Sybil Nichols

When we were kids Sybil lived three doors down from us on Manget Street.   I saw her with friends at John-Boys.  I saw her one other time since we have been grown at Fuddrocker's Hamburgers.

I recognized her, she was eating with several female friends.  So, I had to go over and say hello.

She probably thought, "How embarrassing!"

Rebel Dummy and By the Tracks

A Rebel Dummy hanging out at the history museum    Business as usual.

This has not always been a herb shop.  It has been many things through the years.  Once in my teen years it was a Marietta taxi headquarters.    One time it was pouring rain and probably before I had my driving license, stepped in to get a taxi home after a movie.  To my surprise my old blind friend Charlie was the radio dispatcher.  Charlie and his sister  lived on Glover Street in our neighborhood.  As a preteen I used to visit them and sat in the kitchen and let Charlie tell me about my daddy and uncles and all the mischief and hell raising them did.  I wish I retained what all the told me.  

From the back porch there was a clothes line going to their outhouse.  The clothes line  served a duel purpose: to hang clothes and for Charlie to hold on to and guide him to the outhouse. 

Melissa the clown

We call Melissa Melissa Junior because her mother is also Melissa.  This photo was taken at my oldest son’s 5^th birthday about 1980.    I think she is probably in her 50s now, with a husband and three sons.  I think two of the sons are in college now,  and the youngest is a star in high school.   And Melissa Junior is high ranking educator herself.

They are the American Dream, big nice house, golf, chess champions, sports,  and compulsive religious kind of people.

Me and Johnny

Johnny and I have known each other since we were preteenagers.  I forgot when I first met him, we went to different grammar schools, probably when I delivered his parents newspaper when I was 14.

Johnny lives in Panama City.  After his divorce and retirement he bought him a condo.  He comes to town now and then to see his kids and old friends.  I don't think he as been here recently.  On this visit we visited old haunts we used to hang out at.

Sam Carsley and Me

This was taken December 9, 1967.  Photographer Robert Crow took our picture synchronizing our watches to make sure we got to the church on time for my wedding.  Actually the wedding place was just a room or two away.

Sam and I knew each other literally all but the first seven months of his life.  We both were babies in the Clay Home.  His father Norman Carsley  in the Navy in WWII lost his life when a suicide Japanese plane crashed into his part of the ship.

Through the years we talked via phone few times a week.  Politically we disagreed, but the arts we had the same taste, we were crazy about EC comics, MAD comics and its artists, music, history, and photography.  Sam was an expert photographer.  Sam graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in physics engineering.  He became a top programmer in Cobalt, just before there was no more use in the computer world for Colbalt.

About six years after Anna was married our son Rocky was born which then we needed  a bigger house.  We had Sam over for dinner one evening and told him we planned on selling and getting a bigger house.  Sam bought it!

After that Sam married for the third time.  His wife Lita loved to work in the yard and Sam didn’t, so they got along fine.

But there was Sam’s mother Hazel Baldwin Carsley.  Hazel came down with Alzheimer’s disease.  Which Sam got her put in a nursing home and visited her daily.

Years after that he realized he was getting Alzheimer’s symptoms.  He did not want Lita to go through what he went through, or even himself for that matter.  On April’s Fool Day  he took his life with a bullet.  He shot himself in the chest, muffling the sound with a pillow, so he would not disturb Lita.

Little Officer Mac

This is my friend and ex-coworker Mac.  This was taken July 4th,  2004.  We are both retired .  I ran into him at the post office the other day (almost 14 years later) and he looks exactly the same. 

Mac has his eccentric ways.  One time someone brought donuts in from Duncan Donuts.  She was  not sure what to get, so she one bought one of every flavor.  Mac could not decide which one he wanted, so he took a bite out of each one…. Which stirred everybody up.

Mac is a highly decorated military officer.  He was an officer involved in the capture of Panama’s Noreiga.

He kept up his status in the reserves, which he was an officer, of course.  Once I was on break in the break room and a vending machine man was there filling the machines with goodies.  Mac walked by the door and recognized the vender.  He, at the time, was in his reserve unit.  Mac walked in and greeted the guy, and the guy almost snapped to attention.  He addressed Mac as “sir”. And was carried away with the fact he got a one on one with a hero and an officer in his unit..

Then another “Mac” , our supervisor walked by the door and saw Mac talking to the vending machine man.  Mac ruefully told Little Officer Mac he was on the clock, get back to work.

I think that was a downer for worker/officer Mac’s underling.

Herman's Retirement Ceremony

Marilyn and Herman

Cliff, Herman, and Marilyn

Cli

Ex-Poster Garth Cain, Herman, Marilyn, and Station Manager

Schuler, Jackie, and Bill

Marie and Garth

Marie

Sandy and Hy

Stan

Tony and Roy

Bridgette

Bridgett was a long time friend.  She and Anna were co-workers for many years.   She was always busy doing something creative, being a volunteer,  or busy helping a friend.  She was almost hyper.  She was something of a mathematical genius too.  Bridgett was born in Germany, in the early 1940s, needless to say a Swastika is on her birth certificate.  She also did her math calculating aloud in Deutsche.

In the mid 70s  Anna and I went to Kennesaw Junior College.  Also, the same time Bridgette and her husband Bill went to the same classes.  Bill and I couldn't keep our mind on taking notes during  lectures but thankfully Anna and Bridgette did. 
Bill died which left Bridgette to defend for herself.  She did very well.

Until one day she was at her doctor's office and the doctor picked up that something was wrong, she was making too many wrong statements.

She never got to return to see her home.
She had Alzheimer's.

They first put her in Emory Hospital for a study and then in a memory unit in a nursing home in Woodstock.

We visited her about five or six times at the nursing home.  The first couple of visits she told us it was all a big mistake, now she needed us to carry her back home.   It was heart breaking to tell her no.

Then, as time went on, she wasn't sure who we were.  Then she didn't know us at all.  We were strangers.

And our last visit she was docile.  She just sit and smiled and said, "OK" to everything we said.  I think she may have forgot her English, or any language.

And she died, not knowing a thing about herself, family, friends, or anything.

Janna's Wedding Party

July 19 2003

We have known Jana since the day she was born.  In fact, she is partially named after Anna.

Jerry Chastain

Larry Southern, Jr

Larry Southern, Sr

Linda Bates Southern

Roxy West

Sue West ? (mother of bride)

Ed West (father of bride) and Judy

A Thanksgiving Long Long Ago

Back in BN (before Navy) there is one Thanksgiving I don't think I will ever forget.

One Thanksgiving in the very wee hours a bunch of us went to the outskirts of  White, Georgia, to hunt.  We had a plan.  We remembered so many times of driving on deserted roads and coming across a rabbit in the headlights and they just froze from a moment before they hopped off.  Our plan was for two of us to ride on the fenders with shotgun in hand ready for those headlight-frozen rabbits in mind.  Luckily we came across none.

After a while we headed back to Marietta.  I think we were driving through downtown White and we had a flat tire.  I think it was downtown because there was a service station, a store, and maybe a couple of brick buildings.

We did not have a spare tire, which happened often back then.  It seemed like after the first flat we would have learned to carry a spare.  But we didn't.

It was dark.  There was nothing we could do until daylight.  We sat in the car and do what young men do, talk and cut farts.

After an hour or so the daylight slowly merged in.  We were on the side of the road beside a service station and across the street up a little slope was a neat little country home. 

We could see up behind the country home, up the slope about 40 feet or so was an outhouse.  Larry said, "Look!"  Pointing at the outhouse.

Larry loved to take dumps in outhouses.  He said he was going to go use it.  We tried to talk him out of it but he insisted.  He walked up by the house and proceeded up the slope to the outhouse, opened the door and went in and shut the door.

We were talking and I saw that a matronly lady was walking up the hill in her robe with a magazine in her hand.  I punched my friends to look and we all started giggling.

She opened the door and dropped her magazine.  Larry flung himself out of the outhouse, like a force kicked him out.  When Larry got embarrassed he would always scratch the bridge of his nose or his forehead to cover up his face.  As he bounded out, almost hitting her he was scraching his forehead with one hand and trying to pull his pants up with the other.

And we were down on the highway having fits of laughter.

It was his car.  He jumped into the car and we drove away with the flat flapping to reminding us that we were still had a flat tire.

Just a city block or so down the road was another service station.  We figured out the ownder lived in a house behind the station.  We knocked on his door and he had a used tire he could sell us for a price.  Between us, we fell about $2 short.  The man took it and put on the used tire.

We left and on down the road, near the 41 Highway we ran out of gas.  It is useless to try to find a gas station with no money.

We decided I would hitchhike to my home, get my car, drive over to Larry's house and get some money from his secret hiding place.  He said he parents were out of town for Thanksgiving.   

When I got to my house my mother was preparing dinner and my uncle and aunt Tom and Mary Jo Petty had come for Thanksgiving Dinner.  It was the last time I saw Tom alive.  They tried to get me to stay but I had things to do and I didn't want to bore them with the details.  I don't they would understand and try to help which would mess up their plans.

I got Larry's secret money and headed back up the 41.  As I was going through Cartersville heading north I saw my cluster of friends walking on the south lanes with their thumbs out.

I blew my horn so they would quit hitchiking and turned around to go south at the next redlight.

What if they had caught a ride and how far would I go looking for them.  It was just a matter of good timing and maybe divine intervention, I do beleive.
Or, possibly it is true that God looks out for fools and drunks.

Billy & Jimmy

This is William H. Bonner (1859 - 1881) as a young man.  There are no pictures of William as an old man because he never got to be old.  He was known better as "Billy the Kid".

He was killed as a young man by lawman Pat Garrett.

I wonder what Billy would have been like if he lived in our age and in Marietta.  In other words, if he was a friend in our formative years:  Would he turn garbage cans over with on the way home from Boy Scout meeting?  Would he hide in the woods with and hollow scary sounds to the teacher in a classroom who he knew would freak out?  Would he "roll" the opposing high school's marching band during half time of a football game so that all the marching musicians would be tangled up in steams of toilet paper?  Would he learn to learn to sign his father's name and forge his name to reports sent from his teacher to his dad?  There are much more but I'm not sure about the statue of limitatons on some of it, even if the culprit is dead.  You see, we had a friend named Jimmy Pat who did all those things, but he died too.  Jimmy Pat did not die of unnatural causes though, he died of heart failure when bending over to pick up his lap dog.

Small World, again.

We went to a concert last night on the Marietta Square.  We were to meet a friend.  The friend arrived before we did and saved two more places beside her for us.

Before we arrived another couple wanted those two places and our friend would not let them sit.  I do not know what words were exchanged, but I think they were heated.  The two people that wanted the seats sat over to the side.

We arrived and the man of the two that wanted our places immediately recognized me.  We worked together for years at the Marietta Post Office.   He told me retired in 2009.  Small world.