My Father and Donnie Osmond

My Father and Donnie Osmond

Way back many years ago, about 1975, my sister really wanted to see Donnie Osmond in concert. He was going to be at the Omni in Atlanta, Georgia for one night only and my cousin Barbara was able to get tickets to the event.

The big day came and my sister was so excited she could hardly contain herself. My father was going to stay in town and run our Western Auto store while the rest of the family went to Atlanta.

A few hours before it was time to leave, my father and one of our shop employees went out to install a television antenna on the roof of a house. 

My father came back to the store limping and told us he had fallen from the second rung from the bottom of the ladder and jammed his knee. 


He had a bad knee from when he had dropped a heavy cash register years ago, so we did not think too much of it.

He sat in a recliner at the store and had me bring him readings from the registers just before we left. He counted the money, too. 

He sat in that recliner for several hours before it was time for us to leave for Atlanta. Finally, we left.

We met my aunt and my cousin at their house in Norcross, Georgia and soon left to take my sister and my cousin to the concert. We went to a store called Treasure Island. Treasure Island was owned by J. C. Penny.

While at Treasure Island I bought a one hundred twenty pound barbell set. This weighed forty more pounds than I did. 

I could not find any employee to help me load it into the buggy, so I laid the buggy on its side and scooted the box of weights into the buggy. Then, I used the bar as a pry bar to get the buggy back up on its wheels.

When I got to the car I rolled the buggy up to the trunk and sort of laid it down in the trunk and slid the box out of it.

That night, after we picked up my sister and cousin from the concert we went back to my aunt’s house and my mother called my father at home. 


This is what he told her:

As soon as we were safely out of town he had one of our employees, who was also an EMT, call the Iva Rescue Squad. 

The Iva Rescue squad backed an ambulance up to the door of the store and took him to the emergency room at the Anderson Memorial Hospital.

They took X-rays and discovered he had broken his leg. His femur was broken in the most painful way a bone can be broken. Instead of breaking across the leg, it had broken up and down the bone and basically split apart.

My father knew that if my mother knew he had really fallen from the roof of the house and had fallen into a rose bush she would not have left him in Iva and would not have taken my sister to the concert. My sister would have been heart-broken.

My father sat in a chair for hours in extreme pain with thorns embedded in him just because he loved my sister so much that he could not bear to see her disappointed.

The doctor told my father he could not come home. My father could be very persuasive. Finally, the doctor agreed to let him go home if there was someone there to care for him.

One of our shop employees, Marvin, was there with him when we got home. 

The pain was so great that just stepping on the floor near him made my father wince with pain. 

My father was not a baby and he often endured intense pain and “took it like a man.” But this was so bad he would tell me, “Don’t walk so heavy.”

It took my father months to recover, but finally he did. He sucked up the pain for hours just for my sister. I guess he felt she was worth it. After all, she was his only daughter.

Send us an Email

A Hard Play

Wow! Last night I watched the hardest play I have ever seen in my life. Anyone that knows me knows I don’t like sad movies. I can’t watch Penny Serenade with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. It is too sad. The little daughter dies at a very young age.

Last night my two daughters Laynie and Maggie took part in a play called Anatomy of Gray. Laynie, whose real name is Whitney, played the part of Belva Collins.

Belva dies in the play and, after she dies, becomes basically a symbol of death. When other cast members die, Belva comes on stage with her hair in a frighteningly scary style. It is backlit in such a way that she looks like a ghost and she is carrying a flower.

When Belva was dying on stage it took every ounce of my strength to stay seated in the audience. The daddy in me wanted to snatch her off the stage and head for an ambulance. The ambulance headquarters is just a few blocks up the road and this guy with only ¾ of his right foot could walk it in no time.

It made me think, what if Laynie is ever in a play where some guy is hurting her? Am I going to be able to restrain myself?  Will this big redneck whoop somebody before he realizes that it is only a play?

Maggie was part of the stage crew and she spends the play swinging around in the catwalk and helping with fast costume changes. She also births a baby backstage.

Funny thing, Wharton County Junior College seems to have at least one shoe fall from out of nowhere each semester. Maybe this will become a running gag with them. When will the next shoe drop?

Please visit us at McClendon Enterprises

Truly Gross

When my oldest son was a baby I discovered something. It seems that it is a bad idea to feed a baby straight out of the baby food jar. 

I learned that each time the spoon goes into the baby's mouth a little saliva is left on the spoon and that saliva goes into the baby food jar. 

Once in the baby food jar that saliva starts to digest the food in the jar. If the baby does not eat all the food and you put that jar in the refrigerator, then when you take the jar out the food will be all watery and gunky. 

That food in the jar is partially digested food. In other words, the food in the jar is puke. Yummy! And you thought baby food tasted bad the first time around.

If we take this a step further, let's say that we are eating a big plate at Thanksgiving but we discover we just don't have enough room for all of it. 

So, we wrap our plate up in plastic wrap or aluminum foil and pop it in the fridge. There it sits with the plates of food that were left behind by our family and friends who were over for dinner. 

Later you pop in and look around inside the fridge to find your plate of puke amongst the other plates of puke left there by the others. Yum!

This made me think, you see people cooking and notice they are tasting the food as they cook it. 

This is not a bad idea. But, unless they get a clean utensil every time they taste the food what we have is cooked puke. Doesn't that sound appetizing? 

So, cook Bob is in the kitchen making stew. He is sweating and wiping his hands and forehead on his apron. Then he takes out his spoon and tastes the stew. 

To make sure the spoon is clean for the next time he wipes it on his apron. This is the same apron he wiped his sweat with. So now, we have a bowl of puke and sweat stew. Invite the whole family over, we are going to eat.

What really grosses me out is to go out to eat somewhere and see an employee in the bathroom. The employee will be wearing their apron into the stall with them. It will be dragging the floor. The person gets up off the toilet, wipes and then puts their apron back on. 

Hopefully the employee washes their hands before they return to work but as is often the case they don't. So, at best we have an apron that has been touched with hands that have just wiped their butt. At worst we have the same thing with the employee returning to work with unwashed hands.

Don't get me started on those employees who work in a restaurant and have a cold.  Once my family and I went through a drive thru and witnessed a cashier wiping her nose on her hand and then she reached down and wrapped our burger up and served it to us. We did not eat the burger. We did report it to the 800 number.

One time we were at a famous chicken place. The cashier was emptying the trash cans and sweeping the floors when we walked in. She did not wash her hands but went back to the kitchen to get our food. We walked out.

What gross encounters have you had like this?