked him what this was about. He had no idea and had never had to submit a subsidiary payroll. He asked me to provide him copies to look over and I did. After a while, payroll quit calling me asking me to submit subsidiary payrolls. I never figured what that was about.

Soon, I was called in for a review at the Park Commission. I met with my contact and the park commissioner. I was stunned when they asked me to take over as manager of Roosevelt State Park – a much larger and busier park than Golden Memorial. I said no. I didn’t want to be a local boy managing a park where everyone thought they could get me to do whatever they wanted. The director was perturbed. He said I “was not my own man.” Again, I turned red with anger and said he might be surprised how I was indeed my own man and had been for most of my life. He backed down after he saw how angry I was. However, I knew my time with the park commission was fast drawing to a close.

Hilda Hill contacted me and said she had a job for me teaching biology at Mantachie High School in Mantachine, Mississippi. I leaped at the chance to get out of the job.

Before I left, I was in a conference with other park managers down on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and happened to catch a ride with the park manager at J.P. Coleman State Park and Roosevelt. I casually dropped into the conversation that I had been offered a new park. They didn’t bite. So I finally asked them if they were curious as to what park I was offered. They finally said yes and I told them Roosevelt. As you might guess, it was a total surprise to the manager of Roosevelt. It was my way of warning him before I left the park service.

On to Mantachie!

Stay tuned!

29 March 2021

Great! I’ve got a masters degree in biology so what do I do with it? The first thing I did was put in applications everywhere I could for a job as botanist. I had briefly toyed with the idea of going for a PhD and Dr. Pullen had gone so far as to ensure my admission at the University of Georgia – his alma mater – but it came with no financial support. I would have been on my own. I turned it down. I would have been working with Sam Jones – one of Dr. Pullen’s former students.

The most common place for a botanist to seek employment outside of academia was with the government. If you have never filled out a government employment form – good for you. They are challenging to say the least. In the meantime, I got a temporary gig as a director of the Youth Conservation Corps at Tishomingo State Park. It was patterned on the Civilian Conservation Corps but provided summer jobs for teenagers. They would come work on some project in the park and then go home at night.

I was assigned my group and we took on the project of renovation of the museum in the upstairs part of the visitors center and a complete renovation of the basement to make additional space for a museum.

Even though some of the teens in my group were also in shop at their local high school, I quickly learned they did not know how to read a tape measure. We needed to cut a great deal of lumber to “panel” the basement and I had to teach juniors and seniors what 3/4 of an inch was on a tape measure.

George Gilpin, the park manager, was very supportive and gave me some good advice. He said to spread the wealth around the town of Tishomingo. I asked what did he mean? He said not to buy all my supplies from one hardware in town. Duh! There were two hardwares and it made sense to purchase from both to keep both happy. We spent a lot of government money in the very small town of Tishomingo that year.

I was housed in the old park manager home. The front room was a storage facility but the park cleared out the back bedroom and bathroom for me. It was idyllic. My entrance looked out over the public area of the park including the swimming pool. I had pileated woodpeckers to wake me every morning.

One night, I heard something down by the pool. I called George and he came tearing down from his residence at the other end of the park. It was some teen agers who had climbed the fence into the pool facility around midnight and were skinny dippin’. George put the fear of God into them by threatening arrest. I ended up being his eyes and ears on that end of the park for any trouble.

George had a great crew with him and one night, they came knocking on my door and asked if I wanted to go to see the Coon Dog Cemetery in Alabama. I declined but they kept enticing me with beer and whiskey and eventually three of us loaded up in a pickup and set out. It’s amazing we got there in one piece much less made it back in one piece as drunk as we were. I guess they could hold their liquor better than I.

The cemetery was massive. It started in 1937 and there were quite a few dogs buried there and almost all had some massive monument to mark their graves. Apparently, coon hunters love their dogs.

I admit to being drunk on occasion. However, I’ve never been as drunk as I was the night I got back from the cemetery. I had to sleep with one foot on the floor to keep the world from spinning off its axis.

They were simple, good ole boys and they did everything they could to help me in any way they could. It was one of them that pointed out my new truck tires were out of round. They didn’t want me to get into an accident. You can’t buy friends like that.

The YCC group worked very hard. We were nearing completion of the museum and I asked them, as an exercise, to identify the stuffed birds and write a little description of each. I had a meeting to attend at another state park concerning YCC and so left them to it. While I was gone, an ornithology professor from Mississippi State, who was a roving YCC director came in and ripped into their identifications and statements – before I had a chance to check their identifications and correct their statements. I came back and they were in tears. I called up the state YCC director and reamed out the professor to him. It was uncalled for and mean.

Later, I met a grad student of his – who later married the Mississippi State professor – and I eventually taught a short time with her while at Itawamba Junior College. I mentioned it to her and she was apologetic and agreed he could be an ass sometimes.

The YCC work was coming to a close and I got a job acceptance at the Bureau of Land Management at Miles City, Montana. I loaded up everything I owned in a U-Haul, my two cats – Rascal (Siamese) and her “kitten” Sam and drove to Montana. Sam caterwauled the entire trip and Rascal nursed in my lap the whole time. By the time I got to Montana I didn’t have a dry tee shirt from her “nursing” from me.

I made it to Miles City and found a trailer in town in which to live.

I was given a desk at the Bureau and my assignment was to do a plant survey of 858 square miles of eastern Montana – the Wibaux-Beech area. However, there was very little I could do because I hired on in October. It snowed on Thanksgiving day and the original snow was on the ground when I left the job in April.

Miles City was a cowboy town. It had one hotel (with a Chinese restaurant) and a main street. That was pretty much it. The last whorehouse closed the year before I got there and ranch hands would still come into town on Saturday night and shoot up the place. It was also a dangerous place to drive. People from the ranches would come into town on weekends. They were used to driving over thousands of acres and not having to check on traffic around them when they went in reverse. It was not uncommon for someone to back out of their parking space in town without looking.

Too keep me busy, the Bureau gave me a brand new 4 wheel drive truck, per diem and sent me on a information finding trip of all the universities in Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota. I visited each biology/botany department and asked if any of the botanists would be interested in anything I found and any extra herbarium specimens. Everyone was enthusiastic except an older professor at Montana State University. He wanted nothing to do with me – even though I was doing all the work and was willing to provide him herbarium specimens free of charge. Later, the department head called me up and apologized and said the professor, after consultation, had changed his mind.

I traveled so much that one morning I woke up and called the front desk to ask what town I was in. I didn’t even remember what state I was in.

I also found another government agency in town – the U.S. Forestry Service – had an herbarium they no longer wanted and asked if the Bureau would like it. I jumped at the chance. It was delivered and I had it put in the loft of the vehicle service/storage area which became my secondary office space. I think it was three full herbarium cabinets. Later, I mentioned it to the local college. It had originated with them and a change in personnel in the botany department requested it back. I reluctantly complied but it really helped me get a feel for the vegetation in the area.

Since I couldn’t collect plants in the winter, I went ahead and made plans for the spring to lay out my tracts and plots. I was then asked to help a wildlife biologist with his studies in the same area. For the winter I survey deer mice, mule deer, and sage grouse.

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For the deer mice, we baited traps with peanut butter. When we opened the trap, we would take measurements, clip one toe off (and record which one) and then release. The toe was in case we re-trapped the same mouse.

We would also take count of sage grouse. To do that you had to be up before sunrise and be ready next to their dancing grounds. Sage grouse come back to the same place year after year for mating rituals. We would creep up on their dancing ground and wait until the party started. Only males danced in the center with females along the periphery to select their mate. Because they return year after year, the ground gets beaten down pretty well. Think of what hundreds of years of pounding of little tiny feet will do.

There’s the story, perhaps apocryphal, of newbies moving out west and finding a nice flat place to build their dream home only to be driven crazy in the spring by sage grouse dancing on the roof of their house. They had built their house on a sage grouse dancing area.

With winter arriving, I knew I wouldn’t survive in the trailer. I found a home on the outskirts of town for rent. It was the old home of the owner of the furniture company next door.

The house was a nice change from the cramped trailer. It even had a floor furnace. I did, in December, have to climb up on the roof and chip icicles off the roof because it was getting up under the eave, thawing and causing leaks in the ceiling. I also had to shovel snow off the roof on occasion.

I would be gone a week at a time and have to leave Sam and Rascal alone. I left plenty of food and water and new litter. When I returned, I would always have to clean up shredded toilet paper from the bathroom. I guess it was their way of paying me back.

Sam wasn’t a needy cat. Rascal was very affectionate – not Sam. However, every time I came back home from a week in the field, Sam was the first one to climb into my lap and seek pats and rubs. Rascal would pout and snub me for a couple of days.

They also saw the first snow in their lives and it was hilarious to watch them walk in it for the first time.

I met some very interesting people in my quest for permission to get on peoples’ land for my survey. There’s the old joke about the three greatest lies: The check is in the mail. I’ll love you forever. I’m the government and I’m here to help you. Government workers were not always welcome. However, when they heard my southern accent, they all seemed to warm to me. I had ranchers offer me the key to their house with directions as to where the coffee pot was located.

We are not talking about small ranches. Most of the ranches were 25, 50, or 100 sections of land. A section is 640 acres and it was not uncommon to ask permission to go on a piece of property that was 25,000 acres.

The strangest person I met was a lone female (who had about 15,000 acres). I actually called her “sir” when I first met her because I didn’t realize she was female. She brought me into her house through the living room. I noticed I was steeping in about 1 inch of liquid all through the living room. She looked back and told me not to pay attention – it was dog urine. She raised chihuahuas and told me she couldn’t let them out during the winter so they used that room to poop and pee.

You might think this a tad eccentric. She was a rich old woman. She raised and sold Arabians. She had just sold one for $25k. She seemed to like me and I got permission to go on her land.

It was in the new house that I got the sickest I’ve ever been in my life. There was a Dairy Queen close to the house and I got in the habit of stopping there for dinner. They had a pretty good hamburger. I must have gotten a bad one because I came down with food poisoning. I was so sick I could not turn over in bed without vomiting. I had a phone to call for help – I just couldn’t get to it. I was so weak I had to put a trash can by the bed to pee. It stayed with me for about three days.

Later, when lecturing in college, I talked about sea sickness in relation to Charles Darwin. Darwin was chronically seasick during the entire voyage of the HMS Beagle. Anyway, my lecture would talk about Darwin’s seasickness and how he would use that as an excuse to leave the ship to go collecting. I told students that food poisoning could kill you and seasickness would make you wish you were dead.

Two days after I was back on my feet, an old graduate school buddy, Sara Hurdle, came to visit. I had promised I would take her to Yellowstone.

After we got on the road, I felt better. Sara was an older graduate student at Ole Miss. Her ex was a fancy lawyer in Holly Springs. She caught him cheating and her three sons made sure her ex saw that she was well off. She actually went to school with Andy Griffith at Chapel Hill. She was in public health and he was trying to break into acting. She tells of his lamenting he couldn’t lose his southern accent. She would throw pool parties in Holly Springs for biology graduate students with her indoor pool.

Sara, as a graduation present, bought me a very expensive Canon camera. I think the reason was no one wanted to go on field trips with the “old” lady. I was always up for a field trip and I always took her along. She collected insects and I collected plants. We made a good team.

Anyway, we had a ball in Yellowstone. She insisted on paying for everything – a great room in an historic hotel in Jackson Hole, a bombardier trip into the park, snow shoe lessons, ski lessons, and a trip to the National Elk Herd.

I was to go back to Yellowstone some 50 years later and they still used the same old bombardiers that Sara and I took into the park.

I have to tell you she and I both tried downhill skiing at Jackson Hole at -20°F. It was a little too much for her when they taught us how to get up after we fall but she was game to try.

Later, at Yellowstone, she insisted I learn cross country skiing. It’s a lot harder than it looks. That was also my first time on snowshoes.

Sara and I kept in touch the rest of her life. Before she passed, she gave me her entire lifetime collection of insects. I later donated it to the college at Broward. It was two insect cabinets full of specimens and literally tripled the collection I had amassed for the college.

It wasn’t much longer after she left Miles City that I realized I was living the life of deficit spending. I think I was on a GS-4 pay grade. The cost of living in Montana is extremely high because everything has to be imported into the state. They have timber but it’s sold out of state so if you want a wooden screen door, you have to order it from either the east or west coast.

I reluctantly decided to leave Montana. I never collected a single plant – hard to do when it’s under 3 feet of snow.

Hilda Hill, back in Mississippi, was trying to get an environmental center going near the headquarters of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway project near Pickwick Lake on the Mississippi/Tennessee state line. She had met me while I was a graduate student at some presentation I made and she basically decided I was the perfect person to run the center. The only problem was it not only hadn’t been built, it hadn’t even been funded.

She cooked up the idea that I could be a park manager in a state park in Mississippi until the funding came through. I think she probably personally walked my job application through. Hilda was a force of nature. When I drove back to Mississippi – with Sam caterwauling and Rascal “nursing” me the whole way – I had a job as park manager of Golden Memorial State Park near Walnut Grove, Mississippi.

Stay tuned!

28 March 2021

Graduate school was liberating for me. After I figured I did not want to re-up in the Coast Guard, I got to thinking about a botany course I took as an undergraduate. A Doctor Thomas M. Pullen taught the class and he was no nonsense. I liked that in an instructor – nothing cute – just the facts. I also remembered an exhibit he did on the third floor of the biology building that showed off poisonous plants of Mississippi using herbarium specimens. It was impressive.

Not only did I have his general botany course but I also took his Spring and Summer Flora of Mississippi – a taxonomy course at the 200 level. In addition, I took Plant Anatomy with him. Both were demanding courses and right up my alley.

On a wing and a prayer, I wrote him from the Coast Guard base and said he probably didn’t remember me but I asked if he would be willing to take me on as a graduate student. To be honest, I didn’t even expect a reply.

A week letter I got a letter from him saying he did remember me (dubious) and he would definitely be interested in me as a graduate student. I had to take the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) and if my grade was good enough, I needed to apply. He also suggested to apply for a teaching assistantship. I did, I passed, and I got admitted with the teaching assistantship. However, I had never had chemistry or physics as an undergraduate and he required me to to “remedy” that by taking general chemistry, organic chemistry and general physics at the same time I was doing graduate work.

I was scared of chemistry. I was scared of physics. Ole Miss’ chemistry and physics departments had quite a reputation and it wasn’t a good one. In one chemistry lab, you were required to set up your apparatus and have it approved by the lab instructor before proceeding. Chemistry was required for premed and students were cut throat in lecture and lab. I saw one kid set up his apparatus and asked the instructor to come approve it. The instructor screamed
“Wrong!” and pushed the whole apparatus set up off on to the floor breaking glassware everywhere. The student got charged for the broken glassware.

The general chemistry teacher I got was far above the heads of the freshman class I was in. He couldn’t explain his way out of a paper bag – as brilliant a researcher as he was. It was sink or swim time. I eventually eked out a “C” in first semester and managed a “B” in second semester.

Organic was nothing but memory. Fortunately, I had a good enough memory to get me through both semesters. However, I refused to take the second semester lab. I related to Dr. Pullen how one young idiot didn’t read the lab before hand and poured diethyl ether into a beaker over a direct flame. I told him I would finish first semester lab but had no intention of getting killed in second semester lab.

Our physics instructor walked in the first day of class and said “Physics is nothing but math.” He then proceeded to prove it. I was drowning. Finally, I realized I had to do something so one night in my office in the biology building, I sat down and told myself I wasn’t leaving until I understood the math homework. I think about 2 am the light came on and after that point, physics wasn’t a problem for me.

Second semester physics was weird. The professor dealt with million volt lasers. He was very religious. One student, hoping to get in on his good side requested we start every class with a prayer. The physics professor considered it and very reluctantly said he didn’t think that would work. Strangely, all but one physics professor I’ve known over my entire academic career have been deeply religious.

Physics lab, on the other hand, was a problem. The lab instructor didn’t like me. I ended up helping most of the students in the lab understand what they were to do but the instructor kept marking down my lab reports. I managed a “C” in the lab.

All this was going on with graduate courses in biology as well as prepping and teaching labs in botany and biology. As an undergraduate, Ole Miss taught me how to write. Graduate courses in biology taught me how to write concisely, clearly, and to the point.

Dr. Pullen was of the opinion you could not understand plants unless you understood animals (and vice versa). As a consequence, I took as many zoology courses as I did botany courses. It was a good thing he did. I ended up teaching as much zoology as I did botany over the years.

Field courses were my favorite courses. One course, Field Botany, required us to make an extensive plant collection. That entailed collecting the plants, drying them for preservation, identifying the plants, and then mounting them on herbarium paper.

We had a great class of graduate students. Dr. Pullen walked in the first day of class and had a worried look. He said he had been checking everyones’ schedules for field trip opportunities and it didn’t look good. He said the only option seemed to be weekends. We all jumped on that – weekends were about the only free time we had and it was perfect for everyone. Everyone in that class worked well together. If I found a plant someone didn’t have, we would trade out specimens. I made some of the best friends for life in that class.

As a matter of fact, two of those in the class, Charlie Cooper and Chris, and the photographer for the department, Bill Martin, and I went on a canoe trip to the Quetico Provincial Park in Canada. Once we got back, the faculty asked us to produce a seminar. We brought my canoe up through three flights of stairs (not so easy when it was 15 feet long) and I showed them how to lift the canoe and carry it over a portage. I even made Hudson Bay Bread for them so they could see the energy food we used on the trip. Everyone said it was the hit of the seminar season.

I loved the graduate courses. I took Plant Morphology, Aquatic Plants, Survey of Fungi, and Agrostology. For zoology, I took Entomology and Invertebrate Zoology.

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I learned that I liked teaching lab. On occasions, Dr. Pullen would ask me to sub his lectures. That was a real thrill.

It finally came time to discuss my thesis project. He recommended I do a floristic study of one of the state parks in Mississippi. At the time, Dr. Pullen was working on a flora of Mississippi and anything I could add with a floristic study would help his work. There were several parks within driving distance from Oxford: J.P. Coleman State Park in northeast Mississippi near Pickwick Lake, Tishomingo State Park, also in the northeast, and Wall Doxey State Park near Holly Springs.

I visited Wall Doxey on my own but took my buddy Crag Knox with me to the other two. We did J.P. Coleman first and it was OK. However, the moment we drove into Tishomingo we knew we had found the one. It was like a trip to the Smokies.

I spent the next two years collecting plants at Tishomingo. I would collect during the day, press plants at night and dry them over plant dryers overnight. I would then take that weeks’s haul back to campus and work on identification. It was bliss. I found 10 new state records in the park. Dr. Pullen was ecstatic.

New species recorded for the state were
Quillwort – Isoetes engelmannii A. Br.
Slender False Foxglove – Agalinis tenella Pennell
Windflower – Anemone quinquefolia L. var. interior Fern.
Carex – Carex baileyi Britton
Carex – Carex caroliniana Schweinitz
Crinkleroot – Dentaria diphylla Michx.
Yellow Wood Sorrel – Oxalis floridana Salisbury var. filipes (Small) Ahles
Nevius’ Stonecrop – Sedum nevii Gray
Lesser Ladies’ Tresses – Spiranthes ovalis Lindley

I was a little taken aback at the hatred among faculty in the department. The faculty in biology had their meetings in the class room a few doors down from me and you could hear the screaming. I think the smaller the department, the more vicious it becomes. The faculty forced out the department chair and hired a new one.

Faculty would get into fights with one another and take it out on graduate students. I saw one graduate student do a seminar on his PhD dissertation. Two of the faculty honed in on him and reduced him to tears in his presentation. The tear down of the graduate student was based on a single word he used in his dissertation. At one point, one of the members of his committee said he was going to reconsider his vote on his degree. It was all based on animosity towards his major advisor.

Somehow, I ended up as president of the biology graduate students and had to deal with the new chair. Finally, we had it out in his office one day – both of us shouting at the top of our lungs – over the tear down of the PhD candidate. Later he told me he thought botanists were mild and meek but I had certainly changed his opinion of that.

Later, he would come out for field trips to Tishomingo under my collection permit. We got along well after the knock-down, drag out and he even later came and produced a program for my students when I taught at Itawamba Junior College.

To his credit, Dr. Pullen didn’t get involved in department politics. They respected him too much. As a consequence, I was never threatened or put upon by other faculty. I didn’t get along with all of them but they never attempted anything with me.

My third year was basically finishing up identification of my collection. I also got to work on a wildflower guide for the park. Fortunately, the Mississippi Wildlife Museum agreed to fund the project. I selected the plants to include and wrote the text. I even tried my hand at illustrations. I showed them to the herbarium technician, Carole Ritchie, and she said “Humph! I think I can do better.” She was right. She came back a few days later with beautiful illustrations of two of the plants I included in the book.

She agreed to do all the illustrations – without pay. What’s even more amazing is Carol had never had an art lesson in her life.

I finally finished my thesis (A Floristic Study of Tishomingo State Park) and the wildflower book (Ferns and Wildflowers of Tishomingo State Park) and was ready to graduate. Now I needed to go out and get a job.

Stay tuned!

24 March 2021

I was sent for permanent duty to Communications Station New Orleans located at the old ammunition depot for the U.S. Navy out from Belle Chase. New Orleans wasn’t new to me. There are two places that call to Mississippians: Memphis and New Orleans.

I spent a lot of time in Memphis as an undergraduate at Ole Miss and did the requisite things – like watch the ducks march from the fountain to the roof at the Hotel Peabody and the Ole Miss pep rally in the lobby of the Peabody.

New Orleans, on the other hand, was to become my home for the next two years. Actually, my very first visit to the city was with my cousin Jimmie with her sister Jo. It was also my first hurricane at Pat O’Briens. Actually, I had two and learned to never do that again. That had to be around 1966-67. It was also my first Mardi Gras. I loved the first one. Later, I was trapped in the city for three more and learned to steer clear of the city when that time of year rolled around. I guess I’m just not a big partier.

The Coast Guard Communications Station is really outside of Belle Chase and very isolated from the city. It consists of two thousand acres. A lot of the acreage is old navy ammo storage dumps with the rest is antennas for the radio station. There were two main buildings when I was there – the base itself with a dining hall, a rec hall, a garage for the vehicles and tractors (to mow under the antennas) and a dormitory. I had a private room to myself in the dorm. After sharing berthing space with 15 of my closest friends, it was paradise.

The other building was located a mile or two away and it was the “radio shack” which housed the commanding officer (CO), executive officer (XO) and the radio room. The radio room was about 900 square feet with stations along the periphery and the officer in charge’s (OinC) desk in the middle.

Next to the OinC was a row of teletypes. There were one Morse code site and one voice communications room – glassed in but away from the sounds of the teletypes and Morse code dits and dahs. We generally rotated duty among the teletype, voice, and code station. I had gotten pretty good with Morse code – I was up to 30 words a minute in copying code and it got to the point that the OinC would often put me on code when an SOS came in. I worked several of those during my stay at the base. There were others that were better than me in code but if they weren’t on duty, it was me on the code desk.

I was even better on teletype. As I previously wrote, the Coast Guard taught me Morse code and typing at the same time. To send a message on the teletype, you would type the message out on the keyboard. It would generate a punched paper tape. To send the message, you fed the punched tape through a reader which sent the message at 100 words per minute over the air waves or by landline. By the time I finished my tour at the station, I was able to type a leader on the tape, plug it into the reader/sender and then keep up with the sending of the message. I could type 100 words per minute with no errors. You couldn’t make errors. That meant all kinds of problems in trying to correct them in a message that had been sent out.

Sitting the code desk was kind of miserable if there was nothing exciting going on. We would receive weather reports from ships at sea and there were often 20 or 30 of those a watch. They were all encoded in a standard format that anyone could read if they knew how. I do remember copying one weather report from a ship in the Gulf that was in 80 foot seas. I was glad I wasn’t on board that one.

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I made some good friends at the station and one in particular became a lifelong friend – Lester Theriot – yeah, a true blood Cajun. He was an LSU fan and we got together to make a plaque that held 100 years of Ole Miss/LSU football scores. We passed that plaque back and forth for years. Unfortunately, LSU is ahead of Ole Miss in the win column. Les passed last year. I still hear from his wife Debbie. When they had their son Colin, I would send Ole Miss memorabilia just to piss Les off.

At the time, I thought you could eat better, cheaper in New Orleans than any place in the world. The food was unbelievable. I didn’t really eat at any of the fancy places but once, places like Antoine’s, Court of Two Sisters, Brennan’s. I instead stuck to the hole-in-the-wall restaurants that served good, cheap food. One of my favorite places of Mosca’s.

There are two major bridges across the Mississippi River in New Orleans. At the time, the one that crossed over to the west bank near downtown New Orleans was called the Greater New Orleans Bridge (now two bridges called the Crescent City Connection). The other bridge was upriver and called the Huey P. Long Bridge. To get to Mosca’s from New Orleans, you crossed the Huey P. and traveled to the boonies. I mean literally. This place was a shack in the middle of nowhere. It was an all wooden building with checkerboard red and white plastic table cloths. It was also the absolute best Italian food I’ve ever eaten. The radio station was on the same side of the river and it was a 25 minute drive from the CG Station – and it was worth it.

I got in the habit of jogging around the base. I think it was three miles around the base and I would jog on top of the levee. What was really strange was to walk below the levee and see a ship above your head and seemingly above the levee. I often wondered what would happen if one missed a turn and plowed into the levee.

I might have made a career out of the Coast Guard (20 years) but for one incident at the radio station. The commander was Chief Warrant Officer (CWO) Cobb from Cobb County Georgia. I got along well with him – we both spoke southern. He pulled me from radio watch and assigned me Officer of the Deck (OOD) duty at the base. I was the daytime OOD and in charge of pretty much everything – dining hall, dorms, rec room, grass mowing, etc..

At the time, whoever was OinC at the radio station during the day would call the OOD (me) and request meals be sent down for lunch and dinner. Someone from the base would load up the requested meals and deliver them to the radio shack. After a while, Cobb noticed that more often than not, no one would take the used dishes back to the dining hall. He pitched a fit and ordered me to never allow another delivery of meals. If the radio watch wanted meals, they had to send someone up to base to get them.

Usually, during the day, the OinC was a Radio Master Chief (RMC). I forget his name but he called me one day and “ordered” me to have the meals delivered. I patiently tried to explain to him that Mr. Cobb had “ordered” they never be delivered again. He continued to press. I knew better than to go against the commander of the entire base and told the chief “no.” He said, “I’ll remember this.”

Eventually, I rotated back to the radio shack and the RMC did everything in his power to punish me – sticking me on mid-watches, making me the janitor of the radio shack – literally every demeaning task he could come up with. He later looked over at me and said “I told you I would get you.” I figured it the Coast Guard allowed people like that to stay in service, it didn’t need me. It was getting close to my enlistment to be completed (4 years) and instead of re-enlisting, I applied to graduate school at the University of Mississippi.

Stay tuned!

20 March 2021

You may not want to read this. This post is a downer. I interrupt my Coast Guard days to deal with an issue that has bothered me for years and years. HBO Max recently produced a series called “It’s A Sin” about the AIDS crisis in England during the 80’s and early 90’s. It hit too close to home for me. In particular, the last episode reminded me so much of my life in Broward County in the mid 1980’s.

In the early 80’s, I left Itawamba Junior College because of a difference of more than opinion with the Dean of Academic Affairs. He was a Christian zealot and I was not. I enrolled at the Microbiology Department at the University of Mississippi Medical School in Jackson to work on a PhD. I had this idea I could contribute to the research on AIDS.

That didn’t work out. However, it gave me the impetus to go back to teaching. When I eventually arrived at Broward Community College in 1985, I looked for a way to contribute to the AIDS epidemic and decided to volunteer to go around to Broward General Hospital to visit AIDS patients. It was a horror story.

A person was assigned to me to council me on what I should do. I followed him around on his rounds at Broward General and then assigned to do that on my own It was a time that being HIV positive was a stigma. I found out very quickly doctors would not even enter the room of AIDS patients. My job was to simply visit, ask if they needed anything and do what I could to help them and in many cases be there for them because their families had abandoned them.

Some appreciated the offer and others cursed and demanded you leave because they were embarrassed by the disease .

At Broward General, no one was listed as an AIDS patient. You relied on sympathetic nurses who would tell you on the sly to visit a certain room. You had to dress up in in hospital gowns, masks, and booties. The garb was not to protect you from AIDS. It was to keep you from giving the AIDS patient secondary infections.

There were a lot of nurses at Broward General who put their necks on the line to steer you to someone who had AIDS. I would walk down the corridor and a nurse would whisper to me as I passed to check room number so-and-s0. Some nurses were cruel and wouldn’t speak to you if you asked about isolation patients. The real heroes were the ones who knew what you were doing and did everything to make sure you could help the patient.

There were roofers who were straight that had gotten it from a s exual partner. There were gay guys who had been disowned by their families. There were women who got it from their sexual partner. There were people who didn’t want to see you because of their condition. A lot of people were ashamed.

One particular case stood out. His family had disowned him because he was a drag queen. He wouldn’t talk to me at all. I kept going to visit him every weekly round. Even though he wouldn’t talk, I would sit there for 30 minutes per visit never saying a word. He eventually responded to me after the seventh or eighth visit. I finally got him to talk and once he asked me to go get him a pack of cigarettes – y0u could smoke in the hospital rooms at that time. This was in the mid 1980’s.

He finally warmed up enough to me where he would actually hold conversations with me and we would talk for an hour or two and he got to where he would look forward to my visits.

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The person who started me on these visits was interested in me sexually. He even brought me flowers on a date at my place in Hollywood – the first time anyone had brought me flowers. I cooked him dinner. He had lost a Latino lover from Cuba from AIDS and was emotionally damaged. We took comfort in each other. We even safely did frottage. We were both too damaged to take it much further. He eventually found another Latin lover, but I understood. We remained friends.

He later called me about another AIDS patient I had seen who lived a few blocks from me. I remember the AIDS patient coming to see me at my garage apartment in Hollywood and him insisting to thoroughly wash the glass of water he had at my place. I must have had an impression on him when I told him it was not necessary. I knew enough about AIDS to know it was not casually transmitted. Later, my mentor called me and asked me to go to his place and meet his parents.

He had died and specifically asked that I go into his place and remove any objects that his parents might find objectionable or embarrassing. I met his parents at the apartment and removed several sex toys he had and told them it was OK to go in and remove the rest of his things. My mentor later told me that his parents never wanted me to contact them for any reason. They were totally embarrassed about their son.

Later, I was at graduate school at Florida State University in Library and Information Science during summer session when I received a phone call from my mentor and I was told that the guy I had visited at Broward General who at first refused to speak to me had passed away. I was really devastated. I had finally broken through to the guy.

Another guy I visited at Broward General never had a lover. He later died. However, one visit I made with him he looked me in the eyes and grabbed my hand and kissed my hand. He was the one that the doctors would never enter his room to examine him. He died alone and forgotten except for me.

I never went back to volunteer at Broward General. It was too emotionally devastating to meet with covert AIDS patients only to see them die a few weeks later. I too easily formed bonds with them and it played on my emotional well being.

There are several similarities I can draw with AIDS and COVID. AIDS was considered for may years to be a “gay” disease. I see some of the same with COVID in that some of the conservative element of the nation think that they are not susceptible to the disease. I’ve read stories of people who refused to admit they had COVID because they didn’t believe in the disease. Then there are those obituaries that list anything as the cause of death except COVID because they didn’t want friends and relatives to know. Both were common reactions during the AIDS epidemic.

I remember ministers preaching hate about AIDS and said it was God’s punishment visited upon homosexuals for their deviant lifestyle. I used to tell my students that it was evident that God was obviously endorsing lesbianism since lesbians didn’t get AIDS. By the way, “It’s A Sin” has a very strong female character that leads the way in the fight for recognition of AIDS in Britain.

AIDS was a defining moment in my life. It prepared me, in a sense, for the COVID pandemic. At least the rest of the nation now has some idea of what the gay community went through in the 1980’s and 1990’s. I survived the AIDS epidemic of that time period, but at what cost to me? If I survive the COVID pandemic, again at what cost?

If you get a chance to see “It’s A Sin” I recommend it. It is well done. All the cast are gay. It gives you a glimpse into what went on in the 80’s. There but for the grace of god go I.

9 March 2021

What’s the old saying? Best laid plans…. I got a great night’s sleep – beginning at 7:30 pm. I was awake and raring to go at 5 am but waited until 5:30 to get out of the cozy sleeping bag (morning temp was 41F) and make coffee and oatmeal.

After breakfast I broke camp and packed everything up in the jeep except for a change of clothes and soap and towel for a shower and razor for a shave. I was ready to leave camp at 7:15. I got in the jeep and hit start. It almost did but then changed its mind. I had a dead battery.

I called AAA. I’ve been a preferred member for years and have only used them once. It didn’t work out. I was in the middle of nowhere in Nevada and their tow truck only wanted to do semis. I called today and they said they were having trouble finding someone. I then got a text saying someone was on the way and from the map, it looked like they were only 10 minutes away. The expected arrival time for me was 3 hours.

On an off chance I would not see them until much later, I decided to charge up a storage battery system that Michel and Nancy gave me one Christmas for my travels. In reality, it works great for charging a computer or cell phone but I’ve never tried to jump a vehicle with it. However, the literature swears it will provide at least three charge attempts when the system itself is fully charged. My problem was it was not fully charged. I had used it the night before to charge some electronics.

It took until 10 am to get fully charged. Fingers crossed, I attached the jumper cables to the battery and voila, the jeep started on the first try! I canceled AAA. Now I needed to drive back to Gainesville to the jeep dealer and get a new battery. I had called at 9 am when they opened and they said no problem. Famous last words. I arrived at the jeep dealership around 11:30. I was immediately checked in.

Jeep doesn’t make your life easy. The battery is located under the passenger’s seat. I assume they had to remove the seat to get to the battery.

One thing I noticed on the way to the dealership was the cruise control didn’t work. I assumed it needed to be reset because of the dead battery. I asked about it and the service guy looked and said it was more serious. My engine check light was on – I hadn’t seen it before he pointed it out – and when he ran the diagnostics he said there were several long time outstanding “ADS” issues. He could make an appointment. When I told him I was on my way to north Georgia and that I only wanted the battery, he started telling me about his year in Georgia. He was interested in where I was going, what I was doing, etc. He never said it was dangerous to drive without clearing the issues and said he made notations for the jeep dealership back home.

He came out about 10 minutes later and informed me the dealership didn’t have the battery in stock but they were going to check with an auto parts store. Around noon he came back and told me that store didn’t have the battery either but there was another store that may.

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Long story short, I drove out of the dealership with my new battery and some $330 poorer at 1:15 pm. I really can’t complain. The battery lasted 6 years. Keeping an eye on the service engine light, I headed out to Amicalola Falls State Park. Estimated time of arrival was 8 pm. It dawned on me I did not want to set up a camp in darkness. I called the lodge at Amicalola and as luck would have it, they had a room available for two nights. At reduced rates. A little more communication and the host gave me a deluxe room for the same price as a regular room – the deluxe has a balcony overlooking the mountains. Not only that but they applied my tent camping reservation to the cost of the room for the two nights. The rates were $119 per night – a really good price!

I’m tired but happy. I had rather get the battery changed out now instead of worrying about it the rest of the trip. The lodge and room is beautiful. I go zip lining tomorrow for four hours. Life is good.

After heading to New River Gorge from Amicalola, I may take my jeep in to a dealership in Greensboro and have them check out the service engine light. I’m not too fond of the jeep dealerships in Broward.

Oh yeah, the cruise control started working so I can only hope the service engine light is a function of the battery dying and only needs to have the computer reset. Keep your fingers crossed.

Stay tuned!

6 March 2021

I left you with my lottery pick for the draft.

That summer after the draft lottery, I worked as Scoutcraft Direct at Camp Kickapoo in Clinton, Mississippi.  My days were numbered.  After camp, I got a phone call at home from a recruiter from the U.S. Coast Guard.  I went in for testing and an interview. I had already passed my physical.  In passing, I asked the recruiter how he got my name.  He said someone recommended me and if I signed, he would let me know.  The Disney movie The Boatniks about the Coast Guard had just come out and I had seen it.  I liked the movie so I signed on the dotted line.  

The recruiter asked me if I wanted to know who recommended me.  Honestly, I had forgotten that conversation.  I said sure and he said Mrs. Sheppard.  I said I didn’t know any Mrs. Sheppard.  He said sure you do – your Aunt.  I insisted I didn’t have any aunt named Sheppard.  Apparently he lived in a duplex below a Mr. and Mrs. Sheppard.  He asked if I was sure I didn’t know a Velma Sheppard.  Lightbulb!  It was Aunt Velma and Uncle Shep.  No one in my family ever called them other than Velma and Shep.  Until he said the last name, I don’t think I even knew their last name.  

Anyway, off to boot camp.  It was my first time flying and it was out of the Jackson airport.  The airport has extremely limited flight patterns.  The jet took off and immediately I was thrown back into my seat.  I’ve never flown anywhere anyplace that the flight ascent is as steep as Jackson’s airport.  I was terrified.

The Coast Guard, at the time, operated two bootcamps.  One was in Cape May, New Jersey and the other was in Alameda, California.  Although Cape May was closer to Mississippi, they sent me to Alameda.  

At the time, USCG bootcamp was considered second only to the Marine Corps in difficulty (I didn’t know that when I signed the dotted line). It was pretty physical even for someone who was in pretty good shape (I was at the time). However, it was more mental than physical – at least to me. If one person screwed up, the entire company was punished.

PE was at 5:30 am every morning, breakfast at 7 am (the common phrase in the cafeteria was “Suck it up and get out!”). We then had another round of PE, classes in seamanship, lunch, more classes in seamanship, more PE and then we headed to chow for dinner. Afterwards we either had guard duty of we had to clean rifles and barracks.

Guard duty was interesting. You had to challenge anyone (including the company commander of our company) and if no response was given you had to roust the company out of their beds.

It wasn’t uncommon for the company commander to come in at 3 in the morning and tear the barracks apart and have us put it back together before PE at 7:3o in the morning. Occasionally I had to stand guard duty at the OOD (Officer of the Deck) for the entire boot camp. It was there will freezing my butt off “guarding the clothes line” that I saw my first fog bank. I was so startled at the sight I took my life in my hands to address the OOD and report a huge cloud on the bay. He came out and looked and laughed and told me what it was. It literally was a white wall of clouds.

In boot camp, you have all types. One particular type was “the skater.” That’s the one that does everything to get out of everything. His name was Tarpley. For some reason he took a liking to me. He very cleverly volunteered to serve as the treasurer of our company. Our paychecks were deposited in the base bank but we were not allowed access to the funds. Instead, specified amounts were removed and provided to the company treasurer for things like laundry expenses, purchase of uniform parts, etc. Invariably, when a bill was paid by the treasurer, there was left over change. Tarpley carried all the cash and change in a cash box. Because of the change, he couldn’t run. In bootcamp, you never walked from point A to point B – you always ran full out. Tarpley learned about that little gem and he never had to run again on base.

Because he thought enough of me, he designated me as his co-treasurer. Since he carried company money, he always had to have an escort on base. After the first week of boot camp, I never had to run again.

When I had my original physical with the draft board, they were unimpressed with my two flat fleet. I passed the physical with flying colors. In boot camp, we were on our feet 24/7 (at least it seemed we were) and my feet started cramping as well as my shins. I went to sick bay and was seen by a “doctor” who immediately wrote down on my chart “Boot Camp Blues” and had me report for full duty.

We also had every vaccination know to humankind. I was vaccinated for yellow fever, smallpox (for the third time), and most of my childhood vaccinations again. All in one day. To ensure we had no adverse reactions the company commander had us drop and do 50 push ups so we wouldn’t have sore arms. This was also the first time I’ve ever been vaccinated by a vaccination gun – like you do with cattle.

I was stunned to realize that people enlisted in the Coast Guard without knowing how to swim. We had a huge Olympic sized pool. If they didn’t drown you on your swim test, the next thing you had to do was jump off the high dive. It wasn’t an Olympic high dive. Instead, it was designed to mimic the height of someone having to jump overboard from a ship from the bridge. It was extremely high. Just for your information, one hand goes on your nose and the other hand cups your family jewels and you cross your legs before you jump.

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During boot camp you were tested for what position would be best for the Coast Guard considering your abilities. I seemed to score the highest on Corpsman (the equivalent of medic in the army) and as a radioman. They had enough Corpsmen so I was sent to radio school at Governor’s Island, New York.

However, the new class for radio school didn’t start until October and it was only August. They put me TAD (temporary duty) on base in an old wooden barracks. It was a great time. I had access to the enlisted mens’ club with cheap beer and booze and to the base theater and PX (think Wallyworld).

Eventually, I shipped out to New York and my barracks was across the street from the radio school. The Coast Guard taught me a lot – mostly what I knew I didn’t want to do – but it did teach me to type. As a Boy Scout, I already knew Morse Code but the Coast Guard had a really interesting way of teaching you code. The sounded out the code for the letter “A” which is dit dah (. _) and you typed the letter “A” with the proper hand position on the key board. So, as you learned code, you learned to type.

However, before we were allowed to start learning code, everyone had to pass basic math and electronics. The Coast Guard had an accelerated program of one week where they took you from 2 + 2 = 4 to algebra and from atoms (and electrons) to complex electrical circuits in that week. I learned more math and physics in that one week than I did in all my years in high school and college.

I can’t remember if I’ve written about this but while in radio school the Master Chief of the entire U.S. Coast Guard was a radioman stationed at the school. In essence, he ran it. He must have felt sorry for me because he had me join him on all inspections of the barracks (I took notes and noted demerits) and he also gave me a pass to the USCG cooking school on the first floor of the radio school building. That meant for chow, all I had to do was walk across the street for breakfast, lunch and dinner while everyone had to wade through snowdrift and the gale force winds coming off Long Island Sound to eat in the dining hall.

The cooking school turned out chefs – not cooks. If you requested an egg over easy and the chef accidentally broke the yolk, he would scrape it into the garbage and start again. It was the best food I’ve ever eaten and it lasted my entire time in the radio school.

One of the best things about duty at Governors Island was the free Coast Guard ferry to Manhattan. We could go on leave or liberty in the big city. The USO would provide free broadway tickets (they were generally front row) and I got to see 1776 and Fiddler on the Roof, among others. I also got propositioned as I crossed the street at times square by one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. It must have been the Coastie uniform that did it.

I ended up third in my class and could copy Morse Code at 18 words per minute and type even faster. (Later, I was able to copy Morse Code at 30 words per minute – considered fast – and type at 100 words per minute with no mistakes.) It was time to be assigned a duty station. I was assigned to the Eight Coast Guard District out of New Orleans. I had to appear at New Orleans to get my actual assignment. When I arrived, I was told I was to be assigned to the Coast Guard Cutter Acushnet in Gulfport, Mississippi. The Acushnet was an old rust bucket from 1942. I was told that since I was third in my class I was allowed to chose where I would go in the Eight district. The only other open berth was the Coast Guard Cutter Reliance stationed at Corpus Christi, Texas. I didn’t want Gulfport nor the rust bucket so I insisted I be assigned to the Reliance. Little did I know that the Acushnet was scheduled for decommission and the radiomen would be assigned duty at the radio station in New Orleans. I apparently was a little too full of myself and the officer in charge of personnel sent me to the “hell hole” of a ship in Corpus as punishment.

I arrived for duty after midnight when someone picked me up at the Corpus airport and drove me to the ship. I was logged in at the OOD shack and taken down winding, darkened passage ways to a bunk that I had to make up in the dark. I finally got to sleep around 2 am and at 5 am awoke to a general quarters alarm. I had no idea where I was, what I was supposed to do, what my duty station was during general quarters – in other words – lost. It was a fire in the galley. That was my welcome to the Reliance, my home-away-from-home for the next 18 months.

Stay tuned!