Pictured above is my late cousin’s band, Captain Salt And The Lonely Beatnik Band. They had a steady gig as the house band for the Hip Herford Coffee House in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1957. Junior Parker, my cousin, is the hip dude in the striped shirt. No one could play a stringed instrument, so everyone had a set of bongos. When a guest, such as Brother Dave Gardner, was on stage, the boys would provide a soft, cool beat, adding an aura of hipness to the poet’s reading. The band released a greatest hits album in 1958 that was a local hit within a four-block area. A young visitor from England, on vacation with his aunt, visited the coffee house, heard the band, and dug their stuff. It’s rumored he went back to England and formed his own band called the “Quarrymen,” and years later paid homage to the boys with a groundbreaking album, Sargent Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. I guess you can say my cousin had “X-Ray Eyes and knew his groceries. ” Hit me, man, I’m ice cold.
born to be wild
I wasn’t satisfied with my ordinary peddle car; I craved excitement and wind in my flat-top haircut: Speed was my need. My neighbor, Mr. Mister, our local mentor, and mad scientist, helped me install a Briggs & Stratton 5 HP lawn mower motor in my Western Auto peddle car. We tested my machine on the runway at Carswell Air Force Base, and it reached a speed of 70 MPH. I was a speed demon… ready for Thunder Road, figure 8 stock car races, quarter-mile drags, cruising Berry Street, racing teenagers between traffic lights, which is what I did one Saturday night when my parents thought I was asleep and wound up in a jail cell after the fuzz arrested me and confiscated my hot rod.
Delinquent women on motorcycles
“The Shangri-La’s” motorcycle gang, Fort Worth, Texas, 1957. My late cousin, Marlene Brando, right front, on the bad-ass Harley, was the Leader Of The Pack.
Warning to readers! This is a Tall Texas tale. Some of the folks are real, but most are not. Fort Worth, Texas, Pez Candy, and the polio epidemic of the 1950s are. i was there.
Pictured above is my late cousin, Beverly Hills, of Fort Worth, Texas. Let me tell you a legendary tall tale about her father, a renowned infectious disease doctor at JPS Hospital. He came up with a rather unconventional idea for administering the new Polio Vaccine. Instead of using a giant needle, he thought, “Why not load up a Pez pellet with the vaccine and shoot it into the kid’s mouth? No needle, no trauma, no chasing down running kids, just a minty Pez Candy shot down the throat with a cute little Flash Gordon Ray-Gun dispenser.” What could possibly go wrong?
The hospital installed a fancy display at Leonard Brothers Department Store, and Beverly, with no license to administer anything stronger than her cats kibbles, was designated to give the trusting kiddos their Polio Vaccine with the Ray-Gun Pez Gun. The word spread like wildfire, and soon, the line snaked around the block as moms and kids showed up to beat the dreaded Iron Lung by ingesting a tiny mint. Things got a little wild – police had to step in to control the crowd, and they even started serving hot dogs and cokes to calm down the hungry mob. It was quite the scene – July heat, a frenzied crowd, and the perfect conditions for the spread of Polio. The things people will do for a medical minty treat!
Beverly was overwhelmed, having shot Polio Pez mints down the throats of a thousand or more kids by noon, and supplies were exhausted. Her father’s duffus assistant, overwhelmed by the mob scene, retrieved what he thought were more vaccine pellets from a store room but instead picked refills of “Mother Little Helper Hormone and Hot Flash Lozenges.” They were packed in a similar non-descript box as the Pez Pellets and exactly the same size, a simple mistake made in the heat of battle. Beverly and a nurse vaccinated another thousand kids by afternoon and were done. When loading the car to head home, her father, Doctor Hill, discovered the real Pez vaccine in the trunk of his car. An inspection revealed the terrible mistake, but it was too late, and he had no way to contact the families of the children who had received the hormone therapy lozenges. Fearing fatal retribution, he decided to keep mum and let nature take its course. Better living through pharma did just that.
Two weeks went by, and freaked-out mothers were bringing their kids to hospitals all over town. Eight-year-old girls were growing boobies, wearing makeup, smoking cigarettes, and asking for a martini in the afternoon. Young boys were reading Hollywood Movie Star Magazines, dressing their dogs in doll clothing, painting their fingernails, shaving their still hairless legs, and began wearing their mother’s peddle pusher pants and mid-drift blouses. The town had gone street-rat crazy-town. Dr. Hill fessed up, suffered the consequences, and treated the affected kids with the appropriate drugs to reverse the changes. It seems that 1957 Fort Worth, Texas, was the forerunner for what is going on now. Who would have thought it was all because of a Pez Candy.
In Remembrance is not about a last tribute to a dead guy; for me, it’s about remembering, while I can, bits and pieces of my colorful childhood.
I was nine years old and thought of nothing but baseball, cartoons, and fireworks. I won’t say my childhood was purified and biblically cleansed; my neighborhood pals and I did get into our share of trouble, resulting in no less than three or four butt-busting per day: my poor mother’s spanking arm was toast by noon. We did nothing bad, just the usual little kid stuff: blowing up mailboxes with Cherry Bombs, setting garages on fire, and fighting the “hard guys” across the tracks. It was the 1950s, and we were the first generation of baby boomers unleashed on our suburban-dwelling families.
Our hijinx had reached a crescendo, and the mothers in the neighborhood were plumb worn down from our growing delinquency. Threats of being sent for a stint at The Dope Farm, a boy’s ranch for unruly boys, had lost their punch: we needed an intervention, and fast.
My neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Mister, retired Air Force officers and native Californians, were consulted over cocktails and cigarettes in their luscious backyard one summer evening. A few of the mothers and fathers had one too many Hollywood Dirty Martinis and made an early exit from the pow-wow, leaving my folks, a few buzzed moms, and Skippers’ parents to ask for help. The Misters were our heroes, mentors, and dream parents. We would have gladly traded ours for their parental guidance. Mrs. Mister was the neighborhood “it girl,” and all the fathers had the “Hubba Hubba’s” for her: she was an exact pod person for Jayne Mansfield.
Mrs. Mister, after a few double Martini’s, said she knew a doctor who worked miracles with hypnosis. He had convinced Mr. Mister to quit smoking and hypnotized her Poodles, Fred, and Ginger when Mr. Mister had made them street rat crazy after sending them into the stratosphere on his homemade rocket and Doganaut capsule. The dogs were a wreck until Doctor VanDyke got hold of them. She felt the doctor could take some of the piss and vinegar out of us boys and a few of the poor girls that had joined our coterie of mayhem. The plan was hatched.
The Misters gave a backyard cookout, which was the cover for the intervention. Doctor VanDyke set up his office in the Mister’s TV room, and each of us kids was escorted to the Doctor by a parent. Skipper was first to go down, then Georgie, Cheryl, Rhonda, Bean, Frankie, Billy Roy, Stewart, Stevie, and I batted clean-up.
The old guy was covered in creepiness. Bald head, a sharp devil goatee, horned-rim glasses, and a bowtie. My mother sat in the corner as the doctor held a little pendent in front of me, giving instructions to watch the shiny object, and I was getting sleepy. I gave in: Doctor Creepy put me under. It was a nice nap, and I was refreshed and a bit goofy when I joined my pals in the backyard, but something was off, not just with me but with all of us.
Rhonda and Cheryl announced they were no longer friends with us and were quitting the baseball team so they could go back to playing with doll babies. Skipper wouldn’t drink his Kool-Aid; said it tasted like cat turds. Georgie was whimpering and crying like a baby and sucking his thumb, Stevie got all Romeo’d up and tried to plant a kiss on Rhonda, and she whacked him on his head with a Coke bottle, causing blood to run down his face, and I had this sudden urge to pee, which I did without embarrassment, whipping it out in front of all the guests. My poor mother was mortified. Doctor VanDyke had flicked the wrong switches in our young brains; we were now worse than before. The party abruptly ended.
After a week of house arrest, most of us were back to our normal bad behavior. Mrs. Mister learned that Doctor VanDyke was not a real doctor but had learned hypnosis from a mail-order course advertised in the back of the Farmers Almanac. He was a huckster.
The gang went back to our routine, baseball, cartoons, and fireworks. The two girls rejoined the team and threw away the doll babies and dresses. I felt pretty darn good, except I couldn’t bring myself to touch plastic Tupperware; it was like a live Rattlesnake in our kitchen. The old standby staple of every mother’s kitchen scared the liver out of me. It still does.
Toys in the 1950s, you gotta love them. The one pictured above, the machine gun that shoots wooden bullets, is a weapon I could never get my paws on. I did manage a Fanner 50 western pistol and a Colt snub-nose version that shot plastic bullets, but nothing like a machine gun. That would have been the ultimate weapon for our neighborhood battles against each other and “the hard guys” across the railroad tracks. All of these potentially lethal weapons were advertised in comic books. Did any responsible adult ever check these ads before the book was printed? Hard wooden bullets mowing down kids; talk about shooting an eye out or death. These weren’t ads dreamed up by New York Mad Men, but ones from back alley shops that made money off the gullibility of children, me included. My buddy Georgie ordered a so-called real hand grenade from the back page of a Richie Rich comic. A month later, he got a real steel WW2 surplus hand grenade in the mail. It wasn’t live with explosives, but damn, it gave his parents a shock. His father had thrown more than a few of them when he fought at Guadalcanal.
I ordered the Super Man X-Ray glasses from my Super Man comic book. The first pair I ordered for $1.49 called “Magic X-Ray Glasses,” got me into trouble. I told two girls from my neighborhood baseball team that I could see their bones and guts, even though I couldn’t see a thing. They ended up giving me a beating with their Hula Hoops! Who knew a Hula Hoop could hurt so much? I had the word WHAMMO imprinted on my back for a week. My mother dispensed the fake glasses to the garbage can in the alley and saved me from further assaults. Most everything bad that got me in trouble wound up in those alley garbage cans.
Faster Than A Speeding….
Yep, I had to have one, so for Christmas, mom coughed it up. It was a cheesy-looking costume, not much better than cheap pajamas. My Aunt Norma, a seamstress extraordinaire, added tufts of foam and cotton padding to give the appearance of super muscles. She made gold material covers for my PF Flyers and made a new cape. I was hot stuff. Naturally, all my buddies assumed this suit would enable me to leap tall buildings in a single bound, fly faster than a speeding bullet, and all that super stuff. I actually believed I could, so I climbed to the second-story roof of our house, stood on the roof line, cape blowing in the wind, and stared at my buddies thirty feet down in the backyard, awaiting my takeoff. Down the roof, I ran and launched off the edge into the spring air. I landed on top of two of my friends, which saved me from injury. Mother, who saw the whole performance immediately busted my butt with a Tupperware container while dragging me into the house. The suit was in the alley garbage can the next morning. I never flew again.
Back in the 1950s, before the internet and home shopping networks, us kids were convinced that anything sold in a comic book had to be the real deal. Tiny Sea Monkeys, X-Ray Specs, Space-Ray-Guns, Real Hand Grenades, and yes, like the one above, a real Rocket Ship. What a gullible bunch of schmucks we were.
It took me nearly a year to gather and cash in enough soft drink bottles to purchase my very own rocket ship. I was just a quarter short, and fortunately, my grandfather came to my rescue; he knew where I lived! I was beyond thrilled, trembling with excitement like a dog trying to pass a peach pit, as I sent the order form by mail. In six weeks, my ticket to Mars would be in my hands: a bona fide rocket ship complete with illuminated controls, atomic fuel, a disintegrator ray gun, and space for a buddy and me. When I proudly showed the advertisement to my neighborhood scientist and mentor, Mr. Mister, he tactfully agreed to help me assemble the contraption upon its arrival, not wanting to burst my small bubble. According to my mother’s calculations, my rocket ship should arrive just after Thanksgiving but before Christmas, allowing Mr. Mister to assist me in assembling my celestial chariot. My nights were filled with restless anticipation, I developed a rash, and my appetite vanished; I was a jittery, nervous wreck of a kid.
A week after stuffing my face with turkey, the postman dropped off a ginormous flat box at our doorstep. The moment of truth had arrived. With my mom’s assistance, we lugged the package into our living room, and I eagerly began unpacking my “spaceship.” Instead of finding an epic disintegrator gun or an atomic fuel cell, I only uncovered a pile of flat cardboard, a string of Christmas lights, and two measly C batteries. Oh, and to top it off, the instructions were in Japanese. Talk about a recipe for a miniature meltdown! In my time of need, my mother summoned Mr. Mister from next door. After assessing the comical catastrophe, he instructed me to head over to his place for some cookies with Mrs. Mister while he worked his magic on assembling the rocket ship. Now that’s what I call outsourcing! What a guy! All of us boys wanted to be like Mr. Mister.
Two hours later, I returned home to be greeted by the sight of a rocket ship chilling in the middle of our living room. It was a real looker, decked out in red, white, and silver, all prepped for a space adventure. So, I hopped in, ready to blast off into the great unknown. I couldn’t locate the blastoff switch. I turned to Mr. Mister for some wisdom, and what does he say? “Looks like they forgot to send the engine with the ship. Let’s see if we can piece one together out of spare aircraft parts I have in my garage.” Yeah, right. We both knew it was BS. As I climbed out of the rocket, I accidentally fell backward into the ship. We tried patching it up with tape, but nope, it was toast. There I stood in the dim alley, staring at the crumpled remains of my dream rocket ship to Mars. The things we do for adventure!
“In Remembrance.” How many times have you rolled your eyes at that phrase? Obituaries, Eulogies, sympathy cards, and Life Celebrations all bring it to mind, but to me, it feels like a worn-out catchphrase from the past. Not the most fitting expression, but it has that eye-roll-inducing charm. My grandparents, bless their hearts, were professional funeral attendees. They never missed a chance to show up for the bereavement and raid the potluck table – family, friends, neighbors, and even strangers. Their dedication to mourning and food was truly unmatched. Some months, my grandmother didn’t cook a meal; they lived on leftovers from the family gatherings after the service. Ham, roast beef, tater salad, rolls, they ate better than anyone in the family. Death is final, but it comes with good food.
I’ve taken that old phrase, “In Remembrance,” and revamped it to perfectly encapsulate my childhood adventures. It has nothing to do with shuffling off this mortal coil, pushing up daisies, biting the dust, buying the farm, ashes to ashes, or any other worldly farewells. It’s all about the good ol’ days, mischief managed, butt whooping, and the epic tales of my early youth. I’m an old guy now, so time is of the essence, and my keyboard is hot. My punch card could run out at any time, anywhere.
There will be a flurry of “In Remembrances” hitting my blog. I figure a small novella broken into multiple chapters will about do it. I will, because of being blessed with a crazy-assed family, be using them as fodder and foils in many of the recounts. To protect the guilty, I will change some names because a few of them are still among us.
My direct family, Mom and Dad, are floating around in the clouds now, so what I write about them will be respectful and kind, even though my dear Mother whipped my little kid’s bony rear thousands of times with everything from Tupperware to a Mimosa Tree switch. My neighborhood pals and, of course, my mentors, Mr. and Mrs. Mister, played a large part in my development into what I am today. According to my wife, Momo, I should get into a time machine, return, and start it all over. I’ll give H.G. Wells a ring.
I’m ready for the Eclipse in April. That’s me back in my 3-D days. I walked around for months wearing my cheesy glasses. Everything looked better in the beautiful hues of red and blue, so I saved them in my Roy Rogers lunch box with the original Thermos that held my cold Ovaltine and kept it cold for half a day. How did it know? I figure these specs will work just fine for the Solar Eclipse.
The Beat Goes On…And On
My father’s late cousin, Mail Order Preacher, Little Jimi Bob Fender of Fort Worth, Texas. He started out playing that “Devil music,” rock-a-billy, and jive-assed jumping-around stuff out on Jacksboro Highway. After getting knifed a few times, then shot up real good by the jealous husband of some old hairy-legged gal, he glammed onto religion and started the “Church Of What’s Happening Now.” He had the rocking-ist church music in Texas, and many of the great musicians, such as Delbert McClinton and Willie, stopped by on Sundays to jam. As you can see, he was a snappy dresser. Dig that guitar and that blue suit.
When It’s Round-Up Time In Texas
Back in the 1950s, long before there was the Dixie Chicks, there was my late 14th cousins’ trio, “The Texas Fried Pies.” They played most of the grocery store openings, school assemblies, parades, Tupperware parties, Avon get-togethers, rodeos, The Fat Stock Show, and select funerals. Left to right: Peach E. Keen on the doghouse bass, my cousin Apple Coreby on the banjo, and Cherry la’Tartness on the squeezebox.
The Gospel According To That Person of The Year
Good Lord, help us, please. Now she has her own religion and a bible? It was bound to happen, given she has around ten million young zombie followers. I read from a former swiftie-cult member that when she turned 21 years old, her brain hit reset, and she became a normal woman and started listening to George Strait. There is hope.
Pictured are my late father’s late cousin, Bell, and her husband, Alexander, showing off their 1952 invention, the “Head Phone,” which was the predecessor to the modern mobile cell phone. It was an awkward unit to use. The phone is attached to your head, and the braided phone line is carried in a backpack. Cell towers weren’t invented, so the unit and the lovely couple were tethered to the home plug by a five-hundred-yard cord roll. She eventually sold her phone ideas to some hot-shot princess in Monaco who came out with her own line of cute little bedside phones. ” Besides”, Bell said, “every time the damn phone rang, it gave me a massive headache.” Alexander, on the other hand, was unable to speak, smoke a ciggie, or drink his nightly cocktail, which impacted their social life.
Pictured is my first real grown-up science experiment kit, Christmas 1955. I asked our neighborhood mentor and mad scientist, Mr. Mister, to tutor me in the art of scientific experimentation. He brought home a few viles of Plutonium X3 from his job at Carswell Air Force Base, and with parts and dangerous minerals from the kit, an old Waring blender, and a Betty Crocker pressure cooker, he and I constructed and tested a small nuclear device right there in our neighborhood. Our garage was totaled, and we were all puny and hairless for a few months, but the family got over the effects of the radiation and, seeing they had a small genius in the family, awarded me a second kit the next Christmas. See Below.
Christmas 1956, I received my second kit, like the one above. I had no idea what Meth was, and the instructions were in Spanish, so frustrated with making 9 Love Potions and disappearing inks, I gave the kit to my cousin, Jock, who set up a cute little lab in his family’s camper trailer parked in their backyard. After blowing up their trailer and suffering non-life-threatening injuries, he was sent to the Juvenile Dope Farm for six months. The last I heard, he opened several pot shops in Ruidoso, New Mexico, after retiring from the Texas Senate.
Who knew that Lard was so good for you? My grandmothers would not have been able to cook a meal without a tub of Crisco, White Cloud, or Puffy Stuff lard. They also kept a soup can full of used bacon grease next to the stove, so if they were out of that soft, luscious lard, they could still fill our bloodstream with massive doses of saturated vein-clogging fat. My grannie soaked her chicken mash feed in Puffy Stuff and then fed the hens her secret mixture. She claimed it made the eggs bigger and better, and when she wrung the head off of one of the greased-up hens and cooked it for supper, the chicken was already basted and fried to a golden brown. Yummm. Gotta love that country cooking.
Butch, Sundance, and the gang during a weekend in Granbury, Texas
Maybe some bloggers need prompts to give them that “get along little doggy” push, but I’m not one of them. My personal writing space and white laptop screen belong to me alone. I don’t need ” Big Brother Blogger” to lead me in any direction. I get lost enough on my own. WordPress means well. They want to help us. Think of them as the “Blog spot with a heart, we are all one big internet family, it takes a village” and all that crap. My track record of offending everyone is extensive and documented. No prisoners were taken, and none were harmed. My internal and social filters were lost some years ago. Not even WordPress can reinstall them. I am a rebel with no cause.
Me, the author, back in the day before I got a haircut
The writing prompt for today was a zinger: what would you put on a highway billboard. Considering most drivers have one eye and hand on their cell phones and are not paying attention to the road, why would the morons be looking up at a billboard? “Get your face back in that phone you idiot! Are you trying to cause a wreck?” would be an appropriate sign.
I don’t have a problem with highway advertising. Buc-ee’s has some great signs, as do Dairy Queen and McDonald’s. The only time they catch my attention is when Momo is driving, and I have time to scan the horizon. Churches are getting more inventive, ” Next Exit To Save Your Soul” visit the Second Baptist Church of Twickelstick, Texas, turn right and go 4 miles to reach Heaven. Car dealers are the most annoying. The classics that scream of desperation are ” Dust Bowl City, Where Texas History Lives.” Every darn town in Texas is not a historical landmark. My town, Granbury, is a true old-west historic town., and has been voted that honor for many years now. Lots of notable stuff went down here in the 1800s. General Granbury of the Confederate Army of Texas is a famous man; he lived here, so the town was named after him. The city fathers have armed citizens standing guard over his statue on the square because the new wokie residents from California want to pull it over with a rope tied to their Tesla.
Notable and historical visitors, gangsters, outlaws, and past residents of Granbury were; Billy The Kid, Sam Bass, Bass Reeves, Billy the singing Bass, The Bass-O-Matic, The Purple Passion Triple Jiggle Bass Lure, Cheif Quanah Parker, Santana, Sitting Bull, Crawling Bull, Annie Oakley, The Statler Brothers, Jerry Reed, Wild Bill Hickock, Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald, Lyndon Johnson, Lady Bird, Big Bird, The Surfing Bird, Elmo, Burt and Ernie, Clarance Odbody, Mr. Potter, George Baily, Rasputin, Krushev, Stalin, The Big Bopper, Buddy Holley, Candy Barr, Bill Barr, Captain Kangeroo, Mr. Peppermint, Ickey Twerp, Steve Allen, Ernie Kovacs, Soupy Sales, Mr. Greenjeans, Mr. Rogers, Mrs. Rogers, Roy Rogers, Buck Rogers, Roger Ram Jet, The Jetsons, Sky King and Penny, Poncho and Cisco, Yogi Bear, Boo-Boo, Willie Nelson, Charles Nelson Riley, Paul Lynde, Wally Cox, Rose Marie, Dick Van Dyke, Little Dutch Boy with his finger in the dyke( Rosie O’Donnel) Van Dyke Parks, Jack Keroauc, Sal Paradise, Wavey Gravy, Deputy Dawg and Muskie, The Three Stooges, Chewbacca, Princes Leia, R2D2, CP30, Willie Wonka, Kim Kardashian, Eddie Murphy, The Vanderbilt family, William Randolph Hearst, Patty Hearst, Huey Newton, Huey Lewis and the News, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Rodney Dangerfield, The Gopher, Carl the greenskeeper, Lacy Underall, The judge, Davey Crockett, Jim Bowie, the defenders of the Alamo, The Hole In The Wall Gang, and others liked the food at the hotel and the drinks at the saloon. The Paramount TV show 1883 was filmed here, and I heard that Taylor Sheridan liked the town so much he plans to buy it. So Granbury has some bragging rights and the signs to prove it. My town finds its way into many of my stories, as do the citizens, who now have it out for me. I have to go incognito when strolling the square.
The bottom line is I will not be prompted to write about trivial ca-ca. If what I do write turns out to be bull crap, then so be it. I fear this post, against my will and better writing judgment, accomplished what WordPress requested. But, as any five-year-old will say: “You ain’t the boss of me.”
Christmas, 1955, and I found this under the tree: my first stringed instrument, made by my Coonskin cap-wearing hero, Davey Crockett. My father, a musician, tuned it up and put it in my tiny hands. I must have been a musical savant because I played and sang, with no mistakes, the theme song to the Disney show Davey Crockett. My parents, flaber and gasted, grabbed the Brownie Box camera and took my picture while I was wailing on my miniature ax, mailing it the next day to The Arther Godfrey Talent Hour in New York City. I continued to give impromptu recitals around the neighborhood for my buddies until Georgie accidentally sat on my Davey guitar and crushed it to splinters. After that, I couldn’t remember the words to the song and forgot how to play, and wouldn’t you know it, a week later, Arther Godfrey called my folks for an audition. I could’a been a contender!
Notes From The Cactus Patch 