Category Archives: Memoirs

You get old. You have memories. Maybe you get to keep them. Maybe…what was I talking about again?

The day I broke down on the floor of the dressing room after the state championship game

In Atlanta in the late 1960s, soccer was not exactly popular.  Neither were the people who played it.

I take that back.  The soccer players at North Springs, my old high school, did all right socially, but not solely because we played a particular sport as happened with the football and basketball players.  We labored in anonymity as far as our sport was concerned, playing in empty stadiums through the winter when we wouldn’t compete for space and players with the football team.  We surely would not have competed for fans in any case.

But soccer was trying to make its entrance into America in general and to Atlanta in particular, and I loved it.  The North American Soccer League started a professional league in 1967, and the Atlanta Chiefs had imported marquee players from all over the world.  Pelé had come to conduct a national tour with his Brazilian team Santos, and a lot of momentum seemed to be forming behind the growth of soccer at the time.

My high school started a soccer team during 1965-66, my freshman year.  We were first public high school in Georgia to do so.  Before that, soccer had been the province of the private schools, the Westminsters and Lovetts of the blessed Atlanta upper classes.  They beat us badly in our early days.  Within a year or two, however, we were started beating them on a regular basis.  More public schools were starting teams, so the Georgia High School Association began holding state championships in soccer.

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The day we painted George Wallace’s campaign billboard

In 1968, my junior year in high school, George Wallace took part in the presidential election as a third-party candidate.  He took several southern states in that election, and living in Atlanta at the time, one saw his campaign posters all over town.  This sort of inflamed my nascent political passions and those of my friends.

We were a pretty diverse group, but you wouldn’t know it to look at us–we certainly were not diverse in terms of race or class; likewise, we all were galvanized and focused on the same sort of politics and current events of that year–the year of the Tet Offensive and the anti-war protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; the year of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Through the outward turmoil of that year, we were going through our own inward turmoil, knowing that we would graduate the following year with the draft taking more and more of our acquaintances as they graduated ahead of us.  As focused as we were on the Vietnam War, we also saw the civil rights movement ongoing all around us.  1968 was a year of protest of many kinds worldwide, and a year of strong reaction to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. As one striking example, Georgia elected segregationist Lester Maddox governor the year before.

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The day I baffled the bully

One of the many elementary schools I attended was populated with some real special characters.  This was an Atlanta elementary school, and I was there for sixth and seventh grades, right before going to high school the way we did in those days.

We had our “early maturing” types who developed secondary sex characteristics–and primary sex interests–way before the rest of us.  They would “party” and “make out,” whatever that actually meant, in the basements of unsupervised homes in the afternoons.  We also had our little boys and girls who just needed some time to catch up.  One kid in our class, however, had already had quite enough time to catch up, to forge ahead, actually, except he hadn’t, academically anyway.  He was about two years older than the rest of us, and a real dull tool.

He didn’t seem quite as developmentally disabled as his lack of progress in school would lead one to believe.  A good part of his problem seemed to come from his lack of cooperation with the educational process.  He knew what everybody wanted him to do.  He just didn’t feel like doing it most of the time.

Another of our number was a great George to his Lennie.  Well, I say, “great.”  He was not great in the sense of taking care of him as George did Lennie in Of Mice and Men, but great in the sense of at least hanging out with him.  The rest of us didn’t have much to do with him, really.  This George–I think his name was Jimmy, actually–was especially good at bending the big guy to his will.

One day Jimmy decided it would be fun to get the big guy whipped up and angry at me.  As the school day was ending, Jimmy apparently told him some lies about something I had supposedly said or done, and they were both waiting for me when I came out, along with a bunch of other kids who were there to watch the show.

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The day I punched Buck Blalock in the stomach

Seventh grade isn’t tough for everybody–just the geeks.  Of course, most seventh graders are geeks, at least intermittently.  I was one of the geeks more often than I would have liked, so I should know.

Seventh grade was tough as hell for me.  It was tougher for Buck Blalock.  He was a big, doughy kid in my class, way too mature and sensitive to live in the world with the rest of us on the island–the Lord of the Flies island we all inhabited back then.

He was “Piggy,” all right, and I might have been Ralph or Simon and been his friend, but it seems I didn’t have the nuts for it.  I had just moved back to Atlanta the year before, and I didn’t want to be “the new kid” forever.  A lot didn’t depend on what I wanted, though, and that became clearer and clearer as time went along.  Several of the boys were just as happy to keep me “the new kid” forever if they could manage it.

So, here I was, kinda big and doughy and sensitive myself, and the teachers must have thought Buck and I were a match made in Heaven.  They kept arranging for us to be partners in this and buddies in that.  Maybe that plan was working out fine for Buck, but I started looking down the road, and I didn’t see any promising forks.  It wasn’t that I disliked Buck and liked the other boys–Buck was fine, and some of the other boys were jerks of extravagant proportions.  It’s just that the choice, at least in my mind, became a matter of throwing in with Buck and being a social outcast for life, or putting up with the annoyances of trying to be “one of the guys.”  Even a seventh grader can do a simple deduction like that, and hey, some of the guys were all right.  Some of the girls, too, but I could see that wouldn’t be happening for any friend of Buck’s.

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The day I took two doves that all the others had missed

Just about the only pleasant activity I got to engage in with my Dad growing up was hunting.  One should keep in mind that this was the 1950s and 60s, and people had not developed some of the attitudes about hunting they have today.  The game was there for the taking in those days, too.  In this simpler time, hunting was an activity imbued with tradition, and it provided a good way for the men of the house to “get out from underfoot” and have some fun together.  We ate everything we killed, too, and those feasts were culinary high points to be treasured.

My Dad always was in a good mood on these occasions–something that could not be said on a general basis.  We usually went with a gang of guys from his work.  Sometimes we’d get up really early and drive to south Georgia in November to hunt quail.  Other times we’d just head out to some rural area around Atlanta for some September afternoon dove hunting.

I was typically the only boy along.  I was left to infer that this might be because my Dad wanted to spend time with me.  I also inferred that I was little enough trouble to have along.  Of course, even at an early age I also inferred that he didn’t want to spend time with only me, but OK, I could deal with that.  In an odd way, his reticence worked to my advantage.  While I never got to hear him say he liked spending time with me, I never had to hear him say he wasn’t interested in spending time with me alone.

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The day the crazy kid brought a knife into our yard

Sometimes people have the luck to be in just the right frame of mind when a crisis arises.  OK, bad luck brings the crisis, but the right frame of mind can keep a disaster from happening, from becoming more than a momentary disturbance on a soft summer day.

Our Atlanta neighborhood was a quiet one most of the time, and in those days, the early sixties, parents could send kids outside to play without much of a second thought.  I was in about the sixth or seventh grade, the only boy in a family of four, and the oldest.  On this day, my sisters and I were out under the oaks in front of the house, just passing the time with who-knows-what kind of aimless activity.  Down the street, we could see one of the neighbor boys coming our way with more purpose in his bearing than he usually showed.

We actually didn’t see this boy out all that much.  He had some sort of mental illness that made him behave oddly, setting fires in the storm sewers and acting erratically from time to time.  Mostly his parents kept him at home, but I guess they felt sorry for him sometimes, or just needed a rest from him.  Either way, they let him out to roam the neighborhood once in a while, and it was usually a noteworthy occurrence.

I remember one time, during a neighborhood rock fight, he ran across 75 feet of open ground carrying a huge rock in his hands.  He didn’t dodge the rocks we threw at him; if they hit him, they hit him; he didn’t even flinch.  As he got closer, I hunkered down in the ditch, hoping he wouldn’t see me.  Hunkering down turned out to be a big mistake.  He found me in the ditch and dropped the rock on my head.  That’s the kind of thing this kid would do.

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The day Randy’s mother asked a key question

My friend Randy was a really nice kid and a natural leader–smart, focused, creative, bold, able, and he really knew how to present himself in a pleasing manner, whether to child or adult.  I was lucky to have known him, to be his neighbor, to be his friend.

As it turned out, he was a testament to the fact that sometimes the apple drops really, really far from the tree, and often it’s a good thing it does.  His parents were clueless, self-involved, mean-spirited, and, luckily for me, distant.  He was no more like them than he was like any random pair of adults you might pick out of a line-up.

Being his friend, I had occasion to go to his house from time to time.  I mean, he came to mine a couple of times a week.  When he’d come over, he’d be so ingratiating, so grateful for any little kindness shown to him.  My Mom thought he was the greatest kid ever.  And he was.

But sometimes he and I would have to go to his house.  He’d get an idea for something he wanted to do, remember something he needed at home to make it happen, and that was that; no matter what he had to deal with once he got there, he’d go.  It was real simple for him on that level.

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The day Randy Robinson’s dog was killed by a car

Mutts are just the best, aren’t they?  That has been my experience, anyway.  One of the better ones I’ve known used to follow my group of childhood friends on the fishing expeditions we took all around our homes on what was then the outskirts of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

He was a small dog, mostly white with three or four black spots covering maybe a third of his body.  He hardly ever barked, but he was always alert, always calmly watchful–well, except for that one day when his trusting obedience led to his death crossing a wide-open rural road.

We usually avoided the roads and took the overland route everywhere we went.  When we did walk along the roads, the noise and heat made it a big chore.  We had a much better time walking along creeks and fence lines that always seemed to lead somewhere interesting.

This particular day we did the unusual and made our way along a rural road, single file, wandering along.  We crossed the road at one point, the dog remaining on the far side, sniffing at something in the ditch.  My friend Randy called him just before he realized a car was heading toward us at high speed, something people did all the time on the straight, flat roads of Oklahoma.

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The day I looked up from baseball to find my teacher’s hospital room

This would have happened in the late 1950s, just after my fifth grade year at Andrew Carnegie Elementary School, in Tulsa, Oklahoma .  I loved it there–the school, my friends, the town, the ranches surrounding our suburban subdivision–it was just the ideal place for a boy to grow up.

Carnegie was a “pilot school,” one set up to try out new educational initiatives, and most of them really worked for the students there.  For example, from the second grade on, we changed classes.  The classes of children stayed together throughout the day, but we moved from room to room and from teacher to teacher.  The advantage to us was that when we were in, say, Science class, we had a Science teacher, not some nice lady who really wished she understood Science a little better.  The Art teacher, for example, was actually able to get me to produce some attractive works–something that never happened before or since–just by providing the materials and environment that put success within the students’ grasp.  It still is a great school, apparently–all these years later.

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The day I ice skated on my front yard

Oklahoma has freakish weather.  It is known for being in Tornado Alley, but you don’t have to live through a tornado to experience some weather-related excitement there.  I have seen a hole the size of a Volkswagen blown in a roof by lightning.  I have seen a summer storm fill the gutters in a minute, all the way to the top with warm, chocolatey water.  I have seen the extremes of the continental climate from a first-hand vantage, so I know how extreme it can get.  Weather like that adds interest to the life of a boy not yet old enough to lose his sense of wonder.

One three-day span stands out in my memory as perhaps the strangest.  It was early winter, a time of great variability anyway, but this particular period impressed me.  The first day brought about 6 inches of snow, falling steadily out of the steely skies all day and into the night.  The next day dawned cold, but the sun came out at mid-day, and the temperature climbed into the seventies.  The skies darkened in the late afternoon as huge, anvil-topped thunderheads built in the west.  Instead of rain, though, we got pea-sized hail which pelted into the top layer of snow cover.  Soon thereafter, as the sun descended, the clouds swept by, and the sky cleared as the temperature started to drop.  It went into the teens that night, and the next day dawned bright and clear.  Looking out the window, the hail embedded in the snow sparkled and glistened, fracturing the light into millions of tiny spectra, some complete, some partial.  Roy G. Biv would have been proud of most of them.

Walking outside, it became clear that this crust of ice and snow was very strong.  My sister and I didn’t break through it, even when we jumped up and down.  I think it must have been my mother who suggested we try to ice skate on the icy crust.  Whoever it was, the idea was genius.  We spent most of the morning gliding back and forth on our front yard until the sun softened the snow, and the ice skating was over.

I have told this story a few times in my life, but I stopped telling it because I became aware over time that almost no one ever believed it.  When my parents moved us from Oklahoma, they moved us away from the only audience that would understand and appreciate a story like that.